   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
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S2Madhur Jaffrey: The woman who gave the world Indian food   At a spirited 90 years of age, Madhur Jaffrey takes centre stage on the streaming platform MasterClass, her screen presence marked by a shiny bob, smoky-lined eyes, vivid red lips and a trove of lively, endearing anecdotes from her rich life. A true polymath, Madhur is more than a versatile actress whose cinematic impact has spanned several decades, she's a culinary chronicler and food icon. With over 30 cookbooks to her name, spanning the flavours of India, Asia and global vegetarian cuisine, as well as many television cookery shows (including on the BBC), Madhur Jaffrey is a household name for anyone with a taste for South Asian cuisine.As Indian-born Nobel Laureate and cookbook author Abhijit Banerjee shared during this year's annual HC Mahindra Lecture at Harvard University, "While I could cook many Western dishes, I did not know how to cook Indian food. My first step was smart – to buy her [cookbook], An Invitation to Indian Cooking, and follow it with a certain amount of diligence. And that's how I learned to cook Indian food."
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S3Brack: a fruit cake to celebrate Women's Christmas  Twelfth Night is the last great frolicking feast of Christmas. It's the day decorations are taken down and stored away – woe betide anyone who takes them down sooner, tempting bad luck for the coming year. Across the British Isles, 6 January is most associated with this hand-me-down piece of folklore, rather than the arrival of the Three Kings to Bethlehem bearing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh for the baby Jesus.On the south-western edge of Ireland, in Cork and bordering parts of Kerry, Twelfth Night is still celebrated in style, and exclusively by women. It's a night for soaking up the last vestiges of Christmas spirit in rambunctious merriment rather than a staid religious observance.
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S5Coming of Age While Confronting Arab Stereotypes, in "Simo"  Simo, a typical teen-ager, lives in the shadow of Emad, his older brother, and their domineering dad, in the suburbs of Montreal, where the family emigrated from Egypt. One night, Simo impersonates Emad in a live-stream gaming session. That simple act leads to serious consequences, when a racist false accusation escalates and puts his brother at risk.Bold cinematography and a soundtrack of throbbing Egyptian rap beats set the scene and compound a sense of social alienation that affects these men yet strengthens the family. "Drawing heavily from my own life experiences, I couldn't ignore the elephant in the room," the film's writer and director, Aziz Zoromba, says, regarding "the stereotypes associated with being an 'Arab' in the West."
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S6The Chancellor of Berkeley Weighs In  When Carol Christ first joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, more than fifty years ago, she remembers a new colleague giving her a half-joking piece of advice: don’t bother preparing the last three weeks of your class, because you’ll never get to teach them—the students will all be out on strike. Protest has been part of her experience at Berkeley throughout her career there, first as an English professor (she specializes in Victorian literature) and later as an administrator; apart from an eleven-year stint as the president of Smith College, in the early two-thousands, the university has been her professional home. She assumed its top leadership role—chancellor—in 2017, and announced last summer that she would retire in 2024.The job of heading a college or university has rarely come under greater public scrutiny than in the past two months. Since the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel and the beginning of the Israeli assault on Gaza, campuses across the country have seen a wave of protests—and accompanying accusations of both Islamophobia and antisemitism. There have been demonstrations, open letters, official statements, follow-up official statements, confrontations, threats, anger, and fear. At Cornell, campus police placed the Center for Jewish Living under guard; at Columbia, the administration disbanded pro-Palestinian student groups. At Berkeley, students organized a mass walkout on behalf of Palestine. During the walkout, a student carrying an Israeli flag was allegedly hit with a water bottle, an incident that’s now among the campus conditions cited in a lawsuit alleging antisemitism at the law school. Earlier this month, the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T, and the University of Pennsylvania testified before Congress in a hearing titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.” Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a Trump-aligned Republican, went viral with her questioning, in which she pushed the presidents to say whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated their institutions’ rules. Their responses, which parsed definitions of protected speech, inspired widespread outrage. Liz Magill resigned as president of Penn a few days later. Claudine Gay faced calls to step down as president of Harvard, but maintained the governing board’s support.
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S7Netflix Just Quietly Released the Weirdest Apocalypse Show of the Year  After The Last of Us changed the way we see the apocalypse, this series is for the rest of us.Would you quit your job and see the world? Would you reject society and move into a cabin with all your favorite books? Would you just want to spend that time with your loved ones? For a lot of people, myself included, the question is so overwhelming to fathom, the true answer is... probably nothing out of the ordinary. When they say, “Live every day like it’s your last,” that could just mean following your normal routine — why make a big deal out of something inevitable?
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S830 Years Ago, a Brilliant Capcom Platformer Redefined an Iconic Hero  A little robot person travels across various platforms and themed levels to take on a series of metallic bosses. That could describe pretty much any Mega Man game. But in December of 1993, Capcom decided to push the franchise forward with its boldest sequel yet.At first glance, Mega Man X doesn’t look too different from the franchise’s prior X-less entries on the Nintendo Entertainment System. And considering how beloved those early games are, Mega Man X could’ve very easily taken a “If it ain't broke, don’t upgrade it” route. But Mega Man X, the first game in the series to debut on the Super Nintendo, made a variety of integral changes that would culminate in one of the most iconic side-scrolling platformers of all time.
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S9'Percy Jackson' Nails a Technical Challenge that Star Wars and Marvel Both Failed  A good franchise needs to be built on good source material. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has Marvel Comics, contemporary Star Wars has the original films and non-canon books and comics... and Percy Jackson and the Olympians has the books by Rick Riordan. The series, about an alternate America populated with creatures and characters from Greek mythology, is set to make a big splash on Disney+, which is apt for a story about the son of Poseidon. Also apt is the choice of Dan Shotz and Jon Steinberg, both alumni of the hit pirate drama Black Sails, as showrunners. For them, Percy Jackson has the potential to be the start of a universe. “I think it’s a great big story, and the canvas just keeps getting bigger and bigger,” Steinberg tells Inverse. “The deeper you get into it, the idea that maybe we will be able to make more of that story real and bring it to a bigger audience is pretty exciting.”
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S10The Ultimate Guide to Trading With Friends in 'Pokemon Scarlet and Violet'  As an intrepid trainer and Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, your ultimate goal is to catch every single pocket monster in existence. But the truth is that catching them all isn’t exactly an option. Not only are some Pokémon exclusive to Scarlet or Violet, but others might not be in the current games at all — or only on rare occasions. That’s where trading Pokémon comes in. And if you’re wondering how to trade with your friends in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet we’ve got you covered. Here’s everything you need to know.First, you will need to unlock the ability to trade. This is done at the same time you unlock all of the other multiplayer functions once you reach the first Pokémon Center at Los Platos. You’ll just need to approach the center to unlock all online features. However, it’s also worth noting you will need a Nintendo Switch Online Membership to trade with another player.
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S1150 Bougie Things for Your Home That Are Surprisingly Under $30 on Amazon  Bougie on a budget sounds like an oxymoron, but this list proves that items with surprisingly high-end vibes can cost less than $30. From decor to spruce up spaces around your home to functional finds that you soon won’t be able to live without (like a lighter that works in the wind and rain), scroll on for a variety of elevated home products with rave reviews.These watering globes will keep your plants hydrated when you forget to or are unable to water. The set comes with three bird-shaped glass globes that can each hold enough water to keep your greenery watered for up to two weeks. “These lovely glass watering birds exceeded my expectations,” wrote one fan.
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S1260 Dope Things That Are Only $25 On Amazon Prime  The only thing better than finding something dope on Amazon is finding it for a low price. Everything on this list can be on your doorstep fast with Prime. Don’t miss the gnome-shaped cheese knife, tray that defrosts meat in half the time, and sushi-shaped magnets that will motivate you to check your to-do list. You won’t believe how budget-friendly everything is — nothing costs more than $25.The smooth metal of this massage roller ball will feel like a dream on sore muscles after being kept in the freezer. Since it is corrosion resistant, it can also be used with essential oils.
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S13Rick and Morty Are About to Face Their Greatest Fear in the Season 7 Finale  After two of the most bombastic Rick and Morty episodes ever — Morty’s quest with Ice-T and then one with Bigfoot in Valhalla — Season 7 is about to wrap things up with Sunday’s big finale. With Rick Prime defeated and Evil Morty MIA, there’s no telling what might happen next.Here’s everything you need to know about Rick and Morty Season 7 Episode 10, including the release date and time, episode title, teaser trailer, and more.
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S14How to Change Clothes in 'Pokemon Scarlet and Violet'  Becoming a Pokémon master is great, but what’s the point if you can’t do it in style? Like in most recent games, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet lets you buy and change your character's clothing. There are a lot of options in both the main game and its DLC, but if you’re wondering how to get started here’s what you need to know about clothes in Pokémon Violet and Scarlet.There are clothing shops located in Mesagoza, Levicia, and Cascarrafa. You can see the specific shops marked on your map when you are in the area (a t-shirt icon shows where you can purchase clothing).
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S15How to Use Battle Caps in 'Pok  If you want the best team possible in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, you’ll need to pay attention to IVs and stats. And in that case, you need to be aware of Bottle Caps. Here’s everything you need to know about this crucial item in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet.Bottle Caps can be purchased for $20,000 at the Delibird Presents store, found in most of the main cities within the game. However, it won’t show up as an item in these shops until after you’ve defeated six gyms in Pokémon Violet and Scarlet. Once that’s done, you can buy as many of them as you want.
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S16S18S19S20S21S22S23S24S25Why Do We Give Gifts? An Anthropologist Explains This Ancient Human Behavior  The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.Have you planned out your holiday gift giving yet? If you’re anything like me, you might be waiting until the last minute. But whether every single present is already wrapped and ready, or you’ll hit the shops on Christmas Eve, giving gifts is a curious but central part of being human.
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S26Netflix's Big Data Dump Shows Just OK TV Is Here to Stay  Netflix just did the unthinkable: It released viewership numbers. After years of withholding information on how many hours subscribers spent watching its shows and movies, on Tuesday the streaming giant released a huge trove of data. It covers 18,000 titles, breaking them all down by how many hours viewers have watched of each during the period of January to June 2023. The winner, with 812 million hours viewed? The Night Agent.This bodes well for The Night Agent and maybe less good for people drawn to Netflix’s more esoteric fare. Because while the first season of Sex/Life—a steamy, soapy show about hooking up with a hot former lover—scored 126 million hours viewed, the first season of Sex Education—a warm, funny show about teenagers learning about intimacy and boundaries—landed just south of 28 million. The streaming giant was quick to point out that “success on Netflix comes in all shapes and sizes” and isn’t determined by this stat alone. Although, on a call announcing the numbers co-CEO Ted Sarandos put it somewhat differently: “This is the data we use to run the business.”
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S27The iPhone's Notes App Is the Purest Reflection of Our Messy Existence  In 1994, French artist Jean-Marc Philippe conceived of a spacetime capsule named KEO. This satellite would launch into space and orbit the Earth while carrying samples of our dirt, air, and water. Philippe also envisioned that it would have billions of personal messages on CD-ROMs, a collection so vast it would be able to represent every stratum of human life. The satellite would travel around the globe for 50 millennia before it would return to the planet's surface, a ghost from the past reminding Earth's current inhabitants (whoever they are) of what we felt, what we thought, and who we were.KEO never actually launched. But if such a project were to be undertaken today, I would propose that every Earthling who owns an iPhone should download the current contents of their Notes app onto thumb drives and put them on the rocket.
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S28The Best Smart Christmas Lights to Make Your Home Merry and Bright  If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDEvery year, the only smart device my husband asks about is something for the Christmas tree. But instead of grabbing whatever smart plug I had on hand, I came back with an armload of smart string lights we could use instead of our fake tree's built-in lights—and for decorating all over the house too. It was overkill, judging by his look of horror, but all in the name of research!
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S29Google Just Denied Cops a Key Surveillance Tool  A hacker group calling itself Solntsepek, previously linked to the infamous Russian military hacking unit Sandworm, took credit this week for a disruptive attack on the Ukrainian internet and mobile service provider Kyivstar. As Russia’s kinetic war against Ukraine has dragged on, inflicting what the World Bank estimates to be around $410 billion in recovery costs for Ukraine, the country has launched an official crowdfunding platform known as United24 as a means of raising awareness and rebuilding.Kytch, the small company that aimed to fix McDonald’s notably often-broken ice cream machines, claims it has discovered a “smoking gun” email from the CEO of McDonald’s ice cream machine manufacturer that Kytch's lawyers say suggests an alleged plan to undermine Kytch as a potential competitor. Kytch argues in a recent court filing that the email reveals the real reason why, a couple of weeks later, McDonald’s sent an email to thousands of its restaurant franchisees claiming safety hazards related to Kytch’s ice-cream-machine-whispering device.
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S30Gifts for People Who Just Need a Good Night's Sleep  If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDBetween anxiety and insomnia, I've always had trouble sleeping, and I'm not alone. Chances are, you or someone you know is not getting enough sleep, and that can have a serious impact on your health. In the past few years, a few of us on the Gear Team have worked tirelessly to transform our bedrooms into the comfiest, coziest places possible to help coax ourselves into that ever-elusive restful night of sleep.
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S31The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry  If you work at a spy agency tasked with surveilling the communications of more than 160 million people, it’s probably a good idea to make sure all the data in your possession stays off the open internet. Just ask Bangladesh’s National Telecommunication Monitoring Center, which security researchers found connected to a leaky database that exposed everything from names and email addresses to cell phone numbers and bank account details. The data was likely just used for testing purposes, but WIRED confirmed at least some of the data is linked to real people.A fight is brewing in the United States Congress over the future of a powerful surveillance program. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is set to expire at the end of the year. With the December 31 deadline quickly approaching, members of Congress and civil liberties groups are criticizing Section 702 for enabling the “incidental” surveillance of Americans’ communications and “abuses” by the FBI. While a privacy-preserving update to the program has been introduced in Congress, some 702 critics remain concerned that lawmakers will push through reauthorization using other, “must-pass” legislation.
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S32Tiny biobots surprise their creators by healing wound  Tiny “biobots” made from human windpipe cells encouraged damaged neural tissue to repair itself in a lab experiment — potentially foreshadowing a future in which creations like this patrol our bodies, healing damage, delivering drugs, and more.The background: In a study published in 2020, researchers at Tufts University and the University of Vermont (UVM) harvested and incubated skin cells from frog embryos until they were tiny balls.
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S33S34S35Photos of the Week:  Swimming during a heat wave in Sydney, a sky-high interactive experience in New York City, extensive tornado damage in Tennessee, scarce resources and destruction in the Gaza Strip, ice-skating at a former coking plant in Germany, snowfall in northern China, a Santa Run in Germany, and much more A motorcyclist, Helton Garcia, dressed as Santa Claus, rides his motorcycle before handing out gifts to children in a rural school in Santo Antonio do Descoberto, Goiás, Brazil, on December 10, 2023. #
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S36Why Is the NBA Letting Josh Giddey Play?  The Oklahoma City Thunder player is getting lighter treatment than others suspected of misconduct off the court.The NBA has shown in the recent past that it is willing to discipline players just for tarnishing its brand. So the league’s remarkably passive stance on Josh Giddey, a 21-year-old Oklahoma City Thunder guard, seems strangely out of place.
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S37The Forgotten Tradition of Clemency  Minnesota reformed its system for granting mercy to those in prison. The federal government should take note.The governor, attorney general, and chief justice of the state supreme court sat atop a wide dais at the front of the Minnesota Senate hearing room on a warm day in June of 2019. One by one, petitioners for clemency—almost always without a lawyer—came to the podium and made their pitch for a pardon, which would erase many effects of their criminal convictions. One man with a long-ago, minor drug offense told the three officials, who comprise the Board of Pardons, about his 16 years of sobriety and desire to hunt with his son. An immigrant from Laos was supported by his wife, who had been the victim of his crime. Another man sought a pardon so he could adopt a stray dog. When each petitioner finished, the board discussed the case and voted as the petitioner listened intently.
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S38How Gas Prices Get in Our Heads  The price of gasoline plays an outsize role in shaping consumer sentiment—with big implications for the current “vibecession.”One of the defining characteristics of the second half of 2023 has been the gloominess of American consumers. Even as the economy remained unexpectedly robust—growing at a 5.2 percent clip in the third quarter—and inflation cooled, consumer sentiment as measured by the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index dropped steadily from the summer through the fall, and its rating hit a low of 61.3 in November.
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S39The Fate of Your Holiday-Season Returns  This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.When my colleague Amanda Mull “ventured into the belly of the holiday-returns beast,” she learned that somewhere in the midst of a complex system of transporters, warehousers, and resellers, a guy named Michael has to sniff the sweatpants.
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S40The Sound of Cruelty  The Zone of Interest is an eerie and restrained study of the Holocaust that never shows a single frame of the atrocity.Jonathan Glazer’s new film, The Zone of Interest, begins with a black screen that lingers for at least a full minute. There’s music in the form of a groaning score, as well as a smattering of noises—faint whispers, rustling leaves—that can be heard through the discordant notes. Otherwise, though, nothing appears.
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S41Biden's Domestic, Foreign, and Familial Issues  President Joe Biden faced a convergence of issues this week—domestic, foreign, and familial.The Biden administration’s request for additional aid for Ukraine has stalled as House and Senate Republicans are prioritizing negotiations over border-security policies. Tensions between President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the war in Gaza have spilled into the open. And Hunter Biden, the president’s only surviving son, defied a congressional subpoena and instead offered again to testify in public in front of the Republican-led House committees investigating him. All of this comes as the House voted along party lines to officially open its impeachment inquiry into the president.
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S42What Great Data Analysts Do -- and Why Every Organization Needs Them  “Full-stack” data scientist means mastery of machine learning, statistics, and analytics. Today’s fashion in data science favors flashy sophistication with a dash of sci-fi, making AI and machine learning the darlings of the job market. Alternative challengers for the alpha spot come from statistics, thanks to a century-long reputation for rigor and mathematical superiority. What about analysts?Whereas excellence in statistics is about rigor and excellence in machine learning is about performance, excellence in analytics is all about speed. Analysts are your best bet for coming up with those hypotheses in the first place. As analysts mature, they’ll begin to get the hang of judging what’s important in addition to what’s interesting, allowing decision-makers to step away from the middleman role. Of the three breeds, analysts are the most likely heirs to the decision throne.
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S43Rebel Moon review: Zack Snyder's new space opera is 'gushing Star Wars fan fiction'  There's a scene early on in Zack Snyder's new space opera, Rebel Moon (or, Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire, to use its full title), in which an innocent farmer goes to a seedy cantina with a mysterious warrior in a hooded cloak. One of the ugly, pig-faced aliens there hassles the farmer, so the warrior uses some nifty fighting skills to defend him, and then they meet a roguish mercenary who agrees to take them off-planet aboard his spaceship. The mercenary is named Kai, rather than Han Solo, but it's fair to say that Rebel Moon is set in a galaxy that isn't far, far away from the one in Star Wars.More like this: - Chicken Run 2 soars above the original - The Iron Claw is 'shallow' and 'bland' - Wonka is 'relentlessly wacky' and 'over the top'
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S44Entangled Islands exhibition explores the history of Irish people in the Caribbean -  A new exhibition at Epic, Dublin’s Irish emigration museum, explores connections between Ireland and the Caribbean. Entangled Islands aims to tell “the stories of a wide range of Irish people who traversed and settled in the Caribbean”, while also outlining “our intersecting histories of colonisation and resistance”.One prominent theme is a reevaluation of Ireland’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. The topic has previously been tackled in books such as Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1812-1965 by Nini Rodgers (2007) and Ireland, Slavery and the Caribbean (2023), edited by Finola O’Kane and Ciaran O’Neill.
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S45S46Sandra Day O'Connor saw civics education as key to the future of democracy  Beyond her trailblazing role as the first woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor considered iCivics – a civics education nonprofit founded after she retired from the court – to be her “most important legacy.”“The practice of democracy is not passed down through the gene pool,” O’Connor once stated. “It must be taught and learned by each new generation.”
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S47War in Gaza: An ethicist explains why you shouldn't turn to social media for information about the conflict or to do something about it  As the war between Israel and Hamas drags on, many on both sides have taken to social media to gather information and air their outrage. The impulse to do so is understandable: Political activism on social media provides people with an emotional outlet and gives them a sense that they can do something. The war is awful, and following it generates a sharp psychological need to get involved and do something.In the past few years, my colleagues and I at UMass Boston’s Applied Ethics Center have been studying the ethics of emerging technologies. I believe that political activism on social media is a counterproductive and sometimes even dangerous form of engagement. Here’s why.
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S48S495 things to know about US aid to Ukraine  But public opinion polls suggest that Americans’ support for Ukraine was waning even before Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel and the ensuing Israel-Hamas war drew international attention away from Ukraine. Political scientist Jessica Trisko Darden, author of “Aiding and Abetting: U.S. Foreign Assistance and State Violence,” explains how recent efforts by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to hold up aid to Ukraine reflects the perception that the U.S. is spending too much money on Ukraine at the expense of other domestic priorities, such as increased security at the U.S. southern border.
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S50A US ambassador working for Cuba? Charges against former diplomat Victor Manuel Rocha spotlight Havana's importance in the world of spying  Assistant Director, Applied History Project and Intelligence Project, Harvard Kennedy School The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Dec. 4, 2023, that Victor Manuel Rocha, a former U.S. government employee, had been arrested and faced federal charges for secretly acting for decades as an agent of the Cuban government. Rocha joined the State Department in 1981 and served for over 20 years, rising to the level of ambassador. After leaving the State Department, he served from 2006-2012 as an adviser to the U.S. Southern Command, a joint U.S. military command that handles operations in Latin America and the Caribbean.
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S51Racism produces subtle brain changes that lead to increased disease risk in Black populations  The U.S. is in the midst of a racial reckoning. The COVID-19 pandemic, which took a particularly heavy toll on Black communities, turned a harsh spotlight on long-standing health disparities that the public could no longer overlook.We are clinical neuroscientists who study the multifaceted ways in which racism affects how our brains develop and function. We use brain imaging to study how trauma such as sexual assault or racial discrimination can cause stress that leads to mental health disorders like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
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S52Through its immigration policies, the UK government decides whose families are 'legitimate'  Amid another panic over high net migration to the UK, the government and new home secretary James Cleverly have proposed several changes to visa rules. The proposals apply to economic migrants, rather than other kinds of migrants such as asylum seekers, and have particular consequences for families.Under the proposals, people on health and care visas will no longer be allowed to bring family members with them to the UK. And British citizens and those with settled status will need to earn at least £38,700 in order for their non-British family members to live with them in the UK. This minimum income requirement is double the previous threshold, which has already had devastating effects on thousands of families.
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S53Google's Gemini: is the new AI model really better than ChatGPT?  Google Deepmind has recently announced Gemini, its new AI model to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. While both models are examples of “generative AI”, which learn to find patterns of input training information to generate new data (pictures, words or other media), ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) which focuses on producing text. In the same way that ChatGPT is a web app for conversations that is based on the neural network know as GPT (trained on huge amounts of text), Google has a conversational web app called Bard which was based on a model called LaMDA (trained on dialogue). But Google is now upgrading that based on Gemini.
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S54Genetically modified crops aren't a solution to climate change, despite what the biotech industry says  The European Commission launched a proposal in July 2023 to deregulate a large number of plants manufactured using new genetic techniques. Despite extraordinary attempts by the Spanish presidency to force a breakthrough, EU members have not yet reached a consensus on this plan. But if the proposal were to be approved, these plants would be treated the same as conventional plants, eliminating the need for safety tests and the labelling of genetically modified food products.
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S55US election: how populists encourage blind mistrust - and how to push back  Populism is booming. The first US Republican primary is only weeks away and former president Donald Trump, who is a master of populist techniques, commands substantial support. Meanwhile one in three Europeans are now voting for populist parties.At the heart of liberal democracy lies the principle of pluralism, that there are diverse views on how society should work and that numerous institutions operate independently to balance competing interests. For this principle to work, it’s important that the public trust that these diverse voices act in good faith.
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S56Mark Drakeford: what the resignation of Wales' first minister means for the country and the Labour party  This week, Mark Drakeford announced his resignation as Wales’ first minister after five years as leader. Back in 2018, Drakeford built his leadership bid on a platform of “21st-century socialism”. As the manifesto reveals, the mantra was rooted in the ideas of “the radical tradition of Welsh socialism”, which would drive the creation of “a more equal, fair and just society”. While it’s difficult to assess his legacy so soon, it is worth reflecting on whether these initial aims have been achieved. And what does Drakeford’s departure mean for the future of Wales and the Labour party?
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S57Climate summits are too big and key voices are being crowded out - here's a better solution  Every year, the official UN climate summits are getting bigger. In 2021 at COP26 in Glasgow there were around 40,000 participants, COP27 in 2022 in Sharm el-Sheikh had 50,000.But this year blew all previous records out of the water. More than 97,000 participants had badges to attend COP28 in Dubai in person. This raises questions about who is attending COPs and what they are doing there, who gets their voices heard and, on a more practical note, how this affects the negotiations.
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S58Ukraine: opening EU accession talks is an important boost for Zelensky despite Orb  Hungarian prime minister, Victor Orban, threw a major tantrum at the European Council meeting in Brussels on December 14 2023. Essentially doing the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s bidding, he prevented agreement on a major €50 billion (£25.7 billion) financial package for Ukraine. His only concession was to abstain from a vote that delivered the long-awaited approval of opening accession talks with Ukraine. Though symbolically important, this does not address some of the key problems that Ukraine is facing as Russia’s full-scale war of aggression is about to enter its third year.
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S59Cancer: people living in England's poorest areas at higher risk of death - new study  Each district’s socioeconomic status was measured using data from the English Indices of Deprivation. This estimates the proportion of the population experiencing deprivation due to low income. The team only included cancer deaths that occurred before the age of 80. This was to ensure the data was accurate, as multi-morbidity (the presence of two or more long-term health conditions) becomes more common after 80, and this makes it difficult to know whether a person has died from cancer or a different cause.
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S60Harold Shipman was arrested a quarter of a century ago, but we still have problems with prescribing controlled drugs  Catherine Hudson drugged two patients on the stroke ward of Blackpool Victoria Hospital to give herself an easier life. She has been jailed for seven years and two months. Her colleague, Charlotte Wilmot, who conspired with her to drug a third patient, was given a three-year jail term.The trial highlighted the easy access staff had to controlled drugs. The drug regimen on the stroke ward was described during the trial as “dysfunctional”. But why is this still happening? Wasn’t it all meant to have been sorted following the Shipman Inquiry?
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S61How COP28 failed the world's small islands  As the gavel came down on the latest round of climate talks in Dubai, there were declarations of “we united, we acted, we delivered” from the COP28 presidency. This was met by a sense of déjà vu among delegates of the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis), an intergovernmental organisation representing the nations most vulnerable to climate change.In her post-summit statement, Aosis lead negotiator Anne Rasmussen expressed confusion that the UAE Consensus, COP28’s final agreement, was approved when representatives from small-island developing states (or Sids were not in the room.
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S62S63As another lobbying scandal erupts in the Conservative party, are tougher rules finally on the horizon?  Vice Chancellor Illuminate Fellow, School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen's University Belfast Conservative MP Scott Benton has become the latest British politician to face suspension for breaking lobbying rules in what is becoming a regular cycle of scandals. Parliament’s committee on standards has recommended a 35-day suspension for Benton after he was alleged to have lobbied for the gambling industry and given company access to confidential government documents.
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S64Can a Memoir Say Too Much?  “Should I be allowed to make this said?” Blake Butler writes in his new memoir, “Molly.” By the time he asks, it’s too late. He has already written more than two hundred and seventy pages; no turning back now. The question of allowance, of permission to expose, bubbles beneath so much writing, but it is at the very heart of memoir, where the people are real, and so are the consequences. How to tell the truth about other people, especially people we love—and why? What do we owe to others, and what do we owe to ourselves?Molly was the poet Molly Brodak, Butler’s wife. They lived in Atlanta and married in 2017. On March 8, 2020, a few weeks before her fortieth birthday, Molly—I will call her Molly, because that is what Butler does—left the house, lay down in a field, and shot herself. That was the end of her life, and the beginning of Butler’s book. In its first pages, he describes their final morning together: Molly propped up on the bed in the guest room, where she would often go to write, “clearly feeling extremely down again”; Butler holding one of the chickens that the couple kept in their yard up to the window to try to get her to smile. As he leaves for a jog, she e-mails him the manuscript of the book of poems she has been working on. Alarmed, Butler doubles back and finds her in the kitchen. “The room around us in that moment—dim, traced with a glow, half-hollow where the walls arrange themselves against the black side of my mind—will remain burned in my memory forever as the last time I’d see Molly alive,” he writes. He leaves again and, when he returns, finds Molly’s suicide note taped to the front door.
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S65The Year in Moviegoing  As yet, we cannot tell whether 2023 will be remembered for the movies that we saw or for the movies that were hobbled and hog-tied by industrial action. The strikes called by SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America caused productions to be paused and release dates to be pushed back. If you missed Jeff Nichols’s new film, “The Bikeriders,” with Austin Butler and Tom Hardy, when it kicked off the Telluride Film Festival, at the end of August, but hoped to see it when it opened in early December, tough. Having been passed from one studio to another—20th Century Studios to Focus Features—like a difficult foster child, the movie will now be sent forth into the world next year. (It’s worth the wait.) Amid this gloom, there were sparks of cheering news; not all artistic endeavors fell afoul of the strikes. I can’t be the only person who cried for joy upon learning that “Sonic the Hedgehog 3,” as MovieWeb reports, “was able to continue filming without actors present.” The Union of Working Hedgehogs has declined to comment.Of the many grievances that were voiced by striking actors and writers, the most notable—and the one that linked them most closely to practitioners in other trades—was a dread of artificial intelligence. Whether you’re a star or a background extra, it’s alarming (and vaguely insulting) to realize that your likeness, and your voice, could be cut and pasted from one movie to the next. In which case, will you even need to show up on set? Will you be paid for the pasting? And, should you be so clumsy as to die, will that not simply mean less paperwork for the studios, as they carry on copying you forever, and maybe for free? Ghosts get lousy residuals.
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S66The Federal Reserve Is Trying to Catch Up with Falling Inflation  On Wall Street, happy days are here again, and Jay Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, is the toast of the market. On Wednesday and Thursday, stock prices surged after Powell and his colleagues indicated that they are likely to cut a key interest rate three times next year. Market interest rates, which are tied to the Fed’s actions, fell sharply in anticipation of the central bank’s policy pivot becoming a reality.Just a couple of weeks ago, Powell, who has spent the past two years trying to bring down inflation, said that it was too early to consider interest-rate cuts. But, in a press conference on Wednesday, following a gathering of Fed policymakers, he said, “That’s really what happened in today’s meeting.” A set of new projections showed that Fed officials now expect the federal funds rate, which they control, to be roughly 4.6 per cent at the end of next year, which is about a three-quarters of a percentage point below its current level. Analysts translated these figures into three interest-rate cuts in 2024—a quarter point each time. “Powell played Santa Claus early,” Diane Swonk, the chief economist at the accounting firm KPMG, told the Wall Street Journal.
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S67Coming of Age While Confronting Arab Stereotypes, in "Simo" Simo, a typical teen-ager, lives in the shadow of Emad, his older brother, and their domineering dad, in the suburbs of Montreal, where the family emigrated from Egypt. One night, Simo impersonates Emad in a live-stream gaming session. That simple act leads to serious consequences, when a racist false accusation escalates and puts his brother at risk.Bold cinematography and a soundtrack of throbbing Egyptian rap beats set the scene and compound a sense of social alienation that affects these men yet strengthens the family. "Drawing heavily from my own life experiences, I couldn't ignore the elephant in the room," the film's writer and director, Aziz Zoromba, says, regarding "the stereotypes associated with being an 'Arab' in the West."
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S68A Harrowing Detention in Gaza  While trying to flee the bombardment of Gaza with his family, the poet Mosab Abu Toha, a New Yorker contributor, was erroneously identified as a Hamas activist by Israeli forces at a checkpoint. He was stripped naked and beaten in detention. “I kept saying, ‘Someone please talk to me,’ ” Abu Toha recalls. After an interrogation, he was finally released. Abu Toha talks with David Remnick about his experience, and how it affected his hopes for a resolution to the conflict. Plus, the Reverend M. William Howard, Jr., recounts the extraordinary Christmas he spent in 1979 at the United States Embassy in Tehran, performing services for the Americans held captive during the Iran hostage crisis.Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian writer and New Yorker contributor, was mistaken by Israeli forces for a Hamas activist while he tried to flee Gaza with his family.
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S69Watching Rudy Giuliani Self-Destruct at a Defamation Trial in Washington  When Rudy Giuliani finally arrived at Elijah Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse, in Washington, D.C., on Monday—stiff-legged, about ten minutes late, unapologetic—his attorney, a former U.S. Army Ranger named Joseph Sibley, tucked him into the large and lonely defense table where the two of them sat, alone, with their giant bottles of water. Sibley had drained much of his while waiting. The former mayor of New York began pulling items out of an overstuffed black backpack that looked like something a sixth grader might bring to school. He’d arrived for the most recent phase in a defamation suit brought by two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, whose backs remained turned to him throughout the day.Beginning on December 3, 2020, during a hearing before the Georgia State Senate, and continuing to the present day, Giuliani has claimed that Freeman and Moss—to quote just a few passages of the fable—participated in a “heist” of the 2020 Presidential election, “passing around USB ports as if they were vials of heroin or cocaine,” which they used “to infiltrate the crooked Dominion voting machines.” As evidence, he shared edited surveillance footage from State Farm Arena, in Atlanta, where the two women counted Fulton County votes, purportedly showing them holding the devices. He called the two women “serial criminals” who’d stolen the election from Donald Trump using “suitcases” of ballots, a claim he repeated on podcasts and TV episodes, and on the Web site formerly known as Twitter. Later, Trump mentioned Freeman more than a dozen times in an infamous phone call with the Georgia secretary of state. Soon, millions of Americans were parroting the narrative, and not only from the remove of the Internet. A few showed up at Freeman’s home, threatening to make citizen’s arrests. She went into hiding.
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S70What Would It Mean to Treat Animals Fairly?  A few years ago, activists walked into a factory farm in Utah and walked out with two piglets. State prosecutors argued that this was a crime. That they were correct was obvious: The pigs were the property of Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the country. The defendants had videoed themselves committing the crime; the F.B.I. later found the piglets in Colorado, in an animal sanctuary.The activists said they had completed a “rescue,” but Smithfield had good reason to claim it hadn’t treated the pigs illegally. Unlike domestic favorites like dogs, which are protected from being eaten, Utah’s pigs are legally classified as “livestock”; they’re future products, and Smithfield could treat them accordingly. Namely, it could slaughter the pigs, but it could also treat a pig’s life—and its temporary desire for food, space, and medical help—as an inconvenience, to be handled in whatever conditions were deemed sufficient.
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