--:-- Host: Tracy Mumford: From the New York Times, it's the headlines. Today's Wednesday, November 20th.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Donald Trump has made another unconventional pick for his cabinet, choosing Linda McMahon, who has almost no background in education, for secretary of education.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: McMahon is a former wrestling executive who led WWE. She's also a close personal friend of Trump's, who served during his first term running the Small Business Administration.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Trump has repeatedly talked about getting rid of the Department of Education altogether, but that would require congressional action.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Instead, Times reporter Erica Green says that McMahon, if she's confirmed, will likely upend the department from the inside at Trump's request.
--:-- Erica Green: Like many conservatives, President-elect Donald Trump believes that the Department of Education has inserted itself into issues that it shouldn't be a part of, such as race, gender, that it delivers edicts on what students should be taught and how, and ultimately has taken power away from parents.
--:-- Erica Green: There are some clues about where McMahon might focus first. She's the chair of a right-wing think tank that's called for a drastic overhaul of education policy.
--:-- Erica Green: That includes stopping schools from promoting, quote, unpatriotic concepts about institutionalized racism and expanding voucher programs that would direct more public funds to homeschooling or private or religious schools.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: All of this is expected to happen when schools are combating a series of crises. Student test scores are among the lowest they've ever been.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Colleges are facing enrollment crises. And both K-12 and college campuses are struggling to climb back to the levels of performance that they were at before the pandemic.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And as the nation's schools and colleges have struggled to recover from a lot of the damage they have experienced in recent years, education advocates fear that Trump plans for the department could set them back even further.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Yesterday Trump continued his trend of selecting television personalities to lead federal agencies.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: He said he plans to nominate Dr. Mehmet Oz, best known as TV's Dr. Oz, to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees health insurance programs for more than 150 million Americans.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And Trump tapped the Wall Street executive Howard Lutnick to be Commerce Secretary.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: It's increasingly one of the most powerful economic positions in the government.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The primary responsibility is advocating for U.S. business interests overseas, which could put Lutnick at the center of discussions on tariffs and trade wars.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In Congress, the fight over transgender rights has taken a personal turn.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: This week, Republican Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina said she plans to call for a ban on transgender women using women's restrooms on Capitol Hill.
--:-- Nancy Mace: Is this effort in response to Congresswoman McBride's coming to Congress? Yes, and absolutely, and then some. I'm not going to stand.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Mace has been explicit that she's specifically targeting Sarah McBride, a newly elected Democratic representative from Delaware, who's the first openly trans member of Congress.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: House Republicans have spent the last few years routinely proposing national anti-trans legislation, and now some are signaling they'll support this measure in their own workplace.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Meanwhile, Democrats on the Hill reacted to the proposal with outrage, calling it disgusting and cruel.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: For the moment, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has been noncommittal about how far the measure will get.
--:-- Mike Johnson: A man is a man, and a woman is a woman. And a man cannot become a woman. But I also believe that we treat everybody with dignity.
--:-- Mike Johnson: And so we can do and believe all those things at the same time. And I wanted to make that clear for everybody.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In a statement, McBride herself wrote, Quote, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a reward yesterday $5 million to anyone who returns one of the hostages still being held in Gaza.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The hostages were taken over a year ago during Hamas' attack on Israel.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: About 100 are still being held, though several dozen of them are believed to be dead.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Many Israelis, including the hostages' families, have accused Netanyahu of not prioritizing the hostages' release.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: They say he's resisted making a ceasefire deal to free them, and instead prolonged the war for his own political gain.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The prime minister made the reward announcement while in the Gaza Strip, where he was visiting Israeli troops.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: He said that anyone who returns a hostage will also receive safe passage out of Gaza for themselves and their family.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: This week started with a Monday that was by some counts the absolute worst air pollution there's been over Delhi for about eight years.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: It felt like we got bombed with a pea soup kind of fog or smog over the whole city. You could not see the sun in the middle of the day and most of us can feel it also in your lungs, in your eyes.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Maybe you get headachy. Maybe you get tired.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: My colleague Alex Trevely is a correspondent based in India's capital, New Delhi, where the air quality index soared to more than 1,700 this week.
--:-- Alex Trevely: Anything above 300 is considered hazardous.
--:-- Alex Trevely: While this particular stretch has been brutal, the city is caught in a cycle where thick, smothering air pollution settles on Delhi every November.
--:-- Alex Trevely: As the temperature drops on this part of the Indian plains, backed up against the Himalaya mountain range, it becomes impossible for air to refresh itself.
--:-- Alex Trevely: Wind patterns change, and all of the ordinary pollutants hangs over us in a great choking haze.
--:-- Alex Trevely: There are a lot of contributing factors. There's vehicle pollution. There's fields that have been cleared for harvest.
--:-- Alex Trevely: Farmers burn down the stubble around this time of year to clear it for the next crop. There are firecrackers on Diwali.
--:-- Alex Trevely: Depending on where you stand in society, you might have a very different experience of this kind of pollution.
--:-- Alex Trevely: What you might call upper middle class or wealthy households many now have air purifiers.
--:-- Alex Trevely: But that's proportionally a really tiny part of the population.
--:-- Alex Trevely: Most people are left to fend for themselves.
--:-- Alex Trevely: You see a lot of people tying big pieces of fabric up around their face, or maybe they have some N95 type masks left over from the pandemic.
--:-- Alex Trevely: But it's got so bad that this one very prominent member of parliament wrote, perhaps mockingly, that if the air is unbreathable, if the city is unlivable from November to January each year, should it even be the capital?
--:-- Alex Trevely: Should India's capital be moved to some other place?
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And finally. You hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Les Mis is one of the most famous musicals in the world.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: It's been performed in 22 languages and seen by over 100 million people.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But ironically, the tale of uprising and rebellion has never been a hit in France, despite being set in France, adapted from a French novel, and having two Frenchmen as the show's creators.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: It's only been performed in Paris twice since it debuted in the 1980s, which means more musical theater kids in Kansas probably know the words than anyone in France.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Some of it's because musicals in general were just not popular in the country for a while.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Critics didn't love it either. One French journalist called the show deplorably foolish and vulgar.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Even the film adaptation with Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway didn't win over French audiences.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But a new stage production opening today in Paris thinks it can change that.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The producers have reworked the lyrics, modernized the production, and have a more diverse cast.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And this time, France appears to be ready to embrace its musical offspring.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The initial run is nearly sold out.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Those are the headlines.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Today on The Daily, why breast reduction surgeries are becoming more popular among young women in the U.S.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.
