Month: November 2022

Oscar, Golden Globe and two-time Grammy winning singer-actress Irene Cara, who starred and sang the title cut from the 1980 hit movie “Fame” and then belted out the era-defining hit “Flashdance … What a Feeling” from 1983’s “Flashdance,” has died. She was 63.

Her publicist, Judith A. Moose, announced the news on social media, writing that a cause of death was “currently unknown.” Moose also confirmed the death to a reporter for The Associated Press Saturday. Cara died at her home in Florida. The exact day of her death was not disclosed.

“Irene’s family has requested privacy as they process their grief,” Moose wrote. “She was a beautifully gifted soul whose legacy will live forever through her music and films.”

During her career, Cara had three Top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, including “Breakdance,” “Out Here On My Own,” “Fame” and “Flashdance … What A Feeling,” which spent six weeks at No. 1. She was behind some of the most joyful, high-energy pop anthems of the early ’80s.

Tributes poured in Saturday on social media, including from Deborah Cox, who called Cara an inspiration, and Holly Robinson Peete, who recalled seeing Cara perform: “The insane combination of talent and beauty was overwhelming to me. This hurts my heart so much.”

Movie fame started with the movie ‘Fame’

Cara first came to prominence among the young actors playing performing arts high schoolers in Alan Parker’s “Fame,” with co-stars Debbie Allen, Paul McCrane and Anne Mear. Cara played Coco Hernandez, a striving dancer who endures all manner of deprivations, including a creepy nude photo shoot.

“How bright our spirits go shooting out into space, depends on how much we contributed to the earthly brilliance of this world. And I mean to be a major contributor!” she says in the movie.

Cara sang on the soaring title song with the chorus — “Remember my name/I’m gonna live forever/I’m gonna learn how to fly/I feel it coming together/People will see me and cry” — which would go on to be nominated for an Academy Award for best original song. She also sang on “Out Here on My Own,” “Hot Lunch Jam” and “I Sing the Body Electric.”

Three years later, she and the songwriting team of “Flashdance” — music by Giorgio Moroder, lyrics by Keith Forsey and Cara — accepted the Oscar for best original song for “Flashdance … What a Feeling.”

The movie starred Jennifer Beals as a steel-town girl who dances in a bar at night and hopes to attend a prestigious dance conservatory. It included the hit song “Maniac,” featuring Beals’ character leaping, spinning, stomping her feet and the slow-burning theme song.

“There aren’t enough words to express my love and my gratitude,” Cara told the Oscar crowd in her thanks. “And last but not least, a very special gentlemen who I guess started it all for me many years ago. To Alan Parker, wherever you may be tonight, I thank him.”

Career started on Broadway

The New York-born Cara began her career on Broadway, with small parts in short-lived shows, although a musical called “The Me Nobody Knows” ran over 300 performances. She toured in the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” as Mary Magdalene in the mid-1990s and a tour of the musical “Flashdance” toured 2012-14 with her songs.

She also created the all-female band Irene Cara Presents Hot Caramel and put out a double CD with the single “How Can I Make You Luv Me.” Her movie credits include “Sparkle” and “D.C. Cab.”
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The outlook for the global economy headed into 2023 has soured, according to a number of recent analyses, as the ongoing war in Ukraine continues to strain trade, particularly in Europe, and as markets await a fuller reopening of the Chinese economy following months of disruptive COVID-19 lockdowns.

In the United States, signs of a tightening job market and a slowdown in business activity fueled fears of a recession. Globally, inflation grew and business activity, especially in the eurozone and the United Kingdom, continued to shrink.

In an analysis released Thursday, the Institute of International Finance predicted a global economic growth rate of just 1.2% in 2023, a level on par with 2009, when the world was only beginning its emergence from the financial crisis.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) agrees with the pessimistic forecast. In a report issued this week, the organization’s interim Chief Economist Alvaro Santos Pereira wrote, “We are currently facing a very difficult economic outlook. Our central scenario is not a global recession, but a significant growth slowdown for the world economy in 2023, as well as still high, albeit declining, inflation in many countries.”

U.S. interest rates

In the U.S., inflation and the Federal Reserve’s efforts to combat it have been the dominant factors in most analyses of the current and future states of the economy.

The U.S has been experiencing its highest levels of inflation in 40 years, with prices beginning to jump significantly in mid-2021. By the beginning of 2022, annualized rates were over 6%, and while fluctuating a bit, touched a high of 6.6% in October.

Beginning in March, the central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which sets base interest rates, has engaged in a dramatic series of increases, raising the benchmark rate from between 0.0% and 0.25% to between 3.75% and 4.0% today.

The idea behind the Fed’s moves is to change consumers’ incentives. By making the interest rates on savings more appealing, and the rates on borrowing less so, the central bank is working to reduce demand and thereby slow the rate of price increases.

In general, the Fed believes that an annual 2% rate of inflation is healthy and considers that its long-term target.

Avoiding a recession

The Fed’s goal is to get inflation under control without plunging the economy into a damaging recession. And while a number of economic signs indicate that efforts to slow demand might be working, the threat of a recession still looms.

Evidence released this week showed that business activity in the U.S. contracted for a fifth consecutive month as companies reacted to decreased consumer demand. Although the economy has continued to add jobs in recent months, applications for unemployment benefits are on the rise, suggesting a potential softening in the labor market.

The Federal Reserve this week released the minutes from the early November meeting of the FOMC. The minutes revealed a pessimistic view among the central bank’s staff economists about the U.S. economy in the coming year.

Among their findings was that they “viewed the possibility that the economy would enter a recession sometime over the next year as almost as likely as the baseline.”

A “substantial majority” of the voting members of the committee indicated that they believe it is time to slow the rate of interest rate increases, suggesting that the FOMC will retreat from its recent 0.75% increases when it meets in December, perhaps raising rates by just 0.5%.

Global struggle

Internationally, governments are facing a difficult challenge: supporting their citizens during a time when prices are rising dramatically, particularly for necessities like food and fuel, which have been deeply affected by the war in Ukraine.

In a report this week, the International Monetary Fund pointed to the difficult balancing act governments must manage, saying, “With many people still struggling, governments should continue to prioritize helping the most vulnerable to cope with soaring food and energy bills and cover other costs — but governments should also avoid adding to aggregate demand that risks dialing up inflation. In many advanced and emerging economies, fiscal restraint can lower inflation while reducing debt.”

According to the Institute of International Finance (IIF), while global growth will be low but net positive in 2023, specific areas will face declines. Chief among them is Europe, where the IIF forecasts a 2.0% decline in cumulative GDP.

Bright spots

To the extent that there are bright spots in the global economy in 2023, they are in areas such as Latin America and China.

Many countries of Latin America, where the export of raw materials, including timber, ore, and other major economic inputs drives many economies, global inflation has proved beneficial insofar as the prices for those goods have risen. The IIF report projects a 1.2% expansion in GDP across the region, even as much of the remainder of the world sees economic contraction.

China has suffered economically as a result of President Xi Jinping’s “zero-COVID” strategy, which has forced massive lockdowns of whole cities and regions, with serious disruption to economic activity. The IFF and other organizations expect significant loosening in China’s policy in the coming year, which will lead to economic growth of as much as 2.0% as the Chinese economy attempts to revive itself.

U.K. to suffer

With the exception of Russia, which is still laboring under crushing sanctions related to its invasion of Ukraine, the United Kingdom faces the gloomiest outlook for the coming year of any of the world’s largest economies.

With inflation running significantly ahead of other countries, annualized price increases are expected to touch 10% by the end of the year, before slowly moderating in 2023.

Among the G-7 countries, the U.K. is the only one in which economic output has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, and it is forecast to shrink further. The OECD projects that the British economy will decline in size by 0.3% in 2023 and will grow at only 0.2% in 2024.
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After a student in his classroom had yet another outburst, Tyler Wright couldn’t bear to see him get written up again. Wright, then a student teacher at a Charleston elementary school, led the child out to the hallway for a chat.

Within minutes, the student started crying.

“He was telling me that he really doesn’t get to see his dad and stuff like that,” Wright said. “That his dad was supposed to come see him but never did. At the end of the day, that was the root cause for the outbursts, because the child was angry.”

Wright told him that he grew up in a similar situation, but he still paid attention the best he could, despite what was going on at home. The conversation was all it took, Wright said, for the student to open up and improve his behavior.

Wright became a full-time teacher at Stono Park Elementary in January, thanks to a program in Charleston aimed at making the teaching profession more accessible to Black men, who are vastly underrepresented in classrooms in South Carolina and around the United States.

Just 7% of America’s public school teachers were Black during the 2017-18 school year although Black students make up 15% of the student population, according to the most recent available data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Their absence in classrooms is deeply felt, especially in states like South Carolina, where almost a fifth of students are Black and Black males account for less than 3% of teachers.

Having teachers who reflect the identity of their students can foster connections between teachers and students — and help avoid the kind of misinterpretation of behavior that can contribute to disparities in discipline for Black students, experts say. Research shows that Black teachers can lead to improved academic performance and higher graduation rates for Black students.

At a time of teacher shortages in South Carolina and around the country, the presence of Black teachers also can make it more likely for Black students to pursue careers in education themselves.

“The issue starts fairly young,” said Eric Duncan, a member of the policy team at the Education Trust, a nonprofit advocacy organization. “They get negative impressions of school because they are traditionally overdisciplined or misidentified in terms of behavior challenges, when they may have some other issues or challenges that should be addressed in a more culturally proficient way.”

There are other barriers to the teaching for Black men. Many come from low-income families and face pressure to find higher-paying jobs, and there are license requirements that were deliberately created to prevent people of color from becoming teachers, Duncan said.

The program in Charleston, Men of CHS Teach, is a partnership between the University of South Carolina and the Charleston County School District. It places new teachers in elementary classrooms even if they haven’t participated in a student teacher program and creates an alternative pathway for them to get teaching licenses.

CCSD decided to focus on recruiting elementary teachers because it’s typically difficult to fill those positions with men, and research shows that if Black students have a teacher of color in elementary school, they’re less likely to drop out of high school and more likely to consider college. For Black boys of low-income backgrounds, those effects are even greater.

Program organizers hope to hire 20 male teachers of color within the next five years. Close to half of the district’s student population is non-white.

Wright was one of the program’s first inductees. He decided he wanted to teach after working as a student concerns specialist at one of the district’s high schools. A few years later, Wright is leading a classroom of his own.

The South Carolina districts that have seen the greatest increase in Black male teachers in recent years are Charleston, York 3, Richland 1 and Aiken, with a net total of almost 80 new hires from 2017 to 2021. However, they still have a small share of Black male teachers overall.

Statewide, the racial demographics of teachers barely changed between 2016 and 2021, according to an analysis of state teacher workforce data.

The program in Charleston was partially inspired by Call Me MiSTER, a Clemson University program that aims to recruit, train and certify men of color to become elementary school teachers in South Carolina.

Mark Joseph, the program’s director, said they’ve seen a decrease in applicants in recent years and have had to put more effort into recruitment. It’s a new era of teaching after the pandemic, Joseph said, and the program has had to adapt.

“We took a different approach in terms of talking about leadership, talking about college, talking about what it’s like being a part of a program that provides support, encouragement, brotherhood and teamwork,” he said.

One realization, he said, has been that teachers are ambassadors for the teaching profession.

After all, the teachers they’re looking to recruit aren’t coming out of thin air — they’re sitting in classrooms across South Carolina.
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The Biden administration has banned approvals of new telecommunications equipment from China’s Huawei Technologies HWT.UL and ZTE 000063.SZ because they pose “an unacceptable risk” to U.S. national security.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said Friday it had adopted the final rules, which also bar the sale or import of equipment made by China’s surveillance equipment maker Dahua Technology Co 002236.SZ, video surveillance firm Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co Ltd 002415.SZ and telecoms firm Hytera Communications Corp Ltd 002583.SZ.

The move represents Washington’s latest crackdown on the Chinese tech giants amid fears that Beijing could use Chinese tech companies to spy on Americans.

“These new rules are an important part of our ongoing actions to protect the American people from national security threats involving telecommunications,” FCC Chairperson Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement.

Huawei declined to comment. ZTE, Dahua, Hikvision and Hytera did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Rosenworcel circulated the proposed measure — which effectively bars the firms from selling new equipment in the United States — to the other three commissioners for final approval last month.

The FCC said in June 2021 it was considering banning all equipment authorizations for all companies on the covered list.

That came after a March 2021 designation of five Chinese companies on the so-called “covered list” as posing a threat to national security under a 2019 law aimed at protecting U.S. communications networks: Huawei, ZTE, Hytera Communications Corp Hikvision and Dahua.

All four commissioners at the agency, including two Republicans and two Democrats, supported Friday’s move.
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NASA’s Orion capsule entered an orbit stretching tens of thousands of miles around the moon Friday, as it neared the halfway mark of its test flight.

The capsule and its three test dummies entered lunar orbit more than a week after launching on the $4 billion demo that’s meant to pave the way for astronauts. It will remain in this broad but stable orbit for nearly a week, completing just half a lap before heading home.

As of Friday’s engine firing, the capsule was 380,000 kilometers from Earth. It’s expected to reach a maximum distance of almost 432,000 kilometers in a few days. That will set a new distance record for a capsule designed to carry people one day.

“It is a statistic, but it’s symbolic for what it represents,” Jim Geffre, an Orion manager, said in a NASA interview earlier in the week. “It’s about challenging ourselves to go farther, stay longer and push beyond the limits of what we’ve previously explored.”

NASA considers this a dress rehearsal for the next moon flyby in 2024, with astronauts. A lunar landing by astronauts could follow as soon as 2025. Astronauts last visited the moon 50 years ago during Apollo 17.

Earlier in the week, Mission Control in Houston lost contact with the capsule for nearly an hour. At the time, controllers were adjusting the communication link between Orion and the Deep Space Network. Officials said the spacecraft remained healthy.
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Elon Musk said Friday that Twitter plans to relaunch its premium service that will offer different colored check marks to accounts next week, in a fresh move to revamp the service after a previous attempt backfired.

It’s the latest change to the social media platform that the billionaire Tesla CEO bought last month for $44 billion, coming a day after Musk said he would grant “amnesty” for suspended accounts and causing yet more uncertainty for users.

Twitter previously suspended the premium service, which under Musk granted blue-check labels to anyone paying $8 a month, because of a wave of imposter accounts. Originally, the blue check was given to government entities, corporations, celebrities and journalists verified by the platform to prevent impersonation.

In the latest version, companies will get a gold check, governments will get a gray check, and individuals who pay for the service, whether or not they’re celebrities, will get a blue check, Musk said Friday.

“All verified accounts will be manually authenticated before check activates,” he said, adding it was “painful, but necessary” and promising a “longer explanation” next week. He said the service was “tentatively launching” Dec. 2.

Twitter had put the revamped premium service on hold days after its launch earlier this month after accounts impersonated companies including pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co., Nintendo, Lockheed Martin, and even Musk’s own businesses Tesla and SpaceX, along with various professional sports and political figures.

It was just one change in the past two days. On Thursday, Musk said he would grant “amnesty” for suspended accounts, following the results of an online poll he conducted on whether accounts that have not “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam” should be reinstated.

The yes vote was 72%. Such online polls are anything but scientific and can easily be influenced by bots. Musk also used one before restoring former U.S. President Donald Trump’s account.

“The people have spoken. Amnesty begins next week. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted Thursday using a Latin phrase meaning “the voice of the people, the voice of God.”

The move is likely to put the company on a crash course with European regulators seeking to clamp down on harmful online content with tough new rules, which helped cement Europe’s reputation as the global leader in efforts to rein in the power of social media companies and other digital platforms.

Zach Meyers, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform think tank, said giving blanket amnesty based on an online poll is an “arbitrary approach” that’s “hard to reconcile with the Digital Services Act,” a new EU law that will start applying to the biggest online platforms by mid-2023.

The law is aimed at protecting internet users from illegal content and reducing the spread of harmful but legal content. It requires big social media platforms to be “diligent and objective” in enforcing restrictions, which must be spelled out clearly in the fine print for users when signing up, Meyers said.

Britain also is working on its own online safety law.

“Unless Musk quickly moves from a ‘move fast and break things’ approach to a more sober management style, he will be on a collision course with Brussels and London regulators,” Meyers said.

European Union officials took to social media to highlight their worries. The 27-nation bloc’s executive Commission published a report Thursday that found Twitter took longer to review hateful content and removed less of it this year compared with 2021.

The report was based on data collected over the spring — before Musk acquired Twitter — as part of an annual evaluation of online platforms’ compliance with the bloc’s voluntary code of conduct on disinformation. It found that Twitter assessed just over half of the notifications it received about illegal hate speech within 24 hours, down from 82% in 2021.

The numbers may yet worsen. Since taking over, Musk has l aid off half the company’s 7,500-person workforce along with an untold number of contractors responsible for content moderation. Many others have resigned, including the company’s head of trust and safety.

Recent layoffs at Twitter and results of the EU’s review “are a source of concern,” the bloc’s commissioner for justice, Didier Reynders tweeted Thursday evening after meeting with Twitter executives at the company’s European headquarters in Dublin.

In the meeting, Reynders said he “underlined that we expect Twitter to deliver on their voluntary commitments and comply with EU rules,” including the Digital Services Act and the bloc’s strict privacy regulations known as General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.

Another EU commissioner, Vera Jourova, tweeted Thursday evening that she was concerned about news reports that a “vast amount” of Twitter’s European staff were fired.

“If you want to effectively detect and take action against #disinformation & propaganda, this requires resources,” Jourova said. “Especially in the context of Russian disinformation warfare.”
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Editor’s note: Here is a fast take on what the international community has been up to this past week, as seen from the United Nations perch. 

Russia’s war in Ukraine passes 9-month milestone

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday that Russia would not break his country, as nine months have passed since President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion. This week has been particularly bad, as Russia launched scores of missile attacks aimed at taking out the country’s power grid with winter temperatures dropping below freezing. On Wednesday, the Ukrainian president requested an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council, which he addressed by video. He urged the council to take “concrete steps to protect humanity and life” by adopting a resolution condemning any forms of “energy terror.”

He also repeated his call for U.N. experts to examine and assess critical infrastructure facilities in his country that have been or may be hit by Russian missiles. “Russia is doing everything to make the electric generator a more powerful and necessary tool than the U.N. Charter,” he said.

Human Rights Council orders investigation into crackdown on Iranian protesters

In a special session on Thursday, the Geneva-based Human Rights Council condemned Iran’s repression of peaceful demonstrators following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in mid-September and voted to create an international fact-finding mission to investigate the deadly crackdown. The 47-country council voted 25 in favor and 6 against — Armenia, China, Cuba, Eritrea, Pakistan and Venezuela — with 16 abstentions. The U.N. rights office says more than 300 protesters, including at least 40 children, have been killed by security forces since the protests began two months ago. At least 14,000 protesters have been arrested and at least 21 of them face the death penalty.

Security Council urges Yemen’s Houthis to extend truce

Security Council members on Tuesday urged Yemen’s Houthi rebels to renew a truce that expired in October and to engage in substantive talks to end the more than eight-year-old conflict. A two-month-long truce was originally agreed to on April 2 for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It led to a drop in civilian casualties and some relief in importing fuel and resuming commercial flights. The parties renewed it twice, but it expired on October 2 and the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have not agreed to extend it.

In brief 

— The International Organization for Migration said Wednesday that more than 50,000 people worldwide have lost their lives during migratory journeys since IOM’s Missing Migrants Project began documenting deaths in 2014. IOM noted the lack of action by governments in countries of origin, transit and destination to address the issue of missing migrants. More than 60% of missing migrants remain unidentified, according to the report. Of those whose nationality could be identified, more than 9,000 were from Africa, over 6,500 were from Asia and another 3,000 were from the Americas. More than half of the deaths occurred on routes to and inside Europe, with Mediterranean routes claiming over 25,000 lives.

— Several U.N. human rights experts said Friday that the Afghan Taliban’s treatment of women and girls may amount to gender persecution, a crime against humanity. Despite pledges to the contrary, the Taliban has increasingly tightened restrictions on females since taking power in August 2021. The de facto authorities have reimposed dress codes, prohibited most women from working outside the home, cut them off from secondary education and, most recently, forbidden them from going to parks and gyms. The U.N. experts, which include several special rapporteurs, said confining women to their homes is ‘tantamount to imprisonment” and is likely leading to more domestic violence and mental health challenges.

— U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Monday that Washington would seek international condemnation of North Korea’s November 18 intercontinental ballistic missile test. The test was Pyongyang’s eighth ICBM launch this year and part of a record 63 ballistic missile launches in 2022. At the U.N. Security Council, Thomas-Greenfield said the U.S. would propose a presidential statement – one step below a council resolution. But such a statement requires all 15 members to agree, and Russia and China signaled they would block such a measure. To date, no statement has been adopted.

— The U.N. said Wednesday that the U.N. coordinator for the Black Sea Grain Initiative, Amir Abdulla, is stepping down from his position for personal reasons. The secretary-general expressed his gratitude for Abdulla’s work. His deputy, Ben Parker, will act as officer in charge for the U.N. at the joint coordination center in Istanbul until the position is filled. Since the initiative was signed in late July, nearly 12 million metric tons of Ukrainian grain and other foodstuffs have been exported from three Ukrainian ports.

— U.N. Special Envoy on Myanmar Noeleen Heyzer said on November 19 that she was encouraged by the announcement of the mass release of detainees in Myanmar. She repeated calls for the immediate release of all children and political prisoners, including President Win Myint and State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi. The country’s military junta said it would release nearly 5,800 prisoners to mark national day on November 17.

Quote of Note

“The old methods and the fortress mentality of those who wield power simply don’t work. In fact, they only aggravate the situation. We are now in a full-fledged human rights crisis.”

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk at Thursday’s special session on the Iranian government’s crackdown on protesters.

What we are watching next week

Friday marks the International Day for the Elimination for Violence against Women and the start of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence. Secretary-General Guterres is calling on governments to increase funding to women’s rights groups and organizations.

 
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Driven by concerns about climate change, public education and, to a lesser extent, access to abortion, 21-year-old Ava Alferez made sure to vote in the 2022 midterm elections.

“I don’t think it’s right to complain about something if you don’t get out there and vote,” says the Virginia college student, who describes herself as a liberal democrat. “I also think that every vote matters.”

Alferez is among millions of America’s youngest voters who voted in near-record numbers during the 2022 midterms, breaking heavily for Democrats, and thwarting an anticipated ‘red wave’ that many expected would hand Republicans a significant majority in Congress. The strong showing signals that Gen Z is a rising political force.

“I think Republicans don’t account for Gen Z and they don’t realize the impact that we will have, especially within the next five years,” says Eric Miller, a 20-year-old Virginia college student who identifies as a Republican and says he voted for Donald Trump in 2020. “I think the 2022 midterms are a little bit of a wake-up call for Republicans to be more in touch with young people.”

Midterm elections occur halfway through a president’s four-year term. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives — where members serve two-year terms — and 35 of 100 Senate seats were up for grabs in 2022.

Historically, the president’s political party almost always loses seats in Congress with the opposing party traditionally making significant gains. Republicans did pick up a majority in the House this election cycle, but only by a handful of seats, while Democrats narrowly held on to the Senate.

“I think the data is going to bear out that young voters were quite consequential in many of these swing states and some of these elections,” says John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University.

The early numbers from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE) suggest that 27% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 cast ballots Nov. 8, the second-highest youth midterms turnout in 30 years. (The highest was in 2018.)

“It is reproductive rights, climate change, immigration, racial justice, gender justice,” says Wihbey, listing the issues that drove young people to the polls.

Young evangelicals are not that different from their more liberal peers, according to a recent survey.

“They are diversity and equity conscious, more so than older generations and, therefore, they’re going to take those things seriously and listen to people who talk about those things, like AOC [New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] or [Vermont Sen.] Bernie Sanders,” says Kevin Singer, co-director of Neighborly Faith, a partner in the study. “They’re very, I guess you could say, cosmopolitan when it comes to their political perspectives.”

Wihbey says Gen Z doesn’t get its news from traditional sources like newspapers but rather gets secondhand or filtered news from social media, which has resulted in young voters forming opinions about politics at a much greater rate than previous generations.

“I wouldn’t say that’s surprising at all because everyone’s just on their phones all the time on social media,” says Alferez, who says she has voted in every election since reaching voting age. “It would make sense that they get all their information on TikTok or maybe if they see a political post, they’ll still look in the comments and everyone’s very opinionated and comments, and they’ll probably form opinions based on that.”

CIRCLE’s early analysis shows that young voter turnout may have delivered key wins for Democrats in some battleground states, but that doesn’t mean either political party can take the youth vote for granted.

“It’s possible that younger voters will be less tethered to a particular party and may vote on an issue basis more frequently,” Wihbey says. “I think part of what the digital world does is it creates fewer strong ties to particular parties or causes and emphasizes the new or the rising social issue.”

That appears to be true of young voters across the political spectrum, according to the results of the survey of young evangelicals.

“They’re less beholden to the Republican Party, I think, than older generations are, and we also see that they listen to Fox News and, say, CNN at about the same rate,” Singer says. “They listen to Joe Biden and listen to Elon Musk, and that’s not a huge surprise given that Generation Z is a lot more comfortable with drawing inspiration from a variety of sources than they are being held to the norms of certain institutions.”

Miller, the young Republican voter, says his generation is less interested in partisan bickering and more interested in finding common ground.

“We do a little more research. We don’t just watch, maybe, Fox News, and we listen to the other side, what they’re trying to say,” Miller says. “I think the center is where everything is key. Obviously, I don’t think the extremes will ever get along in any kind of time frame. But I think we can reach out to moderate Democrats, even liberals — but just not progressive liberals maybe — but I definitely see a way forward.”

The results of the survey of young evangelicals appears to confirm increased openness on the part of Gen Z conservatives.

“Young evangelicals are frankly just more peaceable with others than older generations are. Our study found that, for example, they’re more likely to be engaged with people of different faiths than their faith leaders encourage them to be,” Singer says. “There’s definitely more of an enthusiasm about diversity and pluralism and I think, for that reason, they’re more likely to entertain the perspectives of those with whom their parents would disagree.”

Signs of youth voter enthusiasm were evident ahead of Election Day. CIRCLE found that youth voter registration was up compared to 2018, especially in places where abortion-related issues were on the ballot, or where voters recently voted on abortion-related measures.

“My worry is that, as we see a lot of policy whiplash, whether it’s on reproductive rights or on other things, that they become cynical or disengage,” Wihbey says. “I think one of the most important things here is that they see the political system that we have in our democracy as an important lever of social change, and not as something that just is a kind of dead end.”
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A year after omicron began its assault on humanity, the ever-morphing coronavirus mutant drove COVID-19 case counts higher in many places just as Americans gathered for Thanksgiving. It was a prelude to a wave that experts expect to soon wash over the U.S.

Phoenix-area emergency physician Dr. Nicholas Vasquez said his hospital admitted a growing number of chronically ill people and nursing home residents with severe COVID-19 this month.

“It’s been quite a while since we needed to have COVID wards,” he said. “It’s making a clear comeback.”

Nationally, new COVID cases averaged around 39,300 a day as of Tuesday — far lower than last winter but a vast undercount because of reduced testing and reporting. About 28,000 people with COVID were hospitalized daily and about 340 died.

Cases and deaths were up from two weeks earlier. Yet a fifth of the U.S. population hasn’t been vaccinated, most Americans haven’t gotten the latest boosters and many have stopped wearing masks.

Meanwhile, the virus keeps finding ways to avoid defeat.

The omicron variant arrived in the U.S. just after Thanksgiving last year and caused the pandemic’s biggest wave of cases. Since then, it has spawned a large extended family of sub-variants, such as those most common in the U.S. now: BQ.1, BQ.1.1 and BA.5. They edged out competitors by getting better at evading immunity from vaccines and previous illness — and sickening millions.

Carey Johnson’s family got hit twice. She came down with COVID-19 in January during the first omicron wave, suffering flu-like symptoms and terrible pain that kept her down for a week. Her son Fabian Swain, 16, suffered much milder symptoms in September when the BA.5 variant was dominant.

Fabian recovered quickly, but Johnson had a headache for weeks. Other problems lingered longer.

“I was like, ‘I cannot get it together.’ I could not get my thoughts together. I couldn’t get my energy together” said Johnson, 42, of Germantown, Maryland. “And it went on for months like that.”

Hot spots emerge

Some communities are being particularly hard hit right now. Tracking by the Mayo Clinic shows cases trending up in states such as Florida, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico.

In Arizona’s Navajo County, the average daily case rate is more than double the state average. Dr. James McAuley said 25 to 50 people a day are testing positive for the coronavirus at the Indian Health Service facility where he works. Before, they saw just a few cases daily.

McAuley, clinical director of the Whiteriver Indian Hospital, which serves the White Mountain Apache Tribe, said they are “essentially back to where we were with our last big peak” in February.

COVID-19 is part of a triple threat that also includes flu and the virus known as RSV.

Dr. Vincent Hsu, who oversees infection control for AdventHealth, said the system’s pediatric hospital in Orlando is nearly full with kids sickened by these viruses. Dr. Greg Martin, past president of the Society of Critical Care Medicine, sees a similar trend elsewhere.

Pediatric hospitals’ emergency departments and urgent care clinics are busier than ever, said Martin, who practices mostly at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. “This is a record compared to any month, any week, any day in the past,” he said.

Looking to the future, experts see the seeds of a widespread U.S. wave. They point to what’s happening internationally — a BA.5 surge in Japan, a combination of variants pushing up cases in South Korea, the start of a new wave in Norway.

Some experts said a U.S. wave could begin during the holidays as people gather indoors. Trevor Bedford, a biologist and genetics expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said it could peak at around 150,000 new cases a day, about what the nation saw in July.

A new wave would be rough, said Dr. Mark Griffiths, medical director of the emergency department of Children’s Health Care of Atlanta-Spalding Hospital. “So many systems are on the brink of just being totally overburdened that if we get another COVID surge on top of this, it’s going to make some systems crack.”

One bright spot? Deaths are likely to be much lower than earlier in the pandemic. About 1 in 2,000 infections lead to death now, compared with about 1 in 200 in the first half of 2020, Bedford said.

Omicron’s yearlong reign

The same widespread immunity that reduced deaths also pushed the coronavirus to mutate. By the end of last year, many people had gotten infected, vaccinated or both. That “created the initial niche for omicron to spread,” Bedford said, since the virus had significantly evolved in its ability to escape existing immunity.

Omicron thrived. Mara Aspinall, who teaches biomedical diagnostics at Arizona State University, noted that the first omicron strain represented 7.5% of circulating variants by mid-December and 80% just two weeks later. U.S. cases at one point soared to a million a day. Omicron generally caused less severe disease than previous variants, but hospitalizations and deaths shot up given the sheer numbers of infected people.

The giant wave ebbed by mid-April. The virus mutated quickly into a series of sub-variants adept at evading immunity. A recent study in the journal Science Immunology says this ability to escape antibodies is due to more than 30 changes in the spike protein studding the surface of the virus.

Omicron evolved so much in a year, Bedford said, it’s now “a meaningless term.”

That rapid mutation is likely to continue.

“There’s much more pressure for the virus to diversify,” said Shishi Luo, head of infectious diseases for Helix, a company that supplies viral sequencing information to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Doctors said the best protection against the bubbling stew of sub-variants remains vaccination. And officials said Americans who got the new combination booster targeting omicron and the original coronavirus are currently better protected than others against symptomatic infection.

Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, said getting the booster, if you’re eligible, is “the most impactful thing you could do.”

Doctors also urge people to continue testing, keep up preventive measures such as masking in crowds, and stay home when sick.

“COVID is still a very significant threat, especially to the most vulnerable,” said Dr. Laolu Fayanju of Oak Street Health in Cleveland, which specializes in caring for older adults. “People have to continue to think about one another. We’re not completely out of the woods on this yet.
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Retailers braced for their biggest test of the year: Will U.S. consumers open their wallets wide for the Black Friday sales that kick off the holiday shopping season?

Consumer confidence is precarious, rattled by soaring inflation in the world’s biggest economy, casting uncertainty on this festive shopping season that starts the day after Thursday’s Thanksgiving holiday.

A year ago, retailers faced product shortfalls in the wake of shipping backlogs and COVID-19-related factory closures. To avert a repeat, the industry front-loaded its holiday imports this year, leaving it vulnerable to oversupply at a time when consumers are cutting back.

“Supply shortages was yesterday’s problem,” said Neil Saunders, managing director for GlobalData Retail, a consultancy. “Today’s problem is having too much stuff.”

Saunders said retailers have made progress in recent months in reducing excess inventories, but that oversupply created banner conditions for bargain-hunters in many categories, including electronics, home improvement and apparel.

Juameelah Henderson always checks for sales, “but more so now,” she said while exiting an Old Navy store in New York with four bags of items.

The clothing chain’s prices were “pretty good,” she said. “If it’s not on sale, I really don’t need it.”

Higher costs for gasoline and household staples like meat and cereal are an economy-wide issue but do not burden everyone equally.

“The lower incomes are definitely hit worst by the higher inflation,” said Claire Li, a senior analyst at Moody’s. “People have to spend on the essential items.”

Leading forecasts from Deloitte and the National Retail Federation project a single-digit percentage increase, but it likely won’t exceed the inflation rate.

The consumer price index has been up about 8% on an annual basis, which means that a similar size increase in holiday sales would equate with lower volumes.

European countries including Britain and France have been marking Black Friday for a few years now, too, and are also enduring sky-high inflation. So merchants there face a similar dilemma.

“Retailers are desperate for some spending cheer, but the worry is that it could turn out to be more of a Bleak Friday,” said Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said in London.

Diminishing savings

U.S. shoppers have remained resilient throughout the myriad stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, often spending more than expected, even when consumer sentiment surveys suggest they are in a gloomy mood.

Part of the reason has been the unusually robust state of savings, with many households banking government pandemic aid payments at a time of reduced consumption due to COVID-19 restrictions.

But that cushion is starting to whittle away. After hitting $2.5 trillion in excess savings in mid-2021, the benchmark fell to $1.7 trillion in the second quarter, according to Moody’s.

Consumers with incomes below $35,000 were affected the most, with their excess savings falling nearly 39% between the fourth quarter of 2021 and mid-2022, according to Moody’s.

Accompanying this drop has been a rise in credit card debt visible in Federal Reserve data and anecdotally described by chains that also report more purchases made with food stamps.

“We’re seeing continued pressure,” said Michael Witynski, chief executive of Dollar Tree, a discount retailer that has seen “shifts” in shoppers, “where they’re very consumable and needs-based focused to try and make that budget work and stretch it over the month.”

Mixed picture

Earnings reports from retailers in recent days have painted a mixed picture on consumer health.

Target stood on the downcast side of the ledger, pointing to a sharp decline in shopping activity in late October, potentially portending a weak holiday season.

The big-box chain expects a “very promotional” holiday season, said Chief Executive Brian Cornell.

“We’ve had a consumer who has been dealing with very stubborn inflation for quarter after quarter now,” Cornell said on a conference call with analysts.

“They’re shopping very carefully on a budget, and I think they’re looking at discretionary categories and saying, ‘All right, if I’m going to buy, I’m looking for a great deal and a great value.'”

But Lowe’s, another big U.S. chain specializing in home-improvement, offered a very different view, describing the same late-October period as “strong” and seeing no evidence of consumer deterioration.

“We are not seeing anything that feels or looks like a trade down or consumer pullback,” said Lowe’s Chief Executive Marvin Ellison.

Consumers like Charmaine Taylor, who checks airline websites frequently, are staying vigilant.

Taylor thus far has been thwarted in her travel aspirations due to high plane ticket prices. Taylor, who works in child care, isn’t sure how much she’ll be able to spend on family this year.

“I’m trying to give them some little gifts,” Taylor said at a park in Harlem earlier this week. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to. Inflation is hitting pretty hard.”
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The U.S. special envoy for women, girls and human rights in Afghanistan has sharply criticized the ruling Islamist Taliban for organizing public floggings of people, including women, accused of “moral crimes” such as theft and adultery. 

“This is both appalling and a dangerous sign that the Taliban are becoming more defiant in showing the world that they are embracing the policies of the past,” Rina Amiri said on Twitter. 

Her reaction came a day after the Taliban Supreme Court said that 11 men and three women had been flogged “for different sins, including adultery, robbery and other forms of corruption,” in a football stadium in the country’s east. 

The announcement noted that the punishment was administered Wednesday morning “in the presence of respected scholars, security forces, tribal elders and local residents.” 

It was the latest sign of the Taliban’s application of their strict interpretation of Islamic law, known as Shariah, to criminal justice, and restoring policies of their rule from 1996 to 2001, when flogging took place in much of Afghanistan. 

“It didn’t end up well before, and it will once again take the country on a perilous path,” Amiri warned. 

Earlier this month, reclusive Taliban chief Hibatullah Akhundzada ordered senior judges to apply Shariah punishments in cases already concluded. Taliban authorities have since implemented public floggings in at least two provinces for crimes such as adultery, false accusations of adultery, theft, banditry, alcohol consumption, apostasy and sedition. 

The Supreme Court said about two weeks ago that 19 people, including nine women, had been lashed in northeastern Takhar province for adultery, theft and running away from home. Each was lashed 39 times, it said. 

The Shariah legal system is derived from Islam’s holy book, the Quran, and the deeds as well as sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. 

Amnesty International urged the Taliban to immediately and unconditionally end the “criminal practice” of public flogging and all other forms of corporal punishment. The rights watchdog stressed the need for putting in place a formal justice mechanism with fair trials and access to legal remedies. 

“The Taliban continue to ignore widespread criticism as they flagrantly flout basic human rights principles in an alarming slide into what looks like a grim reminder of their rule” of decades ago, Amnesty said.  

“These outrageous punishments are just another step in the legalization of inhuman practices by the Taliban’s cruel justice system and expose the de-facto authorities’ complete disregard for international human rights law.” 

The Taliban returned to power in August 2021 after almost 20 years of insurgency against U.S.-led NATO troops and their Afghan partners. The international troops withdrew from Afghanistan just days after the Taliban seized power. 

No country has yet to formally recognize the Taliban rule because of human rights and terrorism-related concerns. The international community has been pressing the Islamist rulers to reverse restrictions on Afghan women if they want legitimacy for their men-only government. 

Since they seized power in August 2021, the Taliban have ordered women to cover their faces in public and not undertake long road trips without a close male relative. They have also ordered many female government staff members to stay at home. Women are banned from visiting gyms, parks and public baths. 

While public and private universities are open to women across Afghanistan, teenage girls are not allowed to attend secondary schools from grades seven to 12. 

U.S. envoy Amiri also criticized the Taliban for dissolving the Afghan Independent Bar Association last November, saying it was a model of gender inclusion. 

“Now women are sidelined from practicing law & many women judges & lawyers are forced to beg for food for their children rather than use their skills. Such injustice,” she said in a separate tweet Thursday. 

The Taliban defend their governance, saying it is in line with Afghan culture and Islamic law.
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Judith Samkoff needed a bigger dinner table for Thanksgiving this year.

The 65-year-old Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, resident helped resettle an Afghan refugee family of eight, and because this is their first holiday in the United States, Samkoff invited them to her father and sister’s home for Thanksgiving.

“Because they have a larger dining room table and more dining chairs than I have,” she said, adding, “Our meal is not completely traditional in that we’re vegetarians.”

In different homes around the U.S., Jewish volunteers who helped resettle Afghans are welcoming them for their first Thanksgiving dinner on U.S. soil.

One of Samkoff’s guests is Hadia, a 24-year-old Afghan refugee whose family fled Afghanistan in November 2021.

“We got a call and they said we had to go to the airport right away,” Hadia said of her family’s escape from Kabul. Because of security and safety concerns, VOA is sharing only her first name.

In Afghanistan, Hadia had a bachelor’s degree in public administration from Balkh Province. She also volunteered to help displaced people from other countries.

When Kabul fell to the Taliban, her family had to quickly make plans.

The U.S. completed its withdrawal in August 2021 and helped evacuate more than 130,000 Afghans in a chaotic few weeks after nearly 20 years of war.

“We decided to leave our country because my father had a military background,” she said.

Hadia’s father served in the Afghan army and worked directly with U.S. forces.

She did not disclose who helped her family leave Afghanistan, but they were part of a group of people who were able to go to Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

They lived there for four months before receiving authorization to travel to the United States in March 2022.

Pennsylvania was the place the U.S. government chose for the family to rebuild their lives.

“We [didn’t] know anyone here. We [were] worr[ied],” she said, adding, “It’s really hard when we [first arrived] … how can we manage, you know, it’s really hard to start from zero. You left everything behind in your country. When you come here you must start from zero.”

That is where Samkoff and the other volunteers come in. They help recently arrived Afghans like Hadia and her family settle in and give them the resources they need to be successful in their new homeland.

Samkoff said she became a volunteer after talking to a friend who was helping to resettle another Afghan family.

“And I said, ‘You know, sign me up. How do we do this?’” Samkoff told VOA.

Goodwill

Samkoff is one of 1,866 volunteers in the Jewish Federations of North America network, which in partnership with the Shapiro Foundation launched a $1 million refugee resettlement initiative to support local communities around the country, including the Jewish Family Service of Greater Harrisburg (JFS).

The network has resettled 19,163 Afghans across the country and is prepared to resettle more as they arrive.

Darcy Hirsh, associate vice president public affairs at Jewish Federations of North America, said volunteers play an important role in helping refugee families resettle.

“A lot of it is really goodwill. … Our model allows each community to respond in a way that makes the most sense to them. … I’ve been really proud of [the] engagement we’ve seen in communities,” Hirsh said.

Hirsh said volunteers help find apartments and homes for Afghans. They also work together to furnish the new place, help them enroll children in school, find transportation to job interviews and teach them English.

“The support services we have at the agencies will help any Afghan that walks through the doors, but we’re working very closely in coalition with many of the resettlement agencies … to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act that would not only help adjust status but provide an easier pathway for those that are remaining in Afghanistan,” she said.

The Afghan Adjustment Act is bipartisan legislation that would allow eligible Afghans to apply for lawful permanent residence in the United States. It was introduced in both chambers of Congress in August.

“So we’re hoping that bill will be attached to legislation that passes Congress by December,” Hirsh said.

First Thanksgiving

At the table, the family and friends had Tofurky, a plant-based, meat substitute made from tofu.

Hadia said she tried to explain to her mother what the national holiday day means to the United States.

“It’s like they meet [and] appreciate people with thanks. … So it’s really good. In our culture [it’s] also like that. We don’t have any specific date to say thanks but we say thanks [to] everyone,” she said.

Hadia said she looks forward to the future and hopes to one day work as a diplomat helping other refugees to find safety as she has. In Harrisburg, she is working as a social service worker and is volunteering to assist other refugee families.

She told VOA her family is still adjusting to the new country.

“The United States is very busy. … Everyone is busy here. … [But] we have lots of opportunities here. During the morning I can work and during the evening I can take my classes,” she said.

Samkoff said helping Hadia’s family is a blessing and makes her feel “really good.”

“I don’t have any grandchildren of my own. I feel like if anybody asks me if I have any grandchildren, I would say, ‘Yes, I have seven. One of them is in Germany. I haven’t met him in person yet, but he’s coming,” Samkoff told VOA. That is Hadia’s brother, who is waiting to resettle in the U.S.

“My family is always excited when Judith (Samkoff) invites us [to come over] or other volunteers. You know, when we came here, we didn’t have any family. Now they’re my family. I call Judith my grandmother,” Hadia said.
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