Aurelia Butler

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    Who Might Be the Next Archbishop of Canterbury?

    The leader of the Anglican Church, Justin Welby, announced he would resign on Tuesday. Here’s what happens next.On Tuesday, the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, announced he would resign over his handling of an abuse scandal.A damning report concluded last week that after becoming archbishop in 2013, Mr. Welby failed to pursue a proper investigation into claims of widespread abuse of boys and young men by John Smyth, a prominent lawyer and evangelical leader, decades ago at Christian summer camps.Mr. Welby’s abrupt resignation means the question of who becomes the next archbishop — the spiritual leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide — is now urgent.Here’s what you need to know:How will the next archbishop be selected?Who are the leading candidates for the next archbishop?How long will Mr. Welby remain in the post?How will the next archbishop be selected?As Mr. Welby was scheduled to retire in 2026, it’s likely that the Church of England was already beginning to plan for the process of replacing him. The job of managing it falls to a committee known as the Crown Nominations Commission, which was created in 1974. It has 16 voting members, including bishops, representatives from the Canterbury diocese, the global Anglican Communion and the General Synod, which is the church’s national assembly. But do not expect them to operate a transparent selection process.The group is likely to canvass quietly within the church although there may already be prepared dossiers on potential successors. The commission will eventually agree on its preferred candidate — and possibly a reserve — to be sent to Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, who then advises the monarch on the appointment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Lahaina Fire Settlement is Caught up in Legal Fight With Insurers

    Insurers that paid claims in Maui say a deal unfairly keeps them from recouping their own losses.The ashes of last summer’s devastating fire in Lahaina on Maui, which killed 102 people and destroyed the town, were still smoldering when talk turned to how fraught the rebuilding process would be.Fire victims would need help fast, and Hawaii officials pushed hard for a quick resolution to the avalanche of lawsuits filed against the entities that had caused the fire: the state’s electric utility, a school system and Maui County, among others.Just days shy of the fire’s one-year anniversary in August, a settlement was announced: Together, those responsible would pay $4 billion to settle more than 600 lawsuits; compensate over 10,000 homeowners, businesses and others; and — critically — keep key institutions, like the utility, solvent.But getting a deal done that quickly meant adopting an unorthodox approach to the insurance industry’s role in the settlement — one that the industry is challenging. Now, hopes for a timely payout are at the mercy of the courts.Typically, insurers pay claims and then sue whomever they blame for the damage — like the driver who might have caused a car accident — to recover some of what they paid. In the Lahaina settlement, the insurers are instead expected to seek repayment from the people and businesses they insured. A person who received a share of the $4 billion deal from a pain-and-suffering claim, for example, could have to pay a portion of that to the insurance company.The industry is balking at this idea, saying it upends a core piece of its business model. Insurers have turned to state and federal courts to try to block the deal, slowing it down and frustrating fire victims and Hawaii leaders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    After Deadly Car Rampage, Chinese Officials Censor and Obstruct

    Workers cleared away flowers laid at the site of the attack, while censors scrubbed online criticism. The goal is to stifle potential questions and criticism.Two days after the deadliest known violent attack in China in a decade, officials were working to make it seem as if nothing had happened.Outside the sports center in the southern city of Zhuhai where a 62-year-old man had plowed an S.U.V. into a crowd, killing at least 35 people, workers on Wednesday quickly removed bouquets of flowers left by grieving residents. Uniformed police officers and officials in plainclothes shooed away bystanders and warned them not to take photos. At hospitals where patients were taken after the attack — at least 43 more people were injured — local officials sat outside the intensive care units, blocking journalists from speaking with family members.“I’m here keeping watch,” one man, who identified himself as a local community worker, said when reporters entered the ward. “No interviews.”On the Chinese internet, censors were mobilized to delete videos, news articles and commentaries about the attack. Almost 24 hours had passed before officials divulged details about the assault, which happened on Monday, including the death toll. Their statement offered limited details, and they have held no news conferences.The response was a precise enactment of the Chinese government’s usual playbook after mass tragedies: Prevent any nonofficial voices, including eyewitnesses and survivors, from speaking about the event. Spread assurances of stability. Minimize public displays of grief.The goal is to stifle potential questions and criticism of the authorities, and force the public to move on as quickly as possible. And to a large degree, it appeared to be working.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Fashion World Fears High Tariffs in Trump Administration

    President-elect Donald J. Trump has threatened a tax of at least 60 percent on goods from China — a move with the potential to decimate small American brands.In the days after Donald J. Trump won the presidency, several small American fashion designers placed anxious calls to overseas manufacturing partners. Spurred by fears that the president-elect will make good on promises to raise tariffs, thereby upending their operations, they scrambled to find alternatives.The tariffs “would be devastating,” according to Chris Gentile, owner of the Brooklyn-based Pilgrim Surf + Supply, which produces items like padded work coats and fleece zip-ups in China. “I don’t know how we could function.”Throughout his campaign, Mr. Trump threatened to levy a 10 to 20 percent tax on most foreign products and, most significantly, at least a 60 percent tariff on goods from China. The thinking is that sharp taxes would compel companies to begin producing in America again. In conversations with clothing designers over the past week, that logic was met with extreme skepticism.Some designers are not convinced that talk of dizzying tariffs will survive past the campaign trail. But for smaller, independent apparel businesses that rely on the comparative affordability and high quality of Chinese clothing manufacturers, the mere threat of increased taxes on foreign goods was enough to plan for the worst.“We’ve established relationships with these factories,” Mr. Gentile said. “They’ve become almost like family.”A still-scrappy entrepreneur 12 years in, Mr. Gentile doesn’t have an army of supply-chain wonks to ferret out new factories. The task of corresponding with his manufacturers falls largely on him. He’s spent untold hours working with his Chinese production partners on how to set in the sleeves of his shirts just so or how poofy a down jacket should be.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Doesn’t Care Enough About K-12 Education to Break It

    When it comes to education, I consider myself a normie parent. What I want is for my children to have a strong foundation in the core subjects: reading, math, science and history. I want my kids to be challenged to the best of their abilities and be prepared for the future. I want to be guaranteed that they will be physically safe. I don’t want monthslong school board fights over book bans or school renaming. I just want my children to read books and go to school.People disagree about how best to meet these goals (roughly, liberals think the worst public schools should be made better, conservatives think parents should be given more choices outside the public system, though there are some heterodox advocates). But the depressing fact is that neither party has delivered on the basics. As I argued last month, neither Donald Trump nor Kamala Harris had a plan for increasing test scores, fixing Covid learning loss, working on the student absentee crisis or addressing the fact that the teacher pipeline is drying up.Though education is not a top -five issue for voters, I don’t think Democrats on the city and state levels have done a good job as leaders on K-12 schools under President Biden. And on the federal level, he also has struggled. To name one, there’s the ongoing FAFSA debacle — the federal student aid application form was delayed for a second year in a row after last year’s disastrous rollout of a new form.A lot of students are still suffering from the prolonged school closings of 2020-2021, and schools in blue cities and suburbs were closed the longest. While the Biden-Harris administration isn’t responsible for these decisions made on the local level, I don’t think they did enough to push back on the districts that were completely closed for in-person learning after adults could be vaccinated. The federal government pumped a lot of money into Covid education relief, but that funding expired in September. As a public school parent, I can feel it: My third grader’s class has 30 kids in it, more than we’ve ever experienced since my older child entered the system in 2017.In Trump’s first term, he proposed billions of dollars of cuts to the Department of Education that did not get through Congress. His secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, was a huge proponent of school choice. “But for all her efforts, DeVos has little to show for it,” NPR’s Cory Turner said in 2020.Despite Trump’s lackluster record, his ability to gain voters in urban areas might have had to do with how much voters were fed up with Democratic leadership on things like education. As Politico’s Charlie Mahtesian explained, he was able to win in part because “In big, diverse urban places — like Houston’s Harris County or Chicago’s Cook County — he pared down traditionally large Democratic margins.” Trump also increased support in blue places like New York, San Francisco and the densely populated Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. And a lot of city-dwelling Democrats stayed home.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    A Loathsome Colleague Died. Why Is Everyone Pretending She Was So Great?

    A reader smells hypocrisy in his co-workers’ proclamations of mourning and wants no part of it. Is he obligated to attend her funeral if his heart isn’t in it?A high-ranking colleague at work died recently. It was unexpected; she was in her 50s. Dozens of people in the organization, including the C.E.O., are heaping praise on her and saying how badly she will be missed. We’ve all been asked to contribute to a sympathy gift for her family and to attend her funeral. The problem? She was a dreadful colleague: an arrogant, narcissistic bully who belittled everyone in the organization, including me. Nobody wanted to work on her projects. I can’t understand the outpouring of love for her now that she’s gone, and I refuse to be a part of it. Must I contribute to her memorial gift and attend her funeral?CO-WORKERI suspect that in your haste to call out what you see as the hypocrisy of valorizing an unpleasant colleague, you’ve made two big errors in judgment. The lesser of them is assuming that your opinions about this woman are objective fact. You are entitled to hold her in low esteem, of course, but I am virtually certain that not “everyone” found her bullying or that “nobody” wanted to work with her. That’s simply not how life — or opinion — operates.More concerning, though, is your inability to sympathize with the grief of your colleague’s family and friends. I get that she hurt your feelings, but you must be able to see that she was also a human being and that her death will be heartbreaking for those who cared about her. My hunch is that you didn’t give this enough thought before landing on your harsh judgment, and I’m hoping you will consider it further now.This does not require that you become a member of her admiration society. Nor do you have to attend her funeral or donate to a memorial gift. Those are personal decisions, and there is no reason to give in to peer pressure. My only request is that you try to open your heart and take a more generous view of your colleague’s life and her untimely death.Miguel PorlanHost the Thanksgiving You WantMy husband and I want to invite my cousin and his wife to a small Thanksgiving dinner at our house. But I feel obligated to include my brother and his family, too. His teenage son is intolerable, and his wife is a bump on a log. There are other children, too, so when they come, it’s a big group. We’ve had them over many times before, and they lack common courtesy. My brother tries to moderate their behavior to little effect. Still, he would be hurt not to be invited. Last year, we felt so bad about excluding them that we didn’t celebrate at home. Is it possible not to invite them without hurt feelings?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Melania Trump Declines Jill Biden’s White House Invitation

    Melania Trump, the former and incoming first lady, will not accompany President-elect Donald J. Trump to the White House on Wednesday, a person briefed on the plans said.Mrs. Trump had been invited by the current first lady, Jill Biden, for a traditional meeting between the incoming and outgoing presidential spouses as President Biden hosts Mr. Trump at the White House.But Mrs. Trump is declining the invitation, the person said, rebuffing a tradition that’s part of the transition of power.An aide to Mrs. Trump did not respond to a message about her plans.Mrs. Trump sometimes eschewed tradition in her first stint in the White House. She has not yet outlined how she plans to go about the role in the next administration.She has frequently been in New York as the president-elect’s youngest son, Barron, attends college there. In 2017, she didn’t move to Washington for several months while his school year was going on. More

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    NYT Crossword Answers for Nov. 13, 2024

    Todd Gross reviews the state of things.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesWEDNESDAY PUZZLE — When Todd Gross constructed today’s puzzle, he was unaware that it would be published the day I formally decided to switch to decaf. I know that it’s cliché to blame anything on either coffee or on the lack thereof, but I really could have used the strong stuff ahead of solving this labyrinthine grid.None of this is intended as a criticism of Mr. Gross — who, incidentally, plays something of a critic in his own puzzle — as I genuinely enjoyed myself once I got going. I’d love to hear how you all fared, too. Give me your takes, caffeinated or otherwise, in the comments.Today’s ThemeI love a theme that begins at 1-Across. It just thrills me to hit that obstacle right away. In this case, 1A reads [RATING: ★ A big ditch in a big desert. Big deal]. Something’s getting panned, but what could it be? The star ratings continue at 24-, 35-, 51- and 67-Across, with increasingly positive impressions in each entry.35A receives three stars with [RATING: ★★★ Graceland and the Great Smoky Mountains. I volunteer to visit again!], while at 67A top marks are awarded: [RATING: ★★★★★★★★★★★★★ Peaches, peanuts and pecan pie. You’ll always be on my mind!].Americans may have had an easier time than others detecting that these ratings are for U.S. states. Peaches, peanuts and pecan pie, for instance, are emblems of GEORGIA (67A). That “ditch in a big desert” is ARIZONA (1A). Graceland and the Great Smoky Mountains are in TENNESSEE (35A). These ratings weren’t delivered at random, though. We learn at 66A that the sources of these STARS (31D) were STATE FLAGS (8A/66A). ARIZONA’s state flag features only one star, while GEORGIA’s has 13. I have, incredibly, been to none of the states named in this puzzle, so now I have a nice road (or several-flight) trip to plan for the future.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More