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Who is Claudia Sheinbaum, the scientist who will head Mexico as its first female president?

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — Claudia Sheinbaum takes office Tuesday as Mexico’s first female president in the nation’s more than 200 years of independence.

The 62-year-old former Mexico City mayor and lifelong leftist campaigned on a promise of continuity, of protecting and expanding the signature initiatives of her mentor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

In the four months between her election and inauguration she held that line, backing López Obrador on issues big and small. But Sheinbaum is a very different person; she likes data and doesn’t have López Obrador’s backslapping personal touch.

Mexico now waits to see if she will step out of his shadow.

What’s Sheinbaum’s background?

Sheinbaum’s background is in science. She has a Ph.D. in energy engineering. Her brother is a physicist. In a 2023 interview with The Associated Press, Sheinbaum said, “I believe in science.”

Observers say that grounding showed itself in Sheinbaum’s actions as mayor during the COVID-19 pandemic, when her city of some 9 million people took a different approach from what López Obrador espoused at the national level.

She comes from an older, more solidly left tradition that predates López Obrador’s nationalistic, populist movement.

Colombia’s President, Gustavo Petro, dropped a bit of a bombshell before Sheinbaum’s inauguration, telling reporters she had been a sympathizer of Colombia’s leftist guerrilla group, M-19 — the group that Petro himself once belonged to — and that she helped out exiled rebel fighters when they passed through Mexico. “A lot of Mexicans came to help us, and among them was Claudia.”

While Sheinbaum’s office did not immediately respond to queries about Petro’s comments, the idea is not improbable: Sheinbaum comes from a far more traditionally ‘leftist’ background than López Obrador, and has herself said she belonged to a number of leftist youth groups during her university years, at a time when they would have supported rebel groups in Central America and South America.

Her parents were leading activists in Mexico’s 1968 student movement, which ended tragically in a government massacre of hundreds of student demonstrators in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco plaza just days before the Summer Olympics opened there that year.

Sheinbaum is also the first president with a Jewish background in the largely Catholic country.

What did her victory look like?

Sheinbaum led wire to wire and won convincingly in June with almost 60% of the vote, about double the number of her nearest competitor, Xóchitl Gálvez.

As López Obrador’s chosen successor, she enjoyed the boost of the high popularity he maintained throughout his six years in office.

The opposition’s coalition led by Gálvez struggled to gain traction, while support for the governing party carried over to Congress, where voters gave Morena and its allies margins that allowed it to pass important constitutional changes before López Obrador left office.

Where does she stand on recent contentious issues?

Before passage of a controversial constitutional overhaul of Mexico’s judiciary that will make all judges stand for election, Sheinbaum stood with López Obrador who had pushed it.

Sheinbaum said “the reforms to the judicial system will not affect our commercial relations, nor private Mexican investments, nor foreign ones. Rather the opposite, there will be a greater and better rule of law and democracy for everyone.”

Shortly after, when López Obrador’s proposal to put the National Guard under military command was being considered, Sheinbaum defended it against critics. She said it would not militarize the country and that the National Guard would respect human rights.

And just days before she took office, Sheinbaum stood with López Obrador in his long-running diplomatic spat with Spain. She defended her decision to not invite Spain’s King Felipe VI to her inauguration, saying in part that the king had failed to apologize for Spain’s conquest of Mexico as López Obrador had demanded years earlier.

How important is her election for Mexican women?

Sheinbaum’s victory came 70 years after women won the right to vote in Mexico.

The race really came down to two women, Sheinbaum and Gálvez, but Mexico’s prevailing machismo still pushed both women to explain why they thought they could be president.

Since 2018, Mexico’s Congress has had a 50-50 gender split, in part due to gender quotas set for party candidates. Still, Sheinbaum inherits a country with soaring levels of violence against women.

There are also still many parts of the country, especially rural Indigenous areas where men hold all the power. And some 2.5 million women toil in domestic work where despite reforms they continue to face low pay, abuse by employers, long hours and unstable working conditions.

Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that national laws prohibiting abortions are unconstitutional and violate women’s rights.

Although the Mexican ruling orders the removal of abortion from the federal penal code and requires federal health institutions to offer the procedure to anyone who requests it, further state-by-state legal work is pending to remove all penalties.

Feminists say that simply electing a woman as president does not guarantee she will govern with a gender perspective. Both Sheinbaum and López Obrador have been criticized before for appearing to lack empathy toward women protesting against gender violence.

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One man dead, two injured after shots fired in Mississauga, Ont., break-in: police

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MISSISSAUGA, Ont. – Police say one man is dead and two others were injured after shots were fired during a break-in at a home in Mississauga, Ont.

Peel regional police say they responded to a call around 3:45 a.m. Tuesday near Joan Drive and Central Parkway.

Police say it’s believed three suspects broke into the house and an altercation took place before shots were fired.

Investigators say they believe the man who died was shot, while the other two injured men were not.

Police say those two men were sent to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Police did not immediately offer any description of the three suspects who they say fled the scene.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 1, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Salman Rushdie, Percival Everett and Miranda July are National Book Award finalists

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NEW YORK (AP) — Salman Rushdie’s memoir a bout his near-fatal stabbing, “Knife,” and Percival Everett’s revisionist historical novel, “James,” are among the finalists for the 75th annual National Book Awards. Others nominated include author-filmmaker Miranda July for her explicit novel on middle age, “All Fours,” and the celebrated Canadian poet Anne Carson for “Wrong Norma.”

On Tuesday, the National Book Foundation announced finalists in fiction, nonfiction, young people’s literature, poetry and books in translation. Judges in each category pared long lists of 10 unveiled last month to five final selections. Winners will be announced during a Nov. 20 dinner ceremony in Manhattan, when honorary prizes will be presented to novelist Barbara Kingsolver and publisher-activist W. Paul Coates.

In fiction, nominees besides “James” and “All Fours” are Pemi Aguda’s debut story collection, “Ghostroots”: Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, “Martyr!,” Hisham Mayar’s “Friend,” a novel by the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir “The Return.”

Four of the five fiction books, including “James,” were published by Penguin Random House. Everett’s novel, which re-tells “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of the enslaved man Mark Twain had named Jim, is also a Booker Prize finalist and among the year’s most acclaimed works. Among the books on the fiction long list that judges left out of the final choices was Rachel Kushner’s “Creation Lake,” another Booker finalist.

Rushdie’s “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” is a nonfiction finalist, along with Jason De León’s “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling,” Eliza Griswold’s “Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church,” Kate Manne’s “Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia” and Deborah Jackson Taffa’s “Whiskey Tender.”

“Knife” is the first National Book Award nomination for the 77-year-old Rushdie, who was living overseas and ineligible at the time he published the Booker Prize-winning “Midnight’s Children’s” and other works. A native of India who lived for years in London, Rushdie became a U.S. citizen in 2016. The prolific Everett, author of more than 20 books and the recipient of several awards, is also a first-time nominee.

The poetry list includes Carson’s “Wrong Norma,” Fady Joudah’s “(…),” m.s. RedCherries’ debut collection “mother,” Diane Seuss’ “Modern Poetry” and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s “Something About Living.” In young people’s literature, the finalists are Violet Duncan’s “Buffalo Dreamer,” Josh Galarza’s “The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky,” Erin Entrada Kelly’s “The First State of Being,” Shifa Saltagi Safadi’s “Kareem Between” and Angela Shanté’s “The Unboxing of a Black Girl.”

Two books originally written in Arabic are on the translated works list: Bothayna Al-Essa’s “The Book Censor’s Library,” translated by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain, and Samar Yazbek’s “Where the Wind Calls Home,” translated by Leri Price. The other finalists are Linnea Axelsson’s “Ædnan,” translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel, Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s “The Villain’s Dance,” translated from the French by Roland Glasser, and Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s “Taiwan Travelogue,” translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King.”

Judging panels in each category made their selections from hundreds of submissions, with publishers nominating more than 1,900 books in all.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, looks back in memoir ‘Be Ready When the Luck Happens’

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NEW YORK (AP) — Long before Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa mini-empire of bestselling cookbooks and TV shows ever took off, she found herself at an airport, wanting to learn to fly.

It was the late 1960s and she was a newlywed in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She and her soldier-husband, Jeffrey, would often pass a small private airport and Garten was intrigued.

She marched into the terminal to find out about taking flying lessons. “I’m really sorry,” the guy at the desk told her, “but we don’t have anybody who’ll teach a girl how to fly.”

Do you think that stopped Ina Garten?

The story of how she refused to budge until she got lessons in a cockpit is included in her new memoir, “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” which distills stories from her life into lessons for foodies and non-foodies, alike.

“I wanted it to be fun to read because otherwise nobody would read this,” she tells The Associated Press. “I wanted it to be stories from my life, but I also wanted each story to have a point — in the way you could take a recipe away and make a chocolate cake, I want you to take the idea away and be able to use it in your life.”

Revisiting key moments and her marriage

The memoir — written with help from writer Deborah Davis — is packed with stories of Garten pushing for her vision, not least when in 1978 she spotted an ad in The New York Times and on a whim bought a little specialty food store in the Hamptons called Barefoot Contessa.

At the time, she was 30, writing policies on nuclear energy at the White House and had never worked in food, outside of re-selling Dunkin’ Donuts to hungry students in her dorm room in college.

“It sounded a little crazy, but I was out of my mind with excitement. I didn’t know if it would be the best decision or the worst mistake I ever made,” she writes of the store, named after a 1954 Ava Gardner movie but perfectly summing up her philosophy of both elegant and earthy.

Garten would, of course, turn it into a global, inviting brand thanks to her keen eye for quality and dedication to sourcing the finest ingredients. She also put in the long hours, learning each dish and even sleeping in the store.

“The process of writing the book really kind of gave me confidence that this wasn’t just luck — that I had actually worked really hard for it with determination and vision,” she says “I stuck with what I wanted. And my life has turned out so much better than I could have even dreamed.”

Fans know much of her story already since her cookbooks are filled with personal anecdotes, but they may not know about her chilly childhood in Connecticut.

She describes her father as abusive at times, a man who told her when she was 15 that no one would ever love her. Her mother was distant and used food as a source of control, serving broiled chicken or fish with canned peas and carrots. “I spent my early life searching — no, begging — for flavor,” she writes.

That early nightmare helped her down the road. “My childhood, because it was so painful, it gave me enormous empathy for people,” she says. That meant she could read customers, putting herself in their shoes.

Readers will also learn for the first time about her six-month separation from Jeffrey, which took them to the brink of divorce. Their relationship has lately been heralded on social media — #couplegoals or #relationshipgoals — as an ideal partnership, but Gartner reveals it took work.

After finding her new career path, Garten rebelled at the traditional domestic chores expected of her — cooking, cleaning, shopping, managing. “When I bought Barefoot Contessa, I shattered our traditional roles — took a baseball bat to them and left them in pieces,” she writes. Following some time apart, the couple agreed to meet each other halfway.

“There are lessons that any reader can find throughout, specifically about persistence and trusting yourself and your instincts and also taking chances,” says Gillian Blake, executive vice president, publisher and editor-in-chief of Crown & Currency.

“I think there’s a thematic resonance between the way she’s taught people how to cook and the way she teases out these inspirational lessons for larger life questions.”

Taylor Swift, Elmo and courage

Garten may be known for her approachability, but she admits to having a stubborn streak — “a barrier to me isn’t a stop sign; it’s a call to action,” she writes — and she isn’t a blushing flower. She once worked in the backroom of a strip club.

She writes that she faced off both a robber at gunpoint who wanted $50 and a bank officer who wouldn’t make a loan to her business because she was a woman and likely would soon have babies.

There are also lighter stories about a memorable lunch with Mel Brooks, and meeting Elmo, Jennifer Garner and Taylor Swift, plus a boozy tale of playing beer bong with soccer star Abby Wambach.

There are practical lessons — like standing up for yourself, even when it’s hard or taking a risk. Find just one person who really believes in you, she argues.

“People who are well known and successful aren’t there because they are smarter, more creative. It’s because they hit a wall and they just said, ‘I don’t even see the wall. I’m going to get around the wall. I really want to do this and I’m going to figure it out,’” she says.

“One thing I learned by doing the book, which surprised me, is I had a lot more courage than I thought I had. And I realized that those things that I did with courage were the making of my life.”

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