FIFA has a human rights policy, so how could it award Saudi Arabia the 2034 soccer World Cup?

Hamas/Fatah reign will enure attacksWhen I think back on what I read his year, on what stuck, and stuck , refusing to unstick, the common denominator was my surprise at my own surprise. A fresh take! A subject I’d assumed I knew! An antidote to heard-it-all-before-ism, that cynicism we develop from having access to every story ever told, every opinion ever voiced and every song ever sung, behind a black mirror in your pocket. Cults? Bret Anthony Johnston’s “We Burn Daylight” found a love story in the old ugliness of Waco. Dystopia? The heroine of Anne de Marcken’s “It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over” is dead, yet still longing for a failed world. Chicago’s Jesse Ball, never at a loss for experimenting, returned with “The Repeat Room,” mashing Kafka, fascism and our courts into a revealing sorta-thriller. And those aren’t even three of my 10 favorite books of 2024. Surely you have your own? Social media is awash in lists of reads from last month, last week, last year, driven by the same shock of recognition that there’s plenty new under the sun. “Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil,” by Chicago’s Ananda Lima, impressively remade the Faustian bargain. James Marcus’ “Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson”; Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ “Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde”; Keith O’Brien’s “Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose and the Last Glory Days of Baseball” — each a cool breeze in the typically formal category of biography. Ian Frazier’s “Paradise Bronx” found a wandering epic in the history of a neglected borough; Tana French continued to retool detective writing in “The Hunter”; and Katherine Rundell’s “Vanishing Treasures” not only brought a strange, hilarious appreciation to endangered animals, her underrated fantasy “Impossible Creatures” invented a world of new ones. Rebecca Boyle’s glowing history “Our Moon” looked into the sky and reminded us that seeing something every day is not the same as knowing it. None of those books are in my top 10, either. That’s how much good stuff there was. What follows then are 10 favorites, the stickiest of stickers, in no order. If you need a stack of fresh takes for 2025, start here: “Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy and the Trial That Riveted a Nation” by Brenda Wineapple: If you’re eager for answers to the presidential election, start here. If you’re merely looking for gripping history you assumed you knew — ditto. Wineapple, one of our great contemporary American historians, recounts the players, causes and events leading to the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. A Tennessee school teacher, accused of teaching evolution, was defended by Chicago’s Clarence Darrow. But as Wineapple shows with impeccable research and accessible storytelling this was never about proving science, but about harnessing intolerance and exploiting the national tension between ignorance and truth. Wineapple doesn’t explicitly lay out the trial’s resonance 100 years later. She doesn’t need to. “Headshot” by Rita Bullwinkel: Debut novel of the year, a sports drama that doesn’t find headlong momentum in triumph but how a group of teenage girls define themselves through competition and each other. Structured around seven bouts at an amateur tournament in Nevada, Bullwinkle’s novel pulls readers in and out of real-time thoughts, pausing over futures. One boxer will be a wedding planner; another won’t be able to hold a cup of tea, her teen boxing reaching out into old age. In their minds is where the action is most brutal: Some can’t shake tragedies; some find themselves fond of violence. Bullwinkle keeps us in the moment, never parsing their psychology, and certainly not leading us toward cinematic bombast. One fighter, as she wins, notices “warmth radiating through her chest.” But it’s a warmth, Bullwinkle writes, “she’ll feel again very few times in her life.” “James” by Percival Everett: I didn’t want to include this. If only because, if you’re up on literary fiction, you expect it. This is the book of the year , an instant classic. What’s left to say? Well, it’s one of the few instances when the hype matches the quality. Everett, whose decades of obscurity are now gone, is on all burners here — humor, pacing, language, making room for a reader to rest. His companion to “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is too alive to be a 21st-century corrective. Reading Twain is not necessary, only knowing that Everett’s James was Twain’s simple and loyal Jim. And James is boundless, turning on and off his intellect to appease white people, noting the irony of having to pretend that he doesn’t understand the word “irony,” always playing the long game to escape from slavery: “I never felt more exposed or vulnerable as I did in the light of day with a book open.” “Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV” by Emily Nussbaum: You’re wondering: Do we need this book? Nussbaum, who won a Pulitzer Prize as TV critic for the New Yorker, asks it herself. Then directs us to a better question: Who knew the development of the most hated TV genre offered so much insight into social experiments, human cruelty, technology and the blur between high and low art? It’s a poke through roots (“The Gong Show,” cinema verite) and a cache of interviews (including Rodney Alcala, the killer subject of Netflix’s “Woman of the Hour”). Nussbaum is such a fun guide you reveal in your own rubbernecking even as you sweat the apocalyptic ramifications of, she writes, “filmmaking that has been cut with commercial contaminants, like a street drug, in order to slash the price and intensify the effect.” “The History of Sound: Stories” by Ben Shattuck: Ever close a book and just ... sigh? There’s nothing overtly gimmicky to the dozen stories in this graceful collection, rooted in New England pubs and logging camps and prep schools, spanning the 1600s to now. Shattuck — whose excellent “Six Walks” retraced the footsteps of Thoreau — is more interested in natural echos of ambivalence, uniting characters across stories without fuss, in sometimes funny ways. One tale, a harrowing account of a lost utopian community in backwoods Maine, is revisited in another tale, but as an academic paper written centuries later that gets the history of that community completely wrong. A (faux) Radiolab transcript about the mysterious photo of an extinct seabird is matched later to a bittersweet response, the story of the struggling husband who snapped the picture. If it sounds like last year’s “North Woods” (also set in New England, spanning centuries), that’s not a bad thing. “The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America” by Sarah Lewis: Lewis, a Harvard University cultural historian with a specialty in how visual arts shape the world, is one of a few innovators worthy of that overused title “disruptor.” She works here in the period from the Civil War to Jim Crow, showing how civic leaders (Woodrow Wilson, P.T. Barnum) willfully disregarded evidence that race was a myth, establishing racial hierarchy. It’s a fascinating history of cultural blindness, centered on the Caucasus region in Europe, from which we derive “caucasian,” and where scholars rooted whiteness. Americans sympathized with the Caucasus people as they went to war against Russia — and then photos circulated showing a population far from just white. It’s a handsome, art-filled book about how choosing to ignore facts creates the illusion of truth. “Everyone Who is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America and the Making of a Crisis” by Jonathan Blitzer: Clarity. If there’s something Blitzer, a New Yorker staff writer, brings to the intractable debate on immigration, it’s an accessible, unimpeachable clear-eyed account of how the US came to the assumption that fixing the border crisis was either simple (“Deport!”) or, as he quotes Rahm Emanuel, so broken it’s “the third rail of American politics.” This urgent, sad freight train of reporting doesn’t offer solutions, but rather, a compelling origin tale for why the influx of Central America migrants and the fear of immigration in the United States are pure cause-and-effect, and how the U.S. bears responsibility. We meet families, policymakers, border officials, activists, and get a history lesson full of military actions perpetrated by U.S. corporations, cash and politics. “The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster” by John O’Connor: Ignore the title. This isn’t that book. It’s a tale of how folklore gathers steam, why we believe what we want to believe, and what happens when “the unbelievable is the only thing people believe,” facts be damned. O’Connor, a journalist from Kalamazoo, Michigan, cleverly uses the legend of Sasquatch and those who think too much about him to explore the persistence of hope beyond hope. Along the way, it’s also an entertaining travelogue of local legends, true believers and the sort of dense acreage seen from planes that could hold anything — right? O’Connor himself is skeptical of a massive wildman on the loose, but gracefully honors the metaphor and sacred beliefs required for myths, zeroing with wit and curiosity why it’s an essential fact of humanity that we need mystery to go on. “Lazarus Man” by Richard Price: I think of Price, that great chronicler of city life, author of “Clockers,” screenwriter for “The Wire,” as a community novelist, in the tradition of “Winesburg, Ohio” and “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.” No more so than with this discursive, pointedly meandering novel, his first in a decade. His writing mimics hardboiled noir then settles on the multitudes, the granular detail, staccato dialogue. Loiters are “a languid pride of lions.” A sudden apartment collapse generates a “night-for-day rolling black cloud.” That mysterious implosion of a five-story apartment complex in East Harlem is just a catalyst for a cataloging of the lives transformed in its aftermath: the unlikely media star created by merely surviving, a cop sleeping with her partner, a mortician who wants his card thrust into the hands of whoever watches the rescue. And on. Why the building fell is an afterthought to the ways we doubt ourselves, transcend and move on, imperfectly. “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey: Speaking of rhapsodic community novels. Here is the story of six astronauts on the international space station, circling Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, on an average day, peering down at a seemingly uninhabited planet. Or as Harvey describes, only alive when day goes to night and lights flick on. This is a novel of distance and perspective, with no real plot. Aliens wander past, but don’t invade. The station turns without incident. No one goes nuts. And yet, in lyrical bursts, our travelers soak in cosmic hugeness: “Sometimes they want to see the theatrics, the opera, the earth’s atmosphere, airglow, and sometimes it’s the smallest things, the lights of fishing boats off the coast of Malaysia.” Harvey is out to reclaim wonder itself from everyday lack of interest — and in a way, reclaim the novel as a place for feeling . Mission accomplished.

President-elect Donald Trump says he has “always been in favor” of the H-1B visa program that imports hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, primarily from India, to take white-collar American jobs. “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas,” Trump told the New York Post of the H-1B visa program. “That’s why we have them.” “I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B,” Trump continued. “I have used it many times. It’s a great program.” The remarks come after a weeks-long online debate that has divided proponents of the H-1B visa program, mainly billionaire Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and other tech investors, and critics from the political right and left. For years, Breitbart News has chronicled the abuses against white-collar American professionals as a result of the H-1B visa program. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News. Research published in the Journal of Business Ethics recently revealed that foreign H-1B visa workers are paid about 10 percent less than their American counterparts doing the same line of work. Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers. Up to 99 percent of foreign H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms arrive from India. Trump, in particular, for years has been a critic of corporations abusing the H-1B visa program to hold down wages in white-collar industries by laying off American professionals only to replace them with foreign workers. In 2015, Trump’s immigration agenda laid out key reforms for the H-1B visa program to prevent such gaming of the system by corporations, Breitbart News reported at the time: [Trump] called for also increasing the prevailing wage when it comes to the issuance of H-1B visas so as to get Americans — especially Hispanics, blacks, and women — hired into corporate positions in Silicon Valley rather than foreigners. It is here where he points out that Rubio — who along with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is one of the two candidates in the Republican primary against Trump that the donor class is pulling for — has put forward legislation that would drastically harm American workers’ job prospects, and he’s done so on behalf of Zuckerberg and other donors. [Emphasis added] “We graduate two times more Americans with STEM degrees each year than find STEM jobs, yet as much as two-thirds of entry-level hiring for IT jobs is accomplished through the H-1B program,” Trump wrote. “More than half of H-1B visas are issued for the program’s lowest allowable wage level, and more than eighty percent for its bottom two. Raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant, instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas. This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities.” [Emphasis added] In 2020, Trump implemented such reforms to the program — requiring federal agencies to complete audits to assess their compliance with requirements ensuring only American citizens are given federal civil service jobs and ending the program’s lottery system, instead making companies offer the highest salaries when seeking to import foreign H-1B visa workers. The move was celebrated by longtime Trump supporters who have helped represent Americans fired from their jobs and forced to train their foreign H-1B visa replacements. “Outsourcing hundreds of workers is especially detrimental in the middle of a pandemic, which has already cost millions of Americans their jobs,” a White House statement said at the time. “President Trump’s actions will help combat employers’ misuse of H-1B visas, which were never intended to replace qualified American workers with low-cost foreign labor.” Only months before, in July 2020, Trump issued the reforms, the federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced an outsourcing plan whereby 200 American professionals would be laid off and made to train their foreign H-1B visa replacements. By August, Trump stepped in and fired TVA Chair Skip Thompson. He also demanded that TVA CEO Jeff Lyash cut his salary to no more than $500,000 a year after learning that he had raked in $8 million at the time of the outsourcing announcement. Most importantly, with the help of U.S. Tech Workers, Trump successfully lobbied TVA to abandon its outsourcing plan, thus saving hundreds of Americans from layoffs. John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here .

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Google has unleashed another wave of artificial intelligence designed to tackle more of the work and thinking done by humans as it tries to stay on the technology's cutting edge. or signup to continue reading The next generation of Google's AI is being packaged under the Gemini umbrella, which was unveiled a year ago. Google is framing its release of Gemini 2.0 as a springboard for AI agents built to interpret images shown through a smartphone, perform a variety of tedious chores, remember the conversations consumers have with people, help video game players plot strategy and even tackle the task of doing online searches. In a blog post, Google CEO Sundar Pichai predicted the technology contained in Gemini 2.0 will "understand more about the world around you, think multiple steps ahead and take action on your behalf, with your supervision." A lot of Google's latest AI technology will initially be confined to test groups and subscribers who pay $US20 per month for Gemini Advanced, but some features will be made available through its search engine and mobile apps. Google is planning wider releases next year that will include the technology popping up in its smorgasbord of free products, including its Chrome browser, digital maps and YouTube. Besides trying to outshine OpenAI and other ambitious startups, Google is also trying to stay a step ahead of Apple as that trendsetting company begins to blend AI into its latest iPhones and other devices. After releasing a software update enabling the first bundle of the iPhone's Apple Intelligence features that spruced up the device's Siri assistant, another batch of the AI technology came out with a free software update that was also released on Wednesday. Google is pushing forward with its latest AI advances even as the US Justice Department is trying to break up the company to prevent further abusive practices by its dominant search engine, which was declared an illegal monopoly by a federal judge earlier this year as part of a landmark antitrust case. Among other things, Gemini 2.0 is supposed to improve the AI overviews that Google began highlighting in its search results over its traditional listing of the most pertinent links to websites earlier this year in response to AI-powered "answer engines" such as Perplexity. After the AI overviews initially produced some goofy suggestions, including putting glue on pizza, Google refined the technology to minimise such missteps. Now, company executives are promising things are going to get even better with Gemini 2.0, which Pichai said will be able to engage in more human-like reasoning while solving more advanced math problems and even churn out some computer code. The improvements to AI Overviews will initially only appear to a test audience before a wider release next year. As part of Gemini 2.0, Google is also going to begin testing an extension to Chrome called Project Mariner, which can be turned on to do online searches and sift through the results so people don't won't have to bother. If the US Department of Justice gets its way, Google will be forced to sell or spin off Chrome as part of its punishment for deploying its search engine in ways that stifled competition and potential innovation. Google has ridiculed the proposal as "overly broad" and vowed to resist any attempt to break up the company during federal court hearings scheduled to begin in Washington next year. DAILY Today's top stories curated by our news team. WEEKDAYS Grab a quick bite of today's latest news from around the region and the nation. WEEKLY The latest news, results & expert analysis. WEEKDAYS Catch up on the news of the day and unwind with great reading for your evening. WEEKLY Get the editor's insights: what's happening & why it matters. WEEKLY Love footy? We've got all the action covered. WEEKLY Every Saturday and Tuesday, explore destinations deals, tips & travel writing to transport you around the globe. WEEKLY Going out or staying in? Find out what's on. WEEKDAYS Sharp. Close to the ground. Digging deep. Your weekday morning newsletter on national affairs, politics and more. TWICE WEEKLY Your essential national news digest: all the big issues on Wednesday and great reading every Saturday. WEEKLY Get news, reviews and expert insights every Thursday from CarExpert, ACM's exclusive motoring partner. TWICE WEEKLY Get real, Australia! Let the ACM network's editors and journalists bring you news and views from all over. AS IT HAPPENS Be the first to know when news breaks. DAILY Your digital replica of Today's Paper. Ready to read from 5am! DAILY Test your skills with interactive crosswords, sudoku & trivia. Fresh daily! Advertisement AdvertisementRape allegation against Jay-Z will not affect NFL relationship, says chief

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Can ordinary citizens solve our toughest problems?Henry Cejudo names 2025 UFC title fight that could be ‘bigger than Jon Jones and Tom Aspinall’The stage is set for a historic clash in the Eastern Conference Semifinals of the 2024 MLS Cup Playoffs as the New York Red Bulls take on New York City FC at Citi Field on Saturday, November 23rd. Kickoff is at 5:30 PM ET , and the match will be streamed live on MLS Season Pass on Apple TV in both English and Spanish. Both teams boast passionate fanbases and a fierce competitive spirit, making this a must-watch encounter for any Major League Soccer fan. This highly-anticipated matchup marks the first-ever playoff edition of the iconic Hudson River Derby. The Red Bulls , hungry for their first MLS Cup title since 2018, are riding high after defeating the defending champions, Columbus Crew , in a thrilling penalty shootout victory after Round One. NYCFC, meanwhile, look to continue their dominance over their crosstown rivals, having already secured a season sweep against them in the regular season. How to subscribe to MLS Season Pass to watch the NYC FC vs. New York RB matchup Where can I watch MLS Season Pass? MLS Season Pass, your gateway to every Major League Soccer match, is available on the Apple TV app. Watch live games, replays, highlights, and exclusive content across a wide range of devices, including iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, smart TVs, streaming devices, game consoles, and cable set-top boxes. Additionally, you can access MLS Season Pass on the web at tv.apple.com/sports , expanding your viewing options to Android and Chrome OS devices. Note: Content availability may vary depending on your location. If you’re having trouble finding MLS Season Pass, ensure your device has the latest software update. How much is MLS Season Pass? Watch the race for the 2024 MLS Cup for only $9.99. If you are subscribed to Apple TV+, you will get it for free! Renews at full price in 2025. New York City FC vs. New York Red Bulls matchup info Tune in to MLS Season Pass on Apple TV at 5:30 PM ET for comprehensive coverage of the NYCFC vs. New York RB matchup. Enjoy expert commentary from Steve Cangialosi and Danny Higginbotham (English) and Bruno Vain and Andres Agulla (Spanish). Get ready for in-depth analysis and live action, with the pre-game show, Countdown to Kickoff, starting at 5 PM ET on New York Red Bulls Radio. Estudió Ciencias de la Comunicación en la Universidad San Martín de Porres y ejerce el periodismo desde hace 10 años en las ediciones web de varios medios nacionales. Actualmente se desempeña como Analista SEO del Núcleo de Audiencias del Grupo El Comercio.

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