Ressa (L) and Muratov. Photos: Dimitrios Kambouris/TIME; Mikhail Metzel/TASS via Getty Images
“The journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitri A. Muratov were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which the Nobel Committee described as a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.
The two were recognized for ‘their courageous fight for freedom of expression in the Philippines and Russia,’ with the committee noting that they were part of a broader struggle to protect press freedoms.
‘They are representatives of all journalists who stand up for this ideal in a world in which democracy and freedom of the press face increasingly adverse conditions,’ the committee wrote.
Ms. Ressa has worked to expose the ‘abuse of power, use of violence and growing authoritarianism in her native country, the Philippines.’
She co-founded Rappler, a digital media company for investigative journalism, which she still heads.
Since going live in January 2012, Rappler has become one of the country’s most popular and influential media platforms, mixing reporting with calls for social activism. Today, the site attracts an average of 40 million page views and 12 million unique visitors a month, figures that more than double during the Philippines’ election season.
Reporters for the organization have exposed government corruption and researched the financial holdings and potential conflicts of interest of top political figures, working tirelessly to expose President Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial, violent antidrug campaign.
Mr. Muratov has defended freedom of speech in Russia for decades, working under increasingly difficult conditions.
He was one of the founders of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta in 1993 and he has been the newspaper’s editor-in-chief since 1995.” Read more at New York Times
“STOCKHOLM — UK-based Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose experience of crossing continents and cultures has nurtured his novels about the impact of migration on individuals and societies, won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.
The Swedish Academy said the award was in recognition of Gurnah's ‘uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee.’
Gurnah, who recently retired as a professor of English and postcolonial literatures at the University of Kent, got the call from the Swedish Academy in the kitchen of his home in Canterbury, in southeast England — and initially thought it was a prank.
‘You think it can’t be true,’ he told the Associated Press. ‘It literally took my breath away.’
Gurnah, 72, arrived in Britain as an 18-year-old refugee a half-century ago. He said the themes of migration and displacement explored in his novels are even more urgent now — amid mass movements of people displaced from Syria, Afghanistan, and beyond — than when he began his writing career….
Born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania, Gurnah moved to Britain in the late 1960s, fleeing a repressive regime that persecuted the Arab Muslim community to which he belonged.
He has said he ‘stumbled into’ writing after arriving in England as a way of exploring both the loss and liberation of the emigrant experience.
Gurnah is the author of 10 novels, including ‘Memory of Departure,’ ‘Pilgrims Way,’ ‘Paradise’ — shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994 — ‘By the Sea,’ ‘Desertion’ and ‘Afterlives.’ The settings range from East Africa under German colonialism to modern-day England. Many explore what he has called ‘one of the stories of our times’: the profound impact of migration both on uprooted people and the places they make their new homes.
Gurnah, whose native language is Swahili but who writes in English, is only the sixth African-born author to be awarded the Nobel for literature, which has been dominated by European and North American writers since it was founded in 1901.” Read more at Boston Globe
“WARSAW — Poland’s constitutional court on Thursday set up a head-on collision with the European Union by ruling that the country’s constitution trumps some laws set by the bloc, a decision that threatens to dissolve the glue that holds the union’s 27 members together.
The ruling, issued in Warsaw by the Constitutional Tribunal after months of delays in a closely watched case, effectively challenges the supremacy of European law, a cornerstone of the continent’s push for an ‘ever closer union’ since it began more than 60 years ago.
The judgment could raise perilous long-term questions about the future European Union membership of Poland, the most populous and economically important nation in a group of former communist states that joined the bloc after the collapse of the Soviet empire.
The case began in April when Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, of the deeply conservative ruling party, Law and Justice, filed a request that the constitutional court analyze the ‘collision between the norms of the European law and the national constitution.’
The 12-member tribunal that issued Thursday’s ruling is headed by Chief Justice Julia Przylebska, a close friend of Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, a longtime critic of what he sees as attempts by Brussels to restrict Polish sovereignty and push policies on LGBTQ rights and other issues he says are at odds with Polish norms.” Read more at Boston Globe
“Pfizer and BioNTech said they are seeking US Food and Drug Administration emergency use authorization for their Covid-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11. If authorized, this would be the first Covid-19 vaccine for younger children. What does that means for children and their parents? Here are some questions and answers. The move towards vaccinating this age group comes as the US appears to be turning a corner in the pandemic with fewer hospitalizations and increased vaccinations. One expert acknowledged the progress but said he felt ‘we’re still in two Americas,’ -- a reference to differing vaccination rates regionally -- and another expert warns gaps in those rates still could hinder the country's progress. Globally, the true effects of the pandemic are still being registered. People with learning difficulties died from Covid-19 at a rate nine times higher than the general population during the first wave of the pandemic in the UK, according to a new study. And despite the reopening of some of the world’s major business hubs, Hong Kong is still stuck in limbo, after it prioritized opening to China over the rest of the world.” Read more at CNN
“WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump has instructed his former aides not to comply with subpoenas from the special congressional committee investigating the Capitol riot, raising the prospect of the panel issuing criminal referrals for some of his closest advisers as early as Friday.
In a letter reviewed by The New York Times, Mr. Trump’s lawyer asked that witnesses not provide testimony or documents related to their ‘official’ duties, and instead to invoke any immunities they might have ‘to the fullest extent permitted by law.’
The House committee has ordered four former Trump administration officials — Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff; Dan Scavino Jr., a deputy chief of staff; Stephen K. Bannon, an adviser; and Kash Patel, a Pentagon chief of staff — to sit for depositions and furnish documents and other materials relevant to its investigation. They all faced a Thursday deadline to respond.
Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the select committee, has threatened criminal referrals for witnesses who do not comply with the subpoenas, and said the panel expected witnesses ‘to cooperate fully with our probe.’” Read more at New York Times
“WASHINGTON — The Senate passed legislation on Thursday to raise the debt ceiling through early December, after a small cluster of Republicans temporarily put aside their objections and allowed action to stave off the threat of a first-ever federal default.
The action came the day after Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, partly backed down from his blockade on raising the debt limit, offering a temporary reprieve as political pressure mounted to avoid being blamed for a fiscal calamity.
But the fragile deal to move ahead was in doubt until the very end, with some Republicans reluctant to drop their objections. Mr. McConnell and his top deputies labored into the evening on Thursday to persuade enough members to clear the way for a vote. Ultimately, 11 Republicans joined every Democrat in voting to take up the bill, clearing the 60-vote threshold needed to break the G.O.P. filibuster.
The final vote was 50 to 48, with Democrats unanimously in support and Republicans united in opposition. Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader, said the House would return on Tuesday to take up the bill.” Read more at New York Times
“AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Abortions quickly resumed in at least six Texas clinics after a federal judge halted the most restrictive abortion law in the U.S., but other physicians remained hesitant, afraid the court order would not stand for long and thrust them back into legal jeopardy.
It was unclear how many abortions Texas clinics rushed to perform Thursday after U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman suspended the law known as Senate Bill 8, which since early September had banned abortions once cardiac activity is detected, usually around six weeks.
Prior to the blistering 113-page order late Wednesday, other courts had declined to stop the law, which bans abortions before some women even know they are pregnant.” Read more at AP News
“Millions of Americans have returned to work this year as health risks have subsided, but a full jobs rebound is a long way off, and the recovery so far has largely left behind Black Americans and workers without college degrees.
The job losses for these groups are still worse than anything college-educated Americans ever experienced during the pandemic.
The highly uneven recovery has been driven by long-standing problems in access to the Internet and child care, along with recent economic head winds: Hiring slowed sharply in August, supply chain issues have worsened, inflation remains high and consumer sentiment plunged in August and remains near its pandemic-era low. While September jobs numbers are expected to show some improvement over August, forecasters keep pushing out predictions for a full recovery further and further.
Why America has 8.4 million unemployed when there are 10 million job openings
There were great hopes for a return to almost normal this fall as students flooded back to in-person schooling and federal unemployment benefits halted, but they are not panning out. Repeated covid-19 outbreaks and escalating shortages of key goods have brought a volatile fall.
At this point, 8.4 million Americans are still actively looking for work and another 5 million have given up on job hunting and dropped out of the labor force completely. Those having the hardest time finding jobs are less-educated Americans and Black women of all education levels. Similarly, the Black unemployment rate, at 8.8 percent, remains nearly double the White unemployment rate.” Read more at Washington Post
President Biden will reinstate and slightly expand the original 1.3 million acre boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah. The size of the monument had been cut by about 85 percent by former President Donald J. Trump. Credit...Ash Lindsey/Alamy
“WASHINGTON — President Biden is expected to announce on Friday that he will use his executive authority to restore sweeping environmental protections to three major national monuments that had been stripped away by former President Donald J. Trump, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Biden will reinstate and slightly expand the original 1.3 million acre boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument, and restore the original 1.8 million acre boundaries of Grand Staircase-Escalante, two rugged and pristine expanses in Utah that are defined by red rock canyons, rich wildlife and archaeological treasures.
He will also restore protections covering the Atlantic Ocean’s first marine monument, the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts, an expanse of sea canyons and underwater mountains off the New England coast.
Mr. Trump had sharply reduced the size of all three national monuments at the urging of ranchers, the fishing industry and many Republican leaders, opening them to mining, drilling and development.” Read more at New York Times
“Some health officials view wider booster use as a tool against long Covid.
New data showing that a small percentage of vaccinated people develop long-term Covid-19 is driving the Biden administration’s push to roll out boosters more widely. Breakthrough infections among fully vaccinated people remain rare, and long-Covid cases are more common in unvaccinated people, but some federal health regulators see new data as a reason to offer boosters more widely in the coming weeks. Some doctors and health experts have expressed opposition to giving boosters to people other than seniors or those with weakened immune systems. They say the vaccines appear to be protecting healthy people against severe Covid-19 and that evidence doesn’t support broader use. Federal health regulators are concerned that the risk of developing long-term symptoms from Covid-19 could eventually be higher for people who don’t get booster shots because emerging data shows the risk, while small, may have grown because of the Delta variant. Among the emerging evidence influencing regulators is a small Israeli study, published by the New England Journal of Medicine in July, that found that 39 out of 1,497 fully vaccinated healthcare workers developed breakthrough infections, and some 19% of them had symptoms lasting longer than six weeks.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Secret help | China called on the U.S. to abide by its agreement to withdraw troops from Taiwan, a relatively muted response to news that American military advisers have been deployed to the island. About two dozen U.S. military personnel, including special forces, have been in Taiwan for more than a year, training local soldiers to repel any attack by China.” Read more at Bloomberg
“WASHINGTON — The CIA will embark on a reorganization intended to focus more on China, the agency’s director announced Thursday.
At the heart of the effort will be a new China Mission Center meant to bring more resources to studying the country and better position officers around the world to collect information and analyze China’s activities.
The new center ‘will further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government,’ William J. Burns, the agency’s director, said in a statement.
Another new center will focus on new technology and global problems like pandemics and climate change. Called the Transnational and Technology Mission Center, part of its mission will be to identify new technologies that could be used by the agency to help collect intelligence and by others against CIA operatives.” Read more at Boston Globe
“Greg Smith had been out of the National Basketball Association for about two years in December 2018, when the former power forward for the Houston Rockets and Dallas Mavericks had what appeared to be a long day at a dental office in Beverly Hills. Invoices submitted on his behalf showed that he received IV sedation and root canals, and had crowns placed on eight teeth.
But the invoices, totaling $47,900, were fake, federal prosecutors in Manhattan said on Thursday.
Mr. Smith was actually thousands of miles from California, playing basketball in Taiwan at the time, the prosecutors said, adding that they had evidence to prove it, including box scores showing he had appeared in games there.
Mr. Smith was one of 18 former N.B.A. players who were charged in what federal authorities portrayed as a brazen conspiracy to defraud a health care program extended to current and former N.B.A. players.
The claims submitted by another defendant, Sebastian Telfair — a Brooklyn high school legend who went on to a journeyman’s professional career — suggested truly woeful dental problems. His claims showed he had received root canals on 17 teeth in a year’s time, the indictment said. He pleaded not guilty on Thursday and was released on bond.” Read more at New York Times
“SAN FRANCISCO — Tesla will move its headquarters from Palo Alto, Calif., to Austin, CEO Elon Musk announced at the company’s annual shareholder meeting on Thursday.
Musk had hinted for months that a move to Texas could be imminent. He also started residing in the state — the country’s second largest and second most populous — where Tesla has ramped up a factory in Austin and where many of the operations for his aerospace firm, SpaceX, are based. Musk lashed out last year at California’s restrictive shelter-in-place measures during the coronavirus pandemic and their effect on the company’s ability to operate its largest production facility in Fremont, Calif.
A move of the company’s corporate headquarters signals a major shift for Tesla, which traces its roots to Silicon Valley and has drawn from a lush environment of incentives for electric-vehicle buyers and green-energy initiatives to propel its growth. The company’s proximity to Stanford University has provided a rich landscape of engineers from which to choose — and its Silicon Valley location placed it within the radius of numerous technology companies, including Google, Apple and Facebook.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“A chain of recent, devastating hacks is exposing some of the Internet’s most fiercely guarded secrets, stepping up a guerrilla struggle between tech firms and anonymous hackers and raising fears that everyday Internet users could get caught in the crossfire.
Hackers this week dumped a colossal haul of data stolen from Twitch, the Amazon-owned streaming site, revealing what they said was not just the million-dollar payouts for its most popular video game streamers but the site’s entire source code — the DNA, written over a decade, central to keeping the company alive.
That followed the hack by the group Anonymous that exposed the most crucial inner workings of Epik, an Internet services company popular with the far right, and triggered firings and other consequences for some of the company’s clients whose identities had previously been undisclosed.” Read more at Washington Post
“Tax talks. Representatives from 140 countries gather virtually today to continue OECD-led negotiations on a global minimum corporate tax. Although a framework agreement was signed in July, differences still remain on exemptions for certain industries. Ireland, one of the major holdouts on the proposal, said on Thursday it would agree to increasing its rate from 12.5 percent to the proposed 15 percent rate, a decision which leaves Hungary as the remaining EU state yet to back the agreement.” Read more at Foreign Policy
“WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly all Americans agree that the rampant spread of misinformation is a problem.
Most also think social media companies, and the people that use them, bear a good deal of blame for the situation. But few are very concerned that they themselves might be responsible, according to a new poll from The Pearson Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Ninety-five percent of Americans identified misinformation as a problem when they’re trying to access important information. About half put a great deal of blame on the U.S. government, and about three-quarters point to social media users and tech companies. Yet only 2 in 10 Americans say they’re very concerned that they have personally spread misinformation.
More — about 6 in 10 — are at least somewhat concerned that their friends or family members have been part of the problem.” Read more at AP News
“For many college students, the pandemic’s arrival last year did more than disrupt their studies, threaten their health and shut down campus life. It also closed off the usual paths that lead from the classroom to jobs after graduation. On-campus recruiting visits were abandoned, and the coronavirus-induced recession made companies pull back from hiring.
But this year, seniors and recent graduates are in great demand as white-collar employers staff up, with some job-seekers receiving multiple offers. University placement office directors and corporate human resources executives report that hiring is running well above last year’s levels, and in some cases surpasses prepandemic activity in 2019.” Read more at New York Times
“New York City is ending its gifted program — which is highly selective and racially segregated — for elementary school students.” Read more at New York Times
“Lives Lived: For 11 years, Neal Sher ran a Justice Department office devoted to hunting down former Nazis. His targets had often lied to enter the U.S. after World War II. Sher died at 74.” Read more at New York Times
Opening night at Carnegie Hall. When the simple words ‘welcome back’ greeted the audience, people burst into cheers. Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times
“Carnegie Hall, the country’s pre-eminent concert space, reopened after 572 days.” Read more at New York Times