Orange is the New Trump

 

Former President Donald J. Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury on 34 counts of election and business fraud. A spokesperson for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said the office has contacted Trump's attorney to "coordinate his surrender" for arraignment on "a Supreme Court indictment, which remains under seal." Trump becomes the first ex-president to be charged with a crime. But he can still for President in 2024.

Mouring Edson Arantes do Nascimento (1940-2022), the King of Football

Brazilian football legend Pelé, widely considered one of the best players ever, if not the best, died yesterday after a year-long battle with colon cancer. He was 82 years old.

Brazil has planned 48 hours of national mourning. Pelé, is expected to be buried in Santos, southeast of Sao Paulo, where he played for the city's club from 1956 to 1974. Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, said in a statement Pelé's "life was about more than football. He changed perceptions for the better in Brazil, in South America and across the world." 

The UK's Guardian has a great piece on his career and how he came to be the face of football the world over. Pelé burst onto the world stage when he was just 17 scoring six goals to help Brazil win the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. He stole the show in the final which Brazil won over hosts Sweden, 5-2, with two goals that were "an illustration of the ability that set him apart from all other footballers. The first was a breathtaking piece of skill; he controlled the ball on his chest, chipped it back over his head and then ran around the flummoxed defender and volleyed it into the net. For the second, he soared above his marker before making a perfectly placed header." He is the only player to have won the World Cup three times (1958, 1962, and 1970).

"Pelé was blessed with a blend of supreme athleticism, skill and tactical vision...His sheer physicality and turn of speed were electrifying as he homed in on goal, outsprinting or simply charging through defences while managing to keep the ball under close control."  Those qualities made him a hot commodity as wealthy clubs attempted to lure him away from Brazil, offering a then unheard-of $1m to his club, Santos FC. But in 1961, Brazil's president Jânio Quadros "declared Pelé a 'non-exportable national treasure', ensuring that he remained at the club for almost two decades."

 It was at the 1970 World Cup, however, that Pelé truly became a global phenomenon. It was the first football tournament watched live by a worldwide television audience and also the first to be broadcast in color. "In the brilliant Mexican sunshine, the gold shirts and cobalt blue shorts of Brazil dazzled the watching world. They won the tournament for the third time – beating Italy 4-1 in the final – by playing football of such imagination and thrilling execution that it is regarded as one of the high-water marks in the history of sport...with Pelé [its] most potent symbol." After that World Cup he was the most recognizable man in sport.

In 1999 Pelé was named athlete of the century by the IOC and in 2000 FIFA player of the century (jointly with Diego Maradona). Pelé first two marriages ended in divorce. In 2016 he married his third wife, Marcia Cibele Aoki. She survives him, along with six children from prior relationships.

Felicidades Argentina!!! Campeona Del Mundo!!!

ARG (4) 3 - 3 (2) FRA 

Argentina edges out France on penalties.

The most thrilling World Cup final...in perhaps the best World Cup ever? So much drama, so much quality, and so many goals! Messi, Mbappe, and Martinez...a breathless, epic finish to a magnificent tournament. In the end, Argentina are World Champions for the third time!

  Relive the highlights here:

And the full drama of the penalties:

Oh, Elon: It's Funny Because its True

He's been trying for months...but finally lands a great Twitter joke.

Wonder if his backers are laughing as well..."Musk gathered over $7 billion in equity commitments from an unusual mix of investors, including Silicon Valley billionaire Larry Ellison, cryptocurrency exchange Binance, venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital...Text messages produced during the legal fight showed that co-investors did little analysis of their own, deferring instead to Musk. “If you are considering equity partners, my growth fund is in for $250M with no additional work required,” wrote Marc Andreessen." 

Investing with other people's money is so easy! Hahaha...Funny for everyone except Andreessen's investors. 

The Jewel in the Crown: UK Get its Own Obama Moment

Congratulations to Rishi Sunak who is set to succeed Liz Truss at Britain's next Prime Minister. He becomes the 81st person to attain the position, going back to 1721. Significantly, he will be the first person of color to lead the country in the long history of Brittania. While Sunak was born and raised in Britain, his parents are of Indian origin. He is also the UK's first Hindu Prime Minister. That he becomes PM by leading the Conservative Party is even more remarkable and a truly historic moment for multiculturalism and racial equality.

Rishi Sunak was born in the port city of Southhampton in 1980. His parents are of Indian descent by way of East Africa. His father, Yashvir, a doctor, was born in Kenya and his mother, Usha, in Tanzania. They migrated to the UK in the 1960s. While Sunak maybe a second-generation Briton, his rise to first, among equals followed "one of the most traditional paths to power: prestigious Winchester College, one of the U.K.’s elite private boarding schools, before going on to study philosophy, politics, and economics—the quintessential degree for anyone aspiring to go into British politics—at Oxford University." After graduating in 2001, he pursued a career in finance; working first as an analyst with Goldman Sachs and then, after getting his MBA from Stanford University, joining Chris Hohn's hedge fund, the Children's Investment Fund ("TCI"). Sunak started his own fund, Theleme Partners, in 2010 before leaving to join politics in 2015. 

Rishi Rich 

Sunak's background isn't the only thing atypical about him. He is also the richest lawmaker in the House of Commons, ranking in at #222 on the Sunday Times Rich List of the wealthiest people in Britain in 2022. Sunak is worth an estimated £730m, thanks to his finance past and marriage to Akshata Murty, his Stanford classmate and daughter of Indian billionaire and Infosys founder, N. R. Narayana Murthy. I guess it takes a billionaire to relate to kitchen table issues. Err, how much is a pint of milk Rishi?

Well, in any case, the new PM has his work cut out for him, having inherited an economy that is experiencing significant turmoil, not least due to the ill-conceived policies of his predecessor. But it is worth taking in the symbolism of the UK's "Barack Obama" moment. The British conquered India in 1742 and for the 200 years it was the jewel in the crown of an empire that stretched across a quarter of the earth. India was so valuable that General Charles Cornwallis, who lost the Colonies in the Revolutionary War, was feted at home as a hero because of his successes in the Subcontinent. America, what? Now, the new King of England will appoint a new Prime Minister that looks very different from everyone else before him. Interesting times!

The Nobel Prize for Physics Goes to Messrs. Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger

Nobel Prize season continues and on Tuesday the Nobel Assembly announced they awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.” Umm...in more layman terms, their independent works showed that tiny particles of light can be "entangled" and behave like a single unit, even when separated by large distances. The phenomenon was famously called "spooky action at a distance" by Albert Einstein, who dismissed the theory.

Their results have cleared the way for new technology based upon quantum information, including encrypted communication.

Alain Aspect is French and is associated with Université Paris-Saclay, Paris and École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France. John Clauser is an American and is associated with the University of California, Berkeley and John F. Clauser and Associates. Anton Zeilinger is Austrian and is associated with the University of Vienna.

The Nobel Prize for Medicine Goes to Svante Pääbo

It's the start of the Nobel Prize season and today the Nobel Assembly announced they have awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Svante Pääbo for "his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution."

Svante is a Swedish geneticist specializing in the field of evolutionary genetics and has worked extensively on the Neanderthal genome. He is the founding director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, since 1997 and is also professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan.

Pääbo, 67, has spent decades pioneering and perfecting the complex methods of extracting Neanderthal DNA, and successfully sequencing their genome. His decades of research have made it possible for scientists to study the differences between today’s modern humans and their ancient ancestors, giving insights into human physiology and possible future cures for disease.