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Average rate on a 30-year mortgage in the US rises to highest level since July
Nov 21, 2024Tap to summarizeThe average rate on a 30-year mortgage in the U.S. edged closer to 7% this week as it climbed to its highest level since July. The rate rose to 6.84% from 6.78% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. That’s still down from a year ago, when the rate averaged 7.29%. Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners seeking to refinance their home loan to a lower rate, also ticked up this week. The average rate rose to 6.02% from 5.99% last week. A year ago, it averaged 6.67%, Freddie Mac said. When mortgage rates increase they can add hundreds of dollars a month in costs for borrowers, reducing homebuyers’ purchasing power at a time when home prices remain near all-time highs, even though U.S. home sales are on track for their worst year since 1995. While the average rate on a 30-year mortgage fell to a two-year low of 6.08% in late September, it’s been mostly rising since then, echoing moves in the 10-year Treasury yield, which lenders use as a guide to pricing home loans. The yield, which has mostly hovered around 4.4% since last week and was below 3.70% in September, has been rising in recent weeks following mixed reports on inflation and the economy. It also surged after the presidential election, reflecting expectations among investors that President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed economic policies may widen the federal deficit and crank up inflation. The average rate on a 30-year home loan hasn’t been this high since July 11, when it was 6.89%. Despite its latest uptick, the average rate is still down from 7.22% in May, its peak so far this year. Economists predict that mortgage rates will remain volatile this year, but generally forecast them to hover around 6% in 2025. By ALEX VEIGA AP Business Writer
Transcribe →Lil Wayne, GloRilla and Camila Cabello to headline college football concert series in Atlanta
Nov 21, 2024Tap to summarizeLOS ANGELES (AP) — Lil Wayne, GloRilla and Camila Cabello are gearing up to make their presence felt in a festive concert series leading up to college football’s national championship game. The College Football Playoff announced Thursday that the hitmakers will headline the AT&T Playoff Playlist Live! starting Jan. 18 at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta. The two-night series will be held before the College Football Playoff National Championship on Jan. 20, the same day as the presidential inauguration and the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. “The incredible lineup at this year’s AT&T Playoff Playlist Live! will create unforgettable experiences in Atlanta, where sports and music thrive together,” said Mark Wright, vice president of media services and sponsorships at AT&T. “It’s the perfect way to kick off the championship weekend and keep the exhilaration alive for fans, no matter which team they’re rooting for.” Hip-hop stars Lil Wayne and GloRilla will hit the stage Jan. 18. Singers Camila Cabello, Myles Smith and Knox are expected to perform Jan. 19. Along with the concert series, country music artists Kane Brown and Ashley Cooke will perform at the Allstate Championship Tailgate, which will kick off game day festivities. The tailgate performance will take place outside the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in the Georgia International Plaza and The Home Depot Backyard. Championship game ticket holders will have access to the tailgate concert. Tickets for the Playoff Playlist Live! series will go on sale Nov. 25 at 10 a.m. ET. Previous concert series performers include Lenny Kravitz, Jack Harlow, Latto, Saweetie, Pitbull, Doja Cat, Usher, Meghan Trainor and Sting. By JONATHAN LANDRUM Jr. AP Entertainment Writer
Transcribe →Was it all a joke? How stand-up comedy helped reelect Trump
Nov 21, 2024Tap to summarizeDid stand-up comedians help reelect Donald Trump? Not a joke, as outgoing President Joe Biden might say. Trump has been the butt of countless late-night monologues and “Saturday Night Live” sketches for the better part of a decade, as much of Hollywood tracked the highs and lows of his political career with revulsion and ridicule. But in the weeks leading up to Election Day, he sat for interviews with podcasting comedians who occupy an increasingly popular space where political discourse is mediated through roast-style insults, right-leaning conspiracy theories and mockery of the left. “They’re all sort of simultaneously entertainers and influencers and pundits and — I’ve argued, propagandists — who have massive, loyal fanbases,” said Seth Simons, a journalist who writes a newsletter about the comedy industry’s darker side. The Trump era has coincided with the rise of the hourlong Netflix special and comedy podcast. And while the world of stand-up is as diverse as the nation itself, some of its hottest acts have punched left. Dave Chappelle has repeatedly courted controversy by mocking transgender activists. Bill Burr has roasted feminists with relish, most recently in his post-election “SNL” monologue (“All right, ladies, you’re 0-2 against this guy”). Even Michelle Wolf, who famously roasted Trump at the 2018 White House Correspondents Dinner, has an extended riff in her 2022 special critiquing #MeToo, calling it “the worst-run movement I’ve ever seen.” None of these comics publicly supported Trump, but nonetheless trained their fire on the so-called woke left, a bogeyman of Trump’s campaign. Trump got a warm welcome — but not everyone was amused That’s what seems to have brought Trump, a veteran TV entertainer himself, into the studios of Joe Rogan, the nation’s most listened-to podcaster, and other comedians. He discussed addiction and the opioid crisis with Theo Von, who told the past and future president that “cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie.” On another podcast, Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh laughed out loud as Trump went through his nicknames for political rivals — like “Comrade Kamala” Harris — and recounted his near-assassination. Politicians have long sought to reach voters on alternative platforms. Former President Barack Obama slow jammed the news with Jimmy Fallon, who ruffled Trump’s hair in 2016. Both Obama and Hillary Clinton appeared on Zach Galifianakis’ web series “Between Two Ferns.” Harris appeared on “SNL” days before the election and sat with an array of more earnest podcasters, with less evident success. For Trump, the podcasts were part of a larger effort to reach young male voters — a tactic he says his son Barron, 18, suggested. More than half of male voters ages 18-44 supported Trump, and 45% supported Harris, although Biden won this group in 2020, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters. While politicians’ late-night appearances tend to be carefully scripted affairs, Rogan interviewed Trump for a whopping three hours in a conversation that veered from false claims about the 2020 election to speculation about UFOs and John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Rogan, who supported Bernie Sanders in 2020, subsequently endorsed Trump this cycle. Trump’s interviewers aren’t political comedians; they’re just as likely to chat about internet curiosities, mixed martial arts or weightlifting. Their views seem primarily rooted in suspicion of the establishment, devotion to free speech and openness to alternative — and often unfounded — theories about things like vaccines and immigration. That may have led them to see Trump as a kindred spirit. “The rebels are Republicans now. You want to be a rebel, you want to be punk rock, you want to like buck the system, you’re a conservative now,” Rogan said during the interview, which has nearly 50 million views on YouTube. Simons says Rogan and his acolytes, consciously or not, have shifted what’s acceptable in comedy rightward. “The relationship that people have with these roast comics, these comics who tell racist jokes or sexist jokes, is that they don’t mean what they say, it’s just funny,” Simons said. Marc Maron, whose podcast “WTF” helped birth the genre, called out his fellow comics in a blog post after the Rogan interview. “The anti-woke flank of the new fascism is being driven almost exclusively by comics, my peers,” Maron wrote. “When comedians with podcasts have shameless, self-proclaimed white supremacists and fascists on their show to joke around like they are just entertainers or even just politicians, all it does is humanize and normalize fascism.” A fractured media landscape It wasn’t always like this. Johnny Carson, the king of late night for three decades until his 1992 retirement, steered clear of political controversies to cultivate a mass audience. This was also when most Americans got their news from the “Big Three” television networks. Fast forward to today: Left-leaning hosts of comedy shows across many channels deliver nightly polemics interspersed with news clips. To their critics, comedians like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver are indistinguishable from MSNBC commentators. Comedian Wayne Federman, the author of a history of stand-up, says these hosts can only draw a fraction of Carson’s viewers, removing the economic incentive to appeal widely. “As most late-night hosts seemed openly aligned with (the Democratic National Committee), a market niche opened in the podcast space. Enter Joe Rogan,” he said. Rogan’s show, for which he landed an estimated $250 million deal with Spotify, has become a springboard for up-and-coming comics. “For a lot of comedians right now, following in Joe Rogan’s footsteps and trying to be in his world and emulate him is a smart career move,” Simons said. “I think that’s partly why there are so many Andrew Schulzes and Theo Vons.” Presidential candidate or insult comic? Beyond his podcast appearances, Trump may have benefited more subtly from stand-up’s proliferation. Much was made of Trump’s extemporaneous speaking style — what he referred to as “the weave” — in which his hourlong speeches meandered through stories, digressions, movie references and obscenities. As political speech, it was unconventional, but it bore many of stand-up’s hallmarks: deliberate provocations, trademark punchlines and callbacks eventually wrapping it all together. “Because some of the things he says seem like they’re so off-center, people take it as a joke,” said Shilpa Davé, a University of Virginia professor of media studies. “The kind of comedy that he’s doing doesn’t come off as threatening, it comes off as acceptable.” It also posed problems for journalists covering his speeches: When he said he would be a dictator for a day, or inveighed against “enemies from within,” or promised to round up and deport millions of immigrants in the U.S. without authorization, was he laying out policies or joking around? “You can first denounce what journalists do by having called everything they say ‘fake news,’ and then you can denounce what they expose by saying they just don’t get it — the stand-up comedy defense,” said Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University. There were times when the jokes didn’t land — but they weren’t his. Trump faced outrage after Tony Hinchcliffe, another comedian with a roast-style podcast, referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” and made other racist jokes at a rally. The campaign distanced itself from Hinchcliffe as Puerto Rican celebrities backed Harris and commentators wondered if it would turn off Latino voters. “Imagine bombing so hard you save america from fascism,” comedian Zack Bornstein posted on X. But barely a week later, it was Trump who brought the house down. By JOSEPH KRAUSS Associated Press <a class="foobox" rel="gallery" href="/static/apImages...
Transcribe →Spain and tennis having to cope with the retirement of the great Nadal
Nov 21, 2024Tap to summarizeMALAGA, Spain (AP) — As Rafael Nadal prepared to serve in what turned out to be the last tennis match of his career, a woman’s voice broke the silence from the stands: “You make Spain proud!” Not long after that, Nadal was wiping away tears from his face and waving goodbye to his fans. His farewell from tennis was as emotional as expected when it came in Malaga on Tuesday, too soon for most. Nadal deliberately set up his swansong on a home court but Spain was eliminated in the Davis Cup quarterfinals and he and they couldn’t complete his exalted career with a win. It was also heart-wrenching for his fans across Spain as they saw one of the country’s very best — arguably its greatest sportsperson ever — finally call it quits. “It’s clear that Rafa is the best athlete ever in Spain. He is on a different level than everyone else, by far,” Feliciano López, a former tennis player and the tournament director of the Davis Cup Finals, told The Associated Press. “No disrespect to all other Spanish athletes, and we have very good ones, but no one has been able to inspire the fans the same way that Rafa did.” López, who was Nadal’s teammate in the Davis Cup, compared him to the likes of Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali, all athletes who transcended sports. “There is a very small group of athletes who, during their careers, were able to inspire people in a special way, going beyond sports,” López said. “Rafa belongs to this small group. People everywhere in the world will remember Rafa some 40 or 50 years from now.” Unable to overcome a string of injuries in recent years, the 38-year-old Nadal retired from professional tennis after more than 20 years on tour and 22 Grand Slam titles, two more than Roger Federer and second only to the 24 of Novak Djokovic, the only one of the Big Three still playing. The front pages of Spain’s dailies all talked about Nadal following his farewell match — a 6-4, 6-4 defeat against No. 80 Botic van de Zandschulp of the Netherlands. “It was an honor,” the sports daily AS said. “Thank you, Rafa,” Marca headlined. “Eternal,” Mundo Deportivo said. It’s hard to find any other Spanish athlete coming close to Nadal’s fame and sporting achievements. Other Spaniards who have earned sporting greatness include five-time major golf champion Seve Ballesteros; five-time Tour de France winner Miguel Induráin, two-time NBA champion Pau Gasol; two-time Formula 1 champion Fernando Alonso; six-time MotoGP champion Marc Márquez; and four-time Dakar Rally winner Carlos Sainz. Spain also has a long list of successful soccer players, including World Cup winners Iker Casillas and Andrés Iniesta, but none with a status like a Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi, who have transcended sports like Nadal. Nadal is also a two-time Olympic champion, and was Spain’s flag-bearer during the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro. He is adored in Spain just as much for his victories as he is for his passion and unwavering dedication, and is seen as an example for society in general for his values and humbleness on and off the courts. “Nadal makes us Spaniards feel proud. He represents the values of passion, camaraderie, solidarity. He will always be the image of sport in Spain,” said Clara García, a 35-year-old fan who was in Malaga to watch Nadal. “It’s not easy knowing that he won’t be playing and representing Spain on the courts around the world anymore.” Federer gushed about his friend and longtime foe’s retirement in an open letter. “You made Spain proud, you made the whole tennis world proud. You have always been a role model for kids around the world.” Nadal told the crowd in his farewell ceremony after Spain’s loss that he always “strived to be better and achieve my goals from a place of respect, humility, and I valued all the good things that happened to me. “I’ve tried to be a good person, which was what mattered the most to me, and I hope that you have noticed that.” Fellow tennis pros Djokovic and Serena Williams, as well as former soccer stars David Beckham and other athletes praised Nadal. “Thank you for so many incredible moments and memories as a tennis fan and for everything that you have done to inspire young people around the world,” former England and Real Madrid player Beckham said. “My goodness, you will be missed,” Williams said. Carlos Alcaraz, regarded as Nadal’s heir in Spanish tennis — he already has four Grand Slam titles at 21 — said it will be hard to avoid the inevitable pressure that will come along with following in the footsteps of his idol. “I don’t want to think that we have to continue his legacy. I don’t want it to be a frustration if we don’t reach the level that he reached,” Alcaraz said. “If I achieve half of what he achieved, I will be happy. His legacy is going to be eternal.” It wasn’t quite clear what the future would hold for Nadal, who is an avid golfer and who has always been linked to Real Madrid. He has said in the past he would probably enjoy being the club’s president one day. “My life will change radically,” Nadal said on Wednesday after arriving home in Mallorca, where he also has the Rafa Nadal Academy. “I have to accept this change as something normal, and accept that my life will be different now than it was for the last 30 years or so. I’m excited about it, there is no doubt.” One thing was certain: Nadal will never be too far away from tennis. “I’ll retire from the sport but I will continue to be available for whatever is needed, and to being a good ambassador, which is what I have tried to do my entire life.” ___ AP Tennis Writer Howard Fendrich contributed. ___ AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis By TALES AZZONI AP Sports Writer
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