The Washington Post

On Washington Post Live’s “First Look,” associate editor Jonathan Capehart speaks with The Post’s Michael Birnbaum, Megan McArdle and E.J. Dionne about civil unrest in Syria, a looming government in the U.S. and what President’s Biden’s legacy will be as the end of his term nears.

Only 15 percent of the 2.19 million civilian full-time federal employees in the United States work in the Washington metro area, which includes Northern Virginia, suburban Maryland and even a touch of West Virginia. The other 85 percent work elsewhere around the country.

Americans are scrambling to stock up on cars, appliances and other big-ticket imports in anticipation of new Trump administration tariffs — a spending spree that could reignite the very inflation buyers are hoping to avoid.

How the Washington Commanders’ restaurant-trained chefs chop, cook and serve hundreds of pounds of high-end fuel each day.

The Plainsman Herald nearly folded. The 137-year-old weekly newspaper in Springfield, Colorado, had documented rural life in the southeastern corner of the state for decades — from the annual Baca County fair to school board meetings and city councils. But printing, delivery and insurance costs had gone up. Advertisers fell away. And in July, owner Kent Brooks announced that the paper would cease printing by the end of this year and could shut down entirely soon after that. Then Brooks’s phone began ringing, and his inbox overflowed: Readers were stepping up to save the only news source across the county’s six towns.

Bob Wenrich and Fay Gable were married under a tree in a relative’s backyard a few weeks after Fay learned she was pregnant in 1951. She was 16 and Bob was 21, but they were in love and decided to make a go of it. Their son was born, then they had three more children and settled into a busy life in Lancaster County, Pa., where Bob ran a house-painting business and Fay was a nurse. But 24 years later, in 1975, their marriage hit a rough patch and the couple divorced. They both eventually remarried and remained friendly toward each other, attending holiday events with their four children and celebrating together at birthday parties for their grandchildren, said their youngest daughter, Carol Smith, 64. After Bob and Fay’s second spouses passed away, Carol noticed they seemed lonely, so about a year ago, she began inviting her parents to play card games with her and her husband at their home in Reamstown, Pa. “We reconnected like two teenagers,” said Fay Gable, 89, about new husband Bob Wenrich, 94.

The Biden administration is drafting a plan to allow construction of data centers and electrical power plants on federal lands, responding to worries that the United States could fall behind in the global race to dominate artificial intelligence, according to people involved with the deliberations.

BREAKING: The Teamsters launched strikes against seven Amazon warehouses Thursday, in the union’s biggest provocation yet against the nation’s second-largest private employer, threatening to delay some package delivery during the busy Christmas season. “If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed,” Teamsters President Sean O’Brien said. https://lnkd.in/gf9pNBpT

Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt joins Washington Post Live to discuss his new book, “Genesis,” which explores the opportunities and challenges of the artificial intelligence revolution, how AI could shape the future and how America stays ahead.

When a car rolls down a freeway, a fine spray of microplastics spews out from its tires. When you wash your clothes, millions of tiny synthetic microfibers spill into waterways. And those tiny pieces of plastic may be harming our health, a new study shows. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, researchers at the University of California at San Francisco evaluated dozens of studies in mice and humans to learn how microplastics may be harming digestive, respiratory and reproductive health. They found that these shards — which are now virtually everywhere in the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat — are suspected of links to colon cancer and lung cancer.