Eloquent and resolute, Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, retains at 85 the passion and determination to continue the work that has defined her life: the defense of human rights.
Donald Trump’s second presidency, it was said, would not be like the first. He was back after a period in the wilderness, but with lessons learned; this time he was surrounded by an army of loyalists and not, as in 2017, by a team of aides willing to disagree with him now and then. Nor would it once again be a nonstop spectacle of leaks, backstage betrayals and impulsive firings communicated through social media.
© Kevin Lamarque (REUTERS)
On November 3, voters will head to the polls for the midterm elections, which will determine whether Donald Trump’s Republicans retain a friendly Congress or whether Democrats take control of one or both chambers, enabling them to mount a more aggressive opposition by blocking legislation, budgets and appointments during the final two years of his term.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday fired his brand new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, just five days into the job. The story broke right after Trump told reporters that he had asked Zacharia to reconsider whether she wanted to remain in the job after her bumpy first briefing on Monday.
© JIM LO SCALZO (EFE)
Janeese Lewis George, a D.C. councilmember and the city's presumptive next mayor, has come out against pending legislation that would allow autonomous ride-share vehicles onto city streets, citing the technology's potential to eliminate the jobs of ride-share human drivers.
"DC is facing a jobs crisis. Rushing the legalization of autonomous vehicles is irresponsible given the anticipated AI-related job displacement and disruptions that put countless workers at risk," she said on X yesterday.
DC is facing a jobs crisis.
Rushing the legalization of autonomous vehicles is irresponsible given the anticipated AI-related job displacement and disruptions that put countless workers at risk.
— Janeese Lewis George (@Janeese4DC) October 15, 2026
In a follow-up post, she said that the D.C. Council should delay consideration of a pending bill that would allow Waymo, which is currently testing its technology with human safety operators on District streets, to offer autonomous rides to the public.
Ever since Lewis George won a commanding victory in D.C.'s Democratic mayoral primary earlier this year, pundits and wonks have been trying to read the tea leaves on how the Democratic Socialist will govern.
D.C.'s economy is currently in a rough spot. Unemployment is high. The housing market is down. Population growth is slowing.
Lewis George's comments about Waymo suggest the mayor has a deeply mistaken view about the effects and benefits of technological innovation. Contrary to her contention, Waymo legalization is unlikely to exacerbate a "jobs crisis" for at least three reasons.
The first reason she's wrong is that very few D.C. residents work full-time as ride-share drivers. On her Capital Commonsense Substack, Ashley Schapitl reports that, by Lewis George's own estimate, there are only 200 District residents who work full-time as ride-share drivers.
For comparison's sake, the District has a labor force of roughly 400,000 people. So even if Waymo displaced all human drivers in the District, it would be a statistical nonevent.
Few headlines, for instance, reported that D.C.'s labor force shrank by 1,000 people between May and June. Neither did many outlets report that the labor force grew by roughly 600 people between July and August.
Yet here the mayor is talking about a "jobs crisis" over what would be an even smaller change in the number of employed workers in the city.
The second reason not to fear an exacerbated "jobs crisis" as a result of Waymo legalization is that autonomous vehicles (A.V.s) will not completely replace human rideshare drivers in the foreseeable future.
In the cities where Waymo has been active for years, A.V.s are still responsible for a minority of rideshare rides.
That's the case in Phoenix, where Waymo has been offering autonomous commercial service since 2020. In an article from April, Business Insider cites one study that put Waymo's market share at 16 percent of ride-share rides.
In other words, 84 percent of ride-share rides are still being performed by humans a full six years after A.V.s came onto the scene.
That isn't to say the impacts of A.V.s are necessarily positive for human drivers' earnings.
Another study by Gridwise from August 2025 found that A.V.s appeared to be marginally reducing drivers' hourly pay and number of trips per hour. That's evidence of the market for rides becoming more competitive, but it's not, as of yet, evidence of a job apocalypse.
Network design matters too. In places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Waymo is a standalone competitor to traditional ride-share companies like Uber and Lyft. In Austin and Phoenix, Waymo partners with Uber to offer rides on hybrid human-and-A.V. networks.
A report by EnoTrans, funded by a grant from Lyft, found that the later cities' hybrid networks actually increased human drivers' trips per hour. Their pay-per-hour fell, albeit less steeply than in cities without hybrid networks.
All of that is to say that while Waymo, as a competitor to human-operated ride-share services, shouldn't be expected to have a positive impact on drivers' earnings. It shouldn't be expected to have a catastrophic impact on them either.
The third and final reason that Lewis George is wrong to think that Waymo will worsen a coming "jobs crisis" is that Waymo's employment impacts are not limited to its effect on competing human drivers.
If Waymo earns any market share at all, it'll be because it's offering some travelers a better transportation option than the ones that currently exist. Increased ease of travel within the city would be expected to raise employment levels, not lower them.
If Waymo makes it easier or cheaper for people to get from home to the office or from the office to their kids' school, they might be more willing to live in D.C. over Arlington or Silver Spring. If it's more convenient to get to the movies or dinner, residents will be more willing to patronize local businesses.
None of that even touches on the economic and human benefits of Waymo's likely positive impact on road safety.
The direct effects of Waymo on drivers' employment must be weighed against all the other economic activity that autonomous vehicles will facilitate.
In the long run, the economic effects of autonomous vehicles may well be revolutionary. In the foreseeable future, they'll make the market for for-hire rides slightly more competitive.
A reasonable assumption then is that Waymo will have a modest, but positive, impact on overall economic activity and employment in the District, even if it has a modest, but negative, impact on the small number of full-time ride-share drivers who live here.
If the new mayor can't even tolerate that level of economic disruption, that does not portend good things for D.C.'s economy under a Lewis George administration.
The post Presumptive D.C. Mayor Janeese Lewis George Demands Halt to Waymo Legalization To Protect Drivers' Jobs appeared first on Reason Magazine.
Seasoned in defending rural communities and smallholder farmers, Sofía Monsalve, 56, was appointed United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food in May. In exchange for throwing herself into an unpaid position, the Colombian political scientist says she enjoys complete independence. “I have the freedom to call things by their name,” she tells EL PAÍS in Turin during Terra Madre, the gathering of the international sustainable food network Slow Food.
The No Kings movement, which organized the largest protests against the government so far during Donald Trump’s second term, is taking its mobilization to the polls to promote early voting ahead of the midterms. The goal is to get as many voters as possible to cast ballots before November 3, the official day of the midterm elections, to counter abstention and problems that could arise at a time when, they say, the government is doing everything it can to restrict the right to vote.
The United States on Wednesday lifted sanctions against Jorge Rodríguez, president of Venezuela’s National Assembly and brother of the South American country’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, the Treasury Department reported.
Washington has stepped on the accelerator to renew Venezuela’s Supreme Tribunal. It is its first major democratizing initiative in the country and the main task of the negotiation table between the 2015 National Assembly and the government of Delcy Rodríguez, which meets again this Wednesday. The goal is to have a new court by December, but beyond the outline the United States published last week, nothing is as yet known about the timetables, the profiles sought, the procedures to challenge appointments and how civil society will take part in a process crucial to a country that is supposedly moving toward a democratic transition.
© Ariana Cubillos (AP)
On Tuesday, three weeks before the midterms, the White House went back to its news conferences after a 47-day hiatus following the departure of former press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Her successor, Katie Zacharia, made a very brief appearance in which she only took three questions and fell short of the cool aplomb with which Leavitt made a name for herself defending the policies of her boss, President Donald Trump, resorting to lies when necessary.
© WILL OLIVER (Pool/EFE)
The government of acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez has handed Álvaro Pulido — Álex Saab’s Colombian-born associate who had been held in Caracas since 2023 — over to the United States. The transfer was announced Sunday on X by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, while the Venezuelan government has remained silent on the case.
© DEA
Despite years of political defeats in Texas, Democrats are hoping that the 2026 midterm elections will finally turn a Senate seat in the staunchly red state purple. James Talarico, a rising star within the party, is seen as one of the keys to achieving that new shade. For Republicans, he has become one of the biggest challenges in this closely contested campaign. So much so that a substantial share of the money being spent in the race has gone not toward promoting their controversial Senate candidate, Attorney General Ken Paxton, but toward attacking his opponent.
© Eric Gay (AP)
“What plague?” an Irkutsk resident exclaims when the epidemiological crisis that has put this small Siberian city near Mongolia on the front pages over the past week is mentioned. “Do you see me wearing a mask?” the annoyed clerk at a pharmacy retorts when asked whether she has noticed any concern over reports of quarantines and the death of a laboratory worker. “Whatever the authorities say, we’ll obey. We all obey the authorities,” say two elderly women, carefree as they sit on swings in a park in Shelekhov, the suburb that their own governor advised people not to visit due to “a particularly dangerous infection.”
The United States has sent spy drones to Colombia and Ecuador to support both countries’ actions against organized crime, two military sources told the newspaper The New York Times. The aircraft involved are an undetermined number of MQ-9 Reapers that had been stationed in Africa. Although their primary roles are linked to surveillance, they can be used in offensive operations. The arrival of these aircraft, announced by Colombia in August, cements Washington’s growing active role in the operations of the armed forces of the two South American countries, which in recent months have agreed to begin “joint operations.”
© William Rio Rosado (EFE)
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