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Jen Psaki, White House press secretary to Joe Biden, tests positive for Covid The Guardian
The Saints' defense stepped up when Jameis Winston went down, Josh Allen shook off an uncharacteristically sloppy start, and wide receivers around the league auditioned for Tuesday’s trade deadline.
They’ve been banging at the Super Bowl door for half a decade. They’ve had their collective hearts ripped out in new inconceivable ways each January.
Could 2021 be the year the New Orleans Saints break through again? A 36-27 win over the defending-champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers must fill this injury-ravaged team with belief that it can be.
When the starting quarterback Jameis Winston was carted off the field with a knee injury early in the second quarter, and with the backup Taysom Hill still out with a concussion, the Saints had every reason to fold. Instead, they took Tom Brady’s best shots, keeping pace deep into the fourth quarter behind the journeyman Trevor Siemian until the defense came up with a game-saving play.
The drama at the Superdome truly started with 5 minutes, 44 seconds left in the fourth quarter, when Brady rainbowed a 50-yard touchdown to a wide-open Cyril Grayson. With three Bucs receivers lined up to the right, two Saints defenders bit on Mike Evans’s route underneath to leave Grayson all alone deep.
Brady has been throwing touchdowns to receivers nobody has ever heard of for a good two decades and Grayson kept that streak alive. Grayson was an All-American track sprinter at Louisiana State University, where he did not even play football. He has bounced around the league with eight different teams since 2017.
Grayson, a Louisiana native, caught his second career reception and first career touchdown to put the Bucs up, 27-26.
Yet, the Saints didn’t flinch.
Siemian drove the offense 70 yards in 12 plays to go back up, 29-27, on a 23-yard field goal by Brian Johnson (the third kicker the Saints have tried this season). Granted, Saints Coach Sean Payton’s clock management at the tail end of the drive was ugly. With incompletions on first and second down from Tampa Bay’s 9-yard line instead of running the clock, the Saints appeared to gift Brady 1:41 on the ensuing possession. With a timeout.
It didn’t matter. After Brady attempted a deep shot for Evans on the Bucs’ first play from scrimmage, Saints cornerback P.J. Williams stepped in front of Brady’s next pass for a pick and returned it for a 40-yard touchdown.
That’s the story of the Saints. Long gone are the days of their offense exploding for 350 passing yards each week. Rather, Payton has squeezed out as much talent as he possibly can from every crevice of the roster, and when the offense cannot find a playmaker, a defense built by coordinator Dennis Allen steps up.
The team’s lone star on offense, running back Alvin Kamara, was held in check, managing only 3.2 yards per carry and 76 total yards. Siemian threw his first touchdown pass since 2017 in the second quarter, but looked like a career backup thereafter.
Receiver Deonte Harris, playing in his first game since Week 5, fielded a key punt return and he and Marquez Callaway came up with clutch catches. The defense kept coming up with plays, an interception or a forced fumble, goading Brady into three turnovers. The Saints committed none.
The Saints are now 5-2 and thinking big yet again, while hoping to have their quarterback healthy to face Brady and the Bucs when it really counts: in January.
For two decades, the two franchises toiled in the same misery. The Buffalo Bills and the Miami Dolphins were essentially locked in Tom Brady’s A.F.C. East torture chamber.
After 17 division titles, nine conference titles and six Super Bowl triumphs as quarterback of the New England Patriots, Brady headed south to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and a door cracked open for these two rivals.
The Bills gambled on the strong-armed quarterback few watched at Wyoming, Josh Allen, and then handed him a six-year, $258 million contract extension.
The Dolphins took the Alabama quarterback everyone saw in college: Tua Tagovailoa.
Now, it sure looks like the Bills will own the Dolphins, and maybe the rest of the division, for a while to come. The Bills’ 26-11 victory was their seventh in a row over the Dolphins, and the massive discrepancy at quarterback between the franchises is a major reason.
The game was unexpectedly tight through the first three quarters, with Buffalo’s typical pyrotechnics stalled by sloppy plays. Only one of the Bills’ first six drives traveled farther than 23 yards, and the score was tied, 3-3, at halftime.
One play with under a minute remaining at the end of the first half was particularly ghastly. On fourth-and-4 from Miami’s 44-yard line, Allen thought the Dolphins had jumped offsides and haphazardly pointed to the line of scrimmage while backpedaling midplay. He was hit, threw incomplete and then was flagged for intentional grounding.
Of course, the Dolphins’ popgun offense did nothing with this gifted field position, and fumbled the ball right back to Buffalo.
In the second half, Allen eventually overwhelmed Miami through sheer physical ability. As if sick and tired of this pillow fight, he dissected the Dolphins’ secondary on the Bills’ second possession of the half — a 13-play, 80-yard touchdown drive that ate up 7 minutes 6 seconds of game clock.
Allen hit receiver Cole Beasley for four completions on the drive alone, including a 15-yard floater on third-and-14.
On third-and-1, the 6-foot-5, 247-pound Allen bulled his way through the arms of Dolphins linebacker Elandon Roberts to gain 5 yards.
The go-ahead touchdown pass showed the sort of toughness and improvisation Allen makes look so, so routine.
On first-and-goal, and his face mask ripped sideways by the 266-pound defensive end Jaelan Phillips, Allen shook free and flipped an 8-yard touchdown pass to a wide-open Gabriel Davis. Impressive as the throw seemed then, replays confirmed that it had been a no-look pass, to boot.
On Sunday, Allen looked like Ben Roethlisberger in his prime — only stronger, faster and with a ton more attitude, resuscitating plays with the sort of confidence in his arm that all teams seek at the position.
Buffalo’s next drive ended with a 19-yard scoring strike to wideout Stefon Diggs, who promptly punted the football into the stands. The afternoon was capped by Allen’s third-and-6 touchdown dash into the end zone, the 28th rushing touchdown of his career.
He flexed his biceps. He snarled. He even mixed it up with Dolphins defensive tackle Christian Wilkins after a failed 2-point conversion attempt. When the two were separated by officials, Allen waved goodbye to Wilkins for seven seconds as he walked back to the Bills’ sideline.
Allen has done more than resurrected a franchise that has waited decades to get out of Brady’s Patriots shadow. With his refusal to back down, he has given fans a rallying point, an embodiment of their confidence.
While there may be questions about Patrick Mahomes’s recklessness at Kansas City, Baker Mayfield’s health at Cleveland and imbalances at Las Vegas, Baltimore and Tennessee, there is certitude in Western New York.
N.F.L. teams have come around on roster building, realizing that clinging to draft capital forever rarely pays off. Contenders like the Los Angeles Rams have proven that the smarter play is often to go all in on proven commodities.
With the trade deadline on Tuesday, a handful of wide receivers should be available.
Allen Robinson has been thwarted by bad quarterback play and bad play-calling for most of his eight-year career, yet has found a way to churn out numbers. His relationship with the Chicago Bears was severely damaged before this season began when the two parties could not agree on a contract extension and Robinson accepted the franchise tag. Chicago’s 33-22 loss to the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday, despite a heroic outing from Justin Fields, should render the Bears (3-5) sellers at this deadline.
Elsewhere, Cleveland dropped to 4-4 with a 15-10 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers, further proof that the Odell Beckham Jr.-Baker Mayfield marriage never worked for the Browns. Miami’s DeVante Parker and the Giants’ Darius Slayton, who is due only the rest of his $850,000 salary, should warrant interest, though the receiver who perhaps most wants a relocation, the Houston Texans’ Brandin Cooks, may stay put. After the Texans shipped Mark Ingram to the New Orleans Saints last week, Cooks voiced his frustration at the team’s direction.
Who could bite on adding a playmaking receiver? The Baltimore Ravens (5-2) and the Kansas City Chiefs (3-4) perhaps.
This season has been miserable for Patrick Mahomes, who has exhausted Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce trying to compensate for a paltry defense. Trading for a receiver would put the team all in on outgunning opponents.
Lamar Jackson has been transcendent for the Ravens, but with receiver Sammy Watkins nursing a hamstring injury and a rotating cast at running back, Baltimore could use another option so Jackson does not have to take on too much of the load.
Patriots 27, Chargers 24: Maybe those close losses to Tampa Bay and Dallas will end up costing the Patriots, but Sunday was further proof that Coach Bill Belichick’s defense will always give this team a chance. Justin Herbert threw nearly as many incompletions (17) as completions (18) and had two passes picked off by Patriots safety Adrian Phillips, who returned one for a fourth-quarter touchdown. Next up for New England: three extremely winnable games against Carolina, Cleveland and Atlanta.
Seahawks 31, Jaguars 7: Jacksonville was flagged for having 12 men on the field on back-to-back plays, a befuddling pair of penalties with extra time to prepare given their bye last week. That just about summarizes how Urban Meyer’s first year as an N.F.L. head coach is going.
Broncos 17, Washington Football Team 10: Broncos safety Justin Simmons continues to be one of the best players we don’t talk nearly enough about. He smacked Washington tight end Ricky Seals-Jones to force one incompletion on a fourth-and-1, picked off two passes and had seven solo tackles. The Broncos’ defense gives them a chance in most games.
Panthers 19, Falcons 13: Carolina stopped the bleeding of a four-game losing streak with 203 rushing yards. After being benched in Week 7, Panthers quarterback Sam Darnold left this week’s game in the fourth quarter with a concussion.
49ers 33, Bears 22: Neither team looks like a contender, but Deebo Samuel got some recognition. He pulled off a 83-yard catch and run, and his 819 receiving yards through seven games breaks Jerry Rice’s franchise record of 781 yards set in 1986.
Titans 34, Colts 31 (overtime): After throwing one interception through Indianapolis’s first seven games, quarterback Carson Wentz threw two in the final eight minutes on Sunday. Tennessee capitalized to gain distance on the Colts, its only threat in the A.F.C. South.
Rams 38, Texans 22: Ho-hum. It was another massive day from Rams receiver Cooper Kupp, who helped the Rams race to a 38-0 lead through three quarters with 115 yards and a touchdown. It was his fifth 100-yard game of the season.
Steelers 15, Browns 10: It is scientifically impossible for a Mike Tomlin-coached team to die off in October. Ben Roethlisberger continued to own the Browns, even as a shell of his former self, with 266 yards, one touchdown and, most important, no turnovers.
Jets 34, Bengals 31: In his first N.F.L. start, the Jets backup Mike White outplayed the sizzling Joe Burrow, throwing for 405 yards and three touchdowns on a remarkable 37-of-45 passing. Four Jets players caught at least five receptions, and Bengals receiver Ja’Marr Chase (three catches on nine targets) was neutralized.
Eagles 44, Lions 6: Philadelphia fans had been clamoring for Coach Nick Sirianni to run the ball. Against the winless Lions, they got their wish. Quarterback Jalen Hurts threw only 14 times as a host of backs bashed away for 236 yards and four touchdowns on a combined 46 rush attempts. At 3-5, though, the Eagles should probably be sellers at the trade deadline.
Journalists and tech executives seem to be fighting each other to a draw in a battle that has no end in sight.
After Mark Zuckerberg announced, in a goofy video on Thursday, that he was changing his company’s name to Meta and shifting its focus to the creation of a digital space called the metaverse, he granted interviews to just four media outlets, including exactly zero of the great American legacy publications.
For the outlets receiving a golden ticket, it was a big get. It was also a little embarrassing: What did you do to ingratiate yourself to one of journalism’s biggest targets, just as your competitors were feasting on a leak of thousands of internal company documents?
Only one outlet with access to the Facebook documents — the tech site The Verge — got an interview with Zuck. The other three were The Information, a tech news site, and a pair of relatively sympathetic newsletter-ers, Ben Thompson and Dylan Byers.
The message of this short list was clear: Silicon Valley doesn’t really need East Coast media anymore.
It has been more than half a decade since coverage of the tech industry, once known for its boosterism, turned adversarial, with Facebook often at the center of the story. As the battle between tech companies and the news media continues, Mr. Zuckerberg appears to be acting on the view, increasingly common in his circle, that journalists are just another hostile interest.
As the opposing sides were digging into their trenches, I thought it would be interesting to talk with Jessica Lessin, a journalist and media executive who often finds herself in an awkward spot somewhere between the battle lines, and who also has an unusually charitable view into both camps. She is the founder and editor of The Information, which started in 2013 as the Silicon Valley’s savvy and nimble answer to The Wall Street Journal, where she had been a star reporter.
“Bigger publications would like to make a stink that he’s going to the indies and not the big guys, which is frankly absurd,” she said. “What’s really happening is a recognition that there are many different audiences.”
She also noted that the reporter from The Information who interviewed Mr. Zuckerberg last week had pressed him on whether he would step down as Facebook’s chief executive.
Ms. Lessin has a unique vantage on Mr. Zuckerberg, and on the tensions between tech and the news media. She first remembers hearing his name in 2004, when she edited a story about The Facebook at The Harvard Crimson. She also spent part of the pandemic visiting him at his compound on Hawaii’s island of Kauai — their families are close.
She was in Lake Tahoe, but outside the frame, when Mr. Zuckerberg posted a video on Instagram of his big YOLO moment, when he celebrated the Fourth of July by riding a hydrofoil across the water while waving an American flag. Sam Lessin, her husband, is an old Zuckerberg friend and former deputy. In June, he appeared in a series of photos published in The Daily Mail that showed him marching behind the armed and camo’d Facebook C.E.O. on a mission to hunt either wild boar or wild goats in Kauai.
Ms. Lessin said she sees herself as having both feet firmly planted on the journalism side of the deepening rift, and pointed to tough stories that The Information has done on the company. She said that she doesn’t see her relationship as a conflict of interest, and that she recuses herself when “there is something that could stand in the way of me doing my job objectively.”
“It’s pretty simple — my job is very different from people I know and personal relationships,” she said.
Ms. Lessin dates the hostility between journalists and Silicon Valley to the rise in the mid-2010s of Uber, whose leaders treated the worst features of tech culture — arrogance and misogyny, among them — as features, not bugs, and faced a new kind of adversarial coverage for it.
But Donald J. Trump’s election in 2016 was also central to the shift. Mainstream publications woke up to the centrality of Facebook in a new and sometimes violent and anti-democratic strain of global right-wing populism, a connection that Mr. Zuckerberg at first glibly dismissed. (Reporters also resented being forced to police Facebook’s informational byways like underappreciated mall cops, when Facebook should have been doing that itself.)
In their frenzy to provide a simple explanation for Mr. Trump’s victory, journalists sometimes botched the details and oversimplified the story. This was particularly true in the overhyped case of the political consultant Cambridge Analytica, which embodied fears of a new kind of algorithmic propaganda but which, a British government report later found, never actually did most of the sinister things it bragged about. Accurate reporting and erroneous articles alike bred a deep sense of embattlement in Palo Alto.
Ms. Lessin said she sees a few patterns, and a lot of symmetry. One is that journalists and tech figures are bad at reading one another’s motives.
“Tech companies say journalists are doing this hard-hitting reporting for profit motives” and because they’re angry about losing advertising, she said. “That’s obviously absurd.”
“But journalists who are accusing Facebook of making bad content moderation decisions because they’re only concerned about profits are also missing the point. Most of the time the challenges are around free speech.”
“They’re actually making the same mistake in reverse directions about each other,” she said. “I’m kind of baffled by it.”
Ms. Lessin’s second observation is that many tech chief executives see themselves in a battle with news outlets for the hearts and minds of their own employees. When they blast media coverage, they are also speaking to the people whose salaries they pay.
“The woke revolution in Silicon Valley is fueling this, too,” she said. “Tech executives are completely associating their employees’ activism with media outlets.”
And then there’s Twitter, where up-and-coming tech executives like the Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong take inane shots at the news media for industry kudos and journalists show off for one another by mocking “tech bros.”
“Both journalists and tech executives are guilty of thinking Twitter is more important than it is,” Ms. Lessin said. “The tech executives are taking journalists’ tweets too seriously in many cases — but at the same time, it’s hard to build any professional relationship with someone who’s attacking you publicly all day long.”
I’m not sure it’s always quite as symmetrical as Ms. Lessin believes. Silicon Valley ideology sometimes lines up too conveniently with its profits to be taken entirely at face value. And the industry’s scale and power are unmatched.
Ms. Lessin also noted that journalists and the tech giants are stuck with one another at this point. Higher-ups in Silicon Valley, led by an influential Facebook board member, Marc Andreessen, have spent years floating fantasies of replacing the adversarial news media and appealing directly to their consumers and investors. But they have yet to come up with a platform that allows them to outdo the independent news outlets when it comes to communicating with their own employees, much less the general public.
Mr. Andreessen’s venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, invested in the social audio platform Clubhouse in that hope, only to see it fade into an obscure global home for multilevel marketing discussions. The company also started a media platform, Future, amid nervous newsroom chatter that the tech industry “no longer needs” journalists. Several months in, Future threatens no one, though the firm’s head of marketing and content, Margit Wennmachers, told me in a message on (Meta’s!) WhatsApp that both projects are merely in their “infancy” and warned against underestimating them.
Mr. Zuckerberg is aware that he can’t yet be completely free of the mainstream news media. While he gave interviews to only four outlets last week, he quietly briefed more than a dozen larger news organizations, including The New York Times, before his big “Meta” announcement, an aide said.
The tech giants haven’t exactly withered under the news media’s scrutiny, either. Indeed, covering these companies, Ms. Lessin said, requires a kind of “split-screen.” Tech companies’ businesses (in Facebook’s case, advertising) have so far been unaffected by all the exposés and the government investigations that followed. As journalists mocked Mr. Zuckerberg’s metaverse, the company’s stock ticked up.
And so the conflict between the media and tech industries is looking more and more like a stalemate. We may not all be spending the next pandemic in Hawaii with Mr. Zuckerberg, but we’ll probably be living with him a while longer.
The president wants to assure Glasgow’s climate summit that the U.S. is serious about climate change. But he lacks a legislative win at home.
GLASGOW — President Biden will walk into a riverside event space on Monday to try to convince a gathering of world leaders that the United States, which has pumped more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other nation, is finally serious about addressing climate change and that others should follow its lead.
But Mr. Biden is coming with a weaker hand than he had hoped.
He has been forced to abandon the most powerful mechanism in his climate agenda: a program that would have quickly cleaned up the electricity sector by rewarding power companies that migrated away from fossil fuels and penalizing those that did not. His fallback strategy is a bill that would provide $555 billion in clean energy tax credits and incentives. It would be the largest amount ever spent by the United States to tackle global warming but would cut only about half as much pollution.
And that proposal is still pending; Mr. Biden was unable to bridge divisions between progressives and moderates in his own party to cement a deal before leaving for Glasgow. If the legislation passes, he hopes to pair it with new environmental regulations, although they have yet to be completed and could be undone by a future president.
The president traveled to Glasgow from Rome, where the world’s 20 largest economies met and decided on Sunday that they would no longer finance new coal operations overseas.
But they failed to agree to set a date for ending the use of the dirtiest fossil fuel at home, with China, India and Australia especially resistant. And that did not bode well for significant progress at the climate talks in Glasgow.
The leaders of the wealthy nations did say they were committed to the goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement to keep the rise in average global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to preindustrial levels. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the dangers of global warming grow immensely. But the world is on track to heat up 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100, and the G20 leaders were unable to agree on concrete steps to change that.
Mr. Biden has made climate action a central theme of his presidency, winning praise from diplomats and other leaders, who expressed relief after former President Donald J. Trump had scoffed at climate science and had withdrawn the United States from global efforts to address the crisis.
But they remain skeptical, having seen other American presidents promise ambitious action to confront climate change, only to fall short.
“Every country has its own challenging legislation process, but ultimately what matters is the outcome,” said Lia Nicholson, a senior adviser to the Alliance of Small Island States, a bloc of vulnerable island nations.
If Mr. Biden lacks a reliable plan for the United States to significantly cut its emissions this decade, it would “send a signal” to other major emitters that America is still not serious, she said. And it would be difficult for Mr. Biden to urge other countries to take more meaningful steps away from fossil fuels, others said.
“Some of these countries are saying, ‘Oh yeah, but look at what you did guys, and now you’re coming back and demanding after you were away for the past four years?’” said Andrea Meza, the environment and energy minister of Costa Rica.
Tensions were already running high ahead of the summit. China, currently the world’s top emitter, announced a new target on Thursday that was supposed to be a more ambitious plan to curb its pollution but is virtually indistinguishable from what it promised six years ago. President Xi Jinping has indicated he will not attend the summit in person, as have presidents of two other top polluting nations, Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil.
Democrats close to President Biden said he is painfully aware that the credibility of the United States is on the line in Glasgow, particularly after a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan this summer and a dust-up with France over a military submarine contract.
Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, met with the president recently to discuss how to salvage Mr. Biden’s legislative climate agenda.
“He indicated that many world leaders like Putin and Xi are questioning the capability of American democracy to deliver, so we need to show them that we can govern,” Mr. Khanna said.
Mr. Biden, who is accompanied in Glasgow by 13 Cabinet members, insists they have a story of success to tell, starting with his decision on his first day on the job to rejoin the 2015 Paris Agreement, an accord of nearly 200 countries to fight climate change, from which Mr. Trump had withdrawn the United States.
Since then, Mr. Biden has taken several steps to cut emissions, including restoring and slightly strengthening auto pollution regulations to levels that existed under President Barack Obama but were weakened by Mr. Trump. He has taken initial steps to allow the development of large-scale wind farms along nearly the entire coastline of the United States, and last month finalized regulations to curb the production and use of potent planet-warming chemicals called hydrofluorocarbons, which are used in air-conditioners and refrigerators.
But Mr. Biden is likely to emphasize the $555 billion that he wants Congress to approve as part of a huge spending bill. The climate provisions would promote wind and solar power, electric vehicles, climate-friendly agriculture and forestry programs, and a host of other clean energy programs. Together, those programs could cut the United States’ emissions up to a quarter from 2005 levels by 2030, analysts say.
That’s about halfway to Mr. Biden’s goal of cutting the country’s emissions 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels. “We go in with a fact pattern that is pretty remarkable, as well as real momentum,” Ali Zaidi, the deputy White House national climate adviser, told reporters.
Mr. Biden plans to release tough new auto pollution rules designed to compel American automakers to ramp up sales of electric vehicles so that half of all new cars sold in the United States are electric by 2030, up from just 2 percent this year. His top appointees have also promised new restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions from coal and gas-fired power plants. And earlier this year, Biden administration officials said they would roll out a draft rule by September to regulate emissions of methane, a powerful planet-warming gas that leaks from existing oil and natural gas wells.
So far, the administration has not offered drafts of any of those rules. Several administration sources said that delay has been due in part to staff shortages, as well as an effort not to upset any lawmakers before they vote on Mr. Biden’s legislative agenda.
But time is running out. It can take years to complete work on such complex and controversial government policies, and several are likely to face legal challenges. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority, said it would review the E.P.A.’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, potentially complicating Mr. Biden’s plans.
For three decades, American politics have complicated global climate efforts.
Former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, joined the first global effort to tackle climate change, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. His Republican successor, President George W. Bush, renounced the treaty. Mr. Obama, another Democrat, joined the 2015 Paris Agreement and rolled out dozens of executive orders to help meet his promises to cut emissions. His Republican successor, Mr. Trump, abandoned the accord, repealed more than 100 of Mr. Obama’s regulations and took steps to expand fossil fuel drilling and mining.
Mr. Biden is facing similar resistance. No Republicans in Congress back his current climate effort. Representative Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the House science committee, said the international community should be skeptical of the Biden administration’s promises. “I think they’ll roll their eyes just as people will continue to do in the United States,” Mr. Lucas said.
The president has also struggled to win over two pivotal players within his own party. Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, has been steadfastly opposed to a central feature of Mr. Biden’s climate plan: a program that would have rapidly compelled power plants to switch from burning coal, oil and gas, to using wind, solar and other clean energy. Mr. Manchin’s state is a top coal and gas producer, and he has personal financial ties to the coal industry. He was able to kill the provision. Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, has also withheld her support, saying she wants a more modest spending bill.
Environmental leaders said America’s past inconsistency on climate action makes it more important for Mr. Biden to succeed now.
“The U.S. has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the climate table and has slowed down action that was needed to tackle the climate crisis,” said Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, a Nairobi-based environmental think tank. “That is the legacy Biden has to deal with.”
Average global temperatures have already risen about 1.1 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), compared with preindustrial levels, locking in an immediate future of rising seas, destructive storms and floods, ferocious fires and more severe drought and heat.
At least 85 percent of the planet’s population has already begun to experience the effects of climate change, according to research published in the journal Nature Climate Change. This summer alone, more than 150 people died in violent flooding in Germany and Belgium. In central China, the worst flooding on record displaced 250,000 people. In Siberia, summer temperatures reached as high as 100 degrees, feeding enormous blazes that thawed what was once permanently frozen ground.
“Clearly, we are in a climate emergency. Clearly, we need to address it,” Patricia Espinosa, head of the U.N. climate agency, said Sunday as she welcomed delegates to Glasgow. “Clearly, we need to support the most vulnerable to cope. To do so successfully, greater ambition is now critical.”
If the planet heats even a half-degree more, it could lead to water and food shortages, mass extinctions of plants and animals, and more deadly heat and storms, scientists say.
Sara Noordeen is the chief climate envoy for the Maldives, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Most of the country comprises coral islands that sit only about three feet above sea level. Rising seas as a result of climate change mean the Maldives, which has been inhabited for thousands of years, could be submerged within a few generations.
Mr. Biden’s election has brought “a lot of hope” to countries like hers, Ms. Noordeen said. But, she added, “he needs that legislation to go through as well.”
Austin Riley was a quarterback and all-state punter in high school, but baseball was his true love. His breakout season helped power Atlanta’s surge to the World Series.
ATLANTA — When Atlanta seized a three-games-to-one lead over Houston, the team had plenty of hang time while attempting to win its first World Series since 1995. So it makes sense that the team’s newest star was an all-state punter in high school.
In the regular-season stretch and again in October, Austin Riley heard plenty of “M.V.P.! M.V.P.!” chants at Truist Park. It’s no wonder: In just his third major league season — and his first in which he was an everyday player for a full, 162-game year — Riley ranked second in the National League in R.B.I. (107) and total bases (313), third in hits (179), sixth in batting average (.303) and 10th in homers (33). He drove home the winning run with a single in the bottom of the ninth in Game 1 of the National League Championship Series against Los Angeles and was batting .294 with three R.B.I. in the first four games of the World Series.
But in Southeastern Conference country, Atlanta baseball fans starved for a title can thank the demands of high school football for pushing Riley, a slugging third baseman, toward the diamond.
Riley, 24, was a quarterback as a freshman and sophomore at DeSoto Central High School in Southaven, Miss. He was also a budding baseball star. Those two paths collided when his football coach told him that he could not miss seven-on-seven summer drills after his sophomore year.
“He told me, ‘We’ve got another guy here, and he’s really dedicated,’” Riley said while standing in the Atlanta dugout on Saturday. “It’s one of those things where I wanted to play quarterback but at the same time I knew I loved baseball and I wanted to pursue that.”
When Riley decided not to play football, the coach invited him to stay on the team as a kicker.
Sure, Riley said, why not?
“I punted, did field goals, which I was terrible at,” Riley said. “I hit the upright more than I made field goals. It was kind of funny.”
But, wow, could he punt. And to those who knew the family, it did not come as a surprise. His father, Mike, was a punter at Mississippi State from 1987 to 1991 and attended training camp with the Detroit Lions in 1992 and 1993.
“I was in preseason camp, and both years I was there I made it to the very last cut,” Mike Riley said.
Austin Riley estimated that he averaged 45 or so yards a punt in high school, and his father said the high end of his range was 75 to 80 yards. While Austin’s estimate may be generous (the MaxPreps website said he averaged 41.6 yards a punt), his father’s was spot on: His son’s longest punt was recorded as 77 yards.
Father and son bonded over one of football’s more specialized skills.
“We lived on some acreage,” Austin Riley said. “We had plenty of room, and there were afternoons we’d get back there and he could still spiral and turn a ball over. That’s kind of how I learned. It all started in the backyard kicking it, and I got pretty good at it.”
Joining them in the yard was a cousin, Keegan James, who is now a relief pitcher in the Colorado Rockies’ organization.
“All he did was long snap,” Austin Riley said. “So we’d come in, get our stuff on, do 30 minutes of practice and then bounce. ‘We’ve got to go to baseball practice.’ It was cool.”
James ended up playing three years of baseball at Mississippi State. Riley committed to Mississippi State as well, with the Bulldogs offering to give him a chance to punt for the football team in addition to playing baseball. He signed with Atlanta instead, after being taken with the 41st pick in the 2015 draft.
There were times when he wondered if he did the right thing. Riley struggled at the start of his professional baseball career. He reported to Atlanta’s affiliate in the Gulf Coast League, where, he said, “I think I went 0 for 21 with 14 strikeouts before I got my first hit.”
His father remembered it as 0 for 24 with 17 strikeouts. Regardless, he was only 18 and it was every bit as rough as it sounds.
“I’m a homebody,” he said. “We were doing all these workouts and I was like: ‘Man, I don’t even know if this is for me. Should I just go to Mississippi State and pursue professional baseball after that?’”
He laughed as he remembered it: “I was getting tweeted at, ‘Austin’s going to be a pitcher by September.’ I was getting hammered. But once that first hit came, it was a domino effect.”
He was called up by Atlanta in 2019, and initially played left field because the club wanted his bat in the lineup. In the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, he primarily played third base. While he flashed power as a rookie, with 18 homers in 80 games, he also hit just .226. In 2020, his homer output dropped to eight in 51 games and he hit .239. It wasn’t until this summer that Riley settled in as Atlanta’s cleanup hitter.
“He came up and had such a big splash and then kind of had to learn his way through the big leagues,” Atlanta shortstop Dansby Swanson said this month. “And then I feel like, in this day and age, as soon as we come up, we all have a comp, right? And we have a comp to someone of what our ceiling could be and what they were in their prime, and then when you’re not that immediately, it’s kind of like, OK, well, this person’s not any good. I feel like that happens so often in any sport nowadays.”
During the N.L.C.S., Dodgers Manager Dave Roberts said Riley’s maturation was really noticeable.
“You see the confidence,” Roberts said. “Just at the plate, he’s handling velocity, spin. He can beat the shift, so he can control the barrel. He’s just a really good hitter. And defensively he’s gotten a couple of grades better, too.”
Riley said he still talks with his mother and father at least twice a day. He married his high school girlfriend, Anna. Their support helped pull him through his rough early days in the Gulf Coast League, and now they sit in the stands at Truist Park listening to those “M.V.P.!” chants.
It was just a few years ago that he was punting in the Mississippi-Alabama high school all-star game. Now he’s playing in the World Series.
“This has been unreal,” Riley said, mentioning the tough, losing seasons that Atlanta institutions such as Freddie Freeman and Manager Brian Snitker worked through before his arrival. “To me, I feel like I’ve been spoiled because I’ve been in the league three years and I’m already in the World Series. A lot of people have been in the league a long time and have never been here.”
There are times during the season when he will see the relievers tossing a football around in the outfield before batting practice and wonder whether he can still turn a high spiral over with a swift kick. “But I resist it because it takes just one kick and something pulls if I’m not stretched right,” Riley said.
What once was an agonizing decision to give up one sport has turned out well.
“I’m a people pleaser, and I loved football,” Riley said. “Friday nights, that’s what I miss most about high school. You’ve got the pregame, your little downtime. But I loved baseball more.”
He said telling the football coach he was going to pursue baseball and asking Anna’s father for his blessing to marry his daughter were the two times he had been most nervous.
Now?
“Oh yeah,” Riley said. “I would certainly take the World Series in the misty rain to a Friday night high school football game. For sure.”
Around The NFL breaks down what you need to know from all of Sunday's action in Week 8 of the 2021 NFL season. Catch up on each game's biggest takeaways using the links below:
Nick Shook's takeaways:
Next Gen stat of the game: Philadelphia pressured Jared Goff 18 times, registering a pressure percentage of 46.2, more than 14% higher than their rate for the season.
NFL Research: After scoring three rushing touchdowns combined in Weeks 1-7, Eagles running backs combined for four rushing touchdowns in Week 8, posting season-high marks in carries (37) and rushing yards (144).
Chase Goodbread's takeaways:
Next Gen stat of the game: Falcons QB Matt Ryan was pressured on 56.7% of his dropbacks, the most pressure he's faced since 2016.
NFL Research: The Panthers rushed for a season-high 203 yards, their highest total since Week 5 of 2019 against Jacksonville (285).
Kevin Patra's takeaways:
Next Gen stat of the day: Fields scrambled 59.6 yards on his 22-yard rushing TD. The farthest distance traveled by a quarterback as the ball carrier on a rushing TD this season.
NFL Research: Samuel's 819 receiving yards are the most in 49ers history in the first seven games of a season, breaking HOFer Jerry Rice's record of 781 set in 1986.
Nick Shook's takeaways:
Next Gen stat of the game: Ben Roethlisberger completed 13 of 19 passes of 0-9 air yards for 167 yards and a touchdown Sunday.
NFL Research: With a sack Sunday, Myles Garrett reached 10.5 sacks this season, breaking his own franchise record for the most sacks in the first eight games of a season in team history.
Chase Goodbread's takeaways:
Next Gen stat of the game: Bengals wide receiver Ja'Marr Chase had zero deep targets (first game this season without a deep reception).
NFL Research: Jets QB Mike White has become the second QB since at least 1950 with 400+ pass yards in his first career start. He joined Cam Newton, who threw for 422 yards in his first start in Week 1, 2011 against the Cardinals.
Michael Baca's takeaways:
Next Gen stat of the day: Matthew Stafford was 8 of 11 for 223 yards and a TD on passes of 10+ air yards; 7 of 12 for 55 yards and 2 TDs versus blitzes.
NFL Research: Cooper Kupp is the only player in the Super Bowl era with 900+ receiving yards and 10+ receiving TDs in his team's first eight games of a season. Kupp is the first wide receiver with 10+ receiving TDs in his team's first eight games of a season since DET Calvin Johnson in 2011 (also with QB Matthew Stafford).
Kevin Patra's takeaways:
Next Gen stat of the game: Michael Pittman caught 10 of 15 targets on the day for 86 yards and two TDs. Five receptions for 20 yards and two TDs came on passes down the seams. Pittman had receptions on six different routes (Hitch, in, out, screen cross and post).
NFL Research:Brown scored his seventh career 50-plus-yard TD. The only player with more 50-plus-yard TDs in that span (since 2019) is teammate Derrick Henry (eight).
Jelani Scott's takeaways:
Next Gen stat of the game: Dolphins QB Tua Tagovailoa completed two of his eight pass attempts of 10-plus air yards for 63 yards and an INT.
NFL Research: Josh Allen's 28 rushing touchdowns tie Cam Newton for most rushing TDs by a QB in first 50 NFL starts in NFL history.
Editor’s Note: A version of this story appears in CNN’s Meanwhile in today’s Middle East newsletter, a three-times-a-week look inside the r...
