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    Jasmin Paris Is First Woman to Finish Barkley Marathons

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    The Barkley Marathons, which features cryptic rules for entry, requires runners to complete 100 miles of rugged terrain in Tennessee under 60 hours.The runner Jasmin Paris became on Friday the first woman to complete the Barkley Marathons, an extreme footrace that requires participants in rural Tennessee to navigate 100 miles of rugged terrain in no more than 60 hours.Paris, 40, of Midlothian, Scotland, finished the race with one minute and 39 seconds to spare, making her one of only 20 people to complete the Barkley since it was extended to 100 miles in 1989. She was one of five to finish this year, out of 40 entrants.At the end of the run, Paris sank to the ground in front of a yellow gate that marks the start and finish of the event, which consists of five roughly 20-mile laps.“The final minutes were so intense, after all that effort it came down to a sprint uphill, with every fiber of my body screaming at me to stop,” Paris said in an email.Her legs were covered in cuts and scratches by the time she reached the end of the race, which was the subject of a 2014 documentary, “The Race That Eats Its Young.”“I didn’t even know if I’d made it when I touched the gate,” she added. “I just gave it everything to get there and then collapsed, gasping for air.”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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      Dallas Seavey Overcomes Moose-Gutting Penalty to Win Iditarod

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      It was a record sixth win for Seavey in the sled dog race, despite a harrowing close encounter with a large mammal and a strange punishment.Dallas Seavey won his record sixth Iditarod sled dog race on Tuesday, despite an eventful race that included a penalty for failing to properly gut a moose.Seavey was cruising in the race last week near Skwentna, Alaska, when his dog team became entangled with a moose. Sledders in the race are permitted to carry firearms and Seavey used his to shoot and kill the moose. One of his dogs, Faloo, was critically injured in the encounter, but underwent two successful surgeries and was expected to survive.Seavey’s problems were not over when he shot the moose. The ethics of the Iditarod race require that when a large animal like a moose or caribou is killed during the competition, its meat must be taken and distributed. So the sledder involved in the accident must stop and gut the animal.Unfortunately for him, Seavey was judged not to have done so adequately. As a result, he was assessed a two-hour penalty. Nonetheless, he overcame that setback to win the race.The Iditarod covers about 1,000 miles in Alaska from Anchorage to Nome. Seavey completed the race in nine days, two hours, and 16 minutes, crossing the burled arch finish line at 5:16 p.m. local time. Seavey’s sixth win surpasses the five victories of Rick Swenson between 1977 and 1991.Seavey, 37, raced in his first Iditarod in 2005, the day after he turned 18, making him the youngest musher ever to enter.His first win came in 2012 when he was 25, and he also became the youngest winner ever. He won back-to-back-to-back races in 2014 to 2016, and added his record-tying win in 2021.His father, Mitch, won the race three times, and his grandfather Dan has also participated in the race.“This one was supposed to be hard,” Seavey said after crossing the finish line. “It had to be special, it had other be more than just a normal Iditarod. And for me, it was.” More

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      MLB The Show Will Include Women Players for the First Time

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      MLB The Show 24 will feature a career mode that allows gamers to create a female player and steer her journey to the big leagues. The game draws on the experiences of female baseball players.For the first time, women will don Major League Baseball jerseys in MLB The Show, the long-running popular video game.MLB The Show 24 will debut the option to create and play a female player in a reinvented version of the game’s career mode, Road to the Show, in which gamers direct a custom character’s ascent from the minors to the big leagues. The game’s developer, Sony San Diego Studio, announced the new mode Tuesday.The game, which comes out March 19, calls the new career mode Road to the Show: Women Pave Their Way. It includes a storyline that follows the ascendence of two women into the major leagues and touches on the unique challenges they face, according to Sony San Diego Studio.MLB The Show joins other high-profile sports video game franchises that have moved to include women, such as FIFA (now EA Sports FC) and NBA 2K. But the gender dynamics in baseball are far more complicated, because most women and girls play softball instead.Some hoped MLB The Show 24 would help change that.“I think that in the United States especially, we’re brainwashed to think that boys play baseball and girls play softball, when in reality both exist in both worlds,” said Veronica Alvarez, manager of the U.S.A. Baseball Women’s National Team, which will compete in this year’s Women’s Baseball World Cup.Ms. Alvarez, a former national team player herself, and some of her players provided Sony with input for the game’s development.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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      Bitcoin Hits Record High, Recovering From 2022 Meltdown

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      Bitcoin’s price surged above $68,800, breaking the record the digital currency set in November 2021 when the crypto industry was booming.Bitcoin hit a record high of about $68,800 on Tuesday, capping a remarkable comeback for the volatile cryptocurrency after its value plunged in 2022 amid a market meltdown.Bitcoin’s price has risen more than 300 percent since November 2022, a resurgence that few predicted when the price dropped below $20,000 in 2022. Its previous record was just under $68,790 in November 2021, as crypto markets boomed and amateur investors poured savings into experimental digital coins.“This is just the beginning of this bull market,” said Nathan McCauley, the chief executive of the crypto company Anchorage Digital. “The best is yet to come.”Bitcoin’s recent surge has been driven by investor enthusiasm for a new financial product tied to the digital coin. In January, U.S. regulators authorized a group of crypto companies and traditional finance firms to offer exchange-traded funds, or E.T.F.s, which track Bitcoin’s price. The funds provide a simple way for people to invest in the crypto markets without directly owning the virtual currency.As of last week, investors had poured more than $7 billion into the investment products, propelling Bitcoin’s rapid rise, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.The price of Ether, the second-most-valuable digital currency after Bitcoin, has also risen this year. Its increase has been driven partly by enthusiasm over the prospect that regulators may also approve an E.T.F. tied to Ether.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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      In Reversal, Guinness Gives a Frenchman’s Matchstick Eiffel Tower the Record

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      Weeks after disqualifying a 24-foot tower made of matchsticks, Guinness World Records apologized and said it had been too “heavy handed.”Richard Plaud toiled over eight years to construct a nearly 24-foot model of the Eiffel Tower. Each of the 706,900 matchsticks he glued together brought the Frenchman one step closer toward his dream: Achieving a world record for building the tallest matchstick sculpture.But in late January, weeks after he finished the replica, Guinness World Record officials delivered devastating news: His Eiffel Tower was disqualified for being built with the wrong type of matchsticks.“It hurt me,” he told TFI Info, a French television network, in an interview aired this week. He also expressed his discontent on Facebook. “GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT,” he wrote in a post last week. “Tell me that the 706,900 sticks glued together one by one are not matches!!??”By Thursday, however, after days of headlines about Mr. Plaud’s disappointment over his disqualification, Guinness reversed its decision, saying that it had made a mistake. Mr. Plaud had earned the title, Guinness clarified in a statement, even though he had used matchsticks without ignitable ends.Mr. Plaud with his model. Richard Plaud/Via ReutersMark McKinley, the director of records at Guinness, said on Friday that the organization regretted any distress it had caused Mr. Plaud during what should have been a time of celebration.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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      For ‘Barbie’ Fans Online, a Bitterly Ironic Oscar Snub

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      Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie missed Academy Award nominations for director and actress, respectively — a fact that was a little too on the nose for some.When the 2024 Oscar nominations were announced this morning, the snubs of the two most prominent women involved in “Barbie” — the director, Greta Gerwig, and the lead actress, Margot Robbie — became the breakout story.The top-grossing film of 2023, passing the $1 billion mark worldwide, is based on the imagined life and times of the iconic Mattel doll. A cultural phenomenon on its own terms, “Barbie,” along with “Oppenheimer,” became half of an unusually thoughtful summer blockbuster duo released on the same day in July (“Barbenheimer”): nothing to sneeze at.As it turns out, the internet has strong opinions about today’s announcement.“Let me see if I understand this: the Academy nominated ‘Barbie’ for Best Picture (eight nominations total) — a film about women being sidelined and rendered invisible in patriarchal structures — but not the woman who directed the film. Okay then,” read a viral X post by the writer Charlotte Clymer.The film wasn’t completely shut out — it was nominated for best picture, while Ms. Gerwig picked up a nomination with Noah Baumbach for adapted screenplay, Ryan Gosling for supporting actor, and America Ferrera for supporting actress. But the fact that Mr. Gosling was tabbed for his towheaded Ken, who discovers the idea of patriarchy and then attempts to dominate Barbieland, before Ms. Robbie’s character destroys gender-based oppression, was too much for some to take.“We’re actually doing patriarchy very well,” the writer Jodi Lipper wrote in an Instagram story, quoting a Ken line from the film.(In a statement released today, Mr. Gosling wrote, “To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.”)Indeed, because “Barbie” functions as a commentary on sexism and a metacommentary on its own place in feminist discourse, the movie itself was the first place some of its fans reached to express their outrage over the snubs.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?  More

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      Jennifer McClellan Wins in Virginia and Will Be State’s First Black Woman in Congress

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      Jennifer McClellan, a state senator, will fill the seat held by Representative A. Donald McEachin, who died in November.Jennifer McClellan, a veteran Democratic state senator, won a special election for Virginia’s Fourth Congressional District on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, making her the first Black woman to represent the state in Congress.Ms. McClellan, 50, will fill the seat formerly held by Representative A. Donald McEachin, who died Nov. 28 of colorectal cancer. She has cited Mr. McEachin as a mentor and was highly favored to win in the safely Democratic district, which stretches from Richmond, where she is based, to the rural counties along Virginia’s border with North Carolina.She defeated Leon Benjamin, a Republican Navy veteran and local pastor. Mr. Benjamin lost to Mr. McEachin by nearly 30 points in November.Virginia Democrats, including the party’s entire congressional delegation and many local and statewide officials, were quick to coalesce around Ms. McClellan’s candidacy during the primary in late December. Even though the accelerated election calendar set by Gov. Glenn Youngkin left her campaign with less than two weeks to turn out primary voters, she still won with nearly 85 percent of the vote, according to the state party.Ms. McClellan centered her campaign on legislation she spearheaded as a state senator — issues she championed, like voting rights, environmental protection and abortion access, often dovetailed with the national Democratic platform.“I passed legislation to protect our right to vote and our right to a clean environment. I led the fight for our reproductive freedom,” Ms. McClellan said in a television ad. “I’ll take that same fight with me to Congress.”In a January opinion essay for Essence magazine, Ms. McClellan also said that her identity as a Black female lawmaker would help shape her policy positions.“This election isn’t just about my lived experiences, it’s about elevating the experiences of so many whose voices have not been heard in our government,” she wrote.Ms. McClellan, a lawyer who is also the vice chair of the Virginia legislature’s influential Black caucus, has been frequently promoted as a rising star among state Democrats. This is her second run for statewide office: In 2021, she fell short in a crowded primary for governor.Susan Swecker, chairwoman of the Democratic Party of Virginia, said in a statement on Tuesday night: “Jennifer McClellan’s history-making victory as the first Black woman to be elected to Congress from Virginia will have ripple effects across the Commonwealth.”“Her leadership will expand upon the outstanding progress and advocacy for which we remember Congressman A. Donald McEachin — I cannot think of a better way to honor his life and legacy than with the new generation of leadership that Congresswoman-elect Jennifer McClellan will bring to Washington.” More

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      Women Are on the March

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      Perhaps you missed the big news: In 2023, there will be a record-breaking 12 women serving as governors around the nation. Way over the previous record of … nine.And your reaction is:Hey, that’s 24 percent — not bad.That’s less than a quarter!Are any of them going to run for president? And does that mean we have to discuss Kamala Harris? Because I’m really not sure. …OK, one thing at a time, please. Just think of 2023 as the Year of Women Governors.Even so, we’ve still got a way to go. Eighteen states have yet to select a woman governor, ever. California! Pennsylvania! And Florida — really Florida, there’s a limit to how much time we’ve got to complain about you.New York elected a woman for the first time last month, a development that began when then-Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul was propelled into the job because of Andrew Cuomo’s sexual harassment scandal. Sorry, Andrew, but history may well recall this as your final gift to New Yorkers.Arizona hasn’t gotten enough attention — electing Katie Hobbs as its fifth female governor kept it the national record-holder. Good work, guys! It was also one of the states with a woman-vs.-woman race, although being Arizona, it featured a crazy subplot. Kari Lake, the defeated Republican Trumpophile, is taking the whole thing to court.It’s important to admit that while the quantity of female governors expands, the quality is … varied. Current incumbents include the newly re-elected Kristi Noem of South Dakota, whose attitude toward Covid vaccination has been, at best, deeply unenthusiastic. (Noem spent $5 million of pandemic relief funds on ads to promote tourism.)On the other side, there’s Michigan’s current governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who led the Democrats to a monster statewide sweep last month. She went through a lot to do it — remember when a group called Wolverine Watchmen plotted to kidnap her and put her on trial for treason?Our female governors, both incumbent and newly elected, have a wide ideological range, but it’s very possible they’ll still be more conscious of women’s issues — like child care and sexual assault — than would a group of men from similar political backgrounds.And abortion rights — although some, like Noem, are definitely not on that boat. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision mobilized female voters so much in the fall that you’d think we’d be seeing more women out there carrying the flag in the governors’ races.“It may well have come down too late to see candidacies emerge as a result,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, who’s hoping the surge will still be coming.If so, it’ll be the next chapter in a saga that goes back a century — the first two women ever elected governor won their jobs in 1925, in Wyoming and Texas.The Wyoming winner, Nellie Tayloe Ross, was the widow of the prior governor. When he died, his party nominated her to succeed him before she’d decided to run. She won anyhow and apparently liked the job. Ross ran for re-election and lost but went on to forge a successful career as director of the U.S. Mint. Wyoming, however, has never since chosen a woman as governor. Get a move on, Wyoming.The other woman who became governor a century ago was a little less, um, encouraging. Texas’ Miriam “Ma” Ferguson also succeeded her husband — who was, in this case, impeached. “Ma” basically vowed to carry on her husband’s not-totally-reputable practices. Elect her, she promised voters, and get “two for the price of one.” That, you may remember, is what Bill Clinton said when he ran for president in 1992 — pick him and get Hillary as well.It worked a lot better for the couple from Arkansas than it did for the couple in Texas. Ma Ferguson won, and voters got a governor who pardoned an average of 100 convicts a month. Most did not appear to be worthy of release on any basis other than cold cash. But hey, she was definitely carrying on a family tradition.The first woman elected governor in her own right was Ella Grasso in Connecticut. That was in 1974 and I was in Hartford at the time, starting out my career covering the state legislature. My clients were little papers who forked over a tiny bit of money to hear what their lawmakers were up to. The regular pressroom decreed there was no room for any newcomers, and I was dispatched — along with my partner, Trish Hall — to work out of the Capitol attic.The other facilities in said attic included a men-only bar for legislators. The 35 women in the legislature at the time didn’t seem upset about discrimination when it came to access to drinking quarters. Possibly because the facility in question, known as the Hawaiian Room, was a dark, moldy space with dusty plastic leis hanging from the ceiling.But I did complain about having to work in the attic, and one night when I was there alone — it was really pretty late — Ella Grasso herself showed up to check the accommodations. As she was walking down the narrow room, a bat flew down from the ceiling and into her hair.She took it very well.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More