Serena Williams was eliminated from the U.S. Open on Friday in what may be the last match of her illustrious career but the impact she had on the game she dominated for over two decades will be felt for generations to come.

Williams, who made her professional debut in 1995 a year after her older sister Venus, has been one of the game’s most marketable stars. She has a slew of corporate partners and in 2019 became the first athlete to land on Forbes’ list of America’s richest self-made women.

Williams, 40, who also lost in the U.S. Open doubles competition alongside sister Venus, said in a Vogue article last month that she was “evolving away from tennis” and added in an Instagram post that “the countdown has begun.”

While Williams has not stated precisely when her last tournament is, U.S. Open organizers feted her with an elaborate farewell ceremony after her first-round match on Monday.

Williams revolutionized women’s tennis with a lethal mix of powerful serves, groundstrokes and superb athleticism and became the most successful player in the Open Era by collecting 23 Grand Slam titles, the most recent coming in 2017.

That success also inspired a generation of tennis players, including Naomi Osaka, who beat Williams in the 2018 U.S. Open final to claim the first of her four majors and remembers watching her childhood idol.

“When I was younger, the family event would be watching Serena and Venus,” said Osaka, who has Japanese and Haitian parents.

“So when I was watching that, that pushed me a lot. I never got to watch them play live, in a match, but I’ve gotten to watch their practices. Seeing that, seeing people that look like me, it’s definitely inspiring.”

Women’s rights

Throughout her career, Williams has been outspoken about the culture of racism that she and her family, including Venus, were subjected to within a predominantly white sport.

At the peak of her career, Williams began what amounted to a 14-year boycott of a marquee tennis tournament in Indian Wells, California, after suffering racist jeers there in 2001, an incident which she said left her crying in the locker room for hours.

In 2018, she accused officials of allowing a culture of sexism to run rampant in the sport, with women players being penalized for things that her male counterparts would never be punished for.

After being handed a series of code violations during the U.S. Open final defeat by Osaka, Williams was particularly upset when she was docked a game for verbal abuse after telling the umpire he was “a thief” for taking a point off her for a previous infringement.

“I’m here fighting for women’s rights and for women’s equality…. he’s never taken a game from a man because they said ‘thief,'” Williams said at the time.

Tennis pioneer Billie Jean King was among many who praised her for exposing the “double standard” that disadvantages female players.

“In this society, women are not taught or expected to be that future leader or future CEO,” Williams told British Vogue in 2020. “The narrative has to change. And maybe it doesn’t get better in time for me, but someone in my position can show women and people of color that we have a voice because Lord knows I use mine.

“I love sticking up for people and supporting women. Being the voice that millions of people don’t have.”

Williams also pushed the boundaries of fashion on the tennis court, perhaps most notably at the 2018 French Open when she took the court wearing a skin-tight black catsuit with a red waistband – which she said helped her to cope with blood clots that threatened her life when she gave birth to her daughter just months earlier.

The thought of women players turning up in such unconventional tennis attire, however, ruffled the Roland Garros establishment, who then banned such outfits from the Paris major.

Author Howard Bryant, who wrote The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism, said in a report on tennis.com that Williams’ career will be seen as a dividing line when it comes to how women and Black athletes are talked about.

“With her standing, and her empire, she’s created a counter-voice and a new perspective,” Bryant said in the report.

“It’s changed how we scrutinize behavior. You can’t just gang up on her or make off-handed comments about her body. She has the stature of any great male athlete.

“In 100 years, if we ask, when did that shift happen, we’ll come back to Serena.”
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California and much of the western United States are in the grip of a searing heat wave. Mike O’Sullivan reports from Los Angeles on how communities are coping.
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A U.S. judge on Friday unsealed a detailed list of government documents and other items seized from former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate last month.

The eight-page inventory doesn’t describe the subjects of the seized materials, but it confirms the Justice Department’s assertion that highly classified government documents were intermixed with other items at the Trump residence, in apparent violation of federal law.

The FBI executed the August 8 search of Trump’s property as part of a months-long investigation into how hundreds of classified government documents ended up there after Trump left office in January 2021.

The Justice Department last month released a list of items FBI agents took during the search, but the former president later asked a federal judge to both appoint an independent “special master” to review the documents and to order the release of a more detailed inventory.

Federal Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida ordered the unsealing of the inventory report after hearing arguments on Thursday by Trump’s lawyers and federal prosecutors over Trump’s request.

Federal prosecutors opposed Trump’s request for a special master, saying a Justice Department special team has already conducted a review of the documents and identified “privileged” material that may need to be returned to the former president.

While ordering the release of the inventory, Cannon, however, deferred an immediate decision on Trump’s request for a special master, saying she’ll issue a ruling “in due course.”

In a status review of the seized records, also unsealed Friday, federal prosecutors, wrote that the classified documents, numbering more than 100, have been segregated from the rest of the items and “separately stored in accordance with appropriate procedures governing the security of classified material.”

In a footnote, the prosecutors expressed apparent displeasure at Cannon’s order to release the information.

The evidence seized from Trump’s property, they wrote, “contains the type of information that, in the normal course, would not be shared with the owner of a premises that was searched pursuant to a court authorized search warrant.”

“Without directly saying so, they are suggesting to the court that it erred by making them file this under seal, because you usually wouldn’t, as the subject in a criminal case, get this kind of information at this stage,” a former federal prosecutor said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The inventory lists thousands of items and documents without classification marking, as well as other items, often kept alongside classified documents.

In a box taken from Trump’s office in Mar-a-Lago, 99 “Magazines/Newspapers/Press Articles and other media” from 2017 to 2018 were mixed with two confidential documents, 15 secret documents, and seven top secret documents.

In another box seized from a storage room at the premises, 30 magazines, newspapers and media clippings were intermingled with 11 confidential documents, 21 secret documents, three articles of clothing/gift items, one book, and 255 unclassified documents and photographs.
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U.S. employers hired slightly more workers than expected in August, keeping the Federal Reserve on track to deliver a third 75 basis points interest rate hike this month, though the unemployment rate increased to 3.7%.

Nonfarm payrolls increased by 315,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department said in its closely watched employment report on Friday. Data for July was revised slightly down to show payrolls surging 526,000 instead of 528,000 as previously reported. That marked the 20th straight month of job growth.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast payrolls increasing 300,000. Estimates ranged from as low as 75,000 to as high as 450,000. The unemployment rate increased to 3.7% from a a pre-pandemic low of 3.5% in July.

The employment report came a week after Fed Chair Jerome Powell warned Americans of a painful period of slow economic growth and possibly rising unemployment as the U.S. central bank aggressively tightens monetary policy to quell inflation.

Solid job growth last month was further evidence that the economy continues to expand even as gross domestic product contracted in the first half of the year and was another sign the Fed still needs to cool the labor market despite the front loading of rate hikes.

The Fed has twice raised its policy rate by three-quarters of a percentage point in June and July. Since March, it has lifted that rate from near zero to its current range of 2.25% to 2.50%. Financial markets are pricing a roughly 70% probability of a 75 basis points increase at the Fed’s Sept. 20-21 policy meeting, according to CME’s FedWatch Tool.

August consumer price data due mid-month will also be a major factor in determining the size of the next rate increase. Despite rising recession risks, the labor market continues to chart its own path. There were 11.2 million job openings on the last day of July, with two job openings for every unemployed person. First-time applications for unemployment benefits are running very low by historical standards.

Economists attributed the labor market resilience to businesses hoarding workers after experiencing difficulties in the past year as the COVID-19 pandemic forced some people out of the workforce in part because of prolonged illness caused by the disease.

With legal immigration slowing, they say fewer workers are likely to become a permanent reality for employers. There is also pent-up demand for workers in service industries like restaurants and airlines, which are among the sectors hardest hit by the pandemic. The labor force participation rate, or the proportion of working-age Americans who have a job or are looking for one remains more than a full percentage point below its pre-pandemic level.

Average hourly earnings rose 0.3% in August after increasing 0.5% in July. That kept the annual increase in wages at 5.2% in August.

Strong wage gains are keeping the income side of the economic growth ledger expanding, though at a moderate pace, and a recession at bay for now.
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A pair of reports issued this week have combined to illustrate the deep and lasting impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the United States, documenting both declining educational outcomes for young students and a sharp decline in life expectancy for Americans in general.

A special assessment by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) focused on a nationally representative sample of 9-year-olds. It documented the sharpest ever drop in reading achievement between 2019, the year before the pandemic, and the early months of 2022. It also documented the first-ever decline in achievement in mathematics over the same time period.

A separate report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) documented a further decline in life expectancy in the U.S., first identified in 2021. According to the findings, the average American’s life expectancy fell by nearly a year from 2020 to 2021, and by 2.7 years between 2019 and 2021.

As the country heads toward its third winter of the pandemic, the two studies demonstrate that even as Americans have, to some degree or another, returned to normal life despite the pandemic, its effects will continue to play out over the months and years to come.

Students struggling

Educators have been concerned about the impact that the transition to virtual learning had on students, as many schools were closed to in-person classes for much of 2020 and 2021. This prompted the National Center for Education Statistics to undertake its special assessment of 9-year-olds.

“We have all been concerned about the short- and longer-term impacts of the pandemic on our children,” Peggy G. Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said in a statement accompanying the findings.

“There’s been much speculation about how shuttered schools and interrupted learning may have affected students’ opportunities to learn,” she said. “Our own data reveal the pandemic’s toll on education in other ways, including increases in students seeking mental health services, absenteeism, school violence and disruption, cyberbullying and nationwide teacher and staff shortages.”

The NAEP report looks at the change in academic proficiency overall, but also at the change within specific cohorts. It breaks the student population into those who score in the 90th percentile or above, as well as those at the 75th, 50th, 25th and 10th percentiles.

The study found declines in proficiency in both math and reading across all percentiles. However, they were greatest among those in the lowest percentiles. That means that the children in the 10th percentile not only showed lower proficiency than those in higher percentiles in 2022, but that they performed worse than other children in the 10th percentile in 2019.

“COVID-19 disruptions may have exacerbated many of the challenges we were already facing,” Carr said. “We know that students who struggle the most have fallen further behind their peers.”

Life expectancy drops

In 2019, the year prior to the pandemic, the life expectancy of the average American was 79 years. According to the data released by the CDC this week though, that had fallen to just a little more than 76 years by 2021, two years into the pandemic. It was a precipitous drop for the population in general, and was far worse for specific demographic groups.

The decline was most pronounced among Native Americans and Alaska Natives, whose already-low life expectancy of 71.8 years in 2019 had tumbled to 65.2 years by 2021. Black Americans’ average life expectancy fell by four years, from 74.8 in 2019 to 70.8 in 2021.

Over the same time period, the life expectancy for Hispanic Americans fell from 81.9 to 77.7 years, while that of Asian Americans fell from 85.6 to 83.5. White Americans’ life expectancy dropped from 78.8 years to 76.4 years.

Pandemic to blame

Noreen Goldman, the Hughes-Rogers professor of demography and public affairs at the Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs, told VOA that the “vast majority” of the decline is due to the pandemic.

She said that much of the blame lies with a disjointed and ineffective public health response to COVID-19, even after effective vaccines were available and successful mitigation techniques had been identified.

“That put the U.S. in this just horrific situation of inexcusable loss of life expectancy, which I think is embarrassing and disgraceful,” she said.

However, Goldman noted that other factors were at play as well.

“The U.S. has had worse life expectancy than its peer countries — other high-income countries — for a very long time,” she said. “Lower life expectancy comes along with higher rates of chronic disease, higher rates of heart disease, cancer and diabetes, the highest rate of obesity in the world.”

In a study published by the Lancet early this year, researchers looked at the decline in life expectancy across 29 different countries between 2019 and 2020. The countries included most of Europe as well as Chile and the U.S. The study found that the decline in life expectancy in the U.S. during that period was greater than in any other country.
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The United States is at a dangerous junction in its battle to maintain democracy, President Joe Biden believes — and in a rousing speech from Philadelphia on Thursday night, he laid the blame at the feet of one man.

“There’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans,” Biden said, referring to Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan, Make America Great Again. “And that is a threat to this country.”

Biden drew a dark picture of his opponents’ vision for America as he spoke in front of the hall where the nation’s founders wrote and debated both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, nearly 250 years ago.

He spoke for 25 minutes, and in that time, said one word no fewer than 25 times: democracy.

He used the word as a cudgel against Trump-aligned Republicans who echo Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen; who work to suppress voter turnout in key states; and who participated in the violent insurrection attempt at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“History tells us that blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is fatal to democracy,” he said “For a long time, we’ve told ourselves that American democracy is guaranteed. But it’s not. We have to defend it. Protect it. Stand up for it.”

In a refutation delivered ahead of the speech, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy accused Biden of divisiveness and blamed Democrats for rising inflation, crime and government spending.

“In the past two years, Joe Biden has launched an assault on the soul of America, on its people, on its laws, on its most sacred values,” he said. “He has launched an assault on our democracy. His policies have severely wounded America’s soul, diminished America’s spirit and betrayed America’s trust.”

Biden’s condemnation earned him hecklers, who shouted obscenities in his direction as he spoke. Going momentarily off-script, he responded.

“Those folks over there, they’re entitled to be outrageous,” he said. “This is a democracy.”

But he also used the word to reflect what he believes is a better future, led by his party, whose recent legislative gains he touted as proof. Since taking office, Biden has shepherded through major legislation that his administration says will bring about economic recovery, massive infrastructure improvements, gun safety, affordable health care, clean energy and climate change reduction.

“Together, together, we can choose a different path,” he said. “We can choose a better path forward to the future. A future of possibility, a future to build a dream and hope – and we’re on that path moving ahead.”

This is Biden’s second visit to the Keystone State this week. Pennsylvania is a competitive state in what is shaping up as a battleground between Biden’s Democrats and Trump’s Republicans in midterm elections later this year.

Earlier in the day, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stressed that this was not intended as a stump speech.

“This is so much broader, so much bigger than any one party, than any one person,” she said. “And it’s an optimistic speech, again, about where we are as a nation and where we can go. And it’s about the fundamental struggle around the globe between autocracy and democracy and how democracy is a critical foundation for this country to move forward.”

Analysts question that, as Biden’s recent legislative victories and priorities don’t overlap much with the themes of his speech.

“We’re beginning to see what issues that Democrats see as being advantageous: guns are one, democracy is another,” said William Howell, a professor of American politics at the University of Chicago. ”And it’s interesting, too, that he didn’t do much legislatively on either of those domains. And yet those are the ones he’s talking about, but not with an eye towards passing policy now but with an eye towards reshaping the composition of Congress.”

Historians who study presidential rhetoric say Biden’s tone has shifted noticeably as the November polls have gotten closer.

“I believe the sharper rhetoric from the president and other Democrats is working,” said Jeremi Suri, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “There’s evidence that many independent voters – not Trump voters, many independent voters – particularly women, even in conservative states, like Texas and Kansas, are fed up with Republican obstructionism. And quite frankly, they’re fed up with the news of law-breaking by the former president. The more Trump is in the news, the better the Democrats look.”

After the speech, Suri noted that Biden’s words may now put his opponents on a back foot.

“Biden’s speech forces Republicans like [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell and McCarthy to either defend or renounce MAGA Republicans — no way to avoid the issue when commenting on this speech,” he said.

But on this night in Philadelphia — as the president urged Americans to “vote, vote, vote” — he closed with a picture of the country he sees.

“We are the United States of America, the United States of America,” he said, stressing the word “united.” “And may God protect our nation. And may God protect all those who stand watch over our democracy. God bless you all. Democracy. Thank you.”
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