Saturday, October 7, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.
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Joe is always busy.
Spread the word.
Joe Biden once again defied the odds.
His administration just reported 336,000 new jobs were created in September. That’s DOUBLE what analysts were expecting.
Joe is a titan for our economy.
Source.New York Times.
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WNBA news.
WNBA announces Bay Area expansion team to begin play in 2025.
WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert and San Francisco Warriors Star Steph Curry welcome the new WNBA Franchise.
The Golden State Warriors have been one of the most successful NBA franchises over the past decade. They want to do the same in the WNBA, which announced Thursday morning that it had approved the organization as an expansion franchise starting in the 2025 season.
"We're coming in here, number one, to win," Warriors chairman Joe Lacob told ESPN. "Number two, we want to see this league and women's basketball grow, and we hope to be a big part of it.
"We think it's a watershed event for us to come in and commit to it in a big way. We're going to bring all of our resources. We can put this machine to work, and we're going to do that."
The Warriors ranked first in Forbes' most recent NBA valuations at $7 billion, largely due to the enormous success of the Chase Center in San Francisco, a state-of-the-art privately financed arena that opened in 2019, and corporate sponsorships.
The team will play its games at the Chase Center and train in Oakland, where the Warriors practiced until 2019.
As such, Lacob said, the new franchise is likely to be known as "Golden State" to reflect a fan base across the entire Bay Area. However, internal discussions will continue over the next few months on whether it will be called the Warriors or by another name, as well as around uniforms and logos.
Interest in the team was immediate. According to the Warriors, they began accepting deposits for season tickets for the new team at 1 p.m. ET on Thursday; in the first five hours, they had received 2,000 deposits.
This is something of a full-circle moment for Lacob, 67, who began his journey as a sports franchise owner in 1996 with the San Jose Lasers of the American Basketball League. He also held a minority ownership in the league, which folded in 1998.
Lacob said the failure of the ABL, which initially had superior talent to the WNBA with eight of the 12 players on the 1996 United States Olympic team, has always been a regret of his.
"We were rocking and rolling, playing during basketball season, which I still believe is the right way to do it," he said. "We were selling out, doing really well. But we just couldn't get the TV contract. That was the killer. And I lost personally, I can tell you, over $10 million -- which was a lot of money at the time."
The ABL also ran into competition from the WNBA, which began play in 1997 and had the full force of the NBA behind its eight original franchises.
The league expanded to 16 teams by the 2000 season, but several franchises folded or relocated over the next decade. The WNBA has been cautious about expansion since 2008, when the Atlanta Dream were added.
There have been renewed calls to expand in recent years as the league's popularity has grown. The WNBA will continue to discuss adding a second expansion team, likely Portland, but league sources told ESPN those plans have not been finalized.
The Bay Area has long been seen as a good choice for expansion because of the strong existing fan base for women's basketball from Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley as well as the Sacramento Monarchs, one of the original WNBA teams.
Lacob said he has long been a fan of both the Stanford men's and women's basketball teams.
"Both my boys and my girls played basketball," Lacob said. "And I was very much into Stanford basketball, men's and women's. So that was one of the reasons I did the ABL [and the Lasers].
"So this is a big full-circle thing for me. The only reason it took all these years, 25 years or so, is that when I bought the Warriors [in 2010], we had to turn around the team. RThat was a few years. Then we had a seven-year process to build the arena, which was a massive investment of time and money. And then finally when I was ready to go, the pandemic hit. So years go by, and here we are now." (ESPN).
WNBA Playoffs.
The New York Liberty and Las Vegas Aces will meet in the 2023 WNBA Finals this weekend. Liberty star Breanna Stewart, WNBA 2023 MVP, is the player in the air.
The 2023 WNBA Semifinals are over, and the verdict is in: the 2023 WNBA Finals will feature a super-team clash between the Las Vegas Aces and the New York Liberty.
The Aces — the No. 1 seed and defending champions — made a three-game sweep against the Dallas Wings in the WNBA Semifinals, with a 64-61 win Friday determining that they will once again reach the WNBA Finals. The No. 2 seed New York Liberty will be making its first Finals appearance since 2002. It is the only original franchise to not have won a championship. The best-of-five Finals series between the Aces and Liberty will tip off this Sunday (3 p.m. ET on ABC).
Ready to watch some basketball?
Here’s everything you need to know about how to watch the 2023 WNBA Finals, including the full WNBA Finals schedule, streaming options and more.
When are the 2023 WNBA Finals?
The WNBA Finals tip off this Sunday, Oct. 8 at 3 p.m. ET.
What channel are the WNBA Finals on 2023?
WNBA Final games will air across ESPN and ABC.
Don't have access to those channels? Here's how we recommend watching the 2023 WNBA Finals.
Hulu’s live TV bundle (with ads) will get you access to ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC, plus NBC, Fox, CBS and access to ESPN+. That's every channel you may need to watch the WNBA playoffs in 2023. Plus, this bundle gets you a subscription to Disney+ and, of course, access to Hulu’s general content library. Hulu’s live TV plans also include unlimited DVR storage, a hardware-free set-up process and easy online cancellation. Currently Hulu does not offer a free trial for its live TV plan.
While it usually costs $70 per month, right on time for the WNBA playoffs (and football season), Hulu is offering new and eligible returning subscribers Hulu + Live TV at a discounted rate of $49.99 per month for your first three months. Now through October 11. (Yahoo.Sports.com).
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Gym Jordan as Speaker of the House, 2nd in line to the Presidency, a chilling thought.
Liz Cheney weighs in on the possibility that the new Republican Speaker of the House will be Gym Jordan.
"If they were to decide that, there would no longer be any possible way to argue that a group of elected Republicans could be counted on to defend the Constitution." —Newsweek
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Even some Republicans recognize Trump’s Predecessor.
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More on SuperStar Gymnast Simone Biles.
Simone Biles wins women’s all-around final to secure record 21st world championship gold medal.
Simone Biles continued to make history at the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, winning the women’s individual all-around final on Friday to secure her 21st world championship gold medal.
The 26-year-old American put on another near-perfect display in Antwerp, Belgium, to win her sixth all-around title at world championships, as she finished ahead of Rebeca Andrade in second place and Shilese Jones in third.
By winning gold, she also became the most decorated female or male gymnast ever, surpassing Belarusian Vitaly Scherbo’s record of 33 overall medals across both the Olympics and the world championships.
Biles has already won one gold medal at the 2023 world championships, playing a starring role in the US women’s team gold in the team final on Wednesday, and has an opportunity to win four more.
She is set to compete in the women’s vault and uneven bars finals on Saturday, before the balance beam and floor exercise finals on Sunday. (CNN).
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A feminist warrior is recognized by the Nobel.
Jailed Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi wins 2023 Nobel peace prize.
Mohammadi wins prize for her fight against oppression of women in Iran and to promote human rights for all.
Narges Mohammadi, the most prominent jailed Iranian women’s rights advocate, has won the 2023 Nobel peace prize for fighting the oppression of women in the country.
“The Norwegian Nobel committee has decided to award the 2023 Nobel peace prize to Narges Mohammadi for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all,” the committee said in its citation.
Mohammadi is one of Iran’s leading human rights activists, who has campaigned for women’s rights and the abolition of the death penalty and an improvement of prison conditions inside Iran.
The award will be viewed as a tribute to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran that rocked the clerical establishment last year, but has been suppressed with many activists either killed or in jail.
The protests were sparked by the death in police custody of the young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini after she had been arrested for not wearing the hijab in line with state rules. The conflict over the wearing of the hijab continues.
Mohammadi is serving multiple sentences in Tehran’s Evin prison amounting to about 12 years’ imprisonment, according to the rights organisation Front Line Defenders, the latest of the many periods she has been detained. Charges against her include spreading propaganda against the state.
She is also the deputy head of the Defenders of Human Rights Center, a non-governmental organisation led by Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 Nobel peace prize laureate. The committee added: “Her courageous fight has come at a great personal cost.” In recent years, Mohammadi has not been able to live with her family, who were forced to leave Iran.
She has been active from within prison, warning of nationwide protests by publishing letters about the state of prisons and detention centres and violence against prisoners and detainees.
Mohammadi’s brother, Hamidreza, said he was overjoyed after waking up to the news of his sister’s Nobel peace prize. He told the Norwegian broadcaster NRK that he hoped the prize would make activists’ lives safer in Iran.
“We hope it will be safer for those in Iran. The situation there is very dangerous, activists there can lose their lives,” he said.
Describing waking up to the news of his sister’s award, he said: “The joy is so great. I am so happy on behalf of Narges.”
In mid-December last year, in a letter to Javaid Rehman, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, Mohammadi described “assaults against women during detention and in detention centres” as “part of the repression programme” of the Islamic Republic against female protesters and fighters.
In a message published on the anniversary of Amini’s death, she described it as “the day of recording the oppression of the religious authoritarian regime against the women of Iran”. Mohammadi is also one of the women calling for the UN to widen the definition of crimes against humanity to include gender apartheid.
For refusing to be silenced behind bars, she has been banned from speaking directly with her husband and children for the past 18 months.
“When your wife and the closest person to you is in prison, every single day you wake up worried that you might hear bad news,” her husband, Taghi Rahmani, told CNN in a recent interview in France, where he has lived in exile with their children since shortly after Mohammadi was imprisoned in 2015.
After Ebadi, Mohammadi is the second Iranian woman to receive the Nobel peace prize. No Iranian man has received the award. Mohammadi is the 19th woman to win the 122-year-old prize and the first since Maria Ressa of the Philippines won the award in 2021 jointly with Russia’s Dmitry Muratov.
The Nobel peace prize, worth 11m Swedish crowns (£819,000), will be presented in Oslo on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist who founded the awards in his 1895 will. (The Guardian).
The More They Lock Us Up, the Stronger We Become.
September 16, 2023. By Narges Mohammadi.
My fellow inmates and I were gathered in the women’s ward of Evin prison in Tehran one evening when we saw a television report of Mahsa Amini’s death. It was one year ago Saturday that she died in the custody of Iran’s morality police for allegedly failing to wear a proper hijab. Her death set off an immediate and widespread uprising — led by women — that rocked the country.
In the women’s ward, we were filled with grief — and rage. We used our short phone calls to collect information. At night, we held meetings to exchange the news we’d heard. We were stuck inside, but we did what we could to raise our voices against the regime. Anger reached its peak a few weeks later, when a fire swept through part of Evin on Oct. 15. We chanted “Death to the Islamic Republic” amid the gunfire from security forces, explosions and flames. At least eight people were killed.
Thousands of people protesting Ms. Amini’s death were arrested in the months afterward. As the anniversary of her death approached, Iran’s leaders worked hard to suppress dissent. I have been imprisoned in Evin three times since 2012 for my work as a defender of human rights, but I have never seen as many new admissions to the women’s ward there as in the last five months.
Other women’s wards also filled up. Through friends in Qarchak prison southeast of Tehran, I learned of about 1,400 new detainees being held there. Other women have been sent to high-security wards, including Evin’s Section 209, run by the Ministry of Intelligence. A detainee who was transferred to Evin from Adelabad prison in Shiraz told us of hundreds of new female detainees in Adelabad.
What the government may not understand is that the more of us they lock up, the stronger we become.
The morale among the new prisoners is high. Some spoke with strange ease about writing their wills before heading onto the streets to call for change. All of them, no matter how they were arrested, had one demand: Overthrow the Islamic Republic regime.
During recent months, I met many female prisoners who had been beaten and bruised, their bones broken, and who had been sexually assaulted. I have tried my best to document and share that information.
Still, we continue to raise our voices. We have issued statements and held general meetings and sit-ins following the news of mass demonstrations, street killings and executions. The security and judicial institutions have tried to intimidate and silence us by cutting off our phone calls and weekly meetings with family, or by filing new court cases against us. In the past seven months, they have opened six new criminal cases over my human rights activities in prison and added two years and three months to my sentence, which is now 10 years and nine months.
I started campaigning in Iran 32 years ago, as a student. My goal back then was to fight religious tyranny, which along with tradition and social customs has led to the deep repression of women in this country. That’s still my goal. Now, seeing the groundbreaking efforts of young women and girls during this revolutionary movement, I feel my feminist dreams and goals are closer to realization.
Women emerged as the vanguard of this uprising, demonstrating immense courage and resistance, even in the face of heightened animosity and aggression from the religious authoritarian regime.
In the past, before Ms. Amini’s death, I had heard some accounts of sexual assaults against women within the women’s prisons, but I had never personally witnessed so many life-threatening beatings and injuries, nor had I encountered tales of sexual assault and harassment of this magnitude.
The regime seems to be purposefully propagating a culture of violence against women. However, it will not be able to intimidate or restrain them. Women will not give up.
We are fueled by a will to survive, whether we are inside prison or outside. The government’s violent and brutal repression may sometimes keep people from the streets, but our struggle will continue until the day when light takes over darkness and the sun of freedom embraces the Iranian people.
One more thing. Or two.
Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of PEN America, a free expression group, said the awarding of the prize to Mohammadi was “a tribute to her courage and that of countless women and girls who have poured out into the streets of Iran and faced down one of the world’s most brutal and stubborn regimes, risking their lives to demand their rights.”
“For those of us at PEN America,” she added, “Narges is an inspiration and also a personal friend, a woman whose story of unyielding defiance at crushing personal costs awakens the righteous indignation within each of us.” (source. New York Times).
Mohammadi is the 19th woman to receive the award.
Narges Mohammadi is only the 19th woman to be selected for the Nobel Peace Prize in its history.
The Nobel Foundation, which administers the prizes, acknowledged that gender imbalance across the various Nobels in 2017, and Göran Hansson, the vice chair of the foundation’s board of directors, promised that starting in 2018 the committee would take steps to address it.
“I hope that in five years or 10 years, we will see a very different situation,” he said.
More than 100 individuals have received the Nobel Peace Prize since its inception in 1901, which has also been awarded to organizations. The first woman to receive it was Bertha von Suttner, an Austrian writer who was a leading figure in a nascent pacifist movement in Europe. She was recognized in 1905, two years after Marie Curie became the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize, in physics.
It would be 26 years before another woman was selected for the award: the American Jane Addams, regarded as the founder of modern social work and an advocate for the concerns of children and mothers. She shared the 1931 prize with Nicholas Murray Butler, who was the head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Other women to receive the honor include the Philippine journalist Maria Ressa, who was named in 2021; Mother Teresa in 1979; the legal reformer Shirin Ebadi of Iran in 2003; the Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai in 2004; and, in 2014, the education activist Malala Yousafzai, the youngest recipient of the award.
In 2011, three women shared the award: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former president of Liberia; Leymah Gbowee, a peace activist from Liberia; and Tawakkol Karman, a journalist from Yemen who became the face of the “Arab Spring” uprising in her country.
Here are the other female laureates:
1946 — Emily Greene Balch, American economist, sociologist, pacifist and educator
1976 — Betty Williams and Meiread Corrigan, founders of a peace movement in Northern Ireland
1982 — Alva Myrdal, Swedish diplomat and disarmament advocate
1991 — Aung San Suu Kyi, pro-democracy activist in Myanmar
1992 — Rigoberta Menchú Tum, leading advocate for Mayan rights and culture
1997 — Jody Williams, American disarmament activist who campaigned to abolish land mines
2018 — Nadia Murad, Yazidi activist from northern Iraq who escaped enslavement by the Islamic State and led a campaign against the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. (New York Times).
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