Author: CNN

New York
CNN
 — 

The Federal Reserve unanimously approved a quarter-point interest rate hike Wednesday, slowing the pace of its increases in a clear sign that the central bank is seeing progress in its fierce battle with inflation.

The decision, at the conclusion of the Federal Open Market Committee’s first meeting of 2023, comes after months of jumbo-sized rate increases intended to cool the economy, and marks the return to a more traditional interest-rate policy.

Since the last Fed meeting in December, two economic trends have indicated that the central bank’s mission to cool the economy and stall price increases is working: Recent data on wage growth and inflation have been encouraging and economic growth signals have become concerning. The prices of many goods that consumers binged on during the pandemic have started to fall now that consumer demand has shifted to services. Energy costs have also dropped, and the housing market has slowed.

Fed officials nodded towards those trends in its statement on Wednesday, writing that “inflation has eased somewhat but remains elevated.”

And while Fed officials are slowing rate hikes after months of unusually aggressive action, the central bank is far from declaring victory.

In his post-meeting press conference, Fed Chair Jerome Powell signaled that while there’s still a long way to go in the fight against inflation, he believes the trend is moving in the right direction.

Still, Powell warned economy watchers that “the job is not fully done” and that the labor market remains too tight for his liking. it would be “very premature” to think “we really got this,” he said, adding that unless the economic trajectory changes drastically, he doesn’t expect to cut rates this year.

Wednesday’s statement included language that made it clear policymakers expect that more hikes will be necessary to temper inflation. “The Committee anticipates that ongoing increases in the target range will be appropriate in order to attain a stance of monetary policy that is sufficiently restrictive to return inflation to 2 percent over time,” they wrote. The “extent” of these “future increases,” they said will depend on a number of economic and financial factors.

While those trends could make the case for slowing rate hikes after months of unusually aggressive action, the central bank is far from declaring victory. It takes time for monetary policy to take effect and for supply and demand to rebalance. Senior Fed officials like Vice Chair Lael Brainard and Governor Christopher Waller have in recent weeks stressed the need to see six months of positive data before they stop hiking rates.

Powell echoed that sentiment Wednesday, saying: “I continue to think that it is very difficult to manage the risk of doing too little, and finding out in six or 12 months that we actually were close but didn’t get the job done.”

US markets jumped following the press conference, indicating the investors expect a more dovish Fed going forward. The S&P 500 closed the first day of February 1.1% higher after notching its best January in four years.

CNN
 — 

Mourners, from Vice President Kamala Harris to the activist the Rev. Al Sharpton, on Wednesday celebrated the life of Tyre Nichols, whose death at the hands of police in Memphis led to second-degree murder charges against five officers.

“Mothers around the world, when their babies are born, pray to God when they hold that child, that that body and that life will be safe for the rest of his life,” Harris said to applause during Nichols’ funeral service in a packed Memphis sanctuary.

“And when we look at this situation, this is a family that lost their son and their brother through an act of violence at the hands and the feet of people who had been charged with keeping them safe.”

Nichols, 29, who was Black, was subdued yet continuously beaten after a traffic stop by Memphis police on January 7. He died three days later.

“The people of our country mourn with you,” Harris told Nichols’ family.

Sharpton, in a painfully familiar role, delivered an impassioned eulogy that paid tribute to Nichols’ life and served as a clarion call for justice.

Sharpton said he visited the Lorraine Motel, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. He called out the five Black former officers charged in Nichols’ death.

“There’s nothing more insulting and offensive to those of us that fight to open doors, that you walked through those doors and act like the folks we had to fight for to get you through them doors. You didn’t get on the police department by yourself,” Sharpton said.

If Nichols had been white, Sharpton said, “you wouldn’t have beat him like that,” referring to the five former officers.

“You don’t fight crime by becoming criminals yourself… That ain’t the police. That’s punks.”

The reverend invoked King’s 1968 “Mountaintop” speech in Memphis, where King said he had reached the peak and seen the Promised Land. The former cops accused of killing Nichols, he said, failed to live up to that legacy. “He expected you to bring us on to the Promised Land,” Sharpton said.

RowVaughn Wells, Nichols’ mother, remembered her son as “a beautiful person” and echoed others at the celebration of life in calling for passage of the George Floyd Policing Act.

“There should be no other child that should suffer the way my son and all the other parents here (who) have lost their children,” she said.

Nichols’ older sister, Keyana Dixon, recalled looking after her younger brothers.

“With Ty, I didn’t mind,” she said. “He never wanted anything but to watch cartoons and a big bowl of cereal. So it was pretty easy to watch him.”

Dixon said all she wants is her “baby brother back.’

Benjamin Crump, an attorney for Nichols’ family, said the charges against the five ex-officers in Nichols’ death set a precedent. Within 20 days of his death, the former officers were indicted on charges that included murder and kidnapping.

“We can count to 20 and every time you kill one of us on video, we’re going to say the legacy of Tyre Nichols is that we have equal justice swiftly,” he said.

For the day, mourners at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church shifted the focus from the heart-wrenching footage of the beating that Nichols in a hospital bed with his face badly swollen and bruised before his death, sparking protests across the country.

Harris was joined other senior level Biden administration officials, including White House Director for the Office of Public Engagement Keisha Lance Bottoms, former mayor of Atlanta, and Senior Adviser to the President Mitch Landrieu.

Representing other Black people killed by police, Tamika Palmer – whose daughter Breonna Taylor was fatally shot in her Louisville, Kentucky, home by police during a botched raid in March 2020 – attended the service.

Also there was Philonise Floyd, the younger brother of George Floyd, whose name reverberated across the nation following his May 2020 death after an ex-cop Minneapolis cop knelt on his neck and back for more than 9 minutes.

“The family needs all the support that they can get,” Gwen Carr, whose son, Eric Garner, died after being placed in a chokehold by an NYPD officer in 2014, told CNN Wednesday before attending the service. “It’s so fresh for them but for me, it just digs into old wounds.”

The service was scheduled to begin at 10:30 a.m. local time but was pushed back because of bad weather and travel delays. It began shortly after 1 p.m. on the first day of Black History Month with African tribal drummers and a gospel choir.

With Nichols’ black casket, draped in a white bouquet of flowers, as a centerpiece, the young man was praised by the Rev. J. Lawrence Turner as “a good person, a beautiful soul, a son, a father, a brother, a friend, a human being – gone too soon.”

Mourners watched slide shows of a smiling Nichols at different times in his life. A photo montage opened with a quote from Nichols: “My vision is to bring my viewers deep into what I am seeing through my eye and out through my lens.”

Tiffany Rachal, the mother of Jalen Randle, a 29-year-old Black man killed by a Houston police officer last year, offered her condolences to the family before singing, “Lord I will lift my eyes to the hills.”

On Tuesday, Sharpton and Nichols’ family gathered at the Mason Temple Church of God In Christ headquarters in Memphis – where King Jr. delivered his famous “Mountaintop” speech the night before he was killed.

“We will continue in Tyre’s name to head up to Martin’s mountaintop,” Sharpton said from the “sacred ground” where MLK delivered his speech 55 years ago.

Sharpton reflected on the family’s loss as their son’s name is added to a vast pantheon of Black people who died after encounters with police.

“They will never ever recover from the loss,” Sharpton said.

Before Wednesday’s service, Dan Beazley, 61, carried a towering wooden cross over his shoulder outside the Memphis church. He said he drove 12 hours – including through an ice storm – from Northville, Michigan, to pay his respects and shine a light.

Nichols has been described as a devoted son who had tattooed his mother’s name on his arm, a loving father to a 4-year-old boy, and a free spirit with a passion for skateboarding and capturing sunsets on his camera.

Public outrage over the disturbing arrest video led to firings or disciplinary action against other public servants who were at the scene, including the firings of three Memphis Fire Department personnel. Two sheriff’s deputies have been put on leave. Additionally, two more police officers have been placed on leave.

Nichols’ funeral took place less than a week after Friday evening’s public release of footage of the attack on him shook a nation long accustomed to videos of police brutality, especially against people of color.

The brutal attack sparked largely peaceful protests from New York to Los Angeles as well as renewed calls for police reform and scrutiny of specialized police units that target guns in high crime areas.

Up to 20 hours of video recordings haven’t been released, Shelby County District Attorney Steven Mulroy told CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” on Wednesday. The audio from the recordings is “probably more useful” in some cases than what the video shows, Mulroy said.

He didn’t specify what can be heard on the recordings, which he said include sound captured after the beating took place.

The release of that footage will be determined by city officials, he added.

The prosecutor said he has asked the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to expedite its investigation into the other emergency responders – those besides the five already indicted – to see whether any charges are warranted for them. Those people include the officers who filed the paperwork, he said.

Nichols was the baby of his family, the youngest of four children, according to RowVaughn Wells.

He moved to Memphis from California right before the Covid-19 pandemic and remained there after the mandatory lockdowns prompted by the health crisis, his mother has said.

Nichols was a regular at a Germantown, Tennessee, Starbucks where he befriended a group of people who set aside their cellphones at a table and talked mostly about sports, particularly his beloved San Francisco 49ers.

His visits to Starbucks were typically followed by a nap before heading to a his job at FedEx. He would come home for dinner during his break.

Nichols was also a fixture among the skateboarders at Shelby Farms Park, where he photographed memorable sunsets, according to his mother.

In fact, taking pictures served as a form of self-expression that writing could never capture for Nichols, who had written on his photography website that it helped him look “at the world in a more creative way.”

He preferred capturing landscapes.

“I hope to one day let people see what i see and to hopefully admire my work based on the quality and ideals of my work,” he wrote.

Before moving to Memphis, Nichols lived in Sacramento, California, where a friend recalled that “skating gave him wings.”

On Wednesday, one song performed at the end of the service was a gospel version of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

CNN
 — 

An Iranian couple, both social media influencers, have been given lengthy prison sentences after a video emerged of them dancing in a main square in the capital Tehran.

In a video shared widely on social media, Astiyazh Haghighi, 21, is seen dancing without a headscarf with her fiancé Amir Mohammad Ahmadi, 22, in Azadi Square. The couple posted the video themselves.

Each was charged with “spreading corruption and vice,” and “assembly and collusion with the intention of disrupting national security,” receiving sentences of ten and a half years, according to activist group Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA).

However Mizan, a news agency affiliated with Iran’s judiciary, said each individual was sentenced to 5-year prison term on the charges of “assembly and collusion with the intention of disrupting national security.”

The two are accused of encouraging people to assemble and inviting them to riot in an Instagram post made on October 26, Mizan Online also said.

Judge Abolqasem Salavati presided over their case and meted out the sentences, along with a ban on posting videos on social media for two years and a ban on leaving the country for two years, according to HRANA.

Security forces first raided the couple’s home in the early morning hours of October 30, a source told CNN, and took them to interrogation and then later transferred them to prison.

Haghighi was initially sent to Evin prison’s Ward 209 but then transferred to Qarchak women’s prison where she is currently detained, HRANA reports. Both Haghighi and her partner are being denied access to a lawyer, it added.

Haghighi and Ahmadi each has close to a million followers on Instagram and also have separate YouTube channels with a total of more than half a million followers.

This comes after the country has been roiled in nationwide protests over the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young woman accused of flouting the country’s compulsory hijab laws. Iran has cracked down by executing protesters, accused of killing security forces, which critics say were the result of hasty sham trials.

Their lengthy sentences have been compared by critics to that of Sajjad Heydari, an Iranian man who notoriously beheaded his wife last year. Heydari, who killed his 17-year-old wife in February 2022, was sentenced to just eight years and two months in prison, according to the country’s semi-official Khabar Online website.

CNN
 — 

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy did not walk away from his highly anticipated White House meeting on Wednesday with an agreement in hand to address the debt limit, but signaled optimism that both he and President Joe Biden can reach consensus “long before” the United States reaches default.

McCarthy and the president exchanged political jabs ahead of the meeting – preempting their negotiations with red lines relayed to the press and on social media. But emerging from the West Wing on Wednesday, the new House speaker had an unexpectedly hopeful tone as he underscored that he believes that they can come to an agreement, even though he remains entrenched in rejecting a key demand from the White House.

McCarthy told reporters after the meeting he informed Biden that the House would not pass a “clean” debt ceiling with no strings attached.

Asked what he offered the president, McCarthy said, “The only thing I heard for the last month was I’m not gonna negotiate with you. I just spent an hour sitting with the President in the Oval Office talking about what can we do on a debt ceiling. So, the first start is, okay, that’s different than what the last month was.”

The US hit the debt ceiling set by Congress in January, forcing the Treasury Department to start taking extraordinary measures to keep the government paying its bills and escalating pressure on Capitol Hill to avoid a catastrophic default later this year.

The White House and the new House GOP majority have been at odds over how to resolve a way to raise the debt limit, and while McCarthy called it “a good first meeting,” he also noted that they still “have different perspectives on this.”

“I think that at the end of the day, we can find common ground,” he added.

McCarthy said he told Biden he would like to come to an agreement “long before the deadline and we can start working on other things.” And a statement from the White House said Biden “underscored that he is eager to continue working across the aisle in good faith” and continue conversations with the speaker.

In the meeting, the White House statement said, the president “made clear” to McCarthy that it is a shared duty to not allow a default on the nation’s debt.

Following what was his first White House meeting since he won the speakership, McCarthy said he believes that a funding agreement could be reached for the next two years and that “you won’t see omnibuses anymore.”

“You’ll see the Senate and the House actually do what the American public has elected them to do,” he added.

The White House also said Biden “welcomes a separate discussion with congressional leaders about how to reduce the deficit and control the national debt while continuing to grow the economy.”

House Republicans have said that lifting the borrowing cap must be tied to spending reductions. And the White House, had previously countered that it will not offer concessions or negotiate on raising the debt ceiling.

The debt limit fight has been seen as an early test of McCarthy’s leadership, balancing competing demands from different factions of his conference amid a razor-thin majority. It’s also shedding light on how well McCarthy and Biden are able to work with one another.

Senate Republicans have indicated they will sit back and see how the House GOP maneuvers a way to raise the $31.4 trillion borrowing limit – before deciding if they need to insert themselves into the process.

Republicans face a political risk as they push to cut spending: If they propose cuts to popular government programs and services, they could face a public backlash.

McCarthy prepared for the White House meeting by consulting regularly with allies on and off the Hill, sources familiar with the preparation told CNN.

This week McCarthy and his House GOP allies have been hashing out initial demands, discussing steep cuts to domestic programs and a trim to defense spending – all the while steering clear of two programs to avoid voter blowback: Medicare and Social Security.

House Republicans had been hoping to strengthen their negotiating hand with the White House by uniting around a proposal, but finding conference-wide consensus on spending cuts has proved challenging.

The view from Republicans heading into Wednesday’s meeting was that it is still early and there are still months of negotiations ahead – meaning there’s plenty of time for McCarthy to lay out specifics. Still, leaders have also been aware they have to begin laying the groundwork with their members now.

While rhetoric in statements from McCarthy and the White House was relatively toned down following Wednesday’s meeting, both parties had used the last week to draw lines in the sand about the negotiations.

McCarthy’s position that cuts to Medicare and Social Security are not on the table in exchange for a debt ceiling increase has long drawn skepticism the White House.

And in a memo to “interested parties” dated Monday that was written by National Economic Council Director Brian Deese and Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young, Biden’s top economic advisers said the president intended to pose two questions to McCarthy on Wednesday: Whether McCarthy will commit to the US not defaulting on its financial obligations and when McCarthy and House Republicans will release their budget.

A day ahead of the meeting, the president suggested McCarthy was entering the talks from a weakened position, hampered by agreements he made with an unruly GOP conference.

Calling McCarthy a “decent man,” Biden nonetheless said he had been forced to cater to extremist Republicans in his quest to become speaker.

Biden said at a high-dollar fundraiser in Manhattan that McCarthy had to make commitments “that are just absolutely off the wall for the speaker of the House to make.”

Responding to the president’s fundraiser comments, McCarthy told reporters, “Apparently, he doesn’t understand … I’m looking forward to sitting down with the president, negotiating for the American public, the people of America, on how we can find savings. We’ve watched what the spending has done, we watched it brought us inflation, we watched the challenge that it happened. We’re looking forward to changing the course.”

This story has been updated with additional developments on Wednesday.

CNN
 — 

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced on Wednesday it is piloting a $20 monthly subscription plan that offers users priority access to the AI chatbot even during peak times.

The paid plan, called ChatGPT Plus, comes two months after the tool was released publicly and quickly went viral, thanks to its ability to generate shockingly convincing essays in response to user prompts.

Many people who wanted to test the tool have been locked out or joined the waitlist. Now, anyone who signs up for a subscription will benefit from faster response times, and priority access to new features and improvements.

The tool will remain free for the general public, however.

“We love our free users and will continue to offer free access to ChatGPT,” the company said in a blog post. “By offering this subscription pricing, we will be able to help support free access availability to as many people as possible.”

ChatGPT Plus will be made available first in the United States and other countries soon after, according to the company. OpenAI said it will begin inviting people from its waitlist in the weeks ahead. The company also said it is “actively exploring options for lower-cost plans, business plans, and data packs for more availability.”

“The preview for ChatGPT allowed us to learn from real world use, and we’ve made important improvements and updates based on feedback,” the company said in a statement to CNN.

Since it was made available in late November, ChatGPT has been used to generate original essays, stories and song lyrics in response to user prompts. It has drafted research paper abstracts that fooled some scientists. Some CEOs have even used it to write emails or do accounting work.

While it has gained traction among users, it has also raised some concerns, including about inaccuracies, its potential to perpetuate biases and spread misinformation, and the ability to help students cheat.

Earlier this week, OpenAI announced a new feature, called an “AI text classifier,” that allows users to check if an essay was written by a human or AI. The release came amid concerns the AI chatbot can help students and professionals generate convincing essays. The new tool, however, is “imperfect,” according to the company.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the Fed will probably continue to hike rates for the foreseeable future to combat stubbornly high inflation.

Although inflation has come down significantly over the past several months, it’s still more than double the Fed’s target annual rate of 2%.

“I think it would be very premature to declare victory or think we really got this,” Powell said at a press conference. “The job is not fully done.”

Powell noted that the Fed continues to err on the side of caution on inflation. That means the central bank would rather hurt the economy too much to bring inflation down than take its foot off the rate-hike gas too soon and cause inflation to rise again.

“I continue to think that it is very difficult to manage the risk of doing too little, and finding out in six or 12 months that we actually were close but didn’t get the job done,” Powell said. “We have no incentive or desire to over-tighten, but if we feel we have gone too far … we have tools that would work on that.”

CNN
 — 

People who live in a highly polluted area have a higher risk of depression and anxiety than those who live with cleaner air, a new study says.

The study, published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found that people who were exposed to higher amounts of multiple air pollutants for a long period – including particle pollution, nitrogen dioxide and nitrogen oxides – had an increased risk of depression and anxiety.

Particle pollution, also known as particulate matter, is the mix of solid and liquid droplets floating in the air, the US Environmental Protection Agency says. It can come in the form of dirt, dust, soot or smoke. Coal- and natural gas-fired power plants create it, as do cars, agriculture, unpaved roads, construction sites and wildfires.

Nitrogen dioxide pollution is most commonly associated with traffic-related combustion byproducts. Nitrogen oxides are also released from traffic, as well as the burning of oil, coal and natural gas.

The smallest particulate matter included in the new study, PM2.5, is so tiny – 1/20th of a width of a human hair – that it can travel past your body’s usual defenses.

Instead of being carried out when you exhale, it can get stuck in your lungs or go into your bloodstream. The particles cause irritation and inflammation and may lead to respiratory problems. Exposure can cause cancer, stroke or heart attack; it could also aggravate asthma, and it has long been associated with a higher risk of depression and anxiety.

For the new study, researchers looked at the records of 389,185 people from the UK Biobank, a large-scale biomedical database of half a million diverse volunteers. During the study period, 13,131 were diagnosed with depression and 15,835 were diagnosed with anxiety.

Those who lived in areas with higher pollution levels were at higher risk for depression and anxiety, even when the pollution levels were below UK air quality standards.

The risk of anxiety linked to PM2.5 pollution was stronger in men than in women.

The study can’t pinpoint the reason for the overall link, but others have found that exposure to air pollution may affect the central nervous system, causing inflammation and damaging the body’s cells.

Some air pollution, studies show, can also cause the body to release harmful substances that can hurt the blood-brain barrier, the network of blood vessels and tissues made up of closely spaced cells that protect the brain, and that may lead to anxiety and depression. But more research will be needed to fully understand this connection, because the neural basis for both anxiety and depression is not completely understood.

Other studies have found that pollution can affect the onset of anxiety and depression, said Dr. Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, an associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. She wasn’t involved in the new research but has done similar work on the association between air pollution exposure and depression.

“There have been several studies that show that air pollution is also associated with exacerbation. So for example, if there’s air pollution today and yesterday, then we see an uptake in our hospital admissions for these disorders,” Kioumourtzoglou said.

She and her colleagues have also found links with other neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

“The link between air pollution and the brain has now been pretty consistent in the literature,” Kioumourtzoglou said.

The limitations of the new research include a lack of information about other common air pollutants like ozone, carbon monoxide or sulfur dioxide.

“Not all air pollutants are created equal. Some are more toxic than others. And for certain diseases, there’s still a lot of work to be done,” Kioumourtzoglou said.

The study authors hope the research will encourage public policy-makers to do what they can to reduce exposure to pollution.

“Considering that many countries’ air quality standards are still well above the latest World Health Organization global air quality guidelines 2021, stricter standards or regulations for air pollution control should be implemented in the future policy making,” the authors wrote.

CNN
 — 

Less than six weeks after the national team’s remarkable performance at the World Cup, Morocco finds itself at the center of world soccer as it hosts the FIFA Club World Cup.

Since 2005 the Club World Cup has been held annually, featuring the six winners of each continent’s equivalent to Europe’s Champions League tournament, plus an additional club from the host nation.

Over the last decade, European teams have dominated the tournament, last losing a match when Brazilian club Corinthians beat Chelsea in the 2012 final. Fourteen-time European Cup winner Real Madrid will enter the 2023 competition as heavy favorites.

Unlike the World Cup where there is a group stage, the clubs play a straight knockout tournament with the caveat that various continents qualify for different stages of the tournament.

The champion of Oceania plays the host club in the first round. The winner is then drawn with the champions of Africa, Asia and North America in two knockout games. The winner of each game then plays the European and South American champions in the semifinals.

Because Wydad Casablanca is both the champion of Morocco and Africa, the role of “host” passes to Egyptian club Al Ahly who lost to the Moroccan team in the final of the African Champions League in May.

Wydad enters the tournament at the quarterfinal stage, playing against Al Hilal of Saudi Arabia with South American champion Flamengo waiting in the semifinals.

Hunting a record fifth title, Real Madrid also enters at the semifinal stage and will face either New Zealand club Auckland City, Al Ahly, or the Seattle Sounders – the first ever US club to play in the Club World Cup.

No African club has ever won the Club World Cup, but Wydad fan Mohamed Berrada is confident that in a tournament on home soil, the team can channel the success of its history-making national side – and perhaps even lift the trophy.

“We had a very good World Cup with the national team in Qatar,” Berrada tells CNN Sports. “Everybody is talking about us, and we know that we will be very followed in this Club World Cup.”

Expectations are high for the club with tickets for Wydad’s first match against Al Hilal selling out in under two hours as fans from Casablanca will make the one hour journey to Rabat’s 53,000 capacity Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium.

Fans who regularly watch the English Premier League, La Liga, and the UEFA Champions League could be forgiven for asking the question: who cares about the Club World Cup? The European teams nearly always win, it adds extra fixtures to an already busy calendar, and fans have to watch their team play in far-flung countries.

That sentiment is shared by some players. Manchester United great Paul Scholes once said on BBC Radio Five Live that the Club World Cup was less important to him than his local badminton tournament.

But take a step outside Europe and the perception of the competition is very different.

Flamengo fan João Paulo still views his team’s 3-0 triumph over Liverpool in 1981 in the Intercontinental Cup – a precursor to the Club World Cup – as the greatest moment in the club’s history.

Despite Europe’s dominance in the tournament, it is still taken just as seriously in Brazil as it was 40 years ago.

In 1981 Paulo listened to the match against Liverpool on the radio; in 2019, he made the trip to Qatar where Flamengo lost against the same opponent, and this year he is one of thousands of Flamengo fans making the trip to Morocco.

“I believe that for us, for Brazilian and for South American supporters, winning the [Club] World Cup is something incredible. It’s amazing,” he tells CNN Sports.

“If we win this or if any team from South America can win this, this would be something that would change your life as a supporter.”

It’s a sentiment is not limited to South America.

Pitso Mosimane, who took Egyptian giants Al Ahly to back-to-back bronze medals in 2020 and 2021 and is arguably Africa’s greatest coach in the modern era, says the Club World Cup was the “highlight” of his career.

“It’s the pinnacle of any club coach,” he tells CNN Sport.s “What’s the biggest tournament you want to play? Some would say the Champions League, but the Champions League leads you to the Club World Cup.”

For Mosimane and others, the Club World Cup is the one chance that players, coaches, and fans get to test themselves against the very best.

And even in a format that Mosimane says loads the dice in favour of Europeans and South American teams by allowing them to enter at the semifinals, the Club World Cup is the opportunity for fans of the Sounders, Al Ahly, Wydad and even Auckland City to earn the respect that Real Madrid has by dint of its geography.

Those “loaded dice” are potentially on their last roll as Morocco’s tournament is the final Club World Cup to be held in its current format.

Perhaps lost amidst the hysteria of Lionel Messi winning his first World Cup title was the announcement made by FIFA president Gianni Infantino that the Club World Cup would be turned into a 32-team tournament played every four years, starting in 2025.

It is recognition from the head of world soccer that the tournament has not drawn the interest that the concept warrants.

With the tournament falling at the same time as the major leagues in Europe and just a few weeks ahead of the resumption of the Champions League, FIFA has recognized that it needs to both expand the tournament and find a time that does not clash with major club soccer.

Soccer’s global governing body has not provided any information on the format of the tournament beyond the number of participants, but the announcement has caused quite a stir, particularly in Europe.

The Premier League maintains its position that it is, “committed to preventing any radical changes to the post-2024 FIFA international match calendar that would adversely affect player welfare and threaten the competitiveness, calendar, structures and traditions of domestic football.”

FIFPRO, the global player’s union, said that the tournament could have “serious consequences for and aggravate pressure on the welfare and employment of players.”

However, Infantino’s idea has traction outside of Europe.

“We would love to see our team playing against more and more international teams,” says Berrada.

Moroccan journalist Amine El Amri agrees, bemoaning the “frustrating” model of the tournament now that gives the Europeans and South Americans an advantage over the other continents.

He tells CNN Sports: “I think it’s just so enchanting for the people of those countries to have their countries in a [Club] World Cup.”

Even in an expanded format, European clubs would arrive as heavy favorites and there are very real concerns about player welfare as the global soccer calendar mercilessly fills up.

But for those outside of Europe, an expanded Club World Cup, if organized properly, is a potential opportunity for those seen as second-class clubs to take their place alongside European clubs at the top table of world soccer.

CNN
 — 

Sean Payton will join the Denver Broncos as head coach after they agreed compensation with the 59-year-old’s former team, the New Orleans Saints, according to reports from ESPN and NFL Network.

Payton was under contract with the Saints, despite stepping down last season and was working as a broadcaster this season.

In a 15-year stint with the franchise, he took the Saints to the playoffs nine times winning a single Super Bowl in 2010.

“This was the opportunity I was looking for,” Payton said to NOLA.com. “It’s a great fanbase and great tradition. The ownership group is fantastic, and I love the way they competed in some of their games last year.”

He joins a Broncos team in desperate need of an uplift.

Denver finished the season 5-12 and extended its time outside the playoffs to seven consecutive seasons.

Perhaps most disappointing was the performance of quarterback Russell Wilson who the Broncos traded for four premium drafts from the Seattle Seahawks ahead of this season.

The nine-time Pro Bowler had the worst statistical season of his career, finishing with a career low 16 touchdown passes and leading an offense that ended the season averaging 16.9 points per game.

However, Payton is confident of getting the most out of Wilson.

“Russell is a hard worker and has played at a high level and won a lot of games in this league,” Payton told NOLA.com.

“The pressure is on us to put a good run game together and reduce the degree of difficulty on his position. I’m excited about him.”

Elsewhere, the Houston Texans have hired San Francisco 49ers defensive coordinator and former Texans linebacker DeMeco Ryans, 38, as their new head coach, the NFL team announced Tuesday.

The former Texans linebacker comes into the job off the back of an excellent period with the 49ers as defensive coordinator.

Under his leadership as coordinator the last two seasons, San Francisco defense ranked first in total defense (300.6 yards/game), total points allowed (277) and points allowed per game (16.3) in the 2022 regular season.

In 2021, the 49ers defense ranked third in the league, allowing 310.0 total yards per game.

Houston fired former head coach Lovie Smith in early January after finishing 3-13-1 in 2022. Smith was the second coach to last just one season with the team. The Texans fired David Culley after a 3-14 season last year and then went on to hire Smith.

The Carolina Panthers also unveiled the team’s new head coach on Tuesday after bringing in former Colts head man Frank Reich.

The 61-year-old Reich was the starting quarterback in the Panthers’ first ever game in 1995 and returns to the franchise as its sixth head coach.

CNN
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The word “Intimate” is frequently used when describing celebrity documentaries, but it certainly applies to “Pamela, a love story,” which at one point shows Pamela Anderson lounging in the bathtub as portions of her diaries are read as voiceover. The result is a humanizing look at a woman often reduced to cartoon caricature, while occasionally feeling too conspicuously like a licensed product.

Produced by, among others, Anderson’s son Brandon Thomas Lee, director Ryan White (whose biographical documentaries include “Ask Dr. Ruth” and “Serena”) had access not only to her diaries but a collection of home movies – including, yes, the one stolen and posted for the world to see, of Anderson having sex with her then-husband, drummer Tommy Lee.

Anderson, now 55, speaks at length of that interlude, the invasiveness of having private material shown and exploited in that fashion, and what she clearly sees as a reopening of those wounds with Hulu’s limited series “Pam & Tommy,” which dramatized those events.

Anderson’s account actually does little to detract from that Emmy-nominated production, which was quite sympathetic in portraying the hurt she felt and the way the media treated her. Indeed, the clips presented here of late-night comics cashing in on Anderson as a punchline, or interviewers Matt Lauer and Larry King asking her about her breasts, do as much to endorse the Hulu version as undermine it.

“Pamela” makes clear that Anderson is letting her guard down right from the outset, as she appears makeup-free, hanging out in the small British Columbia town where she grew up, before getting discovered at a football game (fans “oohed” when she appeared on the scoreboard camera) launched her as a model and into the pages of Playboy.

As Anderson tells it, during that time she reclaimed her sexuality, having experienced abuse on more than one occasion as a child.

International stardom on “Baywatch” followed, and it’s amusing to hear Anderson reminisce not only about all the celebrities she dated during that stretch, but the whole “Running on the beach in slow motion” imagery. (There’s no mention of “Home Improvement,” or Anderson’s recent allegations in her memoir of being flashed by its star, Tim Allen, which the comic has denied.)

The indignities of that “blond bombshell” status are nicely documented here. Ditto for the intrusions of the paparazzi, who dogged her particularly after the whirlwind romance with Lee.

The feeding frenzy surrounding the sex tape “solidified the cartoon image” of her, Anderson recalls, adding, “I knew at that point my career was over.”

While “Pamela” handles all of that quite well, too much of the rest of it plays like the Hallmark Card version of Anderson’s story, from the cloying, saccharine music to the interviews with her sons, whose protectiveness toward their mother is admirable but not especially enlightening.

The last part of the documentary also feels a bit scattered, venturing into areas like Anderson’s animal-rights activism through PETA, her advocacy for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and, finally, her Broadway debut in “Chicago.”

At its best, “Pamela, a love story” strips away what in hindsight looks like misogynistic media coverage – obsessed with her looks and relationships – to consider the person behind all of that, while proving a little too determined and pliable in the goal of helping Anderson assert ownership over her narrative.

At those moments, “Pamela” might work as a love story, but it fares a little less well as a documentary.

“Pamela, a love story” premieres January 31 on Netflix.