1. WORLD RESTAURANT AWARDS WON’T HAVE CEREMONY IN 2020: The World Restaurant Awards will forego a ceremony in 2020. Organizers announced they plan to adapt the awards for television. Eater: “When talent agency IMG announced plans for a new restaurant awards in May 2018, they were sold as the answer to many of the societal inequities reflected in traditional awards and rankings like Michelin and the World’s 50 Best: mainly, a gross underrepresentation of women, people of color, and non-Eurocentric food. World Restaurant Awards co-creators Joe Warwick, a co-founder of the World’s 50 Best, and Andrea Petrini, co-founder of culinary collective Gelinaz!, had experience running the kinds of events the new awards wanted to improve upon. They enlisted 100 prominent chefs and food writers (with a 50/50 gender split) to help them create an ‘inclusive’ awards that would better reflect the contemporary restaurant industry, covering multiple styles of dining across geographic regions.”
2. KUSHNER AND U.S. TREASURY SECRETARY TO ATTEND SAUDI INVESTMENT CONFERENCE: President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and U.S. Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin are slated to attend a Saudi Arabia economic conference known as “Davos in the Desert.” Businesses leaders dropped out of the conference this year and last year after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Quartz: “According to a federal procurement filing reviewed by Quartz, the State Department recently booked 45 rooms at Riyadh’s Burj Rafal Hotel in support of the two ‘VVIP visitors’ taking part in the kingdom’s third annual Future Investment Initiative, as the event is officially known. … While several big names in Silicon Valley have again decided not to go, more than 150 other global business executives—many of whom stayed away last year because of the Khashoggi killing—have been confirmed as attendees, including representatives from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and BlackRock, according to a guest list seen by the Washington Post.”
3. TRUMP’S WASHINGTON HOTEL CANCELS KURDISH SOLIDARITY EVENT: President Trump’s hotel in Washington abruptly canceled a prayer event for the Kurdish people. The event, titled "A Night of Prayer for the Kurds," was planned by Frontier Alliance International, a nonprofit Christian organization that offers medical aid in the Middle East. The Hill: “F.A.I.’s administrator, Charlene Struebing, said hotel staff had expressed ‘security concerns.’ … However, a D.C. police spokeswoman told the Washington Post that it had not ‘received any information regarding potential security threats or concerns with this event.’ The group planned to hold the event after Trump's recent decision to remove U.S. troops from the northeastern border of Syria.”