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The nonprofit eXXpedition hosts all-female voyages to study ocean plastics and work on solutions.
A nonprofit organization called eXXpedition has hosted 19 voyages to collect data on ocean plastics, share the research with universities and develop strategies to reduce the plastics. Here, the crew use a net to pull plastic out of the ocean. (Eleanor Church Lark Rise Pictures)
Penn, the founder of the ocean research nonprofit eXXpedition was at the time sailing from England to Australia to start a new job as an architect. She dipped into the water for a bath. “When I came out to the surface, I saw a toothbrush floating by. And then a bottle top,” Penn said.
The now 35-year-old was 800 miles away from land and realized “that actually there was this plastic soup all around us in one of the most remote parts of our whole planet. I’d say that for me was the moment when everything started to change,” Penn said.
Her firsthand experience with the ocean’s plastic problem led Penn to change her plans. She never started that job. Instead, she began organizing beach cleanups and going on more sea trips. In 2014, she founded eXXpedition, a nonprofit that takes all-female crews on sea voyages to understand the oceans’ plastic pollution problem and find a solutions.
The women who make up the crew come from different backgrounds: “everyone from scientists to artists, journalists, designers, teachers, industry leaders, policymakers,” Penn said.
“What we’re looking for is people who have the biggest opportunity to create change when they get back home and what that opportunity is. Because the solutions are so varied, that opportunity is varied,” Penn said.
One voyage included a woman who was a packaging designer. Plastic packaging is a major cause of pollution. “Someone who literally for a living designs and decorates plastic: ... That type of person has a really powerful experience at sea when they start seeing products [in the ocean] that they’ve actually put on the shelves,” Penn said. The woman quit her job after the voyage and now works as a independent design consultant for mission-based companies.
There is a lot to observe and study on these voyages. By 2050, plastic will probably outweigh all the fish in the sea, according to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission. Between 8.8 million and 11 million tons of plastic make it to the ocean every year.
Plastic doesn’t decompose as other materials might. Water and wind cause plastic to disintegrate into much smaller pieces, known as microplastics. Microplastics are harder to clean up and easier for ocean species to ingest.
“The last part of the voyage — we really focus on what happens next and start putting together an action plan,” Penn said. She added that the team identifies “what I like to call your superpower, you know, the thing that makes you unique and brilliant that you can contribute to this wider issue.”
The data eXXpedition collects is shared with research universities. The nonprofit group’s “round the world” voyage in 2019 — which ended early because of the pandemic — resulted in a research paper being published about pollution in the southern Caribbean. The paper found that a holistic approach was necessary to finding solutions. A holistic approach means understanding that there are many parts of a whole instead of focusing on one thing.
It was this holistic mind-set that led to eXXpedition launching its Shift platform. It’s a website filled with ideas about how one person, a small group or even a large company can reduce plastic in the ocean. Visitors to the site can scroll through rows of cards and click on one or more to explain the idea, reveal its benefits, challenges and links to additional information. At first the number of ideas can seem overwhelming, but visitors don’t need to see them all at once.
“So, the idea behind the Shift platform was to provide filters … — including one on kids — to help filter down these hundreds of solutions to just a handful, and that you can find a place to start and get started,” Penn said.
The nonprofit group emphasizes that there are many ways to combat plastic pollution. “It’s really looking at how we solve this problem from the source and the realization that actually there’s not a silver bullet, there’s not one solution,” Penn said. “And the good news is that there are hundreds.” | 2022-08-17T13:22:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nonprofit eXXpedition hosts all-female voyages to study ocean plastics - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/08/17/ocean-plastics-exxpedition/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/08/17/ocean-plastics-exxpedition/ |
French farmers made salers cheese for 2,000 years — then a drought hit
Salers (cheese from Auvergne, France) (Blache,/Getty Images/Foodcollection)
Every year, farmers in France’s central region of Auvergne repeat the same process. During summer and fall, their cows graze in pastures, eating to their hearts’ content. It’s only during this time that farmers can produce salers, a highly regulated, semihard cheese with the same buttery depth as a well-aged cheddar.
That seasonal cycle remained uninterrupted for over 2,000 years until last week, when salers became the latest casualty of severe heat waves wreaking havoc across Europe, where human-caused climate change has intensified temperatures. France’s severe drought shut down the cheese production that had continued through two world wars, collapsed monarchies and the fall of the Roman Empire.
The decision to halt the cheesemaking was based on two factors: the meadows’ utterly parched state and the rules that regulate salers’ production.
In France, the dry spell has been so severe that the country has 62 regions with restrictions on water usage — including Cantal, where salers is produced. But it’s not only a drought; wildfires have also raged, displacing thousands of people. This year’s infernos have already scorched more acres there than any year before.
Salers is what’s known as an AOP good, or a product carrying the European Union’s Appellation d’Origine Protégée label. The designation signifies that a good originates from a specific region and has an officially established reputation — similar to champagne or Kalamata olive oil. But carrying the label also means the product must meet strict standards — and that’s why the drought has been such a problem.
In the mountainous and volcanic region of Auvergne, 78 farmers toil between April 15 and Nov. 15 to turn more than 3 million gallons of milk into about 2.4 million pounds of salers cheese each year, according to France’s Ministry of Agriculture. During those seven months, dairy cows graze as much as possible on fresh grass. Their raw milk is collected on a wooden container and then curdled, pressed and salted. The mixture is then left to ripen in a cylindrical mold for three months to a year.
In order for the milk to be used, the rules for salers state that at least 75 percent of the cow’s diet must be grass from local pastures.
“Salers is a seasonal cheese, made with the seasonal grass. It’s one of the pillars of its identity,” Laurent Lours, president of L’AOP Salers, a local group of cheesemakers, told France Bleu. “With more hay [instead of grass], the paste would be whiter; we would have less flavors. Our product still has a certain reputation among consumers — we don’t want to break it.”
Thieves strike in the Netherlands with heist of $22,000 — in cheese
The drought has made reaching that threshold an impossible feat. The normally lush, green pastures are now shriveled and brown. There’s simply not enough grass for cows to feed almost exclusively on it, local farmers have said.
“The ground is so dry, so hard, that in some places it looks like ashes. It’s dust,” Laurent Roux, a farmer, told France Bleu, adding that his cows had not grazed since late June. “We have always had periods of drought in the summer, but this is hard, very hard.”
When a similar situation came up in 2019, L’AOP Salers requested and was granted a waiver to use milk from cows with a local grass intake of just 50 percent. But the dryness this year has proven so harsh that taking a similar route “is not worth it,” Lours said: “We do not even have enough for 50 percent of the grass.”
The specter of the drought looms large for the dairy farmers, who are already grappling with higher fuel costs and food prices. One option they have, Lours told La Montagne, is to use their milk to make cantal, a type of cheese similar to salers but without as many restrictions. Yet that itself comes with a financial loss, since salers is valued higher than cantal.
What the cheesemakers are contending with underscores a larger trend of climate change taking a toll on people’s livelihoods — effects that could become more pervasive in the future.
According to the European Drought Observatory, 47 percent of Europe is under “warning” conditions for severe drought and a major soil moisture deficit. An additional 17 percent is under “alert” conditions — at which point vegetation suffers, in some cases dying out or thinning.
Many French staples, such as mustard, wine, peppers and mussels, have already been affected by the dry spell. Salers now joins the growing list — a hard hit in a country known for its immense variety of cheeses.
“No AOP salers cheese this winter on our tables,” French photojournalist Thomas Jouhannaud wrote on Twitter. “A direct consequence of the drought we are all experiencing.”
“Some will not care, I cry,” he added.
Others are pleading for rain. | 2022-08-17T13:22:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Salers cheese production halted in France because of drought - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/17/salers-cheese-france-drought-climate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/17/salers-cheese-france-drought-climate/ |
The Florida primary vote offers a lens into Democrats’ strategy against a rising star of the Republican Party
Democrat Nikki Fried, the state's agricultural commissioner and a candidate for governor, protests the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade on June 24 in Miami. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
MIAMI — Nikki Fried believes this should be her year to advance to a one-on-one battle against Florida’s ambitious governor, Republican Ron DeSantis.
Her pitch: Democrats need to motivate voters with a fiery liberal message — protecting abortion rights, legalizing marijuana and capping skyrocketing rent prices — if the nominee stands a chance against DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential contender trying to position himself as the next leader of the nation’s conservative movement.
But at a campaign event last week in her hometown, Fried, 44, wandered along a sea wall in Miami for about 15 minutes waiting for a crowd to show up.
“This election is the most important election of our generation,” she told two dozen supporters and family members who eventually gathered, urging them to help turn the tide of her campaign. “Not just the general election, but also this primary.”
Less than one week from the Aug. 23 election, Fried finds herself locked in an increasingly nasty and often lonely contest with former governor and Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.) over who is the most electable candidate against DeSantis — a race that could offer a window into how Democrats might approach a run against him in 2024.
Most political analysts say Crist has a lead, with high-profile Democratic politicians, several major unions and the editorial boards of most of Florida’s largest newspapers lining up to endorse him. His backers contend his background as a onetime moderate Republican and affable, consensus-driven style will draw in voters turned off by DeSantis’s often aggressive brand of politics centered on fanning the nation’s culture wars.
The race has highlighted simmering fissures within the Florida Democratic Party and on the political left more broadly that could carry over into the general election campaign. Whereas the Fried camp says a candidate with solid liberal credentials is the best way to energize the base, Crist’s supporters contend the only way to win against DeSantis is to find someone who will draw voters from the center of the aisle.
“I have known a lot of these people for a while, and I think that is part of it,” Crist, 66, said in an interview. “There is familiarity, and trust and relationships that matter honed over a decent period of time, and that makes a difference.”
“To the extent those Republicans even exist, they tend to be college-educated women, and I think Nikki Fried may have more appeal with them,” said Brad Coker, director of Florida-based Mason Dixon Polling & Strategy. “There are not any White male Republican voters who are going to vote for Crist over DeSantis — these voters don’t exist.”
After serving as the nation’s premier swing state throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Florida has drifted to the right in recent years — underscoring the ongoing challenges Democrats face in winning back the Sunshine State.
Despite being a good year for Democrats nationally, Florida Democrats have stumbled in recent state and federal elections. Former Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum, who was vying to become the state’s first Black governor, lost to DeSantis in 2018 by 32,000 votes — about half a percentage point. Two years later, amid declining support for Democrats in Miami’s Cuban American community, former Republican president Donald Trump comfortably won Florida, even as Joe Biden captured neighboring Georgia.
Since then, Democrats’ woes here continue to deepen in a state that remains key in a presidential election. Florida Republicans eclipsed Democrats in registered voters last year for the first time in history. The GOP advantage has continued to grow this year, with there now being 200,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats in the state.
Florida also has more than 3.8 million voters who are not affiliated with either party, and those voters have historically decided statewide contests.
“My intuition tells me there are a lot of disaffected Republicans who may play the game in their conservative circles, and talk about how much they love DeSantis … but when they go into the ballot box, they will be looking for alternatives,” said state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith (D), who represents part of the Orlando area and is leading for gay rights in the state. “Charlie seems to be the candidate that gives them a viable alternative.”
After serving as the state’s attorney general, Crist, then a Republican, was elected Florida governor in 2006. During his term in his office, Crist navigated the state through the mortgage crisis, expanded access to health insurance and carved out new protections for the Everglades. But Crist also outraged conservatives when he hugged Barack Obama at an event in 2009 to tout the president’s economic stimulus package.
Crist bucked seeking a second term as governor, instead deciding to run for U.S. Senate — as an independent. Polls at the time showed him trailing now-Sen. Marco Rubio (R) by the double digits. Many at the time dismissed his party switching as a political ploy. Two years later, Crist became a Democrat and campaigned for Obama’s reelection.
He ran for governor again in 2014 as a Democrat but was defeated by Rick Scott, a Republican who now serves in the U.S. Senate. In 2016, he won a seat in the U.S. House, where he has become a reliable vote for the Democratic Party’s agenda. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has endorsed his campaign for governor.
These days he touts his experience in both parties as an attribute that will allow him to build a broad, diverse coalition. On the campaign trail, Crist vows to be a “governor for all Floridians,” arguing DeSantis has polarized one of the most diverse states in the nation.
“Most of the people who are going to vote in this Democratic primary, they are already aware that I was a Republican,” Crist said. “And I have had a very good relationship subsequent to that with President Obama, and certainly President Biden, and the Speaker of the House, so that is really old news.”
Last week, at the Florida League of Cities conference in Hallandale Beach, Crist showed up at a reception honoring Miramar Mayor Wayne Messam, whose parents emigrated from Haiti. The former governor slapped backs and stood for nearly an hour posing for pictures, as a torcedor handed out cigars on an oceanfront patio.
“If you have a proven track record, I go with you,” said Woodrow Hay, a city commissioner who is Black and noted that Crist also recently showed up at his church to ask for support. “I didn’t support everything he did the last time he was governor, but for the most part I did.”
Several Democrats compared the choice to the decision faced in 2020, when they were desperate to defeat Trump.
“My decision to support Charlie was very much in the same way that I came to support President Biden” in 2020, said state Sen. Lori Berman (D), who represents parts of Palm Beach County. “I felt he was the candidate who can defeat Donald Trump, and I feel the same way about Charlie. I feel he is the best candidate to defeat Ron DeSantis.”
The Fried campaign, outspent by Crist, says they can still defeat Crist in the primary by rallying a diverse coalition of left-leaning Democrats to the polls.
Kevin Cate, a senior adviser to the Fried campaign, said Fried is gaining momentum in the race just as many voters are starting to pay attention. He compared Fried’s effort to Gillum’s success four years ago in pulling off a surprise victory in the Democratic primary for governor, after he also ran to the left of the other candidates in that race.
“I think as we get closer, and people are tuned in, they are going to go with the grass-roots kind of feel and they will want something new,” said Cate, who also helped oversee Gillum’s 2018 campaign.
Samantha Hope Herring, a member of the Democratic National Committee and chair of the Democratic committee in Walton County, located along the state’s Emerald Coast in the Panhandle, added she also believes Fried’s campaign has taken on new momentum after the fall of Roe v. Wade.
“We’ve already done Charlie Crist. We already lost with Charlie Crist,” said Herring, who recently decided to support Fried. “There is little risk in going in another direction, especially in a year when women’s rights are literally on the ballot.”
To help build her case, Fried, the state’s agriculture commissioner, has been hammering Crist over some of his previous support for conservative policies. In one video clip, Crist states he is “pro-life” and supports “traditional marriage,” an apparent reference to the debate over same-sex marriage before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized it in 2015.
In other television ads, Fried blasts Crist for appointing conservatives to the state Supreme Court and pursuing policies as governor that included mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders.
“Want to know the difference between me and Charlie Crist?” Fried asks in one ad, as she is walking in front of a prison. “While I was a public defender, fighting to keep innocent Floridians out of jails like this, he was passing mandatory minimums during the racist war on drugs.”
In an interview, Crist defended his record on abortion, saying he previously used the term “pro-life” but never supported outlawing abortion. He also argued that he had appointed both conservative and moderate justices to the state Supreme Court.
“Everybody has their own definitions of words,” said Crist, noting that as governor he vetoed a bill in 2010 that would require women to receive an ultrasound before having an abortion. “So I kind of had fun using it, and using my own definition of it, which meant, ‘for life.’ ” He has promised to immediately sign an executive order protecting reproductive freedom rights if elected.
Coker, of Mason Dixon Polling & Strategy, says DeSantis will quickly overwhelm Crist with negative television ads labeling him as being an inconsistent, “flip flopper.”
“Crist is going to be a big, fat, slow pitch over the plate for DeSantis whereas Nikki Fried is a bit more of a curveball,” he said.
In recent weeks, Crist supporters have also been highlighting some of Fried’s own connections to GOP politicians — including donations to several Republican candidates over the years. In a mailer, the Crist campaign has highlighted Fried’s past cordial relationship with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a staunch conservative who has close ties to Trump and has aligned himself in the past with Proud Boys and Holocaust deniers.
Fried said both her support for Diaz and past friendly ties to Gaetz, a former state legislator, related to her work as a lobbyist in Tallahassee, the state capital.
“I was doing my job and building relationships across the aisle,” said Fried, who added that she believes Crist’s mailer is “sexist” because it stated she had a “close friendship” with Gaetz. She says the party establishment’s decision to back Crist as the more “electable” candidate also has sexist connotations.
“I have never heard a man asked if he’s electable,” she said. “It is only ever on women, and minorities, if they are electable.”
Crist said Fried’s charges of sexism do not even merit a response. “I don’t even understand what that means,” Crist said when asked about her assertions. “There is no basis for that, so I think that is all it deserves from me.”
State Sen. Shevrin D. Jones, a Democrat who support Crist and is influential in the Black community in South Florida, said he wishes Fried’s more aggressive style of campaigning had emerged months ago, noting that tens of thousands of Florida Democrats have already voted by mail.
Jones said he and other Florida Democratic leaders decided in the spring to endorse Crist because Fried’s campaign appeared lackluster and didn’t have a cohesive message. At the time, party leaders were watching DeSantis ram controversial legislation through the state House and decided they need to unite behind a candidate who could rise to the challenge of taking him on.
“We had to find someone,” Jones said of Crist. “I think if the [Fried] had this energy six or eight months ago, a lot more people would have been on her side. But she just took too long to pull the trigger on her message.” | 2022-08-17T13:23:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nikki Fried and Charlie Crist battle to take on DeSantis in Florida governor election - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/17/fried-crist-desantis-florida-primary/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/17/fried-crist-desantis-florida-primary/ |
Is the drop in ransomware numbers an illusion?
Welcome to The Cybersecurity 202! Been revisiting the Weyes Blood album “Andromeda” lately. What's struck your fancy of late?
Below: TikTok wants a top House official to rescind a security warning to lawmakers about the app, and more people are being charged with insider trading relating to a 2017 data breach of Equifax.
Ransomware numbers appear to be falling, but that news might not be as good as it sounds
For years, ransomware has been one of the chief scourges of cyberspace, robbing victims of billions, sparking panics for beef and gasoline and maybe even contributing to the death of a child.
In recent months, though, tallies of ransomware — a kind of cyberattack where hackers encrypt a victim’s system, then demand payment to unlock it — have shown signs of decline.
So what’s behind the diminished figures?
The short answer is: It might be less about whether the number of attacks have fallen off, and more about whether the people who do the counting have less information about what’s happening than before.
If it’s not an illusion, analysts can point to a host of potential factors explaining the drop. Either way, by no means do the numbers suggest ransomware is significantly less rampant.
“Ransomware is still alive and well,” Adam Meyers, senior vice president of intelligence at cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, told me.
One of the first tallies pointing to a decline came last month from the Ransomware Task Force, made up of experts from government, industry, academia and nonprofits. It documented 64 attacks on local government, hospitals and schools in 2022 to that point, compared with 150 incidents from the same period last year.
Also in July, SonicWall, NCC Group and GuidePoint Security pointed to decreases across the board, although the companies covered various time periods. Not all companies had identical conclusions. Ransomware incidents increased from the first quarter of 2022 to the second, Avast said last week. But even Avast had seen decreasing numbers from the end of last year and the beginning of this year.
Cybersecurity company Secureworks also hadn’t seen ransomware attacks rising in 2022 like it had in prior years based on the number of incidents it’s responding to, Mike McLellan director of threat intelligence for the company’s counter threat unit, told me. That there was a decline in the first few months of 2022 wasn’t surprising, he said, because of seasonal patterns. But ransomware’s stagnation in May, June and July compared with the same period last year was head-scratching, he said.
Deceptive data?
The Ransomware Task Force figures might be deceptive because they draw on data from ransomware gangs’ leak sites, where they post alleged victims’ identities and data in an attempt to compel them to pay, Benjamin Freed reported for StateScoop. And ransomware gangs have relied less on those sites lately, with more directly contacting customers or others affected by the attack as a means of pressuring victims to pay the ransom.
Other developments could be distorting the numbers as well. Meyers said gangs have been using ransomware-like tactics without using the actual malicious software, stealing data and threatening to release it without necessarily locking up victim networks.
“What we’re seeing is the evolution of ransomware into data extortion,” he said. “We’ve seen some threat actors not using ransomware at all anymore, but they’re still doing this data exploitation.”
Another theory: Last year’s high-profile attacks on Colonial Pipeline, Kaseya and beef supplier JBS might have pushed ransomware gangs to focus on smaller targets to avoid exacerbating the ire of policymakers and law enforcement, and that could distort the numbers in a different way.
“I have a concept that the bad guys are no longer going after large blue chips because of the backlash that can create,” Don Smith, vice president of intelligence at the Secureworks Counter Threat Unit, told me.
“That then gives you a situation where, if you’re a medium-to-large enterprise, you may not have a relationship with a national CERT,” or government computer emergency response team, Smith said. “You may not be prepared to pay for top-tier incident response companies to help you with your problem. And therefore, from that sort of hilltop observation a lot of people may have reporting bias, which can explain this disparity.”
In other words: Lower-tier victims might not be as likely to report their attack to anyone who keeps track of them. And it might be a while before legislation is translated into law that requires major system owners to report ransomware payments within 24 hours to the feds.
Attacks might actually have dropped
Sanctions against Russia, where many of the top ransomware gangs operate, have hampered ransomware operators, National Security Agency Director of Cybersecurity Rob Joyce said in May.
Experts are divided on whether that’s the case.
Other factors might be playing a role, too. After a particularly productive period, the prolific ransomware group Conti apparently disbanded in May, following internal leaks that revealed the gang’s inner workings.
The Russia-Ukraine war also could be preoccupying ransomware gangs in that part of the world, with some of them stating their allegiance to fighting on behalf of Russia.
Whatever the truth behind the numbers, ransomware doesn’t look like they’re dying off anytime soon.
“It’s as troubling as ever,” Smith said.
As the Ransomware Task Force observed about the apparent decline and its causes: “We will have a better picture of this as the year progresses.”
SEC accuses three of insider trading related to Equifax hack
Ann Dishinger, a finance manager at a Chicago public relations firm hired by credit score provider Equifax in the wake of a massive 2017 hack, told her significant other, Lawrence Palmer, nonpublic information about the hack, Reuters’s Noor Zainab Hussain reports.
“The SEC alleges that Palmer then contacted a former client who arranged for the purchase of out-of-the-money Equifax put options with the understanding that the client and Palmer would split any trading profits obtained,” Hussain writes. “The agency also alleges that Palmer tipped his brother and business partner, Jerrold Palmer, who then contacted a high school friend who arranged for the purchase of the same series of out-of-the-money Equifax put options.” Reuters couldn’t reach the Palmer brothers and Dishinger for comment.
The charges against the three Chicago residents represent the third set of insider trading charges unveiled by the SEC in the wake of the Equifax hack. They previously charged an executive and a manager at the company. Both pleaded guilty to criminal insider trading charges.
Top lawmakers demand information on federal agencies’ purchases of private data
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) requested documents and communications between seven government agencies and firms like data brokers and aggregators, Gizmodo’s Dell Cameron reports.
“While comprehensive information on the widespread use of this practice is unavailable, the evidence indicates it is pervasive and that your agencies have contracts with numerous data brokers, who provide detailed information on millions of Americans,” they write in the letter.
The House Judiciary Committee last month held a hearing on “digital dragnets” and government data access. “Little is known about the how and how often the government buys private data, and there are few, if any rules, to prevent agencies like the FBI from simply buying information which it might not otherwise have legal authority to demand,” Cameron writes. “Details of such arrangements have slowly trickled out through the press in recent years, such [as] the Department of Homeland Security’s purchase of phone location data from marketing companies in 2020, first reported by the Wall Street Journal.”
Questions linger over 2020 election review following Michael Gableman's firing (The Journal Times)
When efforts to contain a data breach backfire (Krebs on Security)
Hackers linked to China have been targeting human rights groups for years (MIT Technology Review)
U.S. approves nearly all tech exports to China, data shows (The Wall Street Journal)
Losses from crypto hacks surged 60% to $1.9 billion from January to July, Chainalysis says (Reuters)
New MailChimp breach exposed DigitalOcean customer email addresses (Bleeping Computer)
Microsoft employees exposed own company’s internal logins (Motherboard)
ONCD seeks a lead for U.S. defensive cyber planning and operations (FCW)
Tracy Wilkison, the former U.S. attorney for the central district of California, has joined FTI Consulting as senior managing director in its cybersecurity practice.
Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.), Ukrainian cybersecurity official Victor Zhora and others speak at a Cyber Initiatives Group summit today. | 2022-08-17T13:23:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Is the drop in ransomware numbers an illusion? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/17/is-drop-ransomware-numbers-an-illusion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/17/is-drop-ransomware-numbers-an-illusion/ |
Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Today we're wondering if the Inflation Reduction Act will lower the price of crudité. (Context here.) But first:
There has been lots of talk about federal climate action. Don't sleep on state climate action.
Unless you live under a rock, you've probably heard politicians and journalists talking about how the Inflation Reduction Act will advance the federal government's fight against climate change.
But the landmark legislation, which President Biden signed into law on Tuesday, also contains a slew of smaller but significant investments in climate action at the state level. These lesser-noticed provisions could supercharge efforts to slash emissions and bolster clean energy across all 50 states, according to climate-conscious governors and advocates.
“These are perhaps the smallest and most exciting investments,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), who mounted a climate-centric presidential campaign in 2020, told The Climate 202.
“When the tale is told, I think these will be shown as the most effective provisions,” Inslee said. “These are not eye-popping numbers, but I think they will be eye-popping results.”
The legislation includes the following investments in state climate action, according to the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of governors committed to meeting the goals of the Paris agreement:
$8.6 billion for state energy offices to help consumers make energy-efficiency upgrades to their homes through rebate programs.
$7 billion for states, municipalities and tribal governments to deploy clean-energy technologies and cut emissions in disadvantaged communities through a Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, commonly referred to as a green bank.
$5 billion for states, municipalities and tribal governments to develop and implement plans to curb emissions through Climate Pollution Reduction Grants.
$2.2 billion for state and private forestry conservation programs to promote natural carbon sequestration, including by planting trees.
$1 billion for state and local governments to adopt building energy codes, including $670 million for net-zero energy codes.
$5 million for states to adopt more stringent tailpipe emissions standards for cars and light trucks.
“What's monumental about this package is that it recognizes the role of states in confronting the climate crisis,” Casey Katims, executive director of the U.S. Climate Alliance, told The Climate 202. “Implementing this package is going to be no small task, but I know governors are up to the challenge.”
Banking on a green bank
The Inflation Reduction Act authorizes $27 billion for the establishment of a national green bank to provide low-cost financing for clean energy infrastructure projects.
Of the $27 billion, states and tribes can apply for $7 billion worth of grants and loans “to enable low-income and disadvantaged communities to deploy or benefit from zero-emission technologies,” the legislation says.
Green banks already exist in several states, including California, Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, Maryland and New York, according to the Coalition for Green Capital, an advocacy group.
“What green banks have done over the last decade is help finance the pieces of the clean power transition: heat pumps, distributed solar, microgrids, electric vehicles and much more,” Reed Hundt, chairman and CEO of the Coalition for Green Capital, told The Climate 202.
In 2011, Connecticut established the nation’s first state-level green bank through bipartisan legislation. Since then, the Connecticut Green Bank has leveraged $288.4 million in state dollars to attract $1.85 billion in private investment — a ratio of $7.40 in private dollars for every $1 in public money.
Bryan Garcia, president and CEO of the Connecticut Green Bank, told The Climate 202 that the bank has prioritized helping low-to-moderate-income families reduce their energy bills by making their homes more energy efficient.
“In this context of talking about inflation,” he said, “we have actually helped families and businesses reduce their energy costs.”
The red-blue divide
Of course, states are not immune from the partisan divide over climate action that persists in Washington.
During the Trump administration, 16 states — almost all of them led by Democrats — and the District of Columbia strengthened their climate targets, according to ClearView Energy Partners, an independent research firm.
Under Biden, meanwhile, Republican-led state legislatures have sought to prolong the life of coal plants and punish businesses that divest from fossil fuels.
However, this dynamic could change as the Inflation Reduction Act spurs the deployment of more wind, solar and other renewable energy sources in red states, ClearView analysts wrote in a note to clients Tuesday.
“As renewables proliferate on GOP-represented grids,” they wrote, “their economic and political relevance to government officials seems likely to grow.”
The Biden administration on Tuesday announced that it will mandate unprecedented cuts to water usage in Arizona and Nevada, as a historic drought pushes the Colorado River basin to a tipping point, Joshua Partlow and Karin Brulliard report for The Washington Post.
The decision comes after seven states blew past a Monday deadline, set by the Bureau of Reclamation in June, to reach a voluntary agreement on how to reduce water use by 2 million to 4 million acre-feet — up to a third of the Colorado River’s annual average flow.
The question of how those states will divide what’s left of the shrinking water supply remains unresolved, but Deputy Interior Secretary Tommy Beaudreau told reporters Tuesday that there is “still time” to strike a deal.
Under the new declaration, the lower Colorado River Basin has reached a Tier 2 shortage, requiring reductions in water use that will slash what Arizona gets by 21 percent, Nevada by 8 percent, and Mexico by 7 percent.
The negotiations have caused tension among the Western states as they try to balance the crisis made worse by climate change with their individual needs to sustain cities, agriculture and hydropower for millions of people.
President Biden on Tuesday signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, marking the enactment of the most ambitious climate and energy bill in the nation's history, The Post's Amy B Wang reports.
At a signing ceremony in the State Dining Room of the White House, Biden criticized Republicans for uniformly voting against the legislation.
“Let’s be clear: In this historic moment, Democrats sided with the American people and every single Republican in the Congress sided with the special interests,” Biden said, adding: “Every single Republican, every single one, voted against tackling the climate crisis, against lowering our energy costs, against creating good-paying jobs.”
Attendees included Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who brokered a surprise deal on the measure after weeks of private negotiations.
At one point, Biden glanced at Manchin and quipped, “Joe, I never had a doubt,” prompting some laughter from the audience. After Biden signed, he handed the pen to Manchin and shook his hand.
In the coming weeks, Biden is expected to hold meetings focused on implementing the new law, as well as travel across the country to tout the ways it could help Americans. The White House is also planning an event Sept. 6 to celebrate the law.
White House climate official is sanctioned by prestigious science body
The National Academy of Sciences on Tuesday said it has barred a key White House official focused on climate change, Jane Lubchenco, from participating in its publications and activities for five years, your Climate 202 host Maxine Joselow reports.
The decision marks a rare rebuke of Lubchenco, who serves as deputy director for climate and environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The academy said that Lubchenco violated its code of conduct before joining the Biden administration last year.
In particular, while serving as an editor for the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences, Lubchenco accepted an article for publication that was co-authored by her brother-in-law and later retracted because it was found to rely on outdated data.
House Republicans previously voiced concern about the incident, saying in a February letter to President Biden that Lubchenco “demonstrated a clear disregard for rules meant to prevent conflicts of interest in publishing peer-reviewed studies” but is now “playing a leading role in developing and overseeing this Administration’s best practices for scientific integrity.”
In a statement, Lubchenco said: “I accept these sanctions for my error in judgment in editing a paper authored by some of my research collaborators — an error for which I have publicly stated my regret.”
California's giant sequoias are burning up. Will logging save them? — Joshua Partlow for The Post
Warming oceans fuel earlier Atlantic hurricane seasons, study finds — Matthew Cappucci for The Post
China shuts factories, rations electricity as heat wave stifles economy — Eva Dou and Lyric Li for The Post
Evergreen places six-figure ad buy highlighting Michigan, Nevada clean energy investments — Zach Schonfeld for the Hill
Boston wants to ban fossil fuels in new buildings — Sabrina Shankman for the Boston Globe
Alright, alright, alright: | 2022-08-17T13:23:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | State climate action could be supercharged by the Inflation Reduction Act - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/17/state-climate-action-could-be-supercharged-by-inflation-reduction-act/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/17/state-climate-action-could-be-supercharged-by-inflation-reduction-act/ |
Shane Wiskus competes on the high bar during last year's Olympic trials in St Louis. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
TAMPA — At the Tokyo Olympics last summer, Brody Malone remembers watching the Chinese men’s gymnasts practicing their super-difficult parallel bars sets in the training center. Malone, a fast-rising talent in the U.S. program, had never seen many of these headliners in person. Competing among the stars made the Games a great experience for the Americans — and an eye-opening one, too.
When the U.S. team finished fifth, the athletes — three Olympic first-timers and a veteran — didn’t reflect on their performance with much disappointment or shock. For the most part, they performed well. They knew a gulf existed between them and the best nations, Russia, Japan and China.
“Being honest, we didn’t really have a shot at getting on the podium,” Malone said.
For nearly two decades, elite gymnastics scores have been tallied by combining difficulty, an open-ended value that increases as gymnasts fulfill requirements and perform harder elements, and execution, which starts from a Perfect 10 and decreases with errors. The Americans’ execution scores nearly kept pace with the best teams in Tokyo. But their low difficulty marks meant they started at a deficit and needed their opponents to make major mistakes to have a chance of medaling.
The gymnasts and coaches have known of this gap, but “to have an almost perfect performance, and not even really get close, told us that something’s wrong here and that we needed to fix it,” Tokyo Olympian Shane Wiskus said.
The American men haven’t medaled in a team competition at world championships or the Olympics since 2014. Returning to the podium starts with implementing what high performance director Brett McClure calls “the most aggressive bonus system in the world.”
At domestic competitions, including this week’s national championships, gymnasts receive bonuses based on their difficulty, often referred to as their D score. The bonus can swing scores by more than a full point — the equivalent of the deduction for a fall. Each apparatus has bonuses designated for difficulty scores on a curve, carefully constructed based on the country’s weaknesses and internationally competitive marks.
The national team staff hopes this system will tilt the risk-reward calculus in favor of performing routines that are on par with the world’s best. They plan to wean off the bonus system as the Olympic year approaches. But for now, results at the national championships, which determine who advances to the world championships selection camp, will include these bonuses — making it more difficult for gymnasts with easier routines to be in contention. At the selection camp, bonuses will be removed as top team-score scenarios are assessed.
Around the country, these gymnasts in the sport’s top tier have been trying harder skills and unveiling them with mixed success.
“We’re all on board with whatever we’ve got to do to get on the podium,” said Malone, who trains at Stanford alongside five other gymnasts on the senior national team and two more on the senior development team. “The guys here are the same way. Everyone’s on board.”
The U.S. men’s program has never been a dominant force like its women’s counterpart, but the Americans won the silver in 2004 and had the Olympic all-around champion in Paul Hamm. Two years later, the sport changed to its current scoring system. The United States still won the bronze at the 2008 Olympics and landed on the podium at 2011 world championships.
At the 2012 Games, the U.S. men earned the top qualifying score but stumbled in the team final. Their average difficulty across all apparatuses (6.48) was similar to that of the medalists — China (6.67), Japan (6.49) and Great Britain (6.35). Poor execution, instead, doomed the Americans. The United States won bronze at 2014 worlds but missed the podium at the 2016 Olympics, placing fifth after execution errors again.
“We were pretty frustrated with our consistency,” McClure said. “We had the difficulty and weren’t able to put it all together in a team finals situation.”
Brody Malone was under the radar. Now he’s the future of U.S. men’s gymnastics.
The focus shifted toward hitting routines, said McClure, who began his role in 2017. The staff embraced sports psychology, preparing athletes to perform well under pressure. Consistency improved, McClure said, but difficulty decreased. The team results? Fourth in 2018, fourth in 2019 and fifth in Tokyo.
Those letdowns questioned the philosophy: “What’s more important?” McClure said. “What is the difference between a fifth-place finish hitting 100 percent and being happy with your performance, or being competitive and having a few mistakes and ending in fifth place?”
In Tokyo, the Americans’ execution scores on each apparatus were mostly similar to the medaling teams. However, across 18 routines, the United States averaged a 5.77 D score, compared to a 6.01 for the Russian Olympic Committee, 6.07 for Japan and 6.06 for China. Before the competition began, the maximum score for the Americans was more than four points lower than those top teams.
“We want to be on the other side of the spectrum,” McClure said. “If we end up fifth again, it’s because we made mistakes.”
Consider vault: Three U.S. gymnasts performed in the Tokyo team final, each with a 5.2 D score. The medaling teams averaged at least a 5.6. That was the largest deficit the Americans faced on an apparatus — and why the bonus curve for vault is steeper than the others.
Syque Caesar, the head coach at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center, had a key role in designing the bonus system and called vault a top priority. Some reference the vault curve as a too-extreme implementation of the bonuses, but Caesar said, “that’s what we need.”
The world shares a scoring system, but coaches point to tight judging in the United States that has made the risk-reward calculations for Americans favor well-executed, easier routines. Domestic results help determine selection for the national team and for international assignments, such as world championships and the Olympics.
“Guys wanted to do the difficulty in the last quad, but they also had to make a team,” said Thom Glielmi, the head coach at Stanford, the three-time defending NCAA champion.
College gymnasts also spend a chunk of the year needing to hit routines for their team, rather than experiment with new skills. Glielmi said the college season can be an ideal time for his gymnasts to try new elements, but his program might be able to embrace that philosophy because of how far ahead it is from the others.
With the new system in place at the Winter Cup in February, Vitaliy Guimaraes won the competition without earning any bonus: “He just did his gymnastics at a high level and went six for six,” said Mark Williams, his coach at Oklahoma, who also admitted: “I still think the score is the score, so I guess maybe I’m a little old-school.” The field included one Olympian, Yul Moldauer, who placed fourth despite a boost of nearly two points in bonus.
At the recent U.S. Classic, Malone earned bonus on five apparatuses and won the meet. If the bonuses didn’t exist, he still would have topped the standings. Stanford teammate Colt Walker placed second with or without bonus. The incentive system bumped Donnell Whittenburg into third, ahead of a gymnast who didn’t meet the bonus threshold on any apparatus, but that’s presumably the type outcome the U.S. staff envisioned with this system. Whittenburg had the most difficult vault in the field and can also improve a team score with his rings and floor performances. His jump in the standings matches his ability to fit into a worlds team.
The U.S. men didn’t win any medals in Tokyo; Malone (high bar) and Alec Yoder (pommel horse) were in contention but missed out by narrow margins during the apparatus finals. The world championships in October will be the first major team competition since then, and Russia’s absence aids the Americans’ medal hopes. Worlds last year included only individual events, and the U.S. men earned two medals — Malone’s high bar bronze and Stephen Nedoroscik’s pommel horse gold.
Moldauer, who finished fourth in the all-around at the 2021 world championships, hopes to reach a 6.0 D score on each apparatus in time for Paris. Ask why, and he doesn’t mention the bonus system: “I want to be an Olympic medalist,” Moldauer said.
Wiskus describes the current group of gymnasts — regardless of whether they’ve represented the United States on the world stage — as hungry, committed to improve difficulty, and perhaps their most important characteristic, “tired of seeing the U.S. end in fifth place.” | 2022-08-17T13:23:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S. men’s gymnasts up the difficulty after winning no medals in Tokyo - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/08/17/us-gymnastics-championships-brett-mcclure-brody-malone-shane-wiskus/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/08/17/us-gymnastics-championships-brett-mcclure-brody-malone-shane-wiskus/ |
An artillery shell emblazoned with the message “God Bless the USA. Glory to Ukraine!!” The Ukrainian crowdfunding group Sign My Rocket arranged for the inscription at the request of a donor from the United States. (Sign My Rocket)
KYIV, Ukraine — At a military position near the front line, members of a Ukrainian military unit snickered as a soldier with tattooed arms scrawled a phallic symbol on an artillery shell designed for an M777 howitzer cannon.
The emergence of slogans and symbols emblazoned on U.S.-made artillery — originally a creative outlet for Ukrainian soldiers serving in the country’s east — has become a growing and lucrative fundraising tactic for Ukrainians in the nearly seven-month war.
The most prominent crowdfunding group — Sign My Rocket — started by selling messages on Soviet-made 82 mm caliber mortar rounds for $30 each. But eventually co-founder Anton Sokolenko realized if it sold messages on more powerful weapons, benefactors from the United States, Britain, Germany, Canada, Switzerland and elsewhere would pay even more.
The group recently branded a Buk surface-to-air missile with the message “Not for Use on Malaysian Airlines” — a reference to the downing of a commercial airliner in 2014 by pro-Russian separatists armed with the same missile system, which killed 298 people.
The most expensive item on the website is the naming rights to a Russian-made T72 tank for $3,000 — a topic of contention in the Smith household.
The website Revenge For, launched three weeks ago by a Kyiv native and IT worker Nazar Gulyk, appeals to foreigners with historical grievances against Moscow who would like to support Ukrainians as their proxy.
“ I didn’t believe that it was real,” he said, recalling when the group first approached him. | 2022-08-17T13:43:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Westerners are sponsoring slogans written on bombs aimed at Russians in Ukraine war - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/17/ukraine-russia-bombs-slogans-fundraising/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/17/ukraine-russia-bombs-slogans-fundraising/ |
French toast sticks from Burger King, left, and Wendy's, which recently rolled out the menu item. (Rey Lopez for The Washington Post/Food styling by Nicola Justine Davis for The Washington Post)
I don’t know what it is exactly, but the funk hits my nostrils like an 18-wheeler filled with maple syrup, wet dogs and old fryer oil. I haven’t even taken a bite of one of the new homestyle French toast sticks at Wendy’s, and I’m already regretting the purchase. My car is starting to smell like rancid fat dipped in Mrs. Butterworth’s.
Wendy’s introduced the French toast sticks on Monday, part of the chain’s play to grab a larger piece of the fast-food breakfast market. If you’ll recall, Wendy’s was late to the game: The chain debuted its breakfast menu in March 2020, just as the pandemic was settling in for the long haul. When almost everyone started working from home, folks had little need for a morning sandwich from the drive-through, and breakfast sales dropped accordingly.
But more than two years after Wendy’s went after America’s breakfast dollar, it has reaped the rewards. By the end of this year, morning sales could account for 10 percent of revenue, according to the reporting of one industry publication. Wendy’s, in fact, is breathing down Burger King’s neck for second place in the breakfast category among burger chains. “Our first job is to leave them behind, which we’re very confident that we’re going to be able to do here in the not-too-distant future,” Kurt Kane, Wendy’s U.S. president and chief commercial officer, told CNBC in March.
The new French toast sticks are part of Wendy’s attempt at regicide. If my tastings are any indication, the King will survive this early-morning coup. Perhaps just as important, Burger King is trying to outflank the enemy during the Syrup Wars: Through August, the chain is offering Royal Perk members free French toast sticks with a $1 purchase on the BK app.
The sales gimmick is, frankly, not necessary.
Even if you can get past the unprovoked stink attack, Wendy’s sticks are no match for those at Burger King. Which is not that surprising. Burger King’s version has stood the test of time. They’ve been on the menu since the mid-1980s, when the Wendy’s mascot still looked like Pippi Longstocking on the set of “Gunsmoke.”
I’m no expert on Burger King’s French toast sticks. I couldn’t remember the last time I had ordered some. I have no idea how they have evolved over nearly four decades. According to one news source, the chain was bragging in 1986 about its “dripless maple syrup-like” sauce, a description that must strike the ear of the average Vermonter like an ax handle. (The “syrup” in this ’80s-era commercial looks like Log Cabin cut with a gallon of New York City tap water.)
The item’s history doesn’t matter that much, I guess. As with life, all we have is the now, and the French toast sticks that I sampled recently at a Burger King near my home were everything I’d want in portable breakfast snacks: The thick strips of bread, coated and crispy, are sweeter and more cinnamon-y than those at Wendy’s, even without a dip in the syrup. But the thing that separates BK’s version is its crunch. The French toast sticks have a craggy exterior, not unlike the coating of fried chicken, with little nubbins that crackle under tooth.
I have no idea how Burger King prepares its sticks. An email to a publicist for the chain went unanswered. But my colleague Aaron Hutcherson suspects the secret may be feuilletine flakes, broken bits of crepes dentelle cookies that may be mixed into the egg dip. If Aaron’s theory is correct, Burger King’s French toast may be the first in history to earn its name.
The Wendy’s interpretation doesn’t pass the sniff test. Literally. I still can’t get this smell off my tongue, even after a cup of coffee, an Italian cold-cut sandwich for lunch and a double espresso. The smell lingers like a bad memory.
The flavor and texture of Wendy’s sticks are not bad, once you hold your nose and dive in. They’re chewier than BK’s, like a cross between mochi doughnuts and classic French toast. They’re also served with Mrs. Butterworth’s, a thicker and stickier syrup than the brand version from Burger King. I’m told that Wendy’s flash-fries its version in the restaurant before serving. I suspect that’s where this thing goes off the rails, the victim of bad oil or something.
I tried another Wendy’s location the following day, just to see if the results would vary. The smell was still present, but more muted. It didn’t take over whatever room you occupied, but you could sense it once you waved a stick under your nose.
This time around, I had a better idea of what, I think, Wendy’s is chasing: A French toast stick that behaves like fried plantains — that is, sweet, caramelized logs, with lush interiors and crispy edges. Something, I suspect, is going haywire in the frying process, an interaction that leads to those off-putting aromas. Is the oil not hot enough, thereby clinging to the sticks and leaving behind the flavors of whatever was fried in it previously? Were they fried too long?
Whatever the issue, Wendy’s should take the time to figure it out. I suspect Burger King’s French toast sticks didn’t strike all the right notes when they debuted, either. Just recall those words from 1986: dripless maple-syrup-like sauce. | 2022-08-17T14:14:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Wendy’s new French toast sticks don’t stack up to Burger King’s - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/08/17/wendys-french-toast-sticks-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/08/17/wendys-french-toast-sticks-review/ |
Conservation success stories seen through a camera lens
Photojournalist Ralph Pace shows how scientists are helping turtles, swordfish and other marine life
Photos by Ralph Pace
A bait ball, or a large group of small fish swimming in a tight circle to defend themselves against the sharks and large fish that are trying to feed on them, forms in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico. (Ralph Pace)
Ralph Pace has taken stunning images of sea turtles, sharks, whales and other marine life. But the California-based photojournalist especially likes telling a “comeback kid” story.
“When I first got to San Diego, you could stay on the beach all day long [and] you wouldn’t see a turtle,” Pace said of the large Pacific green turtles, which are listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. “There was conservation on both sides of the border [with Mexico]. Now we’re seeing the fruits of our labors.”
Pace, who lives in Monterey, California, can watch some of these conservation stories unfold in the stretch of Pacific Ocean that’s practically in his backyard. He said one thing that has fueled the successes is technology, such as attaching satellite tags to swordfish.
“How can you help manage them if you don’t know where they are, where they’re traveling to and at what depth?” said Pace, who studied science before he took up photography. He has a graduate degree from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.
The tags have helped researchers find out that swordfish often swim at 700 to 1,200 feet under the surface, below where many other marine animals are found. The researchers designed fishing gear to target the fish at that depth. So there’s less bycatch, or marine animals caught by accident.
“They’re catching like 99 percent clean,” Pace said, meaning that the local fishery has eliminated almost all bycatch.
Some of his photos have helped explain that process, which cost money and caused swordfish prices to increase. “You need to inform people because they’ll say, ‘Why should I pay more?’ ”
Pace enjoys telling stories that combine natural history, science and conservation.
The loss of kelp forests along the coast is one of those stories. Kelp, brown algae that grow in shallow water, provide food and shelter for a variety of marine life. An unusual ocean heat wave several years ago and a disease that killed off a sea urchin predator disrupted the kelp’s ecosystem.
“Warm water is good for urchins, which are native,” Pace said. The growing purple urchin population ate large patches of kelp forest.
“People say, ‘Those urchins are nasty. We need to kill them,’ ” he said. But killing a species that belongs in the area isn’t a simple fix. “Everything is more complicated, and actions that we take have consequences.”
Scientists are testing whether reducing some of the urchins will bring back the kelp, and Pace has dived with them to document their efforts.
Pace, who is 37, said he hopes he can tell this and other stories for years to come, perhaps one day with his two kids, who are ages 5 and 3. He wants them to experience magical moments like a bait ball he observed 300 miles off the coast of Mexico. About 1,000 sharks, dolphins and large fish worked together to feed on the small fish.
“That’s like what the oceans used to be,” he said. “I hope my kids get to see that.” | 2022-08-17T14:14:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ralph Pace tells ocean conservation story through photos - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/08/17/ralph-pace-ocean-conservation-photos/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/08/17/ralph-pace-ocean-conservation-photos/ |
6 MERCURY PICTURES PRESENTS (Hogarth, $28.99). By Anthony Marra. While seeking approval from Hollywood censors, a producer finds herself drawn back into a tragedy from her past.
10 LAPVONA (Penguin Press, $27). By Ottessa Moshfegh. A shepherd boy kills the son of a lord, setting off a power struggle among the religious and secular elites of their medieval town.
4 I’M GLAD MY MOM DIED (Simon & Schuster, $27.99). By Jennette McCurdy. A former child actor who rose to fame on Nickelodeon’s “iCarly” recounts the mistreatment she endured from her mother.
6 SHY (FSG, $35). By Mary Rodgers, Jesse Green. The outspoken composer offers witty and intimate accounts of her life with other broadway legends, including Stephen Sondheim and her father, Richard Rodgers.
10 LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, $32.50). By Rinker Buck. An adventure historian builds a 19th-century flatboat and sails it down the Mississippi River. | 2022-08-17T14:22:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Washington Post hardcover bestsellers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/washington-post-hardcover-bestsellers/2022/08/16/37d753e8-1d8a-11ed-8d30-84c409e82eb3_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/washington-post-hardcover-bestsellers/2022/08/16/37d753e8-1d8a-11ed-8d30-84c409e82eb3_story.html |
Since a miraculous two-goal finish against Orlando in Coach Wayne Rooney’s debut July 31, D.C. United has gone scoreless in four consecutive matches. (Jayne Kamin-Oncea/USA Today Sports)
LOS ANGELES — For a man who made a lucrative living scoring goals — he’s the best in Manchester United and English national team history — Wayne Rooney is not accustomed to empty performances. Over a 19-year career, through power and incisiveness, the soccer ball would usually find its way into the net.
His playing days, though, are behind him now. He has grown out a graying beard and poured his efforts into coaching. Others must score the goals; he can only instruct and inspire. Five matches into his D.C. United tenure, his patience is being tested.
Last in MLS’s 28-deep standings, United has made defensive strides, even without two back line starters sidelined for the season with injuries. Goals, however, remain painfully elusive.
Since a miraculous two-goal finish against Orlando in Rooney’s debut July 31, United has gone scoreless in four consecutive matches.
The latest was a 1-0 decision to league-leading Los Angeles FC on Tuesday. United showed character and fortitude, and under Rooney, continues making small strides.
With several new players and a new system, though, D.C. is not going to generate a lot of scoring opportunities. That will probably have to wait until 2023. What little the team is creating lacks fulfillment. And so, as encouraging as Tuesday’s performance was against an opponent that has lost once over almost three months and scored nine goals the previous two matches, there was nothing to show for it.
“We’ll keep improving. I believe that,” Rooney said. “We’re in a difficult position, of course, in the league. We brought quite a few new faces in, so it will take time. We’re hoping we can end the season well and build some momentum going into next season.”
United posed one major threat in each half. In the 26th minute, it took a wondrous save by Maxime Crépeau to deny D.C. captain Steven Birnbaum’s header. After Birnbaum was sent off for a second yellow card and LAFC took the lead in the 67th minute, United’s Taxi Fountas hit the post from 30 yards.
United performed much better Tuesday than Saturday, when it lost at New England by a 1-0 outcome that seemed larger.
The organization had hoped for a lift this weekend against the East-leading Philadelphia Union at Audi Field. But its marquee summer signing, Belgian striker Christian Benteke, is “very doubtful” to receive his work visa in time, Rooney said. That would push his probable debut to Aug. 28 in Atlanta.
Despite the scoring problems, United looked as though it might escape Banc of California Stadium with one point.
“I thought we performed well and I thought we caused them problems,” Rooney said. “Brave. We competed.”
Yellow cards, though, were piling up. And in the 60th minute, Birnbaum received a second, resulting in his first ejection since a 2014 U.S. Open Cup game.
“I can’t go to ground like that [and take down Kellyn Acosta] and make the decision for him,” Birnbaum said of referee Ramy Touchan. “I take responsibility for it. I felt like I let the team down a little bit.”
He will be sorely missed against Philadelphia, which, six weeks ago, trashed United, 7-0, in Chester, Pa.
“Steve’s an experienced player,” Rooney said. “He knows that if you put yourself in those situations [already] on a yellow card, then it’s possible you can get a red.”
While Rooney had no complaints about Birnbaum being sent off, he was irked with Touchan’s overall work. United players received six yellows; LAFC got one near the end for time-wasting.
“It’s a league which is progressing and getting better, and I’ve got a lot of respect for referees,” Rooney said. “I understand it’s a very difficult job. But if I can give my opinion without getting in trouble, I felt there’s a lot of people in the game who can do better.”
Rooney was happy with goalkeeper David Ochoa, a prized 21-year-old acquired last month from Real Salt Lake. In his D.C. debut, Ochoa made two fabulous saves in the second half and showed command of the penalty area throughout the night.
A star last year but at odds with RSL Coach Pablo Mastroeni this year, Ochoa didn’t appear in any regular season matches.
“It’s been a while,” said Ochoa, a Southern California native who had 20 friends and family in attendance. “I was a little shaky going into it, a little nervous. Once the whistle blew, that adrenaline took over. I’m happy to get back on the field and keep making a name for myself.”
That performance probably elevated him to the top of the depth chart, ahead of Rafael Romo, the starter since June 18 in place of veteran Bill Hamid, who is recovering from hand surgery.
Ochoa and United also benefited from LAFC’s imperfections.
“Just an off-night for our attackers,” said Coach Steve Cherundolo, whose team has a nine-point lead in the race for the Supporters’ Shield (points champion) and is on pace for the best regular season in MLS history. “Same result, though. That’s what is important.”
The attack did click in the 67th minute, on a counter led by Carlos Vela. Cristian Arango drew out Ochoa, then crossed to substitute Mahala Opoku for an easy goal.
LAFC (18-4-3) has won a club-record seven in a row, more victories than United (6-15-4) all season.
Nonetheless, Rooney remains optimistic — even if his team can’t score.
“We handled the game well and I think we deserve something out of the game,” he said. “It’s a shame. We went to 10 men and we concede the goal but there’s a lot of positives.” | 2022-08-17T14:48:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. United Coach Wayne Rooney sees progress in LAFC loss - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/17/wayne-rooney-lafc-dc-united-loss/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/17/wayne-rooney-lafc-dc-united-loss/ |
PALM SPRINGS, CA - MAY 11: An array of electricity producing wind turbines (aka the San Gorgonio Pass wind farm) are viewed along Interstate 10 on May 11, 2022 near Palm Springs, California. The Coachella Valley, located along Interstate 10 and south to the Salton Sea, is home to dozens of municipalities and boosts a winter population of 800,000 residents but drops to 400,000 residents in the hot summer months. (Photo by George Rose/Getty Images) (Photographer: George Rose/Getty Images North America)
“It is not true that we need to gut our environmental protections in order to scale up green energy,” said Mahyar Sorour, deputy legislative director for Beyond Dirty Fuels at the Sierra Club. And thus goes the next chapter in the political war over whether and how the United States will join the battle against climate change.
Unlike America’s longstanding partisan stalemate – not a single Republican voted for the Inflation Reduction Act that President Biden signed into law on Tuesday – the new conflict over climate policy will pit many environmental groups that have pushed hardest for the US to decarbonize against the administration’s efforts to do so.
The new tussle will inevitably trip up the strategy to overhaul the nation’s energy infrastructure, as environmental organizations stand in the way of the most straightforward paths to take carbon out of the American economy over the next 30 years.
“Maybe it was the best they could get, but let’s not be disingenuous about the tradeoffs,” Brett Hartl, the government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity – an environmental advocacy group – told me.
At the moment, what sticks in the craw of green activists are the demands by Senator Joe Manchin in exchange for his vote for the IRA: to clear the path for the completion of a natural gas pipeline across West Virginia, plus a slew of reforms to relax other regulatory hurdles facing energy infrastructure projects, including environmental reviews.
“There is no reason to give Senator Manchin any more concessions than he already got,” Sorour told me. “The IRA is going to be transformative,” she acknowledged. “Congress approved a massive investment to scale up renewable energy.” But as far as Sorour is concerned, giving West Virginia’s natural gas a pass is way over the line.
She has a point. Conscripting Congress to approve a favored pipeline is a little unseemly. One hopes America won’t go about overhauling its energy infrastructure one pipeline bill at a time. Moreover, it is not unreasonable to demand that pipelines abide by standards to protect the ecosystems and communities they traverse.
But let’s face it: Natural gas, which produces just half the carbon emissions of coal, will continue to play a critical role in the decarbonization of the energy grid. “Gas is not a bridge fuel to the clean energy future that we need,” Sorour insisted. In fact, it has been the main fuel to replace coal. And it will continue to for some time. Pipelines will be needed to move it around.
Consider North Carolina, one of 16 states that have imposed a schedule of carbon mitigation, committing to slash CO2 emissions by 70% from 2005 to 2030. An analysis by the Brattle Group for the Clean Power Suppliers Association concluded that the cheapest path to the goal included adding 2,000–3,500 megawatts of natural gas-powered generation by then.
Natural gas features in national decarbonization strategies too. The modeling in Princeton’s Repeat Project, which calculates the IRA could cut the nation’s carbon emissions 42% by 2030, compared to 2005, assumes multibillion dollar investments in additional generation capacity powered by natural gas. The Rhodium Group, which assesses that the legislation could cut emissions from 32% to 42%, also acknowledges that gas-fueled generation will grow.
Getting in the way of natural gas generation, at this stage, will probably just mean burning more coal. “At some point we will approach the end of the ‘coal-to-gas’ bridge,” said Alex Trembath, deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute, which promotes the deployment of technology to confront environmental problems. “But we’re not there yet.”
The environmental movement’s disquiet about the administration’s climate strategy is not just due to the carbon emissions from fossil fuels. Hartl points out that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig emitted little CO2 but still managed to do a lot of damage by spilling millions of barrels of oil into the sea.
Indeed, many of America’s most powerful green organizations have a broader beef with the impact that any energy infrastructure can have on the natural environment. And that’s a problem for the administration’s strategy to combat climate change. Every tool in the IRA is likely to run afoul of one environmental goal or another.
The Sierra Club and other groups opposed a now-blocked project to bring hydropower from Canada to the Northeast on the grounds that the needed transmission lines would cut through long swathes of forest, while hydropower takes up substantial acreage and is not renewable anyway.
Projects to capture carbon from the air and store it have also drawn environmentalists’ ire. And some environmental groups are apoplectic at the renewed interest in nuclear energy as part of the clean energy mix.
The sun and the wind, for now, seem to be relatively unopposed sources of clean energy. But the Sierra Club has already opposed at least one solar plant in Nevada. Scaling up wind power, which requires 370 times as much land as natural gas-based generation, is definitely going to butt against demands to preserve the natural environment.
The environmental movement’s objection to natural gas and other stuff has been of relatively little significance, as the question over what to do about CO2 has been controlled by Republicans’ response to it: nothing. But with the GOP’s veto over climate policy lifted, greens’ opposition to all sorts of things may become the main roadblock to a solution.
The so-called “permitting compromise” between Manchin and Senator Chuck Schumer, which reportedly has the approval of both President Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the House, will provide the first battleground for this new conflict. Schumer promised Manchin the bill would pass before the close of this fiscal year , which ends on September 30.
But this is hardly the end of the new war over the nation’s environmental priorities.
I talked to Phillip K. Howard, the lawyer and good government advocate who wrote “Two Years, Not Ten Years” about how government reviews and regulations have gummed up the deployment of urgently needed infrastructure. I asked whether, ironically, the environmental movement would become a significant obstacle to the nation’s efforts toward carbon mitigation. His answer: “clearly, yes.” | 2022-08-17T14:53:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden’s New Climate Act Is About to Meet a Fierce Foe - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/bidensnew-climate-actis-about-to-meet-a-fiercefoe/2022/08/17/d19135ac-1e30-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/bidensnew-climate-actis-about-to-meet-a-fiercefoe/2022/08/17/d19135ac-1e30-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Wars that are caused by people can also be caused by deep historical processes. For proof, look at the fighting in Ukraine. That conflict is the doing of Russian President Vladimir Putin, a ruler determined to reassert Russia’s greatness by destroying an independent Ukraine. Yet it is also part of a bigger story about what happens when empires break up.
Yet empires don’t die quickly: Their collapse, historian Serhii Plokhy wrote, is a “process rather than an event.” When a vast entity once held together by the iron discipline of the metropole gives way, don’t expect a new, stable status quo overnight.
Because the Soviet Union was governed so brutally, its breakup has been particularly messy. The end of the Soviet state removed the strictures that had suppressed ethnic tensions and national rivalries among the empire’s constituent parts. It birthed new, politically volatile states. It precipitated an ongoing struggle between the country that had dominated the empire, Russia, and the states and peoples that now looked to escape Moscow’s grasp.
The result was what scholars have called the “wars of the Soviet succession” — a series of bloody conflicts over contested areas from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. During the 1990s, wars convulsed Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, Chechnya, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Tajikistan, often drawing in neighboring states and international peacekeepers. Some of these conflicts have since simmered; others, such as the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan, or the fight between Georgia and the Moscow-backed breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, reignited into major international conflicts. The end of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical earthquake whose aftershocks destabilize the international system even today.
Ukraine has suffered the most jarring of these tremors: The current war is distinguished by the ferocity of the fighting and the totality of Putin’s effort to wipe another country off the map. Its most immediate origins can be found in the increasingly totalitarian nature of Putin’s regime, which allows him to be more aggressive while also requiring him to find external enemies; as well as in the question of whether Kyiv will align with Moscow or the West.
Yet it is also of a piece with the larger post-Soviet tumult. Ukraine’s declaration of independence in late 1991 helped destroy the Soviet state and accelerate the imperial dissolution that followed. It is thus unsurprising, and sadly symbolic, that Ukraine is at the center of Putin’s effort to reconsolidate the dominance Moscow once possessed.
The war hasn’t gone as Putin planned: Ukraine has defended itself admirably and will long resist being forcibly incorporated into a Russian sphere of influence. Putin’s quest for imperial resurrection has, in this case, turbocharged the formation of Ukrainian nationalism. Yet if Russia has paid a high price for its misadventure, that doesn’t mean the wars of Soviet succession are over.
The potential for violence in Central Asia remains high, as shown by an anti-government revolt in Kazakhstan, which precipitated Russian intervention earlier, this year. A change of government or a military mutiny in Belarus — neither of which can be excluded due to severe dissatisfaction with Aleksandr Lukashenko’s autocratic regime — could start a fight over that country’s place between Russia and the West.
In early 1992, one American newspaper warned that the troubles caused by the “still-fragmenting, nuclear-armed shards of the world’s last great empire” were only beginning. Even when the present war is over, that empire’s long, violent afterlife will persist.
• Italy’s Far Right Clings to the Past — and Falls Flat: Maria Tadeo | 2022-08-17T14:53:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russia’s War in Ukraine Is How the Soviet Union Finally Ends - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/russias-war-in-ukraine-is-how-the-soviet-unionfinally-ends/2022/08/17/0074ccd6-1e35-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/russias-war-in-ukraine-is-how-the-soviet-unionfinally-ends/2022/08/17/0074ccd6-1e35-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming, during a hearing of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol in Washington, D.C., US, on Tuesday, July 12, 2022. Whether far-right extremists who attacked the US Capitol were encouraged by or even conspired with then-President Donald Trump will be the subject of today’s hearing by the House committee investigating the riot. (Bloomberg)
Oddly enough, Cheney’s father was on his way to being Speaker of the House when his own career path was altered back in 1989; Dick Cheney was the second-ranked House Republican behind a soon-to-retire party leader, but he became George H.W. Bush’s replacement Secretary of Defense when Bush’s first choice was defeated in the Senate. What’s more, Dick Cheney’s biggest accomplishment during his House career also involved serving on a select committee, in his case the one investigating the Iran-Contra affair — and his role was to limit the political damage of the investigation, not to help make it effective. It certainly doesn’t appear likely at this point that Liz Cheney will wind up a cabinet secretary, let alone vice-president or president. But as hard as it is to see a next step that helps her fix the Republican Party and revive its commitment to the constitution and the rule of law, she may actually wind up as having the more important political career anyway. | 2022-08-17T14:53:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Liz Cheney’s Defense of Democracy Needs a Political Strategy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/liz-cheneys-defense-of-democracy-needs-a-political-strategy/2022/08/17/8f60fe6c-1e38-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/liz-cheneys-defense-of-democracy-needs-a-political-strategy/2022/08/17/8f60fe6c-1e38-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
A plot twist for video game novels: As TV shows ascend, books fade
By Greg Leporati
(Xbox Game Studios; iStock/Washington Post illustration)
Once upon a time — in the early 2000s — novels based on video games were a nascent but quickly growing trend. The New York Times best-selling science fiction author William Dietz had a hand in that: In 2003, his publisher approached him about writing a novelization of the landmark video game, “Halo: Combat Evolved.” It was his first time writing a novel based on a video game.
“I had to learn the game, master it and write the book — all in three months,” Dietz said with a laugh. “It was kind of crazy.”
But the result, “Halo: The Flood,” was a rousing success, going on to sell more than 1 million copies and, along with Eric Nylund’s 2001 book “Halo: The Fall of Reach,” helped kick-start a major surge in video game novels. Soon, the term “transmedia” — telling a story across multiple platforms — emerged as a major buzzword throughout the publishing industry, and it became standard fare for Triple-A game releases to feature an accompanying book series.
“Some people take a dim view of tie-in books as being uncool,” said Dietz, who went on to write novels based on other video game series including Mass Effect, Hitman and Resistance. “But I think they’re a lot of fun — and I’m still proud of them.”
In recent years, streaming platforms have jumped on the transmedia bandwagon, adapting video game IPs at a rapid pace. This year saw the release of Paramount Plus’s “Halo” and Netflix’s “Resident Evil” series, and plans are in place to produce shows based on Assassin’s Creed, Fallout, God of War and The Last of Us, among others.
Inside Halo's universal aspirations
But while video game IPs are seemingly hotter than ever, literary tie-ins — which had become so common over the past 20 years — face a more uncertain future: Authors say the number of video game novels has noticeably declined.
“It’s a diminishing market,” Dietz said, adding that it has been many years since he has received an offer to write one.
Part of the problem, he said, is that people are reading less: Despite the publishing industry enjoying record profits during the pandemic, Dietz cites a Gallup poll from earlier in 2022 that found Americans are reading two or three fewer books per year than they were between 2001 and 2016.
Author Brian Evenson, who has written a number of video game tie-ins throughout his career, has also noticed a decline.
“In those early days — the Halo days — there were just so many video game novels, and that has certainly slowed down,” he said. Evensen also noted he has been particularly surprised that narrative-heavy franchises like The Last of Us and Red Dead Redemption have opted not to pursue tie-in novels.
For Kari Snyder, a digital media professor at the University of Houston who specializes in transmedia, the shifting emphasis toward TV adaptations is a logical next step for video game IPs and reflective of how people are consuming media.
“When we simply look at trends in communications, video is skyrocketing, and everything is leaning toward that,” she said. “The reason that streaming is the pick of choice is purely because the audience has moved there.”
A constant gamble
Book publishing and video games always made for strange bedfellows, according to Eric Raab, a former senior editor at Tor books who later worked for Bungie, the original developer of Halo. In the early 2000s, he said, many publishing executives, notoriously old-school and traditional, dismissed video games as a niche hobby. Meanwhile, game designers — many without dedicated writers on staff — often treated plot and world building as secondary aspects of the development process.
“But after the success of the Halo books, one thing we all understood was that this had a lot of potential,” Raab said.
A 3D breakdown of Master Chief's iconic armor
Each project, however, proved to be a significant gamble, and Raab points to “Perfect Dark Zero,” a 2005 launch title for the Xbox 360, as one that didn’t pay off. Hoping to replicate the success of Halo and its accompanying novels, Microsoft signed a multi-book deal with Tor, one of the most prominent science fiction and fantasy imprints, and brought on award-winning author Greg Rucka to helm the project. But when the game released to modest reviews and underwhelming sales, the book series fizzled out.
Since plots often were finalized in the later stages of a game’s development cycle, novels had to be written quickly afterward to coincide with their release and “ride the advertising from the video game,” Raab explained. “It was a lot of work, and you simply never knew when a game would take off or not.”
According to Mat Piscatella, a video game industry analyst at research firm NPD Group, video games historically have been difficult to license across other forms of media, including books, because of the unpredictability of its market. Unlike Star Wars — a franchise that seems to enjoy perpetual success across all of its licensed media — and other well-known IPs in TV and film, modern video games regularly fade in and out of popularity, sometimes suddenly.
“You’re placing a bet that when a particular game comes out, it’ll generate enough interest to make your novel work,” Piscatella said. “You can have the best IP in the world, but if you miss on just one game, everything could go kaput.”
He cites the Dead Space series as a notable example: When the third game in the series received mediocre reviews, the franchise quickly lost momentum, and its corresponding book series dried up.
The sudden dip in popularity caught Evenson, who authored two of the Dead Space novels, by surprise.
“Dead Space games were pretty groundbreaking, and it was a pleasure to write those books,” he said. “But then it just sort of … disappeared.”
It’s not all doom and gloom for video game literature. Although the volume of tie-in novels has slowed down, some of the more established gaming franchises, including Halo and Gears of War, continue to release new books. In fact, a recent NPD study shows that Halo is one of the top-selling book licenses in the second quarter of this year — the only video game IP in the top 10. Author Kelly Gay, who wrote the recently published “Halo: The Rubicon Protocol,” credits the game’s lasting literary success to the IP’s long-term commitment to novelizations and world building.
“There’s so much content and depth to it at this point,” she said. “It makes you feel like this is a universe that could possibly exist.”
Video games meet prestige TV with plans for 'The Last of Us' on HBO
Additionally, Blizzard Entertainment created its own publishing division in 2016 (Evenson contributed to a Diablo short-story collection due out in the fall). And outside of Triple-A titles, the meteoric rise of self-publishing in recent years has helped some smaller game developers pursue literary tie-ins: The designers of the indie horror game “Five Nights at Freddie’s,” for example, released a self-published novel based on the game in 2015, prompting publishing company Scholastic to later release two sequels.
But the rise of online, multiplayer games, such as “Fortnite” and “Roblox” — where gamers essentially create their own stories — has added new complications to the already precarious publishing pipeline in recent years.
“These massively multiplayer games could have hundreds of millions of registered players, but they don’t focus on a unifying plot or a single character, like Master Chief,” Dietz said. “That makes tie-ins quite difficult to produce — and, to my knowledge, there have been no ‘Fortnite’ novels as of yet.”
But single-player narratives with deep, fleshed-out worlds may be due for a resurgence. Piscatella points to the surprising success of “Elden Ring” — in which “A Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin contributed to its lore — as a sign that the literary world could still play an important role in gaming’s future.
“There will be a lot of lessons from that game, and one of them will be this: Your world building needs to be super sharp, polished, and have a guiding narrative,” he said. “And who better to tell those types of stories than real storytellers, right?”
As for Evenson, he is optimistic game developers will see the value that literature could bring to new franchises, and that the success of recent TV adaptations could even breathe new life into tie-in novels. He notes that each type of media — whether a game, book, or TV show — can bring different elements to the table, and he is hopeful certain individuals within gaming will step up and recognize these opportunities from the outset when conceiving new IPs.
“We’ve seen it done piecemeal, always after the fact,” he said. “The game is great, so let’s quickly make a novel or TV show. But we’re going to reach a point where people will be creating all of these things at once — and it could very well change the whole way we think about narrative. The potential here, I believe, is still enormous.” | 2022-08-17T14:54:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Video game IPs are turning into TV shows, but where are the books? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/17/video-game-books/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/17/video-game-books/ |
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with participants of the Bolshaya Peremena national contest for students, via video link in Moscow, July 20, 2022. (Sputnik/Reuters)
Faced with a worrisome decline in Russia’s population, President Vladimir Putin this week revived a Soviet-era award launched in 1944, to encourage Russians to supersize their families.
The “Mother Heroine” award published in a decree on Monday goes to women who bear 10 or more children, offering financial incentives and social kudos in a bid to spur population growth.
The honorary medal was first established by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union and given to around 400,000 citizens, according to Russian media. The revived award will offer Russian citizens a one-time payment of 1 million rubles ($16,500) after their 10th child turns 1 year old — and only if the other nine children have all survived.
However, the Stalin-era accolade was originally launched as part of a wider social package of “pronatalist” measures taken toward the end of World War II, Kristin Roth-Ey, associate professor at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, told The Washington Post on Wednesday.
“It was about service to the motherland,” she said. Its revival is “obviously a conscious echo of the Stalinist past.”
Roth-Ey said the award was created when the Soviet Union was trying to “plan for postwar reconstruction” and support families as “the core institution of Soviet society.” Other measures included better health care for women, financial aid and making it harder for married couples to get divorced, she added.
“The war led to high anxiety about population loss. … It has resonances obviously with what is going on right now,” she added, referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which the Kremlin terms a special military operation.
Last month, CIA Director William J. Burns estimated that about 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the Ukraine war and up to 45,000 more wounded. He cited the latest U.S. intelligence on Russian losses.
Is Russia headed for a return to Stalinism?
Nearly eight decades after Stalin’s decree, having lots of children is still viewed as “part of being a good Russian citizen,” said Roth-Ey, and it is common in other “authoritarian … nationalist movements that we see in places like Hungry and other parts of Central and Eastern Europe.”
In Russia, as elsewhere in Europe, World War II remains a large part of the national psyche. The defeat of Nazi Germany is celebrated each year on May 9, Victory Day, a Russian holiday of national remembrance marked by much pomp and patriotic fervor.
The revival of the motherhood medal is part of a “patriotic campaign” that has ramped up in Russia since it annexed Crimea in 2014, Roth-Ey added.
The original Soviet medal was a gold star superimposed on a silver pentagon and decorated in red enamel reading “Мать-героиня” (Mother Heroine).
Putin, 69, is one of three children, but both of his brothers died in infancy before he was born. He first lent his support to reviving the award on June 1, Children’s Day. “As a rule, you can really rely on those who were brought up in a large family,” he said in a speech marking the occasion. “They will not let down a friend or colleagues, or their motherland.”
Since 2008, the Kremlin has also awarded the “Order of Parental Glory” to parents who have more than seven children. They receive 50,000 rubles ($825 today) and a certificate when their seventh child reaches 3 years old.
Dina Fainberg, author of “Cold War Correspondents” and an associate professor of modern history, agrees that the revival of the Mother Heroine award is part of similar postwar “drive toward state-led patriotism” by Putin.
But she said the reasoning is not necessarily the conflict in Ukraine.
“Ukraine is still not called a war,” she told The Post of the nearly six-month invasion. “Putin and his team took great care not to depict it as a war. If you start calling it a war, you undermine stability and make people panic.”
More than just “nostalgia” for the old Soviet empire, a bigger issue in Putin’s mind may be demographic decline, she said.
The Russians “have an issue with population decline, obviously, and a demographic crisis,” Fainberg said. But there is a “growing return of the patriarchal state,” she added, with Putin viewing himself as the symbolic male head of the Russian family, around which everyone can rally, and the ultimate “protector of the elderly, women and children” from Russia’s enemies.
Russia’s population, now estimated at less than 145 million, is in decline due to low birthrates and an aging populace — issues not unique to Russia but afflicting a number of developed countries.
In June, he called Russia’s demographic situation “extremely difficult” and called for “drastic” measures in response. Last year, he lamented that “there are not enough working hands” in the country with the biggest landmass in the world.
In the first six months of 2022, 6.3 percent fewer children were born in Russia than in the same period a year earlier, Russia’s RBC outlet reported, citing data from Rosstat, a government statistics agency.
But demographic expert Sarah Harper, director of the Oxford Institute of population aging, told The Post that state policies to boost population are rarely successful.
“Demographically, such polices simply don’t work,” she said. “The problem is you have a baby now, and it’s 20 years before that baby is productive.”
Such population policies can be more common in dictatorships or authoritarian regimes where “there is long term strategic planning,” as opposed to liberal democracies, Harper said. In any case, she said, in the 21st century “the quality” of a country’s people is more crucial to a country’s success than the quantity.
“Boosting population is very, very difficult,” she added. Immigration remains a key factor, but it comes with its own political “tensions,” making it a less popular remedy in Russia and elsewhere.
“I don’t see contemporary young Russian women really responding to the call,” she said. “They have other things on their mind.” | 2022-08-17T15:10:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Putin revives ‘Mother Heroine’ award for women who have 10 children - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/17/russia-ukraine-putin-mother-heroine-award-children/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/17/russia-ukraine-putin-mother-heroine-award-children/ |
And the son who has spent decades trying to seal his father’s place in history
Andrew Kravchenko, son of Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko, at home in Arizona amid boxes of his father’s archives. (Adriana Zehbrauskas for The Washington Post)
When Andrew Kravchenko was a child in the 1950s, he didn’t know who his real father was. His mother, Cynthia Kuser Earle, had no trouble supporting the family on her own. A ravishing socialite and heiress who spoke eight languages, she had sufficient funds to sustain three glamorous residences for Andrew and his brother: a mansion in New Jersey, a room at a luxury hotel in Manhattan and a country home on a secluded island in New Hampshire.
Cynthia had a companion whom Andrew called Tato, and when he showed up, he’d be on the scene with Cynthia and her sons for 10 days, maybe two weeks. Then he’d jet off like a wild comet. “There were probably 27 to 30 visits, all told,” Andrew says. “That’s all, but they stayed with me. It was like seeing a woman from the window of a moving train.”
A Ukrainian emigre, Tato — whose real name was Victor Kravchenko — had flair equal to Cynthia’s. He was handsome and stocky, with thick black hair and a temper. He stayed up all night, writing and smoking, Andrew recalls, and took long insomniac walks before dawn. He cooked and let the crockery pile up on the counter. He bought Andrew a drum set.
How World War II Led to Washington’s First Outing
Agony, Endurance and Escape: Ukraine in Pictures
When Victor parted from Andrew, the boy didn’t always know where the man was off to. He knew only that Victor cut a wide swath in the world. In 1946, just after he immigrated to the United States, Kravchenko’s memoir of his life in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union was published. “I Chose Freedom” became a bestseller in the U.S., and it was unflinching, particularly in its description of the Holodomor, a famine that killed 4 million people in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933, after Stalin seized grain there. “The children,” Kravchenko wrote, “were skeletons with swollen bellies.”
Cynthia knew that in revealing Stalin’s depravity, Victor had made himself the enemy of a dangerous autocrat; in his time, Stalin killed as many as 20 million of his political opponents. That’s why, according to Kravenchko biographer Gary Kern, Cynthia never married Victor, even though he was the father of her two sons. That’s why she married a man who’d be her husband only on paper, and why she told Andrew and his older brother, Tony, that this decoy — whom they rarely saw — was their father. She didn’t want the boys to tell anyone they were linked to Victor. The Soviet secret police had a robust U.S. presence in the 1950s, and Cynthia feared these agents would kill her children.
For many years, Andrew believed the lie about his parentage. Then, when Andrew was 13, Tony discerned the truth. He told his brother that Tato was their dad, and Andrew felt betrayed, honing a teenager’s unqualified, burning fury. He ceased speaking to Tato. Indeed, in January 1966, when Victor was 60 and beset by cataracts, a double hernia, shingles and emphysema, 15-year-old Andrew ignored him, as did Tony. In a letter to Cynthia, Victor complained he “heard nothing” from his sons. “Photos, or replies to my letters?” he asked before lamenting that they “don’t write one word.”
Victor died the following month, apparently by suicide. In the 56 years since, Andrew has become obsessed with his father — with trying to figure out what Victor meant to him, yes, but also with trying to bring back into the public eye a once-renowned figure who has faded into obscurity. His efforts have intensified since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February, and he feels that the Jan. 6 hearings only make Victor’s message — about the need to defend democracy and freedom — more relevant than ever. “He carried,” Andrew says, “the fighting spirit that we all need to stand up to a regime.”
Since the late 1980s, Andrew has focused exclusively on Victor. Thanks to a family inheritance, he has not worked a job. Not for a day. And now that he’s 71, time is slipping away from him, and a question shrouds his campaign: Will he ever succeed in bringing renewed attention to his father’s brave stand against tyranny?
To understand Victor Kravchenko and his role in history, we need to go back to 1932, when he was among the Ukrainian Bolsheviks dispatched to the nation’s countryside to seize the land belonging to peasants, so that the agrarian sector could be nationalized. A Soviet apparatchik, Mendel Hatayevich, told him and 80 other young Communists, “Throw out your bourgeois humanism and act like Bolsheviks worthy of Comrade Stalin. … The last weak remnants of the capitalist peasant must be uprooted at all costs.”
When the uprooting work took Kravchenko to tiny Podgorodnoye, Ukraine, he observed the cruelty of one fellow Communist. “This beast drags the peasants out of their houses in the middle of the night, cursing and threatening them with his Mauser,” Kravchenko would later write, referencing a semiautomatic rifle.
But Kravchenko stifled his outrage. He rose in the Communist ranks, and in 1943, as the Soviet Union and the United States allied in the war against Hitler, he came to Washington to serve as a Red Army captain.
When he first arrived in Washington, he did not make an impression. His fellow residents at a Park Road NW boardinghouse would remember him as a quiet non-English speaker awaiting the stateside arrival of his wife. But on April 1, 1944, without authorization from his Soviet bosses, he stole off to Washington’s Union Station clutching two suitcases. On the lookout for “dangers and omens,” he would later write, he took the train north to Manhattan. Amid a freak April snowstorm, he hosted a news conference at which he resigned from his job and lambasted the Soviet government for its failure to “grant political and civil liberties.” The U.S.S.R., he said, was subjecting citizens to “unspeakable oppression and cruelties, while the NKVD” — the Soviet secret police — “acting through its thousands of spies, continues to wield its unbridled domination over the people of Russia.”
Kravchenko’s story ran on the front page of the New York Times and in myriad other newspapers. It shocked America. At the time, bad-mouthing the Soviet Union was almost verboten. President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted Americans to regard Stalin warmly, as “Uncle Joe,” and while it was clear that Kravchenko needed amnesty — returning to the Soviet Union would have been suicide — it wasn’t clear that the president would grant it. So Kravchenko brought into the American lexicon a new phrase. He told reporters that he was placing himself under “the protection of American public opinion.”
A man without a country, pursued by NKVD operatives, Kravchenko spent several months on the lam, hiding out in a succession of friends’ New York apartments, writing all the while. In 1946, the publishing house Scribner released “I Chose Freedom.” The book is a gripping narrative of Soviet treachery that the defector shaped in collaboration with the American writer Eugene Lyons, and it is perhaps best remembered for its discussion of Stalin’s gulags. “Prisons and concentration camps were filled with ‘enemies of the people,’ ” Kravchenko writes before describing one camp: “Behind the barbed wire, I could see a long row of barracks with tiny barred windows. Guardians paced before them, accompanied by huge, fierce-looking dogs.” The prisoners are gaunt. “Never,” he recalled, “have I seen such degraded human beings.”
Stalin was an early reader of “I Chose Freedom,” and after the book was published he made sure that Kravchenko’s family suffered.
Stalin was an early reader of “I Chose Freedom”; one of his spies managed to secure a draft. And after the book became a global sensation, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, he made sure that Kravchenko’s family suffered. Both his parents, as well as his brother, were sent to concentration camps. His mother died there, and his father died shortly after he was released.
In the United States, Kravchenko was obliged to move about under an assumed name: Peter Martin. As the NKVD kept Kravchenko in its sights, phalanxes of FBI agents joined in pursuing him. Kravchenko’s FBI file reveals that, despite his anti-Stalinist rhetoric, the bureau felt there was a “strong possibility” he was an NKVD agent. Of course, both secret agencies knew all about Victor’s romance with Cynthia.
The defector met the heiress on a cold evening in 1946, at a Manhattan party to celebrate the release of “I Chose Freedom.” Cynthia Kuser was married at the time, but she had already conducted affairs with the Spanish matador Manolete and the CEO of General Motors. She found Victor exotic, beguiling. Late that night, speaking in Russian, she inveigled him to her palatial New Jersey manse, Faircourt. “At the landing of the ornate staircase, he reached for her, held her against him,” Andrew Kravchenko writes in “The Glamorous Stranger,” an unpublished 350-page memoir, finished this year. “He kissed her mouth, neck, vigorous in her warmth.”
Perhaps it was Victor’s gusto that spoke most to Andrew. He contends that he and Victor had a primordial connection. In his memoir, he zeroes in on a childhood visit that father and son made to the monkey cage in New York’s Central Park Zoo. “Some kids came in yelling, taunting, heckling,” Andrew writes. The monkeys were “agitated, swinging frantically, screeching about,” and Andrew felt a pained solidarity with them.
“I rushed one of the boys,” he continues, “hitting him in the face, pummeling him.” Next, the assaulted child’s father gets angry at Victor for letting this happen. Victor slaps the man in the face. When the man seems poised to rejoinder with punches of his own, Victor opens up his overcoat so that a hidden pistol becomes visible. The man and his sons then retreat, and, Andrew writes, “Tato picked me up, I burrowed my head close to his chest, dried my tears on his shirt. … I could hear his heartbeat. He did not say anything.”
Victor was not a family man, however. He was a political animal, and in the wake of his book’s publication, he focused his contempt on France, where, in the 1946 legislative election, the Communist Party won over 28 percent of the vote. Leading intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre were so devotedly red that they encouraged others to downplay the horrors of Stalin’s gulags. As independent historian and Russian translator Gary Kern recounts in his 700-page biography published in 2007, “The Kravchenko Case: One Man’s War on Stalin,” the French Communist press was relentless in smearing Kravchenko. In November 1947, Les Lettres Françaises, a Paris paper, ran a front-page headline reading, “How Kravchenko Was Fabricated.”
The fictional tale that followed leaned heavily on an unnamed source, a “garçon,” or young man, who worked for a World War II-era U.S. intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services, and allegedly helped Kravchenko defect. The story claimed that Kravchenko was an alcoholic who’d failed when he tried to write a book, scratching out a mere 60 pages that were “virtually illegible and practically unusable.” It contended that shadowy anti-Communist operatives had written every word in “I Chose Freedom.”
The riff about false authorship was particularly rich since, as Princeton professor John V. Fleming recounts in his 2009 book, “The Anti-Communist Manifestos,” Kravchenko had driven his editors at Scribner bonkers with his manic engagement in the book’s production. After Lyons, his co-writer, rendered each passage in English, Kravchenko insisted that the words be orally translated into Russian, so he could make changes. As the book progressed, Kravchenko’s English improved. Gamely, he revisited supposedly finished passages, making new changes. His publisher told him the edits were “far in excess of what we usually permit.”
Kravchenko sued Les Lettres Françaises for libel, and the ensuing 10-week trial, which took place in Paris in 1949, was such a sensation that many European newspapers ran daily transcripts of the proceedings. In essence, the court asked whether “I Chose Freedom” was an accurate depiction of Soviet life.
Kravchenko and his French attorney answered yes by marshaling devastating testimony from gulag survivors who spoke in detail of the inhumanities they had endured. Margarete Buber-Neumann, a German intellectual and ex-Communist, had spent time in both Hitler’s and Stalin’s concentration camps, and she suggested that Stalin’s were worse. Of her two years in Siberia, she said, “We were given 600 grams of damp black bread with a thin watery soup and sometimes a small salted fish in return for carrying out backbreaking work in the fields from dawn till dusk every day.”
The trial’s protagonist, however, was Kravchenko. Nattily dressed in black suits and afforded far more leeway than a plaintiff would be in a U.S. courtroom, he leaped frequently from his seat. He berated the defense’s witnesses, an array of Soviet lackeys flown in by Stalin to discredit him. He lapsed into tantrums, shouting and rattling his fists so that Buber-Neumann, the witness, is said to have described him as a “Neanderthal man.”
When cerebral French Communists testified that gulags actually didn’t exist, they seemed, in comparison to Kravchenko, anemic and hollow. Kravchenko ultimately prevailed — striking, Fleming writes, “a devastating blow against the pretensions of Western Communist propagandists. He had done so on his own initiative, expending many of his own resources, and calling upon his own indomitable courage. His was a major Cold War victory.”
Victor’s triumph in Paris only deepened Stalin’s hatred for the defector, and Andrew’s mother, Cynthia, would eventually write, “I lived in terror for years.” Even after Stalin died in 1953, she remained scared, and in 1956 she decided to find a hiding spot. She and her two sons moved, without Victor, to a crumbling adobe house in the dry, sparsely populated ranch country northeast of Phoenix. This is where Andrew grew up, wealthy, cared for largely by a Venezuelan nanny, but in the mix with other, less privileged desert kids. Then known as Andrew Earle, he attended a one-room school. He became a decent bareback bronc rider, and he developed a reputation as a renegade, an indifferent student and a prankster. Once, after a motorist drove too close to him and his friend, Steve Carson, on a lonely dirt road, they took vengeance: “We filled up the front seat of his car with cacti,” recalls Carson, now a home builder in New Mexico.
Andrew saw Victor less frequently after he started first grade. The visits came mostly on summer break, in New York and in New Hampshire, and Victor was tired. In 1950, with his prodigious earnings from “I Chose Freedom,” he’d launched a new enterprise. He’d begun spending large stretches of time in Peru, opening up iron mines and paying locals handsomely to work for him. It was his goal to help sprout a humane new Peru governed by socialist principles. But his mining caper was a failure. Peru’s corruption overwhelmed him, and he struggled to breathe when he visited mines high in the Andes. A lifelong chain smoker, he contracted emphysema before he was 50.
Under stress, Victor’s health spiraled downward. By the mid-1960s, Kern writes, he was too fragile to live in his own apartment. He stayed nearby with a friend, a Russian translator named Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, and mixed whiskey and sleeping pills to ward off the creeping anxiety he felt after mining-related failures that cut him, he wrote Cynthia, “like a knife in the heart.” He spoke in low tones, fearful that Hapgood’s apartment was “wired.” Hapgood wrote Cynthia, “He has been talking of suicide.”
By now, Andrew was wild in ways that Victor might never have imagined. He and his friends developed a taste for slipping across Arizona’s southern border, into Mexico, to buy amphetamines. “We were,” Andrew writes in his memoir, “liquor-binging, peyote-eating, mushroom-consuming potheads.”
Cynthia shipped Andrew to the East Coast, to find sanctuary at a boarding school, but, he told me, he dropped out of one school, then another. When he was 18, his brother, Tony, died suddenly, of a pulmonary edema, at age 22. Andrew bypassed college to work as a painter’s apprentice in Spain. Then, in his late 20s, he rented an apartment in Lower Manhattan, in a now legendary six-story brick building. The Mudd Club, a punk-rock venue, was on the ground floor, playing host to bands like X and the B-52s. Actor Dan Aykroyd, of “Saturday Night Live” fame, was one story up. Andrew was a full-time artist now but hardly a starving one. Having inherited wealth from his mother, he had no need to grovel for commercial success. When a West Broadway gallery offered him what would have been his first major show, he decided to hold out for a more prestigious SoHo gallery. Was this just a matter of a well-heeled young man being choosy? Or was Andrew, in saying no, manifesting the same uncompromising bravado as his father?
As it turned out, Andrew never got a show in SoHo. And other facets of Victor’s bequest ate at him. There was the pain of being lied to and the confusion he’d felt concerning his origins. His brother’s death also proved haunting. In his memoir, Andrew writes, “I held a darkness that I could neither fully comprehend nor know how to cure. I started shooting up speedballs, a mixture of heroin and cocaine. … I would continue getting high for months.”
Today, Andrew Kravchenko lives outside Phoenix once again, in a gated community in the city’s rapidly expanding northern suburbs. He is poised and lean, with stylish shoes and a gracious, urbane manner.
He says he hasn’t touched any drugs, including alcohol, since the late 1980s. He swims almost daily and takes walks in the desert. With his partner of 22 years, a Hungarian emigre and visual artist named Livia Kovats, he leads a quiet, contemplative life almost separate, it seems, from the outside world.
Andrew changed his last name to Kravchenko in 1981, and he has, over the past three decades, exercised an almost monk-like devotion to his filial mission of resurrecting Victor’s story. He spent seven years writing “The Glamorous Stranger,” battling dyslexia along the way and teaching himself how to craft narrative prose. Andrew has been shopping the manuscript to literary agents for several months. As we talk about this, I can’t help but focus on the high stacks of numbered, acid-free cardboard boxes tucked into corners throughout his house. These are the Victor A. Kravchenko Archives.
In 1989, the Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote to Andrew, encouraging him to “collect” and “secure” Victor’s papers. Andrew then spent years transforming a jumble of yellowing newspaper clips, personal correspondence and documents in Russian, English, French and Ukrainian into a neatly categorized 60-box collection that was appraised in 2001. Willis Van Devanter, who’d previously appraised the papers of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and composer Irving Berlin, valued the Kravchenko archives at $2.75 million.
Andrew has been trying to sell the collection for over 20 years. But as he and I sip cool drinks on his front porch, he tells me that the campaign hasn’t yielded a match. “One library said that they wanted it,” he says, “but I didn’t feel that proper care would be given.”
Soon, we’re talking about how visitors to the archives might use its contents, and I suggest that a playwright might find gold in Victor and Cynthia’s story. “I’ve written their story,” he rejoinders. “There’s nothing left to write on Victor, or on my mother. What are people going to write? And if they do a play, how do they not infringe on my copyright?”
“So you’re not open source?” I ask him.
“F--- open source,” he says.
We’ve arrived at the first tense moment in a largely genial interview, and I’m reminded of the fierce, insistent Victor Kravchenko who leaped to his feet in the courtroom in Paris, dead certain that he was right. Andrew isn’t unaware that he’s like his father. “I have an insistence on every goddamned thing that I do,” he says. “Where do you think I got it?”
In 1994, Andrew joined forces with Gary Kern, the biographer, to spend six years in a legal fight with the FBI, which refused to release Victor’s file, citing national security. The duo won access to 2,000 pages and 27 notebooks — most of the file, Kern believes — and the historian used the highly redacted papers as he wrote his book.
Kern’s biography is serious and thoroughly researched, and its prose is fluid — musical at times, even. But “The Kravchenko Case” is so hefty a volume, and so fine-grained, that it has reached few casual readers. Published by the now defunct Enigma Books, it is out of print.
In his campaign to bring his father back into the limelight, Andrew has so far fallen miles short of, say, Dhani Harrison, the son of Beatles guitarist George Harrison, who last year released a monumental remastered box set of his father’s 1970 masterwork, “All Things Must Pass.” But in 2005, a vaunted documentary filmmaker — Mark Jonathan Harris, who had won an Oscar for a movie about the smuggling of Jewish children out of Nazi Germany — embarked on a film about Victor Kravchenko.
In 2007, Harris brought his one-hour 23-minute Kravchenko film, “The Defector,” to within inches of the finish line. In Arizona, Andrew gives me a password so I can savor a near final cut on Vimeo. I watch the film in my hotel room, and it’s very good. It’s moving. It’s a sort of world tour, with stops in Victor’s New York City, in Arizona and Paris. It alights in Red Square outside the Kremlin, where a police officer shouts, “Stop! Filming is forbidden here!” and in a forest outside Kyiv, Ukraine, where, during the famine of the early 1930s, Bolshevik soldiers buried thousands who’d perished from starvation.
Andrew is the film’s main presence, playing journalist as he interviews his old Arizona neighbors as well as historians and Holodomor survivors. Suavely wrapped in a navy scarf against the Manhattan chill, he is unhurried and focused, intent in his listening. In the end, as I watch him cast his father’s ashes into the Dnieper River in Ukraine, there are tears welling in my eyes.
Yet “The Defector” has never seen distribution. Andrew, a co-producer who also held the underlying rights to the film, decided, amid a creative squabble with Harris, to squelch it. “It seemed cutesy,” he told me. “The woman who played my mother in voice-over, she had a squeaky Americana voice.”
Andrew’s biggest issue is with the film’s opening. When viewers of “The Defector” first encounter Andrew, he is standing on a Lower Manhattan sidewalk, peering up toward a bay window on the second floor of a tall building. “This was Victor’s apartment,” Andrew says. “This is where he shot himself.”
When Andrew first saw that Harris had used the footage, he stormed out of a screening. In recent years, he has become increasingly unsure that Victor died by suicide, even though most historians, Kern among them, believe that he did. In the 1990s, Andrew obtained a vintage Soviet document noting — ominously, he believes — that just three months before Victor’s death, in November 1965, the Soviet secret police proposed opening a criminal case against him for being a “traitor to the motherland.” Was this a mere coincidence? And what to make of how Victor’s pistol sat in his suit-jacket pocket as he was rushed to the hospital, post-shooting?
In Arizona, Andrew tells me that he has film footage that captures forensic investigator Michael Baden, who testified in the O.J. Simpson trial, suggesting Victor was killed. But he is hesitant to release an outtake from “The Defector,” and when I speak to Baden, who’s still a frequent presence on TV, at age 88, he takes issue with Andrew’s characterization of his views. He tells me that he was working in the medical examiner’s office in Manhattan in 1966 and that he was involved in Victor’s autopsy — and in concluding that Victor had killed himself. “The cause of death,” he says flatly, “was suicide.”
Victor Kravchenko somehow managed to rattle the world’s most egregious living dictator by elbowing editors and courtroom bailiffs out of the way so he could tell his story of tyranny exactly as he saw it. Is Andrew’s bid to thrust Victor back into the public eye going to tank simply because he’s enacting his father’s stubborn, micromanaging ways?
When I speak to Andrew’s friend Richard Mayol, a retired political consultant, he says: “Andrew is a perfectionist, and sometimes this has gotten in his way. Unless things are exactly the way he wants them to be, he’s not going to move forward on a project. Several people have helped him, but it’s been hard for him to find someone who sees things as exactly as he does, so the project” — Andrew’s decades-long efforts to deliver Victor’s message to a mass audience — “will kind of plateau. Then another year will go by, and he’ll take it up to another plateau.”
In Arizona, Andrew tells me that with the war in Ukraine, he’s trying to put aside his qualms with the documentary. “Mark and I are talking again,” he says, speaking with warmth of the director. “We want to release the film.”
In the days that follow, Andrew’s lawyer sends Harris a contract stipulating terms for a creative reunion for the movie. Andrew, meanwhile, keeps sending me emails, suggesting that Harris is on the cusp of signing the contract. “We should have this thing wrapped in a couple of days,” he writes on April 19. “Done. Done.”
Nobody likes to wait around for other people to sign contracts. But there may be a deeper issue at work here, too. In his many decades of promoting Victor, Andrew has brought his father precious few new admirers. He’s published translations of “I Chose Freedom” in Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary, and in July he met an aspiration he’d harbored for decades, republishing the book in Victor’s native Ukraine. But the Victor A. Kravchenko Archives remain unsold. So far, book publishers are not warming to his memoir. In an email to me, he blames this on the “narrowness of the publishing world” and its taste for memoirs “dominated by politicians, dysfunctional starlets, BLM and LGBTQ.”
Harris signs the contract, finally, in early May, but when I call him, he hasn’t forgotten Andrew’s fiery opinions. “He threatened to get an injunction to stop the film,” Harris tells me. “Andrew can be very litigious.”
Still, Harris expresses cautious optimism and hopes to sell the film to a streaming service such as Netflix or HBO. It’s not a stretch. Over the past five decades, he’s brought six documentaries to audiences in theaters. He’s aiming for an autumn release.
But eventually I realize that it would be wrong to regard the film’s success as a litmus test. Just because Victor Kravchenko changed the world, we can’t expect his son to do the same. And Andrew has done something meaningful with his life: In promoting his father, he has communed with an icon of freedom who should never be forgotten. I appreciated this my first day at his house when he handed me a bound volume of photos from Victor’s 1949 trial in Paris. The pictures were black-and-white and dramatically lit, with matter-of-fact captions like “Kravchenko takes a stroll along the Seine with his bodyguards.” Andrew stood back, not speaking, as I slowly flipped through the stiff, musty pages, fixing on the physical force Victor brought to his courtroom war against tyranny.
The entire volume seemed somehow quite relevant. Today we again live in a world awash in tyranny. Truth and civil discourse are now under attack in our country. Every day demands that we stand up for what’s right, as Victor Kravchenko did. Looking at those pictures, I realized that I needed the pure focus that they carry, the insistent idealism. I needed their jolt. And it is quite possible that you need their jolt, too. | 2022-08-17T16:02:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The enduring lessons of the Ukrainian hero who stood up to Soviet Russia in 1944 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/08/17/ukraine-russia-war-putin-stalin/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/08/17/ukraine-russia-war-putin-stalin/ |
In 1970, Tim Joliet was an Army officer serving in Vietnam. An encounter with a helicopter gunner after his platoon was dropped at a base atop a mountain left Tim scratching his head. (Courtesy of Tim Joliet) (Courtesy of Tim Joliet)
Late one night in 1979, Chip Beck found himself atop a roof in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, with a group of strangers.
“It was midnight, and the breeze up high was a relief from the desert heat,” wrote Chip, who lives in Hillsboro, Va. “The conversation turned to the usual small talk.”
Chip asked another fellow where he was from.
“A place you’ve never heard of, called ‘Halfway,’ ” the man answered,
“Yeah, halfway between Hagerstown and Williamsport,” Chip responded.
The man nearly fell off the roof from astonishment. “How did you know that?” he asked.
“Because I lived a half-mile from there growing up!” Chip said.
If this week’s columns have proved anything, it’s that our past is never far away from us. Neither are the people we met there.
To prepare their children for a trip to Venice, Bethesda’s David Austin and Karen Gulliver bought a copy of “Vendela in Venice” by Christina Bjork, with illustrations by Inga-Karin Eriksson. The children’s book, about a young girl’s trip to the watery city, served as a template for their own visit.
A few days before the family left for Italy, Bjork happened to be appearing at the old Olsson’s Books at Metro Center.
“So we went,” wrote David. “She told her audience that she’d patterned Vendela’s trip after her own trip there as a young girl.” Bjork said she still wore something she bought on that trip: a silver pendant of the winged lion that sits above the clock in Piazza San Marco.
A week later, the family was standing in a long line in Piazza San Marco — waiting to enter the basilica to see its four bronze horses — when a solitary woman wandered toward the queue.
“She comes right up to us,” David wrote. “And it’s Christina Bjork! Had she recognized us from Olsson’s? No! She simply wanted to know if this was the line to see the bronze horses.”
Phil Winkler is drawn to explore dark, hidden passages. He’s a caver, and in 1977, when he was in the Army and stationed in Germany, he was one of two Americans invited to join a Swiss team during its annual six-day exploration of Hölloch, a long cave near Lake Lucerne.
“On day four or so, the Swiss team leader said we might want to go over to bivouac where a British team was being given a one-day guided tour of the cave,” wrote Phil, who lives in Dewey Beach, Del.
Phil and his American friend made their way to the large, dark chamber the British team was in, seeing from the dim lights of their helmets that they were eating and resting.
“We asked where they had been and heard of the usual attractions they had visited,” wrote Phil. “A voice from the rear said we sounded like Americans and we answered that we were. The Brit then asked if either of us had ever visited Huntsville, Alabama.”
Phil responded that he’d once lived there. The man said: “If you ever get back there, please say hi to Phil Winkler for me.”
Several years previously, Phil had met a pair of British cavers in the mountains of Alabama, inviting them back to his house for dinner and cave talk. They’d even slept on Phil’s floor. Now one of them was in the same Swiss cave as Phil.
Wrote Phil: “You can’t make this stuff up!”
Not all the stories I heard of uncanny coincidences involved vacations. We’ll close with an entirely different sort of trip. Tim Joliet of Greenbackville, Va., served in Vietnam as an infantry officer with the 101st Airborne. In 1970, it was decided — “by vainglorious minds, smaller than mine,” Tim wrote — to reopen a long abandoned Marine firebase in the heart of the A Shau Valley, near the border with Laos. The base’s new name was “Ripcord.”
“God awful place,” Tim wrote. “Surrounded on three sides by higher terrain.”
Tim’s platoon was normally the first in and the last out, but its insertion was held back as it awaited replacements. “I was down to 18 men, including myself,” he wrote. “That stroke of fate saved my life. The first platoon in was virtually eliminated with their new lieutenant.”
Tim’s platoon was the last in, landing in a hail of bullets that struck the dirt like pattering rain. Other helicopters continued to bring in ammunition and take out casualties, until it was too dangerous to land.
As the last Huey helicopter hovered to leave, Tim saw the door gunner waving insanely at him. Tim wasn’t sure why, but figured it must be incredibly urgent. He sprinted to the helicopter.
Wrote Tim: “The door gunner yelled in my ear: ‘Are you Lt. Joliet?’ I shook my head yes. He yelled in my ear: ‘I knew you in grade school.’ ”
And then the helicopter lifted off and was gone.
“I stood there for a few moments unable to comprehend what had just happened,” Tim wrote. “I went to two grade schools, one in Georgia and graduated from Holy Redeemer in Kensington, Md. I always assumed he was from Holy Redeemer but never saw or heard from him again. His name tag was hidden under his seat harness. Fifty-one years later I still scratch my head.”
That’s a whole different order of uncanny coincidence. Are you still trying to make sense of a mysterious encounter from your past? Send the details — with “Mystery” in the subject line — to me at john.kelly@washpost.com. | 2022-08-17T16:11:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Often we leave home behind, only to find it on our travels - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/17/familiar-people-unfamiliar-places/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/17/familiar-people-unfamiliar-places/ |
Advice on choosing a bold paint color from designer Kathryn Ireland
Interior designer Kathryn M. Ireland is known for creating colorful, comfortable, down-to-earth homes that reflect the people who live in them. Ireland, who was born and raised in the United Kingdom, is now based in Los Angeles. Before launching her design business in the early 1990s, she was an actress, clothing designer and filmmaker. Her clients have included Steve Martin, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and other Hollywood insiders. The author of five books and the designer of her own fabric line, she recently launched her first online interior design course with Create Academy. Ask Ireland for her thoughts on punching up your rooms with an unexpected color, how to choose the best paint for your space, and how to make colors flow in your home.
Submit questions below or check out some of our past discussions. If you have suggestions for Q&A topics, please email me at jura.koncius@washpost.com. | 2022-08-17T16:15:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Designer Kathryn Ireland on how to choose a bold paint color - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2022/08/25/bold-paint-color-tips-choosing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2022/08/25/bold-paint-color-tips-choosing/ |
People can easily avoid many of the common car rental mistakes. (iStock)
The next day, while touring Granada’s historic Alhambra palace complex, Enterprise called Rubin with some bad news: He needed to pay 1,500 euros for repairs, because misfueling a car constitutes negligence and is not covered by the company’s damage insurance. The company later reduced his bill to 844 euros, including 100 euros for an “administrative fee” and 115 euros for a “loss of use” fee. Rubin says he has no recollection of any warnings to only use diesel in the vehicle.
Misfueling one of the most common mistakes travelers make, particularly when traveling abroad. Yet a gas mix-up is entirely avoidable. Vehicles often have warnings next to the tank that say “diesel fuel only,” although they may not be in English, and the fuel nozzles at some service stations will prevent you from using the wrong gas. But never take someone’s word for it.
“Take the time to know the vehicle you are renting,” spokeswoman Lisa Martini told me. “Learn how to operate essential functions, like where the seat levers are located and how to operate the infotainment system.”
“Using artificial intelligence, they compare the photos to detect scratches, dings, dents and other damage to the car’s body and windscreen,” says Abramson, who runs a communications firm in Los Angeles.
“If you want to share the driving, try to find an offer with a free additional driver,” she says. “It’s always cheaper to book beforehand than on arrival.”
And finally, she used another strategy to keep her car: the ability to extend her rental until the end of her trip, an option that many rental car customers don’t realize they have. Enterprise allowed her to do that, which solved her ground transportation problems.
Leighton says it comes down to common courtesy. Don’t smoke in your car. Clean up after yourself. “And if something breaks or isn’t working right, let the rental company know when you return the vehicle. Don’t let the next renter discover the USB outlet has been flooded by root beer and needs to be fixed,” he says.
“Be prepared to spend money,” warns Robert Walden, editor in chief of VehicleFreak.com, a car maintenance site. “Due to shrinking fleets, deferred maintenance on vehicles and many other factors, rental cars are at a premium today.” | 2022-08-17T16:15:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How to avoid the most common rental car mistakes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/17/rental-car-mistakes-tips/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/17/rental-car-mistakes-tips/ |
(Los Angeles County Museum of Art )
Georges de La Tour’s painting is a consummation devoutly to be wish’d
I love, in this picture by Georges de La Tour, the seemingly effortless, elemental coming together of sex, spirituality, violence, death. It’s all there, just so. The painting is at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (there are other, subtly different versions at the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art). It shows Mary Magdalene in a dark grotto in Provence. It was to here that the former prostitute supposedly withdrew to pray and do penance after her extraordinary period of contact with Jesus, whose violent crucifixion and subsequent resurrection she is said to have witnessed.
In de La Tour’s imagining, she sits at a table supporting books of scripture, a candle and a whip or scourge (which Mary has been using on herself), and she stares into the candle’s flame. Cast mostly in strong shadow, she appears in the slightly hypnotized condition common to fire watchers.
One hand props up her lovely, pensive face. The other holds a skull, which gleams with reflected light. De La Tour is inviting us to make a connection between the two pairings of head and hand. The tenderness of the hand on the skull in her heavy-skirted lap (the skull seems to be throwing itself back in ecstasy) suggests shades of meaning more arrestingly sensuous than the pro forma device of the skull-as-memento mori.
Observe, too, the way other forms in the painting seem subtly mirrored, or inverted: the sinuous swathe of rich, glossy hair on Mary’s head is pinched at her shoulder before it swells, as in a warped hourglass, and cascades into the shadow running down her arm and right side. The forms of her legs are similarly distilled, one crossed in front of the other in a way that subtly repeats the movements of the plumes of smoke coming off the exquisitely realized flame.
De La Tour was a painter from Lorraine who was influenced, indirectly, by Caravaggio. Adopting the Italian’s signature tenebrism (dramatic contrasts of light and dark), he purified his intense and gritty realism, focusing instead on rounded, elemental forms in a manner reminiscent of the early Italian master Piero della Francesca.
Here, instead of showing the penitent Mary Magdalene as an old woman, as was often done (most famously by Donatello), he has emphasized her unblemished youth, letting the light pick out the bare skin of her chest, her soft forearm and the outlines of her legs, from the knees down.
Of course, from a religious point of view, the candle is a symbol of spirituality. The 16th-century mystic Saint John of the Cross spoke of the “living flame of love” that draws believers out of the “dark night of the soul.”
But flames have long been associated with sex and yearning, too. Aside from being phallic symbols, they have their own intimate life and powers of generation. A marriage is said to be consummated after sex has occurred; the usage is clearly connected to the way flames “consume” oxygen. “Flames of desire” and “licking flames” are just some of the innumerable cliches that reinforce the connection.
Certainly, flames are unusually potent stimulants to the human imagination. They have the power (as the philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote) “to warp the minds of the clearest thinkers and to keep bringing them back to the poetic fold in which dreams replace thought and poems conceal theorems.”
As our bedtime faces are set aglow by the screens of our phones, a painting like this reminds us of the secret persistence of a more basic idolatry — the idolatry of fire — and of consummations (be they poetic, sexual or spiritual) “devoutly to be wish’d,” as Hamlet put it.
The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame, c. 1635-1637
Georges de La Tour (b. 1593). At Los Angeles County Museum of Art. | 2022-08-17T16:24:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Perspective | A masterful mash-up of sex, death, spirituality and Mary Magdalene - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2022/georges-de-la-tour-magdalen-smoking-flame/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2022/georges-de-la-tour-magdalen-smoking-flame/ |
Rushdie Attack Shows the Hard Truths of Iran’s Soft Power
Taking a leaf out of the post-9/11 Al Qaeda playbook, the IRGC also began to recruit sympathizers living in the West to target high-profile figures like the Saudi ambassador to Washington. Since Soleimani’s death, it has grown more ambitious and reckless, targeting top American officials like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former National Security Adviser John Bolton, as well as prominent anti-regime activists based in the US, like Masih Alinejad.
Biden Should Show Iran What “Plan B” Would Look Like: Editorial | 2022-08-17T16:24:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rushdie Attack Shows the Hard Truths of Iran’s Soft Power - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/rushdie-attack-shows-the-hard-truths-of-irans-soft-power/2022/08/17/17d1ab20-1e3e-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/rushdie-attack-shows-the-hard-truths-of-irans-soft-power/2022/08/17/17d1ab20-1e3e-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Target’s Having a Much Harder Time Than Walmart
If Walmart Inc. signaled better times ahead for the broader economy, Target Corp.’s profit collapse is a reminder that battered big-box stores aren’t in the clear yet.
On Wednesday, Target laid bare the damage from marking down its mountain of inventory, with an almost 90% slump in second-quarter profits. That’s in stark contrast to Walmart’s forecast on Tuesday that earnings wouldn’t fall as much as expected when it warned on profit last month. Target shares declined as much as 5% in early trading.
Why the difference between the two companies?
One explanation is that Walmart generated about half of its sales from food in 2021, while the figure for Target was just 20%. That means Target is much more exposed to Americans ditching discretionary purchases, such as clothing, home furnishings and electronics, because they have to spend more on food, fuel and other things they need. It didn’t help that the company stocked up on these categories, anticipating the frenetic pace of pandemic buying would continue.
Target aggressively discounted excess inventory in areas such as kitchen appliances, patio furniture and bikes to avoid its cluttering stores and free up warehouse space. That was the right strategy, but it exacted a heavy toll on earnings. While same-store sales rose 2.6% in the three months to July 30, just shy of the Bloomberg consensus of analysts’ expectations, net earnings were a meager $183 million, compared with $1.8 billion in the year-earlier period. The operating margin slumped to 1.2% from 9.8%.
Amid the bleak report, Target maintained its outlook for full-year revenue growth in the low- to mid-single digit range and for an operating margin of about 6% in the second half of the year.
There are some grounds for optimism. With US inflation slowing, some of the pressure on discretionary spending should abate. Similar to Walmart, Target said the start of the back-to-school season, often an indicator of fall and winter business, had been encouraging. More broadly, US retail sales rose almost 9% year-on-year in July, although that was flattered by inflation and discounting in the market.
The chain also looks to be getting a grip on its unsold stock, which should put it in a better position for the crucial winter holiday season.
Although inventories, at $15 billion, were little changed from the end of the first quarter, Target has cut about $1 billion of stock in discretionary categories. The company said the vast majority of clearance costs were behind it. It has also pared its fall orders by about $1.5 billion.
Despite the recent difficulties, Target is still one of America’s best-run retailers. It has put its almost 2,000 stores at the heart of its strategy, making them attractive places to shop and using them as hubs for online deliveries. It also has a strong suite of private-label brands, which should benefit from consumers trading down, and it is particularly known for its cheap chic fashion.
Yet maintaining its full-year forecast leaves little room for maneuver. Target is at risk from another step down in discretionary spending if recent more positive shopping trends turn out to be fleeting. The shift from selling nice-to-have items to essentials could also weigh on margins, as food and beverage products are less profitable than clothing and home furnishings.
The shares are down about 30% over the past year. This looks harsh, but to rebuild credibility with investors, Target must demonstrate it’s moved beyond the stock snafus that hobbled it in the second quarter. And after two profit warnings within two months, it will have to meet its maintained guidance.
Unless it can do this, it’s hard to see that “Tarjay magic” returning any time soon. | 2022-08-17T16:24:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Target’s Having a Much Harder Time Than Walmart - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/targets-having-a-much-harder-time-than-walmart/2022/08/17/ca4207b4-1e3e-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/targets-having-a-much-harder-time-than-walmart/2022/08/17/ca4207b4-1e3e-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Atlantic hurricane activity could ramp up heading into September
After a quiet week ahead, hurricane activity could increase as we enter the historically busiest time of hurricane season
A tropical wave near the coast of Honduras on Wednesday morning. (RAMMB/Colorado State)
Despite nearly unanimous predictions that there would be above-average activity, it’s been an ominously quiet start to hurricane season — though that could still change in the coming weeks.
There hasn’t been a named storm anywhere in the Atlantic basin since Colin, a pipsqueak swirl of gusty showers that scraped along the Carolina coastline on July 3 with minimal impact. Since then, it has been quiet despite the calendar nearing September, when hurricane season historically peaks in activity.
There are signs that, after a quiet week ahead, a reversal could be in the cards for the final few days of August. The National Hurricane Center has outlined one system to watch, and indicated that a sudden uptick in activity is possible. It’s far from a guarantee, but it also stands to reason that the tropical slumber can’t last forever.
The historic peak of hurricane season is around Sept. 15, but most of late August into mid-October is regarded as the busiest stretch of weeks when it comes to tracking the tropics. A given season averages 14 named storms, seven of which might be hurricanes, but NOAA forecasters have continued to echo earlier calls for 14 to 20 named storms, six to 10 hurricanes and three to five major hurricanes.
Even the quietest seasons have whipped up meteorological monstrosities.
For instance, there were only seven named storms in 1992, but the first was Category 5 Hurricane Andrew, which lay siege to South Florida and raked the National Hurricane Center headquarters with a wind gust to 163 mph. Conversely, what may have been busier seasons on paper have had comparatively lesser human impacts when storms have spent their lives over the open ocean.
But when it comes to tropical storms and hurricanes, it only takes one.
Tropical disturbance in Caribbean
On Wednesday morning, the National Hurricane Center was monitoring a disturbance centered near the coast of northern Honduras. The bulk of any inclement weather, including some robust thunderstorm activity, was located to the north of land and over the western Caribbean.
The system is currently lopsided, but it was exhibiting evidence of healthy outflow, or exhaust, at its upper levels. Tropical storms and hurricanes breathe in a sense, and the more they exhale aloft, the more warm, humid air they can ingest near the surface to fuel their continued growth and maturation.
Minimal organization of this disturbance is likely through Thursday, but it will slip into the Bay of Campeche into Friday. There, it will encounter very warm sea surface temperatures — supportive of strengthening — but wind shear is moderate. Wind shear, or a change of wind speed and/or direction with height, is known for playing a tug-of-war game with tropical cyclones. High wind shear can inhibit a storm’s vertical development, often knocking storms off-kilter.
It’s impossible to be certain what may transpire with the system more than about 3 or 4 days out, but broadly it’s likely to drift northwest, toward either northern Mexico near Tamaulipas or extreme southern Texas. Localized heavy rainfall is possible if it remains intact, but any forecast beyond that is mere speculation.
The National Hurricane Center estimates a 20 percent chance of eventual development of a well-formed tropical cyclone, but it’s worth monitoring regardless.
Across the Atlantic, there are signs that activity might start to pick up more notably in the next 10 days.
Weather models are focusing on more aggressive tropical waves rolling off the coast of Africa and propagating west through the MDR, or Main Development Region. The MDR, sometimes called “Hurricane Alley,” is the belt of the tropical Atlantic that can occasionally churn out long-lived powerful storms one after another.
It’s far too early to diagnose simulated waves as a potential storm, but several other current factors could aid storm formation. Wind shear seems likely to take a breather, which may allow for better vertical development of a storm. Dust from the Sahara could also thwart storm formation, but the layer of hot, dry air at the mid-levels of the atmosphere it’s embedded in, should thin with time. That may permit some tropical systems to sprout, particularly as the oceans continue to warm.
The Gulf of Mexico could also become increasingly favorable for potential storms toward the end of the month; the gulf is running about half a degree to a degree above average in terms of sea surface temperature.
Simply stated, August came in like a lamb — but its exit may not be as mellow. | 2022-08-17T16:24:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Atlantic hurricane season activity could increase into September - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/17/hurricane-season-tropical-atlantic/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/17/hurricane-season-tropical-atlantic/ |
Considering getting your tubes tied? Here are answers to common questions.
Several types of birth control and other reproductive-health products are displayed at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Museum in Washington in 2017. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, gynecologists across the country have reported seeing an increase in patients who want to get their fallopian tubes tied. But it isn’t always easy to get the procedure. The Washington Post asked doctors about tubal sterilizations; here’s what they said.
1. What is tubal sterilization?
Tubal sterilization, also known as tubal ligation or “getting your tubes tied,” is a form of permanent sterilization involving closing the fallopian tubes, or removing them entirely (which is known as a bilateral salpingectomy). The fallopian tubes carry eggs from the ovaries to the uterus and are the site of fertilization with sperm, allowing for a pregnancy. Once closed or removed, the tubes can no longer allow for fertilization, preventing pregnancies with more than a 99.5 percent success rate.
2. How old do I have to be to get my tubes tied?
There is no set legal age requirement for getting your tubes tied, and the age minimum can vary by state, insurance company and physician. Many younger patients have faced, and continue to face, doubt and pushback from doctors, and some are denied the procedure entirely. If you are under 21, Medicaid will not cover the procedure.
3. Will my insurance cover the procedure?
Under the Affordable Care Act, private insurance companies are required to cover tubal sterilizations, but patients may still have to pay some of the cost. Patients using Medicaid to cover sterilization must wait at least 30 days to receive the procedure after giving consent — another requirement that some say is a barrier. “For people who are pregnant and desiring a tubal at the time of their delivery, or immediately postpartum, [the Medicaid waiting period] has become an issue,” said Amy Lasky, an OB/GYN in Stony Brook, N.Y. Out-of-pocket costs for the procedure can range from zero dollars with insurance to $6,000 without it — a fraction of the cost of a vasectomy, a form of sterilization that prevents sperm from flowing through the sperm duct and combining with semen.
4. Is tubal sterilization reversible?
It depends. Most types of tubal sterilization cannot be reversed, but some procedures are technically reversible through major surgery that is not always effective and can be costly. However, physicians encourage patients to be certain they want their tubes tied, because the procedure is not meant to be reversible. “It’s meant to be considered permanent,” said Lasky. “I think that’s a common misconception that people have when talking about tying your tubes, that it’s like a tie that you can then untie. I’ve heard that before, but it is not that. It’s considered sterilization [that is] permanent.” Bilateral salpingectomies, which are increasingly common, are not reversible because they involve entirely removing the fallopian tubes, said Franziska Haydanek, an OB/GYN in Rochester, N.Y., who makes TikTok videos informing patients about tubal sterilizations.
5. What can I expect at my initial consultation for a tubal sterilization?
According to recommendations from the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, physicians are advised to emphasize to patients the permanence of the procedure, discuss with patients other reversible contraceptive options and, “in appropriate cases,” discuss the sterilization of male partners “as an option with fewer risks and greater efficacy than female sterilization.” You may be asked how certain you are about being sterilized, especially if you are younger, and be informed about the risk of regret. Many younger patients have reported facing resistance from physicians during consultations.
6. How difficult is it to get a tubal sterilization performed?
In addition to the barriers some patients report about getting the procedure performed, it is important to note the procedure itself is a surgical procedure, unlike a vasectomy, which is an office procedure. “It takes around under 30 minutes,” Lasky said. “But compared to vasectomy, it’s far more invasive.” Though it is a minor surgery with generally three incisions, she said it has surgical limitations: no heavy lifting for at least four weeks, no exercise, waiting to go back to work until you feel ready. “Although for a minor surgery, I have plenty of people who go back to work the next week,” Lasky said, adding that pain and recovery is also “different for everybody.”
7. Can I still get pregnant after a tubal sterilization?
Tubal ligations are more than 99.5 percent effective in preventing pregnancy, Lasky said. But if you decide to have children post-tubal sterilization, you can still pursue a planned pregnancy through in vitro fertilization (IVF) or surrogacy. IVF is an expensive procedure, however, and typically costs $15,000, according to Haydanek. And there are concerns that the IVF procedure could become more complicated and costly after the Dobbs decision.
Overturn of Roe could make IVF more complicated, costly
8. Where can I schedule a tubal sterilization and find resources?
In addition to making informative TikTok videos, Haydanek has put together a list of gynecologists she describes as “willing to perform a tubal ligation on any patient, 18-21+, no matter their marital status or number of children.” Lasky has created a Twitter thread with resources. And r/childfree on Reddit offers resources for patients seeking tubal sterilizations. Patients have also reported bringing sterilization binders to appointments assembled from online how-to guides to answer their physicians’ questions. | 2022-08-17T16:25:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | After Roe, more Americans are getting their tubes tied. Here’s what to know. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/17/roe-fallopian-tubes-tied/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/17/roe-fallopian-tubes-tied/ |
After the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, views of Trump ... didn’t change
Supporters of former president Donald Trump wave flags outside his Mar-a-Lago home on Aug. 9, the day after he said FBI agents raided the home in Palm Beach, Fla. (Marco Bello/Reuters)
It took minutes — maybe seconds — for a consistent Republican response to emerge when news broke that former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort had been searched by the FBI: This was an egregious, political overreach by the administration of President Biden.
Reports suggested that Trump himself was positively giddy. He’d been working relentlessly to demonstrate to the world that he still had a strong grip on the GOP, an effort demanded in part by the rise of competitors for the party’s throne. Polling showed him leading a hypothetical 2024 presidential field, but not as comfortably as once might have been expected. Then the Mar-a-Lago search happened, and even his detractors were suddenly aligning with him. Some of the more breathless Trump fans began demanding that he simply be anointed the party’s next nominee outright.
This was overly simple, but in more ways than might immediately be obvious. Support for Trump was often framed as opposition to the government. Potential 2024 opponents were taking his side, but often in an enemy-of-my-enemy way. It’s the safe harbor here, like claiming that the 2020 election was “rigged” against Trump instead of “stolen.” You can appeal to the base without having to join Trump in his mud puddle.
A week after Mar-a-Lago, Fox News host Laura Ingraham dared to return to the case that had undergirded some skepticism about Trump’s 2024 potential.
“The country I think is so exhausted,” she said in a podcast appearance. “They’re exhausted by the battle, the constant battle, that they may believe that, well, maybe it’s time to turn the page if we can get someone who has all Trump’s policies, who’s not Trump.”
That’s a different bifurcation, but still an important one. The Trump-neutral response to Mar-a-Lago was to separate Trump from his enemies. The Trump-neutral response to 2024 is to separate Trump from Trumpism.
On Wednesday morning, YouGov released the latest iteration of the weekly polling it conducts for the Economist. It’s one of the first polls we have in which we can compare where Trump stood before Mar-a-Lago with where he is now. I was curious: Would it show that Republicans were newly enthusiastic about Trump? Had the public defense of the former president led to a noticeable surge in positive views of him?
In the four polls before the one released Wednesday, YouGov had Trump at an average 81 percent favorability among Republicans and 41 percent overall. In the new poll, those figures are not statistically different.
Compare that with the drop in the five polls before and after the U.S. Capitol riot. Before the riot, Trump was averaging 90 percent favorability from Republicans and 44 percent overall. In the five polls after the riot, he fell to 85 percent favorable within his own party and to 41 percent among all Americans.
YouGov breaks its favorability assessments into tiers: very favorable vs. somewhat favorable. There was a big jump in the percentage of Republicans who viewed Trump very favorably — up 11 points from a week ago. (That previous poll included one day of polling after the Mar-a-Lago search, it is important to note.) But it’s not significantly different from where Trump was at the end of July. Then, 55 percent of Republicans viewed him very favorably. Now 57 percent do.
This is an imperfect measure, certainly, evaluating not how people feel about Trump running for president or about his actions and, instead, just how they feel about him. But it does suggest that the response to Mar-a-Lago did not lead to a virulent pro-Trump surge. Perhaps, instead, the Republican response was more heavily a function of opposition to federal law enforcement or support for Trump’s politics than it was a sign of enthusiasm for the person.
Or, perhaps, we should remember that this is just one poll. By now, we all should have learned that assuming Trump is in a weaker position than it might seem is not a bet that tends to pay off. | 2022-08-17T16:25:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | After the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, views of Trump ... didn’t change - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/17/trump-fbi-search-polling/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/17/trump-fbi-search-polling/ |
In 2019, Manti Te'o was playing for the New Orleans Saints. (Bob Leverone/AP)
In 2012, Manti Te’o was a star linebacker for Notre Dame, touted as a Heisman Trophy candidate with a bright future ahead in the NFL. But it wasn’t just his talent that attracted attention. He had a heart-wrenching, inspirational story about a girlfriend who had died of leukemia.
It was all perfect, until it spectacularly fell apart.
Deadspin blew the lid off the story, writing that Te’o had been the victim of catfishing — employing a social media account designed to lure someone into a relationship using a false identity. The girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, was the social media creation of Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, who has since come out as a trans woman and goes by Naya Tuiasosopo.
Now, in a two-part Netflix documentary called “Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist” that debuted Tuesday, Te’o and Tuiasosopo explain their sides of how a story that began so sweetly took such a bizarre turn, making Te’o the butt of jokes and besmirching major outlets such as Sports Illustrated, ESPN and the New York Times.
Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey laid bare the story on Deadspin, along with a headline calling the story a hoax. “The opportunity to make ESPN look stupid?” Dickey said in the documentary. “That’s what we were there for.”
Te’o went on to have a seven-year NFL career spent with the San Diego Chargers, New Orleans Saints and Chicago Bears despite dealing with anxiety and being the subject of jokes on a national stage. Although he said he has not communicated with Tuiasosopo since the scandal, he said in the documentary that his therapist told him, “‘You have to forgive that kid. What happened to you is not your fault. It’s okay. Forgive that kid.’”
Te’o, now a 31-year-old NFL free agent, said he takes heart from the support he received.
“You’re going to have hundreds and thousands and millions of people that tell you, ‘You ain’t worth nothing, man,’” he said, “but there’s going to be the one that’s going to say, ‘You’re worth the world to me,’ and I play for that person. I’ll take all the jokes, I’ll take all the memes, so I can be an inspiration to the one who needs me to be.”
In September 2012, Te’o was a talented young player from a Honolulu family that emphasized faith and football. His breakout season at Notre Dame made him a national star with an inspirational backstory of how, in a six-hour span, he learned of the death of his grandmother and then Kekua.
Te’o led the Fighting Irish to a 20-3 upset of Michigan State that week. He appeared on ESPN’s “College GameDay” to talk about letters he had received from Kekua, and the South Bend Tribune described how the couple had met after a football game outside Palo Alto, where Kekua attended Stanford.
Sports Illustrated described how the relationship intensified, with Te’o saying he responded to Kekua’s values. When she was purportedly hospitalized with leukemia, Te’o said she would respond to his voice over the phone and he would stay on the line with her through the night.
They mainly exchanged texts, calls and messages. But there were no records, according to Te’o’s family and friends in the documentary, that Kekua existed, let alone attended Stanford, and the story crumbled. They had met on social media, with Tuiasosopo using a photo of a woman from Facebook and sending a friend request to Te’o. Te’o said in the documentary that he verified her through mutual acquaintances, and catfishing wasn’t as well-known back then.
Te’o’s explanation at the time was that he was a modern relationship. “This is incredibly embarrassing to talk about, but over an extended period of time, I developed an emotional relationship with a woman I met online,” he said in a statement. “We maintained what I thought to be an authentic relationship by communicating frequently online and on the phone, and I grew to care deeply about her.”
Tuiasosopo explains in the documentary that she created Kekua partly because she was “hurting” and struggling with her identity. “It was a black hole that consumed my life,” Tuiasosopo said. “I didn’t care who I was hurting.”
Now, Tuiasosopo still feels “horrible” and wishes “that everything had been undone. But then also another part of me was like, I learned so much about who I am today and who I want to become because of the lessons I learned through the life of Lennay.” | 2022-08-17T16:26:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Manti Te’o catfishing story revisited in new Netflix documentary - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/17/manti-teo-catfishing-documentary/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/17/manti-teo-catfishing-documentary/ |
United flight from Newark diverted to Dulles after passenger disruption
Dulles International Airport. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
A United Airlines flight was diverted to Dulles International Airport on Wednesday from the New York area after a passenger disruption, the airline said.
Flight 1080 landed at Dulles about 11 a.m. and proceeded to the gate without incident, the airline said in a statement. United officials did not provide other details about the passenger or the nature of the disruption.
Flight records show that the Boeing 737-800 departed at 8:20 a.m. from Newark Liberty International Airport, destined for Juan Santamaría International Airport in San Jose, Costa Rica. The plane had been scheduled to land in the Costa Rican capital at 11:34 a.m. local time.
After the diversion, the flight was scheduled to depart Dulles at 1 p.m., resuming the trip to Costa Rica. | 2022-08-17T16:46:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | United Airlines flight from Newark diverted to Dulles after passenger incident - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/08/17/united-flight-diverted-newark-passenger/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/08/17/united-flight-diverted-newark-passenger/ |
Prince George’s teachers union reaches tentative deal with schools
Students arrive for the first day of school last September at Deerfield Run Elementary in Laurel, Md. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
Maryland’s second-largest school system reached a tentative agreement with its teachers union this week, after a roughly two-month impasse.
The Prince George’s County Educators’ Association — which represents about 10,000 educators — announced the agreement in a statement Wednesday. The union characterized the deal as making “strides on empowering educators to lead the district,” but there was little information shared about the agreement’s details. A spokeswoman for the union said further details will be released in September, when the contract is ratified.
“This agreement is an important step toward building our vision for our students and reaching this point was made possible by the creative thinking and perseverance of our bargaining team members, who bring that same energy and inspiration to their schools every day,” Donna Christy, president of the union, said in a statement.
Prince George’s schools at impasse with teachers union in contract talks
A school system spokeswoman confirmed that an agreement had been reached but did not provide additional information Wednesday.
The union’s most recent contract ended June 30. The tentative agreement reached this week would extend over the next three years, ending in 2025.
In June, the union announced it was at an impasse with the school system, after it issued more than 100 proposals that included reduced class sizes, increased teacher pay and trauma-informed instruction. The union ran an advertisement campaign this year to bolster its calls for the school system to provide additional mental health supports for educators and improve teacher-retention initiatives.
“Securing the tools and resources we need to bolster our students’ success has been the primary focus for Prince George’s County educators,” Christy said of this week’s deal, “and this agreement lays the foundation to help us move our school communities from pandemic to promise and deliver a world-class education to all PGCPS students.”
Maryland teachers have been advocating for more support from school systems’ administrators, following two years of virtual learning and a return to in-person instruction last fall. Many have said they’re experiencing burnout, while attempting to catch students up academically, socially and emotionally.
In Montgomery County — Maryland’s largest school district with about 160,000 students — teachers union president Jennifer Martin has shared at multiple school board meetings that an increased number of teachers are leaving the profession due to the amount of accrued stress and low pay. Montgomery County Public Schools is setting out to fill hundreds of teacher and staff vacancies before the school year begins Aug. 29. And in the District, the Washington Teachers’ Union and the public school system failed to reach an agreement in July on a labor contract that is already three years expired. | 2022-08-17T17:12:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Prince George’s teachers union reaches agreement with school system - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/17/prince-georges-teachers-union-reaches-tentative-deal-with-schools/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/17/prince-georges-teachers-union-reaches-tentative-deal-with-schools/ |
Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny appears on a video link provided by the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service at a courtroom in June 7. (AP Photo/Vladimir Kondrashov)
“The Kremlin wants to see its Gulag composed of silent slaves. But here I am, rallying people and demanding that some laws be obeyed, instead of begging for pardon.”
Mr. Navalny said he was seen on prison surveillance video “regularly unbuttoning the top button of my prison robe while in the industrial zone (the robe is just a few sizes too small for me)” and that minor infraction caused him to be hauled before the prison commission and moved to solitary confinement, known as the Special Housing Unit.
“This, of course, characterizes me as an unrepentant, incorrigible villain.”
“It’s only 3 days so far, but in the middle of September I have a visit from my relatives, which I am supposed to have once every 4 months. No visits are allowed to those in the SHU, so they say that unless I ‘reconsider my attitude,’ it will become my permanent residence. It is not clear what attitude I should reconsider. Toward slave labor? Or toward Putin?”
“Normally, you can’t spend more than 15 days in the SHU, but this rule is easily circumvented. They lock you up for 15 days, release you, and then put you back there for another 15 days. The SHU is a 2.5x3 meter concrete kennel. Most of the time it’s unbearable in there because it’s cold and damp. There’s water on the floor. I got the beach version — it’s very hot and there’s almost no air.
“The window is tiny, but the walls are too thick for any air flow — even the cobwebs don’t move. There’s no ventilation. At night you lie there and feel like a fish on the shore. The iron bunk is fastened to the wall, like in a train, but the lever that lowers it is outside.”
“No visits, no letters, no parcels. This is the only place in the prison where even smoking is prohibited. They only give me paper and pen for 1 hour and 15 minutes a day.”
“There are constant searches, I always need to keep my hands behind my back. All in all, it’s fun, just like in the movies. It’s okay, it can be worse.
“I am now sitting on an iron bench behind an iron desk. I’m going to finish this thread and write a manual for inmates about their workplace rights until they take the paper away.
“The commission is right: I really seem to be incorrigible.”
He is also a stalwart fighter for a Russia free of the Putin stain. When Russia eventually emerges from the petty authoritarianism misruling the country, Mr. Navalny’s fellow citizens must remember his sacrifice. | 2022-08-17T17:34:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Alexei Navalny will not be silent - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/17/alexei-navalny-solitary-confinement-sacrifice/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/17/alexei-navalny-solitary-confinement-sacrifice/ |
China’s ambassador to the United States, Qin Gang, speaks at the 50th anniversary celebration of the National Zoo’s Giant Panda program in April. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for The Washington Post)
The Chinese government is trying to stage a charm offensive in Washington. But the effort is falling flat because Beijing’s diplomats are pushing talking points based on claims that simply don’t match reality. China’s reliance on alternative facts is undermining its credibility in the United States and making an already tense relationship even more difficult to manage.
China’s ambassador to the United States, Qin Gang, met with reporters Tuesday to convey Beijing’s policies on several issues, especially Taiwan. He claimed (falsely) that most Taiwanese people want to unify with the mainland (except for a few “separatists” egged on by foreign forces). He said that Beijing’s military is showing restraint after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan — even as Chinese ships and planes continue to menace the island.
Qin maintained that Hong Kong’s democracy is thriving under the rubric of “one country, two systems,” despite all evidence to the contrary. He also claimed China doesn’t spy inside the United States, that Beijing’s “zero covid” policy has been a success, and that the Chinese economy is doing well.
Mainly, the ambassador’s message was that all problems in the U.S.-China relationship are the United States’ fault and all accusations against China are malicious lies. His government just wants to correct the narrative, he said.
For example, on Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, Qin claimed that the United States “has seriously violated the one-China principle.” Either he was being deceitful or he was unaware that the United States has never agreed to the one-China principle. The United States has for decades maintained a one-China policy, which acknowledges but does not agree with China’s claims over Taiwan. Beijing is now pretending that this crucial distinction doesn’t exist.
“Facts have proved that this is an out-and-out political provocation,” Qin went on, ignoring that the Biden administration tried to stop the Pelosi visit before eventually (and reluctantly) supporting it.
Qin also rejected Biden officials’ claims that Beijing is using the visit as a pretext to increase its menacing of Taiwan. Since Pelosi left, China has conducted military exercises all around the island, fired ballistic missiles over Taiwanese cities, banned more than 100 Taiwanese exports from entering the mainland, and cut off several lines of cooperation with Washington.
The “basic fact is the U.S. side took the first step to provoke China on the Taiwan question,” he said — even though House Speaker Newt Gingrich visited Taiwan in 1997 and congressional delegations have visited regularly ever since.
He also asserted that Congress is not an independent branch of the U.S. government. “According to international law, the Congress is obliged to abide by the foreign policy of the United States,” he claimed — although that is not the case.
To be sure, Chinese diplomats take their top-line talking points from Beijing. But even Qin’s improvised responses to questions included blatantly false statements. For example, when I asked Qin why the Taiwanese people overwhelmingly do not want to be ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, according to all the polls, Qin said it simply wasn’t true.
“As a matter of fact, over the past two years, the mainland has done many things to promote the peaceful developments across the Taiwan Straits,” he said. “We have shown our goodwill.”
Shooting missiles over Taiwanese cities and threatening to “reeducate” the Taiwanese people are odd ways of showing goodwill. Asked about whether China was prepared for the international punishment and isolation that would likely follow a Chinese attack on Taiwan, the ambassador said China need not prepare because no international response was warranted.
“There’s no such presumption that whatever China does, attacking Taiwan, is illegal,” he said.
Qin said that after China reunifies with Taiwan, the terms of “one country, two systems” would be negotiated with the Taiwanese people, who would be able to keep their democracy. He touted the success of that model in Hong Kong. When it was pointed out to him that in Hong Kong, even the pro-Beijing authorities had zero say in the national security law that crushed that city’s democracy and civil society, he didn’t acknowledge it.
Beijing’s “don’t believe your eyes” propaganda approach works well for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s domestic audience, which lives in a highly censored internet and media environment. But for the U.S. government and the American public, it presents a vexing challenge.
“Chinese officials continue to promulgate alternative facts regardless of their validity, thus making it impossible for reasonable people to engage them in a serious fashion,” said Joshua Eisenman, associate professor of politics at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. “They think if they say it enough, they can create an alternative narrative. Unfortunately for Beijing, their approach is no longer fooling anyone.”
There’s a real yearning in Washington for an easy solution to managing rising tensions with China, but it takes two to tango. The Chinese government’s gaslighting approach leaves little room for the real work of diplomacy, which is to identify each other’s interests and find ways to work together to advance common objectives.
So long as China’s officials say that black is white and up is down, openings for making genuine progress on Taiwan or any other issue will be few and far between. But that’s no excuse to accept China’s alternative facts as just another valid narrative. Even if they are drunk on their own Kool-Aid, we ought not drink it. | 2022-08-17T17:34:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | China’s ambassador is pushing Beijing’s alternative facts - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/17/chinese-ambassador-disinformation-alternate-facts-taiwan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/17/chinese-ambassador-disinformation-alternate-facts-taiwan/ |
Fencing outside the FBI's headquarters in D.C. on Aug. 16. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
It is hard to keep track of all the criminal statutes that might apply to defeated former president Donald Trump regarding actions leading up to and after the 2020 election.
The media have lately focused on three statutes that Trump might have violated in retaining highly classified documents, as cited in the FBI search warrant for his Mar-a-Lago home: the Espionage Act; Section 1519 of the U.S. Code, relating to obstruction of an investigation; and Section 2071, relating to theft of government documents.
These potential violations could be on top of the potential charges regarding his phony elector scheme; his effort to pressure former vice president Mike Pence to illegally reject electoral votes; and his invitation and incitement of the crowd on Jan. 6, 2021. As to incitement, University of Chicago law professor emeritus Albert W. Alschuler, writing for Just Security, argues that Trump’s failure to act once the insurrection was underway and his 2:24 p.m. tweet further riling up the crowd against Pence might be powerful evidence against Trump on the charge of “aiding and abetting” the insurrection, since Trump had a legal duty to intervene.
And then, of course, there are the Georgia state criminal statutes that Trump might have violated in his effort to pressure state officials in Georgia to “find” just enough votes to flip the state’s election. Fani T. Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, Ga., is moving full speed ahead with her investigation, with an eye on charges that could include conspiracy to commit voting fraud, interference with performance of an official’s duties and violation of Georgia’s racketeering law.
Considering the parade of witnesses appearing before the FBI, the federal grand jury and the grand jury in Georgia, prosecutors are no doubt collecting a mound of evidence against the former president. And the more witnesses who talk, the higher the risk that someone strikes a deal to incriminate Trump. The identification of Rudy Giuliani as a target in the Georgia investigation raises the potential that even Trump’s attorney might turn on him to avoid prosecution.
Altogether, it seems Trump is in more legal peril than ever before. His misconceptions about the criminal justice system and his supporters’ wishful thinking do not diminish the danger of indictment.
Trump’s lame overtures to Attorney General Merrick Garland to “reduce the heat” of the political fallout from the Mar-a-Lago search — while simultaneously insinuating that violence might occur if the Justice Department keeps pursuing him — is as disingenuous as it is utterly irrelevant to Garland. The Justice Department’s prosecutors and investigators certainly don’t care if Republicans are still enthralled with Trump. They will go after anyone who engages in acts of violence, as Garland made clear in his remarks last week in which he demanded that people stop impugning and threatening the FBI.
Likewise, while Trump seems convinced that announcing his presidential bid for 2024 would make it harder for prosecutors to indict him, that’s another Trumpian delusion. Garland has reiterated he will pursue the facts and the law regardless of where they lead. And he added credibility to that statement with his nervy decision to execute the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. The bottom line: Cult support for Trump is not going to buy him any relief from legal woes.
So if Trump is in deep legal trouble, what can we say about his party? Well, think of this as a “shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue” moment. Republicans are apparently willing to stick with Trump even if he’s caught red-handed in committing crimes. As Never Trumper Charlie Sykes writes for the Bulwark:
That’s the road the GOP seems ready to go down. The party is putting all of its eggs in the basket of a guy who might be indicted under a variety of legal theories in state and federal court. Sure, it might dawn on some Republicans that this might not be a wise strategy. But even if the party shifts to another contender, Trump will almost certainly set out to destroy that candidate’s chances.
You can find plenty of Republican hacks on TV insisting that the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago is a political “win” for Trump. But what is he winning? Certainly not protection from prosecution. And this sort of “win” for Trump creates a potentially debilitating problem for the party, which will be pressed into defending his conduct. One wonders what Republicans really think about the possibility of having to run down-ballot from someone who could be under indictment.
The more Trump tightens his grip on the party, the greater the likelihood that the GOP will nominate someone who is at real risk of criminal prosecution. The party’s Trump worship might soothe the raging narcissist, but it also might ensure the GOP puts forward the most toxic presidential candidate in history. | 2022-08-17T17:34:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Trump has never been in so much peril. Nor has the GOP. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/17/trump-legal-peril-republicans/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/17/trump-legal-peril-republicans/ |
Pence pushes back against GOP calls to ‘defund the FBI’
Former vice president Mike Pence addresses an audience during a visit to the “Politics & Eggs” business gathering of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., on Aug. 17. (CJ Gunther/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Former vice president Mike Pence pushed back Wednesday against those in his party who have called to “defund the FBI” after the bureau’s search of former president Donald Trump’s residence in Florida last week.
Pence, appearing at a “Politics & Eggs” breakfast in New Hampshire, said he was “deeply troubled” that a search warrant had been issued and called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to release more information about its justification. The Justice Department filed a motion to unseal the search warrant, which was released last Friday.
“I also want to remind my fellow Republicans we can hold the attorney general accountable for the decision that he made without attacking the rank-and-file law enforcement personnel at the FBI,” Pence said, underscoring asserting that “the Republican Party is the party of law and order.”
“These attacks on the FBI must stop,” Pence said to applause. “Calls to defund the FBI are just as wrong as calls to defund the police.”
The court-authorized search produced multiple classified documents that Trump had taken from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Fla. Since the search, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) have led the call to “defund the FBI,” with Greene pushing T-shirts with the phrase.
Last Thursday, an armed man wearing body armor tried to breach the FBI’s Cincinnati field office, sparking an hours-long standoff that ended when he was fatally shot after firing at officers, authorities said.
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, who was nominated by Trump and confirmed by all Senate Republicans in 2017, said in a Friday statement that attacks on the FBI “are a grave disservice to the men and women who sacrifice so much to protect others.”
“Violence and threats against law enforcement, including the FBI, are dangerous and should be deeply concerning to all Americans,” he said.
“If there was an invitation to participate, I would consider it,” Pence said. “But you’ve heard me mention the Constitution a few times this morning. Under the Constitution, we have three coequal branches of government. Any invitation that would be directed at me, I would have to reflect on the unique role that I was serving then as vice president.”
Pence said that it would be “unprecedented in history for a vice president to be summoned to testify on Capitol Hill.”
“But I don’t want to prejudge,” he said. “So if there were ever any formal invitation to us, it would get due consideration.”
In July, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) told the Wall Street Journal that the committee was considering asking Trump to testify and may request a written interview with Pence or issue a subpoena for him to testify. | 2022-08-17T17:43:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pence pushes back against GOP calls to ‘defund the FBI’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/17/pence-jan-6-search-defund-fbi/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/17/pence-jan-6-search-defund-fbi/ |
The temporary relief doubles as a retention bonus in a tight labor market, as housing and food prices soar.
Shoppers load a box of merchandise into a truck after visiting a Lowe's hardware store in Philadelphia on Nov. 4, 2020. (Mark Makela/Reuters)
“In recognition of some of the cost pressures they are facing due to high inflation, we are providing an incremental $55 million in bonuses to our hourly front line associates this quarter," said Lowe’s CEO Marvin R. Ellison on an investor call on Wednesday. "These associates have the most important jobs in our company, and we deeply appreciate everything they do to serve our customers to deliver a best-in-class experience.”
These bonuses will give a boost to workers at a time when food, housing, and other costs continue to soar, disproportionately impacting the lowest income households. The temporary relief doubles as a retention bonus in a booming labor market that has afforded workers leverage to quit their jobs and negotiate higher wages.
Lowe’s is not the first company to offer an inflation-related paycheck bump to its employees in a red-hot labor market where employers are struggling to hire. The financial firm USAA gave some employees a one-time $1,000 bonus. Other business around the United States have been offering workers bonuses and gift cards to offset the cost of gas. A draft of a bill in Congress is currently proposing a 2.4 percent inflation bonus for Department of Defense employees who makes $45,000 or less.
Unlike raises, bonuses are typically less useful to workers than salary bumps because they are a one-time lump sum increase that does not change their hourly wages and are taxed.
Lowe’s did not immediately respond to a request for comment and has not said how much each worker will receive. Lowe’s employs approximately 300,000 associates and operates or services more than home improvement and hardware stores. | 2022-08-17T17:56:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Lowe's and other employers give workers 'inflation bonuses' - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/17/lowes-inflation-bonus/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/17/lowes-inflation-bonus/ |
Liz Cheney for president? Wyoming once led the way in women’s rights.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) speaks Aug. 16 at a primary election gathering in Jackson, Wyo. Cheney lost to Republican opponent Harriet Hageman in the primary. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
At a House Jan. 6 committee hearing in July, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) noted that much of the hearings’ most compelling testimony came from young women speaking out against older and more powerful men.
They “are an inspiration to American women and to American girls,” Cheney said.
Cheney’s criticism of former president Donald Trump has been unsparing. Now, after losing the Republican primary in her reelection campaign, she is considering a run for president herself.
Liz Cheney’s political life is likely to be ending — and just beginning
From a historical perspective, it would make a lot of sense for the first female president to hail from Wyoming. In 1869, Wyoming was the first jurisdiction in the modern world to give all women the right to vote, regardless of marital or property-owning status — 50 years before the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.
A territory at the time, Wyoming retained these rights for women when it became a state in 1890. Women in Wyoming territory also had the right to hold public office and own property separately from husbands, and female teachers were guaranteed the same pay as their male counterparts.
There are a few reasons that the region — now one of the most conservative places in the country — was once so progressive. The first non-Indigenous settlers flooded into the territory for gold rushes and mining jobs. They were almost entirely single men and not particularly interested in law and order or in building a community or a working government; they hoped to strike it rich and move back to their home states.
By allowing women to vote, the territorial legislature hoped to attract families, which might become permanently resident, and single women, who might marry some of the men.
Some Democrats who voted for the bill also argued that allowing White women to vote would blunt the impact of the votes of Black and Asian men, to whom the appointed Republican governor had promised suffrage.
A few months after the vote, in 1870, Esther Morris, the 55-year-old wife of a saloonkeeper in Wyoming’s South Pass City, was appointed justice of the peace, becoming the first woman to hold a judicial office in modern history. She ran an efficient court and, according to Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, was a “terror to all rogues.” A statue of Morris, a gift from Wyoming, stands in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall collection.
Despite Wyoming’s crucial role in women’s history, Cheney voted against the creation of a national women’s history museum in February 2020 — and was the only congresswoman to do so. At the time, a spokesman for Cheney told The Washington Post that Cheney “believes women’s accomplishments deserve to be honored in an equal manner, alongside those of men, as part of our great national story.”
Only one congresswoman voted against a bill to create a women’s history museum.
Cheney struck a different tone at the close of the July hearing. Wearing a suffragist-white blazer, Cheney noted that the hearing room was the same where, in 1918, a committee convened “to debate whether women should be granted the right to vote.”
“This room is full of history,” she said, “and we on this committee know we have a solemn obligation not to idly squander what so many Americans have fought and died for.”
Then she quoted Margaret Thatcher, the first woman to become prime minister of Britain.
More on women's history
The forgotten woman behind International Women’s Day
For International Women’s Day, here are 7 of history’s greatest women-led protests | 2022-08-17T17:56:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Liz Cheney for president? Wyoming once led the way in women’s rights. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/08/17/liz-cheney-wyoming-women/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/08/17/liz-cheney-wyoming-women/ |
Transcript: Explaining America with Max Levchin, Founder & CEO, Affirm
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Frances Stead Sellers, a senior writer here at The Washington Post.
Having grown up in Britain and spent my adult life in the United States, I often get questions from friends and family members asking me why things happen the way they do here. What's with the sheer number of guns? Why are there prescription drug ads on TV? What's a corn dog, and why do politicians eat them?
Here today to help me take a step towards explaining America is Max Levchin. He's the Affirm CEO and PayPal co‑founder, and he's going to discuss his own pursuit of the American dream and the importance of immigration to the American story.
Max, a very warm welcome back to Washington Post Live.
MR. LEVCHIN: Thank you. A corn dog is a mystery to me too.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: I'm going to ask you if you've ever had one.
But first, to our audience, you can ask questions of Max on Twitter and questions beyond the corn dog question. Send them to @PostLive. That's the Twitter handle, @PostLive. Please join our conversation.
And, Max, tell me how you got here. You came here from the former Soviet Union as a 16‑year‑old seeking political asylum.
MR. LEVCHIN: That's right. That's a great summary. It has an increasing backstory. My grandparents were both fairly prominent scientists in the Soviet establishment and in spite of a fairly anti‑Semitic regime and a variety of challenges managed to rise to the very top of the sort of scientific establishment, only to find themselves trying to get out as early, apparently, as mid‑'80s and denied exit opportunities and essentially told to stay put and die in a Soviet state. And when my grandfather finally passed away in '86, my grandmother mounted this unbelievable effort to get out by any means necessary, and we sort of snuck out the very last days of the Soviet Union, as a matter of fact, the summer of '91, just a couple of weeks before the state ultimately collapsed. And so it was a bit of a‑‑and all of this was almost entirely invisible to me until the year before we finally left it. The family kept it under wraps on the assumption that the kids would blabber, and we would eventually get arrested or something else.
So I kind of got this "Oh, by the way, we're leaving for America. Start packing," notification, which was quite interesting.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So you said it, "we're leaving for America," but why America?
MR. LEVCHIN: I think there are two parts to that announcement. One part was we're leaving. The country is collapsing. I was due to register for the mandatory draft. There's all sorts of reasons to get out, and then my family was quite worldly. They sort of understood what economic opportunity meant, and they saw there was none of it where we lived. And they sort of presaged the American dream. They wanted the grandkids and the kids to live up to their fullest potential, not serve in the Soviet army that was just about to get routed in Afghanistan.
So, ultimately, the political asylum was probably as much that as it was an economic one. We went to the U.S. so that I could study in a school that would allow me to build on my actual advantages and whatever may come. Obviously, I was extraordinarily fortunate from that point on, but that was the seminal point of what happened to me.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Do you remember sort of legal and logistical problems at that stage, or did it go very smoothly?
MR. LEVCHIN: I think the Soviet side of it was quite lumpy. We had to do all sorts of contortionist things, including‑‑I think there was a moment in time when my grandmother had to obtain a birth certificate, and the city where she was born flatly denied her because they figured out why she needed it. And there was sort of a long and protracted bureaucratic battle, but at the time, at least, the U.S. was still very much motivated by what was called "Operation Exodus," which was a political and economic attempt to save the Soviet Jewry and allow people like my family and me to come to the U.S.
And once we were able to apply for political asylum in the U.S., the process was actually fairly smooth at the time. I think it was seen as a politically supported effort. From the outside looking in, obviously, I don't really know, but what I remember when we moved to Chicago in '91, I saw lots of signage all around Chicago, particularly Chicago synagogues saying Operation Exodus helped Soviet Jews escape. And we were the beneficiaries.
And the real, kind of the only moment I remember my family of having an elevated heartbeat was would we be able to get a full refugee status or something less than‑‑I certainly couldn't pretend to remember or know really what that meant, but I remember them being extraordinarily stressed out about would they be allowed to work in the U.S., would they be able to get jobs, or would they have to ultimately go to some other country where they would be allowed to work and contribute to society.
And so we were very lucky, of course. We got the full sort of a welcome, and within 10 days of arrival, both my parents were working extremely menial jobs, but they were happy to be able to start making sort of an economic movement forward.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: And I think they were a mechanical engineer and a poet, as I remember it, but tell me. Just, you know, 16 is such a formative age to arrive. Teenager, you arrive in Chicago. What were your feelings right then? Were you excited, or was it incredibly daunting or both, I guess?
MR. LEVCHIN: You know, I was unbelievably excited, actually. I would love to tell you some sort of a heart‑wrenching story of little Max missing the homeland, but I was‑‑I was smiling ear to ear every day.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: [Laughs]
MR. LEVCHIN: One of the really funny but sort of memories that stuck with me, we're flying in the very last Pan Am flights. Pan Am declared bankruptcy before we left Moscow, and by the time we landed in the U.S., there were sort of just a few flights left. But, of course, we're sitting in the very, very back of the plane, flying from Moscow to New York City, sort of en route to Chicago, and I snuck into first class and snatched a copy of Computer Shopper, which was this ancient‑now magazine, sort of a 10,000‑pages, kind of upscale catalog of computers you could buy, and in full seriousness went to my mom and said, "Hey, we have something like 300‑something dollars among five of us. Do you think I could have 250? Because I found some extraordinarily inexpensive computer we could buy"‑‑
MR. LEVCHIN: ‑‑so I could continue to be doing what I love doing so much, and she said, "Absolutely not. You know, our rent will be consumed by the total amount of money we have between us, but I'm sure‑‑it's the land of opportunity. You'll find your way to a computer."
And I happened to have a relative in Chicago already. One of the earlier‑‑my grandmother's son, my uncle got there a little bit before us, and he had already found a job, a software engineer, and so his welcome gift to me was a trip to CompUSA, which I think is now sadly defunct, where he bought me the absolute least expensive computer money could buy. And from that point on, I was in heaven.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Just to sort of finish these formative years, you went from there to the University of Illinois in Champaign‑Urbana, and I'm aware that many of the PayPal founders came from‑‑they're all Stanford. So I'm sort of thinking if this is a transition to these bigger ideas that you embraced as you move ahead. You clearly had this entrepreneurial spirit, but what did the university do for you? And I have to say also, it's probably the corn dog capital of the United States right there in the middle of the cornfields.
MR. LEVCHIN: That's why I feel so embarrassed. I've seen many a corn dog in my trips to county fairs, but I have to honestly admit that I don't believe I've ever had one. The idea of deep‑frying mystery meats was already suspect to me then.
So what was really amazing about U of I‑‑so I went to U of I a little bit on the‑‑it's not exactly a lark, but I literally asked a friend sort of where do smart kids from this high school‑‑I was in a regular inner‑city high school and was still trying to orient myself on the U.S., sort of asked one of my best friends, where do you go for school if you want to study computers and can't afford anything. So there's exactly one school. It's go to University of Illinois in Champaign‑Urbana. It's a great computer science school, and you can probably get some scholarships. And so that's sort of how I navigated my path to Illinois.
And I owe a huge, huge amount of what I am and what I've been able to accomplish to those four years where, one, I was extraordinarily lucky. Mosaic, the first graphical browser, was invented on my campus the year I matriculated, and so I sort of got a front‑row seat to what the future would look like. And my plans to become a PhD just like my grandmother and my grandfather evaporated because I saw all these really smart kids go from "Wow, this is really neat" to "Wow, you can build amazing companies and ideas and businesses out of them." So I was bitten by an entrepreneurial bug, obviously.
But the probably more, kind of a subtle impact I got from school is you go from a world of extract ideas for, you know, a family of scientists to this very pragmatic universe of big ideas can be commercialized, and especially for a Soviet kid, this notion of commercialization was somewhere between a dirty word and kind of an abstract construct that I didn't really understand. And being thrust into that as an opportunity was just amazing. I saw all these‑‑you know, Netscape was formed basically on my campus, and Marc Andreessen and five others left Champaign to build what soon became a publicly traded company. And so all these lessons are kind of flashing in front of me, even as I was sort of still gorging myself on computer science lessons. This idea that you can take a science you love and turn it into a force for commercial and ultimately societal impact was really, really transformative in my head.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, Max, you've written that immigrants, in particular, make successful entrepreneurs. Can you elaborate on that? What is it about immigrants that allows them to pursue these pursuits?
MR. LEVCHIN: I think it's a combination of two things. You have absolutely nothing to lose. It was not an exaggeration. We literally had a couple hundred dollars between five of us when we came to the U.S., and it was very clear that you have to learn how to swim very, very quickly, otherwise you're going to drown. And as a result, you have this willingness to do anything and everything to survive and get ahead, but you also are going from zero to one, which means that you very quickly learn this lesson that if you just try as hard as you can, there's probably good things that will happen. And so you're empowered by that idea, go as hard as you can, as far as you can, and there aren't really any limits because we came from nothing, and there's no fear of dropping back. And so I think it was a combination of those things.
I think I've seen that movie over and over again, both as a co‑founder with other people that came from other parts of the world and certainly as an investor these days, just over and over, the story of a plucky immigrant who comes in with nothing to lose and everything to gain and plays out to these amazing companies.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So let me dig a little deeper on that, because is there something quintessentially American about that process? Why is‑‑why does it‑‑or why did it work here? Because maybe things have changed a bit. Why was America such a great place to do these things?
MR. LEVCHIN: I think America in itself is a macro version of what Silicon Valley perhaps used to be known for. Failure is not a permanent state. You are expected to fall on your face every once in a while, and no one permanently casts you aside and declares you useless, even if your first attempt doesn't work.
My mom worked for over a decade as basically a babysitter and other forms of menial labor with a master's degree in physics and a decade‑long career in software engineering before we moved to the U.S. and never really thought to complain or declare herself a failure. She just always knew that eventually she'll get enough English under her belt and enough communication and societal navigation skills, if you will, and ultimately became a software engineer and add another 30 years of successful software engineering, 25 years of software engineering in the U.S.
And so this idea of just kind of you don't give up because this country has lots of shots on goal embedded into its structure. No one will cast you aside because your résumé doesn't have sort of perfect buildup, which is very much true in the majority of the world still.
I think this is especially concentrated in Silicon Valley where you're expected to fail as an entrepreneur over and over again as you earn your stripes, and then you're to get funding. I think the U.S. is kind of a somewhat milder version of the same idea.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: And you've actually stolen my next question out of my mouth because I was thinking, you know, how does your immigrant experience sort of sit behind the founding ideas of PayPal? And you're saying the sort of willingness to fail and start again and try again and pick up and go on.
MR. LEVCHIN: Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of us actually get the ideas and the constructs that we pursue as entrepreneurs directly from personal or professional failures. PayPal was pivot after pivot after pivot. The company itself kind of failed internally to gain traction in our original idea and the original idea modified and on and on and eventually kind of figured itself out, and obviously, PayPal is now a giant, very successful company.
My current project, Affirm, sort of throwing it back to University of Illinois, one of the earliest fundraising ideas I had as a still student at U of I was to get a credit card, which, of course, did not exist as a thing where I grew up in Soviet Union, and use that as a vehicle for funding my first two companies. That probably wrecked my credit‑‑
MR. LEVCHIN: ‑‑and even though by the time I, you know, was an independently wealthy young man after PayPal's IPO, I still needed cosigners to get a cell phone plan and to buy my first real car. And so that sort of stuck with me, this idea that some systems in the American society are woefully behind others. All these discontinuities present amazing opportunities for somebody who wants to fix the system. Affirm is fundamentally about reinventing credit and giving it where it's due, and people like me, sort of immigrants, students that had missteps in their youth but then ultimately end up in a really good place, they all deserve access to credit that's significantly more up to date than the ancient system that was invented sort of between '60s and '70s, which is what we still have in a lot of places in this country now. So I think you inevitably go back to these personal experiences and leverage failures to build something interesting and new, and a lot of times, it doesn't work, but when it does, it's extremely rewarding.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Do you make a specific effort in any way to employ immigrants at Affirm? Is there an ongoing sense that you can embrace this sort of energy and willingness to fail and learn again?
MR. LEVCHIN: You know, I think‑‑Affirm is now 2,500‑ish‑person company, and we are still very actively hiring. Therefore, being so picky as to say only immigrants should apply is certainly not our strategy, but I do find it that on average, the drive and the motivation that I find not just in immigrants but generally speaking‑‑you don't have to be born outside of the U.S. to experience being under‑expected from‑‑under‑estimated is probably a good example.
When you come to the U.S. and you have an accent and you barely fit in and you don't know how to dress, you will absolutely or can actually encounter people dismissing you, and I think that's true for a lot of groups that are born in the U.S. that just don't have the privilege embedded.
And it does turn out that a large percentage of those people, especially the ones that are trying to break into tech or break into entrepreneurship are unbelievably hardworking. They just have this unstoppable motivation to get out there and prove that they can, and so I love hiring those people. And we are fortunate enough to have quite a large representation of both underrepresented groups and, in particular, quite a lot of immigrants as well.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: But, gosh, from a business point of view, is it easier for a business to hire highly skilled immigrants from elsewhere than to reinvest in the U.S. educational system and try to make more people have that sort of sense of drive, willingness to fail, and then move on in confidence that they'll get somewhere if they move on?
MR. LEVCHIN: That's certainly‑‑that's certainly my politics, if you will. I'm long in the record saying that the limit‑‑I'm not sure how viable it is, but when we graduate‑‑I was lucky. By the time I graduated college, I was basically eligible for a green card, and, you know, five years later, I was eligible for U.S. citizenship. So my path was assured to at least the degree that it can be. There are plenty of brilliant immigrants that come on student visas or some sort of restricted visa or H‑1s or the limited‑work visa, and I think we're, frankly, as a nation making a terrible mistake when we are telling them, especially after college, "Hey, thanks for the four years you invested in learning what we have to offer in America. Now please go back to your own country." That is a pretty silly policy.
And I understand that immigration politics are unbelievably complicated, and there's quite a lot about skilled labor and unskilled labor and the juxtaposition of the border crisis, and so none of it is to be dismissed. But just the pure economic self‑interest, we manufacture‑‑or rather, we take on brilliant unformed talent. We form it with undergraduate and graduate schooling, and from my point of view, fail to take advantage of the fact that we just created these brilliant people by sending them back to their country.
And I'm glad perhaps that they're going to their home nations to build economies there, but selfishly, I wish they would stay here and start companies or join companies like mine.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So I couldn't agree with you more that immigration reform is a very, very difficult issue, but many large immigrant‑receiving countries like Canada, like New Zealand have had point systems so that they can bring in the people they need to fill certain entrepreneurial and business needs. Is that the kind of thing you think would make sense in this country?
MR. LEVCHIN: You know, I remember actually‑‑it was interesting, but I remember chatting with my mom right before we left for the U.S. where she had said that one of her coworkers, a software engineer with an illustrious education, background, in Soviet Union was able to get into Australia, and on the one hand, she was quite stressed out about how what if America adopts a point system. What if we can't qualify? What if we don't qualify? On the other hand, the certainty that this particular person had, he had a perfect GPA from some‑‑from Moscow State University or some sort of MIT‑equivalent in the Soviet Union, obviously a brilliant physicist and engineer and was very much in demand, and it took him a trivial amount of time to get to Australia as soon as he was able to get in touch with the Australian embassy.
So some form of‑‑and the point system, I feel like it has an opportunity to both be gamed and potentially exclude people that shouldn't be excluded, but some way of measuring what this person has to contribute to the economy, I think, probably has merit, and we should consider it.
Again, I'm infinitely more comfortable talking about software engineering and entrepreneurship than I am about political reforms. I consider myself fairly apolitical. I do think that there are brilliant people that would be better off for all of us within America than outside, and I know that this space is ultimately not infinite. So there are some people that will be overlooked or excluded, but we would all be better off if more immigrants could start more companies or join amazing companies that contribute.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So among the immigrant co‑founders of PayPal and notably Peter Thiel, some have taken a far more hardline approach than you. Do you see that as shortsighted, or why is this happening right now when they gain so much from coming here?
MR. LEVCHIN: You know, I'm certainly not qualified to speak for anyone else, but myself‑‑
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Mm‑hmm.
MR. LEVCHIN: ‑‑I do think that the overall approach to immigration as a more must come or fewer must be allowed in is a reflection of a zero‑sum versus pie‑is‑getting‑larger mentality, and as an entrepreneur, I certainly deeply believe that‑‑you know, I would be‑‑I would be insane not to believe in America. I think I'm a died‑in‑the‑wool patriot because I owe everything I have to this country, and my gratitude is infinite.
And I do think that the pie is getting larger. I'm a big believer in what Warren Buffet has to say. You know, he's been observing U.S. economy for a very long time, and every time I see him speak, every time I've sort of been privileged to speak to him, his attitude has never been different. You know, the best years are ahead of us. We can build more. It is not a zero‑sum game. The pie is getting larger. We should just continue expanding what we've built here. This experiment is working, and I believe that wholeheartedly.
And so, as a result, I think the idea of what if too many people come in is a silly, frankly, attitude. I think we want more people building the economy up. I think the, you know, close the door behind you, there's already too many of us in here, it is just very shortsighted and suggests some kind of a zero‑sum fear, which I don't subscribe to.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So I have to ask you. When you say that about the number of people pouring out of Ukraine right now, your former homeland, and how you see and what you think about, refugees coming in large numbers and what the country can do to help them.
MR. LEVCHIN: I think as an exceedingly terribly and complicated situation, I do think that‑‑I mean, I think the one thing I'm sure I cannot predict is the future of warfare and what's really happening there, other than the tragedy and great need of humanitarian aid, which, you know, I've been fortunate enough to contribute a little bit there.
It's hard to tell. I do think that Ukraine will need its brilliant people back there once this tragedy is over, and so, in some ways, I think it's maybe controversial, but I would love to‑‑and we have some folks in Ukraine that work for Affirm, and as I am worried about them, I'm also, frankly, happy that they're still there as opposed to leaving Ukraine, because I think the country needs all the brilliant people it can have to defend itself and to deal with the tragedy that's there and the rebuilding period that can't come a moment too soon.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: You spoke about yourself just so very movingly as an undying patriot, and I'd love it if you could describe just briefly what America has given you beyond extraordinary wealth, what other gifts you got from emigrating to this country.
MR. LEVCHIN: You know, it's almost too difficult to count. I remember two things. I'll give you two visuals which are‑‑I mean, this is a question that can only be answered in episodes and anecdotes as opposed to a real sort of countdown.
But I remember a week after we came to the U.S. I was sitting on the bleachers at a random baseball diamond, which, of course, probably was my first time at a baseball diamond, right next to the Chicago Jewish community center, and I looked up. And there was this giant American flag flying above my head, and I was like, "Oh, that is my new flag." I sort of realized that I've seen these bright red Soviet flags my entire life, and I looked up and I saw an American flag. And I thought that's amazing, and it was very moving. And I couldn't really relate to what happened. I was like that's a moment to remember. I should sort of store this in my head as a 16‑year‑old because who knows what this will mean to me.
And very, very recently, I was in London and saw the American embassy there, and I remember thinking like that is such a direct connection. Like, I'm outside of the U.S. Of course, the UK is an extraordinarily friendly country, as you know. There's, you know, sort of no real fear here for anything there but I knew that that same flag would be the place I would go to wherever I would travel, whatever trouble I might be in, you know, whatever might befall me, the sense of like that country cares about you and will protect you was really profound. And I sort of felt this emotional moment of overwhelming, like, wow, I don't think many people worldwide enjoy that sense of security and safety that comes with being a part of a large nation like this.
And I think a variance of that idea are just‑‑you know, frankly, as an immigrant, you can't take this for granted, especially an immigrant from an oppressive regime, and I think that's probably the most important. Now that I have kids of my own, I sort of‑‑you know, if we get lost in some godforsaken place, just find an American flag, and you'll be okay. And I think that's a fairly, fairly amazing thing to think about.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: What a great note to leave you on. Find an American flag and you'll be okay.
Max Levchin, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about immigration and your own pursuit of the American dream.
MR. LEVCHIN: Thank you for having me.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Thank you, everybody, for joining us today. If you want to see more programming from Washington Post Live, it’s at WashingtonPostLive.com. You can sign up and register for future programs.
I'm Frances Stead Sellers. Thank you. | 2022-08-17T17:58:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transcript: Explaining America with Max Levchin, Founder & CEO, Affirm - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/08/17/transcript-explaining-america-with-max-levchin-founder-ceo-affirm/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/08/17/transcript-explaining-america-with-max-levchin-founder-ceo-affirm/ |
Transcript: Leadership During Crisis with Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R)
MS. ALEMANY: Hi. Welcome to The Washington Post. I’m Jackie Alemany, congressional investigations reporter here at The Post. We have a lot to cover today with our guest, from water conservation issues to conservative politics and more. I’m joined today by Utah’s Governor, Spencer Cox. Governor Cox, welcome to Washington Post Live.
GOV. COX: Thank you. It's great to be with you again.
MS. ALEMANY: And a quick note for our audience, we do want to hear from you. So please send us questions on Twitter using the handle @PostLive. Governor, to start I want to set the record straight--or have you set the record straight for us. You were out for a run on Saturday morning when many other residents heard an explosion. What was that mysterious noise over Salt Lake City this weekend?
GOV. COX: Well, yeah, so I'm running and I hear this explosion. My first thought is, is that an earthquake? Because sometimes they have that sound. I kind of waited. Nothing was moving. And I thought, well, it sounded like a sonic boom, but it was weird. It was--there was an initial boom and then there were a couple muffled booms after that almost like it was moving. And immediately reached out to our teams. They reached out. We have military installations all across Utah, who are sometimes doing different explosive activities. It wasn't them. We were able to soon confirm that it actually was a meteor that entered the atmosphere over Utah and exploded into some smaller pieces. We don't know where those landed, but we were landed but we were able to confirm that it was indeed a meteor that made that explosion.
MS. ALEMANY: So you didn't take any meteor home that day after your run?
GOV. COX: No, no, I was not--unfortunately unable to locate where the meteor landed, probably closer to Idaho. It was--it was moving very quickly to the north. We did get some video confirmation from some Ring doorbells and other places that saw the blue streak traveling across the sky. So definitely not something you see or hear every day. No confirmation if there was any alien life form attached to that meteor, though.
MS. ALEMANY: I'm sure the House Intel Committee is going to be very interested in that topic. But at the top of mind for in--for people in Utah right now is the drought. The breaking news this afternoon is that the Biden administration has announced that water shortages along the Colorado River passed a threshold for the first time that will require unprecedented cuts for states in the region. As you know, the southwestern U.S. is falling--is facing the most extreme drought in 1,200 years and the drying Salt Lake is causing significant issues for the surrounding ecosystem. What are Utah and upper--other Upper Colorado River Basin states prepared to sacrifice given the call for basin-wide cuts of 2 to 4 million acre feet?
GOV. COX: Sure. So that announcement today will have some serious impacts, of course, on--especially on the lower basin states who have over allocated their proportion of the water. Many of the upper basin states, including Utah, we're under our allocation. But that doesn't matter that much when there isn't enough water to go around. So, we know we were all going to have to make sacrifices. We've been working really hard on that here in the state of Utah since I took office last year. We introduced and passed 11-12 pieces of legislation, specifically around water conservation and reducing the amount of water that is being used in Utah per capita, additional legislation around preserving the Great Salt Lake, which as you mentioned is it at record lows right now. We're about a foot below the record we set in 1964--certainly something we're deeply concerned about.
We changed--we changed legislation that had been in place since Utah became a state well over 100 years ago impacting the way that we that--I guess let me back up. Historically in Utah and many other states, we had a use it or lose it mentality. If you're not using your water rights, then you could forfeit them, which gave an incentive for people to sometimes over water. And certainly, there was no incentive to leave water in the streambed that would take it to a place like the Great Salt Lake that was not considered a beneficial use. We changed that doctrine this past year in the state that allows farmers and ranchers and other water rights holders to keep their water in the streambed without the potential for losing that. That's going to have a major impact on the Great Salt Lake.
But more importantly, we've seen tremendous work around conservation. We've had some areas of the state that have seen a 25 percent water reduction rate usage by farmers, ranchers, citizens, homeowners. Everybody is cutting back, companies, employers. Everybody's doing their part. And it's actually working. So, we're very proud of the work that has happened there. But we still have a long ways to go, and I will continue to work with the legislature. We put aside about $500 million this past year, which is a record amount of funding for water conservation, and we hope to do the same thing next year.
MS. ALEMANY: With everyone cutting back, does Utah still want to build a pipeline from Lake Powell when it's clear that the reservoir is drying up?
GOV. COX: Yeah, sure. So of course, we would love to build that pipeline. But we're also very practical and recognize that that's not going to do us much good with Lake Powell and Lake Mead at record low levels. So even though we are under utilizing our portion of the--that belongs to Utah has been assigned to Utah as part of that Colorado River Compact, we recognize that if there's no water there, then that's not going to matter, that's not going to help. So, we have to focus on rebuilding that that capacity, making sure again, if we are going to continue an extended drought, that we're doing everything possible within upper basin states and lower basin states to really preserve that--the ecology of the river and making sure that we're doing our part to get more water into that river system. And so I suspect, and as we continue, that that's going to be slowed down, that project, unless and until we can get more water and the recovery happens.
MS. ALEMANY: And I want to ask you about a criticism that allowing for rapid city growth like that of St. George, Utah, which is one of the fastest growing cities in the country, and also has the highest water consumption rate in the West, is irresponsible given the drain of natural resources. What's your response to that?
GOV. COX: Sure. Well, a couple of responses. One, I would challenge that--the second part of that, that that they have the highest consumption per capita in the West. We measure things a little different than some other states, and so those aren't apple to apple comparisons. I would also say that we have significantly cut back, especially St. George in that area. They've been implementing over the last couple of years some very serious water restrictions that are cutting down significantly on the amount of water that is being used per capita. So that is very responsible. And I'm grateful that they are making those decisions as a municipality, as a county, and of course as a state. We have--we have a role to play there.
We--one of the laws we passed this last legislative session requires municipalities to be able to prove that they have the water to support the growth that is going to be happening. So that's important not just for St. George, but for every municipality in the state. Many of them were doing that already, but not all of them. And so we’re--the engineers are going to be able--they're going to have to show that they have the water available for the building permits that are being issued. And that will certainly help move the growth to the places that can sustain it, where we do have enough water, and slow the growth in places where we don't have enough water. So the ability to conserve and be more water wise is going to be critical to our ability to grow as a state. And if we--you know, if we don't have the water available, then then we're not going to be able to grow as much as we would like. And most of the growth is still internal. These are people who--these are kids and grandkids, people who are moving back to Utah who grew up here. And we certainly want to make sure their kids and grandkids can live here.
MS. ALEMANY: And I want to ask you about another lake that is shrinking in your state, the Great Salt Lake, which is unleashing dangerous toxins. We have images here actually depicting the lake drying up over time--the first image from 1985 and the second from just last month. What action are you taking to protect this ecosystem and the surrounding affected areas?
GOV. COX: Sure. So, I mentioned one of those changes, and that was changing that longstanding law that now allows water rights holders to keep water in the stream that will get to the--to the Great Salt Lake. We also set aside $40 million to purchase those water rights. So again, this is a change. This is now giving us the opportunity to purchase these rights, and we're using some great nonprofits to help us with this that are working on preserving those waterways, preserving the animal sanctuaries around that landscape to get more water into the river. So that $40 million will be able to purchase water rights or to lease water rights from water rights holders and get that water into the--into the lakebed. Very critical.
We're also doing a significant amount of work around the streambeds to enhance and actually remove some of the invasive species that have gone in there. These invasive species of plants and trees, Russian olives and others, suck water out of the landscape and again don't provide any real benefit to the surrounding areas. And so by removing those, we're keeping more water in the stream and getting it to the--getting it to the end of the road, literally to the to the Great Salt Lake.
We need more money for that. And we've had those conversations with the legislature. We have a speaker of the House who’s very dedicated to preserving and saving the Great Salt Lake. So, we're going to see additional funding for that coming in the future that will make a significant difference.
We're also working with the federal government as well. If this--if this lake goes dry, the impacts of that will not just hurt Utah but surrounding states as well. There's certainly a federal nexus there. There's been legislation run by members of Congress from the state of Utah and with support from leadership in both parties to help us get some resources here as well as the Army Corps of Engineers that will help us work on plans and some of the scientific studies to understand exactly what is happening with the hydrology of the lake and how we can--we can do more to save that.
MS. ALEMANY: Now, I want to pivot to a slightly different topic of conversation. You've garnered a lot of attention for your decision on transgender athletes. You've said that you're an outspoken LGBTQ ally. Does your thinking on this reflect a shift in the state of Utah on these social issues?
GOV. COX: Well, I--there's certainly a divide on these very contentious issues. That's true across the United States and it's also true here in the state of Utah. I do believe that there is a change that is happening, and I think it's an important change, that helps us understand that we--you know, we are all children of a God, that we are all brothers and sisters, that we love each other and that one of our primary duties and purposes is to help care for everyone, especially those who feel marginalized or different. And I am certainly seeing more of that. I was--I was very grateful. You've reported on this, but all four members of the House of Representatives and Congress from the state of Utah, all four Republicans voted to support same sex marriage, which was very different than a vote that would have been taken 10 years ago. And I think that's really what this is about. It's about the second great commandment to love our neighbors, to love others. And that's something that I certainly believe in, and it's something I've been--I've been trying to focus on for many years, making space for everyone in our state to feel like they belong here. And certainly, we're trying to do that. We're not perfect. I'm not perfect. We're not there yet. But I think we've made great strides. And I think if you talk to anybody from the LGBTQ community here in the state of Utah, they would--they would say that Utah has come a long ways on these issues.
MS. ALEMANY: And I want to get to a great question from an someone in the audience, Randall in Maryland, who asks, why are Utahns able to compromise on such a difficult issue as LGBTQ rights and religious liberty when so many other states can't compromise on anything? Are you encouraging other GOP governors to do the same?
GOV. COX: Yeah, yeah, we certainly are. And I appreciate the question and bringing that up. Maybe referring specifically to a law that we passed, gosh--time flies, maybe six years ago, it seems, sometime around there--when we came together, we had the religious community. And by the way, not just the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, formerly known as the Mormons, but also religious leaders from many denominations that came together to work with our LGBTQ community. And we passed this signature bill that that did preserve and enhance the rights of faith-based institutions and believers in our state. So protecting that piece of the--of the First Amendment that is so critical to all of us, but also supporting and putting in protections specifically in the areas of housing and employment protections for the LGBTQ community. And we set that up really as a model for the nation. Our hope was, again, at a very divisive time when these discussions were happening in Arkansas, in Indiana, and certainly at the national level, that this could be a model for the rest of the nation. And unfortunately, that hasn't been the case. There is an effort in Arizona right now to pass something similarly. There has been some proposed legislation in Congress that would do the same thing. I think it makes perfect sense. It's worked very well here, and both sides would tell you that.
And seems like--I just--gosh, it's so frustrating. I believe that this is one area, but there's so many others. Immigration is another example where Utah did something very special. Now, neither President Obama nor President Trump would allow us to implement what we did, but we found some great compromise around immigration that I think could be a model for the nation. There's so many of these other areas where we're not that far apart. And either side being willing to just give a little bit, we can--we can solve, you know, 90 percent of our problems and really build bonds that bring Republicans and Democrats together.
Now, the question is, why can't this happen anywhere else? And certainly, we're seeing threads of this in Utah as well. But it's the incentive structure, just historically, recently, I guess, has not been there for politicians, unfortunately. We tend to do better and get elected by demagoguing, by othering, people who disagree with us, by applying a purity test to people in each party, trying to kick people out who disagree on anything. And it's leading to this place where we are as divided as a nation as we've been probably since the 1860s. And it's leading to some failures and inability to solve real problems that are affecting people's lives. And we lament that. We're hoping that we can be different in Utah. Sometimes we are. Sometimes we're not. But we're certainly trying.
MS. ALEMANY: And you have previously said that you wholeheartedly supported the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade and that this was an issue that should be decided by the states. How concerned are you that 50 state legislatures battling this out might exacerbate divisions in the country on the issue of abortion?
GOV. COX: Well, I'm less concerned about that. I mean, the reason that--one of the reasons we're so divided is because of Roe, because we had this piece of policy and legislation that didn't come from Congress; it didn't come from the States. It came from some, you know, nine unelected people at the Supreme Court. And if you look at what's happened in other countries, where they've been able to kind of find maybe a better balance that makes a little more sense, it isn't quite as divisive, we never got that opportunity as a country. It was kind of imposed on us. And I believe you can point to a lot of the divisions in our country right now, I believe, point back to that decision in Roe that has led us to a place where we are so divided.
And so my hope is that now through the laboratories of democracy that over time, we'll be able to find a stasis, a balance, a better way of figuring out this this tug and pull that is happening between people like me, who believe that there is life before birth and that that life is vulnerable and worth protecting, as is all life, and those that believe that there should be a right to abortion in some cases, or in all cases, that kind of finding that that right balance and where we end up. Obviously, it's going to be different in different states. But I think if we had had this opportunity back in the '70s and '80s, we wouldn't be nearly as divided as we are right now.
MS. ALEMANY: You've also said that every time there is an abortion, there has been a failure. And you've pledged to do more to support mothers, pregnant women, and children facing poverty and trauma. I’m wondering what are some of those things that your administration is doing more and addressing some of the systemic issues that are tied into abortion care?
GOV. COX: Sure. So coincidentally, I just had a meeting this morning with my lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson, who is working with me on developing policy ideas. We're going to be bringing those to the legislature as we prepare for a legislative session that is coming up in January. So, we're just--we're workshopping these. I mean, these are ideas that we believed in for a long time, but they will center around maybe three or four policy areas. So one is trying to prevent unwanted pregnancies as much as possible. So access to contraception is one area where I think we can do more, talking about, again, supporting mothers, especially single mothers who are struggling, those who are living in poverty, that will be access to childcare, making it easier for pregnant women to get--to get the healthcare that they need to have a successful birth, and then providing the support after birth to those moms and those new children, looking at ways to hold men more accountable and more responsible. It takes two to make a child, and we haven't historically as a country I think done as well as we can to hold men accountable.
One of the things that we passed last--not this year but the year before was a policy change around prohibiting the procurement of hunting and fishing licenses to men who are behind in their--in their childcare payments, who--men who have been divorced or have never wed but fathered a child. And we've actually seen that be successful. So, we're looking at other ways where we can expand that to try to hold people more accountable for their responsibilities.
So those are just a few of the areas where we're working to try to make a significant difference. And I'm really hoping that we will have several policy proposals that will be passed by the legislature that will show that we do care about all life--obviously, life in the womb, but especially life after birth and the women who are far too often bearing the responsibility of caring for these children.
MS. ALEMANY: I'm wondering, though, Governor, how does holding men more accountable help a woman who ultimately decides that for even maybe potentially medical reasons, personal reasons that she does not want to carry a child to term?
GOV. COX: Well, again, it helps when that child is born, and potentially helping to pay for the childcare costs even before that child is born. There are too many men that that fail in their responsibility to that woman and to that child. And so that's where the help comes, is making sure that we're getting monetary help from the people who should be responsible, equally responsible for the creation of that life.
MS. ALEMANY: And I want to jump to some news of the week. You were critical of what you saw as an overreaction by some in both parties to the search at Donald Trump's Florida residence Mar-a-Lago. It's been a week now since that search warrant was executed. In your view, was this government overreach or an example that no one is above the law in America?
GOV. COX: Well, I don't know that we have a clear answer to that yet, and we won't until we know all of the details. Now we have seen some of what was--what was in the warrant. At least we know that that was finally released. And it was released, I believe, a couple of days late. And so I have been very critical of both sides of this issue.
And look, I mean, I just--I just have to say this again, because I think it's so important. First of all, this is not just like any other citizen. It's just not. As much as we would like it to be, it's not. This is a former president of the United States. And we have to live in a practical reality that this is very different. And the reaction to this was always going to be very different. And I hope the FBI and the DOJ understand that. I think they do. I mean, they've said as much. And so while, yes, if--you know, if the FBI were to come and search my home, they may not say anything publicly about it, you have to say something publicly about this, and you have to give as much information as you can from the beginning and at every stage of this investigation. You have to be a completely open book in this one. You--there's just no other way around this. The stakes are too high, and the potential negative results are far too damaging.
And so I was very critical of the FBI and the DOJ for not coming out at the very beginning. We have a--we have a saying in my administration that if there is a vacuum of information, it will be filled, and it will almost always be filled with bad information. And we certainly saw that. And part of that is just people making stuff up, and part of that is the media having to fill pages and time--right?--on air. And so you have to bring in experts who will tell you what they know, even though they don't know any more than any random citizen knows at the time. And so we're filling that with bad information. And that leads to terrible outcomes. And so the DOJ and the FBI have an absolute responsibility in this case, because it is so very unique, to keep us as informed as possible, even going overboard to keep us informed. And if they--if they have the goods, show us the goods. I mean, you have to do that.
At the same time, we had people, of course, in my party, and others who are trying to defend something that they have no concept about. One of the things I love about the United States of America is that that we do not--we never should use our position of authority to punish our political enemies. And so the Biden administration should never use the DOJ and the FBI to punish their political enemies. By the same token, a Republican administration should not use these levers of power of law enforcement to punish our political enemies. And so any time you have a Democrat in office and there's a search or some sort of criminal activity related to a Republican or a criminal investigation related to a Republican, there's going to be immediate pushback and vis versa. We've certainly seen that with Hillary Clinton. We've seen it with Hunter Biden. We've seen that pushback that's going to come.
At the same time, one of the things that's great about living in the United States of America is that no one can or should be above the law. If a law was broken, then everyone should be held responsible. You don't get a pass just because you're a governor, or you're a--or you're a former president of the United States. And so again, I think we should withhold any judgment until we know what we're actually talking about, and then we should deeply scrutinize exactly what it is it's happening because, again, this is not like any other situation. And we have to hold them to the highest possible standard.
MS. ALEMANY: Governor, unfortunately, we are all out of time, even though I have several questions left for you. But, Governor Spencer Cox of Utah, thank you so much for joining us today.
GOV. COX: Thank you, Jackie. We'll save it for the next time.
MS. ALEMANY: And thanks to you all for watching. To check out what interviews we have coming up, please head to WashingtonPostLive.com and register and find out more information about our upcoming programming. I’m Jackie Alemany. Thanks again for joining us today. | 2022-08-17T17:58:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transcript: Leadership During Crisis with Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/08/17/transcript-leadership-during-crisis-with-utah-gov-spencer-cox-r/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/08/17/transcript-leadership-during-crisis-with-utah-gov-spencer-cox-r/ |
Landlord tells Prince George’s nonprofit it must find a new home
Nancy Meyer, chief executive of the nonprofit Community Forklift in Hyattsville, Md. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
Location is everything, Nancy Meyer knows. Although the site she inherited when she became chief executive of Community Forklift in 2007 seems an odd place for a nonprofit storefront, the old industrial lot by the Anacostia River at Edmonston’s edge has worked well for 17 years.
People drive in from D.C. and Silver Spring or even make the short walk south from downtown Hyattsville because they want what Community Forklift sells out of its 40,000-square-foot warehouse — at a steep discount.
Part salvage yard, part Ikea showroom, the group sells refurbished furniture, surplus construction material, and various salvaged antiques and oddities from across the D.C. region at affordable prices, luring hobbyists, small businesses and local collectors. Families from Hyattsville, Edmonston and Riverdale have been only a short walk or bus ride away.
Now, Meyer must find a new home. Washington Gas, the landlord, wants the property back, the nonprofit announced this month, throwing Community Forklift into a historically challenging market for industrial real estate as warehouse rents across the D.C. region surge in the wake of pandemic-driven demand.
“We will be very sad if we have to go too far afield from where we are right now,” Meyer said.
Washington Gas spokesman Andre Francis did not answer questions about the decision to stop leasing the property to Community Forklift but did say the company would work with the nonprofit to find a new home.
Community Forklift opened in 2005, when a group of builders and activists met to discuss waste reduction in D.C. and where to store piles of leftover construction material they had collected from local construction sites. Tips led the group to the Edmonston warehouse, located on an unused industrial lot owned by Washington Gas. The nonprofit expanded into a salvage and refurbishing service to sell donated furniture and home appliances that the group repairs.
The site evolved into an eclectic showroom lined with rows of refrigerators, light fixtures and couches arranged alongside paint buckets and pallets of bricks. Displays of the nonprofit’s quirkier acquisitions flank the rows of furniture: antique typewriters and sewing machines, ornate chandeliers and a white fiberglass reproduction of the Statue of Liberty.
Homeowners, local businesses and independent construction contractors come to save. The nonprofit also donates supplies to schools, community organizations and low-income households. Salvaging allows them to make unlikely connections between donors and recipients in need: minifridges donated by renovating hotels get sold to diabetes patients who need them to store insulin. Local suppliers get a tax break for donating their surplus flooring tiles, which independent contractors buy to save money on their projects.
“We’re part of this dynamic grass-roots economy in the local community,” Meyer said.
Gerald Williams III, an entrepreneur and builder who lives in D.C., comes to Community Forklift for discounted construction materials. But returning to the nonprofit’s always-changing collection of donations has also become a matter of loyalty for him, Williams said this month as he picked between pallets of tiles at the warehouse.
“This is a city that conforms,” Williams said. “[And] this is the place where you can have variety and taste.”
For Dale Manty, a volunteer with the refugee-resettlement coalition Good Neighbors of Capitol Hill, Community Forklift is a lifesaver when the group needs dressers, desks and beds — quickly — for arriving families. Many of the families they resettle, most recently refugees from Afghanistan, live in East Riverdale, a 10-minute drive from the warehouse. After several visits, Community Forklift offered them a yearly grant to fund furniture purchases.
“It’s special to work with them,” Manty said. “If they relocate, we’ll go wherever they are. We hope they stay in the nearby region.”
Just down the road at Templeton Elementary School, community coordinator Camille Hill and counselor Adrienne Smith said their students’ attendance improved after Community Forklift donated sleeper sofas for their families, many of whom are resettled refugees.
“The families were grateful,” Smith said. “[And] our kids came to school well-rested.”
Meyer said Washington Gas hasn’t set a timeline for the move but wants the nonprofit out “as soon as possible.” She added that finding another location and completing the move could take over a year.
“Washington Gas continues to support Community Forklift, as we have, for more than 15 years,” Francis wrote to The Washington Post. “We will continue to work with Community Forklift throughout their transition.”
Asked at the warehouse, Williams was dismayed but unsurprised about the possibility of Community Forklift relocating.
“I’m used to a good place going,” he said. “That’s what life is around here.”
Smith said she worried that Templeton staff and families might struggle to reach Community Forklift if they move farther away. Sometimes, she’ll pick out furniture for families, who can walk to the warehouse to collect them.
“We want to keep resources like this where our families live,” she said. “We don’t want to take it from them.”
Meyer’s team faces a historically challenging market for warehouse space as they plan their relocation. The vacancy rate for industrial real estate in the D.C. metro area, including Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland, is 3.5 percent as of June 2022, according to research by commercial real estate services company JLL. Rent has increased to about $11.43 per square foot, about $2 higher than before the pandemic.
JLL senior research analyst Ben Caffey said that the historic surge in warehouse demand and rent has been driven in part by e-commerce giants such as Amazon, which purchased more warehouse space to meet an increased demand for online shopping and faster deliveries in the lead-up to and during the pandemic. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
“When you look at the historical statistics for metro D.C., we’re currently dealing with a completely different market,” Caffey said.
The trend isn’t confined to D.C. Last week, Community Forklift retrieved materials from a similar salvage nonprofit in Philadelphia, Philly Reclaim, which closed after being priced out of the city’s warehouses. Competing with “corporate behemoths” frustrates Meyer, who said other companies don’t provide the same support to individuals that Community Forklift does.
“If you need an air conditioner, either you have the money, or you don’t,” Meyer said as an example. “If you don’t, you can come here.”
David Iannucci, president and chief executive of the Prince George’s County Economic Development Corporation, said in an interview that Prince George’s remains the cheapest and most competitive jurisdiction for industrial warehouse space in the region. (Average warehouse rent in regions of Prince George’s is lower than that of Montgomery County and Northern Virginia, according to JLL’s report.) The PGCEDC is working with Community Forklift to identify potential sites for relocation, he said.
“They’re a great operation, and we want to keep them in Prince George’s County,” Iannucci said.
Community Forklift’s warehouse will remain open as the search for a new home continues. | 2022-08-17T18:22:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Community Forklift seeks a new home after 17 years - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/17/community-forklift-moving/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/17/community-forklift-moving/ |
Husband is negative about teenage son. Carolyn Hax readers give advice.
Dear Carolyn: My husband (“Dad”) has gotten increasingly negative about our 17-year-old son (“Son”), and is constantly giving me the “glass half empty, negative projection” with him. If I say I am going to ask Son to mow the lawn, he will say, “Oh, he won’t do it. He’ll just argue and try to get out of it.” Or if we are watching Son play his sport, Dad will say to me, “Oh look, they put Son in the game. Well, he will not play well because he didn’t hydrate enough, and they’ll be sending him to the bench within five minutes.”
This has gotten much more frequent over the past couple of years, and it's with everything now. I have tried everything: Ignoring it and not responding, saying “Have a little faith in your son," playing dumb when he's wrong ("Huh. It's been 20 minutes and he's still in the game and playing well. Isn't that strange?") and having a serious sit-down conversation about it with him (during which I was told that I need to be his “sounding board" when he is frustrated with the teenagerishness of Son because if I am not the sounding board he will end up saying these things to Son, which he will regret).
The thing is I am so sick of it, and it’s really bringing me down. I can handle it now and then, but it’s every single day. Yes, he’s a teenager and yes, he tries to get out of chores and doesn’t always prepare for sports (or anything) the way he should … but he’s a great kid and is responsible and nice and a good person. I just feel like it’s a standard that Son will never live up to because even if he does the thing perfectly (goes right out to mow the lawn or whatever) I’m reminded that “well, this time he did but we all know what will happen next time!” Any thoughts on how I should handle this or should I just absorb it and be thankful he doesn’t say these things directly to Son?
Frustrated: No, you shouldn’t set the bar as low as “At least he’s not directly undermining Son’s self-esteem.” The problem is your husband’s, and one day the pressure valve you’re providing isn’t going to be enough. And the fundamental disapproval of the child himself, as opposed to acknowledging and working on behaviors, is damaging. Children will carry their parents’ voices with them all their lives. If it is a loving, supportive one, they gain strength from that. If it’s a critical one that focuses on their shortcomings, they’ll carry that everywhere, into every endeavor. Your son is missing the loving, supportive father he deserves and needs.
Tell your husband (at a calm moment, in a calm way) that for your son's sake, you're next-leveling this issue because serving as the safety valve for an issue he won't even try to fix is not something you're willing to do. You gave it time and you gave him the benefit of the doubt, and clearly this issue isn't going to fix itself.
Make a counseling appointment and let him know you expect him to go with you, for your son’s sake. If he doesn’t go, then ask the therapist for best practices to help your son deal with his dad’s disapproval.
— Moby Duck
Frustrated: I imagine there’s a larger issue here with your husband. Does he show signs of depression? Is he negative about other issues in this way? Does he have unresolved issues with his own father? I also think your son must feel the vibe on some level that his dad is dissatisfied. I think some outside intervention with a therapist could help, ideally with both you and your husband. If he refuses to go, talk to him about what might be underneath all this negativity. Is a mental health/health check in order? I think you absolutely have every right to shut this down. It’s a threat on his part that he will say things directly to your son. He should not be threatening you. Tell him, if you can, to find another sounding board, like a therapist who might be able to work on his negativity, or a friend who is also a dad of teenagers. Good luck and I’m sorry you have to deal with this. I’m glad you are there to support your son, since his dad apparently can’t.
— Another Mom
Frustrated: As a teenager close to your son’s age, I hope to answer this from our perspective. The comments from our parental figures have a lasting impact on how we view ourselves. I myself still wonder if I am too fat, too loud, too lazy because of what comments my parents have made. I believe your husband takes one step in the right direction to not speak this to your son outright, but he and you should know that it’s not so easy to hide such a sentiment just by holding your tongue. We teenagers notice far more than some might believe.
You, however, should not be bearing the brunt of this negativity. I understand that the stresses of parenting are immense, but perhaps you and your husband would benefit from some introspection. Perhaps it is out of fear of failure that these faults are so magnified, perhaps it is the words of a parental figure of your husband’s past. I believe that you and your husband can work together, with resources such as counseling to better understand the root of these persistent feelings, and in that you will have done two wonderful things.
1. Understand yourselves better so that you can better parent your son.
2. Show your son that conflicts can be resolved without festering lonely resentment.
— Hyacinth
Frustrated: I would ask Dad why he dislikes Son so much. When Dad denies it (which he will), recite all the negative things he’s said about Son over the past couple of weeks. Point out that there isn’t one single positive thing he’s said during that time frame. Then inform Dad it’s not your job to be his “sounding board” so he doesn’t say these unkind things to Son, it’s Dad’s job to figure out why he has this mind-set and decide what he wants to do about it. Tell Dad you will no longer be his “sounding board,” and if he chooses to say these things to Son instead and ruins their relationship, that is his fault, not yours. It’s time for Dad to take some responsibility for his thoughts and actions. If he is so desperate for a sounding board about his terribly flawed kid, he can go to therapy. | 2022-08-17T19:27:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: My husband is negative about our teenage son. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/17/carolyn-hax-husband-negative-teen-son/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/17/carolyn-hax-husband-negative-teen-son/ |
A strong geomagnetic storm could offer views of the northern lights between New England and Oregon
Several solar storms from the sun could bring auroras to parts of the United States this week. This satellite image, taken Aug. 17, shows an elongated coronal hole on the sun with a particularly active sunspot just below ejecting solar particles and energy. (SDO/AIA via Spaceweather.com)
A brilliant display of auroras could grace northern skies Wednesday through Friday after the sun shot off several waves of energy toward Earth earlier this week. Activity is expected to peak Thursday into Friday as a strong geomagnetic storm, rated G3, reaches Earth.
A strong G3 storm “does bring the northern lights down into the United States,” said Bill Murtagh, the program coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. He said sky gazers could see the dancing light display from New England across the Great Lakes into northwest Oregon and Washington state.
That is, if clouds aren’t an issue.
On Wednesday, sky watchers in the Upper Midwest and New England may be seeing too much cloud cover to get a good view of the aurora. On Thursday, when the geomagnetic storm is expected to be at its strongest, scattered cloud cover still looks likely across parts of the northern tier of the country, although much of Montana, Michigan, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island are all forecast to have mostly clear skies.
Auroras are created when the sun sends a burst of energy and particles toward Earth through solar flares, coronal mass ejections or solar wind streams. Some of the solar particles collide with Earth’s magnetosphere and travel down the magnetic field lines into Earth’s upper atmosphere, where they can excite nitrogen and oxygen molecules and release photons of light — creating displays known as the northern lights.
In this case, several coronal mass ejections (CMEs), or large expulsions of plasma and magnetic material from the sun, were created in a particularly active region of the sun over the past few days. The coronal mass ejections are coming just below a gargantuan coronal hole stretching across the sun’s northern and southern hemispheres. A coronal hole spews out a fast solar wind full of particles that alone can cause some minor geomagnetic disturbances on Earth.
Much of the solar energy is aimed at Earth and is expected to produce moderate-to-strong geomagnetic storms. NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center has issued geomagnetic storm watches for Earth from Wednesday through Friday.
“There’s a lot of excitement from solar physicists and space weather people, but there’s no concern. There’s nothing to worry about; there’s no kind of impending danger coming,” said Alex Young, the associate director for science in the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He added that late Tuesday night, the first CME had only minor impacts on Earth.
Some solar flares caused minor radio blackouts over the past few days. Larger solar storms also can disrupt GPS systems.
On Thursday, the enhanced activity will be attributed to a “cannibal CME” event, which occurs when a faster-moving CME ingests a slower one. Coronal mass ejections can move anywhere from 1 million mph to 6 million mph as they travel through space, meaning that a faster-moving CME can easily overtake a slower one before it reaches Earth.
“When the slower [CMEs] are launched first and the faster ones catch up to them, they can be even more impactful,” space weather physicist Tamitha Skov explained on a YouTube live stream, adding that the term is not her favorite way to explain the phenomenon, though.
“Cannibalism is not really true, [CMEs] don’t really eat one another,” Skov said. “All they can do is plow into each other like bumper cars and slam into the back of one another and magnify each other.”
More solar storms are expected as the sun continues to progress through its 11-year solar activity cycle, which is ramping up toward its maximum, which Murtagh expects it to reach between 2024 and 2025.
“Since we started ramping up from the solar minimum, we’ve had some G3-type level storms, but we haven’t had greater than that yet. We’ve not had a G4 or higher geomagnetic storm yet in this stage of the cycle,” Murtaugh said. “But that’s inevitable. We will be seeing that level of storming in the coming months and years.”
Geomagnetic storms are categorized via NOAA’s G-Scale, a tool that runs from G1, a minor solar disturbance, to G5, an extreme storm capable of causing widespread blackouts, knocking out satellites for days and making the aurora borealis visible as far south as Texas and Florida.
Certain parts of Earth appear more at risk from solar weather than others. A combination of local geology, proximity to the ocean, latitude and large interconnected power grids all play into calculating which areas are at the highest risk for disruptions caused by geomagnetic storms, according to Murtagh.
“One of the most vulnerable areas, essentially, in the world is the northeast corridor of the United States,” Murtagh said, adding that parts of Canada also are quite vulnerable to solar storms.
The last G5 storm to hit Earth struck in 2003, with coronal mass ejections striking around Halloween. The storm impaired satellite systems, knocked out power to parts of Sweden for an hour, and sent the aurora borealis as far south as Florida, according to NASA.
Another disruptive solar storm struck in March 1989, causing significant breakdowns of global communications networks and knocking out power across much of Quebec for 12 hours.
“Just like people who live in areas where there are hurricanes or tornadoes, it’s always good to have flashlights, to have extra batteries, to have some water put aside, because it’s true that recent research papers have shown that the geology is such to make [the Northeast] slightly more susceptible,” Young said. | 2022-08-17T19:28:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Aurora borealis could dazzle skies in northern United States this week - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/17/aurora-lights-northern-solar-united-states/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/17/aurora-lights-northern-solar-united-states/ |
In this photo taken from video footage released by Roscosmos Space Agency, Roscosmos’ cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev and Denis Matveev are seen during their spacewalk on the International Space Station (ISS), Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2022. Roscosmos’ cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev and Denis Matveev make a spacewalk at the space station to continue installation work of the European Space Agency’s robot arm on the new Russian lab. (Roscosmos Space Agency via AP) (Uncredited/Roscosmos Space Agency Press Service) | 2022-08-17T19:28:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russian spacewalk cut short by bad battery in cosmonaut suit - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/russian-spacewalk-cut-short-by-bad-battery-in-cosmonaut-suit/2022/08/17/594ee88e-1e5b-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/russian-spacewalk-cut-short-by-bad-battery-in-cosmonaut-suit/2022/08/17/594ee88e-1e5b-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
By Yusuf Dahl
(The Washington Post illustration: photos by iStock)
Yusuf Dahl is a past president of the Apartment Association of Southeastern Wisconsin; founder of the Real Estate Lab in Allentown, Pa.; and board chair of the Petey Greene Program, a national prison education nonprofit.
At 18, I was sentenced to 10 years in prison for dealing drugs. Twenty-five years later, as a Princeton-educated nonprofit leader and entrepreneur, I thought that part of my past was far behind me.
I had a rude awakening last year when my application to rent a home was denied after a background check. My prospective landlord exercised their legal right to discriminate against me for my prior conviction.
That is because the Fair Housing Act — which since 1968 has banned discriminatory housing practices, such as redlining, that kept Black people and others out of White neighborhoods — expressly permits denial of housing to those who have been convicted of drug manufacture or distribution.
That exception was added to the act in 1988, as part of an amendment package aimed at protecting people with disabilities. It was proposed by South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond — a longtime segregationist who had voted against the original act. “One offense is sufficient for a landlord to refuse to rent to a drug dealer,” he said. “It is that simple.” Thurmond’s amendment passed by voice vote.
And it reinstituted, by stealth, a form of neo-redlining. Under the pretext of penalizing those convicted of drug distribution (but not those convicted of any other offenses, including homicide), he had achieved virtually the same end as racist practices before: keeping minorities out of certain neighborhoods.
Since Thurmond’s amendment passed, millions of people have gone to prison for drug offenses. Tens of millions more have convictions but did not serve time. Black Americans bear the brunt of this; a 2016 study calculated that they were almost three times as likely to be arrested and more than six times as likely to be sent to prison for drug-related offenses as White people. In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such impact could serve as the basis for fair housing lawsuits.
Having served as the president of Wisconsin’s largest apartment owners’ trade association, I was not really surprised that my rental application was denied. Still, telling my young daughter that she could not move into that part of town — close to her favorite park and zoned for the high-quality school her friends attend — was heartbreaking.
Eventually, I did find a rental — only because my current landlord’s faulty background check missed my conviction — but in a much less desirable, underserved community with a higher crime rate and underperforming schools. My daughter is paying for the long-past sins of her father.
While the consequences for me and my family are frustrating, they are devastating for millions of others who cannot access quality housing and the personal, professional and educational opportunities that go along with it. It traps those trying to “make good” after time behind bars in untenable and risky situations.
When my friend Obie Blunt was released from prison in 2003, he was determined to never go back. Focusing his energy on becoming a plumber, he mastered his trade and built up a robust clientele. Then he sought to give his family the opportunities that come with safe streets, strong schools and communities, and quality local services.
Despite Obie’s substantial income, stable employment and good credit, however, he was turned down for housing again and again because of his past crime. In the process, he racked up hundreds of dollars in application fees, while the multiple credit checks hurt his score. Eventually, he and his family had to settle for a lower-income neighborhood where his criminal history was not an issue because it was the norm.
“At some point,” he told me, “you just have to accept what you can get.”
The impact goes beyond minority communities; studies show this kind of discrimination makes us all less safe because ex-prisoners who are unable to get safe and stable housing are more likely to reoffend.
While a few cities and states have banned such practices, most have not. Half a century after the Fair Housing Act outlawed racial discrimination in housing decisions, the law’s promise remains elusive everywhere this legalized form of redlining persists.
An obvious remedy exists. Congress can and should eliminate Thurmond’s drug-distribution exclusion. Although Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) introduced legislation to give more groups housing discrimination protections, it fails to include this crucial element.
It is time for lawmakers to give everyone who has paid their debt to society the freedom to live where they want, not just where they are allowed. | 2022-08-17T19:29:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Congress should remove the drug-sales exception to fair housing law - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/17/drug-sales-exception-fair-housing-law/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/17/drug-sales-exception-fair-housing-law/ |
The reemergence of polio is a public health emergency. And a tragedy.
Beena John, supervising public health nurse for the health department in Rockland County, N.Y., measures a dose of the polio vaccine on July 25. (N/A/Rockland County Department of Health)
The good news is that the polio vaccines are at least 99 percent effective at preventing paralytic polio. These vaccines are protective for many years — probably a lifetime. This is what made polio eradication possible; it’s estimated that we reached herd immunity when 80 percent of the population developed immunity. Nationwide, the numbers are good: 92 percent of children have received at least three doses of the polio vaccine by age 2 (the first three doses are given at 2 months, 4 months and between 6 and 18 months; a fourth dose is administered between 4 and 6 years old).
The reemergence of polio should also be a much-needed catalyst to reverse the worrisome trends in routine childhood immunizations. According to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, national vaccination coverage dropped by an entire percentage point in the 2020-2021 school year compared with the previous year, with an additional 35,000 children entering kindergarten without documentation of completed vaccination against diseases such as measles, chickenpox and diphtheria. Globally, millions of children have missed their immunizations over the past two years, a drop that the United Nations has called the “largest backslide in childhood vaccination in a generation.”
As the United States exits the emergency phase of the pandemic, we must divert resources previously directed to the coronavirus to other neglected areas, especially childhood immunizations. Older people who came of age before polio was eradicated should remind younger generations of how much parents feared, year after year, that their children would be the next ones struck by incurable paralysis or death. | 2022-08-17T19:29:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The emergence of polio in New York is an emergency. And a tragedy. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/17/polio-new-york-public-health-emergency/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/17/polio-new-york-public-health-emergency/ |
Liz Cheney’s historic margin of defeat
Depending on how you slice it, it might be the biggest of the 21st century. And its nearest competitors have something in common.
Rep. Liz Cheney’s loss in the Wyoming primary on Tuesday was a staggering setback for what exists of the anti-Trump movement in the Republican Party. She was defeated by a more than 2-to-1 margin by Trump-backed Harriet Hageman, short-circuiting a once-promising political career and serving notice that, however much or little direct control Trump exercises over the party, running afoul of him remains perilous.
The result perhaps wasn’t too surprising in a state that gave Trump 70 percent of the vote in the 2020 election — his best state in the country — but the size of Cheney’s loss shouldn’t be undersold.
In fact, depending upon how you slice the numbers, it might be the biggest incumbent primary loss of the 21st century.
The current results show Hageman taking 66.3 percent of the vote to Cheney’s 28.9 percent — a more than 37-point margin — with 99 percent of expected votes counted.
Incumbents rarely lose primaries, but it has happened with increasing frequency in recent years. Yet only a few have rivaled Cheney’s margin of defeat.
Leading that list is someone once dubbed the “accidental congressman,” Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-Mich.). A long shot primary challenger, he won the seat in 2012 after the incumbent Republican failed to qualify for the primary ballot and then resigned. Two years later, Bentivolio — a novice politician with no real chance of winning in ordinary circumstances — lost his own primary by 33 points.
Rep. Chris Bell (D-Tex.) lost a primary in 2004 by a 35-point margin, but that came after his district was massively overhauled, sharply diluting the number of White voters and opening the door to a Black primary challenger.
Like these examples, most of the most lopsided margins, historically, have come amid unusual circumstances: dramatic redistricting, party switches, scandals or unusual primary processes. Many incumbents have lost primaries by double digits, and several have lost by 20 points or more, but mostly when these factors were present.
About the only intraparty rebuke this century that has been comparable to Cheney’s — both for its absence of those factors and the size of the defeat — came in South Carolina in 2010, when Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) found himself overcome by the tea party wave. But it required a two-candidate runoff before it got anywhere near as bad as Cheney’s loss.
Inglis was somewhat competitive in the primary with challenger Trey Gowdy, trailing by 12 points in a crowded field. But the runoff wound up being a rout, with Inglis losing by more than 41 points, 70.7 percent to 29.3 percent. Inglis alienated Republicans by bucking his party on climate change and the Iraq War. That margin appears to be the only one larger than Cheney’s on Tuesday, and it required a runoff.
Beyond the races mentioned above, the next biggest primary defeat might sound familiar: Rep. Tom Rice’s (R-S.C.) 27.5-point loss earlier this year. Rice, like Cheney, voted to impeach Trump. | 2022-08-17T19:29:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Liz Cheney’s historic margin of defeat - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/17/liz-cheney-historic-defeat/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/17/liz-cheney-historic-defeat/ |
Abortion rights activists including Alexis McGill Johnson, president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, protest the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Planned Parenthood’s advocacy and political organizations will spend a record $50 million on November’s midterm elections in an effort to elect abortion rights supporters across the country.
The record investment underscores how much reproductive rights advocates believe abortion will be a motivating issue for voters in this year’s midterm elections, a few months after a Supreme Court decision in June overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that for nearly half a century guaranteed the right to an abortion in the United States.
Lawson said Planned Parenthood will focus initially on nine states — Georgia, Nevada, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Michigan, and Wisconsin — where gubernatorial or down-ballot races could determine abortion access in the state or federally. For example, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan currently have Democratic governors who have prevented their Republican-led state legislatures from enacting statewide abortion restrictions.
Many of those states, such as Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona, also have competitive Senate races that could determine which party has control of the chamber.
“They’re part of the pathway to [Democrats] maintaining the Senate and stopping antiabortion folks from passing a national abortion ban, which they have said they want to do,” Lawson said.
While Republicans generally have praised the ruling overturning Roe, many are focusing their messages on economic issues ahead of the midterms.
Planned Parenthood’s midterm efforts and investments, launched under the program name Take Control, will take shape in the form of voter engagement, volunteer and paid canvassing, phone and text banking, and advertising. The group will also launch organizing programs run by and for young people of color. Local Planned Parenthood advocacy and political groups in Colorado, California, Maine, Ohio and Florida “will also run robust electoral campaigns,” the group said in a statement.
The Associated Press first reported on Planned Parenthood’s election plans.
More than a dozen states had “trigger laws” restricting or banning abortion that were set to take effect after Roe was overturned. Those laws went into effect immediately in at least eight of those states, and several others are in various legal limbos. Earlier this month, Indiana passed a near-total abortion ban, the first to do so after Roe was struck down.
“When people go to vote this November, nearly half of them will be living in a state that has already banned abortion or is quickly moving that way,” Lawson said. “We’re facing a very serious national abortion crisis that people are feeling and reading about and witnessing the very real impact and devastation of that every day. And abortion is going to be top of mind and is top of mind for many voters.”
Planned Parenthood’s previous record was a $45 million investment in the 2020 election cycle. In 2018, Planned Parenthood spent $20 million on its efforts to elect abortion rights supporters and protect reproductive rights, a figure more in keeping with the group’s spending in a midterm election year.
Lawson said Planned Parenthood always planned on investing a “significant” amount in this year’s midterm elections, particularly after the leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion in May that suggested the high court was ready to strike down Roe. Earlier this month, Kansas voters soundly rejected a referendum that would have allowed state lawmakers to regulate abortion, the first time state voters decided on such an amendment since Roe was overturned.
Lawson said Planned Parenthood leaders had been hearing anecdotal reports of “energy and anger and outrage” from on-the-ground organizers in Kansas leading up to the vote but said that the “sky-high turnout” was surprising even to her. Data showed a surge in women registering to vote in Kansas after the May leak of the Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe. There was a second surge in June after the court decision was released, when the fraction of newly registered voters that were women spiked at 70 percent.
“Kansas is a fabulous data point showing that voters are angry, they are ready to come out in droves, they are ready to vote in elections to vote their values and overwhelmingly reject the notion that abortion bans should happen in states,” Lawson said. “This was just the beginning, and it proves the point that voters are energized and motivated to take control as a whole. So Kansas was validating and exciting and one step in our pathway forward.” | 2022-08-17T19:29:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Planned Parenthood to spend record $50 million on midterm elections - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/17/planned-parenthood-50million-midterms-abortion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/17/planned-parenthood-50million-midterms-abortion/ |
No, half the country doesn’t oppose charging Trump with a crime
That doesn’t mean that half does
Pro-Trump influencer Brandon Straka sits in a simulated jail cell during a demonstration at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Aug. 5 in Dallas. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
One of the side effects of living in a polarized political climate is the description of “half the country” doing something or other. “Half the country supported Donald Trump” is a common refrain, a bit of rhetoric that jumps from “Trump didn’t lose that badly” to “the 2020 results were about 50-50” to “the election results reflect the views of the country broadly.” What might accurately be described as an election in which an unpopular president viewed negatively by most American adults was rejected by more than half of those who cast ballots suddenly becomes a toss-up.
The utility of this is pretty obvious. There’s a difference between saying that you’re representing the will of a minority segment of the American population and saying you’re representing half of it. This is a democracy, after all, so claiming to speak for half of the country’s residents carries more weight than saying you’re speaking for those whose position has already been measured in an electoral contest and rejected.
A lot of supporters of Donald Trump, of course, believe that they represent a majority. They believe that he speaks for most Americans, including those whose voices aren’t otherwise heard. His is a “silent” majority, both he and they have claimed, which is a bit like the political version of a high-schooler’s Canadian girlfriend. If your majority is not heard in polling or at the polls, it’s silent in a way that is both unmeasurable and unhelpful.
Of course, many Americans don’t know anyone who voted for the other candidate in 2020, making it much easier to assume that the candidate they opposed has less support than it might seem. All of this almost certainly contributes to the willingness of Trump supporters to believe the election was stolen, which it wasn’t.
Over the past week or two, the idea that “half the country” wants something has cropped up in a different context: how broadly Americans think Trump should be held accountable for his post-election behavior.
The immediate trigger for this is the sudden revelation from the Justice Department that it is focused on this precise subject: The search of Mar-a-Lago last week made concrete reports that Trump’s handling of documents was being scrutinized. Views of the search quickly polarized — and quickly spilled over into consideration of the risks posed by the government taking the unusual step of investigating a former president. The Justice Department was taking quite a political risk, some argued, given that half the country would object to a Trump indictment.
We have polling that assesses this question, at least in one particular context. Over the past few months, pollsters have repeatedly asked Americans whether they support the filing of criminal charges against Trump in relation to the Capitol riot. In April, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that a majority supported the filing of charges. In July, an NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll found that 50 percent of adults did. Then, at the beginning of the month, a YouGov-Economist poll determined that a plurality of adults supported the idea.
Those results differ for a few reasons: different questions, different timing, different universes of respondents. The takeaway is the same: More people support charges than oppose them, if not overwhelmingly. In only the Marist poll was anything close to half the country opposed to the idea.
But this raises an interesting point, one pointed out by the New York Times’s Jamelle Bouie on Wednesday. When we talk about what half of the country does in the context of politics, we have to layer on all sorts of qualifiers.
For example, more than a fifth of the country is not included in these polls because they are under age 18. The Democrat-Republican bifurcation is itself misleading as an estimation of segments of the population, because a plurality of adults identify as independents. Overlapping “Republican” with “Trump voter” carries its own risks; analysis from Pew Research Center determined that more than a quarter of Trump’s 2020 votes came from independents, as did 30 percent of Joe Biden’s.
The population, then, isn’t simply a red-blue split right down the middle. Instead, it looks something like this.
If we break out the polling on criminal charges by party and 2020 vote, we see more complexity. Most Democrats support filing charges and most Republicans oppose — but those sentiments are not universal. In each of the three polls, we see that about 6 percent of Trump voters think he should be criminally charged, some 4.4 million Americans.
In the Marist and YouGov polls, there’s an interesting added dimension. Democrats are less likely to think Trump will face charges than they are to support the idea. The same holds for Americans overall. But among Republicans, there’s a higher expectation that charges will be filed than there is support for it happening.
What happens if we overlap views of filing charges (from the recent YouGov poll) with the distribution of partisanship? A picture much like the one approximating what happened in 2020.
Centering the question on parties, though, obscures the results. So let’s center it instead on support or opposition to potential charges. Now we see a different — but still complex — picture.
Half the country doesn’t oppose charges, but, here, half doesn’t support charges, either. We can read this lots of ways — only 4 in 10 Americans actively object to filing charges! — but, again, it’s complex. We can estimate that 3 percent of American adults are Republicans who support filing charges. Seventeen percent of adults are Democrats or independents who oppose filing charges — but 41 percent of adults are non-Republicans who think an indictment should be made.
Talking about the country as two big groups is useful. In many contexts, it’s generally accurate. But we should be wary about the difference between using that framing as a shorthand and using it to create a sense of equivalence.
Or of threat. Much of the subtext to the Justice Department’s decision is that criminal charges would yield a backlash far worse than the threats seen since the Mar-a-Lago search. If we assume that half the country would be infuriated, the risk of filing charges seems far more dangerous — something that many allies of Trump’s readily suggest.
There is a risk, certainly. But if the Justice Department were to charge Trump with a crime in connection with Jan. 6, we can estimate that about 17 percent* of the over-18 population are Republican Trump voters who oppose that action — about 1 in 6 adults. Another 7 percent are Trump-voting independents.
That is a lot of people from which threatening actors might emerge. It is not, however, half of the country.
* The math, for those curious: About 74 million people voted for Trump, 70 percent of them Republican. That’s about 52 million, of whom 85 percent oppose charges — 44.2 million. That’s about 17 percent of the total population of 258 million adults. | 2022-08-17T19:29:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | No, half the country doesn’t oppose charging Trump with a crime - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/17/trump-criminal-charges-fbi-search/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/17/trump-criminal-charges-fbi-search/ |
A surge in traffic deaths that began in the pandemic’s early days is showing no signs of stopping, federal officials said
Police investigate a car accident at a gas station in the Panorama City section of Los Angeles on July 26. (Richard Vogel/AP)
More than 9,500 people were killed in traffic crashes in the first three months of this year, federal transportation officials said Wednesday — a figure that represents the deadliest start to a year on U.S. roads in two decades.
In seven states and the District, officials estimated crash deaths jumped at least 50 percent. Nationwide, deaths were up 7 percent compared with the same period last year.
The figures are preliminary estimates, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration did not release breakdowns of the causes of crashes. Officials say a surge in traffic fatalities that started in 2020 as the pandemic began has continued unabated.
“The overall numbers are still moving in the wrong direction,” said Steven Cliff, the head of NHTSA. “Now is the time for all states to double down on traffic safety.”
Experts have struggled to come up with an explanation for the spike in deaths but have pointed to less congestion amid changed driving patterns during the pandemic, which they say have allowed more dangerous speeds. Officials say there’s also evidence of an uptick in reckless behavior, such as driving impaired or without wearing a seat belt.
“When everyday life came to a halt in March 2020, risky behaviors skyrocketed and traffic fatalities spiked,” Cliff said. “We had hoped these trends were limited to 2020, but sadly, they aren’t.”
NHTSA reported 7,893 traffic deaths in the first three months of 2020, a period mostly before the onset of the pandemic. In 2021, the figure jumped to 8,935 deaths, then rose to 9,560 this year.
The number of deaths this year was the highest in the first three months of a year since 2002. The first quarter is consistently the least deadly on U.S. roads.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg earlier this year said the nation would work to eliminate crash deaths, pledging to adopt a “safe system” approach that would look as much at the design of roads and cars as the behavior of individual drivers. The effort is backed by billions in new safety funding from last year’s infrastructure law, including a $5 billion fund that will provide grants aimed at protecting bicyclists and pedestrians.
Buttigieg releases national plan to reduce road deaths
The Governors Highway Safety Association, which represents state traffic safety agencies, said the numbers released Wednesday underscore the need to implement the new strategy.
“Another new report of an increase in lives lost may feel a bit like Groundhog Day, but we must not become desensitized to the tragedy of roadway deaths,” said Jonathan Adkins, the group’s executive director.
The crash data was released at an event where federal transportation officials unveiled ads designed to encourage people not to drive drunk over the Labor Day holiday. The campaign has a $13 million budget and will run on television, radio, the internet and on billboards. It will be paired with an enforcement campaign by local police from Friday through Labor Day.
The infrastructure law included mandates for technology that could address some of the biggest causes of fatalities, such as calling for NHTSA to require breath monitoring devices for alcohol in new cars. Such a system is in testing, but a mandate is likely years away.
While NHTSA has responsibility for the safety of vehicles, much of its budget is dedicated to advertising campaigns and help for law enforcement. Some safety advocates say the federal government has struggled to move beyond its long-standing focus on driver behavior.
Ken McLeod, policy director at the League of American Bicyclists, pointed to a recent campaign using the slogan “speeding slows you down” as a missed opportunity.
“We focus a lot on the bad people who speed or drive drunk. Of course those things are awful, but we also need to make that positive case for investing in safer streets, safer vehicles, slower roads,” he said.
The early stages of the pandemic saw roads become emptier as people stayed home, but drivers quickly returned to their vehicles, even as driving was no longer as dominated by morning and evening commutes. NHTSA reported that Americans drove more than 750 billion miles between January and March, an increase of more than 5 percent compared with 2021.
The agency calculated the death rate on U.S. roads during the first three months of this year at 1.27 per 100 million miles driven, which was also higher than last year.
Cliff announced this month he is leaving for an environmental job in California, coming three months after receiving Senate confirmation. His duties will be fulfilled by the agency’s top lawyer, but safety groups have urged President Biden to quickly nominate a replacement who can tackle problems on U.S. roads.
Adkins said the success of the administration’s strategy “demands that all levels of government be bold and aggressive in making our roadways safer and a strong NHTSA can and should lead that charge.” | 2022-08-17T19:30:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Traffic deaths jumped in early 2022, hitting 20-year high - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/08/17/traffic-deaths-us-roads/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/08/17/traffic-deaths-us-roads/ |
There’s a ‘Wordle’ for video games now. It was just a matter of time.
(Courtesy of Samuel Stiles/Washington Post illustration)
Depending on your tastes, “Wordle” is arguably the best game to debut in the past 12 months. In its short lifespan, the daily word guessing game gained millions of players, was purchased by the New York Times for an undisclosed, seven-figure sum and spawned an entirely new genre of guessing game spin-offs such as “Worldle” (geography), “Heardle” (music) and “Nerdle” (math). Now, video games are getting the Wordle treatment as well.
“GuessThe.Game” is, you guessed it, a round-based deduction game in the tradition of “Wordle.” The game is a solo project by Sam Stiles, a Canada-based software engineer. Stiles was playing “Framed,” another Wordlelike where players guess a movie-of-the-day by viewing still shots, when he realized that no such variation existed for video games.
“So I decided to whip one up,” Stiles wrote in an email to the The Washington Post, and launched his creation in May.
In “GuessThe.Game,” players have six chances to deduce the video game of the day based on a series of screenshots and hints such as the year it released, its score on Metacritic or its original platform. Guessing wrong will progress you to the next round, which will reveal an easier, more identifying screenshot. The objective is to guess what game it is in the fewest turns, ideally in the first round, but definitely before your six guesses expire.
The games can be tricky to identify. The game on Aug. 16 started with a zoomed-out shot from an old cinematic depicting a figure on horseback treading across a vast desert. The second was a zoomed out map of a sandy city with large domed buildings. It was the third screenshot, which featured a very distinct gothic UI with spheres for health and mana, that made the answer obvious: “Diablo II.”
Stiles said “GuessThe.Game" has been played millions of times on “almost every single country on Earth” since it launched in May. He was deeply thankful that what started as a passion project is now being enjoyed daily by thousands of fans. In the future, Stiles is planning on releasing new feature that will allow players to retroactively play games-of-the-day that they missed (as of this article’s publishing, “GuessThe.Game” is currently on Day 95). Stiles is also interested in finding a new home for “GuessThe.Game,” in the same way that “Wordle” and “Heardle” were acquired.
‘What’s ‘Wordle’?’ and your other ‘Wordle’ questions, answered
“In an ideal world, it ends up getting acquired by some brand or publication,” Stiles said. “Given how much traffic ["GuessThe.Game”] is getting every day, I am confident that as the game continues to spread virally, someone may come along and want to have their brand name associated with it like ["Wordle" and “Heardle”] did.”
On GuessThegame’s website, Stiles requested help for choosing future puzzles and screenshots. Per the site, inspired parties can reach him on Twitter at @SamuelDev or samuel.dev.stiles@gmail.com.
Stiles’s creation is both poetic and ironic. “GuessThe.Game” is the only prominent video game Wordlelike in town, but running it means Stiles can’t play the only thing that marries his twin passions of video games and “Wordle.”
“Because I am making it and choosing the games, I never get to play it myself!” lamented Stiles. “A real tragedy for me.” | 2022-08-17T19:30:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Guess.TheGame is Wordle for video games - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/17/guessthegame-wordle-video-games/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/17/guessthegame-wordle-video-games/ |
Commanders defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio has overseen a unit that swung from among the league's best in 2020 to among its worst in 2021. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
In two years, the Commanders defense went from the top of the NFL’s ranks in most categories to near the bottom, prompting defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio to come to camp last month with a new message.
He urged humility. He urged players to just do their jobs.
“It’s always something that I stress,” Del Rio said. “We’re not going to be fearful of anybody that we go against. But at the same time, we want to make sure we’re really respectful and just prepare and understand the need to strain every day. And that’s what it comes down to.”
Del Rio’s defense has undergone significant change since he took the coordinator job in Washington in 2020. The secondary has been overhauled twice and tweaked again this offseason. The linebacking corps has been remade — and rearranged — and the defensive line has lost key veterans and recently underwent a coaching change. Del Rio has even altered the scheme to adapt to personnel.
In the early going of camp and the preseason opener (a 23-21 loss to Carolina), the defense has shown flashes of improvement but also reminders of its struggles. The notable changes are in the way players communicate, the way they play in sync, the way they’ve maybe shown a bit of that humility.
“The biggest thing is we had a really productive offseason,” Del Rio said. “It was really important to make sure that our guys were here. They were working. They were together. The communication is really strong right now. It’s such a huge part of what we do, being on the same page and being able to play fast.”
Ron Rivera, Jack Del Rio know something about great pass rushers. Enter Chase Young.
After a season together, the defensive backs, led by veteran corners Kendall Fuller and William Jackson and safeties Kam Curl and Bobby McCain, have taken strides in their on-field communication. The chatter before each snap is just as loud as after, and in between, players swarm to the ball, deflect passes and play tight coverage with a confident grasp of the defense.
In the preseason game, however, issues on third downs — which plagued the team last season — reappeared early. The Commanders allowed the Panthers to convert their first three third downs and 11 total in 18 tries (61.1 percent). In fact, five of Carolina’s 10 longest plays of the day came on third down.
“My reaction is not to overreact, but I didn’t like it,” Del Rio said. “Sometimes things go like that. But for us, it’s about getting to work and understanding why. … We want to be a defense that starts fast, and letting them get three first downs on third downs is not starting fast. It’s something we’ve identified as a must-do, and we’ll keep tabs on that as we go.”
Yet Del Rio did seem pleased with the linebackers, noting Jamin Davis’s marked improvement at outside linebacker. Davis is playing with more certainty and confidence and “understands where he belongs,” Del Rio said. The coordinator also lauded Cole Holcomb’s mentorship of the younger players.
Del Rio seemed pleased with the depth of the defensive line and with the reserves who have had to step up in Chase Young’s absence; James Smith-Williams, for one, can play inside on the line, but he has moved outside full-time, and Del Rio described him as “rugged.”
Although Washington’s starting D-line will be the same as last season’s when Young returns, the group has undergone significant change in recent years, having lost Ryan Kerrigan, Matt Ioannidis and Tim Settle. In addition, coach Sam Mills III was fired during camp and replaced by his former assistant, Jeff Zgonina.
When asked about the firing, Del Rio deferred to Rivera.
“I have nothing to add,” Del Rio said. “Jeff’s doing a good job, and the guys are responding well to him. So [Rivera] has a good sense of what he wants to do, and our job as staff members is to make it come to life and make it productive.”
Del Rio did add that Zgonina has 17 years of football experience and a “connection” with players, which Del Rio believes is important for building trust.
The question still is whether the defense, with the new and young pieces it added, can bounce back from a difficult season on and off the field. Many players landed on the covid-19 list late last season, some were dealing with family losses, and the seeming lack of communication on the field spurred fights off the field. See: Dallas, Thanksgiving, 2021.
Jack Del Rio can choose his words. The Commanders can choose their coaches.
And though the offseason is always a time of optimism in the NFL, the Commanders have continued to draw headlines for off-field incidents. Earlier this year, Del Rio was at the heart of one such incident, when Rivera fined him $100,000 for comparing the protests that began after George Floyd’s killing to the Jan. 6 insurrection, which Del Rio called a “dust-up” on Twitter. He later deleted his Twitter account — a “personal choice,” he said Wednesday — and for the past two months, he had not addressed his fine.
He didn’t address it Wednesday, either.
“Happy to be in camp right now,” he said when asked about the offseason controversy. “The team is doing a great job working on preparing for the season. Everything that I like to talk about should have to do with football and playing good defense.”
He added: “It’s about production in our business, and that’s what we’re stressing.”
And his messaging, about humility and production, have seemed to rub off.
“Coming to work, being humble and understanding that we haven’t done much,” McCain said of the defense’s emphases. “Last year we didn’t do much. We didn’t make it to the playoffs, and [the playoffs are] the goal.” | 2022-08-17T19:36:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jack Del Rio preaches humility as key to improvement for Commanders defense - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/17/jack-del-rio-commanders/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/17/jack-del-rio-commanders/ |
People march in protest of the Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson decision on June 24. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
A Florida appeals court on Monday upheld a ruling that denied a 16-year-old an abortion out of concern she lacked the maturity to make the decision, despite her statements that she “is not ready to have a baby.”
The teenager, described in court documents as “almost seventeen years-old and parentless” and identified only as Jane Doe 22-B, had submitted a handwritten petition seeking a waiver of the state’s parental notification and consent requirements. Under Florida law, an abortion generally cannot be performed on a minor without the consent of a parent or guardian.
In her petition, according to the appeals court, the teenager wrote that she is still in school and doesn’t have a job, and that “the father is unable to assist her.” Court records indicate she was 10 weeks pregnant at the time she sought a court’s permission to end her pregnancy.
Jane Doe 22-B lives with a relative and has an appointed guardian.
She is pursuing a GED through a program that supports young women who have experienced trauma. She suffered “renewed trauma,” according to the appeals court’s ruling, after the death of a friend. She decided to seek an abortion shortly afterward.
Escambia County Circuit Judge Jennifer Frydrychowicz denied the petition in what one judge with the 1st District Court of Appeal, Scott Makar, said appeared to be “a very close call.” The appeals court upheld Frydrychowicz’s ruling, with a majority of the three-judge panel agreeing that the lower court’s order and findings “are neither unclear nor lacking” in a way that would require reconsideration.
The decision was condemned by Florida lawmakers who support abortion access. State Rep. Anna Eskamani (D) wrote on Twitter that there is “Lots of cruelty in Florida’s anti-abortion policies.”
Florida legal experts said it’s difficult to grasp the full context of the case because details from the trial court are sealed, though they questioned why the girl was not appointed a lawyer and why she checked a box on her petition saying she didn’t request one.
Thirty-five states have judicial bypass laws, which allow minors to ask the court to grant them permission to get an abortion where they would otherwise need a parent or guardian’s approval. Florida has among the tougher standards, according to Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California at Davis who formerly taught in Florida on the history, politics and law of reproductive health care. State lawmakers expanded Florida’s parental-involvement law in 2020, requiring that teens not only notify a parent but also obtain their consent.
“Trying to glean what the trial judge was doing is tough,” Ziegler said. “But this a person who we know has experienced recent trauma and is not an expert in navigating the legal system. That seems to be held against her, or signaled she’s ‘not mature.’”
In one puzzling detail from the case, the teen said in her petition that her guardian “is fine with what [she] wants to do.” If the guardian supports her decision, Ziegler said, it is unclear why the case went into a bypass procedure in the first place.
“It’s also somewhat striking because denials are not that common,” Ziegler said.
How hard is it to get a court-approved abortion? For one teen, it came down to GPA.
The trial court judge’s ruling raised other questions.
Determining a petitioner’s maturity is ultimately up to the judge’s discretion, though they typically follow a pattern, according to Jeri Beth Cohen, a retired child-welfare judge in Miami-Dade County.
Cohen, who heard judicial bypass cases during her time on the bench, said she would ask petitioners if they had talked to trusted adults about their situation, if they were in school or worked, whom they lived with, if they understand the basics of the abortion procedure and why they felt it was not right for them to continue their pregnancy.
Judges, Cohen said, also consider “maturity, or”: Is a minor mature, or are they in a situation where getting a parent or guardian’s consent would be dangerous or disadvantageous, such as a case in which the minor was abused by their caretaker?
“The dissent seemed to lay out very clearly that she was questioned at length and seemed to show maturity, so that should be the end of it,” Cohen said. “Once you make these determinations, you pretty much have to grant [the bypass].”
Makar, of the appeals court, agreed in part with Judges Harvey Jay and Rachel Nordby in their ruling but wrote that the case should be sent back to the lower court for a potential reevaluation. His partially dissenting opinion offers a rare window into the case.
In it, he wrote that Frydrychowicz “displayed concern for the minor’s predicament throughout the hearing; she asked difficult questions of the minor on sensitive personal matters in a compassionate manner.” The hearing took place in the judge’s chambers, with the teenager’s case worker and a guardian ad litem attending alongside her.
Makar stated that based on a transcript, the teen was “knowledgeable about the relevant considerations in terminating her pregnancy” and had looked through a pamphlet and searched Google for more information about her options and potential consequences.
“The trial court noted that the minor ‘acknowledges she is not ready for the emotional, physical, or financial responsibility of raising a child’ and ‘has valid concerns about her ability to raise a child,’ ” he continued.
In denying the petition, Makar wrote, Frydrychowicz left open the possibility for additional proceedings by saying that the girl might be able to “adequately articulate” her request at a later time and that the court might reevaluate its decision. The key factor appeared to be the Frydrychowicz’s initial concern that the teenager’s assessment of the benefits and consequences of her decision was “wanting.”
Because of time considerations, he said he would have remanded the case back to Frydrychowicz’s court for a reevaluation.
Like Ziegler, Makar also questioned why the case came up for a judicial bypass if the teen’s guardian was, as the teen wrote in her petition, supportive of her decision. He wrote, “If the minor’s guardian consents to the minor’s termination of her pregnancy, all that is required is a written waiver from the guardian.” The teen also “inexplicably checked the box indicating she did not request an attorney,” despite her right to have one appointed at no cost, Makar wrote.
Cohen, the retired child-welfare judge, said a petitioner’s uncertainty about getting an abortion is not a relevant criterion.
“There isn’t a ground that says, ‘Well, if she’s wavering, don’t give it.’ The ground is to grant it if she’s mature enough to make the decision,” Cohen said. “Just because you grant the waiver, doesn’t mean she has to get [an abortion]. Grant it, and if she changes her mind, she changes her mind.”
With Florida’s relatively short 15-week window for abortion (states with fewer restrictions tend to allow abortion up to 22 or 24 weeks of pregnancy), denying the girl’s petition but leaving the door open to potentially revise it and try again may ultimately delay her long enough to where she would be outside the state’s legal window. Any delay, Cohen notes, narrows a petitioner’s options. At 10 weeks, for instance, the girl could get a medical abortion, which is less expensive and invasive than a surgical abortion, which she might need if she has to wait longer.
“It’s very traumatizing to be refused and have to come back. And it gets very expensive,” Cohen said. “Something she can afford today she may not be able to afford tomorrow.” | 2022-08-17T20:19:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Teen not mature enough to get an abortion, Florida court rules - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/17/florida-teen-abortion-denied-mature/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/17/florida-teen-abortion-denied-mature/ |
Justin Thomas is among the players who attended Tuesday night's meeting with Tiger Woods in Wilmington, Del. (Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
Woods, who is not in the field this week and has played sparingly since his car crash in February 2021, has been candid about his allegiance to the PGA Tour as the upstart circuit has poached several high profile golfers, including past major winners Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau.
Preventing more defections has become part of the agenda for Woods, who spoke about the importance of legacy before the start of the British Open last month at the Old Course at St. Andrews. Justin Thomas, who is close friends with Woods, provided a bit of insight Wednesday morning on the significance of the 15-time major champion making the trip to Delaware to meet with some of the Tour’s leading players at a Wilmington hotel.
“I think if someone like him is passionate it about it, no offense to all of us, but that’s really all that matters,” Thomas said. “If he’s not behind something, then one, it’s probably not a good idea in terms of the betterment of the game, but two, it’s just not going to work. He needs to be behind something.
“I think he’s been a great kind of leading role in a lot of ways in the game, for a lot of us.”
Rory McIlroy, a four-time major winner and another vocal supporter of the PGA Tour in its contentious battle with LIV, indicated that the meeting offered a respite from the sport’s conflict.
Also absent from the BMW are three of the top nine finishers from last year’s tournament at Caves Valley Golf Club in Owings Mills, Md., where Patrick Cantlay outlasted DeChambeau on the sixth playoff hole in one of the most compelling conclusions in recent memory.
As the conflict between tours simmers, players on Wednesday said that Woods, 46, continues to play an invaluable role on their tour, whether he’s competing.
“I think he came because it was very important to him,” said Thomas, ranked seventh in the world and 10th in the FedEx Cup standings. “It probably was just not something that he felt was appropriate to do over Zoom or just to call in. I think it shows how passionate he is about golf and wanting to improve it and paving the way for the next generation of young players to come out down the road.”
The meeting — which also included Rickie Fowler, who accompanied Woods to Delaware — unfolded a week after a federal judge ruled against LIV golfers Talor Gooch, Matt Jones and Hudson Swafford in their bid for a temporary restraining order to allow them to compete in the FedEx Cup playoffs.
The trio had accumulated enough points to qualify for the playoffs but lost their PGA Tour privileges when they joined LIV, the Saudi Arabia-backed series with ties to Mohammed bin Salman. The country’s crown prince, according to U.S. intelligence officials, authorized the plan that led to the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
Eleven players on the LIV circuit, including DeChambeau and Phil Mickelson, filed an antitrust lawsuit against the PGA Tour earlier this month challenging their suspensions. The suit charges the PGA Tour not only has threatened golfers who sought to play in LIV tournaments but also “threatened sponsors, vendors, and agents to coerce players to abandon opportunities to play in LIV Golf events.”
The two have been in conflict since at least January 2020, when an attorney representing the then-PGA Tour player sent a cease-and-desist letter to Chamblee demanding he stop repeating an accusation that Reed cheated in the 2019 Hero World Challenge, an unofficial event in the Bahamas hosted by Woods. It was yet another ugly headline for a sport that’s had many of them this season. | 2022-08-17T20:28:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | PGA Tour players pledge unity after meeting with Tiger Woods - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/17/tiger-woods-meeting-delaware/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/17/tiger-woods-meeting-delaware/ |
LeBron James has agreed to a two-year max extension with the Lakers. (Ashley Landis/AP File)
For once, a “Decision” made by LeBron James proved anticlimactic.
The Los Angeles Lakers agreed to sign James on Wednesday to a two-year maximum contract extension worth at least $97 million, according to a person with knowledge of the agreement. ESPN first reported the deal, which runs through the 2023-24 season and includes a player option for 2024-2025.
James, 37, averaged 30.3 points, 8.2 rebounds and 6.2 assists per game last season, earning all-star and all-NBA third team honors despite being limited to just 56 appearances by a number of minor injuries.
The four-time MVP’s recommitment to the Lakers comes after a disappointing 33-win campaign that led to the firing of Frank Vogel and the hiring of Darvin Ham as his coaching replacement. During All-Star Weekend in February, James flirted with the idea of returning to his home state of Ohio and the Cleveland Cavaliers, but has remained mum all summer about the possibility of eventually leaving Los Angeles, where his family has lived since 2019.
The agreement secures James’s future with the Lakers until the summer of 2024, when his 17-year-old son, Bronny, will become draft eligible. James has repeatedly expressed a desire to play alongside Bronny, his eldest son, in the NBA. Meanwhile, the contract will align James with teammate Anthony Davis, who can also become an unrestricted free agent in 2024.
Though James waited nearly two weeks after he first became extension-eligible on Aug. 4, he still agreed to re-sign despite an underwhelming offseason that has included lingering questions about Russell Westbrook’s fit and future with the Lakers. After reaching the NBA Finals every season from 2011 to 2018, James has missed the playoffs twice during his four-year Lakers tenure, which was highlighted by his fourth title and fourth Finals MVP award in 2020.
James’s ability to command a full max contract — which will pay him more than $44 million this season — will impact the Lakers’ salary cap flexibility next summer. Even if Westbrook departs, Los Angeles will be paying James and Davis more than $86 million combined in 2023-24, a figure that could complicate their hopes of adding a third star or filling out a championship-caliber supporting cast.
Upon the completion of this extension, James will have earned more than $500 million in player contracts during an NBA career that began in 2003. If he picks up his option for the 2024-25 season, this extension will carry him past his 40th birthday in Dec. 2024. | 2022-08-17T20:54:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | LeBron James inks two-year extension with Lakers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/17/lebron-james-lakers-extension/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/17/lebron-james-lakers-extension/ |
Two people have been diagnosed with West Nile virus in New York City, local health authorities announced Tuesday — the latest battle for a state that has been grappling with the coronavirus and, more recently, monkeypox and polio cases.
City health department officials said one case of West Nile virus (WNV) was reported in Brooklyn and another in Queens as “a record number” of infected mosquitoes have been detected in all five boroughs.
“We are in the height of West Nile virus season, but there are things you can do to decrease your risk of being bitten,” Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan said in a statement.
Since the virus is typically transmitted through the bites of infected mosquitoes, Vasan suggested using an EPA-registered insect repellent, wearing long sleeves and pants — particularly when outside at dawn or dusk when the insects are most active — and keeping water from collecting in any outdoor containers.
“Help keep you and your loved ones safe with these actions during WNV season,” Vasan added.
New evidence of brain damage from West Nile virus, scientists say
West Nile virus was first seen in New York City more than 20 years ago — spread mainly through several Culex species mosquitoes, including Culex salinarius and Culex pipiens, according to information from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
This year, 1,068 positive mosquito pools were detected in the city, compared to 779 the same time last year, the health department said.
“An average of 77 mosquitoes were caught in each trap per day, compared to 75 mosquitoes per trap per day for the same period in 2021. Once trapped, a large number of mosquitoes are then tested in a single pooled sample or ‘pool,’” health officials explained in the statement.
Unlike many other illnesses, West Nile virus is not spread through droplets or skin-to-skin contact, but through the bite of infected mosquitoes. Most people who contract the illness do not experience symptoms, but some may develop a fever, headache, body aches and intestinal issues such as vomiting and diarrhea, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Most patients have a complete recovery, although it may take weeks or even months, the CDC said.
In rare but serious cases, a small number of people may develop complications such as encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) or meningitis (inflammation of the membranes that surround the brain and spinal cord), which can be fatal, according to the CDC.
He was ‘perfectly healthy’ before the mosquito bite. Nine days later, he was brain dead.
Even more rare, another mosquito-borne illness, Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), was recently discovered in mosquitoes in Upstate New York. Infected mosquito pools have been found in Madison County and in Oswego County, but cases have not been reported in humans, according to surveillance data. The virus, which causes inflammation of the brain, can be serious — about 30 percent of those who are infected die and many who survive go on to suffer long-term neurological complications, according to the CDC.
There are no vaccines to prevent West Nile virus or Eastern Equine Encephalitis and there are no specific anti-viral medications to treat them. Patients with these mosquito-borne illnesses are given supportive care and treated for any potential complications.
Those who experience symptoms are encouraged to contact their health-care providers. | 2022-08-17T20:59:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | West Nile virus reported in two people in New York City, health officials say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/17/new-york-west-nile-virus/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/17/new-york-west-nile-virus/ |
FILE - Randy Rainbow arrives at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards on Sept. 14, 2019, in Los Angeles. Rainbow has built a career on his musical parody videos, and he’s up for his fourth Emmy nomination. But his competition in the short-form variety series category includes heavyweights James Corden, Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers. (Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File) | 2022-08-17T21:00:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Randy Rainbow, master satirist, vies with Goliaths for Emmy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/randy-rainbow-master-satirist-vies-with-goliaths-for-emmy/2022/08/17/216a3904-1e6b-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/randy-rainbow-master-satirist-vies-with-goliaths-for-emmy/2022/08/17/216a3904-1e6b-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Ukraine live briefing: U.N. chief arrives in Ukraine; Nuclear agency report...
David L. Stern
Smoke from an explosion at a Russian army ammunition storage depot near the village of Mayskoye, Crimea, on Aug. 16. (AP)
KYIV — Ukraine is hoping that a new strategy of attacking key military targets deep inside Russian-occupied territory will undermine Moscow’s ability to hold the front lines ahead of an eventual Ukrainian counteroffensive to reclaim territory, Ukraine’s defense minister said Wednesday.
To that end, Ukraine is activating a “resistance force” under the command of Ukrainian special forces to carry out attacks far behind Russian lines, Reznikov said. The force was formed in January in accordance with a law passed last year, and in recent weeks has been activated in Ukrainian territory held by the Russians.
Some spectacular explosions in the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula over the past week have drawn attention to the emerging strategy, and to the role of Ukrainian special forces in implementing it. Ukrainian officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, have told The Washington Post that those forces were responsible for the Crimea blasts, at a Russian air base last week and at an ammunition depot and an air base on Tuesday.
Reznikov reiterated the Ukrainian government’s official position that it can neither confirm nor deny Ukrainian involvement in the Crimea attacks. But striking such targets does form a part of Ukraine’s current military’s strategy, and Ukraine lacks weapons systems with the range to reach targets in Crimea from Ukrainian-controlled territory, he said.
“They have their full depots of ammunition in Crimea and they deliver them to the south of Ukraine, the mainland. So we need to destroy them, like we did in the Kyiv campaign, to cut their logistics lines,” he said. He was referring to the way Ukrainian forces interrupted Russian supply lines and eventually forced a Russian retreat from the Kyiv area in the first weeks of the war.
Until last week, Russian troops — and even beach-going tourists — had assumed they were safe in Crimea, which was occupied and annexed by Russia in 2014, because it was out of range of Ukraine’s existing arsenal. Ukraine has been seeking longer-range weapons from the United States but U.S. officials have balked, citing fears that Ukraine could use them to attack Russian territory and perhaps trigger a wider war.
However, Ukraine’s Western allies have been involved in training the special forces that are responsible for the attacks, said Mikhail Podolyak, an adviser to the defense ministry. NATO partners have provided trainers to show the Ukrainians how to operate behind Russian lines, he said.
They have nonetheless played a major role in recent weeks, blunting Russian advances in the eastern Donbas region that is the current focus of Russia’s military offensive. Since they arrived, the HIMARS have been used to destroy ammunition depots and command-and-control headquarters positioned behind Russian lines that had previously been out of range. | 2022-08-17T21:01:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Crimea attacks point to Ukraine’s newest strategy: defense minister - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/17/ukraine-defense-minister-special-forces-new-strategy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/17/ukraine-defense-minister-special-forces-new-strategy/ |
The American University campus in Washington. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for The Washington Post)
Hundreds of staffers at American University plan to go on strike next week if negotiations over wages and health-care benefits with the school in D.C. do not produce a contract.
American and a union representing about 550 clerical, technical and academic staff members have been hammering out a labor agreement for more than a year. While they have made progress on issues such as job security, they remain at odds over salary increases, said Sam Sadow, an organizer with Service Employees International Union Local 500, the union representing the staff members.
“We want AU to live up to its values and invest in its workforce,” said Sadow, who works as a visual resources curator at American. “We’re hopeful the university will come around, but we’re prepared to take action.”
The pandemic ushered in greater demands from the higher-education workforce for pay equity and job security. The staff union at American formed in November 2020, riding that wave of labor activism and organizing on campuses across the country. Now, the group is willing to walk off the job for the university to take its demands seriously.
Union leaders have filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board, accusing American of violating labor laws by excluding its members from annual merit-based raises. University officials contend that salary increases are a part of ongoing negotiations and cannot be unilaterally made until a contract agreement is reached.
In the wake of the dispute, the staff union voted last week to authorize a strike of up to five days if a contract agreement is not secured by Aug. 22, when students will be moving onto campus.
Talks between the university and the union are scheduled to resume Thursday.
University spokesman Matthew Bennett said American continues to negotiate in good faith with the staff union and is optimistic that a resolution can be reached.
“We have resolved numerous issues for this first contract and continue to offer proposals on the outstanding items,” Bennett said in a statement. “A strike is not an inevitable outcome, and American University is committed to reaching a final agreement.”
All the same, Bennet said, the university is prepared to fully support students as they return to campus and continue operations and activities with minimal interruption.
The staff union is raising money for a strike hardship fund to lessen the economic impact on members. The effort has yielded more than $13,000 to date, according to the GoFundMe page.
A primary point of contention between the union and the university is pay equity. Staffers want a 5 percent raise in the first year of the contract and a 4 percent increase in the second. They want the university to extend annual raises to part-time staff members and ensure no full-time member earns less than $40,000 a year.
“In order to retain staff and provide top-notch services for students and faculty, we have to lift everybody up,” said Amanda Kleinman, a member of the union and academic coach at American.
Kleinman, who has worked at the university since 2018, said she has witnessed a lot of staff turnover and has colleagues that commute more than 90 minutes to work because they can’t afford to live anywhere nearby. To avoid a lengthy commute, Kleinman said she lives in a group house in D.C., the most affordable option on her salary.
“I love AU. Students and faculty are politically minded and engaged in their community,” she said. “The staff members I’ve come to know and love — I don’t want to go to anymore goodbye happy hours.” | 2022-08-17T21:03:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | American University staff preparing to strike over wages - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/17/american-university-staff-labor-strike/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/17/american-university-staff-labor-strike/ |
A better understanding of nuclear power reactors is needed
SM-1, a former nuclear power plant, on Jan. 11, 2019. (Calla Kessler/The Washington Post)
The Aug. 14 “Meltsville” news article, “We built a fake metropolis to show how extreme heat could wreck cities,” said that “nuclear plants need more water to cool the reactors when the water is warmer.”
That statement is highly misleading. The implication is that water, perhaps from a river or lake, or from a public water utility, flows over the reactor to keep it cool.
This does not happen. The water in question is only used in a “condenser” to return steam back to liquid water, not to directly cool the reactor.
In my power reactor operating experience, we did not change the flow rate of condenser cooling water as the outside temperature increased. So, we didn’t use “more” water. But it is true that this cooling-water temperature increase has the effect of reducing the plant’s thermodynamic efficiency, as was mentioned in the piece.
Misleading statements about how nuclear power plants work are not helpful, especially, as The Post has recognized, given that we need to make more use of this source of non-carbon electrical energy.
William C. Evans, Germantown | 2022-08-17T21:51:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | A better understanding of nuclear power reactors is needed - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/17/better-understanding-nuclear-power-reactors/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/17/better-understanding-nuclear-power-reactors/ |
Declassifying documents isn’t easy
A Secret Service agent at the entrance to former president Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg News)
I applaud the Aug. 14 news article “Decoding the classified information included in the Trump search warrant.” However, it needs some expansion for people to understand how serious an exposure of top secret/sensitive compartmented information (TS/SCI) is.
Unlike a secret clearance, which only requires a national agency to conduct a background check, a TS/SCI clearance requires a more in-depth investigation. Your friends, family and co-workers past and present get interviewed. Your finances, credit, loans, travel and investments all get scrutinized. It is a time-consuming, expensive process to make sure that risk is minimized.
Donald Trump had a clearance only by virtue of being president. His status as an unindicted conspirator with Michael Cohen, his liaison with Stormy Daniels, his friends and close associates being convicted of felonies, his character reference from retired Marine Gen. John F. Kelly as “the most flawed person” he ever met, and his financial ties to foreign entities would have all almost certainly disqualified him from having a TS/SCI clearance. And have no doubt about it, declassification of a TS/SCI document would have severe negative consequences — potentially getting U.S. and allied personnel killed, and having our technology, methods and strategy compromised. Access to them is on a need-to-know basis for what is in a specific document, not on curiosity or a self-serving whim. And they are stored in a highly secure special facility. You sign to get access to specific documents, and you don’t take notes. Even declassifying pieces of one document should involve approval of the originating source, especially because there is often more than one copy and the source is in the best position to weigh the risk. Storing them in a basement, in a place populated by foreign visitors, is unbelievable negligence.
Robert Hutten, Fairfax
The writer is a retired director for strategic plans and policy at the Defense Information Systems Agency.
I appreciated the clarity in the Aug. 14 news article “Decoding the classified information included in the Trump search warrant.” The explanation of different levels of classified information was useful to understanding who is allowed access to that information. What struck me as I read about the scrutiny of an individual’s background — for each increasing check to get clearance for sensitive information — was that former president Donald Trump would never pass the test.
Given what the public knows about Mr. Trump reportedly ripping up documents, flushing papers down the toilet and taking classified documents out of the White House, if he is not found guilty of a felony, he could still be elected to another presidential term? How frightening!
Diane Fuchs, Rockville | 2022-08-17T21:51:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Declassifying documents isn’t easy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/17/declassifying-documents-isnt-easy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/17/declassifying-documents-isnt-easy/ |
D.C. won’t have a vote in the midterms — but it has plenty at stake
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser marches with others on voting rights and D.C. statehood at Freedom Plaza in D.C. in August 2021. (Michael Blackshire/The Washington Post)
With their party in control of Congress and the White House, Democrats in D.C. had the sense that anything was possible at the start of the legislative session last year. Momentum for D.C. statehood hit an all-time high. The city government was preparing to usher in a legal recreational marijuana industry, assuming Congress would allow it. And the city was angling to take back control from the feds of its parole system and the D.C. National Guard.
But now, with only a few months left in the session, those goals and others appear in doubt. And if Republicans win control of Congress in November, it may be years before D.C. has another chance at them — creating high stakes for D.C. in an election that its residents can’t vote in. D.C. is also the only jurisdiction in the United States that Congress oversees, since it’s not a state, and Republicans have already indicated that they plan to intervene in D.C. affairs.
Officials worry about legal abortion in D.C. if GOP takes Congress
The city has been used to that congressional oversight for decades — but in a post-Roe world, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) and local abortion providers warn that Republicans could try to severely curtail abortion in D.C. if they are in the majority. One Republican, Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (Ga.), has gone as far as threatening to try to end D.C.’s home rule and local government altogether — an idea Norton doesn’t think realistically would succeed in Congress but is nevertheless evidence of the hostile posture a GOP majority could take toward the city.
“The stakes [in the midterms] are perhaps higher for D.C. than any other jurisdiction,” Norton said.
RFK, parole plans fizzling this year
With the House-passed statehood bill sitting stagnant in the Senate — largely dashed after Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) said he would not support the bill last year — D.C. had turned its attention to more readily attainable local priorities it could still pursue in Congress.
‘It’s not a local issue anymore’: D.C. statehood moves from political fringe to the center of the national Democratic agenda
But even some of those have faltered amid internal disagreement that still hasn’t been resolved — particularly the city’s hope to purchase the RFK Stadium land from the federal government through federal legislation.
Earlier this year, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) boldly stated her desire to turn the site into a new stadium for the Washington Commanders, with a portion of the land used for housing. But a majority of the D.C. Council members said in a June letter that they opposed bringing the scandal-plagued football team into the city, as it remains under congressional investigation over alleged widespread sexual harassment and financial improprieties. And Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) said in June he would not support federal legislation to buy the land unless it includes language prohibiting an NFL stadium.
The negotiations remain at a standstill as the clock ticks. Norton has said she won’t introduce the bill until the two leaders reach an agreement — but neither Bowser nor Mendelson is budging, and they haven’t discussed RFK since June, according to Mendelson and Beverly Perry, Bowser’s special adviser.
Asked if that meant the city was giving up on RFK, with time running out in the congressional session, Perry said “the ball is in Mrs. Norton’s court” and that Norton needed to introduce the bill anyway. To some degree, all parties blame each other for the inaction.
D.C. Council chair ready to support RFK legislation — without stadium
“The mayor will never commit to any type of legislation that is going to have Congress suppress our options,” Perry said, referring to the restriction Mendelson wanted in the bill to prohibit the football stadium, which she called a “nonstarter.” “She’s not going to do that.”
Norton said she would have no problem playing “tiebreaker” between Bowser and Mendelson if they told her they couldn’t reach an agreement and both wanted her to make a decision about the legislation herself. She said in that case she would not include any land-use restrictions in the legislation.
D.C. was also poised to regain control of its local parole system from the federal government should Congress pass legislation enabling that to happen. But after more than two years the city has not come up with its own framework for a new local parole board and has indicated it won’t meet a November deadline, as DCist reported last month. If Republicans are the ones in control by the time D.C. is ready, it’s unclear if they would allow D.C. to regain control of its parole system.
D.C. wants to take back parole from the feds. But it’s taken almost no action as deadline looms.
Perry said she was hopeful that Republicans would see handing parole back to D.C. as savings for federal taxpayers, and said the mayor would hope to work with them on both the RFK land deal and parole if the GOP were in charge. “The mayor has sought to have a strong relationship with the leadership of Congress regardless of parties,” she said.
Rep. James Comer (Ky.), who serves on the House Oversight and Reform Committee and would become the most powerful House Republican with leverage over D.C. if in the majority — did not answer questions from The Washington Post about whether he would support giving D.C. parole authority or the ability to purchase RFK. But he did say in a statement that Republicans intended to exercise greater oversight powers regarding D.C. if they were in the majority, as they have in years past.
He called the District’s policies “reckless,” citing pandemic restrictions and school closures, problems with homelessness and what he claimed were “radical defund-the-police” policies, although the District increased its police budget last year.
“If Americans entrust Republicans with the majority in 2023,” Comer said in a statement, “we will conduct much needed oversight of the District to ensure all Americans feel safe visiting our nation’s capital.”
Republicans have recently offered a preview of the types of policies they would be more likely to pursue aggressively if they win the majority. During debate over Democrats’ major climate, health-care and tax bill, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) introduced a motion to block D.C. from requiring a coronavirus vaccination to attend school, which failed on a party-line vote. Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) introduced an elections bill this week that would also essentially rewrite D.C.'s elections laws, including creating a photo ID requirement, banning same-day voter registration and restricting mail-in voting procedures.
“House Republicans have shown us that they’re willing to do whatever it takes to destroy the Democratic agenda and affirm the rights of our democracy, so everything is on the table in this election,” said Jamal Holtz, a lead statehood organizer with 51 for 51. “There’s been many attacks on D.C. by Republicans who sit in Congress, whether it’s control of the National Guard or how we spend our local dollars.”
Last push
Norton and D.C. officials said they are hopeful there is still time for one last push on several priorities, such as taking control of the D.C. National Guard and removing two long-standing federal budget riders. The riders have prohibited D.C. from using local funds to subsidize abortions for low-income women and from setting up a legal recreational marijuana industry to raise revenue.
Hoping Democrats in Congress would finally kill the riders, D.C. even held a hearing last year on legislation it prepared to allow D.C. to legalize the sale of recreational marijuana at dispensaries. Congress has for years prohibited the city from doing that even though D.C. voters opted to legalize possession of marijuana in a 2014 referendum. D.C. entrepreneurs instead have operated a gray-market “gifting” system that gives people marijuana if they buy other items such as apparel or pencils.
“We’re in an impossible situation that’s reminiscent of the Prohibition era, where the federal government prohibited alcoholic beverages, bootlegging was rampant, and that’s exactly what’s happening in the District today,” Mendelson said. “Congress prohibits us from regulating recreational marijuana, which is legal, and because we can’t regulate it, bootlegging is rampant.”
Perry said she was relieved that for the first time in years, both the House and Senate appropriations bills did not include any riders restricting how D.C. could use its money, clearing the way for low-income women to access abortion and for the city to eliminate that gray-market marijuana industry. But only if Republicans don’t add the riders back, which they almost certainly intend to do.
Republicans have aggressively opposed allowing D.C. to use local funds to subsidize abortion, in the same way they oppose removing the federal Hyde amendment preventing federal taxpayer dollars from subsidizing abortion. In a statement decrying Senate Democrats’ proposed appropriations bill, Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), vice chairman of the Appropriations Committee, also pointed to Democrats’ desire to allow D.C. to legalize the sale of marijuana as an example of a “radical” idea that Republicans would not support. Nineteen states allow nonmedical cannabis use in some fashion.
“If we are going to get full year bills during this Congress, Democrats must commit to a bipartisan framework that abandons poison pills” and “preserves legacy riders,” Shelby said earlier this month, ensuring an uphill climb for Democrats to successfully remove the D.C. riders.
A bill to give D.C. control of its National Guard faced a similar hurdle in the Senate last year after it didn’t make the cut in the annual must-pass National Defense Authorization Act, which also needs Republican votes to pass because of the Senate filibuster. Senate Democrats’ push to support the bill could only go so far, as they couldn’t risk tanking the entire defense spending bill to insist on a D.C. priority that the GOP opposed.
Mendelson said the Defense Department’s denial of Bowser’s latest request to mobilize the D.C. Guard to aid in the humanitarian crisis of busloads of migrants arriving weekly in D.C. only strengthened the case for why D.C. should be able to have control of the Guard. He remained hopeful that the legislation still had one more chance to succeed this Congress.
“We need the National Guard to help. I think people somehow misunderstand what the needs are,” he said. “It’s not a question of money, it’s not a question of federal assistance — there just aren’t enough employees available for the nonprofits.”
Last but certainly not least in the eyes of D.C. officials, they’re hoping for a late-game revival of the statehood cause in the Senate. Holtz said that advocates have been pushing for another statehood hearing and a vote for the statehood bill in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee — something Norton said was in the works.
In Perry’s ideal world, Senate Democrats would deliver a “historic lame-duck session” and decide to hold a floor vote on statehood for the first time ever, regardless of whether they win or lose control of Congress in November. While Manchin’s opposition makes success unlikely even if Democrats remove the Senate filibuster, Norton said she wanted statehood to reach that milestone too — something she has been waiting to see for more than three decades.
“I just don’t want to let this moment go by, even if we lose” the vote, Norton said. “This really is a penultimate moment for me on statehood. Having gotten this far, I’d certainly like to see it go the full throttle.” | 2022-08-17T22:04:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. won’t have a vote in the midterms — but has plenty at stake - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/17/dc-midterms-statehood-congress/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/17/dc-midterms-statehood-congress/ |
Cynthia Killough describes a frustrating search for answers from the U.S. Postal Service
A pedestrian passes the 14th Street Post Office in Washington, D.C. on April 22, 2020. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
As a child, Cynthia Killough would grab an extra Popsicle for her mail carrier and head outside to greet him. She knew exactly when to expect him.
Now, as an adult who works in D.C., Killough has grown used to opening her office mailbox and finding nothing for weeks.
Since May, she has received only three pieces of mail.
For many people, that might not be concerning. But Killough works as a psychologist in Dupont Circle and relies on her mail to get paid. Insurance companies and clients often mail her checks, and by her count, more than $45,000 has not reached her.
“There is this huge batch of mail for me that is just sitting somewhere,” she told me on a recent morning.
Or maybe it isn’t sitting somewhere. Maybe it’s been destroyed. Maybe it’s been sent on a slow journey back to senders. The truth is, Killough doesn’t know what happened to her mail, despite spending this summer in a series of exchanges with U.S. Postal Service officials, trying to get answers.
“It’s been so hard to figure out what’s happening,” she said. “No one knows where my mail is.”
Killough now keeps a growing word document titled “USPS SAGA” that contains detailed notes of her interactions with U.S. Postal Service employees. It shows her making repeated phone calls, getting advice from her former mail carrier, visiting two local post offices, once during a lightning storm, and exchanging emails with officials.
Mostly, though, it shows someone losing faith in the U.S. Postal Service. Killough relies on technology for many parts of her business and is now moving to a more complete electronic billing system. Sure, she could have done that sooner, but it’s not an easy process. It requires changing billing software that allows her to handle complicated insurance breakdowns, paying additional fees and asking clients to adjust their practices. She also didn’t think she had to.
In her notes, she addresses why she didn’t grow alarmed sooner by her empty mailbox. She explains that the pandemic slowed mail delivery and writes, “Plus, for the first 54 years of my life I TRUSTED the USPS.”
“I don’t think the point is, ‘Why don’t you do everything electronically?’” she told me. “I think the point is that this huge part of the reliable American infrastructure is not reliable anymore. That’s huge, and especially the older you are, I think that’s a blow to your faith in this infrastructure.”
Killough agreed to share her story because she wants to find out what happened to her missing mail. She also recognizes that her situation is not isolated. “What if you’re 80 and it was your social security check?” she said.
A beloved Virginia mail carrier could become one of the first covid victims to get a building named for him
Mail delivery issues in D.C. are not a new source of grumbling. On Tuesday, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) met with the Chief Postal Inspector Gary Barksdale to talk about mail theft in the city. And in April, the congresswoman sent a letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy addressing reports of undelivered and delayed mail throughout the city.
“My constituent services office has approximately 130 cases of mail problems open with USPS, at least a quarter of which have been open for almost a year or longer,” the letter read.
Her letter continued: “In response to one of my recent letters to USPS regarding mail issues in D.C., USPS indicated that delays in delivery were due to employee leave during the pandemic, along with problems of retention of the local supplemental workforce. We are no longer in the same situation with the pandemic that we were at that time, so it is not clear why delivery issues persist.”
In May, Norton’s office said 75 percent of those cases had been closed and shared a letter she had received from a USPS official.
“There are a variety of reasons for a delay in the delivery of a mailpiece or package, from transportation problems in our system to unscheduled employee absences,” it read. “In this instance, local postal officials advised that there are no systemic delays in Washington similar to those we experienced earlier this year during the surge in Omicron-related employee absences.”
Killough said she occupied the same office suite from 2002 to 2006 and never experienced any problem receiving mail. She then moved back into that office in September 2021, and the mail delivery seemed fine until May.
In June, she started growing concerned at her lack of mail and began speaking to her office mates to see if anyone else was experiencing issues. Then in July, she entered an odyssey of making phone calls, waiting on hold, sending emails and being offered different advice by postal workers. She said one suggested she call a facility at about 4 a.m. to get someone on the phone.
Her husband, she said, jokingly started calling her Ahab, a reference to Captain Ahab who grows obsessed with finding the white whale Moby Dick. “It has taken on this absurd quest feeling,” she said.
Killough said she doesn’t blame the carrier. She knows she is just trying to do her job. Whatever is happening, she said, involves the broader system. Just as frustrating as not getting her mail has been not getting clear answers about it.
“If the point of the slow down and administrative stuff is to create such bad faith in the mail that people stop using it, it seems to be working,” she said.
Emails from USPS that Killough shared with me show that on July 17, she was told: “The letter carrier for your route was made aware of the mail delivery issue. All mail for your address will be monitored closely to ensure your mail is being delivered timely.”
Then after getting one piece of mail and calling again to get information, she received an email on Aug. 10 saying: “Our investigations led us to confer with the carrier and she has confirmed that the mail sent to your office is not properly addressed. The address should include the suite number such as Ste 500 N or Ste 500 S etc. as there are a few Suite 500 in the complex. Regrettably, the items that were insufficiently addressed, were returned to sender.”
Killough said she knows of only one piece of mail that was received by a sender. She also questions whether the issue was really a missing identifier for the suite number since it was never previously a problem and her mailbox in the lobby shows her name. Her landlord also sent her an email saying that extra identifier was not needed.
On Wednesday, after being asked about Killough’s case, USPS spokesperson Paul Smith said in an email that the proper address should contain that extra identifier after the suite number and that as of Aug. 12, a notice was placed on Killough’s box alerting the carrier to leave her mail there. “We sincerely apologize for the experience,” he wrote.
Killough said before the mail disruption occurred, her family had been planning to renovate their home, and in preparation of going through the refinancing process, she and her husband had been working to make sure their credit scores were high. She said the missing checks caused her to rely more on credit and her credit score to drop, which could end up costing her family thousands in interest over the life of the loan.
The experience has also cost her time. She said she had to cancel an appointment with a client to wait on hold with USPS. She also had to change her address to add that extra suite identifier — despite feeling skeptical it will help — on her insurance and professional licenses in D.C., Maryland and Virginia.
And after all of that, she still doesn’t know where her mail ended up. She also doesn’t know if she will open her mailbox in the coming weeks and find anything in it. | 2022-08-17T22:04:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A D.C. therapist has waited months on mail containing at least $45,000 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/17/lost-mail-dc-therapist/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/17/lost-mail-dc-therapist/ |
Two men charged in fatal shooting in Upper Marlboro area
The shooting occurred during a robbery, according to Prince George’s County police
Two men have been arrested and charged with murder in a fatal shooting in the Upper Marlboro area Sunday, Prince George’s County police said.
Demarco Bethea, 19, of Suitland, and Montaz Norman, 20, of Temple Hills, are both charged with first- and second-degree murder and related counts in the killing of 21-year-old Tyren Spry, of Cheltenham, police said. They are being held without bond at the county jail.
Officers responded at about 8 p.m. to the 10200 block of Twayblade Court in unincorporated Upper Marlboro, police said. When they arrived, they found Spry in the roadway with multiple gunshot wounds. He died at the scene, according to police.
Police allege the suspects shot Spry during a robbery, according to an initial investigation.
Five people were killed in homicides in the county between Friday and Sunday.
It was not immediately clear whether either Bethea or Norman has an attorney. | 2022-08-17T22:04:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Two men charged in fatal shooting in Upper Marlboro area - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/17/men-arrested-shooting-upper-marlboro/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/17/men-arrested-shooting-upper-marlboro/ |
Grants not enough for some eateries
The owner of the Wharf Rat in Fells Point said that during the coronavirus pandemic the restaurant "was unable to maintain the level of customer service on which it had built its reputation," and was forced to close, despite receiving federal grants. (Wesley Case / Baltimore Sun)
BALTIMORE — In 2021, the owners of the Wharf Rat in Fells Point got a lucky break, receiving a grant of about $300,000 from the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, a federally funded program designed to help businesses during the coronavirus pandemic.
Within months, the Wharf Rat closed, making it one of more than a dozen Baltimore-area restaurants that shut down after receiving federal funds intended to keep them open.
“The Wharf Rat was unable to maintain the level of customer service on which it had built its reputation,” Martin said in an email. “It was with great sadness that the Oliver family decided to close the Wharf Rat after 35 years of service to the community.”
Demand overwhelmed the effort: In Maryland, fewer than 4 out of every 10 applicants were approved. Some $562 million was distributed to 2,024 eligible businesses across the state. And it helped many of them survive. According to the National Restaurant Association, the funds saved 900,000 restaurant jobs across the country, and 96 percent of recipients said the funds helped their establishments remain open.
'It's a big red flag'
While there is no requirement to pay back the funds as long as the money is spent by March 2023 on eligible operating expenses — including payroll, utilities, rent or mortgage, and supplies — restaurants are supposed to return unused money if they shut down. Christopher Hatch, an SBA spokesman, said he could neither confirm nor deny any returns.
Hatch declined to comment on individual restaurants. Another SBA spokesperson offered this statement: “The funding provided by the American Rescue Plan’s Restaurant Revitalization Fund, together with other SBA assistance programs, has helped more than 100,000 restaurant and other food and beverage business owners get back on their feet and survive the pandemic.”
A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found issues with the SBA’s oversight of the program. Nationwide, nearly a third of grant recipients had required annual accounting reports that were overdue for submission to the SBA by six months, according to the GAO. And the SBA hasn’t kept track of businesses that closed.
“SBA should be more on top of businesses that don’t do the required reporting,” said Lisa Moore, the GAO’s assistant director of financial markets and community investment. “It’s a big red flag. If someone’s not reporting, you should immediately be taking steps to proactively look into that.”
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request last year, the SBA released the names of all grant recipients, including more than 2,000 with Maryland addresses.
'A critical lifeline'
IBT LLC, which shares an address with Ida B’s Table near Baltimore’s City Hall, got about $260,000 from the program in May 2021, about a month after the restaurant announced on social media it was shutting down. An Instagram post dated April 5, 2021, stated: “Effective today, Ida B’s Table has made the tough decision to close our doors.”
'The whole thing is just such a mess'
“Those that had it are really going to weather this storm — the high-inflation storm, on top of the covid storm — far better than those of us who didn’t,” Hahn said.
Hahn was notified initially that Faidley Seafood was approved for an RRF grant, only to be denied later after three lawsuits in June 2021 challenged SBA’s policy, mandated by Congress, to give priority to businesses owned by women and other groups.
Erika Polmar, executive director of the Independent Restaurant Coalition, which formed during the pandemic and advocated the creation of the RRF, said most cases of restaurant owners shutting down even after receiving federal grants reflect the high cost of running a business. | 2022-08-17T22:04:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Grants not enough for some eateries - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/grants-not-enough-for-some-eateries/2022/08/17/be54557c-1dd7-11ed-8d30-84c409e82eb3_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/grants-not-enough-for-some-eateries/2022/08/17/be54557c-1dd7-11ed-8d30-84c409e82eb3_story.html |
Trump’s defense against federal investigation: The ‘Russia hoax’ hoax
In this July 16, 2018, photo, President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin sit together at the beginning of a one-on-one meeting at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
One of the most useful things to remember about Donald Trump’s claims that the investigation into 2016 Russian interference was a politically motivated smear campaign is that his complaints about it began before we even knew much of anything about what had happened.
The first time he called the Russia investigation a “hoax” was in March 2017, at which point his argument against it was, predictably, that Hillary Clinton’s ties to Russia were much closer. He first dubbed it a “witch hunt” 10 days before he was even inaugurated. Every rationalization that’s emerged since in order to cast the probe as biased or contrived or dishonest came only after Trump had begun declaring it to be precisely that.
This could have been just another component of Trump’s well-documented dishonesty, a particularly durable example of his saying something untrue repeatedly. But the idea that the Russia investigation was a “hoax” has endured — and has become a sort of ground zero for claims that federal law enforcement is out to get Trump.
In the week since Trump’s estate at Mar-a-Lago was searched by the FBI as part of a probe into his retention of government documents, this assertion that the Russia investigation was a hoax has emerged repeatedly, including from Trump. Because so many of his supporters believe, incorrectly, that the investigation into Trump’s campaign and Russia’s efforts was somehow thoroughly debunked, they are ready to believe that the new probe is similarly artificial.
So it’s worth pointing out that, in fact, the Russia probe was neither a hoax nor debunked — and allow people to draw their own conclusions about the new investigation as a result.
We’ll consider several components of the Russia investigation in order to show that popular right-wing presentations about it are incorrect. There’s what was known publicly even before Russia’s efforts to intervene were reported in the wake of the election. There’s what was happening behind the scenes that raised alarms with the Justice Department. And there’s the breathless effort to discredit everything that cast a derogatory light on Trump — an effort that has objectively failed.
What we knew before Election Day 2016
It’s easy, six years later, to forget the breadth of concern about Trump’s ties to Russia that preceded the election itself. Post-election reporting that Russia was trying to aid Trump landed only after months of demonstrated overlap between Trump’s election effort and Russian actors.
On June 14, 2016, The Washington Post reported that the network of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had been hacked and material stolen. Even at the time, it was clear that Russian actors were responsible. Less than a month later, Carter Page, a member of Trump’s cobbled-together foreign-policy advisory team, traveled to Moscow where he gave a speech criticizing the United States’ approach to democratization.
The Republican National Convention began a few days later. Support for Ukraine in the party’s platform was watered down, reportedly at the behest of a member of Trump’s campaign team. Before the Democratic Party convention began at the end of the month, WikiLeaks began releasing material stolen from the DNC.
Trump’s campaign chairman at the time was Paul Manafort, tapped to manage delegates at the convention. But by mid-August he was gone, forced to resign in part because of questions about his ties to Russia-linked Ukrainian politicians.
In early September, The Post offered one of the first reports suggesting that Russia was actively trying to influence American politics. Reading that report now, it seems prescient. By early October, the reporting was confirmed: An unusual joint statement from the Department of Homeland Security and the National Intelligence Directorate warned that Russia was actively trying to influence the election and might be trying to hack elections systems.
That statement was buried with other news later in the day. First, that Trump had been caught on a hot mic talking about groping women. Then, with the beginning of WikiLeaks’ releases of material stolen from Clinton’s campaign chairman.
There were other news reports, too, that landed with smaller splashes. In August, attention turned to Trump adviser Michael Flynn’s attending a dinner in support of a Russia-backed television station in Moscow the prior December at which he sat with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In late September 2016, Yahoo News reported that federal investigators were looking at possible ties between Page and Russian officials. This led to Page’s resignation from the Trump campaign. At the end of October, Slate reported that analysts had discovered odd links between a Russian bank and Trump’s private company. That report was quickly debunked.
But the pattern was well established by Nov. 8, 2016. Russia was demonstrably trying to intervene in the election, doing things that seemed to aid Trump. And Trump’s team had unusual links to Russia.
What was happening behind the scenes
That’s what we knew publicly by Election Day. There was a lot we didn’t know.
We didn’t know the extent to which Russian actors were actively working to undermine America’s election and to boost Trump’s political standing.
We didn’t know that Page had been part of an investigation into Russian espionage back in 2015 or that federal law enforcement had interviewed him at about the time Trump’s campaign tapped him to serve as an adviser.
We didn’t know that George Papadopoulos, another member of Trump’s foreign-policy advisory team, had been actively working to arrange a meeting between Trump and Putin. That brought him into contact with a Russia-linked professor who revealed that the Russians had collected emails related to Hillary Clinton. Papadopoulos revealed this to an Australian diplomat over drinks in London in May 2016.
When WikiLeaks began releasing stolen material in July, the Australians contacted U.S. law enforcement. That was the trigger for the opening of Operation Crossfire Hurricane at the end of the month — the first investigation of possible overlap between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
We didn’t know that a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele was collecting data that would eventually become a dossier of reports that he turned over to the FBI. Steele met with the FBI in July but first briefed the bureau on his efforts in mid-September.
We didn’t know that the government obtained a warrant to surveil Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in late October, after he’d left the Trump campaign. That warrant was based in part on material included in Steele’s dossier.
All of this was hidden in the shadows by the time of the election. As weeks passed, though, more and more details about the government’s probe became public.
Trump, frustrated at having lost the popular vote even though he won the electoral college vote, at the time reportedly saw discussion of Russia’s intervention as an effort to denigrate his victory. He lashed out, his initial objections rooted not in complaints about FBI bias but, instead, on general incompetence.
Trump team releases statement on claims of foreign interference in US election: pic.twitter.com/uZQizVoxa6
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) December 10, 2016
As months passed, the Russia investigation continued to frustrate him. He pressured FBI Director James B. Comey to help lift the “cloud” over his presidency that the investigation represented. Comey wouldn’t. Trump fired him (hosting Russian officials in the Oval Office the following day). Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was appointed to continue the investigation outside of Trump’s influence.
The efforts to undermine the investigation
Trump’s relentless effort to cast the Russia probe as illegitimate created an ad hoc universe of crowdsourced conspiracy theories. Concepts would pop up on social-media or conservative radio shows and make their way to Trump or to Fox News to be fleshed out and championed. It was evolution at work, the most compelling theories standing the test of time. Sometimes, though, theories survived simply because Trump insisted that people treat them seriously.
One such theory was Trump’s claim that Trump Tower had been wiretapped during the campaign. There was no evidence that happened at the time, and there remains no evidence that it did. But, over the years, the claim was assumed by Trump’s supporters to be true with only the evidence purportedly supporting it being swapped in and out. It was, in a way, a preview of how his false claims about the stolen election would be treated.
It’s not worth exploring all of the claims that were made to suggest that the Russia probe was suspect. There were so many — and so many that were obviously ludicrous — that it’s nearly impossible anyway. This, too, was both part of the strategy and a preview of Trump’s long-term strategy. Claim to see enough smoke and eventually people will just assume there’s a fire.
The theories that have been the most commonly cited and longest-lasting are as follows.
The Clinton campaign got the FBI to investigate Trump. Shortly before Trump took office, BuzzFeed published Steele’s dossier of reports. The claims it made were broadly unsupported and often dubious, but an audience of Trump opponents eager to believe the worst devoured its components. Major news outlets generally avoided treating its claims as matters of fact.
But because so much of the public conversation focused on the dossier — at the time, the most robust set of allegations made against Trump publicly — so did the backlash from Trump’s team. So, when The Post reported in October 2017 that the dossier was indirectly paid for by Clinton’s campaign and the DNC, this was seen as proof that the effort to undercut Trump was simply politics.
That belief was particularly fortified once Trump’s allies in Congress released a memo claiming that the FISA warrant targeting Page was based largely on the contents of the dossier. (It also claimed that the judge asked to approve the warrant wasn’t told that it was paid for by Clinton’s team, which is misleading.) At that point, a narrative began to gel: the Russia probe was all based on Clinton’s dirty tricks.
It wasn’t true.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), now a host on Fox News, made clear at the time that the dossier was incidental to the probe itself: “There is a Russia investigation without a dossier,” he said on CBS News. “... The dossier really has nothing to do with George Papadopoulos’ meeting in Great Britain. It also doesn’t have anything to do with obstruction of justice. So there’s going to be a Russia probe, even without a dossier.”
There were other allegations about the FISA warrant, too. Critics of the Russia investigation often suggested that, by targeting Page, the government really hoped to target others in Trump’s campaign — that they could use rules allowing multiple “hops” of connections to see what others were saying. This ignored: that the warrant was obtained after Page left the campaign; that people like former campaign chairman Paul Manafort would be viable, stronger targets for information than an informal adviser; and that Page had a demonstrated record of ties to Russia that suggested a warrant might be useful.
There was an indictment obtained related to the warrant: An FBI agent pleaded guilty to altering an email with what he claimed was information he believed to be accurate as part of the application process.
This, it turns out, was the most significant accomplishment of an effort to undermine the Russia investigation launched by Attorney General William P. Barr. In May 2019, soon after taking office, Barr appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham to look into the origins of the Russia probe. Barr and Durham invested a great deal of time and money in doing so, without much luck.
The other big push from Durham, though, loops back to the idea that Clinton was somehow responsible for the Russia investigation. Last year, Durham’s investigation obtained an indictment against an attorney who worked for the firm that hired the investigatory firm that produced the Steele dossier. It centered on that weird blip of a news story about the Russian bank — Alfa Bank — being connected to Trump’s private business.
Earlier this year, Durham’s investigators revealed their theory: The evidence of a link was contrived by Clinton allies in order to impugn Trump and then dishonestly shopped to the FBI. Durham’s legal filings even suggested that there had been data collected from the White House as part of the effort.
There was a flurry of agitation about how the Trump White House was spied on — but Durham’s team later admitted the data was collected during the Obama administration. The claims that the data were artificial was never validated. Most importantly, though, the investigation into Trump’s campaign team preceded the Alfa Bank claim by a wide margin. The FBI appears not to have bit on the idea and, as noted above, it was never taken very seriously by the media, either.
One can understand the appeal to Trump’s allies of tying this back to Clinton. But none of this addresses the reality that the trigger for the probe was, instead, Papadopoulos’s conversation with that Australian diplomat — contact that came to the FBI’s attention in the midst of a number of other warning signs.
The investigation was started by FBI agents who hated Trump and wanted to hurt him. Before the Clinton-did-it theory, the favored theory was that the Russia probe was a function of biased FBI agents.
In fact, two FBI officials — Peter Strzok and Lisa Page — shared text messages in 2016 disparaging Trump (and other candidates). Strzok played a role in the launch of Crossfire Hurricane; both were assigned to Mueller’s team (though Page only briefly).
By the time Trump left office, Page and Strzok had been investigated nearly as thoroughly as Trump himself. Two reports from the Justice Department inspector general evaluated their text messages and an incident in which some of their messages were briefly lost. The IG also considered the idea that the probe had been a function of bias.
In short, it wasn’t. The inspector found no evidence that anything except the information from the Australian diplomat triggered the probe and that that information was sufficient for an investigation to begin. It criticized the exchanges between Strzok and Page, but didn’t find that the investigations were tainted by bias.
The release of the text messages resulted in a QAnon-like effort to pick out seemingly suspicious passages, most of which aren’t worth mentioning. One, though, proved useful in answering one of the key rebuttals to the idea that Strzok and Page were hoping to damage Trump: If so, why didn’t news of the probe leak before the election?
So Trump and his allies settled on a mention of an “insurance policy” in one message. Their argument was that this showed that the intent was to have leverage over Trump if he won. Instead, Strzok explained (credibly), the message advocated for investigating Trump’s links to Russia as an insurance policy in the unlikely event he won the presidency — but had been compromised by Russia.
The Mueller report didn’t show collusion. The most common argument that the Russia investigation was a “hoax” derives from the conclusions of the report itself. One of Barr’s most effective actions as attorney general was releasing a summary of the Mueller team’s final report on its probe before the report became public — allowing him to frame its findings in a way that reflected positively on Trump.
“[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” Barr’s summary reads. But that’s not what the report says — at least, not entirely.
“Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome,” the quoted passage reads in full, “and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
Later, the report added: “A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.”
What the report showed was a robust web of ties between Trump’s campaign and Russian actors, from a meeting at Trump Tower to Manafort’s sharing of internal polling data with someone believed to be linked to Russian intelligence. A report released in August 2020 by a bipartisan Senate committee clarified and extended those links.
This is not to say that anyone proved that Trump or even Trump’s senior team colluded directly with Russia as it tried to aid his campaign. It is, instead, to say that none of this was a hoax, that there was good reason for the FBI to be suspicious and that there was good reason to open an investigation that’s unaffected by the claims Trump later raised. It is to say that treating the Justice Department’s Russia probe as riddled with anti-Trump bias depends on elevating nonessential questions as essential and isolated problems as systemic. It depends, primarily, on coming into the question with the presumption that Trump was wronged.
Which — particularly now — is precisely the presumption that Trump hopes you’ll adopt. | 2022-08-17T22:08:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Donald Trump’s defense against current investigations: The ‘Russia hoax’ hoax - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/17/trump-russia-hoax-defense/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/17/trump-russia-hoax-defense/ |
LeBron James and Stephen Curry will renew acquaintances on opening night of the 2022-23 NBA season. (Ashley Landis/AP)
LeBron James will visit Stephen Curry on opening night, the Boston Celtics and Milwaukee Bucks will renew their budding rivalry on Christmas and all 30 NBA teams will get election day off as the league seeks to encourage voting.
The NBA officially released its schedule for the 2022-23 season on Wednesday, and those developments, plus a new rivalry week and the return of international games, counted among the highlights.
After enjoying a full offseason for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic interrupted the 2019-20 season, the NBA has set a standard 82-game schedule that begins on Oct. 18 and concludes April 9, 2023. Following the completion of the regular season, the league will hold its play-in tournaments for the final two playoff seeds in both conferences from April 11-14 before the postseason begins April 15.
Curry’s reigning champion Warriors will welcome James and the Los Angeles Lakers to Chase Center for Golden State’s ring ceremony, as part of an opening night doubleheader that also features Joel Embiid’s Philadelphia 76ers traveling to TD Garden for a date with Jayson Tatum’s Celtics.
The next night, Ja Morant’s Memphis Grizzlies will host the New York Knicks and the Dallas Mavericks will face the Phoenix Suns in a rematch of their second-round playoff series. On Oct. 20, the 76ers will host Giannis Antetokounmpo’s Bucks and the Lakers will host Kawhi Leonard, Paul George and the Los Angeles Clippers. Opening week will conclude on Oct. 21, with the Celtics facing the Miami Heat in an Eastern Conference finals rematch and the Denver Nuggets playing the Warriors.
The Washington Wizards will open the season Oct. 19 against the Pacers in Indiana before hosting the Chicago Bulls for their home opener on Oct. 21. Washington will face Indiana again on Oct. 28 for its national television debut on ESPN, marking its only appearance of the season on the network. The Wizards will also face the Atlanta Hawks on TNT on Feb. 28.
Building on its advocacy efforts around the 2020 presidential election cycle, the NBA will not hold any games on Tuesday, Nov. 8, in an effort to boost voter participation in the midterm elections. All 30 teams will play on Monday, Nov. 7, joining forces for a “Civic Engagement Night” that will provide nonpartisan voting information to fans and viewers.
Two years ago, many NBA owners opened their arenas as polling locations, and high-profile players like James founded “More Than a Vote” to support Black voters and fight voter suppression. During the 2020 playoffs, held in the Disney World bubble, the NBA and National Basketball Players Association encouraged voting efforts with T-shirts, arena signs and video messages.
“We don’t usually change the schedule for an external event but voting and election day are obviously unique and incredibly important to our democracy,” NBA social justice coalition executive director James Cadogan said on MSNBC. “Symbols really matter. If we do something that some might call a symbol, I’d say, that’s a good symbol.”
The NBA’s Christmas slate, which will go head-to-head against an NFL triple-header, features five games: 76ers at Knicks at noon Eastern time; James, who on Wednesday signed a two-year extension, and the Lakers at Luka Doncic’s Mavericks at 2:30 p.m. Eastern time; Bucks at Celtics at 5 p.m. Eastern time; Grizzlies at Warriors at 8 p.m. Eastern time; and Suns at Nuggets at 10:30 p.m. Eastern time. The Brooklyn Nets, mired in a standoff with Kevin Durant following his repeated trade requests, were the most notable holiday snub.
In another new addition to the schedule, the NBA will host “Rivals Week” across 11 nationally-televised games from Jan. 24 to Jan. 28. “Rivalry” has been defined broadly to include Lakers versus Celtics, a sibling showdown between Lonzo and LaMelo Ball and a battle between Nikola Jokic and Embiid, last year’s top-two MVP finishers. The stretch will also include 2022 playoff rematches between the Celtics and Heat; the Warriors and Grizzlies; the Mavericks and Suns; and the Grizzlies and Minnesota Timberwolves.
After shutting down travel outside the United States and Canada because of the pandemic, the NBA will hold international games for the first time since the 2019-20 season. Mexico City will host the Heat and San Antonio Spurs on Dec. 17, while the Chicago Bulls and Detroit Pistons will play in Paris on Jan. 19.
As part of ongoing efforts aimed at improving player availability, the NBA said that teams will play on back-to-back nights an average of 13.3 times, down from 19.3 in the 2014-15 season, and travel a record-low average of 41,000 miles per team. To prevent against the possibility of load management for star players, teams playing in the league’s highest-profile showcases — Christmas, Martin Luther King Jr Day and on ABC’s Saturday and Sunday programming — will be given off days before and after their national television games. | 2022-08-17T22:13:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NBA schedule features ‘Rivals Week’ and no games on Election Day - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/17/nba-schedule-2022-2023/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/17/nba-schedule-2022-2023/ |
The Wizards will play 11 of their first 17 games of the season at home. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
The Washington Wizards will kick off the upcoming season in Indiana on Oct. 19 and host Chicago for their home opener on Oct. 21 following their brief jaunt to Japan for a couple of preseason games this fall. They’ll close the year on April 9 in Houston.
Here are the important things to know about what’s scheduled to take place in between:
Thin national TV schedule
Out-of-market viewers hoping to catch a glimpse of the Wizards are generally out of luck this season, as Washington is scheduled to play just five times on national TV. Three of those games are slated for NBA TV. Here’s the schedule:
Friday, Oct. 28 vs. Indiana, 7:30 p.m. on ESPN
Thursday, Dec. 22 at Utah, 9 p.m. on NBA TV
Tuesday, Jan. 3 at Milwaukee, 8 p.m. on NBA TV
Monday, Feb. 13 at Golden State, 10:30 p.m. on NBA TV
Tuesday, Feb. 28 at Atlanta, 7:30 p.m. on TNT
Holiday highlights
The Wizards’ traditional afternoon game on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Jan. 16, should be a fun one — they’ll host the Golden State Warriors at 3 p.m. at Capital One Arena. Otherwise, the Wizards should get Christmas and Thanksgiving off, though they’ll be on the road for turkey day in the middle of two consecutive games against the Heat on Nov. 23 and Nov. 25.
Eleven of the first 17 games of the season will be at Capital One Arena, which should give the Wizards some time to recuperate after a trip to Japan in late September. But the flip side of all those front-loaded home games is a gnarly January and December slate. Washington’s longest road trip of the season is Dec. 13-23, a whopping 11-day, six-game stretch that includes two back-to-backs. They’ll play Denver, both Los Angeles teams, Phoenix, Utah and Sacramento.
A week later, they’ll head out on a nine-day trip to play Orlando, Oklahoma City and Milwaukee twice. They’ll close out January with one last eight-day saga.
The schedule features a hefty 14 back-to-backs, though three of those will require no travel.
John Wall’s return
It’s hard to believe, but John Wall still hasn’t played a game in front of fans at Capital One Arena since he was traded in December 2020. He’ll have his first chance on Dec. 10 when the Wizards host the Clippers in the second half of a back-to-back after playing in Indiana.
You can view the full 2022-23 schedule here. | 2022-08-17T22:13:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Washington Wizards' 2022-23 NBA schedule released - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/17/washington-wizards-schedule-nba/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/17/washington-wizards-schedule-nba/ |
Kim M. Smith, leader of the Utah Deaf Hospital Rights movement and president of the Utah Association of the Deaf, brushes her hair away from her hearing aid. (Isaac Hale/The Daily Herald via AP)
Here’s what you need to know about over-the-counter hearing aids and how to buy them this fall. | 2022-08-17T22:30:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Over-the-counter hearing aids will soon be available. Here's what to know. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/17/over-the-counter-hearing-aids/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/17/over-the-counter-hearing-aids/ |
South Carolina Supreme Court temporarily blocks 6-week abortion ban
The South Carolina Supreme Court on Wednesday temporarily blocked the state’s near-total abortion ban, which barred patients from terminating a pregnancy at around six weeks, after a fetal heartbeat can be detected. The ban took effect shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
In its unanimous order, the court decided to uphold the pre-Dobbs “status quo” by temporarily enjoining South Carolina’s Fetal Heartbeat and Protection from Abortion Act, which was passed in 2021. That law did not take effect until it was “triggered” when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in late June. Abortions have been banned in South Carolina at about six weeks since June 27.
Abortion access advocates cheered the court’s decision to allow abortions to resume in South Carolina while the legal challenge moves forward.
“We applaud the court’s decision to protect the people of South Carolina from this cruel law that interferes with a person’s private medical decision," Jenny Black, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood South Atlantic said in a statement. “For more than six weeks, patients have been forced to travel hundreds of miles for an abortion or suffer the life-altering consequences of forced pregnancy.”
South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, who is defending the abortion ban on behalf of the state, said this was only the start of legal battle.
“While we are disappointed, it’s important to point out this is a temporary injunction,” Wilson said in an emailed statement. “The court didn’t rule on the constitutionality of the Fetal Heartbeat law. We will continue to defend the law.”
The court decision comes amid efforts by South Carolina lawmakers to pass an even more restrictive abortion ban during an extended legislative session that has stretched into the summer. One proposed bill that passed out of a state house committee on Tuesday does not include exceptions for victims of rape or incest. The state senate’s version is dubbed the “Equal Protection at Conception - No Exceptions - Act” and would outlaw all abortions.
As the state supreme court made its decision to temporarily block the state’s current abortion ban, dozens of members of the public testified for and against the proposed total ban before the Senate Medical Affairs Committee.
The state supreme court did not weigh in on the merits of the case challenging the state’s current ban. Instead, the justices said that, after the U.S. Supreme Court established a national right to abortion access in Roe in 1973, “the South Carolina legislature responded in 1974 by essentially codifying the Roe framework” into state law. Because that 1974 state code “arguably creates a conflict in the law,” the court said it would enjoin the six-week ban until those potential conflicts are resolved and the legal challenge is settled. | 2022-08-17T22:30:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | South Carolina Supreme Court temporarily blocks 6-week abortion ban - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/17/south-carolina-abortion-ban/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/17/south-carolina-abortion-ban/ |
Sebastian Graber, won case for Supreme Court sidewalk protests, dies at 70
Attorney Sebastian Graber, seen at Grand Lake, Colo., on Aug. 4, 2022. (Family photo)
Around noon on March 17, 1980, a woman walked onto the sidewalk in front of the Supreme Court building. She carried a four-foot sign with the text of the First Amendment. Within minutes, a court police officer told her she had to leave or be arrested — saying it was prohibited to have any placards or political messages on that stretch of sidewalk.
“I was really tickled when they came down with a unanimous verdict,” Grace said of the 1983 Supreme Court decision that declared the off-limits rule on the sidewalk a violation of constitutional protections for free speech.
Read the official transcript of the case
The heart of the case was the 1949 decision by Congress to ban “expressive conduct” on the Supreme Court grounds, seeking to preserve decorum and remove any perception of influence over the court’s rulings. Court police interpreted the ban as including the sidewalk.
The case reached the Supreme Court on Jan. 18, 1983. Mr. Graber, less than six years out of George Washington University law school, faced the U.S. solicitor general Rex E. Lee, who was deep into a career that would bring him before the Supreme Court 59 times.
“You can’t be serious,” Justice William H. Rehnquist said.
Mr. Graber: “Your honor, I did not write this statute. But the literal terms of the statute prohibit any device designed or adapted to bring into notice any organization, movement or party.”
The court on April 20, 1983, ruled 9-0 that the limits on free speech on the Supreme Court grounds should not extend to the public sidewalk, “which historically and traditionally are public forums for expressive activity.”
Mr. Graber did not mention during the arguments that his wife was his client.
“Somehow the justices were already aware of it, I believe,” said Grace.
‘A moral point’
He graduated in 1974 from Claremont Men’s College in Claremont, Calif. (now Claremont McKenna College) and began his law studies at George Washington University, receiving his law degree in 1977. He was on the law review, said Grace, but also edited an irreverent campus magazine called the Circle.
“He wore a T-shirt that said ‘Law school sucks’ to remind him not to take it all so seriously,” she said.
Carl Kabat, nuclear arms opponent with Plowshares Eight, dies at 88
He represented Berrigan and his brother, the Rev. Philip Berrigan, several times after protests in front of the Pentagon and other sites. In 1987, Mr. Graber defended Ellsberg and nine other defendants appealing trespassing convictions after trying to stop CIA employees from entering the headquarters in Langley, Va.
Ellsberg — who in 1971 leaked documents known as the Pentagon Papers detailing U.S. strategy and misinformation in the Vietnam War — said the CIA protest sought to stop “hour-by-hour criminal activity” at the agency. Mr. Graber told reporters his defense would seek to call attention to U.S.-backed “systematic atrocities” in Central America and argue his clients’ actions were “reasonable and necessary.” (The conviction stood.)
“Sebastian was a master at trying to construct a defense to make a moral point,” said Patrick O’Neill, a Plowshares activist. “He always tried to portray his clients are being part of a greater good.”
Rights cases became his calling card. In 1990, he was part of an ACLU team that filed suit on behalf of a third-grader and the child’s mother in Woodstock, Va., over a school policy allowing an outside Christian group to enter classrooms to recruit students for outside Bible study. The case settled before trial.
Shortly after the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad in September 2007 — when guards with the private security contractor then known as Blackwater opened fire and killed 17 civilians — Mr. Graber’s wife and others staged a mock re-creation of the bloodshed outside the company headquarters in Moyock, N.C., using an old car and real blood.
Survivors include his wife, and two children, Nicholas Isaac Graber-Grace; daughter Jenneca Rose Graber-Grace, all of Durham, N.C. Mr. Graber died while visiting Grand Lake, Colo., and had a long-term heart condition, his wife said.
Justice Thurgood Marshall quickly pounced on the apparently unnecessary distinction in the legal profession. “What is a constitutional lawyer?” he asked.
“A constitutional lawyer, your honor, is one who devotes his or her practice to the study of the Constitution and the prosecution and defense of constitutional issues,” he said, then paused a beat. “For example, myself.” | 2022-08-17T22:31:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sebastian Graber, opened Supreme Court sidewalk for activists, dies at 70 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/17/sebastian-graber-supreme-court-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/17/sebastian-graber-supreme-court-dies/ |
Scottish council hires man as period dignity officer, stirring criticism
Campaigners and activists rally outside the Scottish Parliament in support of a period bill in February 2020 in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
Scotland made history this week when it became the first country to offer free pads, tampons and other period products nationwide. But now it is already at the center of fierce criticism — after a team of local councils near the capital Edinburgh hired a man as the area’s first “period dignity officer.”
The councils and colleges in the Tay Cities region selected Jason Grant — a former tobacco salesman and fitness trainer — to raise awareness around the new law and promote access to free menstrual products at schools and in the communities. Candidates should have “a successful track record of engaging and empowering a large range of people ... in particular, young people who menstruate,” the job description said.
Grant’s hiring was actually announced last week — but the firestorm around his appointment didn’t start until after the law went into effect on Tuesday, drawing global attention.
Scottish columnist Susan Dalgety said: “Wonder if he’s ever experienced the horror of a blood stained dress in public, or the gut-wrenching fear of a missed period? No, didn’t think so.”
In an interview with the local Courier newspaper earlier this week, Grant said that he knew his hiring would grab headlines but that he wanted to be seen “as a positive male role model.”
“For me it’s about driving the discussion from a young age so boys and girls are included and there’s no hiding it away because that keeps it as a taboo topic,” he said.
Scotland’s Parliament approved legislation to make menstrual products free and available in public spaces in 2020, building on an existing policy that offered free pads and tampons at schools and universities. The new law will expand access to include places such as youth clubs, pharmacies and community centers.
“The term also refers to the increased economic vulnerability women and girls face due the financial burden posed by menstrual supplies. These include not only menstrual pads and tampons, but also related costs such as pain medication and underwear,” the U.N. agency says.
A recent study found that 1 in 4 women enrolled in Scottish educational institutions had trouble accessing menstrual products before they were free.
On Tuesday, Ian Blackford, leader of the Scottish National Party, told Sky News that having a woman in Grant’s position would be “far better,” adding that the move to make period products free is a policy of which all Scots should be proud.
Monica Lennon, a member of the Labour Party in charge of driving the four-year campaign on menstrual equity, struck a more diplomatic tone, saying, “there’s a role for men taking on leadership roles and contributing to positive and respectful conversations whilst ensuring that the voices of women, girls and people who menstruate are never crowded out,” Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported.
“I think being a man will help me break down barriers, reduce stigma and encourage more open discussions,” Grant said in a news release announcing his appointment.
“It’s time to normalize these topics and get real around the subject,” he said. | 2022-08-17T22:33:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Scotland council hires man as period dignity officer, stirring criticism - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/17/scotland-period-dignity-officer-man/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/17/scotland-period-dignity-officer-man/ |
D.C. police probe death of international businessman critical of Putin
Dan K. Rapoport, an international investment banker, was found outside an apartment building. Police do not expect foul play.
Dan K. Rapoport, an international investment banker, was found outside an apartment building at 2400 M Street NW. (iStock)
A businessman who had been critical of Russian president Vladimir Putin died Sunday after police received a call about a jumper on a building in Northwest Washington. Authorities said they don’t suspect foul play.
Dan K. Rapoport, an international investment banker, was found outside an apartment building at 2400 M Street NW, according to a police report. He had $2,620 in cash, a Florida drivers’ license and a cracked cellphone, among other belongings, according to the report.
He was pronounced dead at a hospital.
Because of his global ties and his outspoken views on Putin, Rapoport’s death has generated international interest — even though police have not alleged any wrongdoing. His wife, Alyona Rapoport, said in a Facebook message, “I am heartbroken to share that my husband, Dan Kaplun Rapoport, passed away on Sunday, August 14th. Our daughter and I ask that you respect our privacy while we process and grieve during this extremely difficult time.”
In a 2017 article, the New York Times quoted an aide to Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, who described Rapoport as a successful businessman in Moscow who invested in Soho Rooms, an exclusive nightclub in the city. The aide said Rapoport had been a supporter of Navalny since 2010 and had recently relocated from D.C. to Kyiv, Ukraine.
Rapoport’s Facebook page shows he voiced support for Ukraine and criticized Putin.
Rapoport’s company, Rapoport Capital, is based in D.C., according to its website. The website described Rapport as “directly involved in deal flow valued at over $8 billion including start-ups, private placements, IPO’s, buybacks, and other financial transactions.” The company was founded in 2012.
The Times reported in 2017 that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner had moved into a home previously owned by Rapoport, who was born in Latvia.
Bill Browder, a businessman and an outspoken Putin critic, said on Twitter Wednesday that Rapoport’s death was “very upsetting news.” He said Rapoport was “one of the first Moscow based financiers I knew who publicly supported” Navalny. | 2022-08-17T23:48:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. police probe death of international businessman critical of Putin - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/17/international-businessman-rapoport-dead-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/17/international-businessman-rapoport-dead-dc/ |
Ohio counties awarded $650M in opioid case
Yellen gives IRS deadline on plan
Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen set a six-month time frame for the Internal Revenue Service to compile a plan detailing how it will deploy an influx of $80 billion in enforcement funding over the next decade.
“The work will require an all-hands-on-deck approach from the dedicated employees of the IRS,” Yellen wrote in a memo Wednesday to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, a day after President Biden signed a law including the new funding.
The strategic plan will provide a road map for what has been the largest dedicated funding stream provided to the IRS in decades. The details could also help insulate the agency from political criticism. Republicans, many of whom opposed giving the IRS the extra money, have said it’s using the funding to hire an additional 87,000 auditors to target middle-class households.
In her memo, Yellen said the plan “will require the agency to modernize,” by overhauling an information-technology system “that is decades out of date.”
She said the money will not be used to increase enforcement tied to those earning less than $400,000 annually and instead will focus on evasion by high earners.
The federal government is suing SkyWest Airlines on behalf of a former employee who says co-workers sexually harassed her, including asking her for sex and making explicit comments about rape in her presence. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said in a lawsuit filed Wednesday that SkyWest discriminated against the woman by subjecting her to a hostile work environment and retaliating when she complained. She eventually quit. The EEOC sued in federal district court in Dallas. The agency said the woman joined Utah-based SkyWest in 2007 and the harassment started after she transferred to the airline’s parts and maintenance operation at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in 2019.
Bank of America says the revenue it gets from overdrafts has dropped 90 percent from a year ago, after the bank reduced overdraft fees to $10 from $35 and eliminated fees for bounced checks. Bank chief executive Brian Moynihan said that he expects whatever residual income the bank earns from overdraft fees will come from small businesses using overdraft fees as a convenience. The bank’s new overdraft fee policy was implemented starting in June. Moynihan said that in the policy’s first two months, overdraft fee revenue declined 90 percent and the bank was seeing fewer instances of the fees being collected. He did not share specifics on the number of instances. | 2022-08-18T00:02:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ohio counties awarded $650M in opioid case - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/ohio-counties-awarded-650m-in-opioid-case/2022/08/17/1f6fcaa2-1e38-11ed-8d30-84c409e82eb3_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/ohio-counties-awarded-650m-in-opioid-case/2022/08/17/1f6fcaa2-1e38-11ed-8d30-84c409e82eb3_story.html |
FILE - Anne Heche arrives at the premiere of “The Tender Bar” at the TCL Chinese Theatre, on Dec. 12, 2021, in Los Angeles. The coroner’s office says actor Heche died from burns and inhalation injury after her fiery car crash and the death has been ruled an accident. The cause of her death was released on the Los Angeles County coroner’s website Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2022, although a formal autopsy report is still being completed. (Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File) | 2022-08-18T00:02:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Anne Heche's death ruled accidental after fiery car crash - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/anne-heches-death-ruled-accidental-after-fiery-car-crash/2022/08/17/e7108be0-1e84-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/anne-heches-death-ruled-accidental-after-fiery-car-crash/2022/08/17/e7108be0-1e84-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
School board in Wisconsin votes in favor of banning pride flag
School board votes in favor of pride flag ban
A school board voted in favor of a policy that prohibits teachers and staff from displaying gay pride flags and other items that district officials consider political in nature.
The Kettle Moraine School Board voted unanimously Tuesday to keep a code of conduct in place that the superintendent recently interpreted as forbidding district employees from displaying political or religious messages, including pride flags and Black Lives Matter signs. Staff also may not say in emails what their pronouns are.
More than 13,000 people have signed an online petition opposing the Kettle Moraine policy that was launched by two local high school students.
Kids-for-cash judges to pay over $200 million
Two former judges who orchestrated a scheme to send children to for-profit jails in exchange for kickbacks were ordered to pay more than $200 million in one of the worst judicial scandals in U.S. history.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner awarded $106 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages to nearly 300 people in a long-running civil suit against the judges.
In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, Mark Ciavarella and another judge, Michael Conahan, shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and accepted $2.8 million in illegal payments from the builder and co-owner of two for-profit lockups. Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, pushed a zero-tolerance policy that guaranteed large numbers of children would be sent to PA Child Care and its sister facility, Western PA Child Care. He also ordered children as young as 8 to detention, many of them first-time offenders deemed delinquent for minor infractions.
“Ciavarella and Conahan abandoned their oath and breached the public trust,” Conner wrote Tuesday in his explanation of the judgment. “Their cruel and despicable actions victimized a vulnerable population of young people.”
It’s unlikely the now-adult victims will see even a fraction of the damages award, but a lawyer for the plaintiffs said it’s a recognition of the judges’ crimes.
A$AP Rocky pleads not guilty to assault charges: The rapper pleaded not guilty to two counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm and was ordered to return to court on Nov. 2. He is accused of drawing a gun and firing it twice in the direction of a former friend in 2021.
Officials cite rise in weapons being smuggled from Florida:
U.S. investigators say they have noticed an uptick in the amount and caliber of weapons being smuggled from Florida to Haiti in recent months. Homeland Security Investigations said it continues to look into the uptick. The spike in violence follows the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. | 2022-08-18T00:02:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | School board in Wisconsin votes in favor of banning pride flag - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/school-board-in-wisconsin-votes-in-favor-of-banning-pride-flag/2022/08/17/57660e1a-146c-11ed-aba1-f2b7689c0492_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/school-board-in-wisconsin-votes-in-favor-of-banning-pride-flag/2022/08/17/57660e1a-146c-11ed-aba1-f2b7689c0492_story.html |
President-elect ready for court challenge
Kenyan President-elect William Ruto said Wednesday that if there are court challenges to the election results, “we will engage in those,” as East Africa’s most stable democracy awaited a likely petition from losing candidate Raila Odinga.
Ruto, Kenya’s deputy president, was declared the winner of last week’s tight election on Monday, but the electoral commission became publicly divided minutes before the declaration. Four of the seven commissioners, who were appointed last year by President Uhuru Kenyatta, asserted that the commission chair had excluded them from the final steps before his declaration.
In a statement responding to the allegations, the commission chairman, Wafula Chebukati, asserted Wednesday that the four dissenting commissioners “demanded that the chairperson moderates the results for purpose of forcing an election re-run contrary to their oath of office. This is tantamount to subverting the Constitution and the sovereign will of the people of Kenya.”
Odinga, in his fifth bid for the presidency, has said his campaign will pursue “all constitutional and legal options” to challenge the election results. It is not clear on what grounds Odinga would challenge the results.
NATO eyes larger peacekeeping force
NATO will increase its peacekeeping force in Kosovo if there is an escalation of tensions with neighboring Serbia, the alliance’s chief said Wednesday, on the eve of talks between the estranged western Balkan neighbors facilitated by the European Union.
“We have now a significant mission, a military presence in Kosovo close to 4,000 troops,” Jens Stoltenberg said after talks in Brussels with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic. “If needed, we will move forces, deploy them where needed and increase our presence.”
Tensions between Serbia and Kosovo flared this month when Pristina said it would oblige Serbs living in the north, who are backed by Belgrade and don’t recognize Kosovo institutions, to use car license plates issued by the Kosovo government.
Kosovo won independence from Serbia in 2008, but Serbia still considers Kosovo legally part of its territory.
Israel, Turkey to restore ties: Israel and Turkey will restore full diplomatic relations and dispatch ambassadors for the first time in years, the latest step in months of reconciliation, the Israeli prime minister's office announced. The two countries were once friendly, but relations disintegrated over the past decade under Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been an outspoken critic of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians. Israel, in turn, has objected to Turkey's embrace of the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
10 injured as wildfire causes train to turn back in Spain: A wildfire in eastern Spain caused a train driver to stop and prepare to change directions to avoid the flames, and several passengers were injured when they got off rather than wait, officials said. The train was traveling in the Valencia region on Tuesday night when the driver decided to reverse course because of the fire advancing from around the town of Bejís, farther east. Some passengers got off the train when it stopped, including ones who broke windows to escape, officials said. Ten people were reported injured. The wildfire is one of two still raging out of control in eastern Spain.
El Salvador extends suspension of rights: With 50,000 people locked up since late March for alleged gang ties, El Salvador's congress has approved another month-long extension of the state of exception that suspends some basic rights to combat the country's powerful gangs. Polls have shown the move to be widely popular despite criticism from rights groups inside and outside El Salvador. Those groups and relatives of the detained say people are arrested without evidence and jailed for months as they await trial. | 2022-08-18T00:02:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Digest: Aug. 17, 2022 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug-17-2022/2022/08/17/001a2d80-1e44-11ed-b25f-fb4ac1c3f4c0_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug-17-2022/2022/08/17/001a2d80-1e44-11ed-b25f-fb4ac1c3f4c0_story.html |
Man arrested after vandalism, burglary at D.C. Catholic school
Demitrius Hansford, 32, was arrested Tuesday, said D.C. police.
HANDOUT IMAGE: St. Anthony Catholic School in Northeast Washington has been vandalized twice since last week, officials said. D.C. police on Tuesday arrested a 32-year-old man in connection with the incidents. (Michael Thomasian)
D.C. police have arrested a 32-year-old man in connection with recent burglary and property destruction at a Northeast Washington Catholic school, authorities said Wednesday.
Demitrius Hansford, also of Northeast Washington, was arrested and charged Tuesday, police said. The incidents, which took place on two separate occasions at St. Anthony Catholic School, are being investigated as “potentially being motivated” by bias or hate, according to authorities.
In one incident, around 11 p.m. on Aug. 10, police said two benches, a window sill and a 5-foot-6-inch statue of the school’s namesake, St. Anthony, were destroyed. The statue’s head is still missing, said Michael Thomasian, principal of the 100-year-old school. Outdoor flower pots, maintained by first-graders at the school, “were relocated in random spots,” Thomasian added.
“This handsome statue, which quickly became a hallmark of our school, this statue where students posed with their awards and diplomas, was now laying on the ground broken,” Thomasian said. “Vandalism is always a violation, but the devastation is elevated when children’s play space is damaged and sacred statues, symbols of our faith and Christian identity, are desecrated. It hurt.”
Police also said Hansford entered the building Monday around 7:50 a.m. In a police report, officers said $1,400 in cash had been stolen. Two more statues and four candles — which Thomasian said were Advent candles — were also damaged, according to a police report. Officials said several items of clothing have also been recovered from the scene.
In the days since, the neighborhood has rallied around St. Anthony, Thomasian said. “One little girl who’s never even seen our school learned of the incident and immediately said, ‘Oh, I want to help,’” and her sister donated $50 she recently received for her birthday, he said. The neighborhood launched a GoFundMe campaign that has generated more than $30,000 in four days.
Thomasian aid the money will be used to replace the St. Anthony statue and broken benches and repair the building. The school will use any leftover money to improve safety and security, he added. | 2022-08-18T00:37:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 32-year-old man arrested following vandalism at D.C. Catholic school - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/17/arrest-catholic-school-vandalism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/17/arrest-catholic-school-vandalism/ |
Boston Children’s Hospital says it faces threats after right-wing tweets
Last week, Twitter accounts popular on the far right circulated what the hospital called misinformation about its transgender care
The Boston Children's Hospital on Feb. 26, 2020. (Lane Turner/The Boston Globe/Getty Images)
New England’s largest pediatric hospital said Wednesday that it was fending off a torrent of threats and harassment targeting staffers who treat transgender patients after conservative influencers attacked them in false and misleading social media posts.
Boston Children’s Hospital said it asked law enforcement for help protecting its employees and patients after facing “a large volume of hostile internet activity, phone calls, and harassing emails including threats of violence toward our clinicians and staff.” It said the threats began last week after Twitter accounts popular on the far right circulated what the hospital called misinformation about its transgender care.
The hospital said the vitriol was specifically directed at its Gender Multispecialty Service program, the first pediatric and adolescent transgender health program established in the United States. The program specializes in treating young people with gender dysphoria, the condition in which a person’s gender identity doesn’t align with the sex they were assigned at birth.
“We condemn these attacks in the strongest possible terms, and we reject the false narrative upon which they are based,” Boston Children’s said in an emailed statement. “We are working with law enforcement to protect our clinicians, staff, patients, families, and the broader Boston Children’s community and hold the offenders accountable. We will continue to take all appropriate measures to protect our people.”
A spokesman for the Boston Police Department, Sgt. Det. John Boyle, said police had opened an investigation into the matter but declined to comment further.
Transgender medical treatment — and particularly care for transgender youths — has become a red-hot issue for conservative activists and politicians, who in recent months have intensified criticism of gender-affirming surgery and therapy, and have sought to curtail access to such services.
Anti-trans harassment targeted toward hospitals could deter trans patients from seeking gender-affirming care in the future, C.P. Hoffman, senior policy counsel at the National Center for Transgender Equality, said in an interview. It could “make it very frightening for individuals and their family members going in for gender affirming care,” they said.
Leading medical groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, support providing gender-affirming care for young people experiencing gender dysphoria. Public opinion has also trended in favor of allowing transgender people to access gender-affirming care, polling shows.
The threats against Boston Children’s come at a time when hospital workers and public health officials around the country have faced waves of harassment over their response to the coronavirus pandemic. Angry callers have overwhelmed hospital phone lines, and local health workers nationwide have grappled with threats, doxing, vandalism and other forms of harassment.
Boston Children’s said it started receiving the threatening messages after the right-wing Twitter account Libs of TikTok, which frequently amplifies anti-LGBTQ sentiment, posted a video from the hospital explaining hysterectomies to its 1.3 million followers. The Twitter account holder declined to comment.
The post, which was shared by several prominent conservatives and retweeted thousands of times, claimed that the hospital performed the surgeries on “young girls.” Boston Children’s said it doesn’t perform gender-affirming hysterectomies on any patients under 18.
A flurry of subsequent posts took aim at the hospital’s other gender-affirming treatments, some suggesting that Boston Children’s doctors performed other genital surgeries on children. The hospital said in an email to The Washington Post that it “does not perform genital surgeries as part of gender-affirming care on a patient under the age of 18.”
An archived version of Boston Children’s website appeared to state that vaginoplasties, the surgical construction of a vagina, were available to 17-year-olds. The hospital said that while patients could receive surgical consultations at 17, they must be “between 18 and 35 years of age at the time of surgery.” An updated version of the its website reflects that policy, the hospital said.
“The commentary and the online attention that followed was based on the incorrect statement that Boston Children’s performs genital surgeries on minors in connection with transgender care,” the hospital said. “For hysterectomies and other genital surgeries performed as part of gender-affirming care, Boston Children’s requires a patient to be capable of consenting for themselves. Age 18 is used to reflect the standard age of majority for medical decision-making.”
Some of the same accounts that posted about Boston Children’s transgender care went on to post harassing tweets about pediatric hospitals in Pittsburgh and Phoenix that offer transgender medical treatment. One tweet called for rallies outside hospitals that “butcher children.”
Yotam Ophir, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Buffalo who specializes in understanding health misinformation, said online harassment campaigns could make it harder for patients to access to gender-affirming treatment – and make doctors less willing to provide it.
“If it leads to so much negativity,” Ophir told The Post, “if it leads to attacks on staff, if it leads to threats and harassment, maybe another hospital would just say, ‘You know what, it’s not worth it.’ ”
Hoffman, of the National Center for Transgender Equality, advised young nonbinary and trans patients to seek gender affirming care despite the challenges.
“I would say that while it definitely can be scary to put yourself out there, especially in situations where we’re seeing facilities and trans individuals targeted," they said, “the potential joy of being able to live as your true self is worth it.” | 2022-08-18T00:41:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Boston Children's Hospital says it faces threats after tweets criticizing transgender treatment - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/17/boston-childrens-hospital-transgender-treatment/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/17/boston-childrens-hospital-transgender-treatment/ |
Storm guard Sue Bird, one of the WNBA's all-time greats, will square off one final time with Natasha Cloud in the best-of-three playoff series against the Mystics. Game 1 is Thursday in Seattle. (Terrance Williams/For The Washington Post)
“This is what you dream of when you dream of playoff atmospheres. To come into someone's home and be able to compete and play and hopefully come away with a win, two wins, is fun. I feel like everybody's excited about it.”
Seattle seems to have the edge there with Stewart, who is averaging 21. 8 points, 7.6 rebounds and 2.9 assists while shooting 47.2 percent from the field.
“Make her work,” Thibault said of Stewart. “That’s when the whole thing all along is, make her shots tough. We know she’s going to get shots. We know she’s a great player. For most of the game when we play them, she and Elena guard each other a lot. So, it’s an unbelievable battle. And I would say in general … in some ways they cancel each other out a lot of times in the sense that their stats end up similar.”
If only Stewart was the Mystics’ only problem. The Storm attack also includes shooting guard Jewell Loyd, a four-time all-star who is shooting 38.5 percent from three-point range. And Charles, the 2012 MVP, has been one of the best scorers and rebounders in league history.
Then there’s Bird, who may be the best point guard the league has seen and is in the midst of her final season. There will a huge wave of emotion as the crowd pushes for Bird to finish her remarkable career with a fifth WNBA championship.
The Mystics have been inconsistent offensively throughout the year, but have the firepower to score with anyone. They’re averaging 80.2 points (eighth in the league) and are shooting 43.9 percent (seventh in the league).
A boost from a deep bench and Clark finding her shooting touch would be a huge plus for the Mystics. Clark shot just 30.3 percent from behind the arc in 2022 after knocking threes down at a 52.2 percent clip in 2020. A return to Seattle to face close friends in a raucous environment could provide a jump-start.
“I’m definitely excited about it,” Clark said. “Obviously, I know the caliber of players and the caliber of the organization. So going into playoff time, you want to play against the best. We know what kind of series it’s going to be like. We’re going to have to be really locked in and focused. But I’m confident in the players that we have in this locker room and what we’re able to do. … | 2022-08-18T01:33:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mystics, Storm brace for a WNBA playoff showdown - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/17/mystics-storm-wnba-playoffs/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/17/mystics-storm-wnba-playoffs/ |
DeSantis sued by prosecutor suspended over stance on abortion-related crime
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), left, and Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren. Warren vowed to fight his suspension from office by DeSantis over his promise not to enforce the state's 15-week abortion ban and support for gender transition treatments for minors. (Douglas R. Clifford/Tampa Bay Times/AP)
A Florida prosecutor has sued Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in a bid to be reinstated after he was dismissed from his post for pledging he would not prosecute cases stemming from Florida’s 15-week abortion ban and potential bans on gender-affirming care.
Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren (D) argued his Aug. 4 suspension was unlawful on First Amendment grounds and characterized his removal as “retaliation” by DeSantis against a critic and political rival, according to a federal complaint filed Wednesday in the Northern District of Florida.
In a video message, Warren said that in addition to violating his free speech rights, DeSantis broke Florida law.
“He’s violated the Florida Constitution by removing me from office without any legal justification, throwing out the results of a fair and free election,” Warren said.
Today we took action against Ron DeSantis' abuse of power and unlawful suspension. Please join us in this fight at https://t.co/mebZt8It8i #DefendDemocracyNow pic.twitter.com/ekluzexc2H
DeSantis’s office dismissed Warren’s federal complaint as “baseless.”
“It’s not surprising Warren, who was suspended for refusing to follow the law, would file a legally baseless lawsuit challenging his suspension. We look forward to responding in court,” a spokesperson for DeSantis said in a statement.
Warren has been in office since 2016 and was reelected in 2020 with more than 53 percent of the vote.
DeSantis suspending Warren and replacing him with a person of his choosing sets a concerning tone for democracy in Florida, Louis Virelli, professor of law at Stetson University College of Law, told The Washington Post.
“A small step from here is if I, as governor, don’t think a state attorney is being hard enough on a particular crime, I’m going to replace you with a person I prefer,” Virelli said. “It’s overriding voters’ choice.”
Virelli said the complaint is one of the few options available to Warren if he wants to keep his job.
Part of Warren’s argument in the complaint is that the Florida Constitution limits removal to true incompetence or inability to do the work and violation of a legal obligation.
“Warren is being punished for what he said and not what he did,” Virelli said.
Shortly after Warren’s suspension, his office’s chief communications officer was told she had to resign and be paid through the month — or be fired on the spot.
Melanie Snow-Waxler, who started her role in the state attorney’s office in May, was terminated Aug. 12.
“This illegal firing is part of a troubling pattern of retaliation,” her attorney, Ryan Barack, said in a statement this week.
DeSantis and Warren are ideological opposites who have publicly sparred over topics like abortion, covid restrictions, and criminal justice and transgender rights.
In June, the day that the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling was handed down, effectively ending the federal right to abortion access, Warren joined dozens of prosecutors around the country in signing a pledge that they would “refrain from using limited criminal legal system resources to criminalize personal medical decisions.”
In 2021, Warren signed a similar joint statement with other elected prosecutors affirming that health-care decisions should be “private discretion” and said they would not use their office to “promote the criminalization of gender-affirming health care or transgender people.”
DeSantis’s administration has pursued aggressive policies to increasingly restrict medical treatments like puberty blockers and hormone therapy; just last week, the state barred people from using Medicare coverage to help pay for gender-affirming care.
Since Warren’s suspension, he and DeSantis have disagreed over the nature of the suspension. While Warren characterized his suspension as “temporary” in his filing, DeSantis’s office has said Warren is no longer the state attorney for the 13th Judicial Circuit in Hillsborough County after the governor appointed Susan Lopez, a Republican judge who backed Warren’s opponent in 2016. | 2022-08-18T01:33:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Andrew Warren, dismissed by Gov. DeSantis for refusing to prosecute abortion crimes, sues for reinstatement - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/17/andrew-warren-desantis-lawsuit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/17/andrew-warren-desantis-lawsuit/ |
It was Feb. 27, 2016, the day that Kaniya and her brother became two of the more than 2,400 children in Chicago who would lose a parent to a gun homicide between that year and 2020, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by The Washington Post. On average over that five-year period, the city’s pervasive gun violence stripped nearly 10 children of a parent every week. Almost all were Black or Hispanic.
An earlier version of this story misstated the average number of children in Chicago who lost a parent to gun violence. It was nearly 10 per week. | 2022-08-18T01:42:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kids who witness parents shot to death rarely get help for trauma - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2022/kids-witness-parents-shot-killed/?wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F37acb8a%2F62fd0e88cfe8a21601345961%2F61ff0c33ae7e8a62359d8667%2F25%2F70%2F62fd0e88cfe8a21 | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2022/kids-witness-parents-shot-killed/?wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F37acb8a%2F62fd0e88cfe8a21601345961%2F61ff0c33ae7e8a62359d8667%2F25%2F70%2F62fd0e88cfe8a21 |
“The United States and Taiwan will seek to will deepen our trade and investment relationship, advance mutual trade priorities based on shared values, and promote innovation and inclusive economic growth for our workers and businesses,” the office said in the statement.
The US-Taiwan trade initiative was announced weeks after President Joe Biden launched the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework in May. Designed to counter China’s influence in the region, that deal didn’t feature Taipei despite more than 50 senators urging Biden to include the island.
Taipei has been trying to reduce its economic dependence on Beijing in recent years. China and Hong Kong account for around 40% of its total exports, with bilateral trade between the two economies reaching $328.3 billion last year. Taiwan’s position as the world’s leading supplier of semiconductors is a linchpin of its economic relationship with China and other nations, including the US, making the island a strategic asset for countries seeking cutting-edge chips technology.
In a bid to diminish its reliance on China, President Tsai Ing-wen has explored ways to bolster trade and investment with Southeast Asia, India, Australia and New Zealand. Taipei last year asked to join Asia Pacific’s biggest working trade deal, though its application is still pending.
The island’s Office of Trade Negotiations said signing trade deals with the US would “not only help” Taiwan join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, but would also afford it more opportunities to “deepen institutionalized links with other countries.”
(Updates throughout with additional context, statement from Taiwan’s trade negotiations office.) | 2022-08-18T03:05:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | US and Taiwan Begin Formal Negotiations on Trade Initiative - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/us-and-taiwan-begin-formal-negotiations-on-trade-initiative/2022/08/17/37f82604-1e98-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/us-and-taiwan-begin-formal-negotiations-on-trade-initiative/2022/08/17/37f82604-1e98-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Or he doesn’t care at all. It is ruining my relationship with my daughter and my grandchildren.
Miserable: You could cope with this better if you understood and accepted that your daughter is making a series of choices. Her choice to martyr herself to a husband who sounds like a selfish deadbeat must seem puzzling to you, but your role here is not to fix her life.
Don't agree to anything if you are going to resent it and then make her “pay” in other ways.
Ballet lessons might make a nice special-occasion gift — but with a low unemployment rate, if the children need shoes, then perhaps their able-bodied dad can figure out a way to provide.
Every time I mention it to her, she dismisses me and wants to change the subject. The truth is that she needs to take care of herself, and I have said it many times.
She also works in the health-care field and knows about the risks of breast cancer. I don’t know how to get through to her.
Upset: Your daughter has important reasons to get a mammogram — after all, she has a family history of cancer (through her father’s side).
It takes 10 minutes and then, boom — you’re good!
Real: A swift kick might be called for, but I believe there are less violent ways to handle this appropriately. | 2022-08-18T04:36:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: My son-in-law is 'a bum' who does not help my daughter - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/18/ask-amy-son-in-law-bum/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/18/ask-amy-son-in-law-bum/ |
Dear Carolyn: If I had to rate my marriage, I would give it a B. I don’t want to have a B marriage, but I have toddler kids. The thought of putting them through a divorce is like a punch to the gut. I’m a child of divorced parents, and it exploded my childhood. If I would jump in front of a bullet for my kids, then why shouldn’t I stay in a B marriage for them? It’s a happy home; their dad is a wonderful man and father, he’s just not my wonderful man. Help me see through this.
Were there some A feelings before the toddlers? Might they return when you stop having toddlers (which is just really hard)? Are there obstacles that therapy could clear? And … well, I’m not comfortable with the whole “stay in a marriage for the kids” thing, though the potential trauma for your kids obviously factors into any decisions.
I don’t have enough even to guess whether this is a wait-it-out or get-out moment, so I’ll say therapy, solo, to help you with your vision.
Carolyn: The “why” mostly relates to the relationship conveyor belt of dating for X years, getting engaged, getting married … and my feeling throughout like “this isn’t the one, but it’s not not the one either.” I love him, he loves me, but we don’t have that little spark.
Ignoring that doubt now seems foolish, although I’ll never regret our marriage, both from what I learned throughout it and for my children, who are sparkly and wonderful and who amaze me every day. We are in marriage counseling, and I’m still in individual counseling. What I don’t think counseling can heal is that little voice in my head saying, “Not your person, not your person, not your person.”
— B again
B again: Helpful, thanks.
Maybe you aren’t right for each other — again, I can’t know. But I hope you’ll also consider: Maybe there is no “your person” for any of us. Maybe it’s on each of us alone to make our lives “ours,” and not scan the room for better offers. Maybe your framing is out of date, and it’s time for new expectations.
Clearly this runs counter to other advice I’ve given. However, if things aren’t working as-is and the idea of leaving doesn’t work, either, then break the framework. Decide he is your person as much as anyone can be anyone’s, then live all-in.
· What is a B marriage, anyway? What’s missing and what doesn’t work? Be careful not to judge your marriage by a fantasy-view of what marriage should be.
· My husband is absolutely MY person. But still, in 20 years, our grades have ranged from an A-plus-plus-plus to a total F-minus. Marriage and raising a family are super hard.
· I was in a B relationship for years and am now in an A marriage. But I’ve realized it was not the other person that made it a B, but the choices I made about the relationship. I decided I would make this marriage be the one I wanted. And looking back, I think I could have done that with the B girlfriend. As long as you respect each other and the other person is kind, generous and committed to you, I think you can go a long way toward an A by deciding that person is “right” for you.
Long way, not all the way, yes. Thanks. | 2022-08-18T04:36:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Their marriage is 'a B.' Do they stay in it for the kids? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/18/carolyn-hax-marriage-divorce-stay-kids/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/18/carolyn-hax-marriage-divorce-stay-kids/ |
Britannia Rules the Waves (of Rising Prices)
British consumer price inflation is back into double figures for the first time in almost 32 years. Margaret Thatcher was still prime minister when this landmark was last achieved. For the last time retail price inflation was this high, we need to go back even further, to a point when Thatcher, under intense pressure, had famously denied that she was about to execute a U-turn on economic policy. British inflation was last at its current 12.4% in February 1981, the month that Prince Charles announced his engagement to Lady Diana Spencer:
Breaking during a bad-tempered contest for the prime ministership between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, confirmation of the severity of the cost of living crisis contributes to a febrile atmosphere. Whoever gets to be premier (probably Truss) will have to take measures to ease the pain for consumers, which will mean using taxpayers’ money to subsidize fuel costs while making clear to everyone that they are committed to fighting inflation. That will mean tight monetary policy. Truss’ talk of changing the Bank of England’s mandate adds to the sense of uncertainty.
The detail of the numbers emphasizes just how painful inflation is going to be for many Britons. Rising energy prices, although extreme, came in slightly below expectations, as this chart from Deutsche Bank AG demonstrates. The problem is in growing prices for services and food:
The numbers for food and non-oil energy, over which monetary policy has limited control, are terrifying and show that this will be an unavoidable political issue:
The data prompted plenty of forecasters to revise their estimates for peak UK inflation up to 13%, and to predict a more hawkish central bank. They also drove a rise in bond yields throughout Europe and the US. This despite evidence from the UK data that global pressures are abating, and that the UK’s problems are now more of its own making. This from Ruth Gregory of Capital Economics:
“There were some signs that global price pressures are easing. Second-hand car price inflation fell for the fourth month in a row from +15.2% to +8.6%. Inflation in this category was initially driven high by red-hot demand and shortages of supply during the pandemic. What’s more, price pressures further up the supply chain eased. Input price inflation dropped from 14.9% in June to 14.6% in July and core producer output prices eased from 14.9% to 14.6%. But there were further signs that the global drivers of inflation are being replaced by domestic ones. Rents inflation increased from 3.2% to 3.8% in July. Moreover, services inflation (which is mostly driven by domestic factors) rose from 5.2% in June to a 30-year high of 5.7% in July.”
It’s hard to see much reason for optimism — except, perhaps, from Britain’s perpetually volatile housing market. The British economy tends to be levered to home prices, and governments will go to great lengths to avoid their decline ahead of a general election. The two times in the last four decades when an incumbent government was defeated — John Major in 1997 and Gordon Brown in 2010 — both happened after sharp falls in house prices. So it’s perhaps encouraging that the efforts to take the sting out of the housing market may be having some effect. The latest data show a surprising decrease in house price inflation, from a level that was looking dangerously overheated:
The housing price inflation spikes in this chart were all followed by a crash and an economic recession. If the BOE’s moderate tightening to date has at least managed to fend off another bout of mad housing speculation, that will be helpful. But it’s a slender reed to be grasping.
U-Turn If You Want To. But Is the Fed for Turning?
The release of Federal Open Market Committee minutes doesn’t usually involve a lot of theatrics. They’re published belatedly, three weeks after the Federal Reserve has spoken and in this case many things — including surprisingly strong employment and weak inflation data — have happened since then. But the minutes for the July meeting, released Wednesday afternoon, were interesting because the Fed is trying to take a nuanced position. Bob Miller, BlackRock’s head of Americas Fundamental Fixed Income, wrote:
“The intended message from the Fed was not ‘dovish’ per se, despite the bond and risk asset rallies that followed the meeting date. Rather, we think the intended message was much more nuanced. We believe the intended message was to signal a wider aperture in the Committee’s reaction function, setting the stage to eventually allow time to work for them in pursuit of their policy objectives; a logical transition for the Fed to make at this stage.”
The main takeaway was clear: Officials see the need to eventually dial back the pace of interest-rate hikes but also agreed on the need to assess how their monetary tightening was working toward curbing US inflation before doing anything that could be called a “pivot” (a word that appears nowhere in the document). US stocks fell for the first time in four days on Wednesday. But in the bond market, two-year yields, highly sensitive to rate changes, dramatically pared their earlier advance after the UK inflation numbers:
This looks like an overreaction as the statement was at best ambiguously dovish. This line in particular left the door open to keep tightening: “In view of the constantly changing nature of the economic environment and the existence of long and variable lags in monetary policy’s effect on the economy, there was also a risk that the committee could tighten the stance of policy by more than necessary to restore price stability.”
The implication was that this is a risk the FOMC is prepared to take. In response, futures contracts lowered the likelihood of a 75-basis-points (as opposed to 50-basis-points) fed funds boost next month to about 40%. Intriguingly, fed funds futures also began to show less confidence that the Fed will start cutting rates early next year, and are more inclined to discount a steady plateau for interest rates rather than a sudden pivot. The following chart shows the implied fed funds rates for next month’s meeting, and for February 2024, as generated by the Bloomberg World Interest Rate Probability service.
To visualize it a different way, try the following two screen shots from the Bloomberg terminal. This shows the projection for the fed funds rate at each meeting from now until January 2024, as it stood on July 27, the day of the last FOMC meeting:
This shows quite a dramatic pivot. Now, here is the same chart as it appears at the time of writing, after the publication of the minutes of the July 27 meeting:
Confidence in an imminent pivot has reduced in the last three weeks, as the unemployment data would suggest it should.
“I am not sure these minutes feed into the idea of a policy pivot as much as some of these headlines suggest. Yes, the pace of hikes will slow (you can’t keep going 75) but that does not mean cuts either,” Neil Dutta, head of US economic research at Renaissance Macro Research LLC, wrote. “The minutes also clearly demonstrate the Fed’s hawkish bias is needed for risk management purposes. It is a risk they are willing to take.”
Fed officials even offered themselves some early self-congratulations, said Steven Blitz, chief US economist at TS Lombard. Here’s that part:
In another optimistic tone, the participants also noted signs of gradual improvement in the supply situation and highlighted the improved availability of some key inputs. Here’s Christopher Low, chief economist at FHN Financial:
Jeffrey Roach, chief economist at LPL Financial, noted how the FOMC described the current inflationary environment as fraught with supply and demand imbalances, using this phrase eight times throughout the document. This revealed “a precarious position as the Committee knows its monetary tools do not work on supply shocks,” and he warned: “The markets could interpret this as a Fed impotent against some of the current inflationary fight.”
Governors also commented on the dollar’s strength as yield differentials widened. Exchange rates are officially a matter for the Treasury rather than the central bank, and this could be taken to mean that the Fed is under increased pressure to keep the greenback from appreciating too much against other countries, especially emerging markets.
For now, investors will have to wait until the Fed officials’ retreat next week in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where they will have a chance to tweak expectations again. A lot has happened since these minutes were written. Blitz of TS Lombard weighs in again:
“These minutes caught the FOMC at a moment when decelerating data accelerated their confidence that they could soon entertain a slowdown in the pace of rate hikes. They did, however, acknowledge that tighter financial conditions, including a positive real Federal funds rate, were needed to reduce demand for labor and, in turn, bring inflation back to 2%.”
With equities gaining more than 7% in the three weeks since the Fed wrote, and the real fed funds rate (subtracting the headline rate of consumer price inflation) still at minus 6% (lower than it was a year ago), it’s a good guess that Jerome Powell will feel the need to douse the expectations of a “pivot,” and brace for a tightening campaign that takes the fed funds rate above 3.5%.
There’s been one trend that has held true ever since the Great Financial Crisis: US equities just keep beating the rest of the world without fail. Nothing — not surging inflation, a credit downgrade, fears of recession or even a once-in-a-century global pandemic — can stop it.
The following graph shows the ratio between the benchmark S&P 500 and the FTSE All-World Excluding United States Index, which includes large and mid-capitalization firms for developed and emerging markets. The trend is as clear as day:
Zooming in on the quarter to date, the grind upward may have been a bit bumpier, but the S&P 500 has still outperformed. That’s mainly because it bottomed on June 16, according to Nicholas Colas, cofounder of DataTrek Research. That eventful week, he says, also saw the Nasdaq Composite and the Russell 2000 setting their lows on June 16, the 10-year Treasury yields easing from the 2022 highs they set on June 14, and the Federal Reserve announcing the first of two 75-basis-points rate hikes on June 15.
It was almost a full month later before the MSCI EAFE Index, which represents the performance of large and mid-cap securities across 21 developed markets, and the MSCI Emerging Markets Index that captures large and mid-cap representation across 24 emerging markets countries, bottomed on July 14. DataTrek explains the timing further in a note published Tuesday:
“The upshot here is that it took non-US stocks basically a full month to make their Q3 to date lows because currency markets did not reach ‘peak dollar’ at the same time as ‘peak pessimism’ hit US equities.”
Also on July 14, the US dollar peaked year-to-date, rising to 124.1 based on the Fed’s Nominal Dollar Index. Two years ago on March 23, Colas noted that the greenback also hit its high to coincide with the lows for global stocks on the same day. Both are driven by risk appetite, and the peak for the dollar in 2020 and possibly again this year meant that the peak for risk aversion was also in. That then allowed stocks that didn’t benefit from haven flows into the US to begin to perform better:
After Wednesday’s publication of the FOMC minutes, the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index, a broad gauge of the greenback’s strength, pared back gains. That’s because the market took heart from comments in the minutes that the Fed would need to slow down the pace of interest-rate hikes at some point. Even so, the decline for the dollar was driven almost entirely by the euro — it still climbed relative to its other Group-of-10 peers.(1)
For Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at Bleakley Financial Group, the dollar’s climb may see its end very soon. “With the likelihood that the Fed slows the pace of its rate hikes to 50 basis points and possibly by 25 basis points thereafter at the same time other central banks keep hiking, the dollar has seen the end of its recent rally, I believe,” he wrote Wednesday.
Still, DataTrek’s Colas maintains he continues to favor US equities over international stocks. “We do not see the customary preconditions for sustained rest of world stock outperformance. EAFE and EM tend to be good early cycle plays as the global economy recovers from recession. We are not in that sort of environment just yet.” It’s not been a great idea to bet on the rest of the world to beat the US stock market for almost 15 years now — and on this argument, it still isn’t.—Isabelle Lee
Every so often, there’s a time for schadenfreude. The Red Sox have been lackluster and inconsistent this season, and that’s being kind. They have a poorly constructed team that has occasionally been laughably incompetent at making basic plays.
But never mind. It’s not like we thought they were going to be that good. And there’s always great pleasure to be taken from the misfortunes of others; particularly the New York Yankees. A great (spoof) piece in The Onion reveals the following:
“After observing millions of different scenarios, we have confirmed that seeing the Yankees lose a home game and watching their awful fans sadly file out of the stadium increases dopamine production in the brain to levels unmatched by any other event,” said Professor Andrew Lau, a co-author of the Stanford University study, which found the average level of joy derived from seeing the Yankees lose a ball game surpassed that of watching one’s child be born, one’s wedding day, or winning the lottery.”
That sounds about right. In other sports, a stinging defeat for Manchester United or the Dallas Cowboys is almost as good. But discomfiture for the Yankees is particularly enjoyable. Barely a month ago, they were on track for the best season ever. But since then, they’ve lost two thirds of their games, and they seem to have forgotten how to hit, pitch, field, or — most hilariously — run the bases.
OK, they’re still way ahead of the Red Sox. I thought it was a good idea to indulge now rather than wait for their inevitable late-season resurgence. For now, life is good, and the Yankees are bad. If times are tough, you can always take pleasure in the misery of others. (And, as I write, the Yankees have just won 8-7 with the aid of a walkoff grand slam in the bottom of the 10th, so I’m glad I enjoyed their disquiet while it lasted.)More From Other Writers at Bloomberg Opinion:
• Jonathan Levin: Fed Shouldn’t Get Baited by Vigilante Stock Traders
• Hal Brands: Russia’s War in Ukraine Is How the Soviet Union Finally Ends
• Andrea Felsted: Target’s Having a Much Harder Time Than Walmart
(1) The Australian, Canadian and New Zealand dollars, the euro, Japanese yen, British pound, Norwegian krone, Swedish krona and Swiss franc. | 2022-08-18T06:07:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Two Nations Divided by an Uncommon Inflation - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/two-nations-divided-by-an-uncommon-inflation/2022/08/18/5902e8dc-1eb8-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/two-nations-divided-by-an-uncommon-inflation/2022/08/18/5902e8dc-1eb8-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Grant Wernick is facing a challenge many other Silicon Valley startup founders will find familiar. Before the pandemic, he had 20 employees working for his cybersecurity startup Fletch.ai in San Francisco. Since then, all but one moved to cities such as Portland, Seattle, Denver and Sacramento. His company is now fully remote, and it hasn’t been easy. Productivity slid in the second year of Covid. “Keeping the spirit alive is hard,” he says. Slack and Zoom just don’t beat face-to-face interactions.
His answer to the problem has been quarterly “offsite” meetings. Everyone is required to attend unless they have a serious excuse like contracting Covid. But these have become something of a workplace perk — there’s whale watching, pub crawls in Oakland. Younger employees might not want to meet in an office, but they do like the sound of going to Hawaii if the company meets its goals, says Wernick.
Offsites are nothing new, of course. There have long been executive golf trips and company picnics. But these events are now a necessity as companies battle apathy and loneliness among staff.
The pandemic forced many companies into a new normal, with 74% of U.S. firms planning a hybrid or remote model for their workforces. The numbers are even higher in the tech industry. Twitter Inc. said in 2020 that it would allow employees to work from home permanently. Airbnb Inc. founder Brian Cheskey said this April that his employees could “live and work anywhere.”
That’s had a noticeable impact on California’s Bay Area, where thousands of tech firms are based but where many workers have been fleeing. On a recent visit to San Francisco, I found the streets quieter than before, while offices for firms like Meta Platforms Inc. in Burlingame were more empty than full.
Zoom, with its largely transactional nature, is never going to replace the chance collaborations at the watercooler, and that hasn’t helped morale. A Gallup poll this year found just 21% of employees around the world were engaged at work. Who can blame them? New recruits typically get a laptop their first day and then are left on their own. The answer being pioneered by tech startups is to bring staff together for days at a time, at least once a quarter. Airbnb’s Chesky said his employees should expect to see one another for a week each quarter at a designated location.
Even larger firms with office space are exploring whether to use offsite meetings to boost their teams, according to offsite-planning companies such as The Offsite Experience Inc. and The Cowork Experience. GitLab Inc., a fully remote software firm with 1,700 employees, tells its departments to organize their own offsites, whether it’s mountain biking in Colorado, an improv workshop in San Francisco or water sports in Zanzibar. “Folks are usually energized by their in-person experiences,” says Stella Treas, chief of staff to GitLab’s CEO.
I know what you’re thinking. The idea of being forced to take part in “team-building exercises” and “ice breakers” with your colleagues makes you cringe, especially if it involves chanting, building a raft or making vehicle noises while blindfolded (all of which have actually happened). If you thought Zoom fatigue was bad, imagine spending several days in a hotel with people you’ve only ever seen on a screen.
In reality, though, meeting work colleagues fosters more collaboration and these events can make employees happier. Companies that have started setting up regular offsites say they’re seeing a jump in activity on Slack afterwards and positive responses on employee surveys. As employers figure out long-term strategies for managing remote workforces, they should consider regular offsites to boost teamwork and attract and retain talent.
Kelsey Bishop, founder of social-networking startup Candor, spoke to me last week from her company’s weeklong offsite in a large Airbnb house in Portugal. Earlier she had taken part in a two-hour tile-painting session with her staff, but they spent the rest of the time mostly working together in the living room and kitchen.
Typically, Bishop spends $5,000-$7,000 per quarterly offsite event, where attendance is mandatory for her team of 10 (who can also bring a plus-one and kids). But she would be spending much more, around $15,000 a month, to lease an office space in New York City, she says. Plus, younger job candidates are impressed when they hear they might be flown to Portugal. “It sounds sexier than it really is, because from a business perspective it’s not that expensive.”
That isn’t always the case, according to Jason Lemkin, who runs one of the largest networks for enterprise-software companies. “Most startups will spend more money on four great offsites a year than one office would cost,” he tweeted this month. “But you gotta do it.”
Elisa Rueda, founder of The Cowork Experience, said one of her last clients spent $150,000 on an event for 110 people — three nights at a campsite in the California redwood forest. J ared Kleinert, who runs The Offsite Experience, says his clients typically pay $2,500 per person, per offsite, and often meet up in hotels.
Would it make sense for a company to spend more on offsite gatherings than on real estate? I’d argue “yes.” Remote working has become the new normal, not because it’s cheaper, but because people love having the option to work from home. Flexible working has improved our quality of life. It’s so attractive, in fact, that even Silicon Valley companies, with their lavish office perks, have struggled to get people to come in regularly.
Offsite gatherings offer a compromise between forced, occasional face-time with coworkers and flexibility for most of the rest of the year. And, as Bishop showed, they don’t have to break the bank.
Of course, such events can also create new problems. Bad behavior during boozy outings could tank a company’s culture. And people shouldn’t be forced to socialize when they don’t want to. The perfect offsite has one-third of the time spent working, one-third spent on wellness activities and one-third on optional fun, advises Rueda.
But get it right and you’re offering the lure of regular, “travel-first” experiences, Kleinert says. “For millennial workforces, that’s like catnip.” It’s not a bad deal for older workers either.
• A New Normal Is Dividing the Global Chip Industry: Tim Culpan
• AI Panned My Screenplay. Can It Crack Hollywood?: Trung Phan | 2022-08-18T06:07:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trip to Portugal With Coworkers? It’s a New World of Offsites - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/trip-to-portugal-with-coworkers-its-a-new-world-of-offsites/2022/08/18/6eb9dafa-1eb3-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/trip-to-portugal-with-coworkers-its-a-new-world-of-offsites/2022/08/18/6eb9dafa-1eb3-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
U.S. and Taiwan to begin formal trade talks amid Pelosi visit fallout
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, left, and Taiwanese President President Tsai Ing-wen met in Taiwan on Aug. 3. China was deeply angered by Pelosi's visit to the self-governing island, which it claims sovereignty over. (AP)
BEIJING — The United States and Taiwan said they are set to begin formal trade negotiations, as Washington shows its support for the island democracy facing Beijing’s ire for hosting high-ranking U.S. congressional delegations.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said it expects the formal talks on the U.S.-Taiwan Initiative on 21st-Century Trade to begin in the fall. Washington had excluded Taiwan from the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, a trade initiative widely seen as an effort to counter China’s influence in the region, despite some U.S. lawmakers lobbying for Taiwan’s inclusion.
The U.S.-Taiwan negotiations will cover eleven areas including agriculture, small-and-medium sized enterprises, digital trade and the environment, according to Taiwan’s Executive Yuan, the executive branch of government. The goals for the talks include “strengthening the institutionalized connection between Taiwan and other countries,” it said in a statement Thursday.
“We plan to pursue an ambitious schedule for achieving high-standard commitments and meaningful outcomes,” said Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Sarah Bianchi in a statement.
The announcement comes several weeks after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) visited Taiwan in the face of strong protests from Beijing, which led to U.S.-China relations plummeting to their lowest point in years. Beijing considers Taiwan part of its territory, and tends to respond furiously to any gestures that seem to afford the self-governing island the status of a separate country. U.S. lawmakers and cabinet officials, however, have visited Taiwan for years.
Shortly after Pelosi’s visit, Beijing punished Taiwan by sanctioning some of its trade with China, and intensifying military drills in the waters surrounding the island. Chinese state media also reported the arrest of a Taiwanese man in China on suspicion of endangering national security and promoting Taiwanese independence.
Beijing continued the show of force on Thursday, with state media reporting the People’s Liberation Army destroyer Nanchang received a notice to join a landing exercise simulating a precision strike on an enemy coast. Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said that five ships and 21 aircraft were detected operating around Taiwan on Wednesday, with five aircraft crossing the Taiwan Strait’s median line.
Taiwan, with its population of 23 million, is the eighth largest trade partner of the United States. The island also plays a key role in global electronics supply chains: It is home to the world’s largest and most valuable chip manufacturer, TSMC, as well as crucial suppliers of other specialized components.
If the trade talks are a success, they could alleviate criticism among some supporters of Taiwan that Pelosi’s visit might do more harm than good, putting the island in a more perilous situation without providing concrete benefits.
But it’s also possible the talks may result in further retaliation from Beijing. “China firmly opposes any form of official contact between Taiwan and countries having diplomatic ties with China, including negotiating and signing agreements with implications of sovereignty and of an official nature,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said when plans for negotiations were announced in June.
Only 14 governments around the world recognize Taiwan as a country, including Belize, the Marshall Islands and the Vatican. The rest, including the United States, do not have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, Beijing and Taipei have refused diplomatic relations with any government that formally recognizes the other, resulting in the increasing isolation of Taiwan.
The United States and Taiwan have long kept unofficial relations through the American Institute in Taiwan and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States. The trade talks will be held through these bodies.
In an interview with Taiwan’s official Central News Agency on Saturday, Taiwan’s top trade negotiator John Deng said the government hoped the negotiations would conclude by the end of next year, before the 2023 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. | 2022-08-18T06:08:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S., Taiwan to begin formal trade talks amid Pelosi visit fallout - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/18/us-taiwan-trade-talks-negotiation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/18/us-taiwan-trade-talks-negotiation/ |
A mural seen on March 30 in Belgrade, Serbia, praises Russia’s Wagner Group. The notorious mercenary fighters are now a key part of Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine. (Pierre Crom/Getty Images)
But now, Wagner and its mercenaries have suddenly emerged from the shadows in the Ukraine war, openly celebrated on Russian state media and lauded as heroes of President Vladimir Putin’s bloody invasion. A recent special report on the most-watched state TV channel trumpeted the group’s gains on the Ukrainian front lines — an unthinkable acknowledgment of Wagner even just a few months ago.
A crucial roadway junction, Popasna became the site of a prolonged and bitter battle that started in mid-March and lasted for 1½ months. Throughout April, the Russian military’s advances stalled until reinforcements from Wagner helped achieve a breakthrough and, subsequently, the capture of the city in early May. | 2022-08-18T07:12:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In Ukraine, the notorious Russian Wagner group is recruiting. Murderers are welcome. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/17/ukraine-russia-wagner-group-mercenaries/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/17/ukraine-russia-wagner-group-mercenaries/ |
A worker puts a label on a bottle of Dassai-brand sake in Iwakuni, Japan, on July 7. (Noriko Hayashi/Bloomberg)
Japanese officials, worried about shifting demographics and a sharp decline in sin tax revenue, have come up with an unusual fix to their fiscal woes: encouraging young people to drink more.
“Sake Viva!” — a contest run by the nation’s tax agency — is calling on people aged 20 to 39 to come up with “business plans” to help revive Japan’s drinking culture, long an integral part of corporate life in the East Asian nation.
The coronavirus pandemic exacerbated a decades-long decline in Japanese alcohol consumption, with residents eating and drinking out far less than usual. Although Japan never went into a full lockdown, a state of emergency was declared in Tokyo, with measures including asking restaurants and bars to close early. At one stage in the pandemic, the sale of alcohol in restaurants was banned, while at other times it was restricted to certain hours of the day. While people drank more at home, overall alcohol consumption levels were lower than normal.
Liquor tax revenue in the fiscal 2020 year was about $8.4 billion, a plunge of more than $813 million from the previous year, government data show. That was the largest decline in three decades — and a cause for alarm for a government facing broad fiscal challenges.
By 2020, alcohol consumption in Japan had fallen by about a third from the annual average of 26½ gallons per person in the mid 1990s, according to Japan’s tax agency. Meanwhile, sales of nonalcoholic beverages — which aren’t subject to similar taxation — have grown in recent years, according to industry figures.
Just as in many economically developed places around the world, younger Japanese people are drinking less than older generations. A 2019 health ministry survey found that 29.4 percent of people in their 20s don’t drink alcohol at all, while 26.5 percent said that they rarely drink.
The unorthodox push by bureaucrats to “revitalize the liquor industry” has faced a backlash on social media. No major Japanese alcohol manufacturers have publicly indicated their support.
“Young people not drinking is a good thing. Why make them addicts,” one user wrote on Twitter, in a post that attracted hundreds of likes. Another wrote: “As long as they can collect taxes, I guess people’s health doesn’t matter.”
The contest asks the participants to propose new ways to spur booze sales, including using artificial intelligence and tapping on the metaverse — the virtual universe that blends aspects of digital technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality. Entries close on Sept. 9 and finalists will be invited to a tournament in Tokyo in November.
It also calls for “new services and promotion methods” to stimulate demand among young people, and create products that take account of lifestyle changes brought on by the pandemic.
The health ministry couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
Inuma reported from Tokyo. | 2022-08-18T07:34:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Japan creates contest to get young adults to drink more alcohol - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/18/japan-drinking-competition-alcohol-tax/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/18/japan-drinking-competition-alcohol-tax/ |
The headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. (Ron Harris/AP)
A “fast-moving” E. coli outbreak in Michigan and Ohio has left 29 people ill and nine of them hospitalized, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday.
In a separate news release, Michigan’s health department said it had received 98 reports of E. coli cases this month — up from 20 in August last year. Natasha Bagdasarian, the chief medical executive at the department, said the “significant jump in cases is alarming.” The Ohio Department of Health did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
An estimated 265,000 people report suffering from E. coli infections each year in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Video: Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
Symptoms of E. coli can include diarrhea, fever, excessive vomiting and dehydration, according to the CDC. “If you have symptoms of E. coli, help us solve this outbreak: Write down what you ate in the week before you got sick” and report your case to health authorities, the CDC said in its notice.
Scientists say this E. coli won’t make you sick and could be good for the planet
Why E. coli keeps getting into our lettuce | 2022-08-18T07:39:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | CDC reports E. coli outbreak in Michigan and Ohio - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/18/cdc-e-coli-outbreak-michigan-ohio/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/18/cdc-e-coli-outbreak-michigan-ohio/ |
(Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
— President Biden, in remarks during the signing of the Chips Act, Aug. 9
— Biden, in a tweet, Aug. 11
We’ve learned from experience that when a president utters a big job-creation number, it’s ripe for fact-checking. So we were curious to learn how the president’s job prediction for the Chips and Science Act — which will provide nearly $53 billion for U.S. semiconductor research, development, manufacturing and workforce development — was developed.
During the signing ceremony, Biden mentioned an “analysis” as the source for the claim that 1 million construction jobs would be created. In the tweet, which has recorded more than 5,000 retweets and 31,000 likes, the president treated the number of “more than 1 million construction jobs” as an established fact. But we were puzzled when we did not see the figure in the White House’s “fact sheet” on the bill.
The first tip-off that the number is fishy is because the number is so big and round — 1 million.
President Bill Clinton famously — and incorrectly — claimed in 1993 that the North American Free Trade Agreement would create 1 million jobs in five years. But that only happened because his staff accidentally supplied him with an early draft of remarks that included a made-up placeholder number. The White House quickly admitted the error.
The second tip-off is that Biden was specific — 1 million construction jobs in six years. Before the pandemic tanked jobs, the U.S. economy took four years to add 1 million construction jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data — from all industries, not just the semiconductor business.
When we asked the White House for documentation, we were directed to a 2021 report issued by the Semiconductor Industry Association. That report touted the contribution of the semiconductor industry and examined the potential impact of a $50 billion federal investment program, similar to the Chips Act.
That’s the third tip-off — this is a report issued by an industry advocate. With all respect to the SIA, it’s not neutral on the matter. It would be unusual for any trade group to issue a report that did not put the best gloss on the industry’s economic contributions.
“The statement about 1 million construction jobs is not accurate,” said Sarah Ravi, a spokeswoman for the association. She directed us to a chart in the report that indicated that a $50 billion investment would create an additional 6,200 construction jobs.
Hamilton Galloway, head of consultancy for the Americas at Oxford Economics, which crunched the numbers for the report, said the 1 million jobs would be created during what he called the six-year “construction phase” of the Chips Act investments. He said the largest share of jobs said to be created stems from capital expenditures — the purchase of semiconductor manufacturing machinery and other capital goods. In other words, not construction.
Note that the report said the jobs would be “created throughout the U.S. economy.” That means this is a calculation that includes direct jobs created — plus indirect jobs (via the supply chain) and induced jobs (people spending the wages they earn). These figures were created via economic impact software developed by IMPLAN, an economics firm, derived from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) input-output tables. These tables are used by economists to understand how industries interact with each other and with the rest of the economy. Depending on the industry, the creation of one job may reverberate differently in the economy.
IMPLAN provides the example of how the impact of a new vehicle manufacturing plant might be traced through the economy. Indirect effects would include the plant buying tires, electricity, advertising and paint — and then the tire company buying rubber, the electricity company buying coal, the advertising firm paying rent and the paint manufacturer buying chemicals. The induced effects would be the plant workers paying rent, buying groceries, getting haircuts — and then the real estate employees, grocery story employees and hair salon employees paying rent, buying groceries and getting haircuts. (The calculation also has to take into account the impact of taxes, profit-making and wages being placed into savings, all of which would reduce job creation.)
In the case of the semiconductor industry, the SIA report said the job multiplier for the semiconductor industry was 6.7, or 5.7 indirect and induced jobs for every direct job created.
During the 2011 debate over how many jobs would be created by the Keystone XL pipeline, we revealed how a report touting the benefits of a wind farm project had calculated such indirect and induced impacts to an absurd degree. Among the list of jobs that would allegedly be created by a proposed investment in wind farms: 51 dancers and choreographers, 138 dentists, 176 dental hygienists, 100 librarians, 510 bread bakers, 448 clergy, 154 stenographers, 865 hairdressers, 898 reporters, 136 manicurists, 110 shampooers, 98 public relations people, 65 farmers, and (our favorite) 1,714 bartenders.
The SIA report does not go to such lengths. It transparently says about half of the supposed jobs being created come from induced effects: “531,000 jobs will be supported as a result of workers spending their wages on consumer goods and services, such as groceries, utilities, and transportation.”
To get back to Biden’s emphasis on construction jobs, Galloway noted that the jobs “supported by construction,” such as cement manufacturing, would be higher than the 6,200 figure. The report estimates that about 56,000 direct jobs within the construction sphere would be created, with a total of nearly 120,000 through indirect and induced effects. That’s still much less than Biden’s 1 million.
There’s another issue with such calculations. They do not consider the state of the business cycle at the time of the investment. The Federal Reserve is now raising interest rates and the economy could be headed for a recession. “Input-output models don’t directly model a net change in jobs economywide, only the gross number of new jobs as a result of the expenditure,” Galloway said.
Wendy Edelberg, former chief economist at the Congressional Budget Office and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, was dubious about the job multiplier in the report.
“Those numbers seem implausible,” she said in an email, as the semiconductor industry does not operate in a vacuum. “Equipment manufacturers could manufacture other things if orders from chip companies didn’t expand in the U.S. or abroad. Or, if no one wants to buy equipment, those workers who would have made equipment could work elsewhere,” she said. “In that sense, it absolutely matters if we are in a recession. In the current economic environment, there is likely sufficient demand to employ workers either at the related industries, doing other things, or simply in different industries.”
Edelberg added: “There are no doubt positive benefits to expanding U.S. capacity to make chips, now and in the long run. But, that benefit doesn’t include expanding the number of jobs.”
The White House initially defended the figure but eventually conceded it was wrong. “There was a mix-up and this should have referred to the total jobs resulting from the legislation, but that doesn’t detract from the historic nature of this move to rebuild our manufacturing and supply chains here at home, and to win the competition with China in the industries of the future,” a White House official said.
There’s often a temptation for a politician to cite the highest possible job creation for a new policy. But the president stumbled badly here. In public remarks, and then in a tweet, he claimed 1 million construction jobs would be created because of the Chips Act.
The real number was just 6,200, according to the industry-commissioned report cited as the source. If you wanted to be generous, you could say the report said 56,000 jobs would be supported by construction. If you wanted to be very generous, you could say 1 million jobs would be supported in the “construction phase” of the law. But that would be overly generous, given that the White House amplified Biden’s statement in a tweet; it was not a simple misspeak.
There’s also the separate issue as to whether indirect and especially induced jobs should be part of such political talking points — especially in an uncertain economic period when the number of jobs may not expand.
But in any case, there is no reason to get the number so wrong — twice. While the White House concedes a “mix-up,” the tweet has not been deleted; neither has the official transcript been corrected. The president earns Four Pinocchios. | 2022-08-18T07:39:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden’s bogus boast of 1 million ‘construction jobs’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/18/bidens-bogus-1-million-construction-jobs-boast/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/18/bidens-bogus-1-million-construction-jobs-boast/ |
In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, Yang Jiechi, right, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, poses for photos with Akiba Takeo, head of Japan’s National Security Secretariat, during the ninth China-Japan high-level political dialogue in Tianjin municipality in northern China Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2022. Chinese and Japanese officials have met in northern China amid renewed tensions over China’s military threats against Taiwan that have prompted protests from Tokyo over the firing of Chinese missiles into Japan’s exclusive economic zone. (Zhao Zishuo/Xinhua via AP) (Anonymous/Xinhua)
BEIJING — Chinese and Japanese officials have met in northern China amid renewed tensions over Beijing’s military threats against Taiwan and after Tokyo protested China’s firing of missiles into Japan’s exclusive economic zone during recent military drills. | 2022-08-18T07:39:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | China, Japan officials meet amid Taiwan tensions - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/china-japan-officials-meet-amid-taiwan-tensions/2022/08/18/a7477bac-1ebd-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/china-japan-officials-meet-amid-taiwan-tensions/2022/08/18/a7477bac-1ebd-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
FILE - In this image provided by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, right, and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres leave a news conference during their meeting in Kyiv, Ukraine, Thursday, April 28, 2022. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022 is set to host his Turkish counterpart and the U.N. chief for talks about the implementation of a deal to resume Ukraine grain exports, the volatile situation at a Russia-occupied nuclear power plant and diplomatic efforts to help end the war. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP, File) (Uncredited/Ukrainian Presidential Press Office)
LVIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is due to host the U.N. chief and Turkey’s leader Thursday for talks on the recent deal to resume Ukraine's grain exports, the volatile situation at a Russian-occupied nuclear power plant and efforts to help end the nearly six-month-old war. | 2022-08-18T07:39:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Zelenskyy to host Lviv talks with UN chief, Turkish leader - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/zelenskyy-to-host-lviv-talks-with-un-chief-turkish-leader/2022/08/18/345bd128-1ebe-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/zelenskyy-to-host-lviv-talks-with-un-chief-turkish-leader/2022/08/18/345bd128-1ebe-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
COSTA MESA, Calif. — Derwin James signed a four-year, $76.5 million contract extension with the Los Angeles Chargers on Wednesday, making him the NFL’s highest-paid safety.
ARLINGTON, Texas — Jon Daniels is out as president of baseball operations for the Texas Rangers after two World Series appearances during 17 years leading the club, likely finishing his tenure with a string of losing seasons. | 2022-08-18T07:40:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Wednesday Sports in Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/wednesday-sports-in-brief/2022/08/18/ebb7395a-1ec5-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/wednesday-sports-in-brief/2022/08/18/ebb7395a-1ec5-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Ukraine live briefing: Strikes pound Kharkiv; U.N. chief to discuss grain deal, nuclear risk
Burnt cars painted with sunflowers on Wednesday in Irpin, Ukraine. (Alexey Furman/Getty Images)
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres is in Ukraine to review progress on a deal to release the country’s grain exports, and strikes overnight pummeled Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
The U.N. chief will meet the leaders of Ukraine and Turkey to address the nuclear threat from an escalation in fighting around the Zaporizhzhia plant in southern Ukraine. The U.N. atomic energy watchdog has warned of potential disaster and has been unable to visit the facility, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which Russia now controls.
Guterres is also expected to visit a Black Sea port at the heart of the U.N.-backed grain deal, brokered in Turkey to alleviate rising hunger around the world. Ukraine’s port authority said the largest caravan yet will be loaded with wheat, corn and sunflower products for exporting, after a vessel carrying food aid for the Horn of Africa set sail.
Ukraine is activating a unit under the command of its special forces to attack far behind Russian lines, its defense minister said in an interview. Kyiv hopes this will undermine Russia’s ability to hold the front lines in occupied territory ahead of a potential counteroffensive, he said. Explosions that rocked Russian targets in the Crimean Peninsula over the past week drew attention to the strategy as Ukrainian officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Washington Post that special forces were responsible.
Kharkiv had one of its “most tragic” nights in the war, the region’s governor said early Thursday after what he described as hours of Russian strikes that shook sleeping residents awake and battered their homes. Oleh Synyehubov said shelling in one part of the region killed seven people and injured 17 others. In a district of the city of the same name, a strike on a dormitory also killed two people and injured 18 more, he said.
Dozens of rescuers worked through the night in Kharkiv to douse fires and clear the rubble of buildings, photos showed. As artillery fire on Kharkiv has ramped up, Human Rights Watch denounced the assault on the northeastern region this week. The New York-based group said it documented attacks on health-care facilities, homes and populated areas using explosive weapons and cluster munitions.
An interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: In an hour-long interview with The Post at the presidential office, its hallways lined with sandbags, Zelensky discussed U.S. warnings about Russia preparing to launch a full-scale invasion.
The Post has published a translated and lightly edited transcript of excerpts from the wide-ranging interview. Read the excerpts here, and find The Post’s months-long examination of the road to the war in Ukraine here.
In the interview, Zelensky defended his government’s response to U.S. intelligence warnings and said Western nations did not send his country the advanced weapons it needed before the war began. | 2022-08-18T07:40:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russia-Ukraine war latest updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/18/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/18/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/ |
By Haq Nawaz Khan
Mourners carry the body of a victim of a mosque bombing in Kabul on Aug. 18. (Ebrahim Noroozi/AP)
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A bomb blast in a mosque in the Khair Khana area of Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, killed 21 worshipers including a prominent prayer leader on Wednesday evening, Taliban officials and residents said.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but a year since the Taliban takeover of the country, the rival Islamic State continues to stage assaults, particularly on places of worship.
“With extreme grief, I am going to say that 21 people were martyred and 33 others injured in a bomb blast in a mosque,” Khalid Zadran, a spokesman for the Kabul police, told The Washington Post on Thursday. “The bomb blast occurred when the worshipers were offering the evening prayer the other day.”
“The law enforcement agencies have been working to arrest the perpetrators of the deadly attack and would be tried in the court of law,” he added.
Emergency services reported receiving 27 injured people Wednesday night, including five children.
Zabihullah Mujahid, acting deputy information minister and a key spokesman for the Afghan Taliban, condemned the bombing in the mosque and added in a tweet Wednesday night that “the killers and perpetrators of the blast will be arrested soon and will be punished.”
Residents said the prayer leader, Amir Mohammad Kabuli, was an outspoken cleric and preacher not associated with or aligned against any group. “I am not sure why and who targeted Mawlawi, but he was a great Islamic preacher and always spoke the truth,” said a resident, using the preacher’s honorific. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation and added that many scholars like Kabuli were targeted before the Taliban took over, often by the Islamic State.
Last week, Rahimullah Haqqani, another prominent cleric linked to the Taliban was killed in a bombing.
The wave of attacks linked to the Islamic State’s branch in the country is the first real sustained challenge to the Taliban since it took over a year ago. The group appears to have expanded its presence in Afghanistan since U.S. forces pulled out. Taliban authorities have repeatedly promised to crush the group. | 2022-08-18T09:11:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kabul mosque blast kills over 20; Islamic State suspected - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/18/afghanistan-kabul-mosque-blast/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/18/afghanistan-kabul-mosque-blast/ |
How long-gone transit lines shaped cities — and why the pandemic might, too
Urban economist Leah Brooks discusses the influence streetcars had on growing American cities a century ago
Leah Brooks, director of the Center for Washington Area Studies at George Washington University. (Sam Levitan/GWU’s Trachtenberg School)
More than a century ago, streetcars opened the way to the suburbs as a burgeoning middle class began to leave behind downtown when finishing work each day.
Streetcars are generally long gone, replaced by buses and cars. But Leah Brooks, director of the Center for Washington Area Studies at George Washington University, has studied how these early transit networks shaped cities across the United States and the world, locking in patterns we live with today.
Those patterns that have held for more than a century could be shifting. In the Washington region — and in many other places — the pandemic has shaken the relationship between the suburbs and downtown, as many workers continue to favor their desks at home rather than at the office. At the same time, communities in Virginia and Maryland are investing in new rail lines.
Brooks talked to The Washington Post about the legacy of streetcars, what her research suggests about the prospects of the Silver Line and the Purple Line and why the pandemic might represent a break with the past. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: You’ve studied how even defunct transit networks like streetcars have shaped the cities of today. Why is that?
A: Long ago, transit networks defined the density of land use in cities and the shape and form of buildings. And once cities take on a shape and form, they are very, very, very hard to change — not impossible — but very hard to change. There are these economic forces that make people want to locate together in cities and where, you know, if you’re a nail salon, you might want to locate next to a grocery store so you can get the people going to the grocery store to come to your nail salon in one trip instead of multiple trips. And because those forces exist when a neighborhood is either doing really well or really poorly, there are a lot of incentives for that neighborhood to keep going in its current trajectory.
Cities are turning to supercharged bus routes to more quickly and cheaply expand transit services
Q: Were streetcars the first technology that had this power in terms of transportation, or do we see this in the course of even older cities, that they grew up around nonmotorized transportation?
A: Well before streetcars, cities were defined by how far people could walk. In the walking era, cities were maybe two miles wide. That was true for cities across the world. So there was just a limit to the size of cities. And then the streetcar arrives and the streetcar, relative to everything that comes before it, is cheap and it can go really long distances. They would go from the center of Washington out to the suburbs in Prince George’s County, like in Hyattsville, or they go out to Silver Spring. You know, these are relatively long distances that you could ride pretty inexpensively. Streetcars were a sea change in urban transportation.
Q: You’ve identified similar patterns in Los Angeles and overseas in Bogotá, Colombia, and Jakarta, Indonesia. Where would you place Washington in all of this? It’s got an old core and then you have these streetcar suburbs you mentioned, but the Metro system is pretty modern.
A: I see Washington as a city where density is still largely determined by these original streetcar lines, because streetcars deliver density in a way that highways do not. You don’t need to build densely in the way you needed to when people actually had to walk to the streetcar stop. So you get a very different density pattern from highway-generated development, like you see in the outer suburbs in Maryland and Virginia, than you see in the inner suburbs. I think part of the reason the D.C. Metro was able to be as successful as it has been is because it relied on the pattern of density that the streetcars laid out in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Without that, the Metro couldn’t have succeeded.
$250 million approved as costs escalate on Silver Line extension
Q: Now we’ve got the Silver Line that is really striking quite far out into the suburbs in Virginia. And then you have the Purple Line trying to fill in rail transit between suburbs. What do you see as the potential for those projects?
A: First and foremost, for those transit investments to generate enough riders to be successful, they have to have underlying residential and commercial density nearby. And it’s clear that the planners in Tysons know this and they are trying — in what I understand as being an almost unique way — to take a suburban street layout and density pattern and change it to an almost urban street layout and density pattern to support these transit investments. I’m interested to see how it’s going to turn out. It seems ambitious and valiant in some ways. I think if you can’t succeed in Tysons, where a lot of interests have aligned to make this try to work — landowners, the county, a reasonably good underlying transit system all coming together — it’s probably not going to work elsewhere.
My understanding of the Purple Line is that there’s not as much of a wholesale attempt to change the urban grid near the Purple Line stops. At first when I heard about the Purple Line, I thought, “This is nuts. Who wants to take a cross-county commuter train? You’d have to drive to the train and then you’d get somewhere and then you’d need a car at the other stop.” But then I thought, “Well, maybe what the Purple Line is really doing is linking up more places to the Metro lines that take people downtown,” and I think pre-pandemic, that’s a way of increasing land value because you’re getting more places Metro-adjacent. Post-pandemic, I think we have yet to see how downtown land use is going to shake out, but I think it’s probably not as good an investment as it was five years ago.
Q: The pandemic looms over all of this. So many of our transportation investments were about bringing people from residential space to commercial space. And the pandemic has meant that for a lot of people, those spaces have collapsed into one, and it’s the residential space that has won out. What do you think that means for the future?
A: I do expect cities to change from the pandemic, and I think it’s going to be a particular threat to our current model of public transportation, which is generally a system that takes people from residential areas to a downtown commercial area. And in some ways, that’s what makes transit feasible. Our transit systems are made to take outlying areas into one central place and not to take people to any point across a grid of places. That’s really expensive. And if the pandemic makes it less valuable for people to go to that commercial center because some of them can work from home, it makes that kind of transit system less valuable. The thought of building a transit system that works along a grid is a truly horrifying prospect, cost-wise.
As workers return to the office, experts see early signs of more driving
Q: Do you think we’re at a pretty radical break here? Or are development patterns associated with private cars just as important and there’s less reason to think that they will have been as significantly affected?
A: Don’t take my emphasis on streetcars as saying that cars are not incredibly important. I like to think of the streetcars as being like the Betamax videocassette. You know, they’re really important for a very brief while. And then very quickly superseded by this better, in many ways — probably not for the environment though — technology, which is the car. If you have a choice between getting from point A to point B in a streetcar or a car, and the car is going to get you there faster and possibly more cheaply as well, almost everyone is going to choose the car. To make transit viable when you have the option of a private automobile, there has to be either a lot of congestion so that transit is faster or there has to be really expensive parking so that the transit is cheaper. Or you have to be so poor that you can’t afford a car. Any of one those three could drive you to take transit. That’s why the car is so important, because it gives people this option for mobility.
Now, whether the pandemic is an inflection point? I don’t know. I’m waiting for the first recession to see what happens and how much leverage employers gain over employees and whether they’re going to force employees to the office. I feel like after the first recession then we’ll have a better sense. | 2022-08-18T10:28:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transit lines shaped cities — and why the pandemic might, too - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/08/18/dc-streetcars-planning-transit-pandemic/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/08/18/dc-streetcars-planning-transit-pandemic/ |
James Warren has crafted eight benches and placed them at bus stops around Denver, each made from scrap wood he finds in dumpsters
James Warren, 28, with one of the benches he built for a bus stop in Denver. Warren, who regularly rides public transit, noticed there was a lack of seating at bus stops, so he decided to build benches. (James Warren)
James Warren rides the public bus a lot in his hometown of Denver. Ever since he went car-free in 2017, he uses buses to get around if he can’t get to his destination on foot or bike.
Then in January, Warren spotted a woman waiting for a bus along a busy road. There was no seating at the stop — and no sidewalk — so she sat in the dirt.
“For people to have to sit in the dirt while they’re waiting for a bus is just undignified,” said Warren, 28, who works as a consultant for the Colorado Workforce Development Council.
“I just took some scrap wood and went to town,” Warren said, adding that he hoped this woman — and others seeking a seat — would not need to rest in the dirt again.
“I can change the small amount that I have control over,” Warren said.
Since building his first bench in January, he has crafted seven more and placed them at bus stops around Denver — each made from scrap wood he finds in construction dumpsters. As far as design goes, “I mostly just wing it,” Warren said.
The benches take about three hours to build, and Warren inscribes “Be Kind” on each one — either using a stencil or a wood-burning tool. He keeps an eye out for bus stops around the city that seem barren. He chats with riders at stops to gauge demand.
Recently at one bus stop, “I was talking to someone who said it’s difficult to stand for long periods of time,” Warren said. “I knew where the next bench was going.”
“I get a little giddy when I see someone using a bench,” he said. “They are so thankful. They tell me how annoying it is to wait, or how painful it is to wait.”
“I met some ladies the other day who were talking about how they used the benches every single day,” Warren added. “It fills me up. It’s air in my tires.”
Although some of the benches have been vandalized or stolen, Warren said it doesn’t dampen his desire to make them.
“If people destroy or take away things that I’m putting out there, it’s not going to stop me,” he said. “I’ll keep doing it. For every bench they steal, I’ll put out two more.”
“I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me on Twitter and Reddit,” he said. “Some people have wanted to come help me.”
“He showed me how he does it. It’s a pretty simple design, but it seems to work well,” Haugom said. “It’s been great to just get different people involved and to have something to offer the community.”
“This guy has motivation,” Haugom said of Warren. “Not just a normal amount, huge amounts of motivation. I have never seen anyone quite as motivated as James is to do these things. Hopefully it rubs off on me.”
Others saw Warren’s work in the local news and decided to take out their tools, too. People also started donating supplies.
“That puts me over the moon,” Warren said. “That’s the idea. Let’s just all help our neighbors.”
As word of the bench initiative spread further, advocates cheered Warren on — and vouched for the importance of more bus stop seating.
“Benches provide a place to rest. Everybody needs to rest,” said Nica Cave, 26, a Denver mobility advocate.
“It’s a public asset that I think is a lot more important than people realize,” she said. “The lack of infrastructure, shelter and seating at transit stops is part of a broader set of policies that marginalize those who rely on public transit. These are people that rely on public spaces being habitable, not hostile.”
She emphasized that grass-roots efforts, such as Warren’s, can spark significant changes.
“People like James are really encouraging me to see how people in our community are willing to use their own time and own resources to provide these much-needed services,” Cave said, adding that she hopes the local government will see his benches and get involved.
That is precisely Warren’s goal. Since he started making benches in January, Warren said he has had several conversations with city officials and transit staff about adding benches more broadly.
Brandon Figliolino, a senior specialist for community engagement at RTD, spoke with Warren about his aspirations for the project — which Figliolino has shared with his team.
“We definitely appreciate when customers raise their concerns, so we can work to address them collaboratively,” said Figliolino, adding that RTD typically coordinates with local municipalities and counties to maintain and build bus stops. “We’re looking into what partners we can work with to ensure that the needs are being met.”
Warren — who is planning to organize a bench-building workshop — said his hope is that his benches make a difference in his community and even beyond.
“My goal is to make people’s lives just a little bit better, in any way I can,” Warren said. | 2022-08-18T10:37:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | James Warren makes bus stop benches after he saw woman wait in dirt - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/18/bus-stop-denver-bench-warren/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/18/bus-stop-denver-bench-warren/ |
Scott, left, is 28 and a consultant. He is seeking someone who “has a plan and knows what they want,” and who is handsome, tall and blond. Logan is 28 and a UX designer. He is looking for a “guy who’s outgoing, active, talkative that can take me out of my comfort zone.” (Daniele Seiss)
The first time Logan met Scott, both 28, was at a Halloween party last year. Scott was wearing caution tape, dressed as Lady Gaga from the “Telephone” music video; Logan was an anglerfish. “Not a sexy anglerfish,” Logan clarified. “Just a regular go-to anglerfish.” Upon reflection, Scott remembered this as well: “I think it was a onesie-type situation.”
As Scott recalled, they had a “five-minute conversation.” Logan’s recollection is that they were “briefly introduced” but may not have even spoken directly. But the group that coordinated the party stayed in touch over text, and Scott and Logan were included. Both described it as one of those extended friend galaxies where you can be on the thread without knowing everyone else well, or even really at all — until fate or, for instance, a magazine’s matchmakers, set you up on a date.
Logan, a UX designer, signed up for Date Lab after taking a much-needed break from dating when a relationship that started just before lockdown ended in March last year. “I’ve mostly been a long-term serious dating relationship person,” he said. “Honestly, I was a very insecure young gay man who always felt like I needed to be with somebody.”
He endured the post-breakup struggle — “I cut my hair and bleached it like every homosexual that has a panic attack” — but spent his year of singledom making new friends, getting into psychotherapist Esther Perel and changing his dating perspective. As he reentered the dating scene, he went out with someone who’d done Date Lab. “So, I signed up as a lark,” he said. “Why not? Sometimes you need to do things for the plot.”
He wasn’t all that specific on what he’s looking for, only saying he wants to feel “that my life is more enriched from having [that partner] be there,” and that he won’t date conservatives. “Deep down I have a type: a hot camp counselor. Eager and fun but also very hot on the [down low].”
Scott, a consultant, has been in D.C. since September and hasn’t dated much since his arrival from Boston, where he went to graduate school. “I’ve just been figuring out my social life here,” he said, though if he’s being honest, he hasn’t “ever been super-proactive about dating.” At dinner recently, a friend told him she was a Date Lab fan. He figured the column would push him to follow through. He signed up while they were eating and was matched soon after.
“It would be kind of nice to have a long-term boyfriend,” Scott said. “[But] I’m a very independent person.” He described himself as “driven” and “on the serious side,” seeking someone similar. “I think a really extroverted person would exhaust me.” He’d like to find someone who “has a plan and knows what they want.” (And he cares that a romantic partner “works out regularly,” as he does.)
The night of the date, Logan was the first to arrive at El Secreto De Rosita on U Street NW. He did some minimal date prep — checking his beard line, consulting a friend on his outfit, which had “a very standard queer vibe” — and showed up 15 minutes early, to avoid fretting about running late. By the time Scott arrived just a few minutes late (in a tight short-sleeve button-up borrowed from a friend, who had also advised on first-date etiquette because Scott was feeling “rustier”), Logan already had a glass of sparkling wine in hand.
Immediately, they realized that they’d met before. For Scott, it was “a pleasant surprise” to see the “cute” Logan again. For Logan, the memory took some of the air out of the date: “I don’t think I was particularly interested because … I had already made that assessment” at the party.
Over a three-hour dinner, they bonded over some shared interests — there was decent overlap in the anime, comics and manga arena — and explored what they didn’t have in common. Scott, a self-described “pretty science-y person,” was intrigued by Logan’s artistic nature and how Logan’s career “merges his passions.”
But Scott was turned off by Logan’s lack of interest in food: “He [said] he just eats to sustain himself,” said Scott, which doesn’t align with Scott’s desire to find someone who wants to try new restaurants with him. And Logan felt like Scott was “very interested in knowing my life goals, and I feel like I didn’t potentially have a good enough answer for him in the moment.” (Logan used to be more of a rigid goal-setter, he said, but it wasn’t bringing him happiness, so he’s “just been vibing and enjoying my life.”)
As the date ended with a hug, Scott asked if Logan wanted to share Instagram accounts — they weren’t already following each other. They added each other and left. “I definitely did enjoy the date and would be willing to go on a second,” said Scott, but that closing interaction “didn’t give off ‘I’m interested in doing this again.’ ”
“I think he seemed like a very sweet guy, [and] it was great to have a deeper conversation with him,” said Logan. “[But] the spark was not there from the get.”
Scott: 4.
Logan: 2.5.
They exchanged messages, but there was no second date.
Jessica M. Goldstein is a regular contributor to The Post’s Style section. | 2022-08-18T10:37:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Date Lab: He was ‘a pleasant surprise’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/08/18/date-lab-he-was-pleasant-surprise/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/08/18/date-lab-he-was-pleasant-surprise/ |
Once a satire of the abortion divide, ‘Citizen Ruth’ now has a ‘devastating’ relevance
Director Alexander Payne and star Laura Dern talk about the 1996 film they had hoped would become ‘passe’ — not a window into current abortion politics
Laura Dern in 1996's “Citizen Ruth.” (Miramax/Everett Collection)
The texts and emails began a few months ago after a leaked Supreme Court decision appeared to signal the impending end of Roe v. Wade. After the court confirmed its stunning reversal of abortion rights in June, director Alexander Payne says calls for his 1996 film “Citizen Ruth” to be rereleased or given a sequel have only intensified.
“Citizen Ruth” was Payne’s feature directorial debut — predating the critically acclaimed “Election” by three years — and starred Laura Dern as the titular Ruth, a pregnant woman whose struggles with drug addiction and homelessness lead her to become a pawn in the abortion debate.
Payne never imagined the satire, which he co-wrote with frequent collaborator Jim Taylor, would be relevant three decades after it premiered to mostly positive reviews (and some controversy). “I can’t believe people even remember the movie,” Payne said in a phone call last month, let alone “see it as prescient or, sadly, still relevant.”
The renewed relevance of the film is “absolutely devastating” to Dern. She was marching with her teenage daughter and Planned Parenthood the week before the official reversal came down, and felt “presumptive that no Supreme Court and no justice could ever overturn that decision and do something so archaic and shocking,” she said by phone last month. With “Citizen Ruth,” “we thought we were making something that in three years might be passe. And now it’s worse for my daughter’s generation.”
“Citizen Ruth” is a particularly beloved deep cut for fans of the actress, who has become known for playing similarly unsympathetic protagonists you can’t help but root for: whistleblower Amy Jellicoe in “Enlightened”; Renata “I will NOT not be rich” Klein in “Big Little Lies.” Dern was fresh off the blockbuster “Jurassic Park” when she came across Payne and Taylor’s script about an Omaha woman whose addiction to huffing spray paint has landed her in jail and state-funded substance abuse programs countless times.
The unsentimental abortion scene in ‘Shrill’ isn’t groundbreaking. Here’s why that’s a big deal.
“I literally called [Payne] up and said ‘I am Ruth Stoops, you have to cast me in this movie,’” Dern recalled. “I felt so emotionally connected to her and so obsessed with it, and I felt like I just understood the comedy of it, which was so specific.”
With four children already removed from her care, Ruth discovers she’s pregnant yet again, angering the judge who weighs her fate following another arrest. “You sicken me,” the judge tells Ruth. “Sor-ry,” she whispers while playing with the teeth of a hot pink comb. “So-oh-ryy.”
Ruth’s repeat offenses prompt the judge to back a prosecutor’s shocking request, charging Ruth with felony criminal endangerment of her unborn child. Before she’s taken to jail, the judge alludes to the possibility of her charges being reduced if she goes to the doctor to “take care of it.” But after being locked in a cell, Ruth meets a group of antiabortion activists who bail her out, offer her shelter and try to make her a public representative of their cause. Abortion rights advocates who have infiltrated the antiabortion group simultaneously work to sway the unwitting Ruth to their side.
Payne and Taylor took inspiration from a news story about a North Dakota woman who had been sent to jail under similar circumstances. When they read how the woman had been offered help by the extreme antiabortion group Lambs of Christ and abortion rights advocates employed at a local women’s clinic, they instantly envisioned it as a black comedy. Payne met resistance when he pitched the project, with executives ruling it “too dangerous” or mistaking it for “an earnest issue movie.” It was producer Cary Woods, who remembered Payne from his impressive UCLA film school debut, who “got me an office and a casting director and started getting the script out there.”
With the help of Woods, who went on to produce “Citizen Ruth,” Payne was able to garner interest in the film from actors including Burt Reynolds, Swoosie Kurtz, Mary Kay Place and Kelly Preston. With Dern and other A-listers in place, Woods sold the project to Miramax (the company owned by a then-powerful Harvey Weinstein). It was shot in Payne’s native Nebraska on a roughly $2 million budget. It generated buzz at the Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered in January 1996. When it was released in theaters later that year, Payne says “the studio kind of dumped it, so it really didn’t do well at the box office.” “We’re all really proud of it,” he added. “We had a really good time making it, you know, young and full of spit and vinegar.”
“Citizen Ruth” very intentionally does not take sides in the abortion debate. The film’s villain is the extremism that fuels both factions, led on the grass-roots level by Kurtz and Place’s characters. Payne said one prominent criticism of the film when it came out was that “it wasn’t pro-choice enough.” (He recalls that one particularly liberal friend was so incensed at the movie’s likening of antiabortion extremists to abortion rights advocates that she ended their friendship.) “I think it’s the reason that it has survived a little bit thematically,” Payne says. “It’s a satire, so it’s much more about how an individual can be lost amid a larger struggle.”
Ruth “becomes a symbol for each side rather than the recognition of who she is as a person, which is ultimately, of course, a pro-choice kind of argument,” Payne says. “But, ostensibly, it’s a human theme rather than a political theme, and I think that’s what’s given it legs.”
Over the years, “Citizen Ruth” has become a cult-favorite black comedy, but it can be hard to find. Until recently, it was only available for purchase on Prime Video, YouTube and other platforms; as of this month, it’s streaming on Paramount Plus.
“I’m thrilled as more and more people discover it, because of a couple of favorite characters in my career, [Ruth] is definitely up there,” Dern said. “I just love her so much.”
From the archives: 'Citizen Ruth' is brave, funny and thoroughly irreverent
She credits Payne for “his unrelenting, unapologetic direction of the character.” “It takes that kind of courage to ask an actor to never, ever need to find or long for empathy from an audience, but just be that complicated, sometimes awful, selfish, sometimes not smart, mess of a pound-rescue girl,” Dern said. “It really freed me and I think made it as honest and also as funny and sad — and all those things — as it is.”
Dern showed the film to her son, now 20, and daughter, 17, a few summers ago when her daughter was working at Planned Parenthood. “It was just an amazing experience to see it again,” she said.
“The film at its core reminds us that people just want to win, to prove they’re right without even considering the human being or the circumstance — a life-threatening circumstance to a mother or child,” Dern said. “It’s just heartbreaking.” | 2022-08-18T10:41:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Once a satire of the abortion divide, ‘Citizen Ruth’ now has a ‘devastating’ relevance - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/18/citizen-ruth-abortion-roe-wade/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/18/citizen-ruth-abortion-roe-wade/ |
Las Vegas is among the areas at a high risk of home price declines should a recession begin, according to Redfin. (John Locher/AP)
While visions of a housing market meltdown haunt some buyers more than a decade after the Great Recession, many economists don’t anticipate widespread home value declines even if a recession hits again.
Redfin’s analysis is based on multiple housing-related factors, such as home price growth, home price volatility and the average debt-to-income ratio of homeowners. The inclusion of that debt ratio is because homeowners with higher levels of debt are more likely to need a foreclosure or short sale if they cannot pay their mortgage, which drives overall home prices lower.
The 10 markets with the lowest Redfin scores — meaning they’re less likely to experience price reductions — include: Akron (29.6), Philadelphia (30.4), Montgomery County, Pa. (31.4), El Paso (32.2), Cleveland (32.4), Cincinnati (32.6), Boston (32.6), Buffalo (33.1), Kansas City, Missouri (33.4) and Rochester, N.Y. (34). | 2022-08-18T10:42:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Housing hotspots at risk of recession price drops - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/16/housing-hotspots-risk-recession-price-drops/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/16/housing-hotspots-risk-recession-price-drops/ |
Black infants have historically suffered the most, while medicine focused on White babies.
Perspective by Shannon Withycombe
Shannon Withycombe is associate professor of history at the University of New Mexico and author of "Lost: Miscarriage in Nineteenth-Century America."
A baby girl sleeps in a nursery crib. (iStock)
Antiabortion activists and lawmakers continue to celebrate the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision as a win for America’s infants. Yet, many of the states that have recently banned or severely restricted abortion access have the highest infant mortality rates in the country. Louisiana, for example, which now bans nearly all abortions, has a higher infant mortality rate than 66 countries — and a Black infant mortality rate higher than 82 countries.
U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) garnered public attention on the issue last spring. “If you correct our population for race,” he claimed, “we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear.” Despite Louisiana having the second-highest infant mortality rate and the fifth-highest maternal mortality rate in the nation, Cassidy seemed to be saying that somehow only looking at the deaths of White infants and mothers is the “correct” viewpoint when addressing health statistics.
J. Whitridge Williams, for example, was a White physician who investigated infant mortality in Baltimore and published his findings in 1914. He looked at 705 infant deaths within a population he estimated was 46 percent Black. In reporting his findings that syphilis accounted for the majority of deaths among Black infants, he found a way to discount this as a cause of concern because it “only” accounted for 14 percent of the deaths of White infants. He argued that Black Baltimoreans lacked proper intelligence and care to prevent syphilis, and that these deficiencies were ones that “so frequently characterize[d] that race.” As he saw it, biological inferiority caused syphilis in Black Americans, which no amount of funding or treatment could change.
In celebrating the Dobbs v. decision, Cassidy likewise proclaimed: “Being pro-life means being pro-mothers, pro-babies, and pro-healthy futures.” While we can criticize antiabortion politicians like the senator from Louisiana for their callous and hypocritical words and actions, we cannot forget the role of medicine and public health in constructing a society that devalues Black life. | 2022-08-18T10:43:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Dobbs may exacerbate our racially disparate infant mortality rates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/18/dobbs-may-exacerbate-our-racially-disparate-infant-mortality-rates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/18/dobbs-may-exacerbate-our-racially-disparate-infant-mortality-rates/ |
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