The Full Belmonte, 12/9/2023
Displaced Palestinians set up a makeshift camp in the Al-Muwasi area of the southern Gaza Strip on Thursday. Fatima Shbair/Associated Press
“The U.S. blocked a U.N. resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, arguing that it would allow Hamas to regroup. The vote was 13 to 1, with Britain abstaining.” [New York Times]
E.U. reaches landmark deal on the world’s most sweeping bill to regulate artificial intelligence, racing ahead of U.S.
“The deal, which arrives after three days of marathon talks, cements the bloc’s role as the de facto global tech regulator, as policymakers around the globe scramble to address the risks created by rapid advances in AI systems. The E.U. legislation establishes a hierarchy of regulations, putting the most stringent limits on the systems that policymakers have deemed riskiest.”
Read more at Washington Post
Texas attorney general opposes emergency abortion allowed by judge
“The same day that a judge said Kate Cox can get an abortion because of a fatal fetal diagnosis, Texas AG Ken Paxton is trying to block the ruling.”
READ MORE at USA Today
Federal judge approves settlement barring migrant family separations
“A federal judge in San Diego on Friday approved a settlement that prohibits U.S. officials from separating migrant families for crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally and offers aid to thousands of parents and children forced apart under the Trump administration. The settlement involves a 2018 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union to block the Trump administration’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy, which called for separating parents from their children to prosecute the adults for crossing the border illegally.”
Read more at Washington Post
Michigan teen gets life in prison for Oxford High School attack
“A teenager was sentenced to life in prison Friday for killing four students, wounding more and terrorizing Michigan’s Oxford High School in 2021. A judge rejected pleas for a shorter sentence and ensured that Ethan Crumbley, 17, will not get an opportunity for parole.” Read More at AP News
Federal judge prohibits separating migrant families at US border for 8 years
“A federal judge has ordered an eight-year ban on policies separating children from parents who cross the U.S. border illegally. The decision preemptively blocks resumption of a Trump-era policy that the former president hasn’t ruled out if voters return him to the White House.” Read More at AP News
Harvard president apologizes for remarks on antisemitism as pressure mounts on Penn’s president
“Harvard University’s president apologized as pressure mounted for the University of Pennsylvania’s president to resign over their testimony at a congressional hearing on antisemitism that critics from the White House on down say failed to show that they would stand up to antisemitism on campus.” Read More at AP News
Billionaire GOP donor endorses Haley, says Trump’s time has ‘come and gone’
BY STEFF DANIELLE THOMAS
“Home Depot co-founder and billionaire Ken Langone put his support behind GOP hopeful Nikki Haley on Friday, calling her approach to the 2024 election ‘smart.’
‘I think she’s just what we need right now. I think her approach is smart. I think she’s clarified herself on some issues which is very important,’ Langone, who is seen as a GOP mega donor, said in an interview with Fox News’s Neil Cavuto.”
Read the full story here at Washington Post
“There have been quite a few metrics of late indicating the US economy is slowing down following the Federal Reserve’s long campaign to rein in inflation. But the robust American labor market isn’t going quietly. Employment and wages increased in November and more people entered the labor force, defying expectations of continued softening as the central bank seeks to stick a soft landing. While this is good news for the American worker, it’s deflating hopes on Wall Street that the Fed will cut interest rates early next year. Over in Europe, rapidly weakening inflation and a feeble economy have raised bets the European Central Bank will slash rates in 2024.
Jerome Powell Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg
Across America, the good jobs news came with a bonus: wage growth remains strong as inflation continues to slow. But of course that lends to concerns that price pressures might be harder to stamp out. The Fed meets next week with many expecting it will hold interest rates steady. The US economy meanwhile seems on track for that soft-landing Fed Chair Jerome Powell is aiming for. But he shouldn’t take a victory lap just yet, Karl W. Smith writes for Bloomberg Opinion. ‘The economy’s resilience suggests monetary policy may be broken, having contributed very little—if anything—to the big slowdown in inflation.’” ” [Bloomberg]
“US President Joe Biden urged Congress to approve additional aid for Ukraine before Christmas as a Republican blockade fuels worries Russia will gain the upper hand in its 21-month war, during which it has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians. The US aid package is part of an almost $106 billion request for emergency funds that also includes support for Israel, money tied to the US southern border and support for US allies in the Pacific. Regarding the latter, China criticized the US after an American warship sailed in disputed waters in the South China Sea.” ” [Bloomberg]
“Israel’s military said its mission to destroy an estimated 311 miles of Hamas tunnels across the Gaza Strip will take months. With Israel’s bombing campaign continuing, the urban devastation is likely to leave about 2.2 million Palestinians homeless with no answers as to where or how they will be re-homed. The Palestinian Authority is working with US officials on a postwar plan for the region, while arguing that fully destroying Hamas is unrealistic. Vladimir Putin (who said he will seek a fifth term as Russian President) and his Iranian counterpart Ebrahim Raisi vowed to deepen ties during a meeting in Moscow. The talks with Iran, which backs Hamas, came a day after the Russian leader made a rare visit to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both critical of Israel’s destruction of Gaza. Gaza health authorities said Israel has killed at least 17,000 Palestinians during two months of war.” ” [Bloomberg]
Vladimir Putin shakes hands with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ahead of their talks in Riyadh. Photographer: Alexey Nikolsky/Getty Images
“Cutting or eliminating the use of fossil fuels, a critical part of any effort to slow global warming, was nevertheless the most contentious topic at the United Nations’ COP28 climate talks. More than 100 countries want an agreement to phase out the use of coal, oil and gas. But top oil producing countries including Saudi Arabia vehemently oppose any such language. UN scientists have warned that greenhouse gas emissions need to fall by at least 43% by 2030 (from 2019 levels) to keep global warming within the 1.5C threshold. The planet is currently on track to warm by 3C at the end of this century, which would be cataclysmic for humans and ecosystems.” ” [Bloomberg]
“Franchises are notoriously risky. Even still, devotees of a popular brand of fitness studios were told they could collect checks amounting to about $400,000 a year by following the corporate playbook. Now, some who have turned their workouts (and savings) into these Xponential franchises—which include Pure Barre and CycleBar—say they’re bleeding money. Then there’s Pilot Travel Centers, the family-owned gas-station network founded by Jim Haslam that’s in a legal fight with Warren Buffett.”[Bloomberg]
“Office holiday parties have gotten a full makeover. Many companies are replacing champagne and sequins for pickleball lessons and guac-making competitions in an effort to be more inclusive. Wondering where the job growth is? The hottest job in the US pays $80,00 a year—and it doesn’t require a college degree. Wind-turbine service technicians will increase almost 45% over the next decade, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts—faster than in any other occupation.” ” [Bloomberg]
(Illustration by Elena Lacey/The Post; iStock)
OpenAI leaders warned of abusive behavior before Sam Altman’s ouster
“Some senior employees described Altman as psychologically abusive, creating chaos at OpenAI. The complaints were a major factor in the board’s decision to fire the CEO, who was reinstated five days later.”
By Nitasha Tiku ● Read more »Washington Post
At World Central Kitchen, José Andrés Is in the Middle of a Mess
The celebrity chef’s nonprofit has become a global leader in disaster response. Some workers say its recent scandals reflect the dark side of his style.
“A painting that hung until recently at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, depicts José Andrés, the celebrity chef and restaurateur, standing in a foot of rainwater, holding out a large ceramic pot of stew with an expression of steely resolve. Well behind him, a couple dozen people lug food and supplies, with the logo for World Central Kitchen, Andrés’ disaster relief nonprofit, scattered throughout. At the edge of the jungle behind them sit some collapsed buildings, and distant plumes of smoke frame Andrés’ head against the blue bits of sky peeking through. This is a tribute to the man, and to WCK, whose influence has transformed him from a professional foodie into a figure of global import with the White House’s ear.
WCK has fed millions of people in need after devastating hurricanes, earthquakes and fires, becoming one of the largest such organizations on Earth. Over the past five years, its annual revenue has grown more than 50-fold, topping $500 million in 2022. (Michael Bloomberg, majority owner of Bloomberg Businessweekparent Bloomberg LP, has also donated to WCK through his charitable organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies.) Its hundred or so staffers, along with thousands more volunteers and contractors, have responded to disasters in 18 countries so far this year—feeding war victims in Ukraine, delivering meal kits to earthquake survivors in Syria and Turkey and partnering with local aid groups in Gaza, Israel and surrounding countries to feed war victims and the families of hostages. ‘When we hear about a tragedy, we all kind of get stuck on ‘What’s the best to way to help?’ playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, an Andrés pal, told Time magazine in the early days of Covid-19. ‘He just hurries his ass over and gets down there.'
As WCK’s co-founder, face and ‘chief feeding officer,’ Andrés officially has no serious role in its day-to-day management, but this dramatically understates his involvement. More than two dozen current and former employees, contractors and volunteers, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisals, say Andrés frequently, if unpredictably, manages relief efforts on the ground. They say he has a fierce antipathy to bureaucracy and regularly sends his people into the thick of an urgent disaster or, if the logistics make that impossible, has them pay local restaurants to share their larders with neighbors. The chef’s orders sometimes arrive when he’s on the ground with a WCK response team and at other times when he’s half a world away, texting directives to the team’s group chat. WCK insiders call this phenomenon ‘Hurricane José.’
‘Many people always say, ‘José, you are very hard on everybody,’ Andrés tells the camera in We Feed People, a 2022 documentary directed by Oscar winner Ron Howard, after he’s caught chewing out one of his workers. ‘I would love to be the nice guy all the time. ‘Good job, good job, good job.’ I am sorry,” he goes on. ‘When it ain’t happening, everything is [BLEEP].’
After a devastating earthquake killed tens of thousands in Turkey in February, Andrés demanded that his staff send a food truck into areas the provincial governor had declared no-gos because of landslides, according to a series of messages reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek. Other messages show the chef questioning a staff member’s stated concerns about safety measures in Haiti and a concerned staffer reporting that Andrés had urged a colleague to ‘go against his judgement of safety’ and operate ‘guerrilla style,’ in Andrés’ words.
As a matter of course, disaster relief nonprofits tend to operate in dangerous, often chaotic environments. It’s extremely unusual, however, for one to pause operations to take stock of internal scandals and staff complaints. That’s what happened in the middle of this year, when WCK stopped deploying to new disasters for about a month, internal messages show. Several of the key issues at hand, workers say, center on the downsides of Hurricane José.
Staffers called for reforms to a range of basic WCK procedures. Some of these changes they proposed in response to safety concerns. Others they sought in response to a Bloomberg News report that WCK leadership had spent years ignoring allegations that its director of emergency relief was a serial sexual harasser. Still others, they say, were intended to head off the potential waste of millions of dollars in donor funds directed to questionable partners. Current and former employees say the driving force was often Andrés’ demands to serve more meals, faster. As in the kitchen at one of his restaurants, his word carries the weight of law. ‘It’s this ‘yes, Chef’ shit,’ says Prabakaran Sechachalam, a contractor in Turkey who was fired this spring after he raised concerns that partners in the local supply chain were defrauding WCK. ‘Everybody had to impress him. He is the ultimate decision-maker.’
Andrés declined to comment for this story. WCK has acknowledged missteps, including failing to respond to allegations of sexual harassment and losing money to fraud, but said in a statement that it’s setting up safeguards to prevent such issues. WCK is ‘committed to mitigating any and all risks to the safety, security and wellbeing of staff, contractors and volunteers,’ Chief Executive Officer Erin Gore said in the statement. The nonprofit recently hired its first chief people officer and chief safety and security officer, Gore noted. She stressed, however, that there are risks inherent to crisis response work.
‘World Central Kitchen believes hungry people need to be fed today, not tomorrow,’ Gore said. ‘This sense of urgency is foundational, and coupled with José’s passion and drive, is what inspires us to start cooking and feeding where others can’t or won’t.’
Over the past year, current employees and contractors say, they’ve seen little change in practice. Almost all say they still believe in the nonprofit’s mission and its founder’s good intentions, and most acknowledge that any organization that grows at the rate WCK has in recent years is bound to screw up, sometimes big. Yet most also say that Andrés and his lieutenants remain a long way from regaining their trust and that ‘yes, Chef’ isn’t good enough anymore. ‘The work is groundbreaking and necessary,’ says Elyssa Kaplan, who was the organization’s director of culinary operations until she was laid off in the fall, along with several other staffers, in what she was told wasn’t a ‘performance-based’ decision. (WCK declined to comment on the recent layoffs.) ‘What’s tragic is that WCK’s leadership team treats these incredible people and their concerns as disposable nuisances.’
Born in 1969 in the north of Spain, Andrés enrolled in culinary school in Barcelona at age 15 and moved to the US at 21. He first made his name as a chef in Washington, DC, with the tapas restaurant Jaleo, then expanded with eateries with names like Zaytinya and minibar. Before Andrés turned 40, Anthony Bourdain dubbed him the ‘big daddy of the DC fine dining scene.’ By this time, he’d also become a cookbook author and TV personality. In 2005 he began hosting a Spanish-language program called Vamos a cocinar (“Let’s Cook”), with a vibe somewhere between Julia Child and Mister Rogers. He taught viewers to make croquettes and moussaka, chatted with local butchers and goofed around with kids assembling sesame tuna skewers. Soon he made breakout appearances on Iron Chef and Top Chef.
Today, Andrés has 35 restaurants. He co-chairs President Joe Biden’s Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition. On his podcast, Longer Tables, he interviews the likes of Secretary of State Antony Blinkenand New Jersey Senator Cory Booker about the plight of farmers and the national security implications of food policy.
When an earthquake rocked Haiti in 2010, Andrés was among the celebrities who flew there to cook for people staying in tent cities. That work inspired him to do more. He and business partner Rob Wilder founded WCK that year with the goals ‘to provide food for vulnerable people, to support local agriculture, to promote environmentally sustainable cooking fuels and technologies’ and whatever else they saw fit, according to the organization’s first-year tax filing. For seven years or so, its efforts remained small-scale and focused on Haiti. Andrés toured agricultural projects with Bill Clinton and Mario Batali, helped distribute clean cookstoves in poor communities and stumped for microloans at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. According to tax filings from the time, WCK never employed more than three staffers or topped $700,000 in annual revenue during this period, most of it from donations.
Things started to change in 2017, after Hurricane Maria decimated Puerto Rico. By coordinating local chefs and other nonprofits, Andrés and his small team managed to sign up 20,000 volunteers to serve 3.6 million meals, and WCK’s annual revenue soared to $21.6 million, according to its report on the year. ‘Puerto Rico was a game changer in every aspect,’ Andrés’ wife, Patricia, says in We Feed People. The film shows the chef in Puerto Rico rallying groups of volunteers, working the phones for donations, smoking cigars, crying from exhaustion and celebrating a local veteran’s birthday.
In the years since, WCK has sought to replicate its Puerto Rico strategy in crisis areas around the world. When a disaster strikes, it sends employees, contractors and volunteers to set up a kitchen, hand out food kits, or both. Where possible, it partners with local restaurants and food trucks to scale up quickly and dispense as many meals as possible.
Soon after Hurricane Maria, it was regularly grappling with logistics a couple orders of magnitude more complex than those it employed in its years in Haiti. Andrés and his team set up kitchens in Guatemala after the Fuego Volcano erupted, in North Carolina after Hurricane Florence, in Colombia for refugees fleeing the violence, hyperinflation and political turmoil in Venezuela.
WCK’s power was growing, and so were its responsibilities. This would have been an opportune moment for Andrés to hire experienced nonprofit leaders to professionalize the operation and set up bedrock oversight protocols. Instead, he put his friend Nate Mook, a documentary filmmaker, in charge, and brought on several trained chefs without disaster relief experience who quickly rose to the top of the org chart. They included Jason Collis, now chief relief officer, and Tim Kilcoyne, who eventually became director of emergency relief.
Andrés’ enthusiastic pandemic response efforts attracted many new donors to WCK, increasing the nonprofit’s annual revenue from $29 million in 2019 to $270 million in 2020 as it embedded in communities throughout the US. When the era of quarantines waned, Andrés continued to enjoy big boosts in revenue without having to set up traditional guardrails. In July 2021, Jeff Bezos announced he was giving Andrés one of two ‘Courage and Civility Awards,’ worth $100 million, to be disbursed to nonprofits as he saw fit. ‘No bureaucracy, no committees, they just do what they want,’ Bezos told a crowd gathered in Van Horn, Texas, just after he went into suborbital space for the first time. (He was still wearing his blue spacesuit and a cowboy hat.) An emotional Andrés called it the ‘start of a new chapter’ for WCK.
WCK was now huge, but it had developed little in the way of due diligence, according to more than half a dozen current and former workers. They say they still can’t trust the official meal counts, partly because WCK has no process for auditing its restaurant partners and has never even defined what it considers a meal. Also, they say, the incentives are skewed: The local restaurants and chefs that WCK partners with on the ground are paid based on how many meals they say they’ve served, and the WCK response teams know Andrés wants to hear that overall meal counts are rising.
‘For all the good that these organizations do, we just ignore the bad,’ says Tim Linaberry, who worked for the nonprofit in Washington, DC, during the worst of Covid. Linaberry, who’s still on call as a WCK contractor but hasn’t been worked with them since 2020, says he’s proud of all the good he saw WCK do. As for the bad, he says, without offering specifics, he saw WCK ‘waste large amounts of money on things for the sake of optics’ and allow ‘abuse, harassment and toxic masculinity to permeate its workplace unabated.’
Last year, Kilcoyne, the director of emergency relief, left WCK without any explanation to staff. This spring, Bloomberg News reported that he’d been fired based on the conclusions of a human resources investigation. According to interviews with six women who say he harassed them over a period of years, Kilcoyne, who was often in charge of the sleeping arrangements during deployments, discussed his sex life in explicit detail with subordinates and other colleagues and pressured some into sleeping in his hotel room and having sex with him. Months after the investigation into these allegations began, he was deployed to Ukraine in a leadership position.
The month after Kilcoyne’s exit, in July 2022, CEO Mook left, too. As Bloomberg News reported, the investigation had revealed that Mook knew about one of the complaints as early as 2018 and took no significant action. His successor, Gore, has said a review of WCK procedures around the time of the alleged harassment led to his departure. Mook has said he addressed concerns about Kilcoyne and that he’s ‘disappointed’ in how WCK has characterized his departure, saying ‘the WCK board and I had differences over the CEO role.’
About a week after Mook’s departure was announced, Andrés tweeted a picture of the two of them and praised his work. ‘I can not wait to see what you will do next,’ he wrote. ‘Gracias amigo!’ Andrés had also been close with Kilcoyne, calling him a friend and a ‘true American hero’ on social media.
People who’ve worked directly with Andrés at WCK say he’s not known to be forgiving. Several described his tendency to publicly shame employees over mistakes as minor as forgetting the ketchup on a sandwich, or requests as reasonable as increased security training and protocols in a country where authorities have warned about kidnappings. Several also say the pressure to take on dangerous assignments often comes directly from Andrés, via WhatsApp messages and tense phone calls. In a message Businessweek reviewed, Andrés chides a staffer for suggesting they wouldn’t go to Haiti without a beefed-up security plan or proper training. ‘What? I think we need to rethink who we are and what we are,’ Andrés wrote. ‘We will respond!’
Over the past couple of years, current and former employees and contractors say, WCK’s lack of formal safety protocols has grown tougher to ignore. Sechachalam, who was used to rigorous trainings from his years of work with other disaster relief nonprofits, says he was shocked that WCK provided no safety briefing or gear on his way to earthquake relief efforts in Turkey—no hard hat in case something falls on you, no brightly colored vest in case you get knocked out, not even a KN95 or equivalent mask to protect against such contaminants as asbestos. Instead, Andrés sent a message to the Turkey team’s WhatsApp group chat, telling them to ignore a governor’s orders to avoid landslide areas. ‘We don’t care about governors … we care about people,’ he wrote in the group chat, according to a screenshot of the message. ‘Send a food truck.’ People reacted with praying hands, a flexing bicep and heart emojis.
Cihan Çinar, another former WCK contractor in Turkey who previously worked for the UN World Food Programme in similar situations, describes WCK’s smattering of armed personnel and daily updates about safety statistics as ‘pseudo-security.’ Contractor Christina Arriola, who’s worked for WCK all over the world, says the organization often puts contractors in dangerous situations without adequate safety measures in place. ‘They’re not doing right by people,” Arriola says.
Complaints about WCK’s governance have begun to spill into public view as its scale and Andrés’ ambitions have reached new heights. Last year, WCK raised $400 million just for Ukraine relief and reported spending $2 million a day on thousands of food distribution sites across that country, partnering with hundreds of local restaurants in an active war zone. Only Ukraine’s national bank raised more money for relief efforts there in the first nine months of the war, according to Forbes Ukraine. During his appearance on Andrés’ podcast, Secretary of State Blinken praised ‘the extraordinary work of World Central Kitchen’ in serving ‘wonderful, nutritious food’ in a war zone.
WCK says it has served more than 200 million meals to victims of the war in Ukraine since Russia invaded last year. Yet the real number is likely lower, says Katerina Serdiuk, a contractor who helped oversee operations throughout Ukraine until this past May. Over a period of about six months in 2022, according to copies of multiple reports, she and other contractors told WCK higher-ups that some local partners appeared to be massively inflating their meal counts and pocketing the extra money; serving up lousy meals, like a bit of mystery meat with a single slice of bread; or taking money from WCK while making no food at all. (More than one kitchen had been demolished or occupied by Russians, and at least one chef moved away without telling anyone.) An internal investigation by the Palo Alto-based law firm Cooley LLP found that millions of dollars had been misspent along these lines in Ukraine, according to a June blog post by Gore, the new CEO, and Wilder, Andrés’ co-founder and business partner. Serdiuk, who worked closely with Andrés in Ukraine, says she was impressed by the chef’s bravery and holds WCK’s other leaders responsible for its errors there.
Sechachalam and five other current and former workers say they’ve seen similar behavior in Turkey. Çinar, who has years of experience in procurement, estimates that WCK overpaid one grocery supplier by at least $10 million. One of the current employees says the WCK team simply didn’t check on any partner restaurants for weeks and can’t verify that some of them served any meals at all.
Spokesperson Linda Roth said in an email that ‘WCK audits operations on an ongoing basis and has a strong record on this front.’
In March, WCK held a tense retreat for about three dozen members of its disaster relief team, including Sechachalam, at a resort in Austin. The team-building exercises were supposed to involve obstacle courses and the like, but things got heated after the moderators brought up some mandatory reading, a business handbook called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Dysfunction No. 1 is ‘absence of trust,’ and attendees said they felt it. They demanded improved safety measures, plus a full accounting of what had happened with Kilcoyne, according to Sechachalam and four current employees who were there. They say the executive team wouldn’t agree to any changes.
This spring and summer, after the publication of the Bloomberg News story about Kilcoyne’s and Mook’s ousters and the details of the Cooley report, frustrated members of the relief team expanded their complaints about WCK’s leadership. During a companywide call in mid-May following the publication of the Bloomberg News report about allegations of sexual harassment, Andrés seemed surprised and unprepared for how upset the team was, according to three people who were on the call. Executives held a series of meetings on the subject and resumed deployments in late June, but many workers and volunteers say things haven’t improved. ‘We’re in the same place,’ Sandra Orsa, a manager on the relief team, said during a contentious team call in June, a recording of which was shared with Businessweek. ‘How [do] you think we’re ready to deploy?’
Outrage among WCK staffers and calls for change have done little to dim Andrés’ halo. Shortly before Halloween, the chef appeared on Good Morning America’s afternoon show GMA3: What You Need to Know to pitch his mission and a graphic novel, Feeding Dangerously, which depicts him on the ground in disaster areas. ‘We used to go to earthquakes and hurricanes and volcanoes, but now, more and more we are getting into also conflicts,’ Andrés said, sporting a WCK-branded jacket. ‘We are right now still in Ukraine. We’ve done more than 240 million meals.’
‘Wow,’ host DeMarco Morgan said. ‘That’s why we’re so grateful for you and all that you do.’
WCK, now operating at megascale and a leader in disaster relief, is still undeniably doing good. When Andrés appeared on GMA3, his people were monitoring and responding to crises in Afghanistan, Armenia, Egypt, Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, Mexico and Morocco. Recent WCK teams have helicoptered in to feed a small village wrecked by a hurricane, sent hundreds of aid trucks to a partner nonprofit in Gaza and distributed meals and food kits to refugees and earthquake survivors.
Some of those teams just haven’t gotten much support. In late October, WCK sent two staffers and a handful of contractors to Mexico to respond to a Category 5 hurricane despite pushback from at least two staffers, who said they’d be stretched too thin. ‘Activating without full teams goes against our commitment to not engage in such practices,’ Fatima Castillo, a senior manager of Latin America relief operations, wrote in a Slack message Businessweek reviewed. ‘It seems like we are once again being ‘dirty yes’ people.’
‘Dirty yes’ is a common phrase among WCK staff. It means saying yes to something even if there’s little confidence that it can be done safely and responsibly. A current employee on the relief team said there have ‘barely’ been safety protocols on WCK’s Armenia, Egypt and Morocco response efforts, though the new security chief has been in action.
Over the past six months, Andrés hasn’t spent much time on the ground with WCK, say three current workers. He’s been in Las Vegas for a Formula 1 race, and in Spain, the setting of his new TV show, which co-stars his three daughters. He’s continued to host his weekly podcast, announced three new cookbooks and founded the Global Food Institute at George Washington University, with the stated goal to ‘transform people’s lives and the health of our planet.’ And, according to two of the workers, he’s still giving orders in the group chats.
Meanwhile, several longtime staff members have left recently, including the two people who were running operations in Ukraine, the chief finance officer, multiple director-level managers and a security specialist. Of the top 10 key employees listed on WCK’s most recent tax filing, for 2022, only three still work for the nonprofit. Three current employees on WCK’s relief team say the status quo hasn’t changed, however. They say they’ve lost trust in WCK’s leadership, including Andrés and Gore to impose real accountability or meet basic disaster relief safety standards. (Gore said in a statement: ‘The addition of experienced leaders to our executive team, a newly formed culture team, and an ongoing leadership listening tour demonstrate our commitment to solidify the trust that has allowed World Central Kitchen to show up in 18 countries this year.’)
This dissonance, between the pageantry of Andrés’ grand restaurants and the gritty reality for the relief workers on the ground, is difficult to ignore at The Bazaar by José Andrés, one of the chef’s latest fine dining outposts, in New York City. It opened toward the end of summer on the second floor of the Ritz-Carlton, a testament to how his restaurant empire has flourished along with his image. On a Wednesday night in late August, Andrés wasn’t around; the menu, brought by one of the restaurant’s six hosts, included a message from him instead, as well as cocktails and small bites named for some of his famous pals. A server said the $30 Andrés & Cooper cocktail (a mezcal drink) was named for ‘his friend Anderson Cooper,’ while the $46 potatoes Pau Gasol, topped with Ossetra caviar, referred to the Spanish basketball player.
Waiters, some sporting Andrés’ name on their white coats, rushed around the luxurious dining room. One carted around a pig’s leg for quiet tableside jamón slicing; another carried the biggest shrimp you’ve ever seen, topped with a puff of ponzu ‘air.’ No detail was too small to deserve thorough consideration. So why, some WCK staff ask, can’t Andrés apply that same care when lives are on the line?
Google reviews for Andrés restaurants often include praise for his nonprofit. ‘It feels good supporting José Andrés restaurants with all the amazing work he does with his World Central Kitchen,’ reads one for Jaleo in Chicago. Kaplan, WCK’s former director of culinary operations, says she hears people say they eat at Andrés’ restaurants to support his charity. But as the chef’s star rose, her job got tougher. ‘During my four years at WCK, I only saw the toxicity from above grow and worsen,’ she says. ‘I hope that one day the interior reality will match the exterior messaging.’” [Bloomberg]
Extremely rare white alligator is born at a Florida reptile park
“An extremely rare white leucistic alligator has been born at a Florida reptile park. The 19.2-inch female slithered out of its shell and into the history books as one of a few known leucistic alligators, Gatorland Orlando said.” Read More at AP News
Young tyrannosaur died with a full stomach, remarkable fossil reveals
The young Gorgosaurus had dined on the drumsticks of two smaller bird-like dinosaurs
Paleontologists reported Friday the discovery of a remarkable fossil: a juvenile tyrannosaur called Gorgosaurus libratus with the partially digested drumsticks of two birdlike dinosaurs where its stomach once was. The extraordinary specimen opens a vivid window into the behavior, development and diet of a predator that lived 75 million years ago.
‘It’s a phenomenal paper, and the discovery is just over-the-top,’ said David Burnham, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas who was not involved in the research.
The tyrannosaur Gorgosaurus is a slightly smaller cousin of the most famous Tyrannosaurus rex. This juvenile was probably between 5 and 7 years old and weighed about 740 pounds — 13 percent the size of a fully grown adult. It would have measured about 15 feet from nose to tail and stood about as tall as an average human adult.
Darren Tanke, a technician at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, collected the fossil in 2009 in the badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada. It had been buried lying on its left side. As he worked to prepare the fossil, he noticed something odd poking through the rib cage — a few small toe bones.
Careful investigation would reveal those to be parts of the hindlimbs of two yearling birdlike dinosaurs called Citipes that would have each been about the size of a turkey.
Outside paleontologists said the find was exceptional for a long list of reasons. The bones were articulated and found in place, rather than jumbled up for scientists to piece together. The animal is a juvenile, providing a critical window into the time before Gorgosaurus bulked up into a bone-crushing apex predator. But most dazzling, its stomach contents were intact, allowing scientists to see that before its death, it had recently dined on two separate occasions.
‘This is a once-in-a-career fossil,’ said Darla Zelenitsky, a paleontologist at the University of Calgary and one of the authors of the study, published Friday in Science Advances. The adolescent dinosaur ‘was probably very much a precision eater. It had a very narrow skull, bladelike teeth [and] it could probably just easily rip the hindlimbs off these animals.’
Dino drumsticks and ‘killer bananas’
For years, scientists have pondered the developmental arc of the tyrannosaurs. The adults are the celebrities of the dinosaur world: Most of the known species were burly, robust animals that are thought to have hunted massive duck-billed and horned dinosaurs.
But until they reached maturity — 11 years old for a Gorgosaurus — they were almost like a different species, more lightly built than their elders, faster and lacking the bone-crushing chomp. Their teeth were more like sharp blades, not rounded like the ‘killer bananas’ of adult tyrannosaurs, said Francois Therrien, the curator of dinosaur paleoecology at the Royal Tyrrell Museum.
The changes in physiology led to theories that, like modern-day Komodo dragons, tyrannosaurs underwent a dietary shift over the course of a lifetime, eating small prey when they were young and possibly occupying a separate ecological niche from that of adults….” Read more at Washington Post
Not Real News: A look at what didn't happen this week
“A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. Here are the facts.” Read More at AP News
THE WEEK IN CULTURE
Karen Finley at Art Basel Miami Beach this week. Marian Carrasquero for The New York Times
“Conservatives called Karen Finley’s artwork obscene. Twenty-five years after she was involved in a Supreme Court ruling, she’s revisiting the subject at Art Basel Miami Beach.
James Poniewozik, our television critic, writes that Norman Lear, the “All in the Family” producer who died Tuesday at the age of 101, made his sitcoms into a form of patriotic dissent.
“Oppenheimer” will be released next year in Japan. Critics there had said the biopic’s cross-promotion with “Barbie” trivialized the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan during World War II.
A new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, “Women Dressing Women,” is the museum’s first to survey the work of only women.
The composer Jay Schwartz’s latest orchestral work, born of the pandemic, loss and long swims in open water, is premiering in Germany.
A new lawsuit accused the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs of participating in the gang-rape of an unnamed 17-year-old girl in 2003. He denied the allegations.
Artforum lost most of its contributors and longtime staff after its top editor was fired for publishing an open letter on the Israel-Hamas war. Now the magazine’s future is in flux.” [New York Times]
Ryan O’Neal has died at 82. He became an instant star with the hit film ‘Love Story,’ the highest-grossing movie of 1970.
“Mr. O’Neal was a familiar face in both film and television for a half-century. His performance as a wealthy, golden-haired Harvard hockey player in ‘Love Story’ garnered him an Academy Award nomination.”
Read more at New York Times