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      Why Christopher Wray’s Resignation May Signal a Shift in FBI Tradition

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      Mr. Wray’s voluntary departure could usher in a new era at the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, one in which the job of director changes with the administration.Christopher A. Wray had considered resigning as F.B.I. director before. More than once, confronted with angry demands from President Donald J. Trump and his allies, he contemplated calling it quits.When Mr. Wray on Wednesday announced his intent to do so, it was because he believed staying on the job into a second Trump term risked significant disruptions to the work force and its mission.Mr. Trump had already declared his plan to replace him with Kash Patel, a tough-talking loyalist who has vowed to force out bureau leaders and empty its Washington headquarters.In conceding to the reality of raw power, Mr. Wray’s voluntary departure could usher in a new era at the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, one in which the job of director is more of a political post that changes with the administration. For decades, F.B.I. directors have been appointed to 10-year terms to insulate them from the shifting winds of politics. Few F.B.I. directors stay a full decade, and the circumstances of Mr. Wray’s departure after seven years suggest that insulation has worn thin.“We are now in a position in which no F.B.I. director may be expected to serve for 10 years, and every time a new president comes in, that new president is likely to signal that the director will be replaced,” said John C. Richter, a Republican and a former U.S. attorney who served in the Justice Department with Mr. Wray.By several measures — agent recruitment and retention, arrests, and disrupted plots — the F.B.I. has been successful during Mr. Wray’s tenure, even as its politically charged cases consumed most of the public attention.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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      Man Found in Syria Appears to Be a Missing American

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      Syria’s new authorities said on Thursday that an American citizen who had been imprisoned while Bashar al-Assad was in power had been found outside Damascus and handed over to the rebel group that now controls the capital.In interviews with international news media, the man appeared to identify himself as Travis Timmerman, an American who is believed to have gone missing from Budapest, Hungary, this year. In a video aired on Thursday by the news channel Al Arabiya, someone is heard asking the man if his name is Travis Timmerman. The man says, “That’s right.” Hisham al-Eid, the mayor of Al-Thihabiyeh, a poor, partly rural town east of Damascus, said that the man had been found on Thursday morning on a main road. He was barefoot and cold but otherwise seemed to be in good health, Mr. al-Eid said.The man told reporters that he had entered Syria from Lebanon on a Christian pilgrimage, and had been detained for several months. He said he had received food and water while in detention, and was allowed to go to the bathroom three times a day.In another video posted by Al Arabiya, the man, wearing a beard and a gray hooded top, said that he had been held in a cell alone. When asked how he was freed, he said that on Monday, someone “took a hammer and they broke my door down.”It was not immediately clear where the man had been held. The fall of the authoritarian Assad regime over the weekend to rebel forces led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has prompted the release of many prisoners held in a sprawling network of detention centers operated by the former government.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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      The Best Memorable Wines of 2024

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      The scarcity and fragility of rare old bottles makes them naturally memorable, but these 12 younger wines had their own unforgettable charms.I’ve had the privilege of drinking some wonderful wines this year, including a few rare, breathtakingly gorgeous old bottles.Those are often the ones that stick in the memory, the experiences that you carry around as benchmarks of beauty.But I drank a lot of memorable wines that were not so rare, old or hard to find. This year, as I considered which bottles to include in my year-end list, I decided to focus on 12 younger, more accessible bottles along with a couple of middle-aged examples.Perhaps for that reason, every bottle is from the 21st century, the first time for me since I’ve been writing year-end lists. Time passes quickly.Here they are, in order of their age.Kelley Fox Dundee Hills Dux Vineyard Chardonnay 2022Each year, Oregon chardonnays seem to get better, more precise and more interesting. One that I’ve enjoyed several times this year was the 2022 Dux Vineyard chardonnay from Kelley Fox in the Willamette Valley.Ms. Fox tends to float under the radar compared with the more well-known Willamette producers. She offers quirky, sometimes pointed opinions. Referring to her own wines, she said, “These are living things and quite inscrutable.”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 Plans Jan. 6 Pardons and Deportations as First Acts in Office

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump said in a new interview that he will use the opening hours of his presidency to pardon people convicted of participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol assault, begin deportations of undocumented immigrants and increase oil production.He also said during the interview, which Time magazine published on Thursday, that he might supporting getting rid of some childhood vaccines if data shows links to autism. He declined to answer a question about whether he had talked with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia since the November election but said Ukraine should not have been allowed to fire U.S.-made missiles into Russia.Speaking of pardons in Jan. 6 cases, he said: “We’re going to do it very quickly, and it’s going to start in the first hour that I get into office.” He said the pardons would go to “nonviolent” people who were at the Capitol, which was overrun by Trump supporters after he lost the 2020 election. “A vast majority should not be in jail, and they’ve suffered gravely,” he said.The president-elect’s comments came during a wide-ranging interview conducted on Nov. 25 as part of the magazine’s choice of Mr. Trump to be its person of the year. In the interview, which the magazine said lasted more than an hour, the president-elect bragged that he had run a “flawless” campaign and that Democrats were out of touch with Americans.He also said he planed a “virtual closure of Department of Education in Washington,” though he did not explain what that meant. And he said that he might reverse President Biden’s expansion of Title IX protections, which includes prohibitions against harassment of transgender students.Americans “don’t want to see, you know, men playing in women’s sports. They don’t,” Mr. Trump said. “They don’t want to see all of this transgender, which is, it’s just taken over.”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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      Donald Trump Is Time’s Person of the Year

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has both derided Time magazine and pined for its approval, was named the publication’s person of the year on Thursday.Mr. Trump also received the title in 2016, after his first presidential election victory, and now joins a group of 16 people who have been chosen more than once. The club includes the last three two-term presidents: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. (Franklin D. Roosevelt is the only person to have been given the title three times.)Sam Jacobs, Time’s editor in chief, wrote in the magazine that the choice was not a difficult one: “On the cusp of his second presidency, all of us — from his most fanatical supporters to his most fervent critics — are living in the Age of Trump.”Mr. Trump, who rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning, has had a tempestuous relationship with Time. After being named person of the year in 2016, he described the magazine as a “very important” publication and said it had granted him a “tremendous honor.”But Mr. Trump, who had won a polarizing presidential race in which he lost the popular vote, bristled at Time’s cover, which described him as “president of the divided states of America.”“I didn’t divide,” he objected in an interview with Matt Lauer on NBC’s “Today” show, adding: “We’re going to put it back together. And we’re going to have a country that’s very well healed.”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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      European Central Bank Cuts Interest Rates as the Economy Weakens

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      The bank has been lowering rates since June as inflation slowed, but other risks are growing, including the threat of higher tariffs promised by President-elect Donald J. Trump.The European Central Bank lowered interest rates on Thursday, the fourth cut this year amid growing concerns that the region’s economic outlook is darkening.Policymakers reduced the bank’s deposit rate by a quarter point, to 3 percent, in a move widely expected by investors. The bank, which sets rates for the 20 countries that use the euro, has been lowering rates since June as inflation slowed toward its target of 2 percent. In November, inflation averaged 2.3 percent across the region, slightly higher than in previous months as energy prices rose.“The disinflation process is well on track,” Christine Lagarde, the president of the central bank, said on Thursday at a news conference in Frankfurt. The bank forecast inflation to average 2.1 percent next year.Despite substantial progress on reining in inflation in recent years, other risks are accumulating. Europe faces the prospect of higher tariffs on its goods exported to the United States imposed during the second term of President-elect Donald J. Trump, and political turmoil in Germany and France, the bloc’s two largest economies, is adding to the uncertainty. Much of the past year has been spent warning that Europe needs to take drastic action to improve its competitiveness, but it is not clear where the leadership will come from to make the necessary changes. That increases the pressure on the central bank to support the economy with lower interest rates.As inflation has slowed in Europe and the United States, central bankers have eased their monetary policy stances. But in recent months, there are growing distinctions between the banks over how fast and how much they need to lower rates.Earlier on Thursday, the Swiss National Bank cut rates by a larger-than-expected half-point as its currency, considered a haven during times of geopolitical stress, has strengthened. Next week, the U.S. Federal Reserve is expected to cut rates after inflation data published on Wednesday added to confidence of slowing price growth. And the Bank of England is expected to hold rates next week, continuing its gradual approach to easing amid concerns the recent government budget will add to price pressures.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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      BuzzFeed Strikes Deal to Sell ‘Hot Ones’ Company for $82.5 Million

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      The sale, to a group that includes the show’s host, Sean Evans, and Soros Fund Management, will allow BuzzFeed to pay down tens of millions of dollars in debt.BuzzFeed on Thursday said it had reached a deal to sell the company behind the popular interview show “Hot Ones” for $82.5 million, easing a cash crunch that has loomed over the media company for months.The buyer is a consortium of investors led by an affiliate of Soros Fund Management that also includes Sean Evans, the affable host of “Hot Ones,” and Chris Schonberger, the founder of First We Feast, the show’s parent company. Mythical Entertainment, the media company created by the YouTube stars Rhett and Link, is also an investor.The deal will allow BuzzFeed to pay down tens of millions of dollars in debt that was scheduled to come due this month. The company is reducing its debt load of nearly $124 million by $88.8 million, using proceeds from the sale and funding from its operations, leaving the company with more cash than debt on its books.The deal is also a new chapter for the company behind “Hot Ones,” a show in which Mr. Evans stoically interviews celebrities while they eat progressively hotter chicken wings. Scarlett Johansson, Megan Thee Stallion, Sydney Sweeney, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele have all appeared as guests. Campaign officials for Vice President Kamala Harris wanted her to go on the show, but First We Feast demurred, saying that “Hot Ones” didn’t want to delve into politics, an adviser to Ms. Harris, Stephanie Cutter, said during an interview last month.The sale unwinds the vestiges of a deal, struck three years ago, to acquire Complex, a rival company that owned First We Feast and is known for its coverage of pop culture. The deal helped BuzzFeed go public, but the company’s stock has since fallen, as investors grew increasingly bearish on digital media.BuzzFeed has since pared back its investment in expensive original content, telling investors that it is focusing on using technology such as artificial intelligence to create and deliver content to users. The company shuttered its news division in 2023, and this year, it sold Complex for $108.6 million, though it held onto First We Feast.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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      China Pledges More Stimulus to Shore Up Flagging Economy

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      At a meeting to set the party’s economic policy agenda, China’s leadership said it would borrow more and cut interest rates in a bid to bolster growth.China’s top leaders on Thursday pledged more stimulus measures to shore up the country’s economy, building on steps they have taken in recent months to bolster growth.At an annual gathering of the Chinese Communist Party and the cabinet, led by the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, officials agreed that the government should allow a bigger budget deficit, borrow more and cut interest rates, the state television broadcaster said on Thursday.The statements suggest a willingness by Beijing to take more aggressive steps to increase spending, part of a shift that began in September to turn around years of weak consumer demand, lackluster growth and declining prices.China “will need to maintain economic growth and maintain overall stability of employment and prices next year,” the state broadcaster said at the conclusion of the two-day Central Economic Work Conference, which sets the economic agenda for the upcoming year.The Chinese government typically uses the conference to signal priorities that could translate into policy action in the next year, and to agree on budget details that will be announced at the spring legislative session.Earlier this week, the ruling Politburo gave a rare public acknowledgment that Beijing needed to take a stronger approach on the economy, when it indicated it would be more willing to lower interest rates. It was the first time that China’s leaders had eased their stance on monetary policy since the aftermath of the global financial crisis 14 years ago.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