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Hi friends, thanks for reading Newley’s Notes.
Story of the week, and story of next week – and weeks to come, I’m sure: Donald Trump.
Here’s the very NSFW audio, and a piece on how it surfaced. Here’s a list of the Republican leaders who have jumped ship, and when they did so. Will he quit? Trump tells the The WSJ “I never, ever give up.". And finally, from a WSJ colleague, the fallout:
A divided Republican Party descended into turmoil, as a startling chorus of GOP candidates and officials repudiated their own presidential candidate and scrambled to find personal paths to political survival just a month before Election Day.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Saturday told party officials to redirect funds away from nominee Donald Trump to down-ballot candidates, according to an official informed of the decision. In practical terms, the party will be working to mobilize voters who support GOP House and Senate candidates regardless of their position on the presidential race.
What I wrote in The WSJ
James Bond Actor Pierce Brosnan Stars in Ad for Indian Pan Masala
Sometimes you have to hunt hard for stories. Sometimes they find you:
Pierce Brosnan is the new face of Pan Bahar, an Indian brand of “paan masala,” a concoction of areca nut, a stimulant, and spices often chewed along with tobacco or betel leaf by millions in South Asians.
The debonair actor, a former James Bond, is appearing as a pitchman for the mixture, which carries a government-mandated warning declaring that it is “injurious to health.” The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies the areca nut as carcinogenic to humans.
A front-page ad in the Times of India on Friday featured a photo of a bearded Mr. Brosnan in a tuxedo holding a container of Pan Bahar above the slogan “Class never goes out of style.”
How Google’s Bicycle-Riding Internet Tutors Are Getting Rural Indian Women Online
For this story, I traveled to a village outside Jaipur, India. Click through for photos. The story begins:
The internet fails to reach millions of women in the small towns and villages of India, so Google is trying to deliver it to them — by bicycle.
The Alphabet Inc. unit has built an army of thousands of female trainers and sent them to the far corners of the Subcontinent on two-wheelers, hoping to give rural woman their first taste of the web. Each bike has a box full of connected smartphones and tablets for women to try and train on.
The idea is to give people who have never even sent an email a better understanding of how being connected could improve their lives. Families that can afford to be online often chose not to be because they do not see the value. Meanwhile women are sometimes blocked by their families from new technology.
5 items that are worth your time this week:
1) Email newsletter of the week: Sunday New York Times Digest
I’ve mentioned many times how much I love email newsletters, like the one summing up stories in every New Yorker issue.
Here’s a similar one – it’s not new, but it’s new to me – that provides a round-up of what’s in every edition of the Sunday New York Times.
2) “In a wealthy Virginia suburb, their cars are their beds.”
The Washington Post profiles people in Fairfax County whose only homes are their cars.
3) Huge news for U.S. soccer: Bob Bradley, former men’s national team coach, is the new manager of English Premier League club Swansea. Sports Illustrated has the story. Here’s more from The Guardian about what Bradley had to say, not long after joining Swansea, about current U.S. coach Jürgen Klinsmann.
That’s the title of a New Yorker story about Isabelle Mège, a woman in Paris who for 16 years has been gotten well-known photographers to take photos of her.
5) Here’s a fun, informative, two-minute video on the benefits of meditation.
Have a great week, and let me know what’s new in your world.