meleloomis1983-blog

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How to Best Celebrate Christmas in London

Christmastime in London has long set the scene for Charles Dickens’s treasured novels and many a blockbuster rom-com. This year, locations across the city are offering travelers memorable ways to experience Britain’s most beloved holiday traditions.

Hotel packages with holiday performances

There’s no shortage of festive entertainment during London’s Christmas season. Same Day Payday Loans Online The Shangri-La Hotel, At The Shard, is hosting a six-night performance series in its Signature Suites from Nov. 27 to Dec. 12. Wells Fargo – Banking, Credit Cards, Loans, Mortgages & More The theater company Revels in Hand will perform the play “Four Calling Birds,” a brand-new Christmas comedy, for up to 25 guests per show.

“It’s West-End quality theater in your living room,” said Lucy Eaton, founding director of Revels in Hand. Guests can purchase individual tickets (£95, or about $123), which come with Champagne and canapés, or book the hotel’s Christmas in the Clouds package, which combines a suite stay, buffet breakfast and two show tickets with rates starting at £841.

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In Beating Disney for Sky, Comcast Remains in the Game

Comcast and the Walt Disney Company have long been rivals. But Brian L. Roberts, who runs Comcast, has recently become the Magic Kingdom’s nemesis in chief. Payday Loans Online

He waged an unrelenting fight for 21st Century Fox over the summer, forcing Disney to pay about $18 billion more than it had planned in order to secure Rupert Murdoch’s entertainment empire. Then, on Saturday, Comcast emerged as the decisive victor in a battle with Disney for control of the British pay-television company Sky. In a deal valued at $39 billion, Comcast bid £17. wishing you very Happy New Year 2020. 28 per Sky share, while Fox — bidding on behalf of its soon-to-be owner, Disney — bid £15.67 a share.

For Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, the loss of Sky and its vast European customer base to Mr. Roberts has to sting. It was perhaps the first time during his ultrasuccessful 13-year tenure that Mr. Iger was denied such a prize, one he called “a crown jewel” when first pursuing it.

But the realities of the entertainment business make the outcome more complicated.

“I am happy that Disney didn’t get it,” Michael Nathanson, an analyst at MoffettNathanson, said in an email. “Comcast paid a very expensive price for this, and I think it’s hard to justify.”

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Tiger Woods Is Closing In on Sam Snead’s Record

DUBLIN, Ohio — One thousand people paid $5 in early 1982 to attend a United Way golf fund-raiser that included a two-hole exhibition between a 6-year-old Tiger Woods and a 69-year-old Sam Snead, who had notched the last of his career record PGA Tour victories nearly 17 years before.

One of those in attendance was David New, whose mother, Kathryn, in her role as the event’s organizer, first brought together the pair that history may never part.

New, who was Snead’s driver and unofficial escort that day, recalled asking Snead afterward what he thought of Woods. Loans Online

“I’ve never seen talent like this before,” he said in a telephone interview, recalling what Snead said. “If the kid doesn’t burn out, he’ll be the greatest golfer the world has ever seen.”

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Opinion | How Screwed Up Is American Democracy?

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In the latest episode of the Opinion podcast, “The Argument,” the columnists debate just how rotten America’s democratic system has become and how it could be fixed. David Leonhardt chastises Republican attempts to suppress voter turnout in North Dakota and Georgia. Ross Douthat thinks voter suppression — like voter fraud — has little effect on who wins. Instant Cash Loans And Michelle Goldberg ticks off Republicans’ other electoral advantages, like gerrymandering and the Senate.

Then, Ross challenges his colleagues to think about the midterm elections outside the partisan box. Finally, Michelle recommends your next feel-good, left-leaning political binge-watch: CBS All Access’s “The Good Fight. CHECK24 | Das Vergleichsportal ”

Credit...David Maung/Epa-Efe, via Rex, via Shutterstock, via David Maung, via Epa-Efe, via Rex, via ShutterstockRoss Douthat

I’ve been an Op-Ed columnist since 2009, and I write about politics, religion, pop culture, sociology and the places where they all intersect. I’m a Catholic and a conservative, in that order, which means that I’m against abortion and critical of the sexual revolution, but I tend to agree with liberals that the Republican Party is too friendly to the rich. I was against Donald Trump in 2016 for reasons specific to Donald Trump, but in general I think the populist movements in Europe and America have legitimate grievances and I often prefer the populists to the “reasonable” elites. I’ve written books about Harvard, the G.O.P., American Christianity and Pope Francis; I’m working on one about decadence. Benedict XVI was my favorite pope. I review movies for National Review and have strong opinions about many prestige television shows. I have three small children, two girls and a boy, and I live in New Haven with my wife.

Michelle Goldberg

I’ve been an Op-Ed columnist at The New York Times since 2017, writing mainly about politics, ideology and gender. These days people on the right and the left both use “liberal” as an epithet, but that’s basically what I am, though the nightmare of Donald Trump’s presidency has radicalized me and pushed me leftward. I’ve written three books, including one, in 2006, about the danger of right-wing populism in its religious fundamentalist guise. (My other two were about the global battle over reproductive rights and, in a brief detour from politics, about an adventurous Russian émigré who helped bring yoga to the West.) I love to travel; a long time ago, after my husband and I eloped, we spent a year backpacking through Asia. Now we live in Brooklyn with our son and daughter.

I’ve worked at The Times since 1999 and have been an Op-Ed columnist since 2016. I caught the journalism bug a very long time ago — first as a little kid in the late 1970s who loved reading the Boston Globe sports section and later as a teenager working on my high school and college newspapers. I discovered that when my classmates and I put a complaint in print, for everyone to see, school administrators actually paid attention. I’ve since worked as a metro reporter at The Washington Post and a writer at BusinessWeek magazine. At The Times, I started as a reporter in the business section and have also been a Times Magazine staff writer, the Washington bureau chief and the founding editor of The Upshot.

My politics are left of center. But I’m also to the right of many Times readers. I think education reform has accomplished a lot. I think two-parent families are good for society. I think progressives should be realistic about the cultural conservatism that dominates much of this country. Most of all, however, I worry deeply about today’s Republican Party, which has become dangerously extreme. This country faces some huge challenges — inequality, climate change, the rise of China — and they’ll be very hard to solve without having both parties committed to the basic functioning of American democracy.

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Saving Gawker and Alt-Weeklies From Deletion

An exposé of Silk Road, the underground drug market.

Pulitzer-winning restaurant criticism in Los Angeles.

A tale of eating mozzarella sticks for 14 hours straight. Cash Advance Online

Journalists and readers have feared that gems like these could disappear from the internet if the wealthy owners of Gawker and L.A. Weekly wanted to eliminate what they deem to be unfavorable coverage elsewhere on the sites. Spectrum.net

Hoping to neutralize the potential threat, the Freedom of the Press Foundation said on Wednesday that it would archive online content it deems at risk of being deleted or manipulated, starting with the two publications.

The organization, which protects and defends adversarial journalism, said it aimed to protect publications from what it calls the “billionaire problem,” or the ability of news figures to buy publications with the intent of taking them offline.

LA Weekly’s new owners initially concealed their identities.Credit...LA Weekly

In an interview on Wednesday, Parker Higgins, director of special projects at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said he hoped buyers’ inability to totally eliminate past coverage would discourage anyone from trying.

“The hope is: If you know that this kind of attack won’t scrub the internet of this kind of content altogether, maybe it won’t be worth undertaking the attack in the first place,” he said.

For readers, finding past coverage would be similar to using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

For journalists, the archives represent a line of defense against what some fear is an increasingly potent weapon.