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“There is nothing in the world like the food you can find in Louisiana,” Chef Isaac Toups, owner of popular New Orleans restaurant Toups Meatery, told VOA. “It’s such a unique mix of so many different cultures that converged here from around the globe. They brought their ideas about food with them and made a cuisine that is unparalleled.”

Immigrants’ culinary influences span centuries in New Orleans, a port city near the mouth of the Mississippi River. From French colonists who were the first Europeans to permanently settle in the area in 1699 to Vietnamese immigrants in the 1970s to recent arrivals from all over the world, newcomers have continually added to the DNA of local cuisine.

 

Liz Williams, founder of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum and author of New Orleans: A Food Biography, says there’s something unique about the way cultures – and cooking – have melded in this Southern city compared with other places in America.

“You can find every food in the world in New York City,” Williams said. “Go two blocks that way for this type of cuisine and six blocks the other way for that type of cuisine.”

New Orleans, by contrast, has spawned a gastronomical melting pot. Or, to use a local analogy, a gumbo.

“There’s no ‘New York City cuisine’ because all those immigrant groups didn’t meld together,” she said. “In New Orleans, though, all of these different immigrant cuisines have been influenced by New Orleans food and influenced New Orleans food. There’s a melding, merging and updating that seems to be constantly happening here that doesn’t happen in other places.”

Early settlers

Mention Louisiana cooking, and most people think of Creole cuisine, Cajun cuisine or some mixture of the two.

“When the two foods were first being established in Louisiana in the 18th century, they were two distinct cuisines from two distinct regions,” explained chef Donald Link, owner of several New Orleans restaurants all under the banner of the Link Restaurant Group. “Creole food was being created in New Orleans while Cajun food was in the more rural, southwestern part of the state.”

Creole culture in New Orleans arose from a mixture of the early French settlers, Spanish immigrants who followed shortly after, enslaved people taken from Africa and the Native Americans who were already here. Once the United States purchased Louisiana from France in 1803, waves of Anglo-Americans came to New Orleans as well as thousands who fled the Haitian Revolution taking place at the same time.

The confluence created a unique mix of cultures that is reflected in local cooking to this day.

“New Orleans is often called the most northern city in the Caribbean, and there was a lot of influence coming from Spanish-controlled Latin countries,” explained Link. “They brought their rice, beans, guisados and stews. And then the French brought their boudin and fricassees and all these celebrated techniques, and Africans had gumbo, which comes from the West African word for okra. It all came together to make what we call Creole food.”

Creole food is considered a cosmopolitan cuisine. It often features rich sauces, local herbs, ripe tomatoes and local seafood.

“You use what you have available to you,” said Brad Hollingsworth, owner of longtime New Orleans favorite Clancy’s. “Here, that means all these great, fresh fish from the Gulf of Mexico: speckled trout, pompano, red snapper, redfish, flounder and all the way down the line.”

Hollingsworth said cuisine from Creole culture is more focused on sauces than its Cajun counterpart. That, he said, is in large part because of the city’s ability to attract settlers from more cosmopolitan, cultured areas of France.

“They brought with them the French mother sauces that we really lean into at Clancy’s,” Hollingsworth said. “Bechamel, velouté, espagnole, hollandaise and tomato. We use them to complement our local fish or meat. It’s a combination of using what is geographically available and the techniques of the immigrant groups who came here.”

Cajun food, on the other hand, is known for being more rustic. It features meat-heavy, all-in-one-pot dishes like jambalaya and the rice-filled, spicy pork blood sausage known as boudin.

The Cajuns were also largely originally of French descent, but these French-influenced immigrants came from backcountry parts of Acadia in Canada rather than the major cities of France. They were forced out of Canada by the British in 1755, and about 3,000 arrived in rural Louisiana, where they interacted with German immigrants, Native Americans and enslaved people – all of whom added their own culinary influences.

“Cajun cuisine was more of a country food, while Creole cuisine was more of a city food,” said Toups, who grew up in the part of Louisiana known as Cajun Country, about two-and-a-half hours west of New Orleans. “That’s because the Cajuns were French fur trappers, not French-trained chefs like you might find in the city. As a poorer immigrant group, we had to add things to make our meals last. Fortunately, the region had tons of rice, which is why you find rice in our classics like boudin, jambalaya and gumbo.”

Continuing the evolution of a food

During the 19th and 20th centuries, thanks to improved methods of communication and better transportation, the two cuisines began to merge and inspire each other. They also continued to be influenced by other groups

German immigrants, for example, brought their passion for sausages to Cajun food, which helped create Louisiana’s famed spicy andouille. But the next big addition to the local food scene came when nearly 300,000 Italian immigrants – most of them Sicilian – moved to the city between 1884 and 1924.

“If you look at stuffed peppers in other places, they’re usually prepared with rice,” said Liz Williams, who will be releasing the book, Nana’s Creole Italian Table in March 2022, “but in New Orleans, our veggies are stuffed with breadcrumbs. That’s an effect of the Sicilians who arrived here.”

Red gravy, the Creole adaptation of tomato sauce – similar to how Creoles use a roux in gumbo as a thickener – and the introduction of sno-balls, made from shaved ice, to New Orleans are further examples of how New Orleanian and Sicilian cuisines merged.

“In Sicily and lots of Europe, it was common during hotter months to walk up a mountain to collect snow that you could flavor with syrup for a summertime treat,” Williams said. “In America, most places use crushed ice for more of a frozen sherbet. In New Orleans, however, shaved ice is used because it emulates more of what our Sicilians knew back home.”

In more recent decades, Mexican immigrants came to New Orleans to help rebuild after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. They, too, left an impact on their new home – not just on the cuisine, but also the way it’s served.

New Orleans is now dotted with dozens of taco trucks it didn’t have before the storm.

“Because the local ingredients are different here,” Williams explained, “so are the items sold. You’re not going to find fried oyster tacos in many places in the world, but you can find them in New Orleans.”

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Pots and pans in kitchens across one of the world’s most unique food cities clatter with creations that can’t be found anywhere else. At two-time James Beard award-winning chef Alon Shaya’s restaurant, Saba, Louisiana blue crab is a local addition to a traditionally Mediterranean hummus. Popular Indian restaurant Saffron NOLA adds curried seafood and basmati rice to gumbo, Louisiana’s state dish.

And Dong Phuong Bakery, an institution formed in 1982 after thousands of Vietnamese refugees arrived in New Orleans after the Vietnam War, has forever changed how many residents think of two of their most prized foods. Dong Phuong and their unique king cake – topped with cream cheese icing because bakery owner Huong Tran didn’t want her cake to be as sweet as the ones with traditional sugar icing – is one of the most popular in the city. Also, the bakery’s bread is sold by the thousands to restaurants across the city. The beloved Louisiana po’boy sandwich is now often made with Vietnamese-style banh mi bread instead of the more Louisiana-standard French bread.

“We came here as refugees with nothing, so of course it makes us so proud to have our new home appreciate what we can add to the food here,” explained Linh Tran Garza, president of Dong Phuong Bakery. “But we’re also continuously influenced by our home, as well.”

Garza points to the emergence of Viet-Cajun cuisine as proof that the two cultures are evolving with each other.

“It’s a great thing, I think. We should always be paying attention to the community and seeing how we can get better, give customers what they want, or create some new amazing food.”

Liz Williams said that is something New Orleans is especially able to do, perhaps more so than any other American city, because of its past.

“I think it has to do with us being originally colonized by the French while much of the rest of America was colonized by the British,” she said. “The British have a way of doing things and, historically, exercise less flexibility. The French, however, are more curious and more eager to make great food. They see it as an art, and they welcome new inspiration. The Creoles sought and welcomed that inspiration centuries ago, and I think our culture continues to do it today.”
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President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden brought some Christmas Eve cheer to hospitalized children who aren’t well enough to go home for holidays.

It’s longstanding tradition for first ladies to visit Children’s National Hospital at Christmastime, but Joe Biden’s visit on Friday was a surprise. It marked the first time that a sitting president had joined the fun, the White House said.

The Bidens are set to help a group of children making lanterns as part of a winter craft project. Jill Biden will also sit by the Christmas tree and read “Olaf’s Night Before Christmas” to the kids. Video of her reading will also be shown in patient rooms throughout the hospital.

The Walt Disney Co. provided copies of the book for each patient so they can follow along with the first lady, the White House said. Each book includes a White House bookmark designed by her office.

The annual tradition of a hospital visit by the first lady dates to Bess Truman, who served in the role from 1945-1953.
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For over four decades, novelist Dan Hurley has been writing 60-second-long stories about New Yorkers he met on the street. But apart from amusing passers-by with his literary talent, Hurley also happens to be an award-winning science writer. Anna Nelson met with Hurley on the streets of the Big Apple. Anna Rice narrates her story. Camera: Natalia Latukhina, Vladimir Badikov, Dmitry Vershinin, Alexander Barash
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Deep in the desert of the United Arab Emirates, the moment that camel breeders had been waiting for arrived.

Families hauled their camels through wind-carved sands. Servers poured tiny cups of Arabic coffee. Judges descended on desert lots.

A single question loomed over the grandstand: Which camels were most beautiful?

Even as the omicron variant rips through the world, legions of breeders from Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Qatar traveled to the UAE’s southwestern desert this week with 40,000 of their most beautiful camels for the Al Dhafra Festival.

The five-man jury at the annual pageant insists beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. Camel aesthetics are evaluated according to precise categories determined generations ago. Only female camels participate because males fight too much, authorities said.

As hundreds of woolly black camels trotted through the dusty pastures, necks and humps bobbing, one of the organizers, Mohammed al-Muhari, outlined the platonic ideal.

Necks must be long and slim, cheeks broad and hooves large, he told The Associated Press on Wednesday. Lips must droop. They must walk tall with graceful posture.

“It’s not so different from humans,” al-Muhari said, his robe sparkling white amid clouds of dust.

The high standards have prompted many breeders to seek an advantage, using banned Botox injections to inflate the camel’s lips, muscle relaxants to soften the face and silicone wax injections to expand the hump.

Festival spokesman Abdel Hadi Saleh declined to say how many participants had been disqualified over plastic surgery this week. All camels undergo rigorous medical exams to detect artificial touch-ups and hormones before entering Al Dhafra Festival.

Since Emirati investigators began employing X-rays and sonar systems a few years ago, Saleh said the number of cheaters has plummeted.

“We easily catch them, and they realize getting caught, it’s not worth the cost to their reputation,” he said.

A great deal is at stake. Al Dhafra Festival offers the top 10 winners in each category prizes ranging from $1,300 to $13,600. At the main Saudi contest, the most beautiful fetch $66 million. Camels change hands in deals worth millions of dirhams.

But breeders insist it’s not only about the money.

“It is a kind of our heritage and custom that the (Emirati rulers) revived,” said 27-year-old camel owner Saleh al-Minhali from Abu Dhabi. He sported designer sunglasses over his traditional headdress and Balenciaga sneakers under his kandura, or Emirati tunic.

Gone are the days when camels were integral to daily life in the federation of seven sheikhdoms, a chapter lost as oil wealth and global business transformed Dubai and Abu Dhabi into skyscraper-studded hubs with marbled malls, luxury hotels and throbbing nightclubs. Foreigners outnumber locals nearly nine to one in the country.

However, experts say Emiratis are increasingly searching for meaning in echoes of the past — Bedouin traditions that prevailed before the UAE became a nation 50 years ago.

“Younger Emiratis who have identity issues are going back to their heritage to find a sense of belonging,” said Rima Sabban, a sociologist at Zayed University in Dubai. “The society developed and modernized so fast it creates a crisis inside.”

Camels race at old-world racetracks in the Emirates, and still offer milk, meat and a historic touchstone to citizens. Festivals across the country celebrate the camel’s significance. Al Dhafra also features falcon racing, dromedary dancing and a camel milking contest.

“People in Dubai may not even think about them, but young people here care deeply about camels,” said Mahmoud Suboh, a festival coordinator from Liwa Oasis at the northern edge of the desert’s Empty Quarter. Since 2008, he has watched the fairgrounds transform from a remote desert outpost into an extravaganza that draws camel lovers from around the world.

In a sign of the contest’s exploding popularity, about a dozen young Emirati men who call themselves “camel influencers” filmed and posed with the camels on Wednesday, broadcasting live to thousands of Instagram followers.

The digital likes have proven important this year, as the coronavirus pandemic curtailed tourism to the festival and dampened the mood. Police checked that visitors had received both vaccine doses and tested negative for the virus. Authorities nagged attendees to adjust their face masks, threatening fines. There were few foreigners or other spectators strolling the site Wednesday.

Each category in the 10-day pageant is divided into two types of camels: Mahaliyat, the tan breed that originates from the UAE and Oman, and Majaheen, the darker breed from Saudi Arabia. Wednesday’s showcase focused on 5-year-old black Majaheen camels.

For hours, judges scrutinized each camel, scribbling lists of the animal’s body parts for scoring purposes. Breeders shouted to startle camels so they’d look up and show off elongated necks.

As the sun set over the sands, the winning breeders were called to accept their gleaming trophies. Down below in the dirt rings, camels were crowned with gold and silver-lined shawls.

“Until now we are the first in the category … We’ve received over 40 prizes (in various camel contests) this year alone,” beamed Mohammed Saleh bin Migrin al-Amri as he juggled four trophies from the day, including two golds.

Then he jumped into his Toyota Land Cruiser. The victory parade of honking SUVs and grunting camels faded behind the desert dunes.
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Author Joan Didion, whose essays, memoirs, novels and screenplays chronicled contemporary American society, as well as her grief over the deaths of her husband and daughter, has died at the age of 87. 

 

The cause of death was Parkinson’s disease, her publisher Knopf said Thursday in a statement. Didion first emerged as a writer of substance in the late 1960s as an early practitioner of “new journalism,” which allowed writers to take a narrative, more personalized perspective. 

 

Her 1968 essay collection “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” a title borrowed from poet William Butler Yeats, looked at the culture of her native California. The title essay offered an unsympathetic view of the emerging hippie culture in San Francisco and a New York Times review called the book “some of the finest magazine pieces published by anyone in this country in recent years.” 

 

Didion had an air of casual glamour and writerly cool and in her heyday frequently was typically photographed in oversized sunglasses or lounging nonchalantly with a cigarette dangling from her hand. She was 80 in 2015 when the French fashion house Celine used her as a model in an ad campaign for its sunglasses. 

Tragedy inadvertently led to a career resurgence in the 2000s as Didion wrote of the deaths of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, in “The Year of Magical Thinking” and daughter Quintana Roo Dunne in “Blue Nights.” 

 

Didion’s works were insightful, confessional and tinged with ennui and skepticism. The Los Angeles Times praised her as an “unparalleled stylist” with “piercing insights and exquisite command of language.” 

 

British writer Martin Amis referred to Didion as the “poet of the Great Californian Emptiness” and she was especially incisive in writing about the state. Her 1970 novel “Play It as It Lays” showed Los Angeles, through the eyes of a troubled actor, to be glamorous and vapid while the 2003 essay collection “Where I Was From” was about the culture of the state, as well as herself and her family’s long history there. 

 

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” Didion said in a speech at her alma mater, the University of California in Berkeley, in 1975. 

 

From California to New York

 

Her life and career were captured in the 2017 documentary “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold” by her nephew, actor-filmmaker Griffin Dunne. The New Yorker magazine called the film, which borrowed its title from another Yeats work, “an intimate, affectionate, and partial portrait.” 

 

Didion ended up in New York by winning a college essay contest that provided an internship at Vogue magazine in the late 1950s. She met Dunne there two years later. 

 

Didion and Dunne, who were married nearly 40 years, split their lives between Southern California and New York and managed to be leading figures in both literary circles and Hollywood.

 

The parties at their Malibu beach house, where Harrison Ford worked as a carpenter before “Star Wars” fame, drew crowds that included singer Janis Joplin, moviemakers Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese and actor Warren Beatty, who was reportedly infatuated with Didion. 

 

Dunne was demonstrative and garrulous while Didion could come off as introverted. Their marriage was rocky at times and Dunne moved to Las Vegas for a while. In an essay in “The White Album,” Didion wrote that they once took a vacation in Hawaii “in lieu of filing for divorce.” 

 

Through it all they edited each other’s work and collaborated on screenplays for the 1976 remake of “A Star Is Born,” “The Panic in Needle Park,” the 1971 film that gave Al Pacino his first starring role, as well as the movie adaptations of “Play It as It Lays” and Dunne’s novel “True Confessions.” 

 

The couple moved to New York in 1988 and after Dunne suffered a heart attack at the dinner table in 2003, Didion wrote of the ensuing heartache in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it,” she wrote. 

 

Twenty months after Dunne’s death, Didion returned to the place of grief when Quintana Roo died from acute pancreatitis after a series of health problems, which she chronicled in “Blue Nights.” 

 

The diminutive Didion dwindled to 75 pounds (34 kg) after the deaths but began to come out of it by working on a one-woman stage version of “Magical Thinking” that opened on Broadway in 2007 with Vanessa Redgrave starring and David Hare directing. 

 

Didion, whose other books included the novel “A Book of Common Prayer” and non-fiction works “Miami” and “Salvador” was presented the National Medal of Arts in 2013 by President Barack Obama. 

 

 

 
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A neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn is stunning visitors with its spectacular Christmas lights. The Dyker Heights neighborhood boasts some of the most over-the-top holiday displays. Elena Wolf takes us there in this story narrated by Anna Rice.
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Pope Francis urged Vatican cardinals, bishops and bureaucrats Thursday to embrace humility this Christmas season, saying their pride, self-interest and the “glitter of our armor” was perverting their spiritual lives and corrupting the church’s mission.

As he has in the past, Francis used his annual Christmas address to take Vatican administrators to task for their perceived moral and personal failings, denouncing in particular those pride-filled clerics who “rigidly” hide behind Catholic Church traditions rather than seek out the neediest with humility.

As they have in the past, cardinals and bishops sat stone-faced as they listened to Francis lecture them in the Hall of Blessings, which was otherwise decked out in jolly twinkling Christmas trees and poinsettias.

“The humble are those who are concerned not simply with the past but also with the future, since they know how to look ahead, to spread their branches, remembering the past with gratitude,” Francis told them. “The proud, on the other hand, simply repeat, grow rigid and enclose themselves in that repetition, feeling certain about what they know and fearful of anything new because they cannot control it.”

The proud who are so inward-looking are consumed with their own interests, the pontiff said.

“As a consequence, they neither learn from their sins nor are they genuinely open to forgiveness. This is a tremendous corruption disguised as a good. We need to avoid it,” he added.

Since becoming pope in 2013, Francis has used his Christmas address to rail against the Curia, as the Holy See’s bureaucracy is known, denouncing the “spiritual Alzheimer’s” that some members suffer and the resistance he had encountered to his efforts to reform and revitalize the institution and the broader Catholic Church.

Those reforms kicked into high gear this year, and some of the top Catholic hierarchy bore the brunt as Francis ordered a 10% pay cut for cardinals, imposed a 40-euro ($45) gift cap for Holy See personnel and passed a law allowing cardinals and bishops to be criminally prosecuted by the Vatican’s own tribunal.

On top of that, Francis added his Christmas greetings in the form of another public brow-beating of Vatican clerics, who normally are treated with the utmost deference by their underling and the faithful at large.

Francis told them to stop hiding behind the “armor” of their titles and to recognize that they, like the Biblical figure of Naaman, a wealthy and decorated general, were lepers in need of healing.

“The story of Naaman reminds us that Christmas is the time when each of us needs to find the courage to take off our armor, discard the trappings of our roles, our social recognition and the glitter of this world and adopt the humility of Naaman,” he said.

Francis also repeated his call for tradition-minded clerics to stop living in the past, saying their obsession with old doctrine and liturgy concealed a “spiritual worldliness” that was corrupting.

“Seeking those kinds of reassurance is the most perverse fruit of spiritual worldliness, for it reveals a lack of faith, hope and love; it leads to an inability to discern the truth of things,” he said.

Francis this year took his biggest step yet to rein in the traditionalist wing of the church, reimposing restrictions on celebrating the old Latin Mass that Pope Benedict XVI had relaxed in 2007.

He intensified those restrictions last weekend with a new set of rules that forbids even the publication of Tridentine Mass times in parish bulletins.

Francis said the proud who remain stuck in the past, “enclosed in their little world, have neither past nor future, roots or branches, and live with the bitter taste of a melancholy that weighs on their hearts as the most precious of the devil’s potions.”

“All of us are called to humility, because all of us are called to remember and to give life. We are called to find a right relationship with our roots and our branches. Without those two things, we become sick, destined to disappear,” he warned.
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In India, the government has proposed legislation to raise the minimum age of marriage for women from 18 to 21 years old, bringing it on par with men and saying it will empower women. But many women activists say the planned law would do little to address deep-seated societal problems that result in millions of young girls being married at an age even younger than 18.

“We are doing this so that they can have time to study and progress. The country is taking this decision for its daughters,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said after The Prohibition of Child Marriage [Amendment] Bill was introduced in parliament Tuesday. The action comes more than a year after he said, during an Independence Day speech, that the government is considering raising the legal age of marriage for women.

The government says the aim is to provide equal opportunity to women by giving them more time to complete their education, access employment opportunities, attain psychological maturity before marriage and ensure gender parity.

“In a democracy, we are 75 years late in providing equal rights to men and women to enter into matrimony,” Smriti Irani, minister of women and child development, said in parliament Tuesday.

The proposed law would mark a major change for women in a country where, according to several estimates, about 50 percent marry before turning 21.

Some women’s groups have supported the bill. “Completing her education and employability ensures a better life for a girl than being dependent on her husband all her life,” Ranjana Kumari, director of the New Delhi-based Center for Social Research, told VOA.

She wants the marriage age for both genders to be the same. “Why should the boy be elder to the girl? Who has made that decision?” she questioned.

The government says the proposed change is also prompted by concerns for the health of women who become mothers at a young age. Early marriages are linked to higher infant mortality and low life expectancy, especially among rural women.

According to Irani, raising the age of marriage for women would help bring down the incidence of teenage pregnancies.

Some experts, however, cautioned that the proposal might backfire because it does not address the underlying causes of early marriage such as poverty, patriarchal attitudes and lack of access to education, and fear that if these root causes are not solved, an age change could do more harm than good.

They point out that although marriages for girls under 18 are currently illegal, child marriages still pose a major challenge in the country — as many as one quarter of women ages 20 to 24 were married before they turned 18, according to the National Family Health Survey, 2019-21.

“The bill is well-intentioned but thoughtless,” says Mary John, professor at the Center for Women’s Development Studies, a research and advocacy organization. According to her, many of the indicators that the government is trying to address, like maternal mortality, will not be solved by simply raising the age of marriage.

“An anemic woman will remain anemic, whether she gets married at 18 or 21. She stops being anemic only if she gets better health and nutrition,” John told VOA.

Pointing out that the proposed law will lead to criminalizing many women whose families marry them off at an early age, she said, “It betrays a carelessness and disinterest in women’s empowerment and will leave a large number of women without protection.”

Some women activists call the bill a token gesture that will not empower women. They say that the government should focus on improving access to educational facilities, which remain deficient, especially in the country’s vast rural areas, better nutrition and health care, and ensure safety and security for women.

“There cannot be any gain through a law either educationally or economically or on health indicators. Unless you earmark enough funds to tackle these basic problems, how can you change these issues?” Annie Raja, general secretary of The National Federation of Indian Women, told VOA.

She says if the aim is to implement gender parity, then the government should reduce the marriage age for men to 18.

Others argue that if a girl at 18 is old enough to vote or be treated as an adult if she commits a crime, there is no reason why she cannot marry at that age.  

 

Responding to such criticism, supporters of the bill say that this move should not be seen as a problem but an opportunity. “There are a lot of other recommendations made by the government to facilitate education for girls up to graduation and also to have reproductive health rights made available to all girls,” according to Kumari.

However, she agrees that every arm of society, such as government, political parties or civil society, will have to work to make a higher age for marrying girls acceptable to communities. “Just by changing the law you do not change society or the institution of marriage, which is a social institution accompanied by cultural practices.”

The proposal has also been welcomed by hundreds of young girls, who have been campaigning in the northern Indian state of Haryana to raise the marriage age for women.

“It’s a huge step forward,” said 17-year-old Prachi Chauhan, one of the campaigners. “Such a law will help take away societal and parental pressure to get married soon after turning 18 that many girls face.”

Suhasini Sood contributed to this story.

 
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National Hockey League players will not compete in February’s Beijing Winter Olympics in the wake of 50 NHL games being postponed over COVID-19 issues, according to multiple reports Tuesday. 

ESPN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today and other newspapers cited unnamed sources in saying the league and the NHL Players Association had reached agreement not to send talent to China. 

Without the NHL’s elite millionaire stars, national teams at the Olympics will likely resemble those at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games, when minor-league and recently retired players filled out rosters, with the Olympic Athletes from Russia capturing the gold medal. 

The NHL and players union had agreed to send players to the 2022 and 2026 Winter Olympics unless league seasons were impacted by COVID-19 postponements. 

With Tuesday’s Washington at Philadelphia game being postponed by an outbreak from the visitors, the NHL has been forced to postpone 50 games this season.

Staying home during the period of the Beijing Olympics would open two weeks to reschedule contests and still provide something of a rest for most of the players. 

The NHL plans to pause the season after Tuesday’s lone contest, which finds Tampa Bay at Vegas. 

Games planned for Wednesday and Thursday were called off ahead of a scheduled three-day Christmas weekend break, which was tweaked to have players return to work on Sunday. 

Teams would be off Wednesday through Saturday and return Sunday for testing, with negative tests required to enter team facilities. 

On Sunday, the NHL announced that all games involving cross-border travel for US and Canadian clubs would not be played. Nine teams had already shut down operations to the break by Monday. 

That’s when concerns rose about the NHL skipping Beijing. 

“The NHL and NHLPA are actively discussing the matter of NHL Player participation in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, China, and expect to be in a position to announce a final determination in the coming days,” a league spokesman said Sunday. 

 
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An advertising-technology billionaire has formally resigned his membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and rebuked the faith over social issues and LGBTQ rights in an unusual public move. 

Jeff T. Green has pledged to donate 90% of his estimated $5 billion advertising-technology wealth, starting with a donation to a LGBTQ-rights group in the state, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

In an unusual public step, Green said in a Monday resignation letter to church President Russell M. Nelson that he hasn’t been active in the faith widely known as Mormon for more than a decade but wanted to make his departure official and remove his name from membership records. 

“I believe the Mormon church has hindered global progress in women’s rights, civil rights and racial equality, and LGBTQ+ rights,” he wrote. Eleven family members and a friend formally resigned along with him. He will donate $600,000 to the group Equality Utah.

The church didn’t immediately return a message from The Associated Press seeking comment Tuesday, but in recent years has shown a willingness to engage on LGBTQ rights that is unusual for a conservative faith. While it maintains its opposition to same-sex marriage, the faith didn’t block a 2019 ban on so-called conversion therapy in Utah and in November high-ranking leader Dallin Oaks said in a speech that religious rights and LGBTQ rights can coexist. 

Green, for his part, said most church members “are good people trying to do right,” but he also worries about the faith’s transparency around its history and finances.

Green, 44, now lives in Southern California. He is the CEO and chairman of The Trade Desk, an advertising technology firm he founded in 2009.

He also mentioned concerns about a $100 billion investment portfolio held by the faith. It was the subject of an Internal Revenue Service whistleblower complaint in 2019, from a former employee who charged the church had improperly built it up using member donations that are supposed to go to charitable causes.

Leaders have defended how the church uses and invests member donations, saying most is used for operational and humanitarian needs, but a portion is safeguarded to build a reserve for the future. The faith annually spends about $1 billion on humanitarian and welfare aid, leaders have said. 

The church has also come under criticism for conservative social positions. Women do not hold the priesthood in the faith, and Black men could not until the 1970s.

In recent years, though, the faith has worked with the NAACP and donated nearly $10 million for initiatives to help Black Americans. It has also worked with Equality Utah to pass a state LGBTQ nondiscrimination law, with religious exemptions.

Another prominent onetime Latter-day Saint sued the faith this year, accusing it of fraud and seeking to recover millions of dollars in contributions. James Huntsman is a member of one of Utah’s most prominent families and brother of a former governor. The suit was later tossed out. 

 
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New Orleans is shortening parade routes for the upcoming Mardi Gras season because there are fewer police officers, medics and other first responders to handle the crowds, officials said Tuesday. 

The city canceled Mardi Gras parades this past February because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and 2020 parade crowds are considered a big reason that New Orleans was an early pandemic hot spot.

“The big news and the best news is that Mardi Gras is returning to the city of New Orleans and to the world in 2022,” Mayor LaToya Cantrell said. 

As city officials announced their Carnival plans, Governor John Bel Edwards said Tuesday that he’s again extended Louisiana’s public health emergency, which was first enacted by the Democratic governor in March 2020.

He’s modified it several times since then, and the latest version contains few restrictions for businesses and no statewide mask mandate. 

But Edwards announced that agencies led by his Cabinet secretaries will again start requiring employees and visitors to wear masks inside their offices, including at Office of Motor Vehicle locations around the state. 

“While vaccines and booster doses are the strongest tools we have in the fight against COVID, public health experts also agree that masks are an important way to slow the spread of the omicron variant now. This means you should be masking indoors around people who aren’t in your household,” Edwards said in a statement. 

The face covering recommendation comes as infectious disease experts say Louisiana appears to be entering its fifth surge of the coronavirus outbreak, driven by the fast-spreading omicron variant of the virus. The number of new cases of COVID-19 has doubled over the past week, and hospitalizations of patients with the coronavirus illness are starting to grow again. 

That hasn’t derailed Mardi Gras plans in New Orleans, however. 

Weeks of Carnival season parades lead up to Fat Tuesday, which will be on March 1. Members of each parade krewe pay for that group’s parade.

Some krewes have not decided whether to roll, but none has given pandemic guidelines, mandates or restrictions as the reason for their uncertainty, Cantrell said. 

“Clearly it’s about the bottom line and the impacts COVID has had on our community and on our economy and particularly on their krewe members. … They pay the price for us to enjoy our Mardi Gras,” the mayor said. 

She said krewes will have to follow city pandemic restrictions.

Cantrell noted that “if things go wrong in our city” she might have to change its plans for Carnival and Mardi Gras. 

But she said she is confident the city can make it through the omicron variant, flu season and the holiday season.

With 80% of its residents fully vaccinated, New Orleans is a national leader, she said. 

 
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