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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has pushed laws that limit discussion of diversity and inclusion in workplaces, colleges and universities, and public schools. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP)
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — A federal judge on Thursday blocked Florida from enforcing a new state law that limits how private companies teach diversity and inclusion in the workplace, saying the measure violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression.
In a ruling that took aim at one of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s top priorities, U.S. District Court Judge Mark E. Walker said Florida has turned “the First Amendment upside down” by trying to regulate how employers train employees on topics such as racial inclusion and gender equity.
“Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech, while private actors may burden speech freely,” Walker wrote, comparing the state to the television series “Stranger Things.” “But in Florida, the First Amendment apparently bars private actors from burdening speech, while the state may burden speech freely.”
Walker’s ruling blocks Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody (R) and state regulators from enforcing a key provision of the “Stop Woke Act,” which the Republican-controlled legislature approved in March. DeSantis, a possible candidate for president in 2024, frequently touts the measure during political speeches in front of conservative audiences.
Spokesmen for DeSantis and Moody did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The “Stop Woke Act,” also referred to in court filings as the “Individual Freedom Measure,” prohibits trainings in public schools, colleges and universities, and workplaces that may cause someone to feel guilty or ashamed about the past collective actions of their race or sex. A violation of the act is an offense under state anti-discrimination laws.
As students return to classrooms, the law is already having far-reaching consequences, with teachers shelving some lesson plans amid considerable confusion over how it will be enforced. In July, the University of Central Florida even removed statements condemning racism from some websites, which faculty members believed was in response to the law.
The injunction, issued by Walker in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida in Tallahassee, only blocks the enforcement of provisions of the law that deal with trainings offered by private employers.
But several other legal challenges have been filed against other provisions of the law, including a lawsuit Thursday that the American Civil Liberties Union filed on behalf of 10 college professors. That suit, also filed in federal court, seeks to block Florida from limiting how colleges and universities offer lessons on race, gender and the legacy of discrimination.
The lawsuit that Walker ruled on Thursday was brought by two Florida-based companies, Honeyfund.com and Primo, as well as an individual and a consulting firm that conducts diversity trainings for businesses around the state.
Honeyfund.com, based in Clearwater, Fla., is an online wedding registry. Primo is a franchise of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, with stores in Clearwater and Tampa.
Honeyfund.com had argued in court it worried that the new law would prevent them from holding an employee seminar that included “advancing women in business, understanding gender expansiveness” and “understanding institutional racism.” Primo planned to teach its employees about “systemic racism, oppression and intersectionality.”
In an unusually pointed opinion, Walker trashed many of Florida’s defenses of the “Stop Woke Act.” In addition to ruling that the law was a clear violation of the First Amendment, Walker also said it violated the plaintiff’s Fourteenth Amendment right to due process.
“It was a very strong decision and laid out very clearly this is a very blatant violation of the Constitution,” said the lead counsel for the defendants, Shalini Agarwal, who also works with the nonpartisan civic group Protect Democracy.
At the root of the 44-page ruling is Walker’s skepticism that the state of Florida should get to decide what employees may find to be objectionable. He said the state had vague interpretations for the eight provisions of the law, including those that addressed what may cause someone to feel discomfort or anguish in the workplace.
“Even the slightest endorsement of any of the eight concepts at any required employment activity violates the statute,” Walker noted. “The [Individual Freedom Measure] requires no evidence that the statement be even subjectively offensive. Nor does the IFA require that the statement create a severely or pervasively hostile work environment.”
“Thus, the IFA, by design” Walker added, “provides no shelter for core protected speech.”
At one point, Walker suggested that the law appeared to be an attempt by Florida lawmakers to silence the voices of those who may challenge lawmakers’ own views about the nation’s diversity.
“If Florida truly believes we live in a post-racial society, then let it make its case,” Walker wrote. “But it cannot win the argument by muzzling its opponents.”
The first section of the law limits from lessons and trainings the notion that “members of one race, color, sex, or national origin are morally superior to members of another race, color, sex, or national origin.” Walker said the provision was “mired in obscurity.”
“Imagine an employer, during a mandatory seminar on dispute resolution, cites the civil disobedience exemplified by Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi as a peaceful, preferred approach,” Walker wrote. “Has that employer ‘inculcated’ employees with the belief that Black and Asian people are morally superior to White people?”
Walker decried another provision of the law, saying it was “bordering on unintelligible.” The provision states “[m]embers of one race, color, sex, or national origin cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race, color, sex, or national origin.”
“It is unclear what is prohibited, and even less clear what is permitted,” Walker wrote.
Agarwal said the state must now decide whether it will seek a District Court trial to try to reverse Walker’s injunction. The state could also appeal his ruling to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Florida could also drop its legal defense of the matter.
Although Walker’s ruling does not apply to the law’s implementation in public schools or colleges, Agarwal and other lawyers said they believe all sections of the measure are on shaky legal footing.
In its lawsuit seeking to block the law from taking effect at colleges and universities, attorneys for the ACLU argued that the law’s “vague terms and private enforcement mechanism chill speech and expression including the narrowing of campus discourse and gutting academic freedom.”
‘The Stop W.O.K.E. act attempts to censor discussions and erase the history and life experiences of Black people, LGBTQ folks, women, and other people of color who struggle on a daily basis to achieve racial justice and make a positive change,” said Leroy Pernell, a plaintiff in the suit who teaches law at Florida A&M University College of Law “We deserve to have free and open exchanges about racism in the classroom.” | 2022-08-19T01:56:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Judge blocks Florida from enforcing ‘Stop Woke Act’ on private employers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/18/florida-stop-woke-act/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/18/florida-stop-woke-act/ |
DeSantis’s new election crimes unit makes its first arrests
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) speaks during an Aug. 18 news conference at the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the first arrests made by the state’s new elections police force Thursday: Twenty people previously incarcerated for murder or sexual assault who he said had illegally voted in the 2020 election.
The GOP-led Florida legislature passed a bill creating the Office of Election Crimes and Security earlier this year at DeSantis’s behest. While the 2020 election went smoothly in Florida — DeSantis called it the “gold standard” for elections — the governor has said there are still issues and conservative lawmakers have sought to further tighten voting regulations.
“This is just the opening salvo,” DeSantis said. “This is not the sum total of 2020.”
But voting groups and experts said that if anything the initial arrests indicate Florida’s election system is robust and crimes rare. Some expressed concern that the new unit could have a chilling effect, particularly on vulnerable groups of voters, such as formerly incarcerated people who are legally entitled to vote.
“It’s 20 people out of millions of voters,” Michael McDonald, an expert on voting and a professor of political science at the University of Florida. “These arrests are inconsequential to the integrity of the electoral system.”
DeSantis made the announcement flanked by law enforcement officers in Broward County, which has the most registered Democrats of any county in Florida. The arrests came about six weeks after the office opened and five days before the state’s primary election.
In recent years, Florida has introduced new voting regulations. Legislation passed in 2021 and again this year cut down on the number of ballot drop boxes and also make the possession of more than two ballots a felony. DeSantis said that is aimed at eliminating “ballot harvesting.” Voting rights advocates say it criminalizes the once-common practice in places such as Black churches where volunteers collected and delivered ballots.
For those convicted of felony crimes, the process of renewing voter rights can be cumbersome. Legislation signed by DeSantis requires them to pay all fines and fees stemming from their convictions, a process that is confusing because there is no central database for citizens and elections supervisors to consult.
“To this day we believe that if the state cannot hold up its end of the bargain, then they should be hesitant to start jeopardizing an individual’s freedom,” said Desmond Meade, executive director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. “The state system is broken. These individuals should never have been registered.
U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist (D), a former Florida governor who is vying to face off against DeSantis in the upcoming gubernatorial election, said Thursday’s arrests were about “playing politics” and intimidating voters rather than securing elections.
“Ron DeSantis likes to say we had one of the best-run elections in 2020,” Crist said. “Then why is he spending millions to alter the system, including making it harder for people to vote?”
The arrests come at a time when election workers and officials have been coping with an ongoing barrage of criticism and personal attacks in response to Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 White House race was tainted by fraud — a lie that has sparked distrust among his followers in the veracity of the country’s electoral system.
DeSantis has defended and continued to defend the accuracy and efficiency of Florida’s election offices, but he said voter fraud still occurs. The Florida Department of State received 262 election-fraud complaint forms in 2020 and referred 75 to law enforcement or prosecutors. About 11 million Floridians cast ballots for president that November.
“Before I proposed this, this was my idea, because people weren’t getting prosecuted. There were just examples of stuff seeming to fall through the cracks,” DeSantis said.
Thursday’s event, held in a courtroom in a public building, had a partisan tone. Attendees had to be on a list to enter the courtroom, and a woman who identified herself as a volunteer with the Palm Beach County Republican Party monitored who could enter.
At least one Democrat, Ben Sorensen, a Democrat who is the vice mayor of Fort Lauderdale and a candidate for Congress, attempted to gain access to the event but was denied entry. Inside, DeSantis staffers sat media in the back of the room. Invited guests, including Republican supporters and officials from across South Florida, were seated in the jury box. Many held signs that read “My Vote Counts” that were passed out a few minutes before DeSantis entered the room.
Jasmine Burney-Clark, founder of the Equal Ground Education Fund, which advocates for voting rights, said the arrests could spark fear in people who only recently regained the right to vote.
“This places so much fear in people who have already cast their ballots,” Burney-Clarke said.
McDonald, the University of Florida professor, expressed concern that Thursday’s arrests indicate officials are targeting specific groups of voters — in particular those previously incarcerated.
He pointed out that Trump had to fix his voter registration in 2020 when he said his address was the White House, which made him ineligible to vote in Florida.
“I wouldn’t go after Donald Trump for that. He made a mistake and he corrected it,” McDonald said. “I think other folks should be given the same consideration that was given to Donald Trump.”
Amy Gardner in Washington contributed to this report. | 2022-08-19T01:56:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fla. Gov. DeSantis’s new election crimes unit makes its first arrests - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/18/desantis-florida-election-arrests/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/18/desantis-florida-election-arrests/ |
Finland's Prime Minister Sanna Marin speaks with members of the media in Kuopio, Finland, on Aug. 18. (Matias Honkamaa/Lehtikuva/via Reuters)
Germany’s Bild newspaper named Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin the “coolest politician in the world” last week, calling the 36-year-old leader “casual, modern and self-confident” as she navigates the threat from Russia — and also attends music festivals with her friends.
In a series of clips posted to Instagram, which emerged on Wednesday, Marin and other partygoers are shown bopping along to Finnish pop music — and when the beat drops, they break out into dance.
As the videos circulated online this week, some critics called her behavior childish, while others accused her of not staying focused on Finland’s cost-of-living crisis.
But many others paused and asked: What’s all the fuss? Analysts say that Marin’s age and gender — and the intersection between the two — make her a particular target for criticism in a world led mostly by older men.
“I have a family life, I have a work life and I have free time to spend with my friends. Pretty much the same as many people my age,” Marin said Thursday, the BBC reported.
She said the videos were private and filmed in a private space. “I resent that these became known to the public,” Reuters quoted her as saying.
It wasn’t the first time Marin, a member of Finland’s Social Democratic Party, has been “caught” partying. In December, she apologized for another incident in which she stayed out at a Helsinki nightclub until 4 a.m. without her cellphone. While she was out, an alert was sent to Marin’s phone to let her know she was a close contact of someone who tested positive for the coronavirus. (She did not end up contracting it.)
Finland’s prime minister apologizes after partying all night despite coronavirus exposure
Her political rivals seized on the new videos this week, calling on Marin to undergo voluntary drug screenings. “The people are also allowed to expect this from their prime minister,” said Mikko Karna, a member of Parliament from the Center party.
Marin fired back, telling local outlet Yle that she was willing to take a drug test. “I have not used drugs myself, or anything other than alcohol. I’ve danced, sung and partied and done perfectly legal things,” she added.
An editorial in Finland’s Helsingin Sanomat newspaper argued that her partying was a security risk.
“The prime minister can, in a sensitive situation, put the weapons of information warfare in the hands of those who would like to hurt Finland,” the editorial said. “There may be more leaks. If not now, then at the next party.”
Marin was the world’s youngest sitting national leader when she was elected in 2019 at age 34. Her victory placed her in a small but powerful group of presidents and prime ministers who were elected in their 30s, including New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele.
Change in Finland: A government led by five women and the world’s youngest prime minister
Marin’s position in the executive office alone “disrupts what people have historically been comfortable with in terms of age and gender (older men),” Sara Angevine, a political scientist at Whittier College, said in an email.
Bettina Spencer, a professor at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, In., said that young women leaders are scrutinized more harshly than their older male counterparts.
“Young leaders are not taken seriously based on stereotypes about age. Women leaders are not taken seriously based on stereotypes about gender. Young women leaders are especially not taken seriously because of the intersection of their age and gender,” Spencer said.
“As such, they receive harsher scrutiny for any behaviors that reinforce the belief that they may not be ‘serious,’ and that includes simply dancing with friends at a private event,” she said.
But not everyone was critical of Marin for letting loose — and instead applauded what they said was the prime minister “proving when you work hard, you can play hard.”
Someone else on Twitter asked: “is Sanna Marin the only chief executive on earth to have documented friends.” | 2022-08-19T01:57:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Finnish premier Sanna Marin dance party video sparks outrage - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/18/sanna-marin-finland-dance-party-video-outrage/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/18/sanna-marin-finland-dance-party-video-outrage/ |
At U.S. championships, Donnell Whittenburg is chasing the missing piece
Behind an impressive showing on the vault, Baltimore native Donnell Whittenburg moved into third in the men's all-around at the U.S. championships Thursday night in Tampa. (Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)
TAMPA — Donnell Whittenburg had planned to be done with gymnastics by now. He thought so last year, and it didn’t matter whether he earned a spot on the Olympic team. His career would probably end after the world championships that fall. At least that’s what he said.
Yet here he is a year later, on his 28th birthday, still competing and chasing his Olympic goal. In the field at the U.S. national championships that includes three returning Olympians, the Baltimore native is trying to make a case for why he belongs on U.S. teams at major international competitions. And if you ask him now, Whittenburg won’t offer any guesses about an end date for his senior elite career that began nearly a decade ago.
“I still feel like I'm missing something,” said Whittenburg, a four-time worlds team member but never more than an alternate for the Olympics. “And that's literally the one thing. I've done just about everything you could possibly do in this sport, except going to the Olympic Games.”
Here's the trick: To win gymnastics medals, U.S. men need harder routines
After the first of two nights of competition at the U.S. championships at Amalie Arena, Whittenburg is in third place with a total of 84.774 — far behind the all-around leader, Brody Malone of Stanford (88.942). Malone, a Tokyo Olympian and the defending national champion, has a comfortable lead over Asher Hong, an 18-year-old rising star, who’s in second with an 85.480, but Whittenburg managed to stay ahead of Olympians Shane Wiskus (84.423) and Yul Moldauer (84.276) in the standings.
They’re all eying the worlds team — and the Paris Games just two years away — and Whittenburg delivered performances on vault and rings that put him squarely in the mix.
When asked if he could boost a U.S. squad on that stage, Whittenburg said after Thursday’s competition: “Absolutely. No doubt in my mind. We need rings, and we need vault. Those are my events.”
Two falls on floor brought down Whittenburg’s total, but he earned the top score on rings (15.422). He also showcased one of the most difficult vaults in the world, a roundoff entry onto the table and then, after propelling off the apparatus with his hands, two flips with a full twist.
Beyond crowning national champions, this competition also determines which athletes advance to the world championships selection camp. The all-around winner automatically earns a spot on the worlds team, and so does the second-place finisher as long as he places in the top three on two apparatuses. The other members of the five-man team will be named after the camp, and world championships in October presents the U.S. men’s team an opportunity to return to the medal podium for the first time since 2014, particularly with Russia’s absence because of the country’s invasion of Ukraine.
Amid lingering distrust, Li Li Leung seeks to transform U.S. gymnastics
Top team-score scenarios are considered when building a worlds team, using the marks from nationals and the selection camp, so a high all-around score isn’t the only determining factor for a gymnast with Whittenburg’s strengths. A key for him is showing that his best events — vault, floor and rings — could help the team in a final, where three athletes compete on each apparatus. He excelled on two of those events Thursday but struggled on floor.
The Americans have slipped behind the top teams in the world because their routines lack the difficulty of the top teams. With scores calculated by combing difficulty and execution marks, easier routines cap a gymnast’s maximum total. In an effort to improve difficulty, the U.S. program instituted an aggressive bonus system this year that rewards harder routines with additional points.
For Whittenburg, this system means a massive boost on vault, which Thursday was his final apparatus of the evening. He stood in 12th place entering the rotation but surged ahead after his first vault scored a 16.380, including 1.780 in bonus — a huge lift in a sport where a fall deducts one point and gymnasts are often separated by tenths. (Gymnasts vying for vault medals must perform two different vaults and the scores are averaged, but for those who did so at nationals, only the first attempts factors into the all-around score. In team competitions, gymnasts only perform one vault.) With a 6.0 difficulty score on rings, Whittenburg earned an extra 0.522 in bonus to grab the lead on that apparatus.
“At the end of the day, we’re not going to be using [the bonus system] internationally, so it doesn’t really matter,” Whittenburg said of the initiative in place at domestic meets. “Yes, it helps me here, but I’m just trying to go out, compete internationally because I know I can put up big scores out there, just as well as here.”
Hong, the young standout with similar strengths as Whittenburg, performed the same, difficult first vault and outscored the veteran with a 16.630 — and then he added a second vault that was harder than Whittenburg’s. Hong had low scores on pommel horse and high bar but received a massive boost on his best events.
Competing at his first nationals as a senior-level gymnast, Hong said: “I’ve had a good amount of experience with international competitions, so I don’t get too nervous anymore.”
Whittenburg, who trains in Wisconsin, has competed at the world championships four times, placing third in 2014 with the team in his debut on that stage. He returned to worlds the following year and won another bronze, this time on vault. Whittenburg represented the United States again in 2017 and 2021, but both of those editions of the events didn’t include a team competition because that’s the norm for the world championships that follow the Olympics. He didn’t win any medals, but he still has those other two. An Olympic berth is the missing piece.
“As long as I’m healthy and I have the will to keep going,” he said, “why not?” | 2022-08-19T03:06:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Donnell Whittenburg, chasing an Olympic spot, in third at nationals - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/08/18/us-gymnastics-mens-championships/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/08/18/us-gymnastics-mens-championships/ |
Pittsburgh Pirates’ Bryan Reynolds hits a two-run home run against the Boston Red Sox during the fifth inning of a baseball game Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo/Philip G. Pavely)
“Just the idea of coming out, attacking the zone,” Brubaker said on his focus. “Quick first inning and just kept rolling with the momentum and tempo that I was having on the mound. ... It’s really just pace and it’s momentum, just with your body, how your body is rolling out there on the mound. It’s a lot easier when you get it from pitch one to continue it throughout the game.” | 2022-08-19T03:28:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Reynolds 2 HRs; Brubaker, Pirates top Bosox, end 6-game skid - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/reynolds-2-hrs-brubaker-pirates-top-bosox-end-6-game-skid/2022/08/18/6ac43e2c-1f62-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/reynolds-2-hrs-brubaker-pirates-top-bosox-end-6-game-skid/2022/08/18/6ac43e2c-1f62-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Dad: Your former wife’s infidelity led to the ending of your marriage.
I asked what was wrong, but received no reply. I have a suspicion as to the reason, which is based upon a slanderous falsehood that she was told about me.
Ghosted: You’ve already asked your ex-friend why she abruptly pulled away. Don’t ask again.
You have also tried to accept this and have not been able to. I vote for the truth.
This person is already ghosting you. Bottom line, she will probably continue, no matter what. You have one shot at this, so make it good.
You could also state that the way she chose to handle this hurt you then, and continues to bother you. Doing this will help you to move on. And you should move on.
My brother (also adopted but with different birthparents) now knows about his family medical history, including extensive cardiac history. Although he was met with a different outcome in terms of reunion with bio family members, he has no regrets.
Adopted: In terms of filling in these blanks, DNA testing has been a gift. It is every person’s right to know their biological history. | 2022-08-19T04:11:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: My ex told our daughter I have another kid when I don’t - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/19/ask-amy-ex-wife-daughter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/19/ask-amy-ex-wife-daughter/ |
“Excuse me!”
We had a babysitter looking after 10 children while the adults enjoyed themselves in another room. Unfortunately, the sitter let the kids raid the presents and play with all the toys, books, etc.
As you have no doubt discovered, “smooth” is not often a word associated with hosting a party with a 1-10 ratio of adults to young children.
Dear Miss Manners: I am female, but I have an androgynous name often associated with a dog or a male. I work with the public, and many times I am confronted with rude questions, such as, “You’re named after a dog?” “Did your parents hate you? Why are you named that?” “What is your real name?” and so on.
“Yes, my given name is Pooch” followed by a pleasant but defiant smile that says, “You got somethin’ to say about it?” | 2022-08-19T04:11:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Miss Manners: ‘Is there a gender-neutral alternative to sir and ma’am? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/19/miss-manners-gender-neutral-stranger/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/19/miss-manners-gender-neutral-stranger/ |
If it wasn’t certain before, it’s crystal clear now. Former president Donald Trump has a viselike grip over the Republican Party. No allegation of impropriety or illegality, no concern over stoking extremism and violence, no documented trammeling of the rule of law can cut away at his seeming dominance over the American right.
This month, it emerged that the FBI was investigating Trump for his wrongful possession of classified U.S. documents, including items allegedly related to the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal. The wholly partisan reaction to the revelations only boosted Trump’s stock, driving millions of dollars in donations to his political action committee, and fueling right-wing outrage over the supposed overreach of the state. Meanwhile, the results of a series of primary elections across the country — most notably, Tuesday’s landslide defeat of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wy0.) by a Trump-aligned challenger — reinforced how internal party opposition to Trump has generally proven to be a political death sentence. Of the 10 Republican lawmakers in the House who voted to impeach Trump for his role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, only two even stand a chance to return to the chamber next year.
Trump’s hold over the Republican Party has led to the rise of a new crop of potential Republican lawmakers who parrot the former president’s 2020 election lies. That has profound implications for the country’s electoral processes: According to an analysis published by my colleagues this week, nearly two-thirds of GOP nominations for state and federal offices with authority over future elections involve candidates who embraced falsehoods and conspiracy theories about the previous one and deny its legitimacy.
In the time since Trump left office, his sway over Republicans has arguably grown. A straw poll of attendees at the right-wing Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this month saw enthusiasm for Trump as high as ever. If he chooses to launch a 2024 presidential campaign, the bulk of the Republican establishment is set to meekly line up behind him. “If you look at a political analysis, there’s no way this party is going to stay together without President Trump and his supporters,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) told my colleagues last year. “There is no construct where the party can be successful without him.”
It’s a state of affairs more familiar in other parts of the world than in the United States. The wholesale capture of a wing of American politics by what is, as Cheney put it, a “cult of personality” surrounding one demagogic leader has limited precedent in U.S. history. But we can see current variations of the theme in, among other places, Hungary under its illiberal nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Turkey under long-ruling President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and India under Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
In all three countries, the ruling faction in a parliamentary democracy has become a vehicle for consolidating the power of the figure at the top. They are in different stages of their evolution: Erdogan’s grip may be loosening with former allies defecting and forming new parties, while Modi and Orban are more comfortably in control. The leaders’ majoritarian demagoguery has led to the erosion of their democracies, which critics argue have become to varying degrees quasi-autocracies where media is cowed, ethnic or religious minorities are bullied, and the opposition marginalized.
This phenomenon is on show in other democracies dominated by illiberal factions, as political polarization only deepens the incentives to retain power and punish one’s opponents. “The Republican Party’s zealous devotion to getting rid of anyone who challenges Trumpian dogma feels entirely too familiar,” wrote academic Brian Klaas in a Washington Post column last year that noted how Republican fealty to Trump was mirrored by politicians in Poland’s ruling party who have weaponized conspiracy theories about the media and liberal establishment.
“It’s a litmus test. Are you a true believer, willing to repeat the theory even if you don’t believe it yourself?” Klaas wrote. “If you are, the party accepts you. This sort of corrosive loyalty test has caused tremendous damage to Poland’s democratic institutions.”
From earlier this year: @RepLizCheney told me in our @CBSSunday conversation that she believes there is a “cult of personality" around Trump, presenting a moral test that the Republican Party is "failing."https://t.co/g5qRzS68tO
The Orbanization of America: The U.S. right walks in Hungary’s path
For the United States, there’s a long runway for further democratic backsliding. Some analysts believe it’s necessary for the full weight of the judicial system to be brought to bear against Trump, even while others warn of the dangerous precedent it may set. A considerable minority of Americans buy into Trump’s narrative of victimhood and persecution by the Democratic establishment.
“Trump’s whole presidency was unprecedented,” countered Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University and scholar of 20th century authoritarian politics. “He differed from past heads of state of either party in having zero interest in public welfare or consensus politics. His goals were autocratic: amassing power, domesticating the GOP, and having his financial and other personal interests prevail over national ones in shaping domestic and foreign policy.”
Trump’s Republican critics have been demoralized by the extent to which the party’s base has abandoned them and flocked to the Trumpist banner. “Maybe there wasn’t going to be a tidal wave of people to come over, but I certainly didn’t think I’d be alone,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said to reporters last week. Along with Cheney, Kinzinger served on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot; he is not seeking reelection in November.
Now, Trump may see a path to override the institutional checks and the instruments of accountability set against him. Sean Illing, co-author of the new book “The Paradox of Democracy” that traces the long history of democracies growing susceptible to would-be authoritarians, warned that the United States’ existing democratic guardrails may not hold if large numbers of Republicans vote for people who explicitly “promise to subvert the rule of law.”
“The only response is to persuade more people to resist it,” Illing told Post columnist Greg Sargent. “The history of democratic decline is a history of demagogues and autocrats exploiting the openness of democratic cultures to mobilize people against the very institutions that sustain democracy itself.” | 2022-08-19T04:11:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Donald Trump’s personality cult and the erosion of U.S. democracy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/trump-cult-of-personality-democracy-erosion-united-states/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/trump-cult-of-personality-democracy-erosion-united-states/ |
Mystics forward Alysha Clark looks for some room around the defense of Storm guard Sue Bird during Game 1 of the Washington-Seattle WNBA playoff series Thursday night. (Lindsey Wasson/AP)
SEATTLE — Jewell Loyd’s runner with 38.1 seconds remaining sent the Climate Pledge Arena crowd into a frenzy. The Seattle Storm had a one-point lead in Game 1 of this best-of-three first-round playoff series against the Washington Mystics.
Then the visitors committed one of their few mistakes of the final quarter, an errant pass on the ensuing possession. Loyd made them pay again, capping her own 12-point run with a pair of free throws for a three-point lead. The Mystics had finally run out of answers in an 86-83 loss.
Washington now sits on the brink of elimination entering Sunday’s Game 2.
The opener was a thrilling, back-and-forth affair that included a sizzling 26 points from Mystics star Elena Delle Donne, who made nine straight shots at one point in the second half. Breanna Stewart countered with 23 points as the crowd chanted “MVP! MVP!” in the game’s closing moments. Loyd finished with 16.
Natasha Cloud and Ariel Atkins added 16 points apiece for the Mystics.
Delle Donne’s three-point play gave Washington a 65-64 lead heading into the fourth quarter. But once Loyd joined Stewart throwing haymakers at the Mystics in the final quarter, the visitors were unable to counter.
This 4-5 matchup has been the most anticipated of the series of the first round — a clash of teams that have claimed three of the past four WNBA championships — and Game 1 did not disappoint. Both teams finished the regular season at 22-14, the tiebreaker going to Seattle by virtue of it having won two of the three meetings.
Few secrets exist between the two. Their veteran-laden rosters have played against each other for years, on all-star teams and Olympic teams. They were also two of the top defensive teams in the league in 2022.
“I think it’s tougher,” Storm Coach Noelle Quinn said of the familiarity before the game. “You think about what happens in practice when you go against each other and you know the plays that are coming. Now, when you’re able to execute while the other team knows exactly what you’re going to do, that is a level of efficient execution that happens in practice and will happen in the game. It’s exactly that — we know each other, but at the end of the day it’s who’s going to step up and make plays and who’s going to play some really good basketball.”
Mystics Coach and General Manager Mike Thibault had the same end thoughts, but a different approach.
“I don’t know if it matters,” Thibault said. “I think it’s probably easier in preparation in the sense that everybody knows each other. We played each other recently. Some of these players have played together. We play similar styles. Noelle and I know each other. It’s just one of those things where [we’re] evenly matched teams. Who’s going to play a little bit better?”
The storylines are everywhere throughout this series. Delle Donne playing in the playoffs for the first time since the team won a championship in 2019 and nearly having her career end prematurely due to a pair of back surgeries. Alysha Clark, who got a an echoing ovation during introductions, returning to the team where she played her first nine years and won a pair of titles.
The Storm are trying to send Sue Bird out with her fifth championship as she will ender what will be a Hall of Fame career after this season. Tina Charles is continuing to chase that elusive ring as she has found a home in Seattle — the third team in the last two years, including the Mystics. Stewart was named AP player of the year this week and is looking for a second MVP.
Things were all tied up 18-18 after a first quarter in which both teams got their jabs in like a pair of fighters feeling each other out. The Mystics opened with a 7-0 run as the crowd, still on its feet from the opening introductions, murmured quietly. Things flipped quickly as the Storm answered with a 13-5 stretch that got the building rocking.
Charles spearheaded a 10-2 run in the second quarter that forced Thibault to call timeout. He said pregame that the use of timeouts will be crucial as the two teams played their own personal chess match. There will be runs, Thibault explained, but they need to be kept to 5-0 instead of 12-0, for example. Washington quickly answered with an 11-2 run and would take a 42-40 lead into halftime after a pair of baskets from Delle Donne.
Down the stretch, the final run belonged to Seattle. | 2022-08-19T05:00:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mystics fall to Storm in thrilling playoff opener - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/19/mystics-storm-elena-delle-donne-playoffs/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/19/mystics-storm-elena-delle-donne-playoffs/ |
Kim Yo Jong, sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, delivers a speech in Pyongyang on Aug. 10, in a photo provided by the North Korean government. (AP)
TOKYO — The influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Friday rebuffed Seoul’s offer of economic benefits in exchange for denuclearization steps, calling South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol “really foolish” and his plan “absurd.”
In characteristically descriptive language, Kim Yo Jong released a statement titled “Don’t have an absurd dream” in state media, emphasizing that her country has no intention of giving up its nuclear and weapons program for economic cooperation with the South. And along the way, she swiped at the South Korean leader over his plummeting approval ratings, which reached 24 percent after three months in office.
“No one barters its destiny for corn cake,” Kim wrote.
This week, Yoon released details of an economic assistance package that he had announced during his May 10 inauguration speech. In return for Pyongyang taking steps to disarm, the South would help it with food, health care, agriculture and infrastructure, Yoon said, without addressing the North’s desire for international sanctions relief. While Yoon described his plan as “audacious,” previous South Korean leaders have made similar proposals that have failed, while Kim Jong Un has shown no sign of relinquishing a nuclear deterrent he views as his regime’s ultimate security guarantee.
Kim Yo Jong, one of the most powerful officials in the North Korean regime, on Friday called Yoon’s’ plan “an impracticable one to create mulberry fields in the dark blue ocean."
She described it as a replica of “Vision 3000 through Denuclearization and Openness,” a proposal by former conservative South Korean president Lee Myung-bak to push North Korea toward denuclearization in exchange for massive aid and investment that he pledged would raise North Korean income levels to $3,000 per capita. Yet inter-Korean relations worsened during Lee’s term. North Korea is now believed to be preparing for its seventh nuclear test; its per capita income was estimated at $1,083 in 2021.
“The fact that he copied the policy towards the north, thrown into the dustbin of history, and called it ‘bold plan’ shows that he is really foolish,” she wrote, adding that Yoon had “uttered pipedream-like remarks” that made him look “miserable.”
U.S., South Korea demonstrate hardened stances on North Korea
On Friday, Yoon’s office expressed regret over Kim Yo Jong’s attacks, saying that North Korea made “rude remarks” and “distorted” the president’s proposal. An administration official earlier this week had rejected comparisons to Vision 3000, saying Yoon’s plan was an “upgrade."
Meanwhile, South Korean and U.S. militaries are gearing up to resume full-scale exercises next week for the first time in about five years, a move that could raise tensions with North Korea amid the diplomatic standstill between Washington and Pyongyang. The allies had suspended or downsized drills after 2017 as they sought to engage North Korea through diplomacy and denuclearization talks.
Yoon has emphasized his country’s security alliance with the United States and the importance of strengthening deterrence measures in the face of growing nuclear threats from the North. He has vowed to increase Seoul’s defensive capabilities while leaving open the door for talks with North Korea. Military drills have long been an irritant for Pyongyang, which views them as preparations for an invasion of the country.
Yoon’s economic announcement earlier this week was followed by preliminary exercises for next week’s drills. Pyongyang then launched two cruise missiles off its west coast, breaking a two-month testing hiatus.
Min Joo Kim in Seoul contributed to this report. | 2022-08-19T05:00:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | North Korea’s Kim Yo Jong rejects South’s disarmament offer - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/north-korea-kim-yo-jong-reject-south-president/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/north-korea-kim-yo-jong-reject-south-president/ |
That seems like two for the price of one, right? Only not so fast, as Bloomberg Intelligence’s Sam Fazeli explains. Below, we unpack what makes this a trickier policy call and suggest a better way forward.
Therese Raphael: First, Sam, can we clear up the question of whether a booster is indeed imperative ahead of winter for at least older and more vulnerable parts of the population? That is the Aug. 15 advice of the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation and what the US Centers for Disease Control is also saying.
Sam Fazeli: If the aim is to suppress the risk of infection for a short period of time, then for sure a booster campaign will achieve that to some extent. But how long the reduction in risk of infection would last depends on three interrelated issues: 1) whether the virus evolves again to escape existing immunity better; 2) whether the virus has evolved to increase transmissibility or virulence; and 3) how effective the booster proves to be against the current variant, which may form the basis of future variants.
If you’re trying to reduce the burden of the disease on hospitals, then boosting the more vulnerable population is what is needed. But that assumes the booster makes some difference to protection against severe disease beyond reducing the risk of an initial infection.
TR: Do we know if it does make a difference against severe disease then? The UK wants everyone over 50 to get a second booster and says it doesn’t matter whether it’s the new bivalent shot (where there is unlikely to be enough supply initially) or the original. That suggests that any booster is more important than which booster.
SF: What I am worried about is that the bivalent vaccine shot the UK approved will not actually be better than the current shot. In fact, there have been no studies on effectiveness at all, the decision is all based on measuring antibody levels and we don’t really know how that’s correlated to infection prevention.
What does a 1.7-fold higher level of antibodies mean in real life, especially as this was measured relative to a low level of antibodies induced by the current vaccine? There is even a risk that the narrow immune reaction to the BA.1 (the original omicron variant) component of the new bivalent vaccine dilutes out the effect of the original vaccine.
TR: The US is planning to offer a second booster from September using a bivalent vaccine as well, to be offered to anyone 50 and older as well as those over 12 who are immunocompromised. There may be a longer wait, but it’s not the same vaccine that Europe and the UK going for. Is the Biden administration strategy better?
SF: The vaccine the US is going for is a mix of the original shot plus BA.4/5 which, in mice, was shown to be much better in terms of antibody levels against BA.4/5 than any other vaccine tested. As a 58-year-old, I would much prefer a BA.4/5 based vaccine rather than the one the UK and Europe will use as all current variants are related to it.
The UK seems to pride itself on speed, and it has been successful so far, though we shouldn’t forget the suffering caused by rare blood-clotting in younger people who had AstraZeneca’s vaccine. The current supply issue is because the UK wants to roll out these new shots asap and the companies have not yet had enough time to make them. What is troubling is that they are only marginally better than the original vaccines, many millions of doses of which the companies have had to destroy because of lack of demand, as evidenced by their write-downs in the second quarter.
TR: And what about for the population as a whole? To boost or not to boost?
SR: I am not convinced that the majority of people need a second or in some cases third booster to protect against serious disease. The previous shots have already protected against serious illness and there’s no good evidence that this protection wanes. In fact, if you look at CDC data, when you strip out the immunocompromised from hospitalizations, protection remains nicely high. It’s only the protection against an initial infection that falls away over time as antibody levels inevitably fall.
TR: It also seems surprising that the UK government halted procurement of AstraZeneca’s Evusheld Covid-19 therapy, which is used by people who cannot generate a sufficient antibody response with vaccines. The government’s rationale is that there is not sufficient evidence to determine whether it offers protection against omicron rather than the original Covid strain. It seems there’s a double-standard when it comes to how much data or certainty is required compared to the booster program. What’s your thinking on that?
SF: This is what I really don’t get. The UK approved a vaccine based on a weak increase in antibody levels against current strains without really much scrutiny of the underlying data and then it decides to stop using a drug that has clearly been shown to still neutralize, though at a reduced level, BA.2.12.1, BA.4 and, to a lesser extent, BA.5. And this reduced activity can be compensated for by increasing the dose or frequency of administration.
Evusheld is actually one of the best ways to protect immunocompromised people, especially as any vaccine-induced antibodies are likely to fall away quickly.
TR: I think that raises a bigger question about the vaccination strategy. It’s starting to feel a bit scattershot.
SF: Yes, we need to rethink our whole vaccination strategy. That requires, first, asking whether we are using existing drug therapies enough. Paxlovid is a great drug, for example, but requires early testing and application to be effective. Second, we should be doing more to develop intranasal vaccines, which get a different part of the immune system involved. Finally, we need to really spend the time to develop a vaccine that has the chance to be longer lasting and counter a broader range of variants.
Giving people these boosters now feels akin to putting a sticking plaster – or Band-Aid, as Americans say -- on a rather large wound; you may reduce the bleeding somewhat, but not enough to make a big dent in the risk of infection for very long. And at the same time, you end up by continually eroding public confidence in the vaccines by pretending they make a big difference to infection risk. | 2022-08-19T06:30:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Britain Needs a Better Booster Strategy for Covid - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/britain-needs-a-better-booster-strategy-for-covid/2022/08/19/99c04c2e-1f7c-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/britain-needs-a-better-booster-strategy-for-covid/2022/08/19/99c04c2e-1f7c-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
For now, Russians are choosing to brush this aside. Opinion polls, unreliable as they are in any autocratic system, suggest growing support for the government — 68% of respondents said in July that the country was on the right track, up from 52% in February. It’s not that today’s problems are invisible, it’s that more people now expect them to pass, and pessimism about the future has decreased. Indeed, most do not expect to see wage delays, pay cuts or job losses. It helps, perhaps, that fewer Russians are looking for updates from the front.
That all matters, because it suggests public backing is conformist, not unconditional — Russians don’t expect to pay a cost. It’s a detail that hasn’t escaped Putin, who has allowed his citizens to be spectators in his war. He’s downplayed the three-pronged invasion of a neighbor as a “special military operation,” has avoided mass mobilization and (by and large) the use of conscripts. He’s preferring to turn to volunteers from distant regions, to outfits like private mercenary company Wagner and even convicts. No wonder propaganda, at fever pitch in the first months, has become a little less loud — far better for citizens to forget the war altogether.
Will reality bite? Eventually, and inevitably.
Yes, the economic fortress has resisted in the face of the initial shock. Sanctions take time, and Russia was prepared, thanks to years of fiscal restraint, plus the West has not been able to really strike where it would be able to impose the most pain — specifically, oil and gas. Moscow is instead squeezing Europe on gas and selling its crude, which matters more to government revenues, to Asia. Gross domestic product dropped a relatively shallow 4% in the second quarter, the first full quarter since the invasion. Officials now see a decrease of just over 4% for the full year — considerably less than earlier forecasts of more than 12%, which would have marked the steepest decline since the post-Soviet years.
But that’s not the good news it’s supposed to be. The second-quarter GDP decline has still shrunk the economy back to 2018 levels. Never mind that the calculation understates the drop in living standards. Unemployment levels have not soared with Western pull outs. That says something about shallow foreign investment and plenty about the role of state-influenced companies, which tend to prefer to cut wages and reduce hours before culling jobs. And even then, there will be pain. Political scientist Ilya Matveev has calculated the number of workers dependent on foreign capital, directly and indirectly, could be as high as 5 million, roughly 12% of the formal workforce.
Bank of Russia Deputy Governor Alexey Zabotkin is right that the country will find a new long-term equilibrium: It’s called stagnation. Russia exports commodities, but it imports components for a huge variety of industries as varied as agriculture and autos. Now, many of those suppliers are based in countries listed as enemy states. Inventories are rapidly being depleted and substitutes will struggle to match up. McDonald’s Corp., once a symbol of post-Soviet openness, is now Vkusno i Tochka, but the French fries are missing. Russians will still have cars — but where there were Renaults, there will now be Moskvich models; meanwhile, airbags have become a thing of the past and the present is all about government procurement boosting demand. Aeroflot is stripping jetliners for parts.
At a time when the economy should be planning for a carbon-free future — as even Saudi Arabia is beginning to — oil and gas will make up an ever-larger share of the budget. That increases what Janis Kluge at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs described to me as “the asymmetry of power,” the state’s ability to distribute rents and demand compliance. The state becomes the only source of opportunity.
There’s then the slow-burning erosion in education, research, the consequences of a damaging brain drain.
Russians are experts at muddling along — they’ve survived years of anemic economic growth already. The government can keep the military machine going longer by reallocating spending, issuing domestic debt and printing cash. But this is not the 1990s. Russians are overlooking reality because they hope for a short-lived crisis, like those of the past. Putin, ever more out of touch, is offering a Potemkin future — where no one can acknowledge the fall in living standards, the isolation, the technological regression. But then, he has no options. Russians do. | 2022-08-19T06:31:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Putin Offers Russia a Potemkin Future - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/putin-offers-russia-a-potemkin-future/2022/08/19/9a18136e-1f7c-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/putin-offers-russia-a-potemkin-future/2022/08/19/9a18136e-1f7c-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Just as Vito Corleone realized too late which rival don was pulling the strings against him, it looks ever more as though the oil price has been driving markets all along. It shouldn’t be this way. The global economy is far less oil-intense than it was in the 1970s, meaning that fuel accounts for a smaller percentage of gross domestic product. An information and services-based economy shouldn’t be so dependent on burning fossil fuels. But once the oil price rises above a certain level, investors behave as though it is. And it’s hard to read the events of the last few months any other way.
On inflation, the critical issue of the time, breakevens peaked with the first spike in the oil price after the Ukraine invasion, and started a steady decline after oil put in a further decline in mid-June. Current oil prices should have no impact on likely inflation over the next five years, but it evidently doesn’t work that way in markets:
Beyond that, the June peak in the oil price also seems to have driven the decline of value compared to growth. This chart shows Bloomberg’s global measure of the performance of a value portfolio that is long the cheapest quintile of stocks and short the most expensive, again compared with the energy index:
So, cheaper oil has made everyone much happier, which is not surprising. Is it reasonable to expect the oil price to stay under control like this? Perhaps not. Francisco Blanch, Bank of America Corp.’s head of global commodities and derivatives research, said on Bloomberg TV:
In theory, the cycle is driven in large part by the inelasticity of supply. If you want to drill for more oil, or mine more metals, you need to make investments a long way in advance. What tends to happen is that capital expenditures peak at the top of the market, creating a glut of supply that forces prices down. The falling prices make producers reluctant to invest again, leading to a fall in capital expenditures, which means that they are unable to raise supply promptly the next time demand picks up. Capital expenditures for all the main commodities have barely increased over the last five years, as this chart from Longview Economics shows. And that in turn implies that the world is still on track for another classic upward commodity wave:
Here’s a hypothesis. Let’s call it the Dire Straits Conjecture. It’s never good when a narrow waterway is in the news. The recent interest in the Taiwan Strait has been terrifying — please may it soon diminish. It’s also positive that the Sea of Azov has left the headlines, and it’s very good to know that the Suez Canal is no longer blocked by a ship. Back in 1990, the world appeared to revolve around the Straits of Hormuz during the Gulf Crisis, and the Straits of Tiran signaled the end of British and French pretentions to superpower status during the Suez Crisis of 1956.
So it’s concerning that the River Rhine is in the news. A dry summer has left parts of it no longer navigable, and intensified Europe’s acute supply bottlenecks. This is from Bloomberg News’ coverage:
Also, lack of water in rivers is affecting France’s nuclear power output, so climate change is making itself felt very directly. This exacerbates the deeper issue, which is the EU’s response to the conflict in Ukraine. Until now, there have been sufficient energy carve-outs to the sanctions on Russian energy to leave the continent in the worst of all worlds, where consumers still face the risk of severe shortages this winter, they’re paying far more for energy than usual, and Russia’s war effort is getting funded more than adequately. The following deeply depressing chart is from the Institute of International Finance:
This then was a particularly bad time for the Rhine to run dry. Desperate attempts to alleviate the coming problems with natural gas will lead to artificial constraints on the supply of other basic materials, as BofA’s Blanch explains:
“Europe faces an obviously very complicated situation. If you look at European natural gas, 40% comes from Russia or used to come from Russia. And you’ve lost right around 10% of the entire energy supply of Europe with Russia curtailing that gas. Other things being equal, that would mean a 10% GDP contraction. And what’s happening right now essentially is Europe is trying to price itself back into the global economy so to speak by attracting liquid gas from Japan, China, bringing it into the European continent. But also importantly, we are seeing the shutdown of zinc smelters, aluminum smelters, steel plants and fertilizer capacity, so that’s all imported again. So essentially, all European energy prices are rising above global prices, but importantly a lot of the domestic-produced energy-intensive commodities like steel and what have you are also being displaced out. And that’s what Europe is doing to avoid a very very steep recession and probably end up with just a mild one.”
On top of all this, the attempts to keep the European peripheral countries solvent, even as the European Central Bank attempts to fight inflation by raising interest rates, looks as though it will create ever more political and economic pain. The initial sticking plaster was to use money from the PEPP (pandemic emergency purchase program) to help stop the bond yields of countries like Italy ballooning to extremes. That is translating into a direct transfer of resources. This chart from Citi shows which countries’ bonds were bought, and which were allowed to mature, during July:
This is nothing new. As the IIF demonstrates, the ECB — acting through Italy’s central bank — has been keeping Italy afloat for years:
There is no painless way out of this. To quote Invesco’s Hooper:
“Europe is going to have to curb consumption by definition. It’s happening already with curtailments of energy supply to industry but also curtailments of temperatures at home during the summer and during the winter as well. We are going to see forced reductions, potentially rolling brownouts in some parts of Europe. This is what it looks like. And it’s almost like the developed markets are becoming like the emerging markets in a weird kind of way.”
When advanced economies need to start worrying about the depths of their rivers, and the possibility of rationing power to get through winter, it does indeed begin to sound like an emerging-market crisis, heading for Western Europe. But at some point, the river does reach the sea.
There’s been no shortage of debate on whether US equities are seeing a bear market bounce or a new bull market. That’s critical to help investors time the market. But fresh data reveal it might not matter that much, because it could just be better to be late than early.
Richard Bernstein Advisors LLC analyzed the returns of a hypothetical investor around major market bottoms. The returns for entering 100% into stocks “early,” meaning six months prior to a market bottom, were compared with holding nothing but cash until six months after the market bottom and then shifting to 100% stocks “late.”
“Not only does this tend to improve returns while drastically reducing downside potential, but this approach also gives one more time to assess incoming fundamental data,” Dan Suzuki, the firm’s deputy chief investment officer, wrote Tuesday. “Because if it’s not based on fundamentals, it’s just guessing.”
It’s not a foolproof strategy, though. In the past 70 years, there have been a handful of instances — 1982, 1990 and 2020 — where it was more profitable to be “early.” But in each of those, the Fed had already been cutting interest rates. And as the central bank launches its tightest monetary policy campaign in decades to cool inflation, albeit less aggressively than feared following its ambiguously dovish FOMC meeting, Suzuki noted it may be premature to significantly increase one’s equity exposure today.
Should you wish to catch up on podcasts, particularly on economic themes, then my former colleague Cardiff Garcia, who now hosts The New Bazaar, has this handy and exhaustive list of the audio you should try listening to. If you need some reading instead, this is the long list of the books in contention for this year’s Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year award. There are plenty of very interesting-sounding titles in there.
Enjoy the listening and reading matter. Points of Return will now take an end-of-summer vacation. We will be back in your inbox after Labor Day. By that time, I’ll have taken the kids to see Arcade Fire, and they will have taken themselves to see Harry Styles — so you might want to listen to Arcade Fire’s cover of Harry Styles’ “As It Was.” Thanks for all the feedback, and my apologies for not being able to reply to everything. Enjoy the rest of the summer everyone.
• Bill Dudley: Powell Will Face a Tough Audience in Jackson Hole
• Conor Sen: The End of the Retail Recession Is Good — or Maybe Bad
• Elements by David Fickling: The Summer of Our Discontent | 2022-08-19T06:31:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ‘The Godfather’ Insight on What’s Driving Markets - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-godfather-insight-onwhats-driving-markets/2022/08/19/601556b8-1f86-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-godfather-insight-onwhats-driving-markets/2022/08/19/601556b8-1f86-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
So, doubt and disquiet may yet lie ahead. But Kenyans of the glass-half-full inclination already have some cause for relief: The anger in the Odinga camp over the result has not set off widespread violence. In late 2007, the last time the vote was this close, clashes broke out within minutes of results being announced and escalated into a tribal conflict that raged for weeks. Over 1,100 people were killed and 350,000 were forced to flee their homes before calm was restored.
There was a heavy toll on the economy, too: Kenya’s growth rate plunged from 7.1% in 2007 to 1.7% the following year. So, the absence of post-vote violence this time around should also reassure foreign investors eyeing East Africa’s largest and most dynamic economy.
But any relief may be replaced by anxiety about the management of that economy — witness the plunge in the Kenyan shilling’s value since results were announced. Growth has slowed from 7.5% last year, and Treasury Secretary Ukur Yatani’s prediction of 6.7% for this year looks overoptimistic. Even the World Bank’s more modest forecast of 5.5% may be hard to achieve.
The country’s economic challenges require urgent attention from a president undisturbed by political crises. In addition to the global effects of war in Ukraine, Kenya is caught in the middle of East African’s worst drought in decades. Inflation has inched up toward 9%, the highest in five years, and unemployment is reckoned at 14%.
The next president will be burdened by ballooning debt, a legacy of their predecessor. Under Kenyatta, public debt has surged nearly fivefold to $72 billion. With a debt to GDP ratio of 69.1%, Kenya is classified as being at high risk of distress by the International Monetary Fund. A Bloomberg Economics’ assessment on 50 developing economies ranks Kenya as the sixth-most vulnerable to a debt crisis.
Ruto and Odinga have very different ideas for dealing with the problem. Odinga wants to restructure Kenya’s debt to reduce servicing costs and free up resources for development. Ruto maintains that Kenya has the capacity to repay its loans. Whereas Odinga pledged to increase social spending, including a $50 monthly stipend to the poorest households, Ruto said he would focus on job creation by investing in agriculture, small business and industry.
There is not much hope of them cooperating. Ruto has ruled out reprising the arrangement between Kenyatta and Odinga, popularly known as “The Handshake,” under which they agreed to end disputes over the 2017 election and effectively share power.
So, if the results announced on Tuesday stand, Ruto and Odinga will duke it out in parliament, where their coalitions are evenly matched. Each will attempt to lure factions away from the other camp, which could lead to months of legislative inertia.
Paralysis in parliament is certainly preferable to blood in the streets, but Kenyans — and foreign investors — should expect to have their patience tested. | 2022-08-19T06:31:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kenya’s Economy Can’t Afford a Political Crisis - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/kenyas-economy-cant-afford-a-political-crisis/2022/08/19/99127194-1f7c-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/kenyas-economy-cant-afford-a-political-crisis/2022/08/19/99127194-1f7c-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Analysis by Hussein Ibish | Bloomberg
This is as predictable as it is alarming. The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories seized in 1967 — East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — with no political horizon for ending it, has ensured a steady radicalization among Palestinian factions. That’s a disaster not just for the Israelis and the Palestinians, but also for the Middle East and wider world.
The second Palestinian intifada, which broke out after what should have been the culmination of the Oslo peace process at the 2000 Camp David summit, radicalized both sides. Approximately 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis — both mostly civilians — were killed between late 2000 and early 2005.
Another casualty was the Israeli “peace camp” and the credibility of its Palestinian counterpart, the Palestine Liberation Organization. Israeli politics turned to the hard right. Among Palestinians, Hamas, which rejected the peace process and championed armed struggle, became a contender for national leadership.
That set the stage for the Palestinian split in 2007 as the Palestinian Authority held on to the small areas of self-rule, mostly West Bank towns and cities, secured through the Oslo process in the 1990s, while Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip.
Since then, the peace process has been non-functional, and the two Palestinian factions have treated each other as mortal enemies.
Yet over time Hamas has ossified from the leader of armed Palestinian resistance into a kind of entrenched de facto government in Gaza, dependent on regular financial bailouts from Qatar while engaging in periodic aerial bombardment conflicts with Israel that have become less frequent and more opportunistic.
Conditions have long been ripe for the rise of a more radical faction, and the Iranian- backed PIJ has been vying for that role for years.
The Gaza Strip is a perfect incubator for extremism. Some 2 million people, mostly refugees from what is now southern Israel, are crammed into a tiny, wretched area subjected to a total blockade mainly by Israel and, in some ways, Egypt.
Hamas appears content to rule this open-air prison of misery, but the PIJ is increasingly usurping Hamas’s traditional role, by using Gaza as a launchpad for attacks on Israel not just from the strip itself but in the West Bank and Jerusalem. On Wednesday, the PA reported seizing two PIJ members with 17 kilograms of explosives in the West Bank city of Nablus.
This latest bout of radicalization of the Palestinian national movement may not be surprising, but that does not make it any less dangerous. And there is a great deal the outside world can and must do to contain and reverse it.
The PA and the PLO have been made to look ridiculous and ineffective as their policies of negotiations and security cooperation with Israel have resulted in no major gains since 1996. That’s a huge boon for all extremists.
They need to be strengthened with greater economic support, more diplomatic recognition — including the restoration of the US consulate in East Jerusalem and the PLO mission in Washington — and an end to constant, often abusive Israeli raids into PA-controlled areas, which have been condemned by international human rights groups.
Hamas has indicated it wants greater international recognition and to join the PLO. The international community should lay out a clear roadmap for the group to become a legitimate interlocutor, including Hamas’s acceptance of Palestinian treaty commitments such as the Oslo agreements and, even if the group will not disarm, at least abjure all forms of terrorism.
A significant effort to improve the daily lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — and in Gaza without unduly strengthening Hamas by relying on international NGOs and UN agencies — in sectors such as health and education is essential. Hopelessness and despair make radicalization inevitable.
Finally, a horizon for liberation is essential. Israel should, at long last, formally recognize the Palestinian right to a genuinely independent state. The details can be left to future negotiations. But such a commitment would provide Palestinians with much-needed hope for eventual freedom.
Without such measures, just as Hamas rose to challenge the PLO, the PIJ will continue to bedevil and challenge Hamas, with increasing success. The death toll among Israelis and Palestinians will incrementally rise until the next, and inevitable, explosion of massive and sustained violence.
• A Middle Eastern NATO? Not Gonna Happen: Bobby Ghosh
• Biden’s Risky Trip to the Mideast Is Also Pointless: Zev Chafets
• Modi’s India Is Becoming a Reflection of Jinnah’s Fears: Nisid Hajari | 2022-08-19T06:31:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sharper Israeli-Palestinian Strife Is Sign of Worse to Come - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/sharper-israeli-palestinian-strife-is-signof-worse-to-come/2022/08/19/99695db0-1f7c-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/sharper-israeli-palestinian-strife-is-signof-worse-to-come/2022/08/19/99695db0-1f7c-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
The headquarters of Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB, in central Moscow. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; AFP/Getty; iStock)
A months-long examination by The Washington Post of the intelligence war in Ukraine draws on a trove of sensitive materials including intercepted communications involving Russian intelligence operatives, as well as in-depth interviews with senior Ukrainian, U.S. and European officials. Here are some key findings:
1. A clandestine branch of Russia’s security service was deeply involved in the Kremlin’s failed war plan, assuring officials in Moscow that Ukraine’s government would fall quickly and deploying operatives to install a puppet regime.
The FSB branch, known internally as the Department of Operational Information, has for years carried out clandestine operations to penetrate Ukraine’s institutions, pay off pro-Russian politicians and prevent the country from leaving Moscow’s orbit. Despite its intense focus on Ukraine, Western intelligence officials said, the FSB either failed to grasp how fiercely Ukraine would resist, or did understand but couldn’t convey such inconvenient information to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
2. FSB officers were so confident they would seize the levers of power in Kyiv that they spent the final days before the war arranging accommodations in the capital.
Communications intercepted by Ukrainian security services show FSB officers asking colleagues for details about apartments and other locations they might use as safe houses, residences or bases of operation. Days before Russian forces crossed into Ukraine, officials said, FSB informants were told to vacate the capital but leave behind keys to their residences for arriving Russian operatives.
3. The FSB’s Ukraine department underwent a major expansion in the period leading up to the invasion, according to Ukrainian and Western security officials.
The department surged in size from about 30 officers in 2019 to as many as 160 on the eve of the Ukraine invasion, officials said. FSB teams were assigned regions of Ukraine and networks of sleeper agents inside the country. In retrospect, Ukrainian officials see the buildup as an early warning that Russia was laying the groundwork for an attack.
4. The FSB worked closely with prominent collaborators and lined up at least two pro-Russian governments-in-waiting.
The FSB’s main allies included former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia in 2014, and Viktor Medvedchuk, an oligarch who became co-leader of Ukraine’s main pro-Russian party after forging a close relationship with Putin. Yanukovych was at the center of a group that assembled in Belarus in early March, possibly positioned to swoop in and reclaim power. A second group involving former members of Yanukovych’s party gathered in territory in southern Ukraine that was seized early in the war by Russian forces.
5. Despite repeated failures, FSB leaders remain in their positions and the agency has regrouped, putting officers on three-month rotations in regions occupied by Russian forces.
U.S. and other officials said they have seen no evidence that Putin has cleaned house at the top of Russia’s spy agencies or held senior officials to account for costly misjudgments. Instead, FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov and the leader of its Ukraine directorate, Sergey Beseda, remain in their positions, overseeing aspects of the war effort. | 2022-08-19T06:31:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | FSB missteps, overconfidence damaged Russia's war plans in Ukraine - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/19/intelligence-war-fsb-ukraine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/19/intelligence-war-fsb-ukraine/ |
The Moscow headquarters of Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB, which played a key role in President Vladimir Putin's war plans. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; AFP/Getty; Olga Maltseva/AFP/Getty; iStock)
KYIV, Ukraine — In the final days before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s security service began sending cryptic instructions to informants in Kyiv. Pack up and get out of the capital, the Kremlin collaborators were told, but leave behind the keys to your homes.
5 things you need to know about Russia’s intelligence failures ahead of the invasion of UkraineChevronRight
“Have a successful trip!” one FSB officer told another who was being sent to oversee the expected occupation, according to intercepted communications. There is no indication that the recipient ever made it to the capital, as the FSB’s plans collapsed amid the retreat of Russian forces in the early months of the war.
The communications exposing these preparations are part of a larger trove of sensitive materials obtained by Ukrainian and other security services and reviewed by The Washington Post. They offer rare insight into the activities of the FSB — a sprawling service that bears enormous responsibility for the failed Russian war plan and the hubris that propelled it.
An agency whose domain includes internal security in Russia as well as espionage in the former Soviet states, the FSB has spent decades spying on Ukraine, attempting to co-opt its institutions, paying off officials and working to impede any perceived drift toward the West. No aspect of the FSB’s intelligence mission outside Russia was more important than burrowing into all levels of Ukrainian society.
[Hubris and isolation led Vladimir Putin to misjudge Ukraine]
The humiliations of Russia’s military have largely overshadowed the failures of the FSB and other intelligence agencies. But in some ways, these have been even more incomprehensible and consequential, officials said, underpinning nearly every Kremlin war decision.
“The Russians were wrong by a mile,” said a senior U.S. official with regular access to classified intelligence on Russia and its security services. “They set up an entire war effort to seize strategic objectives that were beyond their means,” the official said. “Russia’s mistake was really fundamental and strategic.”
Ukraine’s security services have an interest in discrediting Russia’s spy agencies, but key details from the trove were corroborated by officials in Western governments.
The files show that the FSB unit responsible for Ukraine surged in size in the months leading up to the war and was counting on support from a vast network of paid agents in Ukraine’s security apparatus. Some complied and sabotaged Ukraine’s defenses, officials said, while others appear to have pocketed their FSB payments but balked at doing the Kremlin’s bidding when the fighting started.
There are records that add to the mystery of Russian miscalculations. Extensive polls conducted for the FSB show that large segments of Ukraine’s population were prepared to resist Russian encroachment, and that any expectation that Russian forces would be greeted as liberators was unfounded. Even so, officials said, the FSB continued to feed the Kremlin rosy assessments that Ukraine’s masses would welcome the arrival of Russia’s military and the restoration of Moscow-friendly rule.
“There was plenty of wishful thinking in the GRU and the military, but it started with the FSB,” said a senior Western security official, using the GRU abbreviation for Russia’s main military intelligence agency. “The sense that there would be flowers strewn in their path — that was an FSB exercise.” He and other security officials in Ukraine, the United States and Europe spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.
Instead, FSB operatives who at one point had reached the outskirts of Kyiv had to retreat alongside Russian forces, Ukrainian security officials said. Rather than presiding over the formation of a new government in Kyiv, officials said, the FSB now faces difficult questions in Moscow about what its long history of operations against Ukraine — and the large sums that financed them — accomplished.
The FSB’s plans and the efforts of Ukraine’s security agencies to thwart them — with backing from the CIA, Britain’s MI6 and other Western intelligence services — are part of a shadow war that has played out in parallel to Russia’s military campaign. It is a conflict that was underway long before the Feb. 24 invasion, and its battle lines are blurred by the tangled, overlapping histories of Russian services and Ukrainian counterparts that began as offspring of the Soviet-era KGB.
Ukraine’s security agencies have scored notable victories. Early on, a Ukrainian nongovernmental organization published what it described as a roster of FSB operatives linked to the war effort, posting the identities and passport numbers of dozens of alleged spies in a move meant to disrupt the agency’s plans and rattle its personnel. A person connected to the NGO, which is called Myrotvorets, or Peacemaker, said the data was obtained by Ukraine’s security services. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing threats to his security.
Ivan Bakanov, who headed the SBU, Ukraine's main internal security service, at the start of the war. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; Efrem Lukatsky/AP; iStock)
At the same time, Ukraine’s main internal security service, the SBU, has struggled to rid its ranks of Russian moles and saboteurs. Several senior officers have been arrested and branded traitors by Zelensky, who took the extraordinary step in July of removing SBU Director Ivan Bakanov — a childhood friend — from his post.
“If your security services put such a high priority on understanding Ukraine, and your military plan is based on that understanding, how could they have gotten it so wrong?” said William B. Taylor Jr., who twice served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, including in an acting capacity in 2019. “How could they have assumed the Ukrainians wouldn’t fight, that President Zelensky would not resist so valiantly? The disconnect has to be somewhere between the FSB and the very top.”
Among those making plans to arrive in Kyiv in late February was Igor Kovalenko, identified by Ukraine as a senior FSB officer who had for years been a principal handler of some of the most prominent Ukrainian politicians and government officials secretly on the Kremlin’s payroll, including members of the opposition party co-chaired by Viktor Medvedchuk, a close friend of Putin.
An exchange Kovalenko had with an FSB subordinate on Feb. 18 suggests that he had his eye on an apartment in Kyiv’s leafy Obolon neighborhood, overlooking the Dnieper River.
Igor Kovalenko, identified by Ukraine as a senior FSB officer, seemed to have his eye on an informant's apartment in a building in Kyiv's Obolon neighborhood. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; Heidi Levine for The Washington Post; iStock)
Kovalenko’s subordinate sent back the address, phone numbers and code words used to communicate with the informant, who served in Zelensky’s government, Ukrainian officials said.
The officials declined to identify the informant but said he admitted that he had received FSB instructions days before the invasion to pack his belongings, leave his keys and get out of the capital to ensure his personal security during the war’s initial phase.
Other informants detained by Ukrainian authorities have provided similar accounts, one of the officials said. “They had been told, ‘When you return, it will all be different.’ ”
Details published by Peacemaker and confirmed by Ukrainian security officials describe Kovalenko as a 47-year-old veteran of the spy service who in recent years was responsible for managing the agency’s clandestine ties to Ukraine’s parliament and main pro-Russian party.
Ukrainian authorities believe that Kovalenko may have been just miles from the capital in March, accompanying Russian forces then outside the city. But the FSB team assigned to set up operations in Kyiv had to abandon that plan when Russia’s forces began their retreat, officials said.
Kovalenko is a senior officer in an FSB unit — the Ninth Directorate of the Department of Operational Information — whose main purpose has for years been to ensure Ukraine’s servility to Moscow.
When the protesters prevailed, Yanukovych fled to Russia with a group of senior advisers suspected of working with Beseda’s branch in the years that followed to bring a pro-Russian government back to power.
Anti-government protesters rally in Kyiv in December 2013 in what would become known as the Maidan Revolution. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; Brendan Hoffman/Getty; iStock)
At first, the surge was seen as another venture aimed at “returning Russian influence in Ukraine,” said a security official in Kyiv involved in tracking FSB operations. But in retrospect, it may have been an early signal that Russia was shifting focus, the official said, from shaping events in Ukraine to plotting “its seizure.”
As Russia’s military mobilization accelerated last year, Ukraine’s security services were inundated with additional intelligence from Western spy services, officials said.
On Jan. 12, CIA Director William J. Burns arrived in Kyiv with a detailed dossier on Russia’s plans and a team of accompanying U.S. officials who sought to convince Zelensky and his inner circle that war was imminent.
Yet when the CIA team departed, Ukraine’s spy chiefs gathered with Zelensky to deliver a follow-on briefing that was far more equivocal.
“We relayed all the information that the Americans had shared without any changes,” said a participant. But at the same time, the official said, “our information said that the Russians are not planning war” on such a large scale, and that judgment was given equal weight alongside the CIA warnings.
Ten days after Burns’s visit, the British government declared that it had “information that indicates the Russian government is looking to install a pro-Russian leader in Kyiv as it considers whether to invade and occupy Ukraine.”
The British file identified a pro-Russian former member of Ukraine’s parliament, Yevhen Murayev, “as a potential candidate,” a claim that Murayev dismissed as “ridiculous and funny” in a response to the Associated Press. The British statement also listed former members of Yanukovych’s cabinet, alleging that they had links to Russian intelligence and that officers they were in contact with were “involved in the planning for an attack on Ukraine.”
Russian Sergey Beseda, who oversees the FSB's Ukraine directorate. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; Photo obtained by The Washington Post; iStock)
About the same time, Ukraine’s security agencies picked up indications that FSB operatives were in direct communication with Russia’s airborne forces, officials said. Such direct interaction between the FSB and military units was so unusual, officials said, that it was regarded as a worrisome sign of joint operational planning.
That concern seems to have been well-placed. Russia’s airborne forces played a pivotal role in the capture of an airport in Hostomel, on the outskirts of Kyiv, in the early hours of the invasion. It was a key node for the anticipated assault on the capital, and FSB officers were observed there before Russian forces were driven from the airstrip, officials said.
In mid-February, Ukraine’s foreign intelligence service, the SZR, sent agents into Russia to carry out surveillance operations on military units. One team encountered a Potemkin village of Russian hardware, officials said, with dozens of parked tanks accompanied by a small security detail. No tank operators or maintenance crews were anywhere in the vicinity.
Elsewhere, Ukraine’s spies came upon a scene of disciplinary mayhem: lines of stranded Russian vehicles accompanied by troops who had bartered fuel and other supplies for alcohol. “A lot of them were drunk,” said a Ukrainian official who reviewed reports on what Ukraine’s spies had witnessed.
The scenes fed doubts among security advisers to Zelensky, some of whom were understandably disinclined to believe that their country’s days might be numbered. Even now, months later, many continue to express disbelief that Russia pressed ahead so poorly prepared.
European officials also remained skeptical. In Kyiv on Feb. 8, French President Emmanuel Macron said he had received a personal assurance from Putin that Russia would not escalate the situation. Germany’s spy chief, Bruno Kahl, had said days earlier that Putin’s decision on whether to attack had “not yet been made.” (Kahl was in Kyiv on the day the invasion began and had to be evacuated by car to Poland.)
In the end, many Ukrainian security officials believed that Russia’s military buildup was largely a psychological ploy, but that Moscow might use missile strikes and incursions by airborne units and elite Spetsnaz troops to topple a government it saw as teetering. At the time, Zelensky’s approval ratings had plummeted to around 26 percent as Ukraine faced an energy crisis and pressure on its currency that officials attributed to Russian sabotage.
“We didn’t envision … some classic invasion in Second World War style with tanks, artillery and infantry,” a senior Ukrainian security official said. Ukraine was wrong about Russia’s intentions, he said, but even Moscow may not have envisioned a major land war.
“They expected somebody to open the gate,” the official said. “They didn’t expect any resistance.”
In an interview this month with The Post, Zelensky said that well before the invasion, Russia had been waging “a hybrid war against our state. There was an energy blow, there was a political blow.”
“They wanted a change of power from inside the country,” he said. “I had the feeling that [the Russians] wanted to prepare us for a soft surrender.”
Ukraine’s SBU — like its Russian counterpart — is a direct descendant of the KGB. It occupies the former KGB headquarters in Kyiv, is organized around the same bureaucratic structure as its Soviet predecessor, and employs an undisclosed number of officers who trained at the KGB academy in Moscow or its FSB successor after the Soviet breakup.
The agencies’ entangled histories bring a hall-of-mirrors aspect to the conflict.
Current and former Ukrainian security officials said fear about the loyalties of even senior personnel is a source of constant anxiety. One official said he reached for his phone on the war’s second day to begin calling subordinates to relay orders. But he hesitated as he dialed, he said, worried that his calls would go unanswered or reveal that senior lieutenants had thrown their support to the Russians.
“It’s a paradox of the Ukrainian state,” the official said. “It was believed, including by Ukrainians themselves, that there was a high level of corruption, inefficiency and infiltration of Russian agents in the Ukrainian government structures.” But after Feb. 24, he said, “they not only worked but also worked more efficiently than ever.”
He and others attributed much of that resilience to the example Zelensky set with his decision to remain in the capital. His ability to do so was due in part to the existence of a massive bunker complex under Kyiv’s government quarter that was designed by Soviet engineers and built to survive nuclear conflict.
A senior adviser described being taken to meet Zelensky in the first weeks of the war and descending into a disorienting warren of tunnels and command posts. “I still can’t say to you where [Zelensky’s base of operations] is exactly,” he said, because the complex is such a labyrinth.
Ukraine has made repeated attempts to cleanse its ranks of Russian assets, at one point even enlisting a CIA officer to serve as an internal adviser on rooting out FSB penetrations, according to former U.S. officials. But with an estimated 27,000 employees — making the SBU at least five times as large as MI5, its British equivalent — the agency has struggled to surmount the problem.
SBU and police personnel during July 2021 anti-terrorism exercises in Kyiv. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto/Getty; iStock)
“Is there treachery? What can I say?” Zelensky said. “With all my love for Ukraine, we are not without sin.” The number of those who are not loyal to their country “has fallen over the years,” he said. Still, when the war started, “there were people who were working for Russians for money, and some who from the inside always hated Ukraine and were waiting for the Soviet Union to return.”
Several senior SBU officers have been charged with treason. Among them is the former head of the agency’s directorate in Kherson, in southern Ukraine, who was accused of ordering subordinates to abandon their posts as Russian forces flooded the region.
[In Kherson, misery under Russian occupation, hope over Ukrainian gains]
Last month, Ukrainian authorities arrested another SBU officer, Oleg Kulinich, who had been installed in the service’s upper ranks by Bakanov, the SBU director and childhood friend of Zelensky. The allegations against Kulinich underscore the pervasiveness of Russian penetrations. Charges filed by Ukrainian authorities describe him as part of a cell of sleeper agents operated by Vladimir Sivkovich, a former deputy head of Ukraine’s security council who was placed under sanction by the U.S. Treasury Department in January for working “with a network of Russian intelligence actors to carry out influence operations.”
Two years before the war, Sivkovich “set a task for Kulinich” to begin stealing secret internal SBU files that would be “of operational interest” to the “special services of the Russian Federation,” according to the charging document.
Together, according to the document, they conspired to help promote another alleged Russian spy to take control of the SBU’s counterintelligence department. That figure, Andriy Naumov, was arrested in Serbia in June carrying cash and gems worth more than $700,000, according to information released by Serbian authorities.
On the night before Russia’s invasion, Kulinich “deliberately” blocked the dissemination of intelligence warning that Russian forces in Crimea were hours from launching an attack, according to the Ukrainian indictment.
Zelensky’s decision to oust Bakanov as SBU director after Kulinich’s arrest was driven by exasperation with his failure to “cleanse” the agency of Russia sympathizers, said Andriy Smirnov, deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office. “Six months into the war,” he said, “we continue to uncover loads of these people.”
Overall, Ukraine has detained more than 800 people suspected of aiding Russia through reconnaissance or sabotage, according to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry. Authorities have also moved against suspected “agents of influence” in government, parliament and politics.
Zelensky’s government had charged Medvedchuk with treason in May 2021 and placed him under house arrest. Medvedchuk denied any wrongdoing and said he would fight to clear his name. He then escaped during the early days of the war, but was recaptured in April and now awaits trial. Medvedchuk’s lawyer, Tetyana Zhukovska, declined to comment this month, saying she could not do so until a Ukrainian court ruled in the treason case against her client.
[In the Ukraine war, a battle for the nation’s mineral and energy wealth]
“When they began on Feb. 24, the task was to take Kyiv,” said a Ukrainian security official. “They expected it would lead to a domino effect” that would ripple across the country. “They would take first central power and then they would have strengthened presence in regions.”
As part of that plan, Ukrainian officials said, the FSB had lined up at least two pro-Russian governments-in-waiting — not just one as the British government had warned. Ukraine officials said it was unclear why Russia had mobilized two groups, though some speculated that Putin may have simply wanted options.
One, positioned in Belarus, centered on Yanukovych. On March 7, a plane that belonged to the former Ukrainian president landed in Minsk, its arrival treated as an indication that Russia might seek to reinstate a politician Kremlin officials still referred to after his 2014 ouster as the country’s “legitimate” leader.
Yanukovych then issued an open letter to Zelensky, broadcast by a Russian state news agency, in which he told the Ukrainian president it was his duty to “stop the bloodshed and reach a peace deal at any price.” Over the following week, Yanukovych’s security chief spoke three times with a senior officer from the FSB’s Ukraine unit, according to data intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence.
Yanukovych did not respond to requests for comment. His former prime minister, Nikolai Azarov, said in a telephone interview with The Post that any suggestion that Moscow was seeking to engineer Yanukovych’s return to power was “total nonsense.”
Oleg Tsaryov, a former leading member of Ukraine's pro-Russian Party of Regions. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; Alexander Natruskin/Sputnik/AP; iStock)
A second group, which included former members of the Yanukovych government, gathered in southeastern Ukraine as territory there fell to Russian forces. Among them was Oleg Tsaryov, a former leading member of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, who declared his presence in Ukraine on a post to the Telegram messaging app, saying that “Kyiv will be free from fascists.”
In a telephone interview with The Post last month, Tsaryov said he had even moved into areas around Kyiv during the initial weeks of the war, traveling with “friends” he declined to identify. He wouldn’t answer questions about whether he was part of any plot to seize power, saying only that when he was outside Kyiv, “I didn’t have any agreements with anyone about a new government.”
U.S. spy agencies were prescient on Putin’s intentions but underestimated Ukraine’s ability to withstand the onslaught — an error that contributed to the United States’ initial hesitation to send heavy and sophisticated weapons.
Ukraine’s services appear to have read too much into signs that Russian forces were ill-prepared for full-scale combat, resisting Western warnings of an invasion that came within miles of the capital.
Russia’s intelligence breakdowns in Ukraine seem more systemic, its work marred by unreliable sources, disincentives to deliver hard truths to the Kremlin, and an endemic bias that matched Putin’s contemptuous attitude toward the country.
The FSB fueled this dynamic, officials said, with assessments packaged to please the Kremlin and with sources who had their own reasons — political and financial — for encouraging a Russian takedown of the Kyiv government.
Confidential reports by a think tank with close ties to the FSB, the Moscow-based Institute of CIS Countries, prodded Moscow to reassert control over its neighbor. An early 2021 report obtained by The Post said that doing so was the only way to “rid Russia of the eternal threat … posed by the puppet state ready to carry out any order of the enemy forces of the West.”
The director of the institute, Konstantin Zatulin, insisted in a telephone interview that he had opposed the use of military force against Ukraine, and blamed the Kremlin’s “inflated expectations” about what the invasion could accomplish on exaggerations by Kremlin allies in the country.
Viktor Medvedchuk, the Ukrainian oligarch and Putin friend whom Kyiv charged with treason in May 2021. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; Sputnik/AP; iStock)
Foremost among them was Medvedchuk, who had served as presidential chief of staff in the early 2000s before amassing a business fortune and becoming co-leader of Ukraine’s main pro-Russian party.
The U.S. Treasury Department, which had previously placed Medvedchuk under sanction, went after key party lieutenants in January, accusing them of collaborating with Russian intelligence on efforts to “take over the Ukrainian government and control Ukraine’s critical infrastructure with an occupying force.”
One of those sanctioned associates, Oleh Voloshyn, denied that he or Medvedchuk had any specific prior knowledge of Russia’s invasion plan or that they were seeking to overthrow the Zelensky government. In a telephone interview with The Post last month, Voloshyn blamed the war on Zelensky, saying the repression of Medvedchuk and his supporters forced Moscow to defend its allies.
“The choice was always becoming neutral voluntarily, or made neutral through force,” he said. “I don’t say this is good or bad. It’s just the reality.”
Almost immediately, the war failed to live up to Medvedchuk’s forecasts. And it was his political network, rather than Zelensky’s, that ultimately folded, with as many as a dozen senior party officials leaving the country.
Moscow’s subsequent spurning of Medvedchuk has been one of the few visible signs of Putin’s pique.
Images of Medvedchuk after his 2022 rearrest in Ukraine are seen at a Moscow news conference held by his wife to call for his release. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; Anadolu Agency/Getty; iStock)
To the Kremlin, “he is a traitor because he took all the money and delivered no results,” said Kostyantyn Batozsky, who was an adviser to a Donetsk governor before the region was taken over by pro-Russian separatists.
Medvedchuk “is a played card; they will never use him again,” Batozsky said. “He doesn’t want to go to Russia now because he will be asked the most unpleasant question in the world: What about the money? Where did it go?”
One of the more puzzling aspects of Russia’s miscalculation is that the FSB had received information suggesting that war with Ukraine would not be a walkover.
An April 2021 poll by the firm Research & Branding found that 84 percent of Ukrainians would regard any further encroachment by Russian forces as an “occupation,” with just 2 percent seeing such a scenario as a “liberation.”
Was a “great war” between the countries possible? the poll asked. Were people “feeling concerned for themselves and their loved ones” about the buildup of Russian forces? Was Ukraine’s army capable of fending off an invasion?
The most salient question appears toward the end of the poll: “Are you ready to defend Ukraine in the event of such a necessity?” Overall, 48 percent answered in the affirmative.
Pre-war polls by an organization linked to Russia’s security service found that 48 percent of Ukrainians were prepared to fight to defend the country, and that only 2% would regard the “appearance” of Russian forces as a “liberation”. (Research & Branding)
When contacted by telephone, Eduard Zolotukhin, Research & Branding’s director, asked The Post to send written questions, but then did not respond.
Early reports that Beseda, responsible for the FSB’s Ukraine directorate, had been demoted or even imprisoned are viewed skeptically by U.S. and other intelligence officials, who say they have seen no information to suggest that any of Russia’s spy chiefs has faced such consequences.
Russia's FSB chief, Alexander Bortnikov. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty; iStock)
“We have pretty good reason to believe that he’s still in the job,” a senior U.S. official said of Beseda. Nor, the official said, is there any indication that FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov has been held to account for his agency’s failures. A senior Russian politician with close links to the Kremlin and to the FSB also said in an interview that Beseda was continuing to carry out his duties.
[The West has imposed a barrage of sanctions on top Russian figures. See how they’re connected to Putin.]
“I don’t share this view,” one official said. The FSB “didn’t manage the task they were given. But they are continuing to work. Not with the same enthusiasm. But they continue.”
Ukrainian officials cited recent intelligence indicating that the FSB — like the Russian military — has regrouped, turning its focus to territories in the south and east that have been obliterated by Russian artillery.
“We can see it playing out now in Mariupol, Melitopol, Kherson” and other cities that have fallen to Russian forces, a Ukrainian intelligence official said. FSB officials swoop in to implement a version of the blueprint the agency originally had for Kyiv.
“The aim is political control, economic control, control over criminal groups — all spheres of activity on seized territory,” the intelligence official said. “The final aim is to install a pro-Russian power.”
An official adjusts a Russian flag before handing out Russian passports to residents of the southern Ukrainian city of Melitopol, now under Kremlin control. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA-EFE; iStock)
Kherson, the first major city to fall to the Russian army, now offers a chilling glimpse into what life might have been like if Russia had taken Ukraine’s capital.
The city’s mayor, Ihor Kolykhaiev, was arrested in June after repeatedly refusing to cooperate with the Russian occupiers, and his whereabouts are unknown, an aide to the mayor said. He has been replaced by Oleksandr Kobets, a former KGB officer who had also once worked for the SBU.
The former mayor’s aide, Galina Lyashevskaya, said that at least 300 residents were unaccounted for when Kolykhaiev was ousted from his position in April. More recent estimates are at least double that.
Many more have been arrested, she said, and about half the city’s population of 300,000 has fled. In a recent report, Human Rights Watch documented dozens of cases of torture among Kherson’s residents.
“The FSB does not have any uniform, so you never know who is standing next to you,” Lyashevskaya said. “It is paradise for the FSB here. … They can force anyone to do what they want.”
Igor Kovalenko, identified by Ukraine as a senior FSB officer. (Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; Photo obtained by The Washington Post; iStock)
Ukrainian officials said they have not been able to determine Kovalenko’s current whereabouts.
Shane Harris, Karen DeYoung and Souad Mekhennet in Washington and Isabelle Khurshudyan and David L. Stern in Kyiv contributed to this report.
Editing by Peter Finn. Copy editing by Martha Murdock and Tom Justice. Photo editing by Chloe Coleman. Design and development by Garland Potts and Emily Sabens. Design editing by Joe Moore. Project management by Jay Wang.
Greg Miller is an investigative foreign correspondent based in London for The Washington Post and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of “The Apprentice,” a book on Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential race and the fallout under the Trump administration. Twitter Twitter
Catherine Belton reports on Russia for The Washington Post. She is the author of “Putin's People,” a New York Times Critics’ Book of 2020 and a book of the year for the Times, the Economist and the Financial Times. Belton previously was an investigations correspondent for Reuters and a Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times. | 2022-08-19T06:32:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | FSB errors played crucial role in Russia's failed war plans in Ukraine - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/russia-fsb-intelligence-ukraine-war/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/russia-fsb-intelligence-ukraine-war/ |
A policeman looks at a trailer transporting a Soviet T-34 tank, which had been installed as a monument, to a military museum in Tallinn, Estonia. (Sergei Grits/AP)
Estonia said it had successfully withstood a major cyberattack launched by Russia-aligned hackers who attempted to take down the websites of government offices, banks and health care providers in the Baltic nation.
Wednesday’s attacks came as Estonia, which is a NATO member, relocated a Soviet-era World War II monument to a museum — an effort that stirred controversy in a nation with a sizable ethnic Russian population. But the incursions — distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which involve hackers trying to flood websites with more users than it can handle — were unsuccessful. “With some brief and minor exceptions, websites remained fully available throughout the day,” said Luukas Ilves, the government’s chief information officer.
Estonia is one of Europe’s major software development hubs. The Baltic republic of 1.3 million — which regained its independence in 1991 after decades of rule from Moscow — is also one of Ukraine’s strongest supporters in face of the Russian invasion. Tallinn has provided, on a per capita basis, more military and humanitarian assistance to Kyiv than any other country.
Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, dubbed Europe’s “Iron Lady” for her refusal to compromise with the Kremlin over Ukraine, is also a global leader in the effort to deepen Western sanctions against Moscow.
Killnet, a pro-Russian hacking group, claimed responsibility for the attacks on its Telegram channel. It said it had tried to cut off access to hundreds of websites in sectors such as finance, health care, education, government services and utilities. In June, Killnet also sought to overwhelm Lithuanian public services websites after that country began enforcing E.U. sanctions on a Russian exclave. Lithuanian officials said that a cyberattack had undermined access to more than 130 websites in late June.
Robert Potter, co-founder and chief executive of Internet 2.0, an Australian cybersecurity firm, said this week’s attack against Estonia was a high-intensity and short-term campaign, and that such efforts are “generally lower in sophistication.”
“Adversaries trade precision for scale. As a result, it’s best to interpret these attacks as messaging rather than campaigns designed to destroy,” he said.
In 2007, Estonia suffered a massive cyberattack by hackers that were suspected to have links with the Kremlin. Hackers crippled email servers and forced a major bank to halt its online services for more than an hour. Many Estonian websites were forced to temporarily cut themselves off from the rest of the world, in what was the first-known example of a major nation-on-nation cyberattack. Those attacks also came after Estonia relocated a Soviet-era World War II monument. Moscow denied involvement.
Estonian leader urges faster help for Ukraine amid signs of war fatigue
The 2007 attacks galvanized the small Baltic country into enhancing its cybersecurity infrastructure, making it better prepared for this latest strike. It has a voluntary civilian cyberdefense league and hosts an annual NATO-led cybersecurity training operation, the largest such exercise in the world. Microsoft also ranks Estonia highly on its Digital Futures Index, which measures factors such as e-governance capabilities and the sophistication of digital infrastructure.
“Although subject to the most extensive cyber attacks, [Estonia] is stronger than we were in 2007,” Kallas wrote on Twitter Thursday.
This week, Estonia removed a T-34 World War II Soviet tank from a monument near the Russian border. Officials said that modern Russian tanks were now being used to kill innocent people in Ukraine.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has “torn open the wounds in our society that these communist monuments remind of us,” Kallas recently said. | 2022-08-19T07:14:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Estonia says it withstood cyberattack by Russia-linked hackers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/estonia-cyberattack-russian-hackers-ukraine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/estonia-cyberattack-russian-hackers-ukraine/ |
Xiao Jianhua, a Chinese-born Canadian billionaire, in Hong Kong in 2013. (Next Magazine/AP)
A court in Shanghai sentenced Chinese-born Canadian billionaire Xiao Jianhua on Friday to 13 years in prison after finding him guilty of bribery, illegal use of funds and other financial crimes in a case that has touched upon the highest rungs of Chinese political power.
After Xiao disappeared from the Four Seasons hotel in Hong Kong in a suspected abduction by Chinese security agents in 2017, his case has been a focus for observers of Chinese Communist Party factional intrigue following reports that Tomorrow Holding, the investment group he founded, had links to the relatives of high-powered former officials.
Shanghai Number 1 Intermediate People’s Court announced the verdict on Friday on its official social media account. As well as the prison sentence for Xiao, it included a personal fine of 6.5 million yuan ($950,000), while Tomorrow Holding was fined 55.03 billion yuan ($8.08 billion).
The ruling stated that Xiao and his company had “done severe damage to orderly financial oversight and severely endangered national financial security” by bribing numerous officials with a total of 680 million yuan ($100 million) of stock, property and cash to evade scrutiny.
Xiao, who holds a Canadian passport, was tried in a closed-door hearing in July. The Canadian Embassy said at the time that its representatives were denied consular access. | 2022-08-19T07:31:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Chinese tycoon Xiao Jianhua is sentenced to 13 years in prison - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/china-xiao-jianhua-sentenced-prison/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/china-xiao-jianhua-sentenced-prison/ |
WILMINGTON, Del. — Keegan Bradley hasn’t been to the FedEx Cup finale in four years, and he started the BMW Championship like he was in a hurry to get back.
MOORESVILLE, N.C. — Kurt Busch said he’ll miss the final two races of NASCAR’s regular season, bringing it to six races the 2004 champion has been sidelined with concussion-like symptoms.
MADRID — Mexico forward Jesús “Tecatito” Corona is expected to miss the World Cup after breaking his left leg while training with Sevilla, the Spanish club said.
WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. — The family of a 12-year-old Little League World Series player from Utah who sustained a head injury after falling from the top bunk of his bed at the dormitory complex said that he has been moved from intensive care and is able to sit up, eat and walk with support. | 2022-08-19T08:03:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Thursday Sports in Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/thursday-sports-in-brief/2022/08/19/b2c4b064-1f8d-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/thursday-sports-in-brief/2022/08/19/b2c4b064-1f8d-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Ancient Vatican statue is latest artwork climate protesters glued hands to
Two Italian environmental activists glue their hands to a statue in the Vatican in support of climate change action. (Ultima Generazione Via AP) (Ultima Generazione/AP)
Italian environmental protesters glued their hands to the base of an ancient statue in a Vatican museum on Thursday, in an effort to pressure Rome against reopening old coal mines and launching new plans to drill for natural gas. The protest was the latest effort by European environmental activists in recent months that targeted famous artwork.
The Laocoon statue, believed to have been carved in ancient Greece sometime around 40 to 30 B.C., depicts an ill-fated Trojan priest, whose warnings to his countrymen against accepting a horse gifted by the Greeks went unheeded. The activists felt their warnings of impending environmental catastrophe were similarly unheard.
The protesters said the statue was unharmed. They were arrested by Vatican security and taken to an Italian police station, according to the Associated Press.
“Today, thousands of activists are sounding the alarm about the climate, but they too are ignored and repressed,” said Last Generation, the Italian environmental group responsible for the act, in a tweet.
“There will be no open museums, no art, no beauty in a world plagued by climate and ecological emergencies,” the group said in a statement that was partially attributed to a 26-year-old art history graduate who glued her hand to the sculpture. She was identified only as Laura.
The episode comes on the heels of many other protests involving paintings and sculptures in Europe. In July, activists from the same group glued themselves to a glass frame protecting Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera painting in Florence before security ripped their hands free. A video of the incident garnered Last Generation 35,000 views on Instagram, making it one of their more popular posts.
That month, climate protesters also glued themselves to the frame of a 500-year-old painting of the Last Supper at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. They spray-painted “No new oil” on the wall underneath the artwork.
None of the paintings were permanently disfigured, the AP reported.
“Targeting famous artworks and museums which are so well-known and which attract a diverse range of people from across the spectrum has been a highly effective way of drawing attention,” said Priya Kurian, an expert on environmental politics at New Zealand’s University of Waikato.
“The point is that these activists are not damaging art. Instead, they are drawing attention to the need to protect our treasures, the ultimate treasure of a healthy planet,” she said.
In July, climate protesters also interrupted the Tour de France race and disrupted the British Grand Prix.
In the United States, climate change activism is also gaining popularity, with nearly one-quarter of U.S. adults making efforts to support climate change action in the past year, according to a May 2021 Pew Research Center study.
Scientists are also being drawn to more extreme action. In April a climate change and soil scientist chained herself to the White House fence to protest government inaction.
In December, Bruce Glavovic, an environmental professor at New Zealand’s Massey University, urged his colleagues in an academic journal op-ed to issue a moratorium on research to protest the lack of action on climate change.
“If evidence is being ignored, we need to stand up and call for action,” he said in an interview. “If we are going to destroy the world around us, we are doing something even worse than destroying artwork that is being produced for the public good.” | 2022-08-19T08:32:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Italian climate protesters glue hands to Vatican’s Laocoon statue - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/vatican-climate-protest-laocoon-statue/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/vatican-climate-protest-laocoon-statue/ |
A view shows a building of the Kharkiv National Technical University heavily damaged by a Russian missile strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine continues, in Kharkiv, Ukraine August 19, 2022. REUTERS/Vitalii Hnidyi (Stringer/Reuters)
Both Russia and Ukraine are warning of a possible attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, currently under Russian control, in southeastern Ukraine. The United Nations has expressed alarm, saying any damage to the plant would be “suicide.” Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
Ukraine has warned that Russia could be planning a “large-scale terrorist attack” on the nuclear plant to blame on Kyiv, while Russia said Ukraine and the United States are planning to trigger an accident at the plant, claiming there is a threat of the core overheating.
Any false flag operations at the plant would be out of the “Russian playbook — accuse others of what you have done or what you intend to do,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said when asked about the warnings. He said it was “something we’re watching very closely.”
“We must tell it as it is. Any potential damage to Zaporizhzhia is suicide,” said U.N. Secretary General António Guterres following a high-level meeting of the leaders of the United Nations, Turkey and Ukraine. Russia’s foreign ministry rejected any proposal to demilitarize the area around the plant, stating that it would make the facility “more vulnerable.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky faces a cascade of public criticism — unprecedented since the war began — in response to comments he made in an interview with The Washington Post this week justifying his failure to share with Ukrainians details of repeated U.S. warnings that Russia planned to invade.
In Kharkiv, at least 17 people were killed and 42 wounded by two separate Russian attacks on the northeastern city, the regional governor said on Telegram. Five rockets hit the city early Friday killing at least one person, he added. An escalation of fighting has prompted Human Rights Watch to denounce Russian attacks on the area this week, stating that it had documented attacks on health-care facilities and densely populated areas.
“Kharkiv has suffered because it remains within range of most types of Russian artillery,” with rocket launchers and other inaccurate-area weapons wreaking “devastation across large parts of the city,” Britain’s defense ministry said in its daily intelligence update on Friday. It added that “Ukraine’s second city has been one of the most consistently shelled since start of the invasion,” though the front line had “moved little since May.”
There have been unconfirmed reports of strikes at a Russian air base in occupied Crimea. Ukraine appears to have been stepping up orchestrating attacks in the area in recent weeks. Crimea was annexed by Russia in 2014.
Russia’s spies misread Ukraine and misled Kremlin as war loomed: In the final days before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s security service began sending cryptic instructions to informants in Kyiv. Pack up and get out of the capital, the Kremlin collaborators were told, but leave behind the keys to your homes.
The communications exposing these preparations are part of a larger trove of sensitive materials obtained by Ukrainian and other security services and reviewed by Greg Miller and Catherine Belton for The Post offering rare insight into the activities of the FSB — a sprawling service that bears enormous responsibility for the failed Russian war plan and the hubris that propelled it. | 2022-08-19T08:45:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russia-Ukraine war latest updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/ |
A family won luggage at an auction. Two children’s bodies were inside.
On Aug. 11, the remains of two children were found in two suitcases that were bought in an auction for abandoned goods in Auckland, New Zealand. (Video: Reuters)
“These children may have been deceased for a number of years before being found last week. We also believe the suitcases have been in storage for a number of years,” Vaaelua said at a news conference Thursday.
The discovery has stumped authorities and the public. Myriad questions remain — chiefly, who are the children, and how did their bodies end up in a suburban storage unit?
“We are determined to hold the person, or persons, responsible for the deaths of these children to account,” he said, adding that members of the family who made the discovery are not suspects.
Third set of human remains recovered at shrinking Lake Mead, park says
The family got hold of the bags through a “Storage Wars”-type auction. Participants in the events buy the contents of a storage locker without knowing what’s inside. In this case, the family received a slew of items from a unit at Safe Store’s facility in Papatoetoe.
Safe Store didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post. However, the company’s director told local outlet Stuff that the business is cooperating with police.
In Thursday’s news conference, Vaaelua said he couldn’t confirm whether police had spoken with the storage unit’s previous owner. He said New Zealand Police are working with overseas agencies and Interpol, an international network of police forces in 195 countries.
“This is no easy investigation,” Vaaelua added. “And no matter how long or how many years you investigate horrific cases like this, it’s never an easy task.”
Residents on New Zealand’s northernmost island — known in English as North Island and in Maori as Te Ika-a-Māui — were shocked by the grim discovery. Neighbors in Clendon Park, an area with about 9,000 residents, told the New Zealand Herald they saw the family that bought the suitcases unloading strollers, baby walkers and toys.
Soon after, a “wicked smell” began to emanate from their home, another neighbor told Stuff. The man told the outlet he used to work at a crematorium and knew how dead bodies smelled.
“I knew straight away [what it was] and I thought, ‘Where is that coming from?’” he said. | 2022-08-19T09:03:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Children's remains found in suitcases bought at New Zealand auction - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/19/new-zealand-suitcases-children-remains/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/19/new-zealand-suitcases-children-remains/ |
This nuanced compilation looks at women’s empowerment after Sierra Leone’s civil war, from different perspectives
Analysis by Miriam J. Anderson
“War, Women and Post-conflict Empowerment: Lessons from Sierra Leone” depicts the everyday struggles of women trying to improve their lives, while illuminating the political, legal and economic conditions of Sierra Leoneans after civil war.
The book includes 13 chapters, focusing on various aspects of women’s and girls’ lives following Sierra Leone’s 1991-2002 civil war. It brings together numerous narratives about a single country from a variety of perspectives, professions and academic disciplines. Authors include academics from African Studies, English, gender studies, political science, public health, history and sociology alongside practitioners, activists and diplomats with firsthand experience advocating for political change in Sierra Leone. The range of perspectives paints a rich and nuanced picture of the challenges and successes faced by women and girls in postwar Sierra Leone.
The book tackles four main themes, which build upon one another. After introducing its conceptual frameworks, the writing flows into narratives about women in politics and then transitions into similar stories about women’s legal, social and economic empowerment. Finally, it examines what advancing women’s empowerment looks like in real life.
The section on conceptual frameworks considers how success should be measured in postwar countries. Editors Josephine Beoku-Betts and Fredline A. M’Cormack-Hale note that, after the war, women did not get noticeably more involved in Sierra Leone’s formal politics at the national level. However, they emphasized other significant changes, such as women chiefs’ work to promote an African conception of feminism and women’s networks’ ability to mobilize quickly and effectively to counter the shortcomings of international organizations and the government during crises.
Arthur Onipede Hollist’s chapter examines two Sierra Leonean novels written about women and the war, suggesting that storytelling helps individuals and societies imagine new possibilities. He concludes by suggesting that postwar empowerment programs should encourage participants “to tell and listen to stories” to rethink societal hierarchies usually taken for granted, including gendered inequalities.
The section on women in politics examines violence against women in politics; women’s customary authority as chiefs; and includes LaRay Denzer’s biography of the prominent female leader Zainab Hawa Bangura. Like many women in conflict and post-conflict states, Bangura has tackled social issues in a variety of ways. She has founded NGOs dedicated to democracy, good governance, women’s rights and development; worked for international organizations; held ministerial portfolios; and formed a new political party through which she ran for president in 2002. Devoting a full chapter to an individual female leader is a welcome and all-too-rare recognition of the multiple and changing roles that women play in development and peace promotion.
In the third part of the book focusing on women’s empowerment in legal, social and economic spheres, Lyn S. Graybill discusses the effect that the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic had on gains that women had made in the wake of the civil war.
Sierra Leone’s postwar Truth and Reconciliation Commission had called for reforms to increase women’s representation in politics and reduce women’s marginalization in education and health care. In 2007, Parliament passed new laws addressing child marriage, domestic and sexual violence, and women’s inheritance and property rights. But enforcement was uneven — in part because Ebola disproportionately affected women. Women were more likely to be front-line caregivers both at work and home, and as a result, more likely to contract Ebola. Quarantines and school closures resulted in an increase of sexual assaults and unwanted pregnancies, and a decline in girls’ school enrollment. With government resources funneled into the health crisis, agencies were less able to respond to violence against women. As Graybill points out, the gendered consequences of Ebola remind us that women’s postwar gains are “fragile and ephemeral.” Sustaining any postwar gains for women requires dedicated resources and long-term commitments from all corners of society.
The book’s final section focuses on mobilizing those involved — within and outside the country — in helping move women forward. The section’s four chapters show the many people and institutions struggling for women’s rights in contemporary Sierra Leone. M’Cormack-Hale notes that advancing pro-women legislation is a long and arduous process requiring sustained cooperation among various networks of individuals, groups, community organizations, formal political parties, national bureaucracies and international groups.
The struggle for women’s rights does not stop when a peace agreement is signed. It is a prolonged, messy and difficult effort with many threats and sources of insecurity, especially for women. “War, Women and Post-conflict Empowerment” is innovative, in that its authors avoid focusing only on formal, national political institutions.
I would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in present-day Sierra Leone or in women and postwar societies. It provides a model for other inquiries into women’s rights in the wake of war, illustrating how a broad focus from a diverse set of scholars, activists and practitioners enables a more thorough and effective description of the multifaceted feminist struggles in post-conflict societies.
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Miriam J. Anderson (@miriamjanderson) is an associate professor in the department of politics and public administration at Toronto Metropolitan University, author of “Windows of Opportunity: How Women Seize Peace Negotiations for Political Change” (Oxford University Press, 2016) and co-editor of “Transnational Actors in War and Peace: Militants, Activists, and Corporations in World Politics” (Georgetown University Press, 2017). | 2022-08-19T09:34:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Did women in Sierra Leone manage to gain rights after the civil war? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/sierra-leone-women-rights-apsrs/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/sierra-leone-women-rights-apsrs/ |
Washington Commanders players wear the Guardian Caps during a training camp practice this summer. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
This year, the NFL required all offensive and defensive linemen, tight ends and linebackers to wear the pillowy, padded shells affixed to the outsides of their helmets in practices until this weekend’s preseason games. According to the league, the spongy additions reduce the severity of an impact by at least 10 percent if a player involved in an on-field collision is wearing one, and by at least 20 percent if both players involved are in caps.
According to the NFL’s data, the number of concussions players suffered in each of the past four seasons is down 25 percent from the level over the three seasons before that.
In college, Ismael suffered a concussion. He said recently that, though he wishes he would’ve had the cap earlier than in his 12th year playing football, it was better late than never. And he joked that he already knew how his mom would react when he texted her a picture: “[I’ll] be like, ‘Hey, look, safety this year!’ She’ll be like, ‘Oh my God. Thank God. My baby boy!’”
High-tech helmets designed to lower risk of concussions make NFL debut | 2022-08-19T09:34:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Puffy, spongy Guardian Caps could help curb NFL head injuries - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/19/nfl-guardian-caps-concussions/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/19/nfl-guardian-caps-concussions/ |
Jade Carey won Olympic gold with her floor routine in Tokyo — and has bigger goals for Paris. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
TAMPA — Jade Carey reached the pinnacle of her sport. She performed on the most pressure-packed stage, executing some of the world’s hardest tumbling passes with secure landings and finally relaxing into a smile as she saluted the judges after an Olympic medal-worthy floor routine. Then she waited while her competitors took the stage — a nerve-racking stretch before she could hug her father and coach, Brian, with joy and relief. She had won the gold medal.
Carey and her dad never talked much about where her career might go after Tokyo. Carey once assumed an Olympic experience would mark the end of her time as a globally competitive gymnast — known within the sport as “elite” — and the beginning of her NCAA career at Oregon State. The two realms of gymnastics have different requirements, competitive schedules, scoring systems and levels of difficulty, and many past U.S. Olympians navigated their careers in the way Carey initially envisioned: elite, then college.
But changes in training, compensation rules and age expectations are opening up alternative paths in which competing at one level doesn’t preclude the other, so when Carey headed to Corvallis, Ore., last fall, she didn’t immediately offer her coaches a firm decision regarding her future. Carey’s dad said he had a “gut feeling” she would want to return to the elite level. And he was right.
“A little bit of unfinished business,” Brian said of his daughter.
That’s because she stumbled in the Olympic vault final, which she entered as a medal favorite, and had qualified as an individual, so she wasn’t part of the four-member team that won silver. Once considered a vault and floor specialist, Carey developed into an all-around threat, including here at the U.S. championships, where she could win her first national all-around medal. Carey advanced into the Tokyo all-around final after Simone Biles withdrew and placed eighth, despite a fall on beam. That opened her eyes to her potential.
“I would say I had a successful Olympics but not as successful as I know that I could have done,” she said. “So that’s definitely been pushing me to want to go back.”
After a standout freshman season, Carey will make her return to elite here at this week’s U.S. national championships with her eyes on the world championships in October. Olympian Jordan Chiles (UCLA) and Tokyo alternate Leanne Wong (Florida) made the same decision after their freshman seasons and also are in the mix for the world championships team. Olympic all-around champion Sunisa Lee (Auburn) has said she hopes to return to elite before the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
As top gymnasts go through the recruiting process, “these conversations [about continuing elite], I would say, are a lot more normal,” said Florida Coach Jenny Rowland, whose roster is filled with gymnasts with national team experience, including Wong and Trinity Thomas, the NCAA all-around champion who competed as an elite during her college career. “There are so many young girls who look up to them and see that, and why not?”
College athletes’ newfound ability to profit off their names, images and likenesses meant Olympians could take advantage of the most profitable moment in their careers and still maintain their collegiate eligibility. The ability to do both will keep bringing more Olympic gymnasts into the college ranks. Healthier training environments also have made these returns to elite more common. This level of the sport is certainly difficult, Carey said, but it’s fun, too, which has made gymnasts want to come back.
“Coaches are training smarter, and [gymnasts are] lasting longer, and they’re not getting so beat up at a young age,” Carey’s dad said. “I think that’s definitely a factor, for sure. If you look at the age of the finalists in the last Olympics, it wasn’t full of 16-year-olds.”
College gymnastics routines resemble those in Level 10, the top tier in the development program. Elite performances are generally longer, with more difficult elements, and are judged with an open-ended system rather than on a 10-point scale. So college gymnasts hoping to continue their elite careers must devote time to maintaining those skills that don’t appear in their college routines.
Chiles, who trained at World Champions Centre in Texas, and Wong, from GAGE in Missouri, returned to their clubs in time for the summer elite season. Carey stayed at Oregon State, working together with her college coaches and her dad, who visited about one week per month.
At Florida this season, Wong worked through her collegiate practice assignments for the day and then moved on to her elite skills. Rowland noticed Wong “taking more of a sense of ownership” in her training — which isn’t always the case for gymnasts, who sometimes grow up in club environments that require them to listen to their coaches far more often than make independent decisions.
“You don’t even have to tell her, ‘Hey, what do you think about doing this or this?’ ” Rowland said. “She just comes in, and she already has a plan herself. … Her dedication, her confidence in knowing what she needs and how to do it — we just get to be along for the ride, which is amazing.”
When Wong competed at the U.S. Classic last month, she won the all-around, even after a fall on bars, delivering well-executed skills that were not part of her college repertoire.
NCAA gymnasts compete nearly every weekend — much different from the elite slate that features just a few major competitions. College gymnasts focus on execution, aiming for a perfect score, and the frequent meets — before packed arenas at some schools — boost competitive confidence.
“You’re saluting a judge week in and week out,” said Tanya Chaplin, Carey’s coach at Oregon State. “And that makes a difference, too, even if it’s not the harder routines.”
Wong earned at least a 9.975 on each apparatus as a freshman, with perfect 10s on vault and bars. Carey, the Pac-12 gymnast of the year, had the nation’s best average all-around score during the regular season. Across 48 routines, she averaged a 9.94 — a remarkable run of consistency. Both Carey and Chiles scored a pair of 10s on floor and one on bars.
The challenge for coaches becomes keeping their gymnasts healthy. Carey’s dad said in the future, he wants his daughter to take a bit more time off after the NCAA season. Chaplin is planning to have Carey not compete all four events at every college competition next season, knowing she will have to counter Carey’s “competitive fire” with the “big picture.”
With the NCAA season from January to April, the summertime U.S. elite competitions and world championships in the fall, each year for these athletes will be a careful balancing act. But by the time Chiles and Carey left Tokyo, they knew they wanted to return to the path that ends at an Olympics.
“I just knew I had more to give,” Chiles said, “and more to put out into the world.” | 2022-08-19T09:34:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Elite gymnasts are going to college but not giving up on Olympics - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/08/19/jade-carey-jordan-chiles-leanne-wong-college-gymnastics-olympics/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/08/19/jade-carey-jordan-chiles-leanne-wong-college-gymnastics-olympics/ |
Zoe Seolhee Terrell/Illustration for The Washington Post; Photo by Nicole Craine for The Washington Post
Behind every Trader Joe’s sign is a working artist who painted it
Each of the idiosyncratic grocery store’s 500-plus locations has custom-made signage, created by staff artists
Growing up, Zoe Terrell dreamed of becoming an artist — she sketched scenes from her local farmers market and even won drawing competitions in her native South Korea. But she eventually learned what many creative people know too well. “My dad was like, ‘Well, drawing is not going to feed you,’ ” Terrell says.
So she studied education in college and, after moving to the United States in 2008, taught Korean — that is, until a curious job listing caught her eye.
An ocean away, Terrell called her dad with surprising news: “Hey, guess what, Dad? Now, drawing is going to feed me,” she recalls with a laugh.
Terrell is one of hundreds of sign artists employed by grocery store Trader Joe’s. You probably know the idiosyncratic chain for its eccentric snacks and peppy cashiers, but that festive atmosphere extends to the stores’ interior design, too: Each of the 500-plus outposts has custom, handmade signage, all created by staff artists. Your grocery store is their art gallery.
As what Trader Joe’s calls a “crew member with sign making talent” (we’ll just call them sign artists), Terrell, 40, spends much of her workday at the Athens, Ga., store wielding a paint pen in a backroom studio. She makes signs to promote products with puns like “Hot Grill Summer” and creative drawings such as the Powerpuff Girls reimagined as vegetables. She paints murals that represent the local area, University of Georgia sports teams or the surrounding rural landscape. Occasionally, she gets to incorporate Korean lettering into her work, such as when the store got a shipment of scallion pancakes known as “pajeon.” That was a highlight for Terrell — Korean students told her that seeing the Hangul writing made them feel a little more at home.
Terrell says that in her early days in the United States, she sorely missed Korean grocery stores, where employees knew her family and each store had its own character.
“Especially when I moved to the U.S., everything seemed like it had been kind of standardized. You go to Walmart in New York or you go to Walmart out in the boonies in Georgia, and they look exactly the same,” she says. “Trader Joe’s is just throwing a totally different curveball. It’s definitely more personable, and most of all, it’s just fun for me to look at something different.”
Trader Joe’s calls itself a “national chain of neighborhood grocery stores.” And everything seems to have a human touch: from sweeping murals of local landmarks, which can stay on view for years, all the way down to individual price tags telling you that clementines are $5.99 and “great for the road!” But for the artists, the work isn’t just about selling produce or marketing the latest peppermint-coated, jalapeno-infused, almond-butter-filled whatever. It’s a way to channel their artistic energy in a world that doesn’t make being creative easy. While job postings list pay for sign artists starting as low as $14 an hour, for many, it’s the stable art job they never thought they’d have.
“I always tell everybody, it’s probably the best entry-level artist position that has a steady paycheck, good benefits and everything,” says Dan Kaufeldt, a 35-year-old sign artist in Sacramento, who has been with the company for 16 years.
Kaufeldt’s store decor combines comic book energy with meticulous detailing. For Thanksgiving, he painted a smooth-looking Turkey named DJ Gravy Grav who mixes “All about that Baste” on a turntable, while spring break this year inspired an image of a cartoon lemon, strawberry and potato going on a road trip in a bouncing, orange RV.
For many Trader Joe’s sign artists, going all out is part of the fun. At one of the Philadelphia stores, McKinna Salinas, 25, is working on transforming the bathroom into a parody of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, inspired by works from the museum collection such as Severin Roesen’s “Flower Still Life With Bird’s Nest.” In her version of Winslow Homer’s “The Life Line,” a man is seen dangling above stormy seas — but instead of saving a woman, he’s saving a carrot.
Working at Trader Joe’s was the refresher Salinas needed after studying art at the University of California at Davis. “Right after graduating, I was really burned out. I think Trader Joe’s helped me get back into creating my own art,” she says. “It was enough to get my hands back into the motion of painting and creating.” On her own time, Salinas makes art based on environmental research and data. “Since at work I’m like, drawing corn, it pushes me to be even more creative and abstract at home.”
But Kaufeldt says there’s serious creativity in the store work, too, and he likens it to pop art. “Taking an iconic Trader Joe’s item, like a can of corn and then turning it into an art piece — it’s kind of like Andy Warhol,” he says. Kaufeldt left art school because it was too expensive, but working at Trader Joe’s was a welcome, if unexpected, alternative: “Where else can I just sit down and draw all day?”
Probably not many other places. While so much commercial art has been digitized, it might seem absurd that Trader Joe’s still pays people to hand-draw cartoons of dancing potatoes to sell a new type of chips. But Trader Joe’s didn’t woo its loyal fan base by being ordinary.
Founded by entrepreneur Joe Coulombe in 1967 and now privately owned by a notoriously secretive German family, the grocery store is almost an anti-brand. Trader Joe’s rarely advertises. It doesn’t have coupons. It avoids the words “sale” or “cheap.” The atmosphere is deliberately friendly. Crew members are trained to maximize interaction with customers by say, suggesting a wine or digging through the freezers to help find your favorite frozen food. At the register, the cashiers are famously chatty.
As for the signs, “the handcrafted quality emphasizes the personal relationship,” says Mark Gardiner, a former marketing executive who worked at Trader Joe’s while researching his book “Build a Brand Like Trader Joe’s,” which unpacks how the chain attracted a cultlike following. “It’s the graphic equivalent of that cheerful conversation that you’ll have with a total stranger that’s working there, who sees you buying dog food and asks you what kind of dog you have.”
While working at the downtown Minneapolis Trader Joe’s, Georgia Gump took that idea to its extreme: The 25-year-old artist made a window mural featuring the neighborhood’s dogs. It was a big hit.
But for Gump, who left the store in May, the early excitement of working at Trader Joe’s faded fast. That particular Minneapolis store is now trying to unionize for better wages and benefits (a store in Hadley, Mass., became the first Trader Joe’s to unionize last month), and Gump says it has been plagued by bad management. Gump hit a breaking point after breezing through the installation of an elaborate, handcrafted Christmas village.
“At first I was really excited that I did it in less than two hours,” Gump says. “Then, it hit me that installing this piece of art cost the company less than $30.”
Trader Joe’s declined to comment when asked specifically about pay issues but said in an earlier statement, “Each of our Crew Members engages with all aspects of the job, from stocking shelves and running a cash register, to corralling shopping carts and bagging groceries (and so much more!).” A recent job posting for a crew member “with sign-making talent” at a D.C. store listed a $17-an-hour rate, barely above the city’s $16.10 minimum wage.
“A lot of people don’t understand that art is hard work. It’s labor,” Gump says. “One of the lines that I get that I find eternally frustrating is, ‘You’re so talented.’ I wasn’t born being able to do what I can do now.”
On that front at least, working at Trader Joe’s has served some artists well. During their time there, many say, their designs got cleaner, their work became more professional and they found they could produce art more quickly. It even helped Madi Strubing fight creative blocks.
“I definitely have those days where I don’t have any creativity,” says Strubing, 20, who attends community college while working at a Trader Joe’s in Santa Cruz, Calif., and hopes to become an animator. “But then having to go to work and kind of being forced to draw helps.”
Some artists have used the job as a jumping-off point. Gump now does sign commissions and pet portraiture around town. Salinas recently made a piece for NASA that will be featured on a satellite. Terrell says, “Trader Joe’s became my self advertisement.”
Zoe Terrell works on an illustration commissioned by The Washington Post in her home studio. (Video: Nicole Craine for The Washington Post)
“My dream 10 years ago was that I wanted to be the sign art person in Athens, Georgia,” she adds. “If some business needs a sign, my name would be the first name that comes to their mind.”
Recent commissions making menus for local bars and brunch spots suggest Terrell is well on her way. These days, drawing isn’t just feeding her. You could say it’s feeding Athens, too. | 2022-08-19T10:17:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Behind every Trader Joe’s sign is a working artist who painted it - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/19/trader-joes-sign-artists/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/19/trader-joes-sign-artists/ |
Beto O’Rourke’s book spotlights Texans’ struggles for voting rights
Review by Lee Drutman
Democrat Beto O'Rourke, who was challenging Ted Cruz (R) for a Senate seat in Texas, walks home after casting his ballot in El Paso on Nov. 6, 2018. O'Rourke is now hoping to unseat Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
As you may have heard, Beto O’Rourke is running for governor of Texas. It’s still a red state. But the Democrat is undaunted. And so, the title of his new book, “We’ve Got to Try,” is also a fitting mantra for the indefatigable runner — that is, jogger — who also ran for Senate in 2018, and for president in 2020, after coming to Congress in 2012 by improbably unseating an incumbent.
Thankfully, he has not written one of those folksy humble-brag faux-struggle cliche-paste-job candidate autobiographies. Still, O’Rourke does want to show us the kind of leader he would be — but through the stories of others. He listens to community activists and relates their challenges and stories, especially those of Texans of color who fought for equal treatment.
The most real estate goes to the uplifting tale of Lawrence Aaron Nixon, a Black doctor from O’Rourke’s hometown, El Paso. In 1924, the doctor gamely paid his poll tax. The election judges told him the bad news. “Dr. Nixon, you know we can’t let you vote.” Nixon’s response lends the book its title: “I know you can’t. But I’ve got to try.”
Unbowed, Nixon teamed up with the NAACP to bring two voting rights lawsuits — Nixon v. Herndon (1927) and Nixon v. Condon (1932) — to the Supreme Court. He won the first case on Fourteenth Amendment grounds. The Texas Legislature responded by passing a “white primary law” that allowed the state’s Democratic Party executive to bar Black voters. Because Texas was a solidly Democratic state, this effectively disenfranchised all Black voters. Nixon, denied the vote again, loaned his name to the second lawsuit. The Supreme Court agreed that Nixon “was deprived of his right to vote in the Democratic Primary.” He was awarded a symbolic dollar for his troubles. The state Democratic Party, equally unbowed, revised its rules to keep Black voters out. Nixon kept up his seemingly Sisyphean struggles for the right to vote, despite constant intimidation from the Ku Klux Klan and other white extremist groups. In 1944, he finally got to cast a ballot. “If Nixon and others like him could persist despite those threats, we can certainly do our part,” O’Rourke writes. “His example proves that not only is it necessary but that ultimately it pays off.”
As our unrelenting campaigner tours Texas, we also meet characters like Chole Galvan, who fought for investments in public transit in El Paso, and Pablo Gonzales, a civil rights activist who became the first Mexican American mayor of Cotulla in 1970. We meet Reginald Moore, a retired prison guard who fought to recognize 95 Black boys and men dumped in a mass grave in Sugar Land after the convict-leasing prison system worked them to death. O’Rourke connects Moore’s fight to broader struggles for criminal justice reform. “Moore understood the nature of doing time in Texas prisons. But for those who don’t know, the facts are sobering. … The state of Texas locks up a higher percentage of its residents than almost any democracy on earth.”
O’Rourke has listed both “The Odyssey” and Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey” as his favorite books. (He named his first son Ulysses.) This Ur-story of a long and winding journey infuses the book. Of course, in his picaresque travelogue of Texan political activism, O’Rourke is also telling his own story — as a careful listener and tireless avatar of all those who have fought against injustice, past and present.
But of all the injustices, the contemporary assault on the right to vote stands front and center. Like many Republican-controlled state legislatures, Texas passed laws in 2021 that curtailed access to voting methods favored by Democratic-aligned constituencies (especially voters of color) under the guise of “election integrity.” Since 2013 (following the Shelby County v. Holder decision, which substantially weakened the Voting Rights Act), Texas has closed 750 polling stations.
Since the book opens with an 1886 lynching of Black poll workers who had killed a White attacker in self-defense, the lesson is obvious: Old times are most definitely not forgotten. O’Rourke does not hold back in connecting the links on the chain. In his telling, the same virulent strains of White racist violence are alive and well in the Jan. 6, 2021, siege on the U.S. Capitol and in the Texas Legislature’s SB 1, the voting restriction bill that passed last August. “The goal of this bill wasn’t to ensure election integrity,” O’Rourke writes. “The goal was to finish what had been started on January 6.”
O’Rourke gets an A-plus on both the moral frisson of the long fight and the rightness of the cause: “We are always becoming a democracy; it never ends. It can be exhausting, daunting even brutal work. But compared to the alternative? We don’t have a choice. … We know one thing for sure. We’ve got to try.”
But in laser-focusing on the right to vote as the thing that “makes everything else possible” (the book’s subtitle), he falls prey to a common reform fallacy: If only it were easier to vote, voting rates would skyrocket, and we’d have true accountability. He warns, “Our representatives in Austin do not feel accountable to the people of Texas — both because of the gerrymandering that has insulated them from legitimate challengers and the suppression that has kept many citizens away from the polls,” he writes. If only it were so simple.
Seven million Texans didn’t vote in 2020. “There’s a temptation to blame nonvoters,” he writes. “Is it laziness or lack of civic responsibility? … Or could it be something else?” The implied “something else,” of course, is restrictive voting rules.
Though the obstacles Texas throws at many voters are discouraging, most nonvoters (in Texas and throughout the country) are nonvoters by choice, not circumstance. By choice, because many reasonably think their vote doesn’t matter. Neither party represents them well. Nothing changes no matter who wins. And because the vast majority of voters live in states or districts safe for one party or the other, nonvoting is not entirely irrational. Thus, politicians truly committed to working on behalf of underrepresented communities must work for a voting system that not only allows marginalized residents to vote but also ensures that their votes matter.
A system of proportional representation, with multi-seat districts, could give much more voice and choice to underrepresented voters and would put an end to gerrymandering, which has battered voters of color in Texas (and other states). Sure, it’s a long shot. But the happy warrior from Texas is inspiring. The fight is measured in years and decades. The alternative is surrender. And so: We’ve got to try.
Lee Drutman is a senior fellow at New America, a co-host of the podcast “Politics in Question” and the author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America.”
How the Fight for Voting Rights Makes Everything Else Possible
By Beto O’Rourke
Flatiron. 213 pp. $29.99 | 2022-08-19T10:17:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of "We've Got to Try: How the Fight for Voting Rights Makes Everything Else Possible" by Beto O'Rourke - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/19/beto-orourkes-book-spotlights-texans-struggles-voting-rights/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/19/beto-orourkes-book-spotlights-texans-struggles-voting-rights/ |
Carlos Ghosn always wanted more — and ended up losing everything
Review by Joe Nocera
Carlos Ghosn rose to the top of the auto industry, heading up Nissan and Renault, before his arrest in Tokyo in 2018. He later secretly fled Japan while awaiting trial. (Takaaki Iwabu/Bloomberg News)
Of the seven deadly sins, envy is the one you’d least expect to see in the world’s highest-ranking executives. But you would be wrong. A CEO might fly on a Gulfstream IV, but as he lands in Davos, he grits his teeth looking at another CEO’s more expensive Gulfstream G800. And then there’s compensation. Sure, a $10 million salary is a lot of money for most people, but when all the other CEOs in your industry are making $25 million a year, it feels like chump change.
For most of his tenure running two auto companies — France’s Renault and Japan’s Nissan — in an alliance he forged, Carlos Ghosn bristled at the money he made. According to Nick Kostov and Sean McLain, the authors of “Boundless: The Rise, Fall, and Escape of Carlos Ghosn,” the celebrated executive earned $17 million or $18 million for much of the aughts and had unparalleled perks. By French or Japanese standards, that was an enormous sum — far more than other corporate bosses. But in America, Alan Mulally at Ford made $26 million in 2010. David Zaslav at Discovery Communications made $42 million. Larry Ellison at Oracle made $70 million. That’s the kind of money Ghosn felt he deserved — and as Kostov and McLain persuasively show, his envy of U.S.-style paychecks is what brought him down.
Inside the business world, Ghosn was long known as one of the stars of the auto industry — the man who revived first Renault and then Nissan, and created an alliance that linked them together. (Mitsubishi became the third member of the alliance in 2016.) The nonbusiness world, on the other hand, started paying attention to Ghosn in November 2018, when Japanese prosecutors arrested him as he stepped off his private jet in Tokyo. Thirteen months later, they really became aware of him when he escaped from Japan while awaiting trial.
That daring escape, which included stuffing Ghosn in a large box that was hauled onto a private jet and flown out of Japan, is one reason for cracking open “Boundless.” Kostov and McLain, both Wall Street Journal reporters, have unearthed lots of new details, and they tell that part of the story with all the verve and tension of a good spy novel.
Earlier in the book, in recounting Ghosn’s career, the authors explain why he was so highly regarded as an executive. In France, he was known as “Le Cost Killer” — and he did lay off employees without blinking — but you can’t revive a company just by laying people off. Ghosn knew how to find savings without layoffs, how to energize a downtrodden company, how to break into new markets and much more. His reputation was such that in 2009, in the wake of the financial crisis, the Obama administration tried to get him to run General Motors.
It’s what happened between his rise to the top of the auto industry in 2000 and his arrest in 2018 that turns out to be the most interesting part of the story. Always full of himself, Ghosn seemed to lose sight of what made him a great executive as the years went on. He threw outrageously extravagant parties (including at Versailles). Madly in love with his second wife, whom he married in 2016, he seemed less and less interested in devoting himself to business. And his constant preening for the press alienated executives at both companies who had previously been loyal to him. When the worm turned on him, he had few friends.
It turned on him because he simply could not abide making so much less money than other high-profile CEOs. According to Kostov and McLain, a key moment came in 2010 when Japan, for the first time, forced corporate directors who made more than $1 million a year to disclose their pay. Knowing the furor that would result if his $17 million paycheck was made public, Ghosn agreed to have his pay cut to $9.6 million. (It still created a furor when it was disclosed.) “The prospect of having to return nearly half his pay stung,” write Kostov and McLain, so Ghosn turned to a trusted aide, Greg Kelly. “Was there any way — any legal way, he emphasized — that he might be paid back? Without disclosing it?” write the authors.
Even before the pay cut, Ghosn was involved in a series of deals that reeked of conflicts of interest, sending Nissan’s money to two wealthy Omani business executives who had bailed him out of a financial jam. In the years after the pay cut, Kelly spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find ways to get more money to Ghosn — legally — without having to disclose it. When Ghosn — and Kelly — were arrested, they had come up with a plan to get $150 million to Ghosn once he retired from Nissan.
The question that has always hung over L’Affaire Ghosn is whether his financial shenanigans amounted to crimes. Nissan executives, after all, had no problem with them until they began to fear (correctly) that Ghosn wanted to merge Renault and Nissan, at which point they searched for dirt they could hand over to prosecutors and force Ghosn out. Ghosn has always maintained his innocence, claiming that he had to escape Japan because he was being railroaded by its “hostage justice” system.
Kostov and McLain don’t offer a definitive answer, but in unraveling Ghosn’s financial dealings, they illustrate just how sleazy many of them were and how desperate Ghosn was to keep them quiet. One does not come away from “Boundless” convinced of Ghosn’s innocence.
The authors also don’t opine on how Ghosn feels now about his escape. He left behind a lot of collateral damage. Michael and Peter Taylor, the American father-and-son team who masterminded the getaway, were extradited to Japan and are in prison. Kelly is back in the United States, but he had to endure the trial Ghosn fled; he was found guilty on one count of helping Ghosn hide his pay but acquitted on others.
As for Ghosn, the former globe-trotting executive is in Lebanon, which he cannot leave without fear of being arrested. In their final interview with him, the authors asked if he had any regrets. He had one, he replied — “not taking the General Motors job.”
Joe Nocera is a longtime business columnist.
The Rise, Fall, and Escape of Carlos Ghosn
By Nick Kostov and Sean McLain
Harper Business. 320 pp. $29.99. | 2022-08-19T10:17:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of “Boundless: The Rise, Fall and Escape of Carlos Ghosn,” by Nick Kostov and Sean McLain - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/19/carlos-ghosn-always-wanted-more-ended-up-losing-everything/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/19/carlos-ghosn-always-wanted-more-ended-up-losing-everything/ |
The messy, monumental task of conducting the U.S. census
Review by Karen Sandstrom
In 1940, workers showed off a new machine that would speed up the compilation of statistics from the census. The full, detailed report from a given census isn't released until 72 years later, so Dan Bouk's book dives into 1940 Census data and how it was gathered. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
The U.S. census has always seemed to me a bit like the Bible: an honorable effort to relay powerfully influential information, yet destined never to be 100 percent accurate. Like the Bible, the census is vulnerable to the insufficiencies of language and the human compulsion to put one’s own stamp on events.
In Dan Bouk’s new book, “Democracy’s Data,” any notion of the U.S. census as flawless accounting evaporates within pages and stays gone right up to the end. There, the author writes that he laughed out loud at the “absurd precision” of the Census Bureau’s announcement of the results of its 2020 population count: 331,449,281.
Yet none of that is to suggest that Bouk lacks reverence for the work of the Census Bureau. On the contrary, the historian (he also has a degree in computational mathematics) writes with genuine, even geeky affection for his subject. “I believe in the census, the way I believe in democracy — in part because in the United States, the census and democracy are intimately intertwined,” Bouk writes. “As long as the people control their own enumeration, then the quest to count each person is one of the purest expressions of democratic values.”
The book’s content supports its subtitle, “The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them.” These stories shine light on a part of government that many of us seldom think about. They introduce readers to census designers, enumerators (who slog door to door to do the count) and ordinary Americans whose lives are recorded in the data.
The core purpose of the census is to tally the population for the apportionment of seats in Congress. But as we see, the process has long been vulnerable to those who would bend the survey to meet goals rooted in racism, ignorance or lust for power. Bouk explores these in a spirit of wanting to improve a beloved institution.
The first U.S. census was conducted in 1790. In accordance with the Constitution, the national count has been done every 10 years since then; 2020 was the most recent. General results are released soon after the counts are done, but full reports that include individuals’ names and other detailed information are not released until 72 years later. When Bouk was doing his research, 1940 was the most recent decennial census for which full data was available. (Full data for 1950 was released in April 2022.)
Much of his storytelling, then, is anchored in 1940, when the country was still reeling from the Great Depression and about to be swept up in World War II, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt was busy being elected to a third term. Strictly speaking, census-taking might have operated apart from these factors, but counting the populace has never been a simple math problem. As Bouk points out throughout the book, there are consequences to who does and does not get counted, and how the counted are named and categorized. A meeting of a group Bouk calls “the Question Men” provides a compelling illustration of the vigorous debates that influenced which questions were included in the 1940 Census form. At that time, the printed forms measured 23 3/4 inches by 12 1/5 inches and had room for 32 columns, for noting answers to 32 questions. As Bouk puts it, “Asking a new question meant adding a new column, which meant that some other question, some other column, had to go.”
The Question Men were leaders of government agencies and captains of industry who convened in March 1939 to debate what those questions should be. There were advocates for almost any fact of American life one could think to enumerate: disabilities, religious affiliations, occupations and housing details. Demographer Frank W. Notestein, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, hoped that the census might reveal which groups were “not bearing their fair share of offspring.” And a proposed question about income fed passionate anti-government political rhetoric that at one point included the labeling of New Deal advocates as “fake Americans.” Sound familiar?
The questions that survived had the power to shape policy, yet those being counted also attempted to flex their muscles. Bouk spends a considerable amount of time on the tension between efforts to wedge people into sometimes absurd categories and the efforts of individuals to resist being incorrectly labeled.
There have been long-standing indications that the census undercounts Black people, flawed data that at one point was used to advance a false narrative that they were incapable of thriving in post-Civil War America. Bouk also includes an anecdote involving a family of Americans of Mexican descent being tallied as racially “Mexican,” only to be changed to racially “White” when the form arrived at the Census Bureau. Murkiness around the word “partner” allowed for various interpretations, depending on who was doing the tallying, and the census-taker — not the person whose life was being described on the sheet — was typically the one making the call.
Among the most heartbreaking examples of census work put to ill use was when the federal government broke its promise never to use census data against its citizens. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it did just that — mining records for information about where to find those who were Japanese (and Japanese American) to oust them from their homes and jobs and send them to internment camps.
Solid storytelling chops and a friendly tone help Bouk convince readers who might question just how interesting a book about the census can be. Surprise — it can be! In the hands of someone who understands it, the census is a mirror of the country’s ideals, values, flaws and attributes.
Bouk uncovers the great paradox about the decennial count: that it is an impossibly large and messy task, but also an awe-inspiring achievement. As he puts it, “Every census is a remarkable accomplishment, a glorious dream, and a serious slog.” He wants us to believe that achieving a better census is possible, and to care whether it improves. “Democracy’s Data” makes the case.
Karen Sandstrom is a freelance writer in Cleveland.
Democracy’s Data
The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them
By Dan Bouk
MCD. 362 pp. $30 | 2022-08-19T10:17:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of "Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them" by Dan Bouk - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/19/messy-monumental-task-carrying-out-us-census/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/19/messy-monumental-task-carrying-out-us-census/ |
A reporter probes a powerful university — and fights with his editors
Review by Cara Fitzpatrick
The University of Southern California's student health center. Reporting by Paul Pringle and others at the Los Angeles Times helped reveal abuses by George Tyndall, a gynecologist at USC, as well as other campus scandals. (Richard Vogel/AP)
It started with a tip, one that “hinted at something so salacious, so depraved, so outrageous, that it seemed too good to be true.”
The tip involved an unconscious young woman, an influential dean of the medical school at the University of Southern California and a hotel room full of drugs. A photographer passed along the tip to Paul Pringle, a veteran investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times. Pringle was determined to unravel what occurred that Friday afternoon at the Hotel Constance in Pasadena, northeast of Los Angeles. His quest turned into a fierce battle with the editors of his newspaper, city and police officials, and a prominent university.
In “Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels,” Pringle offers a behind-the-scenes account of his efforts, along with four other reporters, to uncover what happened to the young woman in the hotel room and to bring a powerful man to justice. He also details two other scandals that engulfed USC: a second predatory doctor and the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal. Ultimately, Pringle’s book is about a reporter crusading for justice.
The bad guys in Pringle’s book are real, but it’s not always clear if he knows who they are. He spends nearly as much time writing about his conflicts with top editors at the Los Angeles Times as he does the doctors at the heart of the book: Carmen Puliafito, dean of USC’s medical school, who was using and distributing drugs, and George Tyndall, a gynecologist at USC who allegedly abused hundreds of young women over a period of nearly 30 years.
Pringle was one of three reporters at the Times who won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 2019 for stories about Tyndall — yet Pringle doesn’t address Tyndall until nearly the end of the book. Instead, he spends an inordinate amount of time on what feels like score settling with the newspaper’s former top editors: Davan Maharaj, then the newspaper’s publisher and editor in chief, and Marc Duvoisin, then its managing editor. He levels serious charges against them: He accuses them of delaying and downplaying stories that cast the university in a negative light.
A third former editor, Matthew Doig, then the new investigations editor at the Times, also comes in for some criticism. Pringle describes Doig as “more like an enforcer than a colleague” who was “quick to lash out when we disagreed with him.”
Maharaj, Duvoisin and Doig vehemently dispute the accuracy of Pringle’s account. Doig, now in a similar role at USA Today, wrote a lengthy rebuttal on Medium in which he calls Pringle “a fabulist who is grossly misrepresenting the facts to support his false narrative.” Maharaj responded to the post, saying Doig did an “excellent job shooting down the endless falsehoods in ‘Bad City.’” Duvoisin, too, wrote a post on Facebook saying, “The reporters who worked on the story were never blocked; they were edited.”
Duvoisin’s point is worth considering given the seriousness of the allegations against the editors. Investigative stories often go through multiple rounds of editing and rewriting. It’s not unusual for editors to ask for more reporting or to restructure a story. This process can be lengthy and intense. It can involve conflict. The result should be a better story, which relies on substantial evidence and can withstand public scrutiny.
The editors say this is the process they went through with Pringle and the other reporters. In his response, Doig posted one of the early drafts of the Puliafito story with his handwritten edits in red ink. He wrote that the “quickest way” to tell Pringle was “abusing the truth” was to compare the draft with the story that ran in the newspaper a few months later. There’s no question that the published version is better.
Pringle has now written a response in which he claims that Doig released only the drafts that made him look good. Still, many of the disputes Pringle writes about simply sound like editing. Contentious, perhaps, but not proof that his editors were trying to protect the university from damaging stories.
By the time the team set their sights on the second doctor, those top editors were gone. The newspaper’s human resources department had begun an internal investigation after Pringle complained. The three editors were fired, along with some other employees, as part of “important management changes.” The investigation, however, cleared the editors of an improper relationship with USC.
What seems clear in all of this is that the newsroom was a toxic place to work, and some reporters didn’t like or trust the paper’s top editors. (Some reporters gathered for drinks after the editors were fired.) Doig doesn’t do much to counter Pringle’s description of him as someone who lashes out. In his rebuttal, he describes the reporters on the Puliafito story as “pitching a prolonged tantrum.” And Pringle, even by his own account, was consumed by anger.
This ugly tit-for-tat overshadows the real villains of the book. Pringle is at his best when he focuses on the doctors. The story of Tyndall, the gynecologist who abused patients for decades, is sickening. University officials ignored decades of complaints about Tyndall’s troubling behavior. More than 700 women eventually came forward to say they were abused. Exposing Tyndall and the university’s complicity in protecting him is the best kind of investigative journalism.
It’s a shame that an overblown dispute with editors has eclipsed the vital work done by the Times’ journalists.
Cara Fitzpatrick is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who writes about education. She is working on a book about the history of school choice.
Peril and Power in the City of Angels
By Paul Pringle
Celadon. 352 pp. $29.99. | 2022-08-19T10:17:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of ‘Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels,' by Paul Pringle - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/19/reporter-probes-powerful-university-fights-with-his-editors/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/19/reporter-probes-powerful-university-fights-with-his-editors/ |
Arts workers are increasingly stepping onto the political stage
Members of the creative sector are building coalitions, raising money and even running for office to press for their causes
Christian Amato, a onetime arts worker, is running for the New York State Senate in a district covering parts of the Bronx and Westchester County. (George Espinal/Amato for N.Y.)
NEW YORK — Christian Amato, a 34-year-old Bronx Democrat who ran a theater company in Greenwich Village before switching to politics, was outlining his positions on the arts and other matters at a sidewalk cafe the other day when his phone rang.
“This might be an important endorsement,” he said, excitedly. And it was. Local 1, the theatrical stagehands union, was calling to support his campaign for a state Senate seat representing parts of the Bronx and Westchester County, the latest development in a movement to gain political ground for America’s more than 5 million arts workers.
“That’s fantastic. It means a lot to me,” Amato said into the phone, between bites of avocado toast. “Listen, I’m on your side. I’m with you in this fight. … I’ll take the logo — and do you need my address? Do you guys do a check with the endorsement?”
Amato’s campaign, pitting him against two rivals on primary Election Day, Aug. 23, lays out a palette of issues, including women’s rights, education, housing and climate change. But it’s his articulation of a sophisticated platform for arts and culture that makes his candidacy a true rarity. His website points out that the creative economy — which also includes institutions and industries such as museums, fashion and publishing — accounts for 7 percent of the state’s financial activity and, before the pandemic, generated 484,000 jobs and $120 billion annually.
“As the only candidate running statewide with a real arts and culture platform, these types of endorsements are really important to me,” said Amato, whose résumé includes several years at Samuel French, the venerable play publishing and licensing house. “The political process is so much like putting on a show — and I am in the longest, most arduous audition I could ever be a part of.”
Increasingly, those who make their living in the arts are realizing how much they need allies in government to flourish. And now, they’re building coalitions and raising money to step up their political game. A few with arts backgrounds, like Amato, are running for office. Others in artistic endeavors are organizing, like the Music Workers Alliance and American Circus Alliance, to push for greater recognition and advocate for those in their fields. Still others, such as the two-year-old National Independent Venue Association, or NIVA, composed of more than 3,000 music and comedy venues, festivals and promoters in all 50 states, are going further. They are establishing political action committees to support candidates who share their values.
“From the beginning we held the mantra ‘First we survive, then we thrive,’” Audrey Fix Schaefer, NIVA’s communications director, said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Now that we are an established trade association, we intend to stay connected to mechanisms to advocate for our members, so we’re establishing a PAC to assist candidates that support our mission.”
The creative sector’s victories in securing government aid during the shutdown confirmed for arts groups the need to assert themselves more aggressively, and not merely from the safe space of a stage or studio. The successful campaign led by NIVA for 2020′s landmark Save Our Stages Act, a federal aid bill sponsored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas), resulted in a massive one-time federal rescue package: the $16 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program. The money has gone to clubs, playhouses, productions and amphitheaters of all sizes across the country.
“What’s important and exciting to notice is that the new advocacy is being done by the arts workers themselves,” said Carson Elrod, who in 2020 organized with three other actors and writers the #BeAnArtsHero campaign to raise awareness of the desperate straits for artists and those in ancillary fields. “The National Independent Venue Association didn’t wait for some other organization to come to save them, because nobody was coming to save them. So they assembled themselves very quickly. And, as I like to say, they ran a $16 billion football called ‘Save Our Stages’ into the end zone in less than one year. So, if there is any demonstration of just how powerful grass-roots organizing can be, it is ‘Save Our Stages.’”
Arts workers are building a labor movement for a creative economy in peril
Jeffrey Omura, a New York-based actor who appeared this year in Arena Stage’s world premiere of Craig Lucas’s “Change Agent,” was so energized by participating in a successful grass-roots “Fair Wage on Stage” campaign that he ran last year for the New York City Council from the Upper West Side. Omura lost the race, but not his activist impulse: He’s in the early phases of creating a PAC to back office seekers with positive arts agendas at every government level.
“Every industry has some kind of political action committee or union interviewing candidates, asking them how those candidates are going to be the best advocates for their industry,” Omura said. “While I didn’t win, the big takeaway was, how do we build that infrastructure for the arts? The lobbyists, the PACs: How do we make sure officeholders are advocating for us every day?”
Groups such as the D.C.-based Americans for the Arts have lobbying arms, but activists say that a much more muscular and visible advocacy system must be built. “The next step is to get real serious about it, and to be incredibly well organized and to wield that power productively,” said Jenny Grace Makholm, another of the #BeAnArtsHero founders. “So, to our minds, that means forming an organization similar to the ACLU, the NRA, the NAACP, so that when you hear the name on Capitol Hill, you know exactly who we are.”
Political aspirants like Amato are seeking even more direct impact. His policy rollout in his District 34 race calls for, among other things, increasing state funds for arts education; funding a permanent arts worker program, along the lines of the Depression-era WPA; expanding public art initiatives; and creating a $150 million coronavirus relief fund “for the most damaged parts of the cultural sector, including a $10 million fund to support arts workers.”
Growing up in the Bronx, the son of Italian immigrants who ran a dry cleaner on Arthur Avenue, Amato said he was always encouraged to pursue what he loved. “I made this piece of art and my dad was like, ‘We gotta get him into art classes,’” he recalled. “And so my mom was like, ‘Okay,’ and found the Pelham Art Center, which is still in my district. So I love knocking on doors in Pelham and saying, ‘I have a long history with Pelham: I took art classes for years here.’ You can really believe in what you’re saying.”
Amato’s segue to a political life began with former president Barack Obama’s Organizing for Action program, which offered fellowships and training in grass-roots activism. It eventually led to a position as chief of staff to state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi, who is now running in a primary for Congress against incumbent Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.). “He has the people skills and he has the smarts and the creativity,” said Bruce Lazarus, a theater producer and lawyer who was Amato’s boss at Samuel French.
Zack Bissell, a New York actor, has been a friend of Amato’s since their college days at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, where Amato was voted the student association’s vice president of the arts — a post responsible for allocating the college’s $12.5 million arts budget. Campaigning door-to-door with his pal this summer, Bissell is reminded of the through story in Amato’s trajectory.
“It’s sort of another variation on a theme,” Bissell said, recalling how Amato put together a musical production in Plattsburgh over a summer break, with the two of them in leading roles. “When Christian wants to do something, he will find out how to do that. The entire school came back to this really amazing production of ‘Hair.’ ” | 2022-08-19T10:17:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Arts workers are increasingly stepping onto the political stage - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/08/19/artists-politics-christian-amato/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/08/19/artists-politics-christian-amato/ |
Postal workers sorting packages at a facility in Mykolaiv on July 15. Despite the war, Ukraine's postal service is still delivering mail. (Wojciech Grzedzinski for The Washington Post)
MYKOLAIV, Ukraine — First came the boom. Then the air raid siren.
“Turn off the machines! Turn off the machines!” yelled a mail sorter.
Moments before, workers in this southern Ukrainian city at the regional headquarters of Ukraine’s national postal service, Ukrposhta, had been absorbed in their early-morning shift: taking packages of varying shapes and sizes from a conveyor belt and distributing them according to their final destinations.
Now, they scrambled to safety as the sound of the explosions grew louder. “It’s coming closer and closer!” yelled an employee, huddled in an entranceway with a group of colleagues.
Forty-five minutes later, the all-clear was given. Slightly behind schedule — time they would make up in short order — the sorting facility’s roughly 45 employees returned to work.
Since the beginning of the war with Russia, Ukraine’s postal service and privately owned courier companies have continued to make deliveries and carry out financial services, such as transferring money and paying pensions, even during the height of the fighting in places like Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv and the capital, Kyiv.
Their job is not high-profile, but still crucial to the functioning of Ukrainian society during wartime — one that takes the unofficial motto of the U.S. Postal Service (“Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night …”) to another level.
The blasts last month were the result of Russian missiles striking two universities in the center of town, about five miles from the postal facility. The attack was part of an intensification of Moscow’s airstrikes in the region.
The postal workers’ alarm was understandable. Their workplace is in an industrial district on the eastern edge of the city. Russian forces frequently concentrate artillery strikes on a nearby rail yard and military airport. In early July, a tank shell smashed into the back of one of the postal headquarters’ buildings and shattered the windows.
Officials at Ukrposhta say that of its approximately 73,000 employees, 15 have been killed and 14 injured during the fighting. About 50 post offices have been destroyed, while 480 have been damaged, some repeatedly.
Even so, Ukrposhta had continued to work until recently in some of the regions occupied by Russian forces. Its general director, Igor Smelyansky, announced on his Telegram channel on Aug, 1 that the company was ceasing operations in the occupied portion of Zaporizhzhia, the last Russian-controlled region where it was functioning.
Smelyansky wrote that this was necessary because of “a significant threat to the lives of workers” and because of robbery by Russian soldiers, who were “a collection of thugs and a gang of beggars.”
He ended his Telegram post with two messages to Russian forces occupying Ukrainian territory, lifted from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator films: “Hasta la vista, baby” and “Will be back” — with a photoshopped image of Schwarzenegger in front of a Ukrposhta office.
He was continuing a Ukrainian postal service tradition of trolling the Kremlin. One of its most popular wartime products, which quickly sold out, was a stamp with a drawing of a Ukrainian soldier making an obscene gesture to a Russian military vessel — a reference to the defiant response of Ukrainian soldiers to a Russian ship near Snake Island at the beginning of the war.
When the Russian army swept into the country at the end of February, Ukrposhta workers were among the first to spot the invading forces.
Olena Doroshenko, Ukrposhta director in the northern region of Chernihiv, said she found out at 5 a.m. that hostilities had begun — before any news reports or public announcements — from a postal worker near the Russian border.
“We have Ukrposhta employees in every population center and so they saw the tanks coming through,” Doroshenko said by telephone. “The head of the branch in Novhorod-Siverskyi called me and said, ‘Olena Mykolaivna, war has begun!’ ”
As fighting raged in the Chernihiv region through March, Doroshenko spent much of her time huddled in a basement in her village of Brusyliv, which was occupied by Russian forces. Still, she managed to connect with her workers and direct the postal operations. “We didn’t miss a day of work,” she said.
Mail and packages couldn’t be delivered over front lines, but Doroshenko and her employees set up a system of money transfers so that pensions could be paid.
“We just had to invent and find nonstandard ways to have cash in these branches,” she said. “So, we used the Telegram channel and WhatsApp, and I called the community heads and said quietly, ‘Let’s transfer the money to the bank accounts of businesspeople and businesses.’ And they brought money to the post office, and with that money we at least partially paid out pensions.”
At times, Doroshenko said, Ukrainian partisan forces helped carry bags of money into occupied areas, traveling through forests and crossing rivers. After Russian forces withdrew, she returned to work in Chernihiv city on April 1.
Many of her workers had fled the region, however. “I simply took my car and a mailman, and I myself serviced the villages because we didn’t have enough people and means of transport.”
With Russian forces bearing down on his city in late February, Yehor Kosorukov, head of the postal service in the Mikolayiv region, sprang into action delivering parcels and pensions. Working from his fourth-floor office overlooking the front line, Kosorukov now manages an operation focused mainly on distributing pensions by mail to the elderly and disabled who have stayed behind.
“Leaving isn’t an option. My family has asked me to leave. I tell them I can’t. This is my country and I have a job to do,” said Kosorukov. “A captain always goes down with his ship.”
Before the war, about 60 percent of the parcel delivery market was handled by Nova Poshta — or “New Post,” a Ukrainian-owned courier company. Yevhen Tafiichuk, the firm’s chief operating officer, said that when hostilities broke out, “we understood that if we stop working, it’d be the collapse of the country.” So the company’s leadership decided to “work until the very end.”
When Russia invaded, deliveries immediately plummeted from more than 1 million a day to just over 30,000. But through March, these numbers started to climb. The company began to deliver to hot spots like Kyiv, which was partially surrounded by Russian troops, and Kharkiv in the east, which was under constant bombardment.
Nova Poshta’s top management set up its own war room, monitoring information around-the-clock and altering its delivery routes and stores’ opening hours to minimize the risk to its employees. One Nova Poshta worker died on the job, Tafiichuk said, although 27 have died outside of work and fighting on the front line.
“We met three times a day,” Tafiichuk said. “There was a map of which branches were captured, which ones weren’t captured, from where [the Russians] were attacking. You know, it was more like something military.”
Borys Tkachukovsky, a Nova Poshta manager, opted to work as a courier in Kyiv during the worst weeks of the fighting, transporting humanitarian aid, food and military items such as uniforms and flak jackets.
“Each of us is a soldier,” he said. “The military needs a strong rear support — it needs to be dressed and fed. We don’t take guns in our hands. Our parcels are our guns.”
In the areas close to the front line in the Mykolaiv region, mail carriers with the national postal service travel in armored vehicles to designated meeting spots.
On a sunny day late last month, at a location on the outskirts of the city of Mykolaiv, residents were already jostling one another in a line that had formed. The back of the truck swung open, and they approached one by one to receive packages, cash their pensions and pay utility bills.
Ivan Setianov, 56, walked up to the truck with his yellow Labrador, Maggie. “I’m waiting on a fertilizer for my garden,” he said. “It’s supposed to be here by now, but with all the shelling, I knew there would be delays.”
“Do you have a package for me?” he asked the mail carriers. | 2022-08-19T10:18:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ukraine mail carriers keep delivering during war - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/ukraine-mail-carriers-postal/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/ukraine-mail-carriers-postal/ |
1912 Cleveland Park house lists for $2.6 million
The house was designed by prolific D.C. architect B. Stanley Simmons and renovated by architect Colden 'Coke’ Florance
The 1912 American Foursquare house was designed by architect B. Stanley Simmons. A large stone fireplace anchors the living room. (Chris Ellenbogen Photography)
Faye Moskowitz knew the moment she stepped into this American Foursquare house in D.C.’s Cleveland Park neighborhood that she wanted it to be her home.
“As I heard the story, my mom walked in and just loved the house,” said Elizabeth Korns, Moskowitz’s daughter. “She said, ‘I’ve got to have it.’ ”
It’s no wonder Moskowitz was attracted to the house. Built in 1912 on one of the first streets developed in Cleveland Park, it is one of the grand old houses in the neighborhood. The house is one of three in Cleveland Park designed by architect B. Stanley Simmons. The DC Architects Directory called Simmons “a prolific designer, whose work encompassed a wide variety of styles and building types.”
Cleveland Park house | A spacious, tree-shaded front porch and the large front door, with transom and sidelights, welcomes visitors to the 1912 American Foursquare house. It is listed at just under $2.6 million. (Chris Ellenbogen Photography)
Simmons, who was from Charles County, Md., graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During his time in Washington, Simmons designed a number of buildings that have become historical landmarks. He designed the National Metropolitan Bank on 15th Street NW, the Jewish Community Center on 16th Street NW, the Fairfax Hotel at 2100 Massachusetts Ave. NW and the Barr Building, the first high-rise office building at Farragut Square. He also designed the Wyoming, a condominium building on Columbia Road NW, which is a registered landmark.
The Moskowitzes bought the house for $37,000 in 1962 when they moved to Washington from Michigan. Jack took a job on Capitol Hill as a staff member of a Senate committee on refugees and escapees. He later worked in the Pentagon as deputy assistant secretary of defense specializing in civil rights and industrial relations. He went on to work for Common Cause and the United Way of America.
Jack, who had bachelor’s and graduate degrees from Wayne State University in Detroit, received a Bachelor of Arts degree in religion from George Washington University when he was in his 70s. When Jack died in 2020, the Moskowitzes had been married for 72 years.
Faye, who married Jack at age 18 and was a mother at 20, came to Washington without a college degree. When she was 35, she enrolled at George Washington University. She began her teaching career at the private Edmund Burke School in Washington, where she became a founding director of the middle school. After receiving a doctorate from GWU, she became a professor at the school, teaching creative writing and Jewish American literature. Faye was granted tenure at 65, and she served as chair of the English department for 12 years.
Faye’s freelance contributions to The Washington Post led to a stint writing a column in the New York Times. The first of her five books, “A Leak in the Heart,” was published in 1985. She died in February at 91.
Her obituary in Washington Jewish Week stated: “As matriarch of the Moskowitz home of 60 years on Highland Place in the District, Faye served host to numerous gatherings and readings. Her commitment to Civil Rights, an end to the War in Vietnam and other causes made her one of the most sought-after ‘hoteliers’ of her generation.”
The seven-bedroom, three-bathroom, 3,850-square-foot house was big enough to accommodate not only the Moskowitzes’ four children but also plenty of guests.
“My parents always opened up their home to anyone,” Korns said. “That was really big, especially during the Vietnam War when people came to protest. … I remember housing people up on our third floor, everywhere, making a big pot of spaghetti for everyone. But through the years, no matter who you were, if you needed a place to stay because you had an internship in D.C. or a relative passing through, my parents always opened their home up.”
The spacious, tree-shaded front porch and the large front door, with transom and sidelights, welcomes visitors to the home. A marker identifies the house as a contributing structure of the Cleveland Park Historic District.
Inside the house, many period features remain. The music room to the left of the foyer has parquet flooring, leaded-glass windows and a floor-to-ceiling mirror surrounded with gilded bas-relief sculptures that are repeated in plaques above the indoor fishpond. Korns said artisans who worked on Washington National Cathedral are believed to have done the plaster work.
The Moskowitzes hired Washington architect Colden “Coke” Florance to add a skylight and a wall of windows in the music room.
A large stone fireplace anchors the living room. The dining room has a coffered ceiling, tall wainscoting with wallpapered panels, and a period chandelier and sconces. The breakfast room, next to the dining room, has ornate leaded-glass windows.
There are four bedrooms and a sleeping porch on the second floor and three more bedrooms on the top level. On the lower level, the basement is unfinished. A former garage, which could fit two cars end to end, is attached to the basement and offers more storage space.
“It was an amazing, awesome place to grow up,” Korns said. “It’s very difficult. It’s very, very emotional” to sell the house.
The house is listed at just under $2.6 million.
3306 Highland Pl. NW, Washington, D.C.
Features: The 1912 American Foursquare house was designed by architect B. Stanley Simmons. Architect Colden “Coke” Florance renovated the music room. Inside the house, many period features remain, including parquet flooring, leaded-glass windows and a sleeping porch on the second floor.
Listing agent: Margot Wilson, Washington Fine Properties | 2022-08-19T10:25:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 1912 Cleveland Park house lists for $2.6 million - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/19/cleveland-park-house-for-sale/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/19/cleveland-park-house-for-sale/ |
Kisha Marshall, director of culinary operations at D.C. Central Kitchen, rinses peppers from JK Community Farm. The peppers were picked by volunteers and donated by the Loudoun County farm. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
The poblano peppers were a deep green, with waxy skin that reflected the sunlight. They had grown in Loudoun County soil alongside 20,000 pepper plants of all varieties, from bells to jalapeños, and on this August morning, volunteers were piling them into green plastic bins. A cargo truck waited to haul them away.
Like the rest of the 230,000 pounds of fresh produce and protein produced this year at the JK Community Farm in Purcellsville, Va., the delivery was heading not to a grocery store or a farmers market but to families in need.
Nearly one-third of the people in the Washington region struggled to access food last year, according to the Capital Area Food Bank, which distributed more than 64 million meals in 2021. That number was more than double 2019’s levels, and food providers say the increase in distributed food illustrates not simply that hunger has deepened in the region, but that more families are coming to rely on food assistance as a regular supplement to their lives.
The journey of a single item of produce — say, a box of organic poblano peppers — illustrates the chain of effort and dedication involved in providing those meals, and how that effort is still not enough to meet the existing need.
As the last of the produce was loaded and the delivery truck rumbled away, Samantha Kuhn, the farm’s 29-year-old executive director, turned her attention back to her 150-acre, constantly churning operation.
“We want farms like this all over,” Kuhn said. “There would be much more access to healthy food.”
1 out of 3 people in D.C. region face food insecurity, survey finds
Kuhn, who grew up in Fairfax as the fourth of nine children, was always interested in nutrition and medicine. She attended medical and science camps and thought that one day she’d become a pediatrician. She enrolled at the University of Tennessee as a pre-med student.
But a class her junior year changed her course. The professor encouraged students to “go do something that makes a difference,” Kuhn said, and handed them a list of community groups to explore. From that list, Kuhn worked on a farm in Knoxville that grew healthy fruits and vegetables for those in need, and people could work for the food being grown. It also donated a portion of the food to places that served the unhoused and the prison system. One day, Kuhn concluded, she wanted to launch her own farm to help others.
After graduation, she worked in stem cell research, but she kept coming back to the idea of the farm. For the next two to three years, she bugged her parents to help her start it. Her mother, Stacy Kuhn, grew up in a low-income household and understood the need. “Eventually, they got on board,” Kuhn said.
Her father, Chuck Kuhn, owns the Sterling-based moving company JK Moving Services, and in 2018 it donated a patch of property in western Loudoun County for the farm. The business got naming rights but is otherwise a separate organization, Samantha Kuhn said.
Today Kuhn has one other employee, Mike Smith, the general farm manager. Otherwise, the operation, funded through grants and corporate sponsorships, relies on about 4,500 volunteers each year for planting and harvesting, a setup that allows it to give away its complete harvest at no cost.
In this work, though it’s not pediatrician work, Kuhn sees some of the same priorities. Fresh food fosters healthy lifestyles, she believes, by preventing chronic diseases and providing low-incomes families with alternatives to processed food.
But Kuhn also believes in the dignity of choice. The farm sends out an annual survey to the households it serves to learn what kinds of produce they want.
Peppers are always the top request.
From farm to kitchen
An hour and a half after leaving the farm, the delivery truck backed toward the loading dock at D.C. Central Kitchen on Second Street in Northwest Washington, a few blocks from Union Station. Staff quickly began carting off the green plastic bins of produce into the nonprofit’s kitchen, tucked in the basement of a homeless shelter.
“Oh, we got poblanos!” said Kisha Marshall, the director of culinary operations, as she surveyed the piles of produce entering the kitchen. She snapped one up and began to char it over a gas grill.
“We will roast them, blister them to get them nice and hot,” Marshall explained to production cook Navelle Garrett.
Surviving inflation, one plasma donation at a time
The kitchen was a hive of activity. Multiple meals were in the process of being assembled for delivery over the next few days. D.C. Central Kitchen takes donated food and transforms it into nutritional meals, which are then sent out to schools, shelters and nonprofits. Over the past year, it has provided 5.6 million meals with food from several sources, such as farms, a Franciscan monastery in Northeast and the USDA Farmers Market, said Melissa Gold, director of communications.
Marshall was now integrating the poblanos and other items from JK Community Farm into chicken fajitas plates that would be delivered in two days to 19 sites. The meals would serve 1,300 people.
Marshall, who handles the menu development and planning, has been at the nonprofit for a little more than a year. She was attracted to the kitchen’s mission, so much so that she left her position as a research and development chef with the legendary José Andrés’s ThinkFoodGroup.
“I fell in love with who they are,” Marshall said of D.C. Central Kitchen. “I just needed to be here.”
José Andrés is returning to the former Trump hotel
Marshall said she was able to take what she learned from working with Andrés about feeding masses of people and cooking sustainably and economically and bring it to the D.C. nonprofit. Andrés is the founder of World Central Kitchen, which deploys its operations around the world and provides thousands of chef-prepared meals to areas hit by natural disasters or mired in conflict.
“There is even a bigger need right here, right now,” she said, adding that she sees people on the streets eating food prepared at D.C. Central Kitchen. “There’s a gratification to know that people who couldn’t get a good meal are getting a good meal,” Marshall said.
Many of the kitchen workers have experienced food insecurity themselves. D.C. Central Kitchen has a 14-week culinary job training program and actively recruits participants from halfway homes, from homeless shelters, through the mayor’s office and case workers and elsewhere. For the past 30 years, it has helped more than 1,700 people kick-start their culinary careers, with about 100 people graduating from its training site in the past year, according to the nonprofit.
“This is definitely a second-, third-, fourth-chance place,” Gold said.
Garrett is one recent program graduate, and on the day the peppers arrived, she helped Marshall grill up test plates of fajitas, a process the kitchen staff would repeat over the next couple days. Before that Friday’s meal deliveries went out, they had to make sure it all worked.
From kitchen to people
The fajitas arrived in aluminum pans for lunch distribution at the Salvation Army Sherman Avenue Corps in Northwest Washington, where Christy Harris and others stood in the kitchen and divvied up the seasoned chicken, the peppers and onions, and the tortillas into a few to-go containers. Harris, an administrative assistant, numbered the lids with a marker to track how many people were served that day. Then she waited.
It was nearly 12:30 p.m., and for the next hour, lunch would be served. Bags of fruit, with two apples and two oranges, were also part of the meal, served every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
“You come across a lot of families that are really, really down on their luck,” Harris said. “One woman had five kids, and their gas had been turned off. Another guy had a room, some kids but no food.”
Before covid-19, people could eat at a table inside the facility and socialize for a bit. But for the past two years, patrons have stayed outside, sometimes eating on a concrete step outside the building, often alone.
Joseph Hughes of Northwest Washington was the first to arrive. The soft-spoken 70-year-old said he has regularly come to the Salvation Army outpost for food the past two years and that the fajitas would be his lunch and dinner. But if he became hungry, his friends would “help me out with food, too.”
He sat down to eat outside the weathered, red-brick Salvation Army building, which opened in 1966 at the corner of Sherman Avenue and Morton Street, an area that has seen an exodus of longtime residents and an influx of wealthier newcomers. All around him stood gleaming, boutique-style condominium buildings and renovated rowhouses.
Jorome Benton, 42, has lived in the neighborhood his whole life. He arrived on his bicycle and said he frequently stops in for lunch. “It’s something to get through” the week, he said.
“I’ve come here since I was small, for food or to play basketball,” he said. “It helps everybody who don’t have something to eat.”
In D.C., seniors often struggle to find food
Benton was the second person to show up that day. By 12:45 p.m., four chicken fajita meals had been handed out. Three more people trickled in before lunch was over. The seventh was Andre H. Fields, 62, who said he’s also a regular at the Salvation Army facility, about a 10-minute walk from his house.
Fields said he started coming there for lunch while he was taking care of his mother full time, before she died last year. He’s been living off his savings and said he counts on the Salvation Army for about 60 percent of his food, for lunch and its twice-weekly food pantry.
“They give you a little bit of everything … a well-balanced diet that you can live on,” Fields said, and it was a diet brought together by many other lives, too. “You’ve got to eat your veggies.” | 2022-08-19T10:26:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pepper's trek from Virginia farm to DC Salvation Army spotlights hunger - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/dc-hunger-salvation-army-farm/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/dc-hunger-salvation-army-farm/ |
The puling party’s main challenge comes from the National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola, or Unita, which was on the losing side of the civil war and has been its main political rival ever since. Unita is led by Adalberto Costa Junior, 60, who trained as an electronics engineer and has served as a lawmaker and the party’s spokesman. Widely known as ACJ, he’s pledged to redistribute Angola’s oil revenue and been outspoken about the unacceptable levels of corruption and poverty. His sharp, combative debating style in parliament and in the media have earned him a strong following among young, urban voters. While Costa Junior has pledged to reduce the role of the state in the economy, he’s ruled out replacing civil servants appointed by the MPLA, or reneging on the nation’s debt obligations.
Foreign investors will be watching closely to see whether the new administration continues with the planned sale of stakes in oil giant Sonangol EP and other state companies. They’ll also be monitoring whether Angola utilizes windfall revenue stemming from higher crude prices to help settle about $19 billion in debt owed to China -- funding that was mostly used to build roads, hospitals and rail links. The government has sought to diversify its financing away from the Asian nation -- it completed a $4.5 billion program with the International Monetary Fund in 2021 and sold $1.75 billion in Eurobonds in 2022. It also aims to increase fuel sales to the European Union, which has been trying to reduce its reliance on Russian oil and gas following the invasion of Ukraine.
While the National Electoral Commission insists the vote will be free and fair, officials from Unita and other opposition parties have questioned the body’s independence and accused it of favoring the MPLA and not doing enough to prevent voting fraud. They’ve also criticized the siting of polling stations and complained that it’s too difficult to register election monitors. The state media has devoted 95% of its election coverage to the government and the ruling party, and carried live broadcasts of its rallies, according to Carlos Rosado de Carvalho, an economist at the Catholic University in Luanda, who has been monitoring the campaigns. Unita has asked its supporters to maintain a presence around the polling stations to ensure the balloting and counting is fair. The party has ruled out a return to armed conflict but threatened to hold street protests if there is an attempt to rig the election. Several observer missions will monitor the vote, including ones from the European Union and African Union.
Eight parties will compete for 220 seats in the single chamber parliament. The person that heads the lawmaker candidate list of the party that wins the most seats in the National Assembly becomes president. More than 14 million people have registered to vote. | 2022-08-19T11:05:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Here’s Why Oil-Rich Angola is Ripe for Political Change - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/heres-why-oil-rich-angola-is-ripe-for-political-change/2022/08/19/97ca6632-1fa1-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/heres-why-oil-rich-angola-is-ripe-for-political-change/2022/08/19/97ca6632-1fa1-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Residents stood up to a proposal by two oil and gas industry giants to build a pipeline under their homes and forced them to back down. When the news broke last year in July, the rejoicing began.
The layering of industrial pollution in Black, Indigenous and Latino communities across the country is pervasive. And recent studies show that negative health outcomes in these areas are directly linked to the ways that local governments and financial institutions adopted policies — known as redlining — that kept people of color confined to certain areas in cities, while supporting Whites who relocated to suburbs.
The project would have gone through some people’s backyards. Local activists who mobilized against it felt they were fighting a losing cause after a representative for the oil companies made a remark that angered all of south Memphis.
Valero Energy and Plains All-American declined several requests to comment on the record. At the time, the companies claimed that the land agent had misspoken, saying that choosing “a point of least resistance” was never their intention.
“The path of least resistance. That’s what they call Boxtown. That’s what they call Westwood. That’s what they’re calling Memphis,” Justin Pearson, 27, said, his voice booming across the room.
Block-by-block data shows pollution's stark toll on people of color
‘I Am A Man’ and Isaac Hayes
South Memphis is rich with Black history. | 2022-08-19T11:05:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tennessee Valley Authority is dumping coal ash on Black south Memphis - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/19/tennessee-valley-authority-memphis-coal/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/19/tennessee-valley-authority-memphis-coal/ |
For the first time since June 2020, Adams Morgan’s main strip of bars and restaurants will become free of traffic on Sunday afternoon. The pilot program will repeat in September and October. (Fritz Hahn/The Washington Post)
On Sunday afternoon, traffic will come to a halt in Adams Morgan. Instead of Uber Eats drivers blocking traffic outside restaurants and buses idling at stoplights, 18th Street NW will be filled with diners enjoying restaurants alfresco and families doing yoga together while an entertainer riding a big-wheeled penny-farthing cycles past.
Well, that’s the idea, anyway.
Sunday marks the debut of the Adams Morgan Pedestrian Zone, a pilot program that will close 18th Street to vehicular traffic between Columbia and Kalorama roads one Sunday each month, from noon to 10 p.m., through October. The goal, according to the Adams Morgan Partnership Business Improvement District, is to draw more people to the neighborhood, then make it easier for them to move around and socialize or participate in activities on the pavement.
For years, or maybe decades, Adams Morgan business owners and bar regulars have floated the idea of closing 18th Street to cars on weekends, turning the strip of eateries, music venues and taverns into some sort of combination of Les Halles and Bourbon Street. Outside of the annual Adams Morgan Day festival, however, it remained a pipe dream.
Then, in June 2020, the District Department of Transportation announced it was closing 18th between Columbia and Kalorama roads for extended stretches over the course of a weekend — eight hours each on Friday and Saturday and 12 hours on Sunday. The goal was to “reimagine outdoor space in the District” as bars and restaurants began to reopen, creating more room for outdoor drinking and dining. When the weekend finally arrived, it might have been more successful than anticipated: There were long lines and full patios up and down the street. “That was very successful for us,” says Jo-Jo Valenzuela, the owner of the Game sports bar and Tiki on 18th, though he adds that “it was the craziest shift I’ve ever worked in my life” due to crowds ordering cocktails while restaurants remained short-staffed. Dave Delaplaine, the general manager and beer director at Roofers Union, is more concise: “That kicked our a--.”
Despite interest in repeating the experiment, neighbors complained about the lack of social distancing and masking, and it didn’t happen again. But closing the street became a possibility once more this year thanks to the Streets for People grant program, which supports outdoor concerts, movies and events in public spaces around the city. A majority of the funding is going to purchase a system with metal cables that can be pulled across the street to close it to traffic, rather than using dump trucks to block motor access. (An earlier plan to install hydraulic bollards in the middle of the roadway has been nixed.)
Beyond hanging out on rooftop bars and at streateries, free scheduled activities include yoga and Zumba classes, instructors from Words, Beats and Life leading a dance academy, face painting and balloon artists for children, and the creation of a chalk mural in the middle of the street.
During a hearing with the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission in May, Kristen Barden, the BID’s executive director, stressed that the pedestrian zone won’t become a monthly Adams Morgan Day-style block party with stages or booths for vendors set up in the road. “Because a 20-foot fire lane must be clear in the middle of the street, any entertainment will be more pop-up in nature,” she explained — activities that can quickly move out of the way if needed.
Note for those planning to attend via public transportation: The 90 and 96 buses, which usually run on 18th Street, are being rerouted on Florida and Connecticut avenues on Sunday.
Bars and restaurants are cautiously enthusiastic about the project. “I don’t know what to expect,” says Delaplaine of Roofers Union. “I don’t want to plan too much and stretch the staff out.” Instead, he thinks they’ll operate like a normal Sunday but maybe open the rooftop bar at 2 p.m. instead of 3:30. “Because there are three of these, we’re going to base what we do in the future off this Sunday,” he says, potentially adding live music Sept. 4.
Still, Delaplaine says, he’s looking forward to the series. “Part of Adams Morgan has been lacking coming out of covid,” compared with other neighborhoods. “We’ve lost a few restaurants, and people are looking for more outdoor options.”
The Adams Morgan Pedestrian Zone will be held on Sunday, Sept. 4 and Oct. 23. More information is available at admodc.org. | 2022-08-19T11:05:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Adams Morgan's car-free pedestrian zone begins Sunday - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/adams-morgan-18th-street-closed/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/adams-morgan-18th-street-closed/ |
‘I’m not into video games and goofing around on my phone like some of my friends,’ said Brayden Nadeau. ‘I’d rather be busy on the farm.’
Brayden Nadeau with his sister Emma at his first vegetable stand in 2020. He now has a larger stand for his produce. (Kari Nadeau)
Brayden Nadeau was 2 when he helped his grandpa steer a John Deere tractor, and he was 3 when he helped feed the hogs and chickens on the family farm in Minot, Maine.
At age 5, when he was asked by his kindergarten teacher what he hoped to do for a living one day, nobody was surprised when Brayden said he was going to be a farmer, said his mother, Kari Nadeau.
“It was just a given,” she said.
Brayden, now 12 and in seventh grade, is already on his way to achieving his career goal.
On his own initiative, he does much of the work on his grandfather Dan Herrick’s 25-acre farm, and on the 275 acres that neighbors let Herrick use to grow hay, Kari Nadeau said. Brayden plants, tends and harvests produce, and sells his bounty.
For the past two years, he has run Brayden’s Vegetable Stand, selling fresh food such as corn, cabbage and tomatoes. He used his savings to buy a new store structure in May 2021 for about $7,000 and install it at the edge of his grandfather’s farm. He posts live updates on Facebook about what’s fresh each day.
Brayden Nadeau opened Brayden’s Vegetable Stand in 2020. Each morning, he live streams the day’s offerings on Facebook. (Video: The Herrick Family)
He works on the farm and at his store 10 hours a day in the summer, and four hours a day (mostly after school) when school is in session. He’ll restock his store before school at 7:30 a.m. and leave an honor box for customers to drop in their money.
Brayden said he puts most of his earnings into savings, but uses some of the money to add improvements to his veggie stand, such as a new floor.
“I’ve become his employee,” joked Herrick, 64, adding that he still harvests hay on the farm but has allowed Brayden to take over most other responsibilities.
“I taught him the basics, and he took it from there,” he said. “I couldn’t be more proud that Brayden wants to follow the tradition of farming.”
Herrick said he has never needed to hire extra help at the farm and has always kept it as a family operation.
“Brayden pretty much runs the show now,” he said. “He knows how to use the equipment better than I do.”
Brayden said it’s his favorite way to spend his days.
“I really enjoy it — even getting up at 5 in the morning,” he said. “I’m not into video games and goofing around on my phone like some of my friends. I’d rather be busy on the farm.”
People in the area who appreciate his spring peas and fall pumpkins are glad he’s in business.
Maine was among the top five states with declining farmland between 2012 and 2017, according to a survey done by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In rural towns like Minot in southern Maine, many families eventually sell their farms or stop working the land because their children find other ways to make a living, said Herrick, who has farmed for most of his life.
“It’s a hard job, and you really have to enjoy doing it,” he said. “It’s definitely not for everyone. It’s very rewarding, but we need more Braydens to keep the heritage alive.”
Brayden’s father, Jon Nadeau, said he had a small hobby farm for a while, but he now runs a local boatyard to pay the bills.
“When Brayden showed such a keen interest, we decided to let him run with it,” said Jon Nadeau, 40. “To him, it’s not work. He’s dedicated to it because he’s doing what he loves.”
Brayden’s sense of duty to the farm has also helped to foster a close relationship with his grandparents, said his grandmother, Marie Herrick, 60.
“Nobody has ever asked Brayden to do this — there’s just nowhere else he’d rather be,” she said. “It’s been a joy all these years to watch him learn everything he can from Dan.”
At 6:30 every morning, one of Brayden’s parents drives him two miles to the Herricks’ farm, and he goes to work.
Brayden said he feeds the livestock (100 chickens, 60 pigs, 30 laying hens, 20 turkeys and six cows), cleans stalls, picks ripe produce and gathers eggs. Then he stocks the shelves in his vegetable stand, which he operates until Thanksgiving.
Every spring, he said, he starts his vegetables from seed, then puts them into the ground. To make the task of caring for the plants easier, he recently bought a drip irrigation system with money he’d saved from his produce sales.
Jon Nadeau said his son is meticulous about following safety precautions.
“He’s confident and he knows the proper way to use everything,” Jon Nadeau said. “There’s never been a time when we’ve been nervous about it.”
Brayden said that farming has taught him important lessons about patience.
“My goal is to have $100,000 in the bank, a truck, a tractor and a trailer,” he said. “And I know that will take time.”
Until then, he said he’s happy to drive his grandpa’s tractor and load up his vegetable stand with whatever he picks fresh each morning.
His customers said they look forward to seeing what he has to offer each day, from broccoli and tomatoes to eggplant and summer squash. Brayden also sells bacon and sausage made from his grandpa’s hogs and loaves of his grandma Marie’s fresh zucchini bread, as well as jars of her zucchini relish.
“Zucchini is probably the favorite thing I plant,” he said. “It’s always been amazing to watch something grow from an itty-bitty seed.”
Some of his customers feel the same way about watching Brayden grow.
“He’s the hardest-working kid I’ve ever known,” said customer Wendy Simard, 48, who was also Brayden’s reading teacher at Minot Consolidated School.
“Brayden is always encouraging people to try to grow their own produce at home, and he passes along some valuable pointers,” she said. “He’s told me a couple of times when it’s time to start my seedlings.”
Simard said that when she taught Brayden in first grade, he was drawn to books about farming, and liked drawing pictures of tractors, pigs and cows.
“Now he comes in to tell our pre-K students all about vegetables, and he’ll bring in a baby pig at the end of every year to show the kids,” she said.
Brayden said he likes educating people about where their food comes from.
“Everyone needs to eat, and that wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t have farmers,” he said. | 2022-08-19T11:05:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Farmer Brayden Nadeau, 12, supplies his Maine town with fresh produce - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/19/farmer-brayden-nadeau-maine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/19/farmer-brayden-nadeau-maine/ |
A new bra reveals that the military is moving toward gender equality
Women’s military uniforms were once about making soldiers look feminine. Now they’re about enhancing performance.
Perspective by Tanya L. Roth
The Army Tactical Brassiere will be presented to the Army Uniform Board for approval in the fall. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Solider Center)
The U.S. occupation of Japan ended in 1952 but American troops remained in the country, including a group from the Women’s Army Corps (WAC).
That fall, Lt. Jeane Wolcott arrived to take over command of the 96-member WAC detachment in Yokohama. While inspecting her unit, Wolcott discovered that a staggering 95 of the 96 women did not have as polished a feminine appearance as regulations demanded. Wolcott told the women to be better prepared for their next inspection. She recommended the women shop around for shapewear, including girdles, shoulder padding and “falsies” — better known today as push-up bras.
Within a week, a male commander came to inspect the women. He and Wolcott believed the women looked better in this inspection, although Wolcott said she had sent some women for medical attention so they could be placed on a diet. In her view, women needed to look feminine, and when they did not, that needed to be fixed. Wolcott explained that she wanted her “women to be women.” Her view reflected military leaders’ prevailing views on female soldiers at the time. Since World War II, military leaders had worried over the possibility of lesbianism in the women’s services. To combat these fears, officials linked femininity and women’s military service, assuming that women who looked and acted like women were also heterosexual.
Yet, while an Army bra took another 60 plus years, women began serving in greater numbers in the ensuing decades. But even as their numbers increased, equal treatment came slowly to the military. Through the 1970s, military leaders carefully shaped women’s defense roles to make the idea of women in uniform acceptable to the American public. Regulations required parents to sign off on women’s enlistment if they were under the age of 21. Rank limitations ensured few servicewomen, until the late 1960s, would advance to high ranks, in part to ensure that women would not command men. Women could marry while in service, but motherhood meant dismissal from the armed forces. | 2022-08-19T11:05:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A new bra reveals that the military is moving toward gender equality - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/19/new-bra-reveals-that-military-is-moving-toward-gender-equality/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/19/new-bra-reveals-that-military-is-moving-toward-gender-equality/ |
Postal Service ditches office with ‘White’ and ‘Colored’ historical signs
The post office shared a space with a museum, where the signs are part of an exhibit on segregation
The racial segregation exhibit in Orange County, Va., includes “White” and “Colored” signs over a pair of separate entrances. (Google Maps)
For years — and long after segregation ended — the Montpelier Station, Va., post office operated in a building where signs reading “White” and “Colored” hung over two separate doors.
The signs are not meant for people to follow, but rather intended as features of a museum exhibit about the country’s era of racial segregation.
No matter: The U.S. Postal Service is done being associated with it.
Over the summer, the Postal Service shut down its small, one-employee operation housed within the building, telling news outlets in a statement last week that it “determined the display at the site was unacceptable to the Postal Service.”
“Postal Service management considered that some customers may associate the racially-based, segregated entrances with the current operations of the Post Office and thereby draw negative associations between those operations and the painful legacy of discrimination and segregation,” a spokesman added in a statement to the Associated Press.
The post office had operated in the building since 1912, opening two years after the building was constructed as a train station. It sits along train tracks outside of the Montpelier estate, a former residence of James Madison, the fourth U.S. president. The Montpelier Foundation, a nonprofit that runs the estate, owns the former depot and in 2010 opened the segregation exhibit to “foster the discussion of citizenship and equal justice in American society,” according to a sign outside.
Officials with the estate, as well as some residents who said they relied on the post office, are opposed to the Postal Service’s withdrawal, the Culpeper Star-Exponent reported.
“We call upon the USPS to reverse the decision and reopen this historic facility that has served this community for over a century,” Christy Moriarty, a foundation spokeswoman, told the paper, adding that the exhibit will remain open.
The foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post early Friday. The Postal Service also did not immediately respond to inquiries.
The Postal Service distancing itself from the exhibit comes amid fierce debate over how the country should confront its history of slavery and racist policies. Montpelier Station is a little over an hour from Richmond, where numerous statues of Confederate figures were removed from public spaces following a reckoning on race relations prompted by the 2020 police killing of George Floyd.
Opponents of the statue removals have argued that tearing down monuments is an effort to erase history, while supporters say monuments are offensive in modern society. In Richmond, some statues have been placed into storage while others are on display at history museums with informational signage and even graffiti from recent protests. Some statues in Richmond remain in the public sphere.
Outside the Montpelier Station segregation exhibit is a sign noting that the train station was restored to “document this time of legalized segregation in American History,” explaining segregation laws were in effect in the state and other parts of the South from the end of the Civil War to the civil rights era. The sign gives a brief history of the depot and notes that a “vibrant black community called Montpelier Station home.”
The exhibit features restored segregated waiting areas, but the post office’s entrance was separate from doors featuring the “White” and “Colored” signage, the Star-Exponent reported.
Orange County, where Montpelier Station is located, is about 82 percent White and 13 percent Black, according to census data.
Moriarty, the foundation spokeswoman, told the Star-Exponent that the exhibit taught an important historical lesson. “We are proud of the exhibition that presents the realities of life during the Jim Crow era, showing the original segregated ticketing and waiting facilities,” she said.
Residents told the Star-Exponent they were not warned of the post office’s closure in June and questioned the Postal Service’s reasons for pulling out. Betsy Brantley, who is White, told the paper that segregation is not something the country should be proud of, “but as with so many things unpleasant in our history, we are doomed to repeat what we do not identify.”
The post office’s closure has left nearly 100 residents without mail delivery, Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat representing Orange County, wrote in an Aug. 4 letter to the Postal Service’s Virginia district manager. She did not address the Postal Service’s concerns in her letter, and her office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post early Friday. But she wrote that residents were not given proper warning before the Montpelier Station location shut down and now must travel to another post office to pick up their mail. | 2022-08-19T11:06:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | USPS closes Va. post office with ‘White’ and ‘Colored’ historical signs - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/19/montpelier-post-office-white-colored/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/19/montpelier-post-office-white-colored/ |
Children hold Chinese flags as they pose for a photo at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in June 2021. (Mark Schiefelbein/AP)
Forty-two years later, China becomes more dangerous as its decline becomes more predictable. Writing in the Spectator, Rana Mitter, a British historian and political scientist, cites a U.N. report that China’s population growth has declined 94 percent, from 8 million in 2011 to 480,000 last year. The projection of China’s 15- to 64-year-old population in 2100 has been revised from 579 million to 378 million.
George F. Will: China’s decline may be looming. Here’s how the U.S. can win, if it so chooses.
Josh Rogin: China’s ambassador is pushing Beijing’s alternative facts | 2022-08-19T11:06:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Why China will become ever more dangerous as its baby bust worsens - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/dangerous-china-demographic-decline/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/dangerous-china-demographic-decline/ |
After a Democratic plan to redraw the congressional map backfired, fierce infighting erupted, including in a Manhattan race pitting two titans of the House against each other
House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) arrives during a campaign stop at Zabar’s in New York on Aug. 6. (Jeenah Moon/For The Washington Post)
NEW YORK — Standing in a suit and tie under the blazing midmorning sun one recent Saturday, Rep. Jerrold Nadler spent an hour greeting voters. A political fixture of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Nadler, 75, is fighting to prove his decades of on-the-job experience and ties to the neighborhood’s Jewish community make him the best choice to meet this political moment.
The next morning, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, 76, wove through two sidewalk farmers markets carrying a binder with 50 typed pages of her accomplishments and endorsements to give a reporter. She bought a bouquet of sunflowers that she tucked in her purse, she bent to pet dogs and she waved to shoppers, insistent she not interrupt anyone’s buying. For much of her career, she’s been the only woman in a room full of men — and that perspective, she says, is needed more than ever.
Whizzing by on a bike, Suraj Patel, the 38-year-old underdog trying to beat them both, stopped at the same farmers markets to meet would-be voters. The day before he canvassed the vast Sheep Meadow lawn in Central Park, sprinting between blankets of 20-something sun bathers and picnickers, downing a can of mango White Claw from one group and tossing a football with another. “Generational change is on the ballot,” he kept repeating in his pitch.
The three Democrats are competing in a bitter primary culminating Tuesday that has pit two titans of the House Democratic Caucus against each other, ensuring that in the end at least one will lose their job. Nadler and Maloney, who both arrived in Congress in the early 1990s and have represented adjoining districts for three decades, are trying to fend off Patel, who is waging an insurgent campaign to unseat them both. The winner is will be heavily favored in November in this left-leaning stretch of the nation’s most populous city.
“No matter who wins, the loser is the people of New York,” said Evan Stavisky, a New York-based Democratic campaign consultant. If Democrats defy the odds and keep their House majority, he said, New York is going to lose one full committee chair and “that’s a loss of influence.”
The campaign has become as much about the candidates’ different identities as their policies, which largely align. Nadler, who could be the only Jewish member of the New York’s U.S. House delegation after this year, hopes that matters in a city with the largest Jewish population in the United States. Maloney, who has broken gender barriers, is emphasizing that she is a woman, and hopes the passions around abortion rights and women’s rights drives voters to her side. And Patel, a millennial and son of Indian immigrants, hopes voters frustrated with the status quo will choose diversity and change.
Recently, the race has turned in Nadler’s favor. He won the coveted endorsement of the New York Times editorial board and later, the support of Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) — who took a side at the last minute while the rest of the New York Democrats in Congress have stayed neutral.
Elsewhere in the state, in the wake of the scrambled congressional lines, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, responsible for protecting the party’s House seats as the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, found himself forced to choose between running in a swing district or moving to a bluer district that encompassed large swaths of freshman Democratic Rep. Mondaire Jones’s constituents. Maloney chose the safer seat, forcing Jones to look elsewhere to avoid a primary against the powerful chairman, and pitting Maloney against state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi, a challenger backed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) who is running to his left.
Jones, a rising liberal star and one of the first two openly gay, Black members of Congress, is fighting for his political life in a crowded nine-person primary against better-known local politicians in a district far flung from his previous one.
The redistricting chaos stems from a 2014 constitutional amendment voters approved to set up a separate advisory commission outside the state legislature to control redistricting that was intended to take the raw political ambitions out of the process. But the independent entity was plagued by partisan gridlock and Democrats in the state legislature took over the process, drawing a map that could have helped them gain seats and improve their standing in the battle for the House. After Republicans filed a lawsuit, the map was struck down on procedural grounds and a court-appointed “special master” was tasked to draw a new one.
Here in Manhattan, Nadler and Maloney’s fight has become one of the most extraordinary member-versus-member showdowns in recent history. After working side-by-side for 30 years, climbing the rungs of seniority until they both secured powerful leadership roles, him as the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and her as the chairwoman of the Oversight and Reform Committee, their career now depends on taking the other one down and fending off Patel, who is pushing a Barack Obama-style call for change.
For decades, an invisible line cut through the length of the Manhattan, where Nadler held the west side and Maloney the east. The new map instead sliced the island north and south, chopping off Lower Manhattan and merging the rest of the island into one district, effectively combining Nadler’s and Maloney’s seats.
“I think Nadler and Maloney are furious at the entire process that led them into this mess, which for one or both of them will be a career ender,” said Jon Reinish, a New York Democratic operative. “This is not how they wanted to go. They wanted to go out on their own terms when they were ready.”
Maloney said when the new lines were announced, she called Nadler to see if they could work together to try to change it. She said he told her to do whatever she wanted, and about 30 minutes later publicly announced he was running in the 12th District and would win. Later, he approached her on the House floor and suggested she step aside, allow him to run in the 12th and instead run in the 10th District — the crowded new one that Jones had been forced to run in, she said. She didn’t even consider it. “People have been telling me to step aside my whole life,” she said.
A Nadler spokesman declined to comment, but pointed to an article that suggested they both urged the other to give up the 12th and run in the 10th.
David Imamura, the Democratic co-chairman of the redistricting advisory commission, said Manhattan voters during public hearings argued that the west and east sides of the city were distinct places and should continue to be represented by two lawmakers in Congress. Nadler’s old district combined the heavily Jewish upper west side with Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn, making it the most Jewish district in the country. It made sense to keep those communities together, Imamura said.
In recent months, Nadler has emphasized his Jewish heritage, noting when he first came to the House there were eight Jewish members representing New York City. “It would be very unfortunate if there was no Jewish representation from New York,” Nadler told The Washington Post earlier this year.
On a Saturday morning this month, Nadler remarked several times how unusual it was for there to be such little foot traffic outside Zabar’s, where tourists and locals come for its bagels and smoked fish and other traditional Jewish fare.
Several elderly people, some who have voted for Nadler since he ran for the state assembly in the late-1970s, stopped to say hello. An older man walking into the store blew him a kiss. Some told him they’d already voted for him. One declined the campaign literature, telling him, “don’t need it, I’m supporting you 100 percent.”
“I voted for you,” said one elderly woman. Nadler responded: “Tell your friends.” He said the race was “looking good if everyone gets out to vote.”
One woman asked Nadler about the Green New Deal, which he at first told her was impossible. Seeing this wasn’t the answer she wanted, he said, if “we get more Democrats in the Senate,” it could possibly be accomplished.
At a debate this month, Nadler portrayed himself as a bulwark against conservative priorities and attempts to overturn the 2020 election. “I am leading the fight to stop this,” he said, before mistakenly saying he “impeached Bush twice,” a reference to his leading role in Donald Trump’s impeachments.
In his 30-year congressional career, Nadler has never faced a reelection fight like this. Maloney, on the other hand, knew she’d be facing Patel, who ran against her twice before, losing by just 3,700 votes in 2020 and refusing to concede for six weeks after that primary. But against Nadler, Maloney’s experience and clout does not set her apart the way it did against Patel. What does is that she’s a woman who has worked on women’s rights issues her whole career.
“Of all the things I’ve worked on, it’s hardest to move things forward for women,” Maloney said. The Supreme Court, she told one voter, “bulldozed our rights into the ground.”
Jodi Bialick, a teacher, was sitting on a bench with her mother and assured Maloney that the congresswoman would win. Maloney sat down beside her. “Why do you think so?” she asked. “You stand up for the right things,” Bialick said.
Maloney said her biggest regret during her time in Congress is not seeing the Equal Rights Amendment ratified — she has introduced nearly a dozen variations of a bill to do so since 1997.
“That’s why I want to go back,” she told a voter. A man walked by and said she had his vote. “Oh! You’re going to vote for me? Let me shake your hand. I am so grateful,” she said. When a passersby offered her good luck, she’d respond, “You are my luck.”
When one voter said she was intrigued by Patel’s candidacy. “Then you’ll have someone with no experience,” Maloney said.
But Patel, during his campaign swing through Central Park, has tried to make his opponents’ experience a negative. They never codified Roe v. Wade, he said. He also mocked Maloney’s first debate performance, where, when asked if President Biden should run for a second term, said, “I don’t believe he’s running for reelection.”
Patel, who worked on Barack Obama’s campaigns, said the party errs when it distances from its leaders. “I’m wearing aviators in honor of my man, Joe, getting passed the biggest climate change bill in recent history,” Patel told a group of picnickers, referring to Biden’s signature eyewear and the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes provisions to combat global warming.
Outside the park on Saturday afternoon, Patel greeted his small army of Gen Z volunteers with high-fives. Some were wearing the campaign’s new swag — a shirt with Patel’s face surrounded by flowers and vines that said, “Change the vibes.”
“He has really good ads of what he’s doing, how he’s up to date, like how he mentioned the old Democrats what they’ve been doing and how he wants to change it and make it like more for us,” said Paulina Rivero, 31, who assured Patel he had her vote.
Former New York Democratic congressman Joseph Crowley, who lost his seat to Ocasio-Cortez in a stunning upset in 2018, said while the loss of seniority for New York Democrats resulting from the race is unfortunate, the reality is “no one owns their seat.”
“It’s a city that’s in constant change,” Crowley said, “the politics are not void of that change. That’s something special about New York.” | 2022-08-19T11:06:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In New York, Democrats clash over identity in bitter primary season - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/democrats-nadler-maloney-new-york/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/democrats-nadler-maloney-new-york/ |
Rep. Greg Meeks talks Afghanistan and his Taiwan visit
Good morning, Early Birds. We regret to inform you that you've missed your chance to ask Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) anything (unless he's going!). Tips: earlytips@washpost.com. Thanks for waking up with us.
In today's edition … The Post's Colby Itkowitz on the bitter primary season in New York where Democrats are clashing over the party's identity … In The Post's latest story on the lead up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Greg Miller and Catherine Belton report that Russia’s spies misread Ukraine and misled the Kremlin as war loomed … Allen Weisselberg pleads guilty and a Florida judge signals he’s willing to unseal some of the Mar-a-Lago affidavit… but first …
Rep. Greg Meeks: “You can't just kowtow” to China
Nine questions for … Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (D-N.Y.): We spoke with the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee about his recent trip to Taiwan with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Republicans' new report on the Biden administration's failings in Afghanistan and whether the committee will hold more hearings on what went wrong during the Afghan evacuation.
The Early: What did you think of China’s response to your visit to Taiwan? Was it more or less severe than you expected it to be?
Meeks: I think it was predictable. Clearly it was unprecedented. But I believe these are things that [China] had planned out previously, so I was not terribly surprised. It just shows their aggressive nature in trying to change the status of Taiwan.
The Early: Susan Shirk, a former senior State Department official in the Clinton administration, told the New York Times before your trip, “Better to postpone rather than risk war.” Two weeks later, war hasn’t broken out. Do you think the warnings of the risks of your visit were overblown?
Meeks: Yeah. We're not going to allow Beijing and [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] to tell members of Congress what to do, who could visit, when [they can] and cannot visit. I've visited Taiwan previously several times. You just can’t kowtow and bow down, changing what we do because of Beijing's decision to be more aggressive.
The Early: Nearly a year after the United States pulled out of Afghanistan, tens of thousands of Afghans who worked with U.S. forces and their families remain in Afghanistan or other countries waiting to come to the United States, including more than 74,000 waiting for special immigrant visas. What can Congress do to speed up the process?
Meeks: We're looking at the Afghan Adjustment Act. [The bipartisan bill would help] some of the Afghans that are already in the United States [become permanent residents], and also possibly expanding the scope of who can be considered for the special immigrant visas. And of course, taking human rights and security vetting into account. We may need to speed up that process.
The Early: Do you think it can pass this year?
Meeks: Yeah, I think so. This is something that is not a partisan issue. We just got to work out some of the details.
The Early: What do you make of the report on the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan issued this week by Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee?
Meeks: It's a political report that does not take into consideration all of the factors that led up to the 20 days [before the United States pulled out]. You can't consider what took place in Afghanistan without also looking at the Doha agreement [that the Trump administration signed with the Taliban in 2020]. There's things that could [have been] done better. And that's what we need to look at now, to examine. But I don't know of any scenario where there would have been a pull out that is completely, 100 percent not a messy situation.
The Early: Did you have any discussions with Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, about conducting a bipartisan investigation into the Afghanistan withdrawal? Why didn't that happen?
Meeks: Within the last 12 months, we've had almost 14 briefings, classified meetings, hearings, oftentimes calling in the administration to get whatever information we need so that [committee] members would be clear on what was going on in Afghanistan. I still welcome working collectively in a bipartisan way on a review of what took place. What went right, what went wrong through the Bush, the Obama, the Trump and the Biden administrations.
The Early: The committee held two public hearings last year on the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Republicans’ report called for “a robust schedule of open hearings with senior Biden administration officials who were responsible for the withdrawal.” Are you planning any further hearings on what went wrong in Afghanistan?
Meeks: We will probably have some additional hearings. We need to see. I know the State Department is about to release their report. We're looking at the prior nonpartisan report that came out just before the withdrawal. The committee will be looking at all of those things.
The Early: Do you anticipate more public hearings on Afghanistan before the end of the year?
Meeks: I haven't set the agenda for the end of the year. I know that it’s not going to happen in September. We've got October recess before the election. There's only so many days in which to do it. I can't commit to say that it’s going to happen. I won’t say that it won't happen.
The Early: What do you think a Republican investigation of the Afghanistan withdrawal might look like next year if they retake the House?
Meeks: Well, they're not gonna retake the House, No. 1. We know what happened beforehand. We know that when [Republicans] had the majority, and Trump was the president, that [former Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo refused to talk to the committee at all. We know that we didn't get any information in that regard. So we're doing much better with us in the majority.
Democrats clash over identity in bitter New York primary season
To the bitter end: Reps. Jerry Nadler, 75, and Carolyn B. Maloney, 76, “are competing in a bitter primary culminating Tuesday that has pit two titans of the House Democratic Caucus, who both arrived in Congress in the early 1990s and have represented adjoining districts for three decades, against each other, ensuring that in the end at least one will lose their job,” our colleague Colby Itkowitz writes. “They’re both fending off [Suraj Patel, 38], who is waging an insurgent campaign to unseat them both. The winner will be heavily favored in November in this left-leaning stretch of the nation’s most populous city.”
“The campaign has become as much about the candidates’ different identities as their policies, which largely align.”
“Nadler, who could be the only Jewish member of the New York’s U.S. House delegation, hopes that matters in a city with the largest Jewish population in the United States.”
“Maloney, who has broken gender barriers, is emphasizing that she is a woman, and hopes the passions around abortion rights and women’s rights drives voters to her side.”
“And Patel, a millennial and son of Indian immigrants, hopes voters frustrated with the status quo will choose diversity and change.”
Russia's errors played crucial role in failed war plans in Ukraine
Failure to launch: In the next installment examining the military campaign in Ukraine, our colleagues Greg Miller and Catherine Belton use communications between those in Russia’s Federal Security Service (obtained by Ukrainian and other security services and reviewed by The Washington Post) to tell us how Russian spies misread Ukraine and misled the Kremlin. Below is an excerpt:
Allen Weisselberg pleads guilty, Florida judge signals he’s willing to unseal some of the Mar-a-Lago affidavit
Former president Donald Trump and his allies are the subject of multiple investigations — into Trump's business practices and his conduct leading up to Jan. 6, 2021 — that could spell legal peril for Trumpworld. Thursday’s hearings in New York and Florida underscored this:
In New York, former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg pleaded guilty to a tax fraud scheme that lasted 15 years and included more than a dozen felonies, including criminal tax fraud and grand larceny, our colleagues Sheila McClear and Mark Berman report. Weisselberg will spend five months in jail and then five years on probation.
“Appearing in a Manhattan courtroom, Weisselberg, 75, acknowledged his part in the scenario outlined by prosecutors — and agreed to testify, if called, at a pending trial for the company.”
Later Thursday afternoon in South Florida, Federal Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart said he is “inclined” to unseal some of the affidavit that led to last week’s FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.
Reinhart ordered the Justice Department to “redact the document in a way that would not undermine its ongoing investigation if made public” and said he would make a final decision after next Thursday, “when Justice Department officials are expected to submit their proposed redactions,” per our colleagues Josh Dawsey and Perry Stein.
White House speeds monkeypox vaccines, but not everyone likes the pace. By The Post’s Dan Diamond and Fenit Nirappil.
Biden administration readies about $800 mln in additional security aid for Ukraine. By Reuters’s Patricia Zengerle, Idrees Ali and Steve Holland.
He was Congress’ barber for 50 years. Now he’s hanging up his shears. By Roll Call’s Chris Cioffi.
Judges are now using their retirements as leverage against the president. By Slate’s Richard M. Re.
World news: Zelensky faces outpouring of criticism over failure to warn of war. By The Post’s Liz Sly.
From a world away, a U.S. volunteer guides Afghan allies left behind. By The Post’s Abigail Hauslohner.
‘I have nothing left’: Flooding adds to Afghanistan’s crises. By the New York Times’s Yaqoob Akbary and Christina Goldbaum.
Local news: Health, economic disparities continue to affect coronavirus hot spots. By The Post’s Vanessa G. Sánchez.
Marin Sanna and Eric Adams walk into a bar … who starts dancing on tables first? | 2022-08-19T11:06:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rep. Greg Meeks talks Afghanistan and his Taiwan visit - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/rep-greg-meeks-talks-afghanistan-his-taiwan-visit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/rep-greg-meeks-talks-afghanistan-his-taiwan-visit/ |
Unemployed South Africans depended on covid relief grants
But this government assistance wasn’t easy — or cheap — to access
Analysis by Vayda Megannon
A woman joins the queue to receive her social grant in Thokoza, South Africa, on March 30, 2020. (Themba Hadebe/AP)
Coming off a fifth wave of the coronavirus pandemic, South Africans are contending with an economic storm. High poverty, inflation and unemployment, along with slow economic growth, have revived proposals for a basic income grant to help those who are struggling.
Many look to the temporary Covid-19 Social Relief of Distress Grant (SRDG), Africa’s largest cash-transfer program — with the fastest-ever rollout — as a model for more permanent income assistance that would provide ongoing monthly payments to unemployed adults. About 40 percent of South Africans have benefited from the covid-19 grants introduced in April 2020. Most recipients use these funds to meet immediate household needs such as food, electricity and toiletries.
But in-depth interviews with 41 South Africans eligible for the grants suggest that the government assistance could go further if it were easier — and less expensive — to obtain. On average, recipients report that they used about 15 percent of their grants to cover expenses incurred in accessing the funds. For some recipients, these expenses approached 50 percent.
‘A lifeline’ in rough seas
About 14 million South Africans, or approximately 24 percent of the population, were living in poverty before the pandemic. Deprivation and inequality worsened when President Cyril Ramaphosa launched one of the world’s strictest lockdowns in March 2020. The country continued to enforce lockdowns to varying degrees for much of the next two years. Some estimate that by the end of 2020, 2 million South Africans had lost their jobs. One survey reported that 47 percent of households had run out of money to buy food by April 2020.
The government’s package of emergency relief measures included the SRDG, which provides a monthly cash transfer of R350 ($20) to unemployed adults. The South African human rights organization Black Sash described the package as “a lifeline, but … not enough.” Initially intended to run from May to October 2020, the grant has been extended several times, most recently to March 2023.
Who is getting help?
An Afrobarometer face-to-face survey with 1,600 South Africans in May and June 2021 confirms the challenges many citizens face as a result of the pandemic. While 8 in 10 South Africans (80 percent) said the country’s strict lockdowns were necessary to curb the spread of the virus, nearly two-thirds (64 percent) found it difficult to comply with the restrictions.
About 1 in 3 (34 percent) reported losing a job or primary source of income because of the pandemic. For those ages 26 to 35, it was 41 percent, as shown in Figure 1; for the poorest citizens, it was 38 percent.
Fig. 1: South Africans who lost their primary income because of the pandemic | Afrobarometer 2021
But nearly as many (30 percent) reported receiving some form of covid relief assistance from the government (see Figure 2). South Africans ages 26 to 35 — the group most likely to report a loss of livelihood — were also the most likely to receive support (36 percent), along with poorer and less-educated respondents.
Fig. 2: Who got covid-19 relief assistance from the South African government? | Afrobarometer 2021
But applying for help costs money
For some beneficiaries, the SRDG spelled the difference between eating and going hungry. In qualitative interviews focusing on understanding people’s experiences accessing the SRDG in a Cape Town township (Khayelitsha) and a town in the Eastern Cape province (KwaBhaca) between July and October 2021, one of our respondents explained: “There were days where we would run out of food, and when the day comes for me to go and get my grant, I would buy potatoes. With my first payment I bought potatoes, 10 kg of rice, and we were able to eat something with my family.”
But before they can use the money to meet their basic needs, South Africans have to apply for the grant and then secure access to the funds at a post office (since May, some grocery stores have also offered access). Collecting the actual grant money can drain a significant share of the support: On average, recipients we interviewed spent R50 ($3) to acquire their grants; some had to spend as much as R160 ($10), or nearly half of the grant funds.
Applying through the government’s online portal forces some citizens to incur data costs — assuming they have internet access and are familiar with online transactions. But survey participants reported that the most significant expenses involve travel costs to collect the funds, especially for rural residents. In addition, some recipients spent hours in long queues, or had to stay overnight or even make multiple trips before securing their monthly payment. Network problems and poor service from post office staff sometimes disrupted delivery of the funds, participants noted.
More nefarious but common costs include corruption on the part of some post office officials, who reportedly find illegal routes to claim a share of the grant funds. And there are reports of organized extortion in the queues, with some beneficiaries reporting they felt forced to pay security guards or others to access the queues or hold their places.
Here’s an example of the challenges each month, based on the experiences of one SRDG recipient we interviewed. Mpilo reported that he had to borrow the R100 ($6) bus fare, then got up at 2 a.m. to catch the bus, reaching the post office in the early morning to find people who had slept there overnight. He waited in the queue all day before finally receiving his funds late in the afternoon, leaving behind a full queue with some people fighting for places in line. He also described occasions when the system would shut down and everyone would be told to go home and return the next day.
In 2022, with South Africa experiencing its highest inflation rate in 13 years, the buying power of the grants is declining. The high costs that many beneficiaries incur to collect their grants risk undermining an important safety net — and could leave millions of South Africans hungry. Regardless of whether the SRDG evolves into a basic income grant, improving systems for accessing the funds could provide significant and immediate benefit to many of the country’s most vulnerable.
Vayda Megannon (@VaydaMegannon) is a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town and a research assistant with Afrobarometer. | 2022-08-19T11:06:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | South Africa’s covid relief could become a guaranteed basic income. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/south-africa-covid-relief-income/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/south-africa-covid-relief-income/ |
The machine, called the Seeker, saw its NFL debut this week with a test run by the Green Bay Packers.
Green Bay Packers safety Micah Abernathy catches a pass during NFL football training camp with the New Orleans Saints on Wednesday. (Samantha Madar/AP)
In videos on Twitter, a six-foot tall white robotic machine simulates a punter, kicking balls at a rapid pace to players downfield. The robot, which holds six balls in a revolving cartridge, could also imitate a quarterback’s style including the speed, arc and timing of a throw.
The device, called the Seeker, is a robotic quarterback, kicker and punter rolled into one. It’s a modern day version of a piece of football equipment, called a JUGS machine, that’s been used to simulate throws and kicks to football players for decades. The Seeker, company officials say however, is a more accurate thrower and runs software to let players practice more advanced gameplay scenarios.
The Seeker, created by Dallas-based Monarc Sports, is a robotic quarterback, kicker and punter rolled into one. (Video: Monarc, via Youtube)
The robot, created by Dallas-based Monarc Sports, is starting to gain adoption. Prestigious college football programs, such as Louisiana State University, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Iowa, all count the Seeker as part of their training strategy. The Green Bay Packers are the first team in the National Football League to try the technology.
The Seeker’s software allows players to customize how they practice with it. Athletes can catch balls from close to the machine to improve hand-eye coordination. They can also program the robot to throw a ball at a specific spot on the field, or simulate more lifelike conditions by over or under-throwing a ball. Players wear a pager-like tag which allows the robot to track their location on the field, and throw a ball accurately within inches.
“It gives so much opportunity for our guys to get reps without the need of having a quarterback there,” said Ben Hansen, the director of football administration at the University of Iowa, where the technology was first tested. “That’s a huge plus.”
Since the 1970s, football teams have relied on a machine to avoid wearing out quarterbacks and kickers. The contraption, called a JUGS machine, fired off footballs through two high-speed rotating discs and allowed players to run routes or practice catching by themselves, operating with basic machinery and not utilizing any software.
Over the decades, the machine — named after its creator JUGS Sports — became commonplace on the football field. But it’s been criticized by football staff for poor performance.
Matt LaFleur, the head coach of the Green Bay Packers, spent a few minutes in early August criticizing the JUGS machine for not simulating punts well. “It was awful,” he said in a press conference. “You couldn’t get the ball to turn over. It was damn near impossible to catch.”
Lifeguard drones can save lives
J.R. Reichenbach, a national account manager at JUGS Sports, said the company reached out to the Packers after seeing the clip to ask if they could help alleviate the issue. “We were there for them,” he said. “They didn’t need anything, everything’s fine.”
Igor Karlicic and Bhargav Maganti, co-founders of Monarc Sports, started creating the Seeker in 2015 as engineering students at Northwestern University looking for a way that wide receivers could train alone. They created a prototype and worked with the University of Iowa to refine the concept.
The Seeker robot has two rotating discs, similar to a JUGS machine, that rotate quickly and help launch a ball. The robot has the ability to carry six balls at a time in cartridges similar to a revolving gun chamber. Each robot costs teams roughly $40,000 to $50,000 per year for the hardware, software and servicing, Karlicic said.
“Small advantages matter a lot,” Karlicic said of the training options the robot offers. “All of this makes a huge impact on game day.”
Hansen, of the University of Iowa, said in an interview that his team started using the Seeker in 2018. One of the most helpful parts of the technology, he said, is being able to program it to throw passes that simulate game day conditions. Unlike the JUGS machine, he said, which doesn’t have software to pass in random patterns, the Seeker can purposefully throw passes that aren’t perfect.
“Every single pass isn’t always going to just hit you in the chest,” he said. “So to be able to practice and simulate different types of passes that are coming at you only help your ability to be more efficient and productive with regards to catching.”
A case study published in April by Microsoft, which provides the software ecosystem for the robot, noted that West Virginia University’s dropped passes rate fell to four percent in 2021, down from 53 percent the past season after introducing the robot into training. The university’s senior athletic director said the robot deserved a “share of the credit” for that outcome.
These robots were trained by AI. They became racists and sexist.
After LaFleur complained about the Packers’ JUGS machine, Karlicic said his company fast-tracked a plan to give the team a trial of the robot which was at practice this week. The team is not an official customer yet, Karlicic said, but has been conversing with Monarc Sports for months.
Daron K. Roberts, a former NFL coach and director of the University of Texas’s Center for Sports Leadership and Innovation, said in an interview that he is not surprised football teams are interested in the Seeker. In recent years, the NFL has been looking to wearables, drones and other forms of technology to automate coaching and team operations.
“Technology has infiltrated the NFL,” he said.
“The NFL is a very copycat league,” he said. “If another team has an edge, other teams are going to follow.” | 2022-08-19T11:07:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | This robotic quarterback could be the future of football - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/19/robot-quarterback-green-bay-packers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/19/robot-quarterback-green-bay-packers/ |
Friday briefing: Mar-a-Lago search affidavit; monkeypox vaccine; Deshaun Watson; Big Ten TV deal; ‘House of the Dragon’; and more
We might see parts of a key document about the Mar-a-Lago search.
The latest: A judge said yesterday that he’s “inclined” to unseal some of an affidavit that could reveal why officials searched former president Donald Trump’s home last week.
Why this matters: The Justice Department doesn’t want it released, saying it could hurt the investigation. A final decision will come next week.
What else to know: The longtime top financial officer of Trump’s company pleaded guilty yesterday to tax fraud.
Russian spies misjudged Ukraine before its invasion.
How we know this: Communications between Russian officers reviewed by The Post, along with other sensitive documents.
What they said: Agents expected Russia to easily overthrow Ukraine’s government and take its capital, Kyiv. They even started arranging housing.
What this shows: Unrealistic intelligence has guided Russia’s decision-making, which helps explain its failures on the battlefield.
The U.S. is speeding up its monkeypox vaccine rollout.
How? Millions of doses will be finished in the U.S. rather than overseas, officials announced yesterday, and existing doses will be split into fifths.
Is this good news? It depends who you ask. Some health officials welcomed the moves; others were unnerved by the plan to split doses, saying more research is needed.
A high-profile NFL quarterback has been suspended for 11 games.
Who? Deshaun Watson, who signed a record contract with the Cleveland Browns this spring. More than two dozen women have accused him of sexual misconduct, although he hasn’t been charged with a crime.
This is stricter than the first punishment: Watson was initially suspended for six games, but the NFL appealed the ruling. He also was fined $5 million.
The Big Ten landed a TV megadeal.
What to know: The college sports conference, which will soon have 16 teams, turned away from ESPN and signed contracts worth a record $7 billion with Fox, CBS and NBC.
What it means for college football: Starting next year, Big Ten games will have set windows on Saturdays: noon on Fox; 3:30 p.m. on CBS; and prime time on NBC.
Glaciers in Europe are melting at the fastest pace ever recorded.
Where? The Alps. Extreme heat waves have transformed the mountains, melting their glaciers one to two months faster than normal and forcing ski resorts to close early.
Why it’s worrying: Snowpack from these mountains delivers up to 90% of water to lowland Europe for drinking, irrigation and hydropower.
The world of “Game of Thrones” returns to HBO this weekend.
What to know: “House of the Dragon,” a prequel series, premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern time, three years after the original show’s … disappointing … finale.
So, what’s this one about? It’s based on George R.R. Martin’s “Fire & Blood” book, which takes us back in (Westeros) time to the reign of the white-haired Targaryen family and, of course, their dragons.
And now … what to do this weekend: Try one of these 12 books to round out your summer, and start planning a fall vacation at one of these perfect destinations. | 2022-08-19T11:07:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The 7 things you need to know for Friday, August 19 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/08/19/what-to-know-for-august-19/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/08/19/what-to-know-for-august-19/ |
City worker says he was in Capitol for Jan. 6 riot — and keeps his job
The mayor of Charlottesville says the city can’t fire IT worker Allen Groat because he hasn’t been charged with any crimes
Rioters supportive of President Donald Trump storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (John Minchillo/AP)
In the days before the attack on the Capitol, Allen Groat wrote in a since-deleted tweet that the results of the 2020 presidential election were fraudulent, and that he was going to support Donald Trump on Jan. 6 by a “show of force,” according to a screenshot of the post.
The IT analyst for the City of Charlottesville told a police official that he traveled to Washington and was inside the Capitol that day, saying he was working as an independent journalist and left when violence began, according to an internal city probe.
This month, Charlottesville made an announcement that stunned and angered some residents: Groat would keep his job.
Before, During and After: An investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol
The controversy has drawn local and national attention, putting officials on the defensive in a city which was host to an earlier episode of far-right violence: the 2017 “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally, which saw an avowed neo-Nazi plow his car into a crowd, killing one woman and injuring dozens more. Local activists say it is disappointing to see Groat on the government payroll, given what the city has been through.
Interim City Manager Michael Rogers said at an Aug. 1 city council meeting that Groat had provided a letter of apology and that an FBI investigation into Groat’s actions had not produced any charges after a year-and-a-half. Groat did not respond to numerous requests for comment.
“He is very sorrowful of his activities,” Rogers said. “He has experienced a great deal of personal loss. Considering the totality of circumstances including that it’s been a year-and-a-half without any action, I conclude that no further action or review is warranted in this case.”
That did not sit well with some in the city. Molly Conger, a local activist and journalist, has questioned the city’s handling of Groat’s case repeatedly in recent weeks and highlighted his social media postings on Twitter. Groat is tasked with providing tech help to the city’s police and fire departments. She did not respond to a request for comment.
“Whether or not groat’s conduct on january 6th rose to the level of being federally prosecutable is entirely separate from the question of whether this person’s conduct is consistent with what this city should expect from public safety professionals,” Conger tweeted.
Lisa Woolfork, a local anti-racist organizer, told HuffPost, “The city of Charlottesville’s continued support of Groat undermines the credibility of city government and any anti-racist statements they make on paper.”
Charlottesville Mayor Lloyd Snook said in an interview that city code did not allow officials to fire Groat unless he was charged with a crime. He said some towns and cities have codes of conduct that allow employees to be fired if they act disreputably, but Charlottesville does not.
“That is something we may look at,” Snook said of a code of conduct.
He added he did not want to fire Groat because he had become a “political football.” He said it would send a bad message to other employees.
Groat’s presence inside the Capitol on Jan. 6 became public in June, when former Charlottesville police chief RaShall Brackney tweeted about it, saying the city had “downplayed” the affair. Charlottesville fired Brackney late last year, and she is now suing the city for racial and gender discrimination.
In an interview, Brackney said a city official had tipped her off in mid-January 2021 that a Charlottesville police officer had been at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Brackney said she assigned her deputy chief to investigate the matter.
The deputy chief discovered the man was not an officer, but a city IT employee detailed to the police and fire departments. The deputy chief interviewed Groat, who said he had been inside the Capitol on Jan. 6 and showed photos, according to an internal probe of the matter that Brackney posted on Twitter.
Groat told the deputy chief that he was an independent journalist and photographer, who was inside the Capitol along with other media outlets, including CNN, according to the probe. Groat said Capitol police officers allowed the media outlets in, and he left when officers asked him to leave after the action inside became “disorderly,” according to the probe.
The deputy chief concluded no criminal activity had occurred and that Groat’s case was a personnel matter for the city, according to the probe. “The department should not be involved in this matter further,” the deputy chief wrote.
Brackney said she disagreed — and that she was suspicious of Groat’s claims.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Brackney said Groat had told the department he was going to miss work on Jan. 6 so he could take his wife to the doctor.
She said she was also concerned because he had access to police reports, victim information and personnel records within the department as part of his job and was disturbed by his Twitter account. Snook said city officials would know if Groat abused his access to sensitive information.
In one post, Groat is pictured with former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, and he claims to have worked with the group to provide impromptu security for Infowars founder Alex Jones at the Million MAGA March in D.C. in November 2021. In another, he writes if you “love America and will defend the republic by any means necessary please follow me!” He curses Black Lives Matter in a third.
Brackney said she reached out the FBI, which began an investigation. She said she was told by FBI officials that Groat would be charged at one point, but no charges have been filed.
Rogers said at the city council meeting that Groat had been interviewed three times by the FBI, but it’s unclear if the investigation remains active. FBI officials referred all questions about Groat to the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office, which declined to comment.
The Justice Department estimates 2,000 people were involved in the siege of the Capitol, and federal prosecutors are continuing to charge people for trespassing-related misdemeanors, as well as more serious felonies.
A small number of those charged have claimed to be journalists. In those cases, prosecutors pointed to a lack of history in journalism and comments supportive of the riot as evidence the defendants were participants, not observers.
Rachel Weiner contributed to this report. | 2022-08-19T11:22:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Charlottesville worker says he was in Capitol on Jan. 6, and keeps job - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/jan-6-charlottesville-it-worker/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/jan-6-charlottesville-it-worker/ |
Shots fired near National Mall in D.C.; no injuries reported
Shots were fired early Friday morning near the National Mall in Washington, D.C., authorities said.
Police said no one was hurt and three people, including a juvenile, were detained.
U.S. Park Police said the incident happened around 1:15 a.m. in the 1600 block of Constitution Avenue NW. Police received “reports of gun shots,” and officers found three vehicles that had been struck with gunfire. No one was in the vehicles at the time.
Officials with the Park police said they detained one juvenile “found to be in possession of a firearm” and two adults, according to an emailed statement. In the statement, police said “there is no ongoing threat to the public.”
The names of those who were detained were immediately not released.
The incident closed part of Constitution Avenue NW between 15th and 18th streets NW for some time. Officials said the incident remains under investigation. | 2022-08-19T12:23:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Shots fired near National Mall in Washington, D.C.; no injuries reported - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/national-mall-shots-fired/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/national-mall-shots-fired/ |
After surviving attacks in Yemen and Turkey, he died crossing a street
Timothy Fingarson, a former Foreign Service officer, was fatally struck by a driver on Virginia Avenue NW
Timothy Fingarson, a former Foreign Service officer who was killed while crossing a street in D.C. on Aug. 3. (Family photo)
Timothy Fingarson survived riots in Yemen and dodged explosive devices in Iraq. He narrowly escaped the U.S. Embassy in Turkey before a suicide bomber attacked the building nine years ago, his wife said.
Then, on a Wednesday in August, the former Foreign Service officer was struck by a driver and killed while crossing a street in Northwest D.C., police said. He was 66 years old.
“He comes home after all this time,” said his wife, 68-year-old Nisreen Baker-Fingarson, “and then someone hits him and kills him.”
Fingarson was crossing Virginia Avenue NW just after 4:10 p.m. on Aug. 3, when a driver who had just exited the 23rd Street underpass struck and killed him, police said. According to police, Fingarson was outside of a crosswalk. The driver remained on the scene.
Driven by curiosity about the world’s cultures and languages, Fingarson left his home state of North Dakota after college to spend the early part of his life in the U.S. Army. He enjoyed traveling to states such as California for training, his wife said, and spent much of his 20 years of service deployed in Germany.
Just before the United States destroyed Iraq’s air defenses in Operation Desert Storm, Fingarson fell in love with a language teacher he met through friends at one of his training retreats. It was a slower burn, however, for Baker-Fingarson. At first, she was intrigued by his intellect. Then, she started to notice how kind he was. “A gentleman,” she said. “And quiet.”
The two married in 1992, each with one son from a previous marriage. Ten years later, Fingarson joined the State Department as a Foreign Service officer, and the couple moved to Yemen shortly thereafter.
Their life abroad was full of dinner parties with friends and hours sitting together by the nearest body of water, Baker-Fingarson said. They tried not to talk about work, and instead focused on the local food and where to travel next. Over decades at the State Department, the Fingarsons lived in Yemen, Qatar, Iraq, Austria, Turkey, Morocco and Saudi Arabia, Baker-Fingarson said.
Fingarson picked up new favorite foods in each country. Grilled meats in Turkey. Sausages in Austria.
“He had a really full life,” Baker-Fingarson said. “He enjoyed every bit of it.”
Baker-Fingarson admired her husband’s drive, but it also frustrated her as he entered his 60s and still wanted to work. After returning four years ago from living abroad, Fingarson continued working for the State Department. He was supposed to retire at 65.
“Stay home,” she would say to him, imagining days reading together at their house in West Virginia, or sleeping past 6 a.m. “Enjoy it.”
“I have a few more years in me,” he would reply.
He briefly retired, but then went back to the State Department on an independent contract, which meant getting up each morning before 5 a.m. to take the commuter bus into D.C., his wife said.
But as they aged together, the couple did have more and more moments of quiet family time. On Aug. 2, Baker-Fingarson was picking up her grandkids — ages 7 and 5½ — to bring them to West Virginia for a month. Fingarson told her over the phone that night about his plans to take them fishing, his wife said.
The next afternoon, she got a call. Her husband had been hit by someone in a car.
Baker-Fingarson said he must have been on his way to the commuter bus, on his way home to her.
“If he wouldn’t have gone back to work, he would still be alive now,” she said. “It’s not easy to digest.” | 2022-08-19T12:23:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | After surviving attacks in Yemen and Turkey, he died crossing a street - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/state-department-fingarson-dead-crash/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/state-department-fingarson-dead-crash/ |
By Anna Hartley
The writer and her guide cross the Bir-Hakeim bridge in Paris on a cloudy day via Royal Enfield motorcycle and Watsonian sidecar. (Photos by Anna Hartley for The Washington Post)
As we idle at a quiet intersection, waiting for the light to change, a man crossing the street stops in his tracks, pulls his headphones down and approaches us with a look of childish delight. It’s impossible to exchange more than a few words, but that does not seem to bother him, nor the many other Parisians who suddenly drop their usual cool reserve to smile and chat as we ride through the city. My guide, Simon Burke, is used to it. Cruising in a beautiful sidecar does that to people.
I’m sitting low in a Watsonian basket, bolted securely to the side of Simon’s burnished-red Royal Enfield Interceptor 650 motorcycle. We’re zigzagging through streets beside the Seine River, and despite the fact that I’ve lived in Paris for the best part of a decade, I feel as if I’m seeing it all anew.
After years of on-and-off lockdowns, tourism has returned to Paris. And looking at the volume of visitors now, you would scarcely believe they were ever gone. The city is buzzing, and as we cruise, I think of the trilling flute solo and persistent beat of the 1968 hit song “Il est cinq heures, Paris s’éveille” (“It’s 5 a.m., Paris is waking up”) by singer Jacques Dutronc. The city seems to indeed be waking up after a long slumber, yet the pandemic hit the industry here just as hard as anywhere else. Simon would not be sitting on the bike beside me if it were not for covid. The difficulties faced by the large tourism company he had worked with for years gave him the boost he needed to strike out on his own, and he decided to combine his longtime passion for motorcycles into Txango Tours, a private business that could be as agile and independent as his beloved bikes.
The engine roars to life, and we’re now crossing the Bir-Hakeim bridge, with the Eiffel Tower over our right shoulders. It’s an unusually wet and stormy day, but enough light comes through between dark clouds to give the river a brilliant shine. I laugh giddily as we zoom up the street, the wind tossing loose strands of hair around my helmet. Paris is coming at me thick and fast, and without the barrier of a full windshield, nor the responsibility of being the driver, I can really take it all in.
Stop to smell the roses in an unsung corner of Paris
And I’m never more grateful that I’m not driving than when I see what lies before us: the Arc de Triomphe, and around it, the notorious Étoile roundabout. Twelve large avenues all empty onto this one spot, yet it has no lanes, and — read this part carefully — right of way is given to vehicles entering, rather than those already on the roundabout. Rather than stopping at the edge of this swirling vortex, we dive right in, directly into the path of multiple cars and buses. The temptation to clutch the sides and close my eyes is strong, but magically, order prevails and the traffic moves to absorb us. We spin around the towering Arc, under which a giant French flag billows in the wind. The Avenue des Champs-Élysées swoops away behind us, down toward Paris’s other great traffic jumble — Place de la Concorde — and beyond it, the Tuileries Gardens and Louvre Museum. But none of those will be our next stop. On this aptly named Paris Monuments Tour, we are hitting all the sights, but unlike those on a tour bus, we are nimble and free, and taking as many back roads as possible.
Time and again, usually reticent Parisians pop their heads out of car windows or stop in the street to admire the rig. In 2022, a sidecar is charming, old-fashioned and unusual. Yet they were once a common sight: The first sidecar was invented by a Frenchman and was designed to be attached to a bicycle. They were once part of a common family vehicle, before the advent of affordable family cars. Nowadays, they are just for enthusiasts, like Simon, and indeed, my granddad. When he emigrated from England to Australia, he brought his passion for vintage English cars and bikes with him. He and his wife were keen rallyists and spent their weekends zooming across the outback, Nanna in the passenger seat with her helmet and goggles, maps of Australia spread on her lap in the era before GPS. The motorcycle gene has so far not manifested in me, but there is no denying the thrill of being on a bike.
I’m jolted back to reality as we zoom over some of the French capital’s famous cobblestone streets. Our ride is like a who’s-who of Paris sights: Arc de Triomphe, Palais Garnier, the Louvre, Pont Neuf. And although we cannot quite see it from here, it’s impossible not to think of Paris’s other great lady, the Notre Dame Cathedral. In April 2019, columns of thick black smoke billowed high into the sky, when a fire of unknown origin set the ancient cathedral alight, destroying the spire, most of the roof and some of the upper walls, and taking with it a little bit of the soul of Paris. The smoke has long since cleared, but when you pass nearby, it looks strange and hollow, and it’s yet again under construction, almost 900 years after the first stone was laid.
Pont Neuf is its usual glorious self, its stones worn with centuries of weather and foot traffic, and to the east, groups of tourists board boats on the tip of the Île de la Cité, ready to cruise up and down the Seine River. The river is not an official stop on this tour, but it’s the ever-present icon that ties the city together. Paris is one of the busiest ports in France, but the industrial zones are slowly being squeezed out as the banks of the famous river are converted into pedestrianized public spaces. A wealth of gardens, outdoor gyms, bars and cafes have turned the river into a 24-hour attraction. No wonder that for the 2024 Paris Olympics, the organizing committee is eschewing the usual stadium or concert hall, and it will host the Opening Ceremonies on the river.
Exploring Samuel Beckett’s Paris
We continue, back on the Left Bank now, skirting the river past the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de la Légion d’honneur. Then over the Pont de la Concorde, an unbeautiful bridge that holds great historical significance. Connecting the National Assembly on one side and Place de la Concorde, once blood-soaked from guillotined bodies during the Revolution, on the other, the bridge is built from stones salvaged from the Bastille prison. For now, Place de la Concorde’s centerpiece, a magnificent ancient Egyptian obelisk, is obscured, hidden behind scaffolding as it undergoes restoration. Yet more evidence that, since the stillness of the coronavirus, Paris is once again moving and shaking.
The sky has mostly cleared, and rays of sunlight dance on the golden statues of the Beaux-Arts marvel Pont Alexandre III as we cruise underneath them. In a city of epic views, this is still hard to beat. Before us, the gold dome of the chapel of the Hôtel national des Invalides — better known as the final resting place of Napoleon Bonaparte — shines brightly, winking in the sunlight as we drive by. We’re weaving through the beautiful, quiet streets of the 7th arrondissement when Simon makes a few quick swerves and “flies the basket,” sending me, the basket and my surprised laughter into the air. In a place as pretty as this, it’s easy to be silly.
Finally, the Grande Dame. Drops of rain slowly drip from the leaves of the plane trees at the Champ-de-Mars, and from the surprisingly delicate ironwork on the Eiffel Tower. There she stands, at once imposing and fine, gently resting on the soaked ground and reaching high into the sky, where she enjoys an expansive view uncluttered by skyscrapers and cranes. The morning weather had slowed the usual crowds, but now they have reemerged, shaking rain from their umbrellas and folding them away, treading a jaunty beat around the ancient City of Lights. Paris s’éveille.
Hartley is a writer based in Paris. Her website is annahartleywrites.com. Find her on Twitter: @its_annahartley.
011-33-6-23-75-12-68
txangotours.com
This tour company offers group motorcycle sidecar tours in Paris and Versailles. It’s not a passive experience: One guest rides in the basket, another on the back of the bike (a guide drives). The two-hour Paris Monuments Tour zips to some of the city’s most famous sites, including the Eiffel Tower and Louvre. Up to four guests can take the tour with a second sidecar. The Paris tour is available daily, except Monday. Tours are about $130 for one guest, half off for the second guest. | 2022-08-19T12:32:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | To see Paris differently, take a sightseeing tour in a motorcycle sidecar - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/19/paris-sightseeing-motorcycle-sidecar/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/19/paris-sightseeing-motorcycle-sidecar/ |
The smart investor knows to play the long game, according to an analysis of 401(k) accounts
Stock information in a window of the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, U.S., on Tuesday, May 31, 2022. The S&P 500 defied bear market status just over a week ago and is set to finish May roughly where it started. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg (Michael Nagle/Bloomberg)
It wasn’t horrible.
Periodically, it’s fine to look at how your retirement account is doing. As of this week, my account was down 9.4 percent compared to a year ago. But when I looked at the three-year return, it was good, up 12.4 percent. Looking back over the last several years put today’s stock market gyrations in perspective.
Sure, I’m down from the high of 2021, but overall, my retirement investment plan has done exceptionally well over the years.
I know to stay the course, to avoid worrying about short-term losses because retirement investing is a long-term game. Yet it’s hard not to become overwrought when your retirement funds are taking a hit. Once the stock market began its descent earlier this year, I just stopped looking at my account. It’s not that I would have made any changes. I knew I would be extremely agitated if I saw how much my balance had dropped.
But this is the journey you take when investing for your retirement. You have an investment plan, you make your contributions paycheck after paycheck, and you don’t make a rash move when the market becomes volatile.
That’s what 401(k) millionaires do, according to Fidelity Investments, which analyzes the savings behaviors and account balances for more than 35 million IRA, 401(k), and 403(b) retirement accounts.
“We point to the 401(k) millionaire as an example of taking a long-term approach and staying the course,” said Mike Shamrell, vice president for thought leadership for Fidelity. “We’ve found they take full advantage of the company match. They are fairly aggressive savers, and they’re not afraid of equities.”
Percentage-wise, the millionaire club is relatively small, under 2 percent in plans managed by Fidelity, one of the largest managers of workplace plans. Still, their saving habits and tenacity in turbulent markets are inspirational.
Before the pandemic and the economic havoc it brought about — inflation, rising interest rates, supply chain issues — the number of millionaires was increasing significantly among government workers and private-sector employees.
The number of 401(k) millionaires in the fourth quarter of 2021 jumped 32 percent compared with a year earlier. That upward trend ended in the first quarter of 2022, with an 8 percent decline in the number of workers in this elite club from a year earlier. For the second quarter, the number of 401(k) millionaires dropped by nearly 28 percent compared with the first quarter of this year.
The number of millionaires investing in the Thrift Savings Plan had been surging, too. But their numbers have also declined, according to the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board. As of June 30, there were 28 percent fewer TSP millionaires compared with the previous quarter.
Many were knocked out of the millionaire’s club in the last six months. But these long-timers, who, on average, have been investing for about 28 years, stick with the stock market through rough periods — the dot-com bust, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the flash crash of 2010 and the Great Recession.
They aren’t discouraged by stock market drops. And this year, the downturn has been significant.
The average 401(k) balance dropped to $103,800 in the quarter, down 20 percent from a year ago. The average individual retirement account (IRA) balance was $110,800, down 17.9 percent. The average 403(b) account balance decreased to $93,300, a decline of 18 percent year-over-year.
Fidelity looked at three different savings strategies 401(k) investors could have taken during the Great Recession. Each hypothetical investor started with $400,000 in October 2007 in a portfolio with a mix of 70 percent stocks and 30 percent bonds.
In this hypothetical example, it’s September 2008, and the U.S. stock market dropped by 20 percent from its prior high, which is commonly defined as a bear market. The first two investors panicked when their accounts dropped to $352,000.
When you’re a 401(k) millionaire, you know past performance doesn’t guarantee future results. Yet history has shown that bad markets eventually gave way to better returns.
“They have been through a lot of pretty significant economic events,” he said. “They are a group that you can point to as good examples of understanding that retirement savings is a long-term approach and not to react to any sort of short-term market.”
During the month of July, the S&P 500 increased by 9.1 percent, enjoying its best month since 2020, Fidelity pointed out in its retirement report.
The 401(k) millionaire understands staying the course isn’t a trite expression but a wise move. | 2022-08-19T12:36:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | When the stock market is volatile, invest like 401(k) millionaires - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/19/stock-market-millionaire-lessons/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/19/stock-market-millionaire-lessons/ |
He’s the chief executive officer of GXO Logistics Inc., which operates about 900 warehouses, mostly in the US and Europe for customers including Nike Inc. and Nestle SA. The Greenwich, Connecticut-based company, which cobbles together different types of robots tailored to a client’s needs, signed up a record $475 million of new business in the second quarter and has a pipeline of automated logistics projects that extend into 2024.
Even though GXO is one of the most advanced warehouse operators, the trend of adopting automation is only getting started. About a third of GXO’s warehouses are automated, double the percentage of about five years ago. GXO expects to have 60% to 70% of its warehouses operating mostly with machines in the next five years, he said. The warehousing industry as a whole is only about 5% automated, he said in a phone interview.
That will change, and it’s a transformation that is picking up speed. In the US, orders for industrial robots rose to a record 40,000 last year from 31,000 in 2020 and 30,000 in 2019. If anything, the US lags behind on robot adoption. In the latest worldwide data from the International Federation of Robotics, Asia’s installations of 266,000 robots in 2020 topped those in the Americas by more than sixfold. For robot density, which measures the number of these machines for every 10,000 workers, the US is seventh, trailing manufacturing powerhouses such as South Korea, Japan and Germany.
The pandemic and the lingering labor shortage that came with it will accelerate this adoption of automation, which should be viewed as beneficial for the economy, for companies and even for workers. It bolsters productivity, which allows salaries to rise without adding to inflation.
This latest wave of US warehouse and factory automation is unique because it comes at a time of near full employment, which helps allay some of the fears that the robots are coming to take everyone’s job. This rapid rise of robot demand hasn’t put thousands of workers on the street. Manufacturing employment increased by 271,000 in the first six months of this year, and the unemployment rate has dropped to 3.5%, matching the pre-pandemic level in 2019 that was the lowest since the late 1960s.
There will still be warehouse jobs for people for a long time to come. In some of GXO’s operations, such as performing sub-assembly work for Boeing Co., the volume isn’t large enough to justify the automation. Workers will always be needed to tend to the machines and do the tasks that involve solving problems. And although the end-of-arm tools for robots have advanced rapidly, nothing comes close to the dexterity of the human hand — and won’t for decades.
Still, that doesn’t mean there won’t be some labor force disruption. About 6.2 million people work as hand laborers and material movers, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics category that most closely matches warehouse work. They make just less than $15 an hour, and even with automation jobs in the industry are expected to increase 7% from 2020 to 2030, which is as fast as average, the bureau says.
Companies were forced to think during the pandemic about which work can be done remotely and which must be done in person, McKinsey & Co. said in a study last year. Automation will accelerate for the US food service and customer service sectors and cause those jobs to decline by 4.3 million, the report said.
Jobs, though, will expand for health-care providers, technicians and managers, the study notes. That will require people to raise their skill levels for these new positions as the lower-wage work is eliminated. “More than half of displaced low-wage workers may need to shift to occupations in higher wage brackets and requiring different skills to remain employed,’’ the study said.
On the warehouse floor, some of the most tedious jobs, such as packing items in a box or walking miles each day to fetch goods off a shelf, can be performed by an array of different robots. Companies gain efficiencies from automation and often can reduce the size of their warehouse operations because goods are processed and moved through more quickly. And with robots, warehouses are becoming safer as ailments from lifting and repetitive motion are reduced, Wilson said. GXO has a better track record for retaining workers at the automated facilities compared with those that aren’t.
Frontline employees’ attitudes toward robots shifted as well during the pandemic, especially in warehouses and factories where labor shortages were acute and workers were being asked to pull extra shifts to keep up despite the risks of catching Covid-19. During the pandemic, the machines weren’t replacing humans so much as coming to the rescue. That’s because the machines are the most cost effective for mind-numbingly repetitive tasks or jobs where heavy lifting can wear out someone’s back in a hurry. That’s the low-hanging fruit for automation. Technology has also enabled companies to insert robots safely alongside humans, who are increasingly viewing them more as assistants than something menacingly dangerous and isolated behind a cage, as most robots were more than a decade ago.
This current robotics revolution couldn’t have happened earlier because the technology wasn’t ready. Just in the last decade, the industry began to make robots that stop their action when approached by a worker, thereby liberating many of these machines from their cages that keep humans away from the powerful steel arms that move at deadly speeds. Those large robots isolated from humans are still the case in heavy manufacturing such as auto factories, where big robots can easily whirl around a half-made vehicle.A little more than five years ago, autonomous mobile robots arrived on the scene in a big way and revolutionized warehouses. Now, trays and bins are brought to people instead of the other way around. With cameras that allow machines to “see’’ and end-of-arm tools that can now grab almost any item, robots are able to pick and pack specific items. Machine-learning software helps them improve on these abilities and share that knowledge instantly with other robots with just a software update.
Throughout history, machines have eased the physical burdens of labor and have increased the worker productivity that allows wages to rise without sparking inflation. It’s a bit counterintuitive, but these machines have also paved the way for increased overall employment, although automation certainly can directly eliminate specific jobs. Think of the steam shovel that replaced dozens of workers with hand tools. Hoover Dam wouldn’t have been possible to build with just shovels and picks for digging and wheelbarrows for pouring concrete. That said, it’s crucial that workers participate in the productivity gains through higher wages and that displaced ones are given new opportunities. The robot revolution is coming, though, and industry will be better for it.
• A Second Drone Age Is Here and It’s a Free-For-All: Ruth Pollard
• The Made in China Plan Is Back, and It’s Better: Anjani Trivedi | 2022-08-19T12:36:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Robots Are Key to Winning the Productivity War - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/robots-are-key-to-winning-the-productivity-war/2022/08/19/438a9b9e-1fb7-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/robots-are-key-to-winning-the-productivity-war/2022/08/19/438a9b9e-1fb7-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
The latest buzzword among many economists and investors is “ noise.” It’s being used to refer to any piece of economic data that doesn’t fit the prevailing narrative, which is happening a lot these days. Don’t get me wrong — this is economy is proving hard to understand. It is very strong in some respects and very weak in others. The official government data shows gross domestic product just shrank for two consecutive quarters, meeting the technical definition of a recession, but it doesn’t feel like a true recession.
No sooner had the Labor Department said earlier this month that economy added 528,000 jobs in July, more than double the forecast and exceeding every one of the more than 70 estimates in a Bloomberg survey, than economists dismissed the results as “noise.” They trotted out the word again when the government said on Aug. 10 that the consumer price index was unchanged in July from the month before, an outcome all but four of 63 economists predicted. They expected an increase. And just this week we heard a lot of economists respond with “noise” when the Commerce Department said this week that retail sales for July among a control group that is used to calculate GDP rose more than forecast.
This is all very confusing to many, and I get it. But just because the data doesn’t fit Wall Street’s longstanding models that worked in the pre-pandemic era doesn’t mean that it’s ”noise.” It probably means the models are in dire need of updating.
Take the inflation data. The no change in the monthly CPI was surprising, but probably not an outlier. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does a pretty good job of gathering and analyzing data. If it is showing that inflation was unchanged, it does really mean inflation slowed. It also means we can still debate about why inflation slowed. My pet theory is that faster inflation was the result of the lagged effects of fiscal stimulus in response to the shutdowns in the early days of the pandemic, and now that the stimulus is moving farther away in the rear-view mirror, price gains will slow. The data is what it is, but it can still be subject to interpretation.
The strong retail sales number might also be dismissed as “noise.” Retail sales excluding auto purchases rose 0.4% in July, versus a forecasted contraction of 0.1% in a Bloomberg survey. Sales among the control group rose 0.8%, well above the pre-pandemic monthly average of 0.3%. The latest results don’t exactly fit the narrative that the economy is in a recession.
So, the options are to either dismiss data that doesn’t meet the numbers spit out by the models or apply some brainpower to figure out why the models seem to be getting critical parts of the economy so wrong lately. Maybe consumers aren’t as tapped out by inflation as we are led to believe. Maybe the massive amount of money still sitting in household savings accounts thanks to the unprecedented fiscal stimulus when combined with an unemployment rate that, at 3.5%, represents a 53-year low, means consumers are mostly undeterred by rising prices.
This isn’t to say there is no volatility in economic data. There are occasional anomalies. Sometimes the seasonality calculations are off due to an extraordinary event, like an unexpected government shut down due to the debt ceiling being reached or a natural disaster. This is why many economists look at moving averages and data series over a period of time to get a truer picture of trends.
Everything happing in the economy right now is happening for a reason – a reason that many economists and investors are struggling to understand. As I’ve written before, none of models used by economists are useful in predicting the aftermath of an economy that stops on a dime, jettisons some 17 million from the workforce over two weeks and contracts 31% only to rebound just as quickly on the back of free-money government programs that injected trillions of dollars directly into the pockets of consumers to go along with negative real interest rates and quantitative easing policies from the central bank. On top of that, global supply chains were massively disrupted, creating shortages of goods, which in turn led to higher prices for those that were available.
It will take quite a few years before all of this is sorted out and we return to something resembling a normal business cycle. The broad economic slowdown we are experiencing is likely nothing more than a pullback from the artificially induced sharp recovery from the lockdowns. It may not fit the model of a conventional business cycle, but once you accept that this is not a normal business cycle and view the data through a different lens, then the unexpected begins to make sense and not something to be dismissed as “noise.” | 2022-08-19T12:37:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | This Economy Is Proving Too Hard for Economists - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/thiseconomy-is-proving-too-hard-for-economists/2022/08/19/e3110d00-1fae-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/thiseconomy-is-proving-too-hard-for-economists/2022/08/19/e3110d00-1fae-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Endurance sports make a life-changing update for some athletes
With a new race category, nonbinary athletes are finding more inclusion in competition
Rach McBride, in green shirt, at the starting line on Day 3 of the Stages Cycling Leadville Stage Race in Leadville, Colo., on July 31. (Stephen Speranza for The Washington Post)
It would be easy to look at professional triathlete Rach McBride and assume they always feel at home at a starting line. They’ve placed at world championship races, won Ironman 70.3 (half Ironman) races and conquered the field at gravel cycling races. But until last year, that wasn’t the case. Despite a long, impressive list of titles and accomplishments, McBride (they/them), a 44-year-old Canadian, always felt a bit out of place when lining up. At the 2021 Big Sugar Gravel race in Arkansas, however, everything changed.
Big Sugar was the first event in which McBride had the opportunity to race in a nonbinary category. The event, says McBride, was nothing short of life-changing.
“For a person outside the gender binary, it can be really dysphoric to have to check an 'M' or 'F' box on a registration form, be misgendered at a start or finish line, to have to use gendered spaces like bathrooms and change rooms because there is no other option,” says McBride, who previously raced in the female category and came out publicly in the endurance world as nonbinary in 2020. “You feel invisible, out of place and invalidated.”
What gravel cycling is and why you should give it a try
Big Sugar is part of the 30-plus endurance racing events under the umbrella of Life Time Athletic Events. Races include road-running, trail-running, triathlon, gravel cycling and road cycling, many of them long-established, popular events. As of 2021, all of them included a nonbinary category.
Although Life Time might be the largest such organization offering a nonbinary division, it’s not the only one. In 2021, the Philadelphia Distance Run, a popular half-marathon, added the division. New York Road Runners, which sponsors low-key races and major events such as the New York City Marathon, officially added the division, too. And in June, for the first time in its 41-year history, the Escape From Alcatraz Triathlon offered a nonbinary option. Endurance races of all stripes are making gender inclusion a bigger priority.
The why and how
The origins of the movement by endurance race organizations to add a nonbinary category is uncertain, but for Life Time, it started with a conversation in early 2020, just before the pandemic hit.
“We were talking about our diversity and inclusion efforts, what we had done in that regard and what else we needed to do,” says Michelle Duffy, the director of event marketing. “We had a couple of hours together where we discussed what it meant to be nonbinary, and honestly, it was the first time we had dug in to truly understand it.”
Project connects gender, health and history
Research from the GLAAD’s Accelerating Acceptance 2021 study reveals that, in the general public, there is a growing familiarity with nonbinary and transgender people. Some 81 percent of the report’s non-LBGTQ survey respondents say they expect nonbinary and transgender people to become a more familiar part of life. Still, in the endurance racing world, categories other than binary male and female have long been absent.
Coming out of that 2020 meeting, however, the Life Time team determined that it was time to step up and make their events more inclusive. The event producer didn’t make an official announcement about the new race division but simply worked it into its registrations across the board.
“We felt like it was the right thing to do, not something that needed a big splash or marketing,” Duffy says. “What it comes down to for us is that people race endurance events as an escape. Everyone should be able to view the outdoors as a welcoming space.”
Despite the lack of deliberate fanfare, however, Life Time was onto something. The first race in its series after adding the nonbinary category was its Unbound Gravel 100-mile event in Kansas. Abi Robins, a nonbinary athlete, became the first to sign up in the division, earning a spot on the podium. When Robins posted photos on social media, the news took on a life of its own. Life Time began to hear from other race organizers who wanted to offer the same opportunities to athletes. (Life Time allows transgender women to compete in the female category if they “can provide documentation … [that they have] been undergoing continuous, medically-supervised hormone treatment for gender transition for at least one year prior to the date of the race.” Transgender men face no restrictions.)
One year after Robins represented as the only nonbinary athlete at Unbound, 17 athletes signed up in the category in this year’s 200-mile event. McBride was one of them, taking the top spot in the nonbinary division with a time of 11 hours and 56 minutes. “It feels like a new family, because we’ve all come from this place of feeling outside,” McBride says. “To be validated and have the space to compete together is pretty profound.”
Justin Solle (they/he), a 27-year-old New York-based program manager, understands what McBride is saying. A runner for about 10 years, Solle came out as nonbinary eight months ago and began registering in the division at races sponsored by New York Road Runners and Front Runners New York (an international LGBTQ running club). “Seeing the existence of the category allowed me to feel empowered and to come out with my running group,” they say. “It’s beautiful to see how the nonbinary community is growing and coalescing around the category.”
Study shows that ‘extraordinary’ level of exercise does not damage the heart
The addition of the nonbinary division in these New York-based races can be traced to efforts by the Front Runners New York (FRNY) in 2019; FRNY allows participants to self-identify for gender. “We started by offering the option to become a member or renew a membership as nonbinary,” says Gilbert Gaona (he/him), the group’s president. “Then we worked with our timing company to add the category in races.”
Since 2021, the division has existed in every FRNY event, and the club successfully partnered with the New York Road Runners (NYRR) to do the same, including in its 50,000-runner strong New York City Marathon. Gaona estimates there were around 16 nonbinary finishers at last fall’s event. “We have had a great relationship with the NYRR,” he says. “They rolled out the option with our very own Pride Run, and we’ve felt supported by them.”
Even with all the progress, the rollout of nonbinary divisions at many endurance events has not been without bumps in the road. For their part, McBride would like to see more triathlons add the option. “I feel optimistic, but progress is moving at a snail’s pace,” they say. “After my experience at Unbound, I realize that I’m trying to be a professional athlete on the world stage, and also advocate for inclusivity. It’s a lot to take on, but it’s lit a fire under me to push more for triathlons to add the category.”
Super short workouts can be surprisingly effective
Other issues to address include timing and scoring for qualifying events such as the Boston Marathon. “We have a nonbinary member who was fast enough to qualify for Boston in both the male and female categories,” Gaona says. “But there are no standards for nonbinary runners, so they would have to choose a binary category in order to race.”
And sometimes, even with nonbinary divisions in an event, a race announcer will misgender an athlete as they come across a finish line. “It doesn’t make me mad, but it’s a reminder that the community is still working to figure things out,” Solle says. “The more we can come together and be loud and proud, the more attention we can draw, so that people can see us for who we are.” | 2022-08-19T12:37:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Endurance sports make a life-changing update for some athletes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/19/nonbinary-endurance-sports/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/19/nonbinary-endurance-sports/ |
What to watch with your kids: ‘Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero’ and more
A scene from “Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero.” (Crunchyroll)
Dragon-Ball Super: Super Hero (PG-13)
Lots of fighting — and laughs — in brisk, thrilling anime.
“Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero” is part of a long-running anime franchise. It follows the series’s heroes as they battle an upgraded version of the villain called Cell. This review is based on the English-subtitled and English-dubbed versions, both of which include uses of “damn,” “dumba--,” “idiot,” “turd,” “screw that,” etc. Violence includes fighting, kicking and punching, plus characters getting flung through the air and smashed into things. Guns are brandished and shot, and a character is killed. A superpowered 3-year-old is flung about and shot at, but she’s never in lasting danger. Female characters — who unfortunately have a distinctly secondary role to the male characters — wear revealing outfits that outline their rear ends, and one is obsessed with “improving” her figure and features. A villain smokes cigars and blows smoke in other characters’ faces. Overall, it’s brisk, silly fun, offering fantastic animation, consistent humor, and themes of teamwork and courage. (100 minutes)
Pil’s Adventures (PG)
Fantasy animation has positive messages, slapstick action.
“Pil’s Adventures” (a.k.a. “Pil”) is a skillfully made fantasy animated adventure, set in a medieval town, with slapstick action and some moments of peril. The title character, Pil (voiced by Eleanor Noble), is a strong girl role model — brave, clever, welcoming and a good leader. She is an orphan who steals food to eat. She sets out to help the town’s prince when she learns of an assassination attempt by the current ruler, Lord Tristan (Terrence Scammell). The movie has fantasy and magic, with big beasts and a potentially unsettling transformation sequence in which a man transforms into a “chickat” (part cat, part chicken). The movie’s slapstick violence is well crafted and raises a laugh. Stronger violence includes moments of threat, with a character about to be executed, a main character shot with a crossbow bolt and another falling from a high bridge. But all these characters are ultimately fine. The action scenes are exciting and always mixed with jokes. There is a small amount of rude humor, which includes a dog urinating, some mentions of unicorn poo and a running joke with adult male characters in their underwear. (89 minutes)
Available on demand.
Extraordinary Attorney Woo (TV-14)
Charming Korean drama about lawyer with autism.
“Extraordinary Attorney Woo” is a Korean series about a young lawyer with autism. Each episode follows a single case that Woo Young-woo (Park Eun-bin) works on. The representation of Woo’s autism can be seen as somewhat over the top and played for laughs (for example, when she repeatedly gets stuck in a rotating door). But it’s also heartfelt, as when she faces the challenge of riding the subway with the help of whale songs on her headphones. Language includes “b-----d,” “whore” and “damn.” There are some violent moments, like when a character hits another with a heavy iron. (16 roughly 70-minute episodes)
The Sandman (TV-MA)
Sumptuous fantasy drama adaptation has violence, scares.
“The Sandman” is a gothic Netflix fantasy series based on the graphic novels by acclaimed author Neil Gaiman. It follows Dream (Tom Sturridge), also known as Morpheus, the king of all dreams who rules the mythical land of the Dreaming. Violence includes spooky spells, guns and threats of abuse, and an animal is shot in a bloody manner. Body horror includes a shot of eyes cut out of a face. A mythical character is nude and held in captivity. Strong language includes “f---,” “p---” and other vulgarity. (10 roughly 45-minute episodes) | 2022-08-19T12:37:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Common Sense Media’s weekly recommendations. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/08/19/common-sense-media-august-19/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/08/19/common-sense-media-august-19/ |
Captor paroled 46 years after hijacking bus, trying to bury 26 kids alive
Frederick Woods, 70, demanded a $5 million ransom for the children and their school bus driver in a crime that shocked the country
Officials remove in 1976 from a rock quarry in Livermore, Calif., the moving van trailer in which 26 children and their bus driver were held captive. (AP)
Nearly a half-century has not been enough to free Lynda Carrejo Labendeira from the nightmares or haunting flashbacks of three men hijacking the school bus she and 25 other children were riding, burying them alive in an old moving van and trying to score a $5 million ransom.
It’s not been enough time for Jennifer Brown Hyde, a fellow victim of the 1976 kidnapping that started near Chowchilla, Calif., to escape the “lifetime effects of being buried alive and being driven around in a van for 11 hours with no food, water or a bathroom in 100-degree weather,” the Associated Press reported.
And it’s not been enough time in prison for Frederick Woods — one of three men who kidnapped Labendeira and Hyde when they were 10 and 9, respectively — both women argued earlier this week before the California parole board, according to the AP.
Members of that board disagreed. On Tuesday, they granted Woods’s bid to be paroled after serving more than four decades in prison for what one prosecutor called “the largest mass kidnapping in U.S. history,” the AP reported. His two accomplices, brothers Richard and James Schoenfeld, were released in 2012 and 2015, respectively. A partial panel of the board initially granted Woods parole in March. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) petitioned the full 21-member board to reconsider. At Tuesday’s meeting, it affirmed the decision to release Woods.
His attorney, Dominique Banos, did not immediately respond to The Washington Post late Thursday, but on Wednesday, she told the AP that the parole board realized her client had “shown a change in character for the good” and “remains a low risk, and once released from prison he poses no danger or threat to the community.” The AP reported that at least two of Woods’s victims supported his release.
July 15, 1976, was hot, the second-to-last-day of summer school, and the bus driver, 55-year-old farmer Ed Ray, was returning dozens of students ages 5 to 14 from a swimming field trip at the local fairgrounds.
While driving past alfalfa fields and almond orchards, Ray spotted a white van stopped along the county road and slowed the Dairyland Union School District school bus to see whether someone had car trouble, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Three gunmen popped out, took over the bus and drove it to a dried-up canal where a second van was waiting, according to the Times. The kidnappers herded Ray and the 26 children into the back of the vehicles. For the next 11 hours, Woods and the Schoenfelds drove their hostages through the sweltering San Joaquin Valley with no bathroom breaks and no water.
At 3:30 a.m., they arrived at a quarry in Livermore, a city on the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay area about 90 miles northwest of Chowchilla.
Woods and the Schoenfeld brothers, all in their 20s and members of wealthy California families, wrote down the names of the children and took an article of clothing from each hostage before making them go down a ladder into a moving van trailer that had been partially buried at the quarry, according to the Times. Inside the trailer: dirty mattresses, containers with water and two ventilation pipes connected to the outside.
The kidnappers covered the opening to the van with a steel plate, weighed it down with two tractor batteries and then covered the trailer with more dirt to finish burying it. As the children screamed and he cried, Ray tried to console them, although he was sure the van’s roof would cave in, the Times reported.
Woods and the Schoenfelds left the quarry, which was owned by Woods’s father. They tried to call in a $5 million ransom demand to the Chowchilla Police Department but got a busy signal. After taking a snooze, they awoke to learn that Ray and the children had escaped.
Ray and some of the older children had stacked mattresses, climbed on top of them and used wooden slats to dislodge the plate and the batteries, according to the Times. Once they removed the cover, one of the children, 14-year-old Michael Marshall, dug up until he reached the surface.
Sixteen hours after being entombed, the hostages had freed themselves. Ray and the children walked toward the quarry and “were greeted by stunned workers,” CBS News reported.
Investigators learned that the quarry was owned by Woods’s father and were soon hunting for him and the Schoenfelds. Within weeks, they’d arrest all three.
Hyde, one of the survivors, made it clear to the parole board this week that the summer day more than 46 years ago had changed her life. Because she’s serving a life sentence of sorts, Woods should, too.
“His mind is still evil and he is out to get what he wants,” she said at the meeting, according to the AP. “I want him to serve life in prison, just as I served a lifetime of dealing with the [post-traumatic stress disorder] due to his sense of entitlement.”
In 2011, Hyde spoke with the Times as efforts to parole her three kidnappers were gearing up. She told the newspaper she had slept with a night light ever since she was abducted and rarely let her two children out of sight. News of her kidnappers’ possible parole had once again forced her to replay her two days in captivity, particularly the 11-hour drive to Livermore.
“I keep thinking about how, in that van, I could see them up there in the air conditioning, popping sodas,” Hyde told the newspaper. “There was an open crack between us. I screamed, kicked, begged, pleaded. They could hear us — after a while, smell us. They just banged on the side and told us to shut up.”
Because of her abduction, Hyde woke up in the night screaming well into her 20s, she told the Times.
After the board granted Woods parole on Tuesday, Hyde said she was disappointed but that it was “time to close this chapter and continue living the blessed life I have been given,” the AP reported. She lauded her fellow hostages as “true survivors and not victims.”
In 2011, before any of the kidnappers were freed, Hyde struck a similar tone. She said it felt like “a slap in the face” when she learned some of the judges, prosecutors and investigators responsible for putting Woods and the Schoenfelds in prison were supporting their release.
But then she pivoted.
“Many years ago, I decided that it wasn’t my mission to make sure they burned in hell,” she said. “I found peace.” | 2022-08-19T12:37:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Frederick Woods paroled after 1976 Chowchilla school bus kidnapping - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/19/frederick-woods-chowchilla-bus-parole/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/19/frederick-woods-chowchilla-bus-parole/ |
KYIV, Ukraine — The residents of two villages in Russia’s Belgorod region on Ukraine’s northeastern border were evacuated after a fire at a munitions depot near the village of Timonovo. The fire is the latest in a series of destructive incidents on Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine or inside Russia itself. | 2022-08-19T12:37:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 2 Russian villages evacuated after fire at munitions depot - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2-russian-villages-evacuated-after-fire-at-munitions-depot/2022/08/19/01a17bb0-1faf-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2-russian-villages-evacuated-after-fire-at-munitions-depot/2022/08/19/01a17bb0-1faf-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Post Politics Now Biden to host summit next month on countering hate-fueled violence
Noted: Rep. Meeks says China shouldn’t dictate who visits Taiwan
Take a look: McConnell-aligned group depicts Fetterman as ‘just too far left’
This just in: Biden announces White House summit on hate-fueled violence
On our radar: In New York, Democrats clash over identity in bitter primary season
Noted: DeSantis’s new election crimes unit makes its first arrests
Noted: Hogan calls GOP gubernatorial nominee in Md. mentally unstable
The latest: White House speeds monkeypox vaccines, but not everyone likes the pace
Take a look: How the Fetterman campaign trolls Oz in Pennsylvania
President Biden delivers remarks at the White House on Tuesday. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
Today, the White House announced that President Biden will host a summit next month aimed at countering the kind of hate-motivated attacks that have surfaced in Buffalo and other cities around the country in recent months. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden would deliver the keynote address at the Sept. 15 United We Stand Summit.
The announcement followed a busy day of legal developments yesterday involving former president Donald Trump and his associates. A federal judge said that he is “inclined” as early as next week to unseal some of the affidavit central to the recent FBI search of Trump’s Florida home. And Allen Weisselberg, the longtime top financial officer of Trump’s company, pleaded guilty to committing more than a dozen felonies, including criminal tax fraud and grand larceny.
Biden is on vacation in Delaware and has no public events scheduled.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Gregory W. Meeks (D-N.Y.), who traveled with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on her recent trip to Taiwan, says that warnings about the risks of the visit were overblown.
Meeks spoke to our colleagues Theodoric Meyer and Leigh Ann Caldwell for an interview that appears in The Early 202.
“We’re not going to allow Beijing and [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] to tell members of Congress what to do, who could visit, when [they can] and cannot visit,” Meeks said. “I’ve visited Taiwan previously several times. You just can’t kowtow and bow down, changing what we do because of Beijing’s decision to be more aggressive.”
During the interview, Meeks also downplayed the significance of a highly critical report on the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan issued this week by Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“It’s a political report that does not take into consideration all of the factors that led up to the 20 days [before the United States pulled out],” he said. “You can’t consider what took place in Afghanistan without also looking at the Doha agreement [that the Trump administration signed with the Taliban in 2020]. There’s things that could [have been] done better. And that’s what we need to look at now, to examine. But I don’t know of any scenario where there would have been a pull out that is completely, 100 percent not a messy situation.”
Democrats unquestionably have been on a roll in passing legislation, including the Inflation Reduction Act, which, among other things, aims to lower the cost of prescription drugs. The Democratic National Committee is out with a new ad that seeks to capitalize on that, characterizing it was a “big win” for President Biden.
The spot manages to pack in multiple messages, all in just 30 seconds: that Democrats are fighting for the American people and standing up to special interests; that Republicans are a threat to Medicare and Social Security; and that Republicans want to take the country backward on abortion. A brief shot of former president Donald Trump is also featured, as the narrator asserts that Republicans are “just too extreme.”
The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), is out with a new ad that seeks to cast John Fetterman, the Democratic Senate nominee in Pennsylvania, as soft on crime and illegal immigration. Fetterman, currently his state’s lieutenant governor, is “just too far left,” the narrator says.
Fetterman appears to have gained the upper hand against Republican celebrity physician Oz Mehmet, and several other GOP Senate candidates are underperforming in key races around the country. McConnell acknowledged Thursday that Democrats could maintain control of the Senate next year, but the Senate Leadership Fund is pouring substantial money into several races in hopes of a different outcome.
The White House announced Friday that President Biden will host a summit next month aimed at countering the kind of hate-motivated attacks that have surfaced in Buffalo and other cities around the country in recent months.
In a statement, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden would deliver the keynote address at the Sept. 15 United We Stand Summit. The event will also include panels and conversations on combating hate-fueled violence and preventing radicalization, she said.
Plans for the summit began to take shape after 10 Black people were killed in a mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket in May. A self-declared white supremacist was later indicted on 25 counts in the case, including domestic terrorism and murder as a hate crime. Other episodes of hate-driven violence have taken place in recent months in cities including Pittsburgh, El Paso and Oak Creek, Wis.
“As President Biden said in Buffalo after the horrific mass shooting earlier this year, in the battle for the soul of our nation ‘we must all enlist in this great cause of America,’” Jean-Pierre said in the statement. “The United We Stand Summit will present an important opportunity for Americans of all races, religions, regions, political affiliations, and walks of life to take up that cause together.”
She said the summit will include federal, state and local officials, civil rights groups, faith and community leaders, technology and business leaders, law enforcement officials, former members of violent hate groups, gun violence prevention leaders, media representatives and cultural figures.
A congressional race in New York has pit two titans of the House Democratic Caucus against each other, ensuring that at least one will lose their job as the result of Tuesday’s primary.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, 75, and House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney, 76, who both arrived in Congress in the early 1990s and have represented adjoining districts for three decades, are trying to fend off Suraj Patel, a 38-year-old underdog, who is waging an insurgent campaign to unseat both. The winner will be heavily favored in November in this left-leaning stretch of the nation’s most populous city.
Reporting from New York, The Post’s Colby Itkowitz writes that the battle is in part the result of an aggressive attempt by Democrats in the state legislature to draw a favorable map in the decennial redistricting process. But the effort backfired, setting off messy Democratic infighting across the state and highlighting divisions along generational, racial, gender and ideological lines.
Colby writes:
Elsewhere in the state, in the wake of the scrambled congressional lines, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, responsible for protecting the party’s House seats as the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, found himself forced to choose between running in a swing district or moving to a bluer district that encompassed large swaths of freshman Democratic Rep. Mondaire Jones’s constituents.
Maloney chose the safer seat, forcing Jones to look elsewhere to avoid a primary against the powerful chairman, and pitting Maloney against state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi, a challenger backed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) who is running to his left.
You can read Colby’s full story here.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced Thursday the first arrests made by the state’s new election police force: Twenty people previously incarcerated for murder or sexual assault who he said had illegally voted in the 2020 election.
The Post’s Lori Rozsa and Tim Craig report that the GOP-led Florida legislature passed a bill creating the Office of Election Crimes and Security this year at DeSantis’s behest. Per our colleagues:
While the 2020 election went smoothly in Florida — DeSantis called it the “gold standard” for elections — the governor has said there are still issues and conservative lawmakers have sought to further tighten voting regulations.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) isn’t exactly cheerleading for the candidate his party has nominated to succeed him.
The Post’s Ovetta Wiggins and Erin Cox report that Hogan, who is term-limited, previously called Dan Cox a “QAnon whack job,” described the GOP nominee as “a nut” during a recent radio interview and reiterated his prediction that Cox has “no chance whatsoever” of being elected as Maryland’s governor in November.
“He’s not, in my opinion, mentally stable,” Hogan said Wednesday on WGMD radio, based on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. “He wanted to hang my friend, Mike Pence, and took three busloads of people to the Capitol.”
Cox, a Republican delegate from Frederick, handily defeated Hogan-endorsed candidate Kelly Schulz last month in a primary largely viewed as a proxy war between Hogan, who has presidential ambitions, and former president Donald Trump, who endorsed Cox.
In January 2021, Cox tweeted that he was organizing buses to the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6. During the insurrection, he tweeted that Vice President Mike Pence was “a traitor,” though he later apologized for his language while facing a legislative ethics inquiry.
White House officials touted on Thursday steps to expand access to monkeypox vaccinations, including a deal to finish 2.5 million vials in the United States.
The Post’s Dan Diamond and Fenit Nirappil report that although some local health officials applauded the moves, others were unnerved by a rapid plan to stretch existing supply by splitting vaccine doses into fifths. They clamored for more time to examine the data and train providers to deliver the shots correctly. Our colleagues write:
The Biden administration is “forcing our hand,” said one local health official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to jeopardize vaccine orders. “It’s extraordinarily frustrating because we have to execute and defend this strategy … it’s just a question of giving us the time and the doses to bridge to that strategy.”
A team of researchers also urged officials to tweak the plan, saying there was too little data on its effectiveness.
For months, the Senate campaign of Democrat John Fetterman has trolled his Republican opponent in New Jersey, Oz Mehmet, trying to portray the celebrity physician as an out-of-stater who is out of touch with everyday Pennsylvanians. This video pulls together some of the highlights. You can take a look above.
You can read more on the race here from The Post’s Kim Bellware, who documents the latest flash point in the race: whether Oz has been honest about the number of homes he owns.
Kim also notes that on Thursday, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report shifted its rating of the race from “toss up” to “lean Democrat.” | 2022-08-19T12:37:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden to host summit next month on countering hate-fueled violence - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/biden-hate-violence-trump-legal/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/biden-hate-violence-trump-legal/ |
Presidents can’t declassify documents with Green Lantern superpowers
Let’s look at the many, many holes in Donald Trump’s theory of executive power
Analysis by Kenneth R. Mayer
Andrew Rudalevige
Former president Donald Trump leaves Trump Tower in New York on Aug. 10. (David Dee Delgado/Reuters)
Pundits often claim that presidential power is mostly a matter of wanting something badly enough — so often that political scientist Brendan Nyhan dubbed it the “Green Lantern” theory. Nyhan is critiquing pundits who suggest that presidents could do pretty much anything if they used enough willpower — as if the presidency weren’t constrained by laws and constitutional limits.
But since the FBI searched former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for documents — some classified — that were allegedly held illegally, Trump’s allies have added a new comic-book twist to this theory. They’re arguing that a president can declassify a document just by thinking about it. In this telling, any documents Trump brought home had been declassified just because he took them — and were therefore already in the public domain.
But (if we might nod to Lyndon B. Johnson) that lantern won’t shine.
Presidents aren’t superheroes
Indeed, the wish-based method of declassification is wishful thinking. New York Times reporter Charlie Savage’s tour of the topic quotes one expert as calling it a “logical mess” to ask whether a president can declassify information without telling anyone. Classification affects how the government handles documents. Unless agencies know a document’s classification, they can’t change how they handle it.
Other versions of the argument are not necessarily better. In one telling, during his presidency Trump issued a “standing order” that any document brought from the Oval Office to the White House residence was immediately deemed declassified. But Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton called this “a complete fiction.” And again, how would agencies be notified?
Similarly, Kash Patel, briefly chief of staff to Trump’s last acting secretary of defense, told Fox News that Trump had issued “sweeping declassification orders on multiple occasions,” apparently relying on either verbal instructions or a self-executing order that anything that Trump took from the White House on Jan. 20 was, by definition, declassified. This in turn was deemed “laughable” by former Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson, since “part and parcel of any act of declassification is communicating that act to all others who possess the same information.”
Civil servants are the last defense against lawless presidents. No wonder Trump didn't trust them.
Legal hoops and paperwork
As law professor Oona Hathaway detailed in a 2021 law review article, the classification system grows from the president’s constitutional authority as commander in chief. After World War II, presidents set classification rules by issuing executive orders, aiming for a uniform system to safeguard information, “the unauthorized disclosure of which would or could harm, tend to impair, or otherwise threaten the security of the nation,” as President Harry S. Truman’s 1951 Executive Order 10290 put it.
Presidents can evade this process, acting to declassify material quickly and almost on a whim. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush released specific intelligence ranging from satellite photos to Presidential Daily Briefs to broader threat assessments. Trump did so even more casually, including his 2017 disclosure to Russian officials of ISIS-related intelligence and his tweet of a photo of an explosion at an Iranian satellite launch site.
But there are limits to presidential whim. In October 2020, Trump — by tweet — “fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax …. No redactions!” Yet Trump’s own Justice Department repeatedly pushed back against releasing these and other supposedly declassified documents — and won. In July 2020, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals stated flatly that “declassification, even by the President, must follow established procedures.” And when journalists sought the promised “CRIME” materials[AR1], then-Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows gave the court a sworn declaration that “the President indicated to me that his statements on Twitter were not self-executing declassification orders and do not require the declassification or release of any particular documents.”
Advocates of absolute executive authority — via tweet or otherwise — appeal to the Supreme Court’s 1987 decision in Department of the Navy v. Egan. There Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that the president’s “authority to control access to information bearing on national security … flows primarily from th[e] constitutional investment of power in the president [as commander in chief] and exists quite apart from an explicit congressional grant.” But that hardly gives the president exclusive authority over all classification and declassification decisions. As Louis Fisher argues, this language allows the president to act in the absence of congressional action, but not against congressional action.
Public outrage derailed Trump's plans to slow the mail. That's what keeps presidents in check.
Congress has shaped the system as well
Which matters, because Congress has shaped the classification system over the years. For example, the Atomic Energy Act puts nuclear weapons information in a special “restricted” category. Even the executive orders establishing the classification system make clear that they do not apply to information classified under the AEA.
Legislators have also mandated the release of information, as with the JFK Assassination Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act, and required the president to issue policies on classification, as in the FY1995 Intelligence Authorization Act. In 2018, Trump himself signed a law that imposed a possible five-year prison term on any “officer … of the United States” who “knowingly removes” classified information “with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location.” Presidents can’t undo laws like that by executive order.
That law was not cited specifically in the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search warrant. But one that was, the Espionage Act, does not even refer to classified material. Instead, the law seeks to protect “information respecting the national defense” that “could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” In other words, even if Trump had declassified the documents with his Green Lantern powers, keeping them could still have been illegal.
Legislators have the authority to write a broader classification system into federal law, if they wish. Odd bedfellows Sens. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) and Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) argued in 1997 in favor of doing so, since “the absence of a statutory framework has resulted in unstable and inconsistent classification and declassification policies.”
That critique has lost little of its force. Congress could step into the breach today — at the least, to clarify that declassification requires a specified process, not an unspoken impulse or social media post.
Professors, check out our newly improved and indexed topic guides
Kenneth R. Mayer (@uwkenmayer) is professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of “With the Stroke of a Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power” (Princeton, 2002). | 2022-08-19T12:38:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Can Trump declassify documents with his mind? No. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/trump-fbi-documents-classified/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/trump-fbi-documents-classified/ |
Images of descendants of enslaved people who were sold by Georgetown University and the Maryland Jesuits to southern Louisiana in 1838. Joseph Stewart, a key figure in the racial reconciliation initiative announced by the U.S. Jesuits in 2021 with descendants of people once enslaved by the Catholic order, issued a statement on Aug. 16, 2022, expressing deep dissatisfaction with the lack of progress and inaction. (Claire Vail/American Ancestors/New England Historic Genealogical Society via AP)
“It all starts with admitting the wrong,” he said. “But if you apologize and walk away, there is no value to it. It has to be stepping off point to make change that uplifts lives.” — Associated Press | 2022-08-19T12:38:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Lag in slavery reparations from U.S. Jesuits irks descendants - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/08/19/lag-slavery-reparations-us-jesuits-irks-descendants/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/08/19/lag-slavery-reparations-us-jesuits-irks-descendants/ |
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Donald Trump cheer July 31 at the former president’s club in Bedminster, N.J., during the LIV Golf Invitational. (Justin Lane/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
WASHINGTON (RNS) — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has spent much of the summer calling on her fellow Republicans to become the “party of Christian nationalism,” even selling T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Proud Christian nationalist.” Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference’s meeting in Texas on Aug. 5, she said the Christian nationalism label is nothing to be “ashamed” of and encouraged other members of her party to “lean in to biblical principles.”
Two other Republican politicians have disputed the principle of the separation of church and state. In late June, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, speaking at the Cornerstone Christian Center in Basalt, Colo., proclaimed she is “tired of the separation of church and state junk that’s not in the Constitution.” Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano referred to church-state separation as a “myth” in a speech earlier this year.
Religion News Service attempted to contact more than 50 House and Senate Republicans seeking their response, questioning whether they support calls to make the RNC the party of Christian nationalism. The list ranged from hard-line conservatives to more moderate Republicans who recently voted to codify the legalization of same-sex marriage into federal law.
Two Republicans responded: Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma and Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina.
Lankford, a stalwart conservative and Southern Baptist who earned a master’s in divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and still occasionally performs marriage counseling and weddings, answered by locating the separation of church and state in the Constitution.
“I took an oath to defend the US Constitution which states, ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ ” Lankford said in a statement. “While my personal faith is firmly in Jesus Christ, our nation protects the right of each person to choose any faith, change their faith, or have no faith. That has been true from George Washington to the present.”
How the Capitol attacks helped spread Christian nationalism in the extreme right
Mace, who attends services at Seacoast Church in Mount Pleasant, S.C., also attributed the principle to the founders of the federal government.
“The Republican Party has room for anyone that believes in the fundamental principles of limited government, federalism, and keeping taxes low for all Americans,” read her statement. “Our founders designed a nation that explicitly maintains the separation of Church and State, something which should continue to be a guiding principle of our Republic.”
A representative for Rep. Darrell Issa of California also responded, but only to convey that the spokesperson was “totally unfamiliar” with Boebert and Greene’s rhetoric. When House members voted to strip Greene of committee assignments in 2021, after old social media posts showed the congresswoman espousing conspiracy theories and antisemitic and anti-Muslim ideas, Issa was one of the few lawmakers to come to her defense, arguing members should not be judged for things done before taking office.
Elizabeth Neumann, who resigned from the Trump administration in April 2020 after serving as assistant secretary of counterterrorism and threat prevention at the Department of Homeland Security, attributed Republicans’ reticence about Christian nationalism partly to a shift under President Donald Trump that legitimized allegiance to Christian nationalist ideas as a pillar of Republicanism.
“Trump said in a 2018 speech that he’s a nationalist, so if you’re a really big Trump supporter, then think of yourself as a nationalist, too,” Neumann said. “So the idea that you’re merging Christian values with nationalism, it’s not a big leap.”
As a result, she added, “elected officials are afraid of their base.”
Her view is supported by a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, in which “Faith and Flag Conservatives” — a category Pew researchers call the organization’s attempt to assess hard-line Christian nationalist views — make up 23 percent of those who identify themselves as Republican or lean toward the party. Faith and Flag Conservatives also reported the highest political activity of any conservative group, suggesting an outsize influence on GOP politics, probably including party primaries.
Neumann, who now works at the extremism analysis organization Moonshot CVE, said Republican silence is part of a larger pattern of conservatives demurring when presented with opportunities to condemn extremism, which can accelerate radicalization.
“You can do a whole lot before somebody has really radicalized,” Neumann said. “The key is early intervention, and the fact that you have lawmakers not willing to speak truth — whether it’s about an election, whether it’s about an FBI raid, or about Christian nationalism — it is allowing their constituents to be vulnerable to jargon, darker elements, persuading them to move into extremism.”
She added: “When leaders do not lead, there is a cost.”
Brian Hughes, co-founder and associate director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, agreed. “When they fail to speak out against this, they’re surrendering the future of their party to the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world,” he said.
Some Republicans have made it a point to speak out. “I oppose the American Taliban,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois wrote in a series of tweets posted in recent weeks, referring to Greene’s rhetoric. Kinzinger, who is not seeking reelection, tagged House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Twitter handle followed by a question mark.
Russell Moore, the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm and the newly named editor in chief of Christianity Today, who counts Kinzinger as a friend, said, “If anything, Adam is becoming more and more vocal, and will be in the years to come.”
Christian nationalism is shaping a Pa. primary — and a GOP shift
According to Hughes, Trump’s loss of the White House as a bully pulpit has resulted in opportunistic extremist voices pivoting to Christian nationalism as a way to expand their influence on the Republican Party.
“Rather than a recruitment tool that’s bringing mainstream folks to the extreme,” he said, “what it’s actually more effective at doing is injecting the mainstream with extreme ideas.”
In the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, right-wing figures such as Andrew Torba, head of the social media website Gab, a haven for extremists, and Nick Fuentes, the leader of the “America First” movement, began ramping up their religious rhetoric and identifying as Christian nationalists.
Torba, who has feuded with Jewish groups over allegations of antisemitism, made headlines last month by saying Jewish people and non-Christians are not welcome in his vision for American conservatism, which he described as “an explicitly Christian movement because this is an explicitly Christian country.”
In a recent email exchange with Religion News Service, Torba claimed he is preparing to unveil a new book on Christian nationalism titled “Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide for Taking Dominion and Discipling Nations,” saying the book would be “distributed by us to every church in the nation,” though he did not name a publisher and declined to list a release date.
Mastriano made use of Gab during his primary campaign, reportedly paying the platform $5,000 for “campaign consulting.” Torba has disputed the characterization, describing the transaction as more of an ad buy. Mastriano has since deleted his Gab account from the platform, saying Torba “doesn’t speak for me,” and condemned antisemitism while declining to condemn Torba himself.
Meanwhile, Greene spoke alongside Torba and others at Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference in Florida, where she opened her remarks by invoking her faith.
Fuentes, who is Catholic, declared his desire in June to “impose Christian laws on everyone” in the United States; he insists “there should only be Christian countries” and has celebrated the idea of a “Catholic Taliban rule in America.”
Greene maintains she doesn’t know Fuentes and wasn’t aware of his views when she spoke at his conference. But her rhetoric seems to have emboldened extremist voices such as Fuentes’s, who lauded her invocation of Christian nationalism.
“That’s the first time that I’ve ever heard a politician really say something that on the money about where the American right wing needs to go,” he said in a recent live stream, referring to Greene’s remarks.
Torba, for his part, has continued to convey avid support for Christian nationalism and a desire to influence Republican politics.
“We are the GOP now,” Torba wrote on Gab this week. “Get used to it or get out of the way.” — Religion News Service | 2022-08-19T12:38:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Republicans mostly mum on calls to make GOP ‘party of Christian nationalism’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/08/19/republicans-mostly-mum-calls-make-gop-party-christian-nationalism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/08/19/republicans-mostly-mum-calls-make-gop-party-christian-nationalism/ |
Janet Hill, with a Hall of Fame son and an all-pro husband, was a selfless star
Calvin Hill, Janet Hill, Grant Hill and Tamia Hill at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2017. Janet Hill died last week at 74. (Ron Sachs-Pool/Getty Images)
The South Lakes High graduating class of 1990 didn’t have to look far to choose a star to illuminate its commencement. The father of its senior all-American basketball player, Grant Hill, was Calvin Hill. He had a Super Bowl ring he won as a Dallas Cowboys running back; an offensive rookie of the year award; all-Pro on his resume after 12 NFL seasons, including two in Washington that planted his family here. He was the all-time leading receiver at Yale, where he earned a degree in history.
So it was with great pleasure that the chairman of the graduation committee, Jenise Bordatto, walked to the lectern and announced: “We’d now like to announce our guest speaker, Mrs. Hill.”
Janet Hill, Grant’s mom and Calvin’s wife, died Saturday after a year-long battle with brain cancer. She was 74.
Duke University — where Janet and Calvin’s only child earned a history degree like his dad and all-American honors of his own, leading his team to two national championships — lowered its flags in her honor. She served Duke as a trustee for 15 years until last year.
“Although she would say I inherited my athletic ability from my father,” Grant told me by phone on Tuesday, “I think she impacted me in every area. She went about everything with such integrity and pursuance of excellence.”
John Feinstein: Every NCAA tournament Cinderella owes a debt to Pete Carril
I’m not writing about Janet, as she insisted everyone call her, because she was an athlete. She wasn’t. I’m not writing about her because she was a professional or collegiate sports official. She was neither. I’m not even writing about her because she was a seven-time NBA all-star’s mom, or a four-time NFL Pro Bowler’s wife of 52 years.
I’m writing about her because she epitomized what we’ve been told is the greatest quality of the greatest coaches: being a selfless guide and advocate for apprentices in the ultimate game that is life.
She was that to her Hall of Fame son — who was elected to the Duke board following his mother’s stint — as evidenced by his intelligence, humility and distinction. To her son’s friends at Duke, a few of whom were athletes but most of whom were not. To young Black men, in particular, whom she met through her life’s work, her husband’s travels and her son’s ascendancy. There’s Derrick and Kareem and Mark and Riche and Mike and …
“I’m getting texts from people right now who said, ‘Janet wouldn’t remember me, but, dot dot dot dot dot,’” said Mark Williams, who as team manager shepherded Grant on his recruiting trip to Duke and met Janet upon Grant’s enrollment. “You hear this from so many people. You hear this, and you realize how much of a profound impact she had.”
Janet volunteered to others’ kids the sort of direction from which she prospered from her parents. She was born in segregated New Orleans and reared on its coloreds-only side. Her mother, Vivian, and father, Malcolm McDonald, were believed to be the first Black certified dental technicians in New Orleans. They put Janet through all-Black Catholic schools until she graduated from high school in 1965.
“My mother read an article about Wellesley … and she made the decision that Wellesley was the place I should apply, and go to, to get me out of a segregated South,” Janet said years ago in a Wellesley video.
“I didn’t meet anyone White at all until I got to Wellesley,” she said. “I was a little taken aback. They seemed self-assured in ways that I was not. Three days in, I tried to bail out.”
But Janet recalled her mother imploring, “‘You knew they were White. You can compete with them. You’re not coming home.’”
So Janet graduated from Wellesley in a class that included five other Black women — and Hillary Clinton. She earned a Master’s in mathematics education from the University of Chicago. And she began what became her lifelong mentorship of younger people, starting as a teacher of math in high school and college. That role was only enhanced as she became a special assistant and White House liaison to the secretary of the Army, the first Black person to hold that position; started a consulting firm with that secretary, Clifford Alexander, the first Black secretary of the Army; and began serving on numerous boards: the Wendy’s Company, the Carlyle Group, Dean Foods, Houghton Mifflin, the Kennedy Center.
I first met Janet in Dallas through her Wellesley classmate Alvia Wardlaw, a foremost curator of African American art who was serving the Dallas Museum of Art. Janet had returned to Dallas to join Calvin as a special counselor to players on the NFL team that drafted him. But I got to know Janet in Washington in a role that, on the face of it, seemed out of her bailiwick: as a member of college sports watchdog and policy group called the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. But nothing was beyond Janet’s field of study.
“We were on the Wendy’s board when I was president of Ohio State,” William “Brit” Kirwan, the retired Maryland chancellor, told me on Wednesday. “She was the only woman on the board and … she was absolutely fearless.” When Kirwan took over as co-chair of the Knight Commission, he broke its mold by inviting Janet.
“Almost all, without exception, people on the Knight Commission had some professional experience connected to collegiate athletics,” Kirwan said. “I can’t think of another person that was sort of a citizen. But she had lived [the collegiate athletic experience], with a star athlete as a husband and star athlete as a son, in ways other members had not. She had sensible and reasonable ideas about how intercollegiate athletics should work. The university and education was her central focus.”
Janet was, after all, with her advanced mathematics degree and foundation in teaching and research, an academic. As was her husband, who for several years in Dallas pursued a theology degree at SMU. As was her son, who doubled his major in political science and whose Duke friends Janet all but certified based on how seriously they took their present.
When Derrick Heggans as a Duke junior met Grant as a freshman, he counseled Grant on college life. In exchange, Grant put Heggans, who had an interest in business management, in touch with his mother.
“I was thinking about going to Duke for an MBA, and Advantage called and said, ‘We have an opening in our basketball department,’” Heggans recounted to me Thursday. “Janet said, ‘Isn’t that what you want to do?’ She said, ‘You can always go back to get your MBA.’”
“That’s kind of the way she was,” recalled Judy Woodruff, the PBS NewsHour anchor and another Duke alumna. “She wanted to know everything going on in your life. And I’m sure with these young men, she identified as a mother.”
Heggans went to work for the legendary sports marketing firm founded by D.C. lawyer Donald Dell. When Grant became the No. 3 pick in the 1994 NBA draft, Janet and Calvin trusted his fellow alum to represent him. Heggans eventually opted to get a law degree and left Advantage for the NFL’s general counsel office.
“Janet was so altruistic,” Heggans said.
Wardlaw remembered the last time the quintet of ’69 Black Wellesley grads got together. Hurricane Katrina was brewing off the shore of New Orleans and they were sitting in Janet’s Northern Virginia home watching the news.
“I remember her saying she had to get her mother to Dallas before that storm hit, and she did,” Wardlaw said. “That’s kind of a metaphor of how she dealt with her family and friends: to make sure everyone was ok so everyone could meet their potential.”
In early August, Duke announced the 2022 recipients of its highest honor, the University Medal for Distinguished Meritorious Service. The awards next month will be to President Emeritus Richard H. Brodhead, and Janet Hill. | 2022-08-19T12:38:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Janet Hill was Grant Hill's mother, Calvin Hill's wife and a fearless star - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/19/janet-hill-duke-grant-hill-calvin-hill/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/19/janet-hill-duke-grant-hill-calvin-hill/ |
A Ukrainian soldier smokes at a position near the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, Aug. 18, 2022. (Reuters)
ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — Families living close to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine packed up their belongings and started to flee Friday amid rising tensions that they fear could result in a nuclear disaster.
For some families, it was the second time they have been displaced. “We’d been thinking about them leaving for a month,” Oleksander Soroka, 37, said of his wife and two children, who were boarding a bus to the Polish border. “But it was only this morning that it was finalized.”
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said Russia could be planning a “large-scale terrorist attack” on the plant to blame on Kyiv, while Russia in turn accused Ukraine and the United States of planning to trigger an accident at the plant, citing a threat of the core overheating.
Any false-flag operations at the plant would be out of the “Russian playbook — accuse others of what you have done or what you intend to do,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Thursday when asked about the warnings. He added that such statements were a “cause for concern” and said he United States is “watching very closely.”
U.S. says Putin could use ‘false flag’ as excuse for war. Similar accusations have defined Putin’s career.
Employees based in Enerhodar, the Russian-held town on the banks of the Dnieper River that is home to the plant, told The Washington Post earlier this month of the daily terror of working at the nuclear facility.
For the most part, Zaporizhzhia on Friday looked much as it has during months of conflict, as war-weary residents stayed put despite the threat. But amid the deteriorating security situation, vital nuclear plant workers such as engineers and operational staff have fled to Ukrainian-held territory in recent weeks, adding to worries about the plant’s functioning.
“We must tell it as it is. Any potential damage to Zaporizhzhia is suicide,” said U.N. Secretary General António Guterres following a high-level meeting in Ukraine with President Volodymyr Zelensky and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry has rejected a proposal to demilitarize the area around the Zaporizhzhia plant, saying that it would make the facility “more vulnerable.”
“The recklessness with which our opponents are playing with nuclear safety poses threats to the largest nuclear site in Europe, involving potential risks for a huge territory, not only that surrounding the plant but also far beyond Ukrainian borders,” he told Russia’s Rossiya-1 television channel
Ryabkov also warned parties of “carelessness” in the pursuit of “geopolitical goals” as he reiterated Moscow’s rejection of U.N. calls for a demilitarized zone around the plant.
Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, warned that shelling in the vicinity of the plant creates “major nuclear safety and security risks” and is “deeply troubling.” Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi added, however, that IAEA experts assessed that “systems important for nuclear safety and security had not been affected.”
Elsewhere in the embattled country, there have been unconfirmed reports of strikes at a Russian air base in occupied Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014.
Hudson reported from Kyiv, Ukraine, and Suliman from London. Mary Ilyushina in Riga, Latvia, contributed to this report. | 2022-08-19T12:38:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Zaporizhzhia plant: Tensions mount over possible 'false flag' event - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-ukraine-russia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-ukraine-russia/ |
A security officer is shot in the leg near St. Elizabeths Hospital
Suspect caught after hiding in a Metro station maintenance room, according to police
Police say a security officer who was shot in the leg near St. Elizabeths Hospital in Southeast D.C. is in stable condition. (iStock)
Authorities said a security officer was shot in the leg late Thursday near St. Elizabeths Hospital in Southeast and that a suspect was caught after he fled and hid in a maintenance room of a Metro stop.
A spokesman for D.C. police said the incident happened around 11:30 p.m. in the 1100 block of Alabama Avenue SE when a man pulled up to a security gate at the campus and was “acting erratically.”
He got out of a vehicle and allegedly fired shots, police said, striking a security officer before fleeing. Officers found the suspect hiding in a maintenance room at the Congress Heights Metro stop. A firearm was found, and he was arrested, police said. The suspect was later identified as Lynville Porter Jr., 39, of Southeast Washington. He was charged with assault with a deadly weapon.
Police said the security officer was taken to a hospital and is in stable condition. | 2022-08-19T13:11:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A security officer was shot in the leg in Southeast D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/security-officer-shot-in-leg-in-se-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/security-officer-shot-in-leg-in-se-dc/ |
Ask Damon: I want to redistribute the wealth of my slave-owning ancestor
Hi Damon: I just finished the biography of a famous family ancestor who was a slave owner. My family benefited mightily from her crimes and I can afford to redistribute some of our wealth to the descendants of those she wronged. What do you think is the most beneficial thing I could do? Try to find the slaves’ descendants? Scholarships for kids in the county where she lived? Is there a nonprofit famous for private reparations?
Anonymous: I’m immediately reminded, after reading this question, of the scene in “Ocean’s Thirteen” where Basher (Don Cheadle) pretends to be a stunt performer, and barges into the office of casino owner Willy Bank (Al Pacino), demanding to renegotiate his deal.
Basher: Mr. Bank. Do you know what Chuck Berry said every night before counting one, two, three, four?
Bank: What did he say?
Basher: Pay me my money.
Bank: I’m sure if I give you …
Basher: (Singing) In cash!
When circumstances like this arise, where a monied party wishes to provide financial assistance, it’s usually accompanied with the implicit feeling that the person with the money is smarter with money, and knows how to spend it better than the people receiving it. Which is why this type of generosity comes with promises of scholarships, trusts, fellowships, fiscal sponsorships, memberships, bonds, investment opportunities, and even the creation of foundations and nonprofits, when the best thing to give someone who needs money is always just … money.
Let’s say you met someone dying of thirst, and they asked for a glass of water. You wouldn’t offer them a season pass to the wave pool, would you? I hope not! (That analogy has some holes, but you get my point.)
I’m not saying that you’re doing this. You’re doing a good thing! (More people should do good things!) But I’ve seen it happen enough to know that this thought is pervasive.
I imagine that some (White) people reading are scoffing in their seats at the idea of a person acknowledging that their family’s wealth was a direct byproduct of owning people, and choking on their coffee at the desire to redistribute that wealth to the enslaved people’s descendants. And I just think it’s funny when people are perfectly fine to receive inheritances, houses, heirlooms, jewelry, stocks, savings, legacy college admissions, and all the perks of nepotism from extra super duper dead relatives, but not debt.
Anyway, if you’re sincere in your desire to attempt to right your family’s wrongs, find those descendants, show them the money and then hand it to them. You will likely need help, and there are organizations such as the National African American Reparations Commission that could connect you to people with more professional expertise.
(If you can’t find the descendants, and you’re still in a generous mood, my cash app is $givemeyourwhiteguiltcashinstead.) | 2022-08-19T14:08:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Damon: I want to redistribute my slave-owning ancestor's wealth - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/19/ask-damon-young-reparations-ancestor-wealth-redistribution/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/19/ask-damon-young-reparations-ancestor-wealth-redistribution/ |
A pedestrian uses an envelope to shade from the sun, in the City of London, UK, on Friday, June 17, 2022. UK temperatures may hit 34 degrees Celsius (93.2 degrees Fahrenheit) this week, a once-rare level that’s becoming more common on the back of global warming. (Bloomberg)
With a few weeks to go, the summer of 2022 has already breached some alarming milestones.
As India sweltered before the monsoon, temperatures in parts of New Delhi exceeded 49 degrees Celsius (120 degrees Fahrenheit). In the US, millions suffered an almost unprecedented combination of heat and high humidity throughout July, while in wildfire-hit Europe, even Britain issued its first “red” warning, with London topping 40 degrees. Globally, June and July of this year ranked among the warmest months ever recorded.
Unfortunately, such trends are likely to worsen, thanks partly to global warming. In India and Pakistan, one study suggested, extreme heat is 30 times more likely due to a changing climate. Summer days in Britain could exceed 40 degrees once every 3 1/2 years by 2100 — instead of once every 100 to 300 years — if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t reduced.
In part because of poor policy, the world’s sprawling urban centers — where black tarmac and concrete absorb heat, and air pollution stifles — will likely bear the brunt of this crisis. European cities already experience twice as many heat-wave days as their rural surroundings. Even in temperate parts of the world, urban areas are experiencing weather that threatens livelihoods; when it doesn’t kill, “urban heat stress” makes it dramatically harder to work.
Absent radical steps to change our lives and cities, the threats to health and economic productivity will only grow. So how can the world prepare for the hotter summers ahead?
The most important step is to keep up the broader fight against global warming, including by slashing emissions, boosting investment in green energy and related technologies, imposing higher adequate prices on carbon, and funding research on potential breakthrough technologies, such as carbon capture and nuclear fusion.
Beyond that, doing a better job of measuring the problem is critical. That means taking account not only of temperature but also of aggravating factors like humidity, which can reduce human tolerance of sweltering weather by making it harder to sweat and cool down. It also means understanding local conditions in greater detail, such as the extent to which the heat eases at night, how weather patterns vary over time, and how higher temperatures are affecting specific urban environments. Seville, Spain, working with the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, is already using these methods to rank heat waves, tying specific measures to each, and is naming them, like hurricanes, to underline the dangers.
Measures to aid the poor should also be a priority. The least affluent, who are more likely to work outside and less likely to have air-conditioned homes, tend to suffer the most from extreme heat. Solutions can be simple: In Freetown, Sierra Leone, the city’s pioneering chief heat officer has introduced shades to shelter women in open-air markets, and is planning to add urban gardens and cooling centers. Medellin, Colombia, has used green corridors to successfully reduce the “heat island” effect, in which the built environment absorbs the sun’s energy and intensifies local warmth.
That kind of thinking will be essential as urban areas worldwide attempt to adapt. Cities will need to plant more trees and make better use of waterways; build more resilient infrastructure to avoid buckling rails and melting runways; mandate greener buildings and better insulation; and require more efficient air-conditioning units and fans. They should adopt smart-grid technologies to help reduce energy losses, integrate clean power and manage peak demand. Most of all, they should be experimenting with new ideas to make urban life more bearable for the hot summers to come.
Many of these steps are underway. Here’s hopeful that this summer’s blistering heat will only underscore the urgency to act.
• When the Weather Is Hot Enough to Kill: David Fickling and Ruth Pollard
• Britain Is Burning Up. India Knows How to Cool Off: Mihir Sharma
• European Drought Delivers an Energy Gift to Putin: Javier Blas | 2022-08-19T14:08:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Help the World’s Cities Prepare for Extreme Heat - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/help-the-worlds-cities-prepare-for-extreme-heat/2022/08/19/fedcd036-1fbe-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/help-the-worlds-cities-prepare-for-extreme-heat/2022/08/19/fedcd036-1fbe-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) headquarters strands in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, April 9, 2014. The deadline for filing 2013 U.S. taxes is April 15. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)
One of the most conspicuous parts of the tax-and-spending package known as the Inflation Reduction Act is vastly expanded funding for the Internal Revenue Service. The promised flood of cash — an additional $80 billion over ten years, compared with baseline annual spending of around $15 billion — raises some questions, and one of the most important is getting less attention than it should. If the IRS lacks the means to do its job well, could that be because its job is far more demanding than it ought to be?
In a word, yes: The IRS struggles to administer the system because US taxes are insanely complicated. In this respect, the purportedly bold innovation on funding for the agency is partly a tribute to the status quo. The enormous increase in spending is combined with another new batch of complexities. Highlights include incentives for climate-related investments and assorted other good things, and a minimum corporate tax that requires eligible companies to calculate what they owe not one way but two, then pay the larger sum.
The US tax code hasn’t been comprehensively simplified since 1986. Over the subsequent years, Congress has indulged its unlimited appetite for making it unintelligible. (Back in 2010, a panel chaired by Paul Volcker reported that taxpayers and businesses spend 7.6 billion hours and “significant out-of-pocket expenses” to do their taxes each year, a cost equivalent to at least $140 billion, which was 12 times the IRS budget or 10 cents per dollar of income tax paid.) What a mess. And what a shame that the new IRS budget isn’t part of a plan to fix it.
One example should suffice. The US provides tax relief for certain kinds of retirement saving. Security in retirement for people who might otherwise lack it is a worthy purpose, and most countries offer tax-advantaged treatment for those on middle and low incomes. But none that I know of rival the US for the Kafkaesque convolutions of its approach (many of which conspire, it so happens, to narrow the benefits to those with high incomes and accountants on retainer).
For decades, whenever Congress has “reformed” the tax code, it has just layered on new complications. The US now has a system that might have been designed to fail, incentivize avoidance, perpetuate a colossal tax gap, and drive taxpayers and IRS officials alike out of their minds. The biggest problem with the IRS is not that it’s been badly managed (though perhaps it has been) or under-resourced (which it undoubtedly has been), but that hyperactive legislators have given it an impossible task. Sadly, $80 billion won’t come close to putting that right. | 2022-08-19T14:08:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Want a Better IRS? Simplify the Tax Code - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/want-a-better-irs-simplify-the-tax-code/2022/08/19/ff3a34d8-1fbe-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/want-a-better-irs-simplify-the-tax-code/2022/08/19/ff3a34d8-1fbe-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Anacostia traffic is still the Wild West
By Adele Robey
Signs for Good Hope Road Southeast and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue Southeast on Aug. 8, 2019. (Marlena Sloss/The Washington Post)
Adele Robey lives in Historic Anacostia.
Well, hello again, Local Opinions. Yep, it’s me again. You know, that lady who writes near the anniversary of being hit by a car? In the crosswalk with the walk light? At the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and Good Hope Road SE? Yeah, that’s me. Just wanted to update everyone about our progress ’round these parts.
Oh, wait, there hasn’t been any.
Nope, not one thing on the perennial list has been done. Crosswalks? Still those unnoticeable brick things that no one stops for and, come to think of it, hardly anyone actually walks in. Crossing MLK is a contact sport, not for the fainthearted. Okay, what else? Red-light runners? Yes, all of y’all are good to go! We don’t enforce! Speeders? You, too! Be sure to see what speed you can hit as you barrel down from Congress Heights and then run the light at W. That’s the daily double. Then, if you turn right on red, which is a no-no, you’ll have a trifecta. Wheee! No enforcement to get in your way.
Now let’s talk about 13th Street. I think we’re just waiting for a fatality to get those four-way stop signs. Otherwise, what could it be? Is there a shortage of stop signs? Red paint? Poles? Must be, because I am sure that if any of the powers that be ever really drove down 13th Street, they’d want those guys racing down W or V or U to stop.
What’s next? Oh, yeah. Those feeder side streets that have absolutely no controls and no good way to get into MLK except to barge in. So barge it is. Tie up traffic for a few blocks while sitting crossways in the street. Good plan!
And the big megillah: the Good Hope Road and MLK intersection. Still heart-stopping after all these years. Sounds like a song, right? Nothing has changed. Crosswalk guards? Nope. Well, we had a few for a few days, usually when I write my essay, at least until the D.C. Department of Transportation figures we’ve moved on. Red-light runners? You wouldn’t believe those numbers. Oh, and did you know that the crosswalk light from the northwest corner to the northeast corner comes on at the same time as folks are turning the corner from Good Hope Road? And no one stops for that “no turn on red,” by the way. Just sayin’. And let’s briefly touch on the red lane, i.e., the bus-only lane. Did you know it has become the parking lot of choice for the convenience store? Of course, that means the buses have to stop in the middle of the street, but really no one cares about that, right? And around Starbucks? Two deep in the morning.
So it’s still the Wild West. But, hey, we hear the planning for the intersection from hell has been turned over to a consulting firm. Great! Pretty sure its members don’t live in the community. We also heard folks from the actual community could be on this planning committee (or whatever it is), but those I know who have tried have had their emails ignored. We probably wouldn’t know what to do if our emails were answered. I’m thinking they really don’t want me on that committee.
I just wanted to take a minute to catch up before I head to physical therapy for the injury I got from that day — more than four years ago. And I just found out it’s gonna take surgery. So I’ll keep you posted.
Let’s compromise on the Beach Drive closure | 2022-08-19T14:09:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Anacostia traffic is still the Wild West - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/anacostia-traffic-is-still-wild-west/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/anacostia-traffic-is-still-wild-west/ |
In Tulsa, the movement for reparations scores a historic victory
Welcome back to my newsletter! Today, I’m in Alabama on a reporting trip about the battles that midwives are facing here as they seek to provide care in a post-Roe v. Wade world. Stay tuned.
One reason I launched this newsletter was to start a conversation on the theme of liberation — a space for and about those fighting for personal and political freedom. Living in Texas right now, I feel as though the front lines in those battles crisscross all around me. From racial justice to LGBTQ rights to women’s bodily autonomy, America’s democratic, social and spiritual conflicts are rearing up across the South. I want to highlight the people working against historic odds and systemic injustice in this region, which brings me to the subject of this week’s newsletter.
Let me introduce you to one of them …
In conversation: Damario Solomon-Simmons
Last summer, I traveled to Tulsa to write dispatches from the events marking the centennial of the 1921 race massacre there, when white hordes descended on the Black district of Greenwood, slaughtering residents and burning homes and businesses. I went back to observe the search for mass graves and possible victims of the massacre. For decades, White leaders in Tulsa actively hid what happened, and even many Tulsans didn’t know their own history.
Thankfully, over the past few years, much more attention has been paid to the events of 1921, as well as to the long fight for reparations for massacre survivors and descendants of the victims. Justice begins with awareness.
One question stuck out to me as I covered some of the (oddly) festive commemorative events around the centennial: What would happen when the media spotlight moved on?
A year later, the good news is that there have been positive — even historically monumental — developments in the quest for justice and answers in Tulsa.
In May, a judge allowed a reparations lawsuit brought by the attack’s last living survivors to go forward. Then, this month, the suit was allowed to go to the discovery phase. It’s the first time in U.S. history that a lawsuit filed by Black victims of such historic white terrorism has progressed this far.
The bad news, though, is that too little attention has been paid to what these milestones mean for racial justice in America.
To shed light on these developments, I caught up with Damario Solomon-Simmons, one of the lawyers representing the survivors. Here’s some of our conversation, edited lightly for clarity.
Attiah: In May, a judge ruled that the lawsuit brought by the few remaining survivors of the Tulsa massacre could move forward. Can you describe what the scene in the courtroom was like that day?
Solomon-Simmons: I promise you, it was something out of a movie. There were literally hundreds of people in the courtroom. Obviously, a lot of community members here in Tulsa came. But also Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee came down. I saw civil rights icon and lawyer Barbara Arnwine and her group. At the end of the hearing when the judge said she was going to deny the defendant’s motion to dismiss, I never felt that type of joy in a professional setting. I didn’t really realize it but I actually started jumping. There were a lot of tears of joy. It was electric.
Attiah: Why is this new phase such a big deal?
Solomon-Simmons: To go to discovery is something that is of immense importance not only for this case but for the knowledge and the education of the massacre itself. Now, at this point, we only know probably 5 or 10 percent of what actually occurred during the massacre, because most of the information has been hidden by the white perpetrators.
Discovery means that we have the opportunity to get documents that we’ve never had access to. This means we have the opportunity to retain the foremost experts in the areas that we’re going to be looking into — the health issues, land-use issues, economic issues and a host of social issues that we deal with. We can get expert reports to say, this is what happened during the massacre, this is how it impacts the Tulsa community today, and this is what it would take to fix that, abate that — reparations, restoration, whatever you want to call it.
It also gives us the opportunity to get deposition testimony from the representatives of the defendants who perpetrated the massacre. To get them under oath about what their records actually say and what their actual position is.
Attiah: And just for clarity, who is the “they” that you are speaking of when it comes to the defendants? Who is named in the suit?
Solomon-Simmons: Originally, we sued seven defendants, now a handful are still in the case — the city of Tulsa, Tulsa County, Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office, the Oklahoma Military Department, the National Guard and the Tulsa Regional Chamber.
Attiah: When I came to visit Tulsa last year for the centennial events, there were all these promises of healing and reconciliation. What have the reactions to the lawsuit been like since then?
Solomon-Simmons: What we found is that people thought this issue was over with after the big party in 2021. That everybody could just sing “Kumbaya.” And they would say all types of things about how the massacre still impacts life today.
But once we had a real, live case, then folks were like, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, let’s take that back! We’re happy to give you murals, we’re happy to do park benches, plant unity trees, we’re happy to have little discussion panels … but you want us to actually give you your land back? You want us to pay you for the property that was destroyed, the businesses that were destroyed, the lives that were destroyed? You want us to say that, yes, we were actually wrong and we need to atone, for real? Oh, we have a problem with this.” All of this was obviously coming from the white power structure.
But also there are Black people, what I like to call “exceptional Negroes,” that they put into positions to give them cover. We saw a lot of these exceptional Negroes saying, “Why are you bringing this lawsuit? Why are you making Mister Charlie mad?”
They were saying this would never work. That this was a waste of time or a PR stunt. So it feels really good to be where we are now.
Attiah: There’s a sense of urgency, right? Like a feeling that the white power structure is trying to run out the clock on the aging survivors to avoid accountability.
Solomon-Simmons: After the May ruling, we had to wait three months just to get the written order. We hate to talk about this, but we have to talk about this: Our clients are over 100 years old. Viola Fletcher is 108 years old, Lessie Benningfield Randle is 107 years old, and Hughes Van Ellis is 102. We need to be moving with deliberate speed. We’re hoping that Tulsa County judge Caroline Wall understands the moment and does not put our case to any more delays. But we know that that is something that the defendants are going to try.
When I first started this work 25 years ago, there were hundreds of survivors still alive. I got the chance to work and travel with so many of them. And now to only be down to three living survivors — the urgency is for real, this needs to happen now. We want these people to see justice in their lifetime.
Attiah: I’m thinking of the Red Summer of 1919, when massacres and white terrorist violence happened in so many other places. Have you and the Tulsa team heard from lawyers and Black survivors in other states and are you all helping them too?
Solomon-Simmons: We have. We’ve heard from people out of Texas, out of Elaine, Arkansas. We haven’t engaged formally with anyone because we’ve just been so focused on this issue and everything we’ve got going on here in Tulsa. But we definitely are happy to talk to anyone.
It’s not just about the legalities. The Justice for Greenwood project also has things going on outside of litigation, like oral history projects and education initiatives. I’m very proud of the team that we have a separate national team of lawyers, academics and activists. It really shows how you pull together diverse skill sets and create a movement.
Home front: Black wealth still under attack
The Tulsa race riot was 101 years ago. But a story out of Maryland from Debra Kamin of the New York Times this week underscores how white supremacy continues to rob Black people who are trying to build wealth.
Nathan Connolly, an expert on housing discrimination, and his wife, Shani Mott, were denied a refinance loan after their house was valued at $472,000, well below what they expected given market conditions. So the couple, both faculty members at Johns Hopkins University, swept their house of family photos and other potential signifiers of their race, enlisted a White family to stand in for them, and applied again elsewhere. The result: a valuation of $750,000.
Kamin reports that the vast majority of appraisers in the United States — more than 97 percent — are White, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The couple is suing the appraiser and lender responsible for the first valuation.
It goes to show, doesn’t matter how nice your house is, or how many degrees you have as a Black person; discrimination can come to your doorstep at any time.
Fun zone: My big birthday jump
I skydived for the first time last weekend, and it was (mostly) amazing! I’ll write about it next week.
Cat’s corner: Artemis’s gravity tests
The day before I jumped from a plane, Artemis nearly gave me a heart attack. His patio privileges are now restricted.
Do you have questions, comments, tips, recipes, poems, praise or critiques for me? Submit them here. I do read every submission and might include yours in a future version of the newsletter. | 2022-08-19T14:09:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Karen Attiah: In Tulsa, the movement for reparations scores a historic victory - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/karen-attiah-newsletter-tulsa-damario-solomon-simmons/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/karen-attiah-newsletter-tulsa-damario-solomon-simmons/ |
By Anne Richardson
Joel Dunn
Fones Cliffs on the Rappahannock River in Virginia. (Jeff Allenby/Chesapeake Conservancy)
Anne Richardson is chief of the Rappahannock Tribe. Joel Dunn is president and chief executive of the Chesapeake Conservancy.
American Indian political, social and spiritual concepts are interdependent with specific geographic areas. Removing Indigenous people from their land can severely damage the fabric of their culture and effectively turns them into refugees. Reconnecting tribal members with their homeland is key to reinforcing Native identities and preserving tribal lifeways.
It took 350 years, but after being forcibly removed from their homeland, controlled by oppressive bureaucracies and damaged by centuries of disruption, bullying and persecution, the Rappahannock people have survived and now own land on the river that bears their name, and there is no one who will protect it better than the tribe. We worked together to accomplish this goal because we understand the deep importance of preserving and protecting these lands for all life.
Recent times have seen momentous and long-overdue advances by America’s Indian tribes, no more so than in Virginia. For example, changes to the Code of Virginia during the last General Assembly session now allow Virginia tribes to apply for state funds to acquire and conserve lands and waters to protect important ecological, historical and cultural features, funds that were previously off limits to tribes. Another law enacted in 2022 establishes the Virginia Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Historic Preservation Fund, and tribes are among those who will be able to access state funds to conserve lands that are important to their cultural identity.
That these bills passed both houses of the General Assembly with no opposition is a remarkable deviation from policies and attitudes of their colonial past. However, just as a new coat of paint can reveal old cracks, Virginia and the sovereign nations it hosts are finding that more work is necessary to ensure that current statutes and policies fit with the modern paradigm of Indigenous-led land conservation. In the interim, partnerships with nonprofit conservation organizations, such as that between the Rappahannock Tribe and the Chesapeake Conservancy, are becoming useful and necessary bridges to help tribes secure access to both public and private funds.
The partnership between the Rappahannock Tribe and the Chesapeake Conservancy is deeply rooted in a shared mission of land conservation. We collaborated on many projects over the past decade, including working with St. Mary’s College of Maryland on a project for the National Park Service to define the Indigenous cultural landscape of the Rappahannock River valley and its people in the 17th century and today. In 2017, we celebrated the purchase and donation to the tribe of one acre of land within that landscape, marking the tribe’s symbolic “return to the river.” This event marked an important moment of reflection, respect and reconciliation. These have been the hallmarks of our partnership, and “return to the river” has become both a goal and rallying cry for the tribe.
Our collaboration on land conservation has coalesced around an iconic feature on the Rappahannock River called Fones Cliffs, within the Rappahannock River Valley National Wildlife Refuge. This four-mile formation, composed of clay and diatomaceous earth, has been a conservation priority of the tribe, the Chesapeake Conservancy, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service and many other conservation partners because of the concentration of ecological, cultural and historic resources found there. The bluffs supported three Rappahannock towns that were mapped by Captain John Smith in 1608. The miles-long vistas enabled Rappahannock warriors to take stock of approaching watercraft, and the bluffs are a magnet for breeding, migrating and wintering bald eagles.
In April, we gathered with tribal citizens and partners from around the Chesapeake, including the Wilderness Society and Rappahannock Wildlife Refuge Friends, to mark a second and much grander “return to the river,” this one conveying 465 acres of riverfront land at Fones Cliffs to the tribe. The tribe has restored the name “Pissacoak” to the land. It is Phase 1 of a two-phase project to return nearly 1,200 acres to tribal ownership and stewardship. Phase 1 was made possible through generous donations from the family of William Dodge Angle, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation through Walmart’s Acres for America program and the Morris family, who sold the land to the Chesapeake Conservancy specifically for the purpose of returning it to the Rappahannock Tribe. As we worked to complete Phase 1, and now are seeking partners to complete Phase 2, we find ourselves continuing to navigate previously untrod territory.
The primary issues revolve around the intersection of tribal, federal and state sovereignty; the federal Indian trust doctrine administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs; and the rules governing conservation easements as expressed in state and federal codes. Without going into great legal detail, suffice it to say that wrestling these issues to the ground for Phase 1 took months. Now, as the tribe seeks to avail itself of opportunities to apply for state conservation funds for the first time, we find that these same issues must be reconciled to fit within state requirements. For example, we find that the federal government is not listed as “holder” of easements as defined in state code, nor as a “public body” authorized to hold easements. If the federal government were, it would have alleviated at least one of the hurdles we are facing.
Fortunately, there is recognition by the commonwealth that having seven sovereign nations within its borders requires a new look at state code. To that end, the General Assembly created the Commission on Updating Virginia Law to Reflect Federal Recognition of Virginia Tribes. With representation from each of Virginia’s seven federally recognized tribes, the commission is poised to take a serious and thorough review of state code and recommend appropriate amendments.
Virginia tribes also recognize the need for increased understanding, collaboration and coordination. On Sept. 15, the Rappahannock Tribe is hosting the second Sovereign Nations of Virginia Conference: Indigenous Led Conservation in Richmond. Featured speakers, including the authors of this essay, will “share critical information needed to build relationships, understanding, and common ground between Tribes and agencies to better the future for our Virginia Tribal communities and all Virginians.” This includes the suggestion to consider the formation of an intertribal conservation council in the Chesapeake, to share knowledge and ensure tribal priorities are considered by the larger restoration movement. The tribes plan follow-up workshops to forge new relationships within the large and growing community of those who want to know more about traditional conservation principles.
As tribes and state and federal governments strive to reconcile the past and forge a new future for Indigenous-led conservation, partnerships with conservation organizations will remain a critical piece of the puzzle. | 2022-08-19T14:09:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Virginia recognizes the promise of Indigenous-led conservation - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/virginia-recognizes-promise-indigenous-led-conservation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/virginia-recognizes-promise-indigenous-led-conservation/ |
What to know about Ron DeSantis’s political ‘election fraud’ arrests
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody (R) attend a news conference at the Broward County Courthouse on Aug. 18 in Fort Lauderdale. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
When they went to the polls in November 2018, Florida voters made two choices. They narrowly selected Rep. Ron DeSantis (R) to serve as their governor. They also overwhelmingly decided to grant felons the right to vote by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.
The passage of Amendment 4, the Voting Rights Restoration for Felons Initiative, was not the end of that particular fight. Even before he took office, though, DeSantis called for legislation that would constrain implementation of the seemingly straightforward policy. In June 2019, the new governor signed a bill that mandated that felons be enfranchised only after they had repaid any outstanding fines or fees they owed.
This is trickier than it sounds, both because of the direct cost of making the payments and because of the way in which those fees might have been assessed. It was often hard for those subject to the law to determine what they owed.
“Florida has no centralized database to allow people to figure out what legal financial obligations they owe to the state,” ProPublica explained last month. “Instead, its 67 counties and various state agencies each maintain their own databases.”
The law was challenged in court, with opponents arguing that it amounted to a modern poll tax. In September 2020, shortly before the first election in which those individuals would have been able to vote, a federal appeals court ruled that the pay-your-fees stipulation could stand.
The problem was that a number of people covered by Amendment 4 had already registered. That ProPublica article details the case of Kelvin Bolton, who had registered while in jail. A county elections official came and told prisoners they could register, so he did. He doesn’t remember being told that he needed to pay off any fines so, when he voted in the November election, he was unwittingly committing another crime.
ProPublica found 10 examples of people similarly affected: told they could register to vote and then doing so — and ending up with criminal charges.
Those 10 cases probably don’t overlap with the 20 announced by DeSantis in a campaign-style event on Thursday. The governor — up for reelection this year and with an obvious eye toward the 2024 Republican presidential primary — declared that a new “election fraud” arm of state law enforcement had identified 20 potential violations of state voting laws.
Each was a felon.
“All 20 of these individuals were disqualified from voting after they were convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense,” the governor’s office said in a statement, “but they chose to vote anyway, and now they have all been charged with voter fraud — a third-degree felony punishable by up to a $5,000 fine and up to 5 years in prison.”
That “murder or felony sexual offense” stipulation is important: Amendment 4 excepted people convicted of those crimes from being granted the right to vote. But it’s also easy to see how the confused process of implementing the amendment might have increased the chances of unwitting violations of the law.
It’s critically important to put this into context. Attendance at DeSantis’s announcement was restricted, with “a woman who identified herself as a volunteer with the Palm Beach County Republican Party” monitoring who was allowed to enter the room, according to Washington Post reporting. Just as DeSantis was aware of the political utility of announcing the creation of the “Office of Election Crimes and Security” earlier this year, in the midst of ongoing agitation on the right over the specter of rampant voter fraud, he is aware of the utility of standing at a lectern and announcing that purported criminals had been found.
Mind you, this is 20 voters out of more than 11 million who cast ballots in the state that year. Some perspective for that is below. The small black dot indicates 20 votes out of the 2020 total — and, rest assured, the black dot is actually there.
And that this isn’t “voter fraud," as such. An operating theory of Republican politics in the Donald Trump era has been that there’s a rampant effort to cast votes illegally on behalf of unwitting actors. This is people casting votes on their own behalf who are simply having their votes thrown out. It is to “election fraud” what overstaying a visa is to “illegal immigration.”
Most importantly, the allegations being made are just that: allegations. There have been multiple examples in recent years of states making splashy announcements about fraud only to have those allegations wither. Skepticism is warranted here particularly given DeSantis’s track record of hyping culture-war victories that turn out to be little more than the hype itself.
There has been actual voter fraud alleged in Florida. Four people who live in the conservative, senior-oriented community of the Villages have been arrested for committing fraud. DeSantis did not hold a press conference to celebrate that triumph of law enforcement.
That clarifies another particularly revealing aspect of the governor’s announcement. The subtext to much of the fretting over purported illegal voting is that it’s the wrong people who are casting ballots, which is clearly what DeSantis wants to highlight. In Wisconsin, for example, a focus of allegations about election “rigging” was that systems were implemented making it easier for people in low-turnout areas — cities, places with larger non-White populations — to cast a ballot. The backlash against Amendment 4 had some obvious grounding in worries that those new voters would vote for Democrats — in part because they were disproportionately Black.
This week brought related news on that front. The Justice Department argued in a court filing that a law DeSantis signed last year restricting voting access included “provisions that impose disparate burdens on Black voters” — provisions “chosen precisely because of those burdens to secure a partisan advantage.” The filing was offered as an appellate court evaluates whether a lower-court ruling that the law is discriminatory should stand.
What DeSantis wanted from his event on Thursday was for the media to elevate his assertion that he’s taking a hard-line position against fraud. What he demonstrated most effectively, though, is how he has repeatedly taken steps that restrict voting access despite the undeniably minor frequency of fraud in Florida elections (as he himself has pointed out).
And, of course, that he is keenly interested in telling the conservative ecosystem exactly what it’s hoping to hear.
Analysis: What to know about Ron DeSantis’s political ‘election fraud’ arrests
12:48 PMTake a look: In Wisconsin race, Barnes seeks to brush off Johnson’s attacks | 2022-08-19T14:09:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What to know about Ron DeSantis’s political ‘election fraud’ arrests - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/desantis-election-voters-florida/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/desantis-election-voters-florida/ |
It’s been a big summer for author Min Jin Lee. We caught up with her.
By Soo Youn
One minute before our scheduled interview, author Min Jin Lee picks up the phone on the first ring.
“Cool people would wait until the second ring, but I’m just going to show right up and be early because I’ve got nothing to prove anymore,” she jokes. “I’m just such a nerd.”
Earlier this month, the 53-year-old Korean American author was in Seoul, where she was awarded the 2022 Manhae Grand Prize for literature.
She was also there for events commemorating the completely new Korean translation of her best-selling 2017 novel, “Pachinko.” The translation was released this month, sparking rumors about a record publishing deal. (Lee declined to comment on the monetary figure but said the new edition is more accurate.)
“Pachinko” — an epic tracking four generations of a Korean family — was also recently adapted into a critically acclaimed TV show for Apple TV Plus. The first season of the show, which Lee has said she has “no comment” on, was released in March.
Three novels about Korean history give context for current events
These days, Lee is working on her third novel, “American Hagwon,” about Korean after-school academies or “cram schools,” and “Name Recognition,” a nonfiction book. She is also the writer in residence at Amherst College.
Between official events in South Korea, she was able to reconnect with far-flung family. Lee said it was a “really lovely homecoming” to be able to spend time in the country, where she was born, especially because her parents were able to make the trip.
She also spoke with The Washington Post about her writing, her activism — particularly in the face of increased anti-Asian violence — and the arms race of impossible beauty standards.
Q: Your work has obviously been recognized before, but this trip seems to mark a certain kind of validation, if that’s the right word?
A: The Manhae Prize — it was really important for me to show up to accept it. Obviously it’s such an honor to get it, but also as an American writer of Korean descent, I’m the first one.
Recognition of a person like you and me, diasporic Koreans, by an establishment organization, is personally very, very meaningful, because I’ve studied so much about diasporic Koreans and our experience of not being accepted. I’ve also interviewed enough people in Korea who feel rejected and left behind. So there’s an interesting dynamic, and I would love to see a kind of bridge being built by our work and our recognition of what it is to be Korean around the world.
Q: In the last few years particularly, you’ve been an active voice in speaking up about anti-Asian rhetoric and violence. One of the things I grapple with when I report on it is, like with mass shootings, how much reporting makes it worse and inspires new violence? Do you have thoughts about that?
A: I think that the assertion that the reporting of these events will incite more violence and copycat behavior is an assertion. Unless I see credible evidence, showing that causation — and also, if I can have the counter evidence that if we don’t report on it, that it goes away — I will remain unconvinced. I think it’s just another way to make us put ugly news underneath the carpet, just to brush it aside. And I find that really problematic.
I have a very limited, very niche platform. If I can use it to draw attention and to make people realize that it’s not okay to punch out our elders, and that people like our parents and you and I should not be afraid to take the train or go to work, or go to our home, or stay out late at night, I try.
Christina Yuna Lee’s killing ‘hits so close to home’ for Asian American women in NYC
Q: I was just in Korea and I went along with a friend to get the latest cosmetic procedure, and I’ve got to say, even though you brace for it, the pressure to get stuff done really can get to you.
A: I think the beauty standards everywhere are just unreasonable. In the U.S., in Korea and Europe, Africa, in South Asia.
… I would say with conviction that beauty standards are just unreasonable everywhere for all people. And now it’s not just for women, for men as well, and I see a lot of people suffering as a result of it.
Beauty is a form of power. If a woman says I want to be more powerful through this way, then I understand. I’m not saying that it’s going to necessarily get you power, or the kind of power that you want. But it is a form of power. … It’s a very important feminist issue, and I think that there should be more study on it.
Some South Koreans prepare for post-pandemic days with a facelift
Q: People are always interested in a writer’s process. Can you tell us about yours?
A: I read that Willa Cather read a chapter of the Bible every day. So I thought, I’m going to try that. So now I read a chapter of the Bible, every day, before I start writing fiction. I’ve done it since 1995. I must have read it, literally from page to page, about seven times. It has been so helpful to understand how things are written, with a long scope.
If you want to understand literature, especially Western literature, it’s almost impossible to do so without a very deep understanding of the Bible, as well as mythology — I mean, Shakespeare knew it cold. So, I’m such a huge fan of doing this, you couldn’t really get me to stop now.
Q: You are by faith a Christian, right?
A: I am. I do go to church every Sunday.
What is life like for South Korean kids? Busy.
Q: I’m watching the K-drama “Extraordinary Attorney Woo” and just saw the episode on hagwons, which is the topic of your next book. What interested you about them and what angle are you developing?
A: It’s the last novel of a trilogy of a diaspora called the Koreans. My first book is about Koreans in America but particularly New York [“Free Food for Millionaires”]. It’s also from a certain period — 20th-century based, especially the latter part. And “Pachinko” is obviously Korean Japanese.
So then I thought, how do I understand what unites all of us around the world? I’ve had the great privilege of having interviewed thousands of Koreans now in every corner of the globe that I’ve been allowed to travel. And the one thing that struck me is that I’ve never met a Korean who doesn’t have a strong opinion about education — this very strong emotional aspect about the idea of education, and how you should educate yourself and your family.
The more I researched, I thought, what’s my central metaphor? I realized, it’s hagwon — not that everybody goes to hagwon. But it’s a metaphor for me in the same way “Pachinko” works as a metaphor, or what I think is a philosophy of life, for so many who have been oppressed, in an unfair society.
… I’m working on it now trying to explore what education means to Korea, to Koreans and diasporic Koreans. So what I’m really writing about is wisdom. | 2022-08-19T15:09:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Author Min Jin Lee on anti-Asian violence, visiting South Korea & more - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/19/min-jin-lee-south-korea/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/19/min-jin-lee-south-korea/ |
By Skylar Woodhouse | Bloomberg
Pedestrians walk along Main Street in Bozeman, Montana, US, on Tuesday, July 19, 2022. Across Montana’s 147,000 square miles, the state government recently counted 57 charging stations, most of them clustered in towns and cities rather than along the highway. Photographer: Louise Johns/Bloomberg (Bloomberg)
Colorado, Montana, New York and Oregon are set to receive as much as $750 million overall to provide capital for small businesses under the State Small Business Credit Initiative, the Treasury Department announced Friday. | 2022-08-19T15:39:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Four States to Get Up to $750 Million for Small Business From US - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/four-states-to-get-up-to-750-million-for-small-business-from-us/2022/08/19/eceedef6-1fd1-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/four-states-to-get-up-to-750-million-for-small-business-from-us/2022/08/19/eceedef6-1fd1-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
First responders arrive at Watsonville Municipal Airport after two planes attempting to land collided on Thursday, Aug. 18. (KION-TV/AP)
Hundreds more near-midair collisions are reported annually; the FAA defines these incidents as the “possibility of a collision” when pilots are less than 500 feet apart, or when a collision hazard is reported by a pilot or flight crew member.
“In most cases, at least one of the pilots involved could have seen the other in time to avoid contact, if he or she had just been using the visual senses properly,” the agency says in guidance on its website. “In sum, it is really that complex, vulnerable little organ — the human eye — which is the leading cause of inflight collisions.”
Transportation regulations require pilots to “see and avoid” other aircraft when weather conditions permit it. Pilots are instructed to keep a “vigilant lookout,” paying close attention to airport takeoff and landing procedures and refocusing their eyes when shifting views, according to the FAA.
The Watsonville airport was last inspected in May 2022, according to a report listed in the FAA’s airport data and information portal. The inspection did not appear to highlight any hazards that would raise the risk of collisions in the skies over the facility. | 2022-08-19T15:39:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Planes collide over Watsonville airport, killing multiple people - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/19/watsonville-airport-midair-collision-california/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/19/watsonville-airport-midair-collision-california/ |
Technology promises to change the meaning of death — at least for some
New research shows that we might be able to revive bodies we once thought beyond repair. That could increase medical inequities, but it’s still worth pursuing.
Perspective by Raiany Romanni
Raiany Romanni is a bioethicist, a Harvard Kennedy School Fellow in Effective Altruism, a VitaDAO Fellow and an A360 Scholar.
Dr. Niraj Desai (L) sews in a kidney to a recipient patient during a kidney transplant at Johns Hopkins Hospital June 26, 2012. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
When artificial kidneys were first used as a medical tool in 1945, it became unnervingly clear that human organs, until then essential to the human makeup, were replaceable. Soon after, hearts — once thought to be the linchpin of humanity — were quickly substituted by external devices, supplanting the inexplicable complexity of human muscle with far simpler, synthetic parts.
The brain is the last human organ whose parts cannot be replaced synthetically: As philosopher Daniel Dennett writes, brain transplants are the one kind of operation where one should wish to be on the donating side. If at one point our hearts epitomized the singularity of humans, today the gooey, floating mass within our skulls delineates what we understand as human life.
As Harvard bioethicist Robert Truog suggests, what we formally call “death” consists “more of a moral judgment than a biological fact.” In other words, brain death is less the point at which an organism is definitively gone and more an arbitrary limit, designed to permit legal and medical systems to move on. Though there are no properly documented cases of recovered consciousness after a correct brain death diagnosis, Truog predicts that medical advances may at some point preclude us from using the term “brain death” as a legally binding elision with what the U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics defines as “human death”: the irreversible cessation of the “fundamental work of a living organism.”
Green burials can change our relationship with death
The distinction between life and death, in other words, might become a more painful sort of moral judgment: a matter of who can afford to keep a body functioning. In such a future, health inequities would be exacerbated; the wealthy could repeatedly forestall their death, while those least well-off would be forced to accept an indeed “irreversible cessation” of their bodily functions. The fact, however, is that this future shouldn’t sound unfamiliar to those least well-off today. In 2022, a person dies almost every hour while waiting for an organ transplant. Patients of color are especially vulnerable to such deaths, having fewer systemic chances to delay their fate.
If the philosopher William MacAskill is right — and if we do our part to ensure we have a future to look forward to — humanity is only entering its adolescence and has a moral obligation to improve the lives of future generations. In fact, with the current pace of technological advancement, it is not implausible that these futuristic, life-extending medical technologies may become available for low-income people alive today. And one might argue that the fastest, most ethically permissible way of lowering the price of extraordinary medical therapies is by having the wealthy subsidize them as initial customers, as philosopher John Rawls implies.
DNA testing is radically reshaping the definition of family
DNA sequencing is a case in point: The first incomplete sequence cost $2.7 billion in 2003 and offered no clinical relevance. In 2011, Steve Jobs paid $100,000 to learn his genome sequence and his tumors’ genes, without encouraging results. Today, thanks at least in part to Harvard geneticist George Church, who advocated for the democratization of genome sequencing since the 1990s, it is the upper-middle-class American’s $299 go-to Christmas present and is only beginning to provide clinical benefits. Tomorrow, insurance companies and European governments may offer DNA sequencing free of charge, allowing vulnerable populations to benefit from this once-luxurious tool. | 2022-08-19T15:40:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Technology promises to change the meaning of death — at least for some - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/19/organex-yale-death-definition-medical-disparities/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/19/organex-yale-death-definition-medical-disparities/ |
Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert (R-Conway) presides over a committee at the state capitol in 2018. (Kelly Kissel/AP)
Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert (R) will have to unblock his atheist constituents from his social media accounts, as part of a settlement that a national organization of atheists said it reached with the state.
American Atheists, a group that advocates for the separation of church and state, had sued Rapert in 2018, arguing that he violated its members’ freedom of speech by blocking them from expressing their viewpoints on his official Facebook and Twitter accounts. According to a copy of the settlement announced this week, Rapert is required to remove any restrictions on his social media accounts and will have to pay more than $16,000 to American Atheists for costs related to the lawsuit.
“This is a victory for freedom of speech and equality for atheists,” Geoffrey T. Blackwell, litigation counsel for American Atheists, said in a statement.
Rapert, in a statement posted Wednesday to his social media pages, said he admitted no wrongdoing or fault with the settlement he signed. “The opportunity to settle this lawsuit without any admission of liability or wrongdoing saves time, money and effort for all concerned,” he said.
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson on the overturning of Roe and the future of the GOP
American Atheists claimed in its suit that its members were blocked after criticizing Rapert’s “attacks on members of the LGBTQ community, his support of a bill to require the display of the divisive and exclusionary phrase ‘In God We Trust’ in all Arkansas public school classrooms and libraries, and his support for a Ten Commandments display on the grounds of the Arkansas State Capitol.”
“The voices of atheists and other advocates for the separation of religion and government provide valuable contributions to the public discourse,” the organization argued in the claim.
Rapert is also the founder and president of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, which works to “restore the Judeo-Christian foundations of our government,” he told the Deseret News last year.
Members often share model legislation on issues such as abortion and religious freedom, the newspaper reported.
In his statement, Rapert welcomed the public to his Facebook pages and to interact if they are “civil.” He said he runs his own social media and moderates posts for civility “as I see fit.”
“You misbehave and break my page rules, I will block you. I have never blocked anyone for their personal viewpoint ever,” he wrote. | 2022-08-19T15:41:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert agrees to unblock atheist Twitter critics - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/08/19/arkansas-senator-twitter-atheists-rapert/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/08/19/arkansas-senator-twitter-atheists-rapert/ |
Former Washington head athletic trainer Ryan Vermillion, left, reached an agreement to a deferral of prosecution with the federal government. (John McDonnell0-90/The Washington Post)
Ryan Vermillion, the former head athletic trainer of Washington’s NFL team, reached a deferral of prosecution agreement with the federal government, stemming from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s probe into his time with the team. The DEA investigated Vermillion for possible distribution of prescription drugs.
In a deferral of prosecution agreement, the government grants amnesty in exchange for a defendant agreeing to fulfill certain requirements laid out by a judge. Essentially, Vermillion must adhere to the terms of the agreement for one year, and then the government will move to dismiss.
Vermillion, in a black suit with his attorneys by his side, appeared for a brief hearing Friday morning in Alexandria before District Court Judge Claude M. Hilton. No charges were levied.
Vermillion’s attorney, Barry Coburn, and U.S. attorney Katherine Elise Rumbaugh declined to comment after the hearing.
Early last October, the team announced that Vermillion had been placed on administrative leave with pay due to an “ongoing criminal investigation that was unrelated to the team.” Days earlier, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office had searched Vermillion’s workspace at the Commanders headquarters as well as his nearby townhouse.
Roughly two dozen DEA agents, who arrived in unmarked cars, and Loudoun County law enforcement officers executed search warrants while some Washington staff members and players were still in the facility.
DEA investigation of Washington’s trainer is related to disbursement of prescription drugs
NFL teams typically employ multiple physicians in an array of specialties who often have their own full-time practices. These physicians work separately with teams and in conjunction with the clubs’ full-time athletic trainers and strength and conditioning coaches. Federal law bars anyone other than doctors and nurse practitioners from giving out prescription drugs.
Anthony Casolaro, who practices internal medicine, is Washington’s chief medical officer, and Chris Annunziata, an orthopedic surgeon, is the head team physician. The Commanders have nine other physicians on their medical team.
Soon after Vermillion was placed on leave, the team also placed one of his assistants, Doug Quon, on leave, too. The team never provided a reason for Quon’s leave, and it is still unclear if his situation is connected to Vermillion’s; Quon is not listed as a defendant in any case.
After the searches, the NFL Players Association sent a request to the league for information on the matter, stating that the situation “directly impacts player health and safety.” The union also issued letters to player agents, noting that federal investigators had already contacted one player and that “the DEA/prosecutors may contact additional players, but not clearly explain the matter.”
Washington didn’t replace Vermillion or Quon last season. Rivera said the team would operate “pretty much by committee.” It brought back some summer interns and received help from former Washington athletic trainer Bubba Tyer and former Capitals athletic trainer Greg Smith, in addition to the team’s remaining three assistant athletic trainers.
All told, Washington was without a head athletic trainer for 14 games last season. In April, the Commanders hired Al Bellamy to replace Vermillion. Bellamy had been with the team for 13 seasons prior, including its Super Bowl XXVI run in 1991-92.
Vermillion spent 18 seasons as the head athletic trainer for the Carolina Panthers, including nine under Rivera. When Washington hired Rivera, Vermillion was one of the first football staff members he brought with him, and he gave him the latitude to the lead a revamped athletic training staff. | 2022-08-19T15:41:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Former Washington trainer agrees to deferral of prosecution in narcotics case - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/19/ryan-vermillion-commanders-trainer-dea/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/19/ryan-vermillion-commanders-trainer-dea/ |
‘Spider-Man’ modification scene turns into Pride flag battlefield
(Marvel; iStock/Washington Post illustration)
“Marvel’s Spider-Man,” the open-world, web-slinging game originally released on PlayStation 4 in 2018, finally came to PC last week. Among those who make unofficial modifications for games, this would normally be cause for celebration. Some, however, decided to rain on that parade by taking aim at a very specific target: Pride flags.
In the world of PC gaming — where enterprising users can crack open games in ways that more restrictive consoles don’t allow — major releases are often accompanied by a wellspring of mods. “Spider-Man” is no different. Already, modders have swapped Spider-Man’s appearance with those of Stan Lee, Uncle Ben’s tombstone and other people both real and fictional. You can also turn pigeons into pizza, if that, for some extremely specific reason, floats your boat. But the hundreds of already available options have been overshadowed by a battle over flags.
Within “Spider-Man’s” sprawling re-creation of Manhattan, one district contains a few pieces of Pride iconography including flags and a mural. These proved popular when the game first came out on PS4, with LGBTQ players praising their inclusion at the time.
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Shortly after the game’s PC release, a modder going by the handle Mike Hawk (probably don’t try saying it out loud) released a mod called “Non-Newtownian New York.” According to its creator, the mod replaced “Newton’s Prism’s artifacts with the stars and stripes.” This was a roundabout way of saying it turned Pride flags into United States flags. As many have pointed out, “Spider-Man” already includes a plethora of U.S. flags even without mods, and Spider-Man — given his habit of standing up for the oppressed — has frequently been associated with progressive causes.
The original mod was only around for a day, but it amassed hundreds of downloads and numerous comments, many of them homophobic. Mod Nexus, the biggest mod repository on the internet, banned it and the user behind it, but imitators and copies surfaced on Mod Nexus and similar sites like Mod DB, as well as the Internet Archive. Others, meanwhile, uploaded retaliatory mods like “The Amazingly Valid Spider-Man,” which changes Spider-Man’s costume colors to match those of the trans flag and includes a link to support The Trevor Project, a support group for LGBTQ youths.
In reaction to this, Mod Nexus director Robin “Dark0ne” Scott announced that mods which appear “deliberately” against diversity and inclusivity are banned in all games. Same goes for mods “attempting to troll other users with mods deliberately to cause a rise.”
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“In regards to the replacement of Pride flags in this game, or any game, our policy is thus: we are for inclusivity, we are for diversity,” wrote Scott in a lengthy post on the matter. “For our part, we will endeavor to do a better job of moderating our website to this ethos ourselves.”
Mod DB said on Twitter that it also removed anti-Pride mods and banned offending users, but added that its moderation is “largely automated,” meaning users often need to report mods like these before it will take action. Anti-Pride flag mods also remain available on the Internet Archive and other, similar online repositories.
In the aftermath, users have taken to Mod Nexus to upload mods that include additional progressive flags, as well as ones that, bringing things full circle, swap out the U.S. flag with a Pride flag. The discussion sections for these pages have played host to numerous comments suggesting that removing U.S. flags should now also be a bannable offense, even as a historically oppressed group of people continues to have its rights threatened by new laws within the U.S.
“We don’t want to and won’t argue this with you,” he wrote. “We’ve now explained our stance and we won’t be providing a platform for you to distort our position in order to feed an irrational and paranoid narrative. If this policy upsets you, if we’ve broken some moral code of conduct as a business that you can’t accept, then please, delete your account and move on, as we will.” | 2022-08-19T15:42:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The 'Spider-Man Remastered' Pride flag Mod Nexus controversy explained - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/19/spider-man-remastered-pride-flag-mod-nexus/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/19/spider-man-remastered-pride-flag-mod-nexus/ |
She was a longtime supporter of the Washington National Opera and donated $100 million to cultivate and care for trees in the nation’s capital
Washington philanthropist Betty Brown Casey and opera singer Plácido Domingo, the general director of the Washington Opera, in 1996. Ms. Casey was a longtime benefactor of the opera company, now known as the Washington National Opera. (Khue Bui/The Washington Post)
Mrs. Casey was deeply private and avoided interviews, preferring to remain behind the scenes while donating to organizations including the Salvation Army and the Washington public broadcaster WETA. “I don’t like to get up in front of groups. … I like the quiet life,” she once said.
Still, she made headlines for ambitious yet uncompleted projects that promised to transform the city, including a plan to spend $50 million of her own money to construct an official residence for the D.C. mayor, and a proposal to revitalize downtown with a new home for the Washington National Opera, which named her life chairman in 1999. That same year, she read a Washington Post article about the decline of tree cover in the nation’s capital and decided to get involved in the issue.
Mrs. Casey went on to donate $100 million — including an initial $50 million gift to the Garden Club of America — to support what is now Casey Trees, a nonprofit organization that plants and cares for trees in Washington. The group has planted more than 41,000 trees in the city, according to spokeswoman Italia Peretti, including many saplings that were grown at Mrs. Casey’s 730-acre farm along the Shenandoah River in Berryville, Va., which she also donated to the organization.
A former psychiatric social worker, Mrs. Casey was married for 31 years to Eugene B. Casey, a developer and investor who served as an agricultural adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He built shopping malls, apartment buildings and low-cost housing in the Rockville and Gaithersburg area, acquiring a reputation as a brilliant but parsimonious executive with a domineering style, both at the office and at home. To friends, he boasted that he made 95 percent of the decisions in his marriage and told Mrs. Casey how to handle the rest.
By the time he died in 1986, his fortune was estimated at more than $200 million. Half his estate went to Mrs. Casey. Most of the other half went to his foundation, which Mrs. Casey had taken an active role in running. Over the years, she saw to it that her husband was memorialized in the name of a hospice in Rockville, a diabetes education center in Bethesda, and academic and swimming centers at Washington College, her alma mater on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
While many of her donations were made in her husband’s name, the wealth attracted unwanted attention. In 1990, a pipe bomb exploded in the trunk of her white Mercedes 560 as she was being driven home to Potomac from a shopping trip in Washington. The back of the car was heavily damaged, but no one was seriously injured. Mrs. Casey was cut on her face, and her secretary, who was driving the car, had a slight hand injury, according to a Washington Post report.
Investigators determined that the blast was triggered by a Sears garage door opener that had been taped to the side of the bomb. William H. Seals, a veteran of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, likened the explosive to the kind of weapon used “in professional hits in places like Las Vegas.”
The case was never solved, and investigators complained that Mrs. Casey and her family were uncooperative. She told detectives that she couldn’t imagine who might want to kill her, according to ATF reports, although some of her family members scoffed at that claim, noting that she had alienated relatives by inheriting so much of her late husband’s estate. “Who would want her dead? Just open the phone book and start with A,” said one anonymous relative in 1992.
Mrs. Casey was sued that year by 10 of her husband’s 11 grandchildren, who argued that she had manipulated Eugene Casey into cutting them out of his will, which left $1 million to each of his six children, all from previous marriages. She hired Sullivan, who had represented Oliver L. North in the Iran-contra hearings, and prevailed in court.
The trial offered a rare glimpse into her personal life and views on philanthropy, with Mrs. Casey testifying that she became involved with her husband’s work only reluctantly in the 1980s. “I don’t like business. … My husband told me you had to be hard … and let people, even if they were friends, know that you were tough and you were strong,” she said. “And he was right.”
Mrs. Casey won a scholarship to Washington College in Chestertown, where she studied biology and psychology. After graduating in 1947 she worked for eight years at the Rosewood State Training School, an institution outside Baltimore for people with mental disabilities. She also studied at Catholic University for a master’s degree in psychiatric social work, and for a time she lived with a cousin whose husband was the superintendent of Eugene Casey’s farm in Gaithersburg.
The phantom patron of the opera: Betty Brown Casey's journey from Sykesville to Washington
But by all accounts, Mrs. Casey was far more interested in music than her husband’s business affairs. She served on the board of the Washington National Opera since 1974, when the company was known as the Opera Society of Washington, and she donated $18 million to the company in 1996 so that it could purchase the old Woodward & Lothrop department store building to use as its new home.
The 10-story building was purchased at a bankruptcy auction, and I.M. Pei’s architecture firm was enlisted to overhaul the space. But the plan proved too costly, with renovations estimated at $200 million. The opera company signed a new lease at the Kennedy Center, and the building sat vacant until 1999, when it was sold for $28 million.
The proceeds were put toward the opera company’s once-meager endowment, which was then named for Mrs. Casey’s late husband. By 2010, the year before the opera company merged with the Kennedy Center, her donations constituted “between one-half and two-thirds” of the total endowment, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
After the Woodward & Lothrop project, Mrs. Casey was involved in another high-profile real estate deal in 2001, when she bought a 16.5-acre estate in Washington’s tony Foxhall neighborhood and announced that she wanted to turn it into a permanent residence for the mayor, with an eye toward hosting official functions and greeting visiting dignitaries there. District officials were already considering the idea of an official residence, and, while they had contemplated something closer to downtown, the offer of a free mayoral mansion was hard to resist.
The project proved deeply divisive, with opponents bristling at the idea of D.C.'s mayor living in a lavishly decorated home — Mrs. Casey reportedly purchased $2 million of furniture and fixtures before the mansion was designed — in one of the city’s most affluent areas. Mrs. Casey battled with neighbors, city officials and the National Park Service before abandoning her plan in late 2003. Instead of building a mansion on the property, she donated the land to the Salvation Army. | 2022-08-19T15:43:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Betty Brown Casey, Washington philanthropist, dies at 95 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/19/philanthropist-betty-brown-casey-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/19/philanthropist-betty-brown-casey-dead/ |
Embracer Group adds a precious IP with Lord of the Rings
(Embracer; iStock/Washington Post illustration)
Swedish video game publisher and media holding company Embracer Group announced its acquisition of eight properties this week, including Middle-earth Enterprises, which controls the intellectual property licensing rights to The Lord of the Rings franchise. Those rights were previously held by The Saul Zaentz Company, which licensed out the property to New Line Cinema for Peter Jackson’s celebrated Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
While Embracer Group does not own Lord of the Rings — those rights are still owned and managed by the Tolkien Estate — it does mean that Embracer now holds sway over any Lord of the Rings material adapted into different mediums such as film, television, board games, theme parks and of course, video games. In a press release, Embracer cited the various Lord of the Rings adaptations currently in development, including the upcoming Amazon streaming series “The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power,” which is set thousands of years before the original trilogy and will cover the Dark Lord Sauron’s ascent as the eponymous Lord of the Rings.
Embracer also offered a window into some possible future adaptations of Lord of the Rings with films focusing on specific characters. Per the press release:
Embracer did not specify the acquisition price for Middle-earth Enterprises alone but estimated the total cost of all eight acquisitions at $780 million (or 8.2 billion Swedish krona). Some of the other companies that Embracer added during its buying spree include Tuxedo Labs (maker of the game “Teardown”), Limited Run Games (a distributor of rare physical copy video games), Tripwire Interactive (“Killing Floor,” “Red Orchestra”) and Tatsujin (“Zero Wing,” the source of early 2000s Engrish meme “All your base are belong to us.”).
This is business as usual for Embracer. The holding company has been pursuing a prolific acquisition campaign since 2018, buying up video game studios, publishers and IPs. Embracer now holds reign over a number of venerable video game franchises such as Borderlands, Tomb Raider, Deus Ex and Thief. Alongside Lord of the Rings, Embracer also has a respectable multimedia footprint through its ownership of Umbrella Academy, Sin City, 300 and Hellboy via Dark Horse Media.
In June, Embracer’s resources were further strengthened through a controversial $1 billion investment by Savvy Gaming Group (SGG), an arm of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund which in turn is owned and operated by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The investment was met with backlash due to Saudi Arabia’s history of human rights abuses and the prince’s suspected role in the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi (Khashoggi was also a columnist for The Washington Post). Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors that the financial support from SGG would not influence how Embracer is run in any way, stating that the company is “built on the principles of freedom, inclusion, humanity and openness,” in a subsequent press release.
With an ever-expanding stable of media companies and new revenue streams, Embracer has emerged as a major player in the ongoing video game consolidation trend. In the past year, industry juggernauts such as Sony, Microsoft and Take-Two Interactive have rapidly been buying and merging companies as the gaming market continues to grow by billions in revenue each year. If the current pace continues, the global video game industry is projected to be worth $321 billion by 2026, according to a report by Price Waterhouse Coopers. | 2022-08-19T16:18:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Embracer Group purchases Lord of the Rings in IP spending spree - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/19/embracer-lord-of-the-rings/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/19/embracer-lord-of-the-rings/ |
A jury convicted El Shafee Elsheikh, 34, in April of conspiracy charges in the kidnapping and murder of journalists and humanitarian workers
El Shafee Elsheikh (Alice Martins/FTWP)
A jury convicted Elsheikh, now 34, in April of conspiracy charges in the kidnapping and murder of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and humanitarian workers Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller, as well as terrorism charges in the deaths of British and Japanese hostages.
Alexanda Kotey, another member of the group who was captured with Elsheikh in 2018, pleaded guilty in 2021 and was sentenced this year to life in prison. The third member of the “Beatles,” Mohammed Emwazi, who was the masked executioner on the Islamic State’s brutal propaganda videos, was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2015.
At trial, Elsheikh’s defense team had denied that he was a member of the “Beatles” or that he had any role in the torture and execution of hostages, calling him a “simple ISIS fighter.” But Elsheikh had given a series of interviews to journalists detailing his role in seeking ransoms from the families of Western hostages captured during the Syrian civil war, beating the prisoners and demanding personal information.
U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III called Elsheikh’s and Kotey’s conduct “horrific, barbaric, brutal, callous — and of course, criminal.” He sentenced Elsheikh to eight concurrent life sentences.
Foley’s mother, Diane Foley, told Elsheikh at the hearing: “James would want you to know that you did not win.”
Noting that it was the eighth anniversary of her son’s beheading, Diane Foley said through tears that her son’s example of service and compassion lived on in his family and supporters worldwide. | 2022-08-19T16:23:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ISIS ‘Beatle El Shafee Elsheikh sentenced to life in torture of U.S. hostages - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/elsheikh-life-sentence-beatle/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/elsheikh-life-sentence-beatle/ |
Kamoya Kimeu trudges across a rocky slope near the shore of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. (Boyce Rensberger/New York Times)
Mr. Kamoya, as he was always known, died July 20 in a hospital in Nairobi, aged 83 or 84, his daughter Jennifer Kamoya announced to the Kenyan media. She said he believed he had been born in 1938 but had no birth certificate.
Mr. Kamoya was part of a team, and often team leader, of what was known as the “Hominid Gang” set up in the late 1950s by Louis Leakey, the son of British missionaries in Kenya who began a family dynasty of fossil hunters. Under the auspices of Leakey and his fellow paleoanthropologist wife, Mary, Mr. Kamoya went on to train many Kenyans — regaling them, pipe in hand around a campfire, with stories of traveling by camel, being shot at by animal hunters and bandits or coming in eyeball contact with lions or crocodiles.
The fossil became known as “Turkana Boy,” because it was found near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, beginning with a matchbox-size piece of skull Mr. Kamoya spotted glinting among dirt on the dry bed of the Nariokotome River. It is now considered one of the most significant discoveries in paleontology and the quest to understand human origins. Alan Walker, an Englishman who was a paleoanthropologist at Penn State at the time, painstakingly helped piece together the skeleton after Mr. Kamoya uncovered the skull fragment.
One of Mr. Kamoya’s later digs, in 1994, revealed a 4.1-million-year-old human tibia bone which, along with ancient footprints discovered later, proved that human ancestors were already walking upright, as Homo erectus, at that time.
Richard Leakey, who died in January and was the son of Louis and Mary, said Mr. Kamoya had an instinctive talent for finding fossils, whether elephants or humans. He told an interviewer in 2018: “There is something almost magical in the way Kamoya or one of his team can walk up a slope that is apparently littered with nothing more than pebbles and pick up a small fragment of black, fossilized bone, announcing that it is, say, part of the upper forelimb of an antelope. It is not magic, but an invaluable accumulation of skill and knowledge.”
In 1985, after discovering Turkana Boy, Mr. Kamoya was invited to Washington, where President Ronald Reagan presented him with the John Oliver La Gorce Medal from the National Geographic Society, named after an American writer and explorer who spent much of his life working with the Society. | 2022-08-19T16:23:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kamoya Kimeu, renowned fossil hunter in Africa, is dead - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/19/kamoya-kimeu-fossils-kenya-leakey-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/19/kamoya-kimeu-fossils-kenya-leakey-dead/ |
Firing of TV anchor stirs debate about sexism, ageism in Canada
For years, until her unceremonious firing earlier this week , Lisa LaFlamme was a fixture in living rooms across Canada.
The abrupt dismissal of one of the country’s most prominent TV anchors — who covered the biggest stories of her time, including elections, wars and natural disasters — has prompted a widespread backlash and a national conversation about sexism and age discrimination in the media.
LaFlamme, the face of Canada’s most-viewed nightly newscast since 2011, and a model for many Canadian women of how to age with grace, posted a video to Twitter Monday announcing that she had been informed in late June that her career with CTV News was over, after parent company Bell Media decided to end her contract. She had worked for the network for 35 years and had just under two years left on her contract, according to the Globe and Mail.
“I was blindsided and am still shocked and saddened by Bell Media’s decision,” LaFlamme said, adding that she had been asked to keep her firing confidential for weeks.
“At 58, I still thought I’d have a lot more time to tell more of the stories that impact our daily lives,” she told followers. “While it is crushing to be leaving CTV National News in a manner that is not my choice, please know reporting to you has truly been the greatest honor of my life and I thank you for always being there.”
In a statement Monday, CTV said it had made a “business decision” to pursue a “different direction” for the chief news anchor role, citing “changing viewer habits.” The network announced the same day that national affairs correspondent Omar Sachedina, 39, would step into the role.
LaFlamme’s firing drew condemnation from viewers, colleagues in the media industry and prominent figures in Canada, including retired Grammy-winning singer Anne Murray.
The Canadian press has continuing to cover the fallout, with reports suggested various factors behind LaFlamme’s firing, including clashes between the anchor and CTV News head Michael Melling over resources for coverage of the war in Ukraine, among other issues.
But one avenue of speculation has touched a nerve among Canadian women left wondering: Was it the hair?
LaFlamme made headlines when she stopped dyeing her hair in 2020. During a special year-in-review broadcast, she told viewers that the pandemic had prevented her from visiting her hairstylist, and she was tired of spraying her roots each day before going on air, according to the Globe and Mail. “I finally said, ‘Why bother? I’m going gray,’ she said. “Honestly, if I had known the lockdown could be so liberating on that front I would have done it a lot sooner.”
The move resonated with Canadian women who have faced societal pressure to dye their hair. But it apparently ruffled the feathers of top CTV News executive Michael Melling, the Globe and Mail reported.
A senior CTV official told the newspaper that Melling had asked who had approved the decision to “let Lisa’s hair go gray” and later commented on the purple hue of LaFlamme’s locks under studio lighting.
Shortly after Michael Melling became head of CTV News, he raised questions about host Lisa LaFlamme’s hair. According to a senior CTV official who was present at the meeting, Mr. Melling asked who had approved the decision to “let Lisa’s hair go grey.” https://t.co/XQb9zb9N65
— Robyn Doolittle (@robyndoolittle) August 18, 2022
Canadian women took to Twitter this week to celebrate the former anchor for embracing her gray hair and owning her age.
“Lisa LaFlamme allowed herself to age on camera and in doing so gave me the confidence to shine in my natural beauty as I age,” one Twitter user, Sarah M, wrote on Monday, calling CTV News’ decision “a massive mistake.”
Others worried that LaFlamme’s firing would send a message to middle-aged women that they could face professional consequences if they opted for a more natural look.
Hey @CTVNews at the beginning of the pandemic I gave up being a bottled blonde and embraced the grey. I took inspiration from women like Lisa LaFlamme who we watched every day.
We grew gray together.
Women across Canada will remember the message you sent to us with her firing. pic.twitter.com/s6NQUAfvIB
— Christine Cooper 💪🙋♀️🦹♀️ (@coopSpeak) August 18, 2022
Many suggested sexism and ageism had played a role in LaFlamme’s dismissal. Some media experts pointed out that her predecessor, Lloyd Robertson, retired from the chief anchor role at 77 and was given an on-air send off.
Bell Media did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. LaFlamme “has made an important contribution to Canadian television news over the past 35 years,” read a statement posted to Twitter Monday by Bell Media, the parent company, signed by company president Wade Oosterman and senior vice president Karine Moses. The company would initiate an independent, third-party “internal workplace review of our newsroom,” the statement continued.
LaFlamme’s dismissal led some to call for Melling’s ouster, and Canadian media reported that CTV News has been forced to do damage control with its own employees.
Moses said in an email to staff that LaFlamme was given the opportunity to say goodbye to viewers before she left the anchor’s chair, but that she had “opted not to say goodbye to the public,” Canadian broadcaster Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported. The anchor shake-up was part of a shift toward digital content creation at the news outlet, Moses wrote.
The backlash to LaFlamme’s firing has sparked its own backlash. In right-wing circles, figures such as Maxime Bernier, head of the far-right People’s Party of Canada, seizing the moment to divert attention to the firing by Canadian companies of thousands of workers who declined coronavirus vaccines.
Some prominent media figures, meanwhile, lamented that the controversy around LaFlamme’s ouster obscured the significance of her replacement’s hiring. Sachedina, an award-winning reporter who has worked at CTV News since 2009, was born in Canada to parents of Indian descent from Uganda — an underrepresented background in Canadian media.
“A Muslim man helming the biggest National news program — history,” Global News journalist Ahmar Khan tweeted. “But, diversity doesn’t cover the gaps of mistreatment.”
Sammy Westfall contributed to this report. | 2022-08-19T16:23:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Firing of TV anchor Lisa LaFlamme stirs debate about sexism, ageism in Canada - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/lisa-laflamme-canada-ctv-debate-sexism-ageism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/lisa-laflamme-canada-ctv-debate-sexism-ageism/ |
FILE - The line-up of the Apple iPhone 13 is displayed on their first day of sale, in New York, Friday, Sept. 24, 2021, iPhone 13 mini, foregroud, iPhone 13, iPhone 13 Pro, and iPhone 13 ProMax, left to right, background. Apple’s latest security update was easy to miss. But security experts are warning that everyone should update any Apple device they have immediately. Apple said Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2022, that there are serious security vulnerabilities for iPhones, iPads and Macs that could potentially allow attackers to take complete control of these devices, and that the issue may already have been “actively exploited.” (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File) | 2022-08-19T17:10:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | You really need to update your iPhone. Here’s how. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/you-really-need-to-update-your-iphone-heres-how/2022/08/19/36d36c10-1fd4-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/you-really-need-to-update-your-iphone-heres-how/2022/08/19/36d36c10-1fd4-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Then-attorney general William P. Barr waits in the East Room of the White House on President Donald Trump to participate in the 2019 Prison Reform Summit and First Step Act Celebration. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
Department officials argued that the document was protected because it concerned internal deliberations over whether to charge Trump with obstructing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of the 2016 Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia. But the judges agreed with Jackson that the record clearly showed that Mueller had already concluded that a sitting president could not be charged with a crime.
Instead, the panel ruled, the March 2019 memorandum concerned what then-attorney general William P. Barr would say to Congress in advance of the Mueller report’s release about the evidence of obstruction.
Judge blasts Barr, Justice Dept. for ‘disingenuous’ handling of secret Trump obstruction memo
The memo was written by two senior Justice Department officials who argued that the evidence gathered by Mueller’s team did not rise to the level of a prosecutable case, even if Trump were not president. A redacted version was released last year but left under seal the actual analysis of that question.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the nonprofit that sued for the document’s release, celebrated the ruling on Twitter.
“We’re going to get the secret memo Barr used to undercut the Mueller Report and claim it was insufficient to find Trump obstructed justice,” the ethics watchdog wrote. “And we’re going to make it public.”
The DOJ could appeal to the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court. A spokeswoman for the DOJ declined to comment. | 2022-08-19T17:11:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. Circuit orders release of Barr memo on Mueller Russia report - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/barr-memo-court-mueller-release-russia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/barr-memo-court-mueller-release-russia/ |
HYATTSVILLE, Md. — A man was shot and killed in the food court of a Maryland mall on Thursday afternoon, police said.
Officers responded to a report of a shooting at the Mall at Prince George’s around 4 p.m. and found a man suffering from a gunshot wound in the food court, Hyattsville police said. The man was pronounced dead at the scene. | 2022-08-19T17:11:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Police: Man fatally shot at Maryland mall food court - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/police-man-fatally-shot-at-maryland-mall-food-court/2022/08/19/11ec272e-1fd5-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/police-man-fatally-shot-at-maryland-mall-food-court/2022/08/19/11ec272e-1fd5-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act exposes our allergy to taxes
The rise of a new tax politics has made it harder to address our problems, and now it threatens our democracy, too
Perspective by Molly Michelmore
Molly Michelmore is an associate professor of history at Washington & Lee University and the author of "Tax and Spend: The Welfare State, Tax Politics and the Limits of American Liberalism."
President Biden shakes hands with Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) after signing the Inflation Reduction Act at a White House ceremony on Aug. 16. Also shown are, from left, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), House Majority Whip Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) and Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.). (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
On Tuesday, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act. While the measure represents a major legislative triumph for Democrats, it also revealed an allergy to taxation in the United States.
The measure is expected to raise more than $300 billion in tax revenue to fund green energy, fight climate change and improve health-care subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. Yet, as they hit the campaign trail, Democrats probably won’t talk about the act as a revenue-raising measure — except to deny charges leveled by Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who claimed that Democrats “want to pile on giant tax hikes that will hammer workers.”
Republicans accusing Democrats of wanting to hike taxes and Democrats running from the “tax and spend” label is one of the most familiar features of modern American politics, but it wasn’t always this way.
Americans once saw paying taxes as a patriotic duty and Republicans spent most of the 20th century positioning the GOP as the party of fiscal responsibility, focused more on balancing the federal budget, not tax cuts.
The tax politics of the past 40 years have made it harder to address the nation’s societal problems and has even come to threaten our democracy.
The income tax as we know it was a result of World War II. In 1942, Congress transformed the federal income tax from a class tax, paid only by the wealthiest individuals, to a mass tax. Between 1939 and 1945, the number of Americans subject to the income tax increased more than 10-fold, from 3.9 million to more than 42 million.
To sell the new system, the government undertook a major public relations campaign to paint the move as patriotic. The campaign featured a new Irving Berlin song celebrating the ordinary men and women “proud” to pay “taxes to beat the Axis.” The public relations blitz also included radio spots, celebrity endorsements and even Disney films featuring Donald Duck.
This campaign helped make the wartime tax system not only effective but popular.
It was so popular, in fact, that when Republicans regained the presidency in the 1950s after two decades out of the White House, Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill that both codified the WWII-era tax system and set the top marginal tax rate at 91 percent. Republicans saw embracing this system as fiscally responsible at a moment when Cold War defense spending was ramping up alongside domestic spending on priorities like housing, highways and education. The move was considered both popular and vital to the national interest, as Republicans positioned themselves as the guardian of America’s pocketbook.
In the early 1960s, when President John F. Kennedy proposed a massive across-the-board tax cut, the GOP, along with conservative Democrats, threatened the bill’s prospects. Rep. John Byrnes (Wis.), the ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, warned that the proposal would produce an “inflationary binge,” while the joint Senate-House GOP leadership called it, “the “biggest economic gamble in the history of nations.”
In the early 1970s, however, as a new brand of conservatives gained a greater foothold in the GOP, the party began to abandon fiscal responsibility and refashion itself as the “tax cut party.” Conservatives latched on to “supply side economics” — which centered on income tax cuts — and gradually abandoned the party’s historic commitment to balanced budgets, except as a rhetorical cudgel to beat back domestic spending proposals.
Politics, not economics, is what truly drove the GOP’s embrace of tax cuts.
Republicans had rarely controlled both the legislative and executive branches of government since the onset of the Great Depression. Tax cuts might allow the GOP to become what one 1971 Nixon campaign strategy memo called the “visible and outspoken champion of the Forgotten Americans, the working people of this country.” Significantly, these voters had been aligned with Democrats since the New Deal.
But unlike spending programs aimed at those voters, tax cuts could appeal to working-class voters without alienating the wealthy and corporate interests that constituted the GOP base. Paired with an attack on the welfare state — which by the early 1970s had become linked in the public mind with poor, minority communities — tax cut politics fused cultural resentments, racial backlash and economic politics in a way that would soon remake the GOP.
Policy entrepreneurs on the right pushed the GOP in this direction. Jude Wanniski, who helped turned the Wall Street Journal editorial page into the leading cheerleader for supply side economics and lower tax rates, argued in 1976 that the GOP should remake itself as the “Santa Claus of Tax Cuts.” Republicans’ “dumb” fixation on balanced budgets, Wanniski wrote, had “shriveled” the GOP’s “influence as a party,” because it left Republicans without an economic agenda that promised to benefit the majority of voters.
The stagflation seen under the Carter administration in the late 1970s made tax cuts a popular economic and political solution. Pushed by skyrocketing inflation into higher and higher tax brackets, and buffeted by economic head winds that economists seemed unable to explain much less reverse, ordinary voters were now open to previously radical economic ideas and policies. Tax-cut fever swept the nation and enabled tax-cut conservatives to triumph over balanced-budget moderates in the GOP. Tax politics helped to catapult the conservatives’ standard-bearer, Ronald Reagan, into the White House with broad public support in 1980. Promising to stand between the “taxpayer and the tax spender,” Reagan led the effort to remake the tax code and to bring tax rates down for all Americans, though the largest gains were at the very top.
The 1981 tax cut and Reagan’s anti-tax and anti-government rhetoric transformed American politics in significant and lasting ways. But even the “Reagan Revolution” had its limits. In 1982 and 1983, the self-proclaimed tax cutter in chief grudgingly signed two tax hikes — bills supported by members of his own party — to address the problem of rising deficits.
Still, the transformation was underway. By 1990, the GOP had abandoned fiscal responsibility in favor of tax cuts. That year, a new generation of far-right conservatives, led by House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), rebelled over the budget deal struck between President George H.W. Bush and congressional Democrats because it included increased taxes. These firebrands seized control of the GOP in part by attacking its leaders as “tax collectors for the welfare state.”
Outside the halls of Congress, organizations like Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) and the Club for Growth developed as the enforcers of the new tax cut orthodoxy — promising primary challenges to any Republican who did not to sign a written pledge — enforced by the ATR — that promised to “oppose any effort to increase income taxes on individuals and businesses.”
The result has been near unanimity among Republicans that tax cuts are good policy and good politics, no matter their effect on the deficit. In fact, the only major legislative accomplishment of Donald Trump’s presidency was the passage of a sweeping tax cut in 2017; nothing brings the GOP together like a tax cut.
Democrats, too, have largely accepted Republicans’ framing of the tax issue. Despite its reputation for taxing and spending, the modern Democratic Party has rarely defended taxation as a positive good. This reluctance, evident even at the height of Democratic control of government in the 1960s, grew more pronounced in the wake of the Reagan Revolution, as Democrats worked to win back those White working- and middle-class “Reagan Democrats” who abandoned the party in all three presidential elections in the 1980s.
Given this history, it is little wonder that Democrats insist the Inflation Reduction Act is not a tax increase. They argue that its revenue provisions simply close loopholes to make the system fairer. But Republicans’ refusal to contemplate any new taxes and Democrats’ reluctance to defend them as anything other than necessary to balance the budget or to improve tax fairness, has hamstrung good economic and social policymaking for more than four decades. Equally important, this tax politics has contributed to the toxicity of our politics.
This focus on the costs of government rather than its benefits has distorted public opinion as well as public policy in the decades since Reagan’s presidency. As both the left and the right have highlighted how tax eaters — whether they be the “welfare queens” of the right’s imagination or the corporate tax cheats targeted by the left — have flourished at the expense of hard-working taxpayers, it drives more Americans see themselves as victims, rather than beneficiaries of their government.
Taxes matter. And they do more than simply fund the government. They underwrite a shared citizenship and investment in the nation. As Richard M. Nixon put it in 1960, taxes give “life to the people’s purpose in having a government to provide protection, services and stimulus to progress.” | 2022-08-19T17:11:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act exposes our allergy to taxes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/19/bidens-inflation-reduction-act-exposes-our-allergy-taxes/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/19/bidens-inflation-reduction-act-exposes-our-allergy-taxes/ |
It didn’t work in 2020 but why not try again in 2022.
Tucker Carlson, left, talks with former president Donald Trump during the final round of the Bedminster Invitational LIV Golf tournament in Bedminster, N.J., July 31, 2022. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Fox host Tucker Carlson began his show on Thursday night focused on something he found deeply concerning: Republicans might not regain control of both the House and Senate in November.
His is an opinion show, you’ll recall, one that viewers are expected to understand traffics in “exaggeration” rather than “actual facts.” (Those quotes are from Fox News attorneys.) And his opinion is that it is “bad” that polling suggests that Democrats won’t be blown out in the midterms (this time, a quote from Carlson) and that he was “certainly praying” this would occur.
Carlson’s consistent approach to his show is to craft various strawmen and then show off how extravagantly he can immolate them, like Fireball from the movie “The Running Man.” So on Thursday he expressed bafflement that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) might have cited candidate quality as a reason to be pessimistic about Republicans regaining the Senate — shortly after he described Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker as someone “everyone likes.” This was as sincere and honest an assessment of Walker’s deeply flawed candidacy as was Carlson’s effort to pretend he was unfamiliar with the term “crudité.”
The reason Carlson was cobbling together this narrative about how Republicans were flailing more because of McConnell than candidates like Walker — or Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, whose video about the price of vegetables was the prompt for Carlson’s crudité bemusement — is that he wanted to let viewers know he had a solution. Oz shouldn’t be talking about inflation, he said. He and his party should instead be talking only about Carlson’s own obsessions, crime and immigration.
“Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that you ran a campaign on illegal immigration and crime,” he said. “These are two issues that didn’t just arise out of nowhere. They’re the product of policies the Democratic Party put in. They were intentional outcomes. We have millions of people coming in illegally and we have a lot more murders than we had two years ago.”
“These two issues, immigration and crime, don’t simply annoy voters, though they very much do,” he continued. “These two issues threaten the existence of our society. So maybe you should run on them.”
You’ll notice, in this brief patter, how Carlson expands the issues outward into something horrible. Democrats are intentionally seeking to have “millions of people coming in illegally” and intentionally promoting an increase in murder. This is just great replacement theory, once again, the Fox News host’s long-standing hobbyhorse that coincidentally aligns with the rhetoric of white nationalists.
The former point, by the way, is not actually true, dependent on the same sort of rhetorical stumbling that has elected officials pointing to massive drug seizures as somehow bad. The latter point, meanwhile, was bolstered by anecdotal snippets Carlson showed, like a gun-related incident in Philadelphia. He showed a clip from Fox News talking about how crime is up, including that robberies are up 40 percent in New York City — a cherry-picked stat meant to imply a big rise in crime, even though homicide is down by 11 percent year-over-year. Carlson doesn’t care, of course.
To emphasize how great an idea this was, this focus on these existential threats to the country, Carlson brought on perhaps the only American more committed to the idea than he was: former Trump administration official Stephen Miller.
What the Republicans should be saying, Miller said, was: “elect Republicans and in January we seal the border. We reform law enforcement to go after criminals, not Republicans, and we end the war on America’s children.”
One might be skeptical that President Biden would sign such legislation, but so be it. Carlson, of course, agreed wholeheartedly.
The pair insisted that this had worked before: President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 reelection landslide was rooted in a message about crime. What that argument overlooks, of course, is that the violent crime rate in the five years before Nixon’s reelection had jumped by 60 percent. It also overlooks that Donald Trump very recently tried to run a reelection campaign making the same case — certainly with Miller’s direct encouragement — and lost.
What’s noteworthy about this, though, is how detached it is from reality. Carlson might no doubt be forgiven for assuming that his viewers believe that immigration and crime are existential threats above all else and he might also be presumed to believe that his arguments to that effect have been broadly influential. But they have not been.
YouGov polling conducted for The Economist shows that, despite Carlson’s pooh-poohing of the idea, Americans really are more worried about things like inflation than about crime or immigration. Three-quarters of Republicans say crime is a very important issue to them and two-thirds say the same of immigration — but that’s much less common among Americans overall.
Carlson and Miller think crime and immigration are very important because they’re Republicans! Non-Republicans aren’t as compelled by the issues — and it seems unlikely that browbeating them is going to change their minds.
After all, consider another question asked by YouGov: what’s the most important political issue to you. While Republicans do think crime and immigration are more important than Americans overall, even they don’t put either issue in their top four most important issues.
One in 8 Republicans say crime or immigration is the most important issue there is. Only 1 in 12 Americans overall say the same thing. Carlson has a big important TV show and Miller has the ear of a former president, but that doesn’t mean that even their own party thinks those things are more important than prices or jobs.
There’s a useful analogy here, one that would no doubt make Carlson very annoyed: immigration is to him what climate change is to many on the left. He thinks it is of utmost importance and he argues that it is an existential threat, but it simply doesn’t get traction. The same holds for many Democratic officials when it comes to global warming. The difference, of course, is that there’s scientific evidence to support the idea that climate change poses a dire threat whereas Carlson’s presentation of the threat of immigration — America itself is being undermined! — is rhetoric.
The other difference is that Democrats are actually convinced of the urgency of tackling climate change, with 17 percent of respondents identifying it as the most urgent issue in their eyes.
Maybe Carlson isn’t as good at persuading people of his opinions as he clearly believes. | 2022-08-19T17:12:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tucker Carlson and Stephen Miller offer a predictable campaign pitch: fear - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/elections-tucker-carlson-stephen-miller/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/elections-tucker-carlson-stephen-miller/ |
The Montpelier Station railroad depot in Montpelier Station, Va. (Clint Schemmer/The Star-Exponent via AP)
As some Americans grapple with their country’s fraught history of racism, it is crucial that the nation’s institutions ensure they are not tuning out the past. That’s why the U.S. Postal Service’s decision to close a stamp-sized post office at a century-old former train depot in rural Virginia, a quaint building it shared with a small museum on Jim Crow segregation, was wrong.
The segregation exhibit — curated with large plaques inside and outside the depot offering historical context and explanation — opened in 2010 at the entrance to President James Madison’s Montpelier estate, southwest of Washington, D.C. The museum, accessible through side-by-side doors marked “White” and “Colored,” has attracted tourists who see photographs, information panels and waiting rooms that were racially segregated until the late 1950s. The post office — one employee, open four hours daily — has a separate entrance around the side of the building.
The museum and post office coexisted with no known complaints or controversy for 12 years, until the post office was suddenly shuttered on June 2, with no advance notice; a letter in the window announced the facility had been suspended and promised a prompt public hearing, but none has taken place. That was inconvenient for 100 or so local customers who relied on the Montpelier post office for their mail. It was also a mystery, because the agency provided no explanation.
When journalists started asking questions, the Postal Service initially explained to the Culpeper Star-Exponent that “the display at the site was unacceptable” — an odd determination after a dozen years in which visitors, as well as historians, had raised no objections.
A second statement explained that, upon learning of the museum’s segregation exhibit, senior Postal Service management were concerned that “some customers may associate the racially-based, segregated entrances with the current operations of the Post Office, and thereby draw negative associations between those operations and the painful legacy of discrimination and segregation.”
So the Postal Service’s explanation is that the agency, imagining a theoretical protest, bent over backward to avoid a hypothetical controversy. Yet the Postal Service could not cite any examples of “negative associations” arising from its proximity to the museum over the past dozen years. Nor could the Montpelier Foundation, which owns the building and leases space to the post office. And it is highly unlikely that a customer would think that, a half-century after official segregation ended, the Postal Service has somehow endorsed it at a tiny facility where an adjacent historical exhibit features large signs and informational panels.
It is historically tone deaf to close down a postal facility because it shares an adjoining wall with a museum that sheds light on segregation. The Postal Service’s move is at odds with its admirable track record of squarely facing history, including by issuing stamps honoring prominent Black Americans, even in the Jim Crow era. In this case, the agency has fallen short of its own traditions and should reconsider. | 2022-08-19T17:45:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | U.S. Postal Service was wrong to close Virginia facility with museum - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/post-office-virginia-segregation-museum/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/post-office-virginia-segregation-museum/ |
Voters tell us who they are by who they vote for
Former president Donald Trump endorses Harriet Hageman for Wyoming's U.S. House seat in May. (Lauren Miller/The Casper Star-Tribune via AP)
In November 1991, I stood in the packed, smoke-filled American Legion hall in the nearly all-White New Orleans suburb of Metairie. A day later in Baton Rouge, I watched a chilling development unfold on election night.
In Metairie, White men and women in their 20s, 30s and 40s, some decked out in campaign T-shirts and hats, whooped up a storm for the demagogic, ex-Klansman Republican David Duke, who was then running for governor. In Baton Rouge, coiffured senior citizens in suits and ties and cocktail dresses mingled with people clad in jeans and cowboy boots to cheer on the same racist bigot and antisemite. But those things weren’t the shocker.
Thanks to a phenomenal Black voter turnout, Duke lost in a landslide to Democratic Gov. Edwin Edwards. But Duke was able to claim title as voice of Louisiana’s White majority. The searing takeaway was not Duke himself, but nearly 700,000 Louisianans who, knowing what he stood for, voted for him anyway.
On Sept. 30, 2016, after closely watching nearly two years of Donald Trump’s primary and general election campaigns, I wrote about the dangers of his winning. He had been revealed as an ignorant, undisciplined, ranting bully who exaggerated and lied without shame. His tough-guy masculinity was fakery. Trump was a coward, I said at the time, who picks on women, demeans people of color and is thoroughly lacking in human decency.
“What does sicken and alarm, and what ought to concentrate African American minds, is the thought of Trump with the powers of the presidency in his hands. Therein lies the danger.”
On Election Day 2016, just under 63 million Americans voted for Trump, giving him more than 300 electoral votes and the White House. The takeaway? They, too, knew where he stood and voted for him anyway.
Four years later, the impeached, scandal-scarred president went before the American people once again. By then, Trump was known all too well. In his losing bid for reelection, Trump attracted 74.2 million votes.
So, it comes as no surprise — deep disappointment, yes; a jolt, no — that Trump’s foremost Republican critic, Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), would get a thrashing at the polls in 2022, losing renomination by 37 points to Trump devotee Harriet Hageman. Wyoming Republicans knew where Trump stood on Cheney.
The story is the same in Arizona, where Kari Lake narrowly won the Republican primary for governor, Blake Masters prevailed in the Senate GOP primary, and Mark Finchem took the Republican nomination for secretary of state. Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers went down in flames in a state Senate primary for the same reason. Voters knew where Trump stood on all four: Up with Lake, Masters and Finchem; down with Bowers, who resisted efforts to overturn to 2020 presidential election and told the House Jan. 6 committee all about it.
So it has played out in Republican House, Senate and gubernatorial primaries in Michigan, Washington state, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, West Virginia and Maryland, where Trumpist Dan Cox, won the Republican nomination for governor.
This is not a recital of complaints about Donald Trump. It’s about people by the millions who know where Trump stands and slavishly side with him anyway.
Trump holds cultlike control over Republican voters. They aren’t blank slates. They know what the struggle for economic and racial justice is about. They know, too, what Democrats are talking about when they go on about expanding access to health care and reducing prescription drug prices, or confronting the climate crisis, or advancing racial and gender equity, or treating immigrants with dignity and decency. And they know what they don’t like about any of that “liberal” or “progressive” stuff, including those proposing it.
So, when it comes to elections, bear in mind what’s really at stake. Donald Trump’s name will not appear on any midterm election ballot.
The challenge is to turn out more voters who want the country to keep moving forward and upward than voters bent on empowering candidates to stand in for Trump and all he represents.
That kind of test was there with Duke in Louisiana. Also in 2020, when Trumpism was met head on and taken down. And it will happen again in the midterms, and again the 2024 elections. Concentrate on where the battle belongs, not in debates about noxious Trump and his legions of worshipers but where political conflicts and engagements get decided — at the ballot box.
The alternative is almost too dreadful to imagine. | 2022-08-19T17:45:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Millions still stand with Trump and his proxies. That's our real problem. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/trump-voters-kari-lake-liz-cheney-midterms/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/trump-voters-kari-lake-liz-cheney-midterms/ |
Mitch Trubisky is in line to inherit the Steelers' starting quarterback job from the retired Ben Roethlisberger. (Keith Srakocic/AP)
LATROBE, Pa. — The Pittsburgh Steelers are all about constancy, from the ownership of the founding Rooney family to the virtual lifetime appointments afforded their head coaches to the peaceful training camp surroundings at their traditional summer home, Saint Vincent College. The on-field success has been a regular accompaniment as well, as their six Super Bowl titles attest.
But this is a training camp of change for the Steelers as they move on from the 18-year quarterbacking reign of Ben Roethlisberger, the six-time Pro Bowler and two-time Super Bowl winner who retired after last season.
“There’s different questions,” veteran defensive end Cameron Heyward said this week. “You’re no longer just wondering who’s the No. 2 quarterback. You want to know who’s No. 1. … Every practice we’re just saying, ‘Oh, this guy is getting better. Oh, this guy is learning.’ It’s a different feel.”
Roethlisberger’s successor is likely to be Mitchell Trubisky, the No. 2 selection in the 2017 NFL draft for the Chicago Bears who signed with the Steelers as a free agent in March after one season in Buffalo, where he was the backup to Bills star Josh Allen.
“There’s always pressure,” Trubisky said. “... I have a lot to prove, just because last year was like a reset year for me. I didn’t play as much. I’m looking forward to [getting] back on the field and [being] a starting quarterback again and leading a team. I know I have a lot to prove to myself and … I want to show that a lot of the work that I’ve put in has been paying off. So I’ve got a lot of respect for Big Ben and what he’s done here. He had an amazing career. We’re trying to carry on that legacy of winning a lot of games and being a successful quarterback at that position in Pittsburgh.”
Brian Flores, ex-Dolphins coach in legal action vs. NFL, hired by Steelers as an assistant
The Steelers also have holdover backup Mason Rudolph and rookie Kenny Pickett, the University of Pittsburgh product who was the only quarterback taken in the first round of this year’s NFL draft. But the starting job seemingly was Trubisky’s from the moment he picked the Steelers over the New York Giants in free agency. There had been speculation that he might head to New York after the Giants hired Bills executive Joe Schoen as their general manager and Brian Daboll, Buffalo’s offensive coordinator, joined Schoen as head coach.
“To be in that offense and stay with them would have been a lot of fun,” Trubisky said. “It would have been an advantage. But this was one of the spots that I had circled in the free agency. … They wanted to have me here, and this is where I wanted to be. So I just felt like when that happened, I felt like it was working out the way it was supposed to. … I felt like this was the best opportunity for me to get back on the field and compete to win a lot of games.”
Trubisky widely was labeled a bust in Chicago, failing to live up to the promise that accompanied Chicago surprisingly drafting him at such a lofty spot. He never won a playoff game with the Bears, and they declined to exercise the fifth-year option in his rookie contract.
But Trubisky, in truth, wasn’t entirely awful in Chicago. He was even selected to a Pro Bowl as a second-year player in 2018.
“There were very high expectations, obviously, for being drafted No. 2,” Trubisky said. "... At the end of the day, I enjoyed my time in Chicago. I love my teammates there still. And we won a lot of ballgames. So would I love to have more individual success and win Super Bowls? Of course. Everybody does. But I feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be for a reason now in Pittsburgh. That was just part of my journey. I’m thankful for it. But people are always going to say stuff and look at it however they want, especially with social media and everything these days. … It’s part of my story.”
Coach Mike Tomlin eventually will face an interesting decision if Trubisky plays well, given the team’s use of a first-round choice on Pickett. Trubisky is still young — he turns 28 Saturday — and his talent level rarely has been questioned.
From last summer: Ben Roethlisberger doesn’t know if this is his last season, but he’s ready to give it his all
As the Roethlisberger era gives way to, perhaps, a Trubisky era, there are reasons for the Steelers to be hopeful. There are playmakers around Trubisky on offense, from second-year tailback Najee Harris to tight end Pat Freiermuth to a promising group of wide receivers that includes Diontae Johnson, Chase Claypool and rookie George Pickens. The defense is led by standouts such as Heyward, safety Minkah Fitzpatrick and game-wrecking pass rusher T.J. Watt, the reigning NFL defensive player of the year.
Tomlin enters his 16th year with the franchise without a losing season on his head coaching record. He managed to get the Steelers into the AFC playoffs — barely, at 9-7-1 — last season even when it appeared at times that Roethlisberger had played one year too long, before an opening-round loss at Kansas City.
And these are, after all, the Steelers.
“To me, this organization is the gold standard of gold standards,” said Andy Weidl, a Pittsburgh native and long-ago Steelers intern who rejoined the organization in May as the assistant general manager. “You have an expectation and standard to live up to. … The goal here is to win number seven. And it’s important.”
Weidl’s return coincided with another major change, as longtime general manager Kevin Colbert stepped aside following this year’s NFL draft and the Steelers promoted front office executive Omar Khan to GM. But there is continuity with Khan, who has been with the organization since 2001. Likewise, there is a familiar feel to being back in Latrobe, which was the Steelers’ training camp home for more than five decades until they spent the previous two summers in Pittsburgh for pandemic-related reasons.
Not much ever changes too dramatically with the Steelers, even when familiar faces eventually bow out. They expect to keep right on winning and contending even without Roethlisberger.
“I never temper my expectations,” Heyward said. “It’s just we have to win in different ways. We have to be an opportunistic defense. There’s going to be growing pains. We understand that. But as a defense, we’ve got to be able to weather that.” | 2022-08-19T17:46:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The post-Roethlisberger Steelers plan to keep right on winning - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/19/steelers-trubisky-roethlisberger-quarterback/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/19/steelers-trubisky-roethlisberger-quarterback/ |
Vanessa Bryant, center, the widow of Kobe Bryant, leaves a federal courthouse in Los Angeles. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
LOS ANGELES — Vanessa Bryant, the widow of late Los Angeles Lakers legend Kobe Bryant, took the witness stand here Friday morning, describing panic attacks and anguish suffered since learning of photos taken by and shared among authorities of the 2020 helicopter crash that killed her husband, her daughter and seven others.
“I want to remember my husband and my daughter the way they were,” Bryant said, testifying through tears. “I don’t ever want to see these photographs shared or viewed.”
Bryant’s testimony, in a federal courthouse a couple miles from the downtown arena where her late husband led the Lakers to five championships, marked the emotional climax of a wrenching legal saga that’s played out here since the Jan. 2020 crash.
Bryant and Chris Chester, whose wife and daughter were also among the crash’s victims, have used the civil rights lawsuit to demand answers from Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies and firefighters about why they took gruesome cell phone photos of the accident scene and then shared them, including at a bar and a firefighters’ gala.
“I expected them to have more compassion, respect,” said Bryant, whose testimony was expected to continue Friday morning. “My husband and my daughter deserve dignity.”
Laurie Levenson, a professor of law at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said it is the kind of embarrassing and damaging testimony that is usually precluded by a settlement. But in this case, with Vanessa Bryant worth hundreds of millions of dollars, there hasn’t been one.
“If this case wasn’t about Kobe Bryant, and if the plaintiff didn’t have the resources to pursue this to trial, I doubt that it would have ever gotten this far,” Levenson said. “For the Bryant family, they want accountability, and they have the resources to get it.” | 2022-08-19T17:46:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Vanessa Bryant testifies in lawsuit over Kobe Bryant crash photos - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/19/vanessa-bryant-testifies-kobe-crash-photos/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/19/vanessa-bryant-testifies-kobe-crash-photos/ |
D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine. (Amanda Voisard/for The Washington Post)
Grocery delivery service Instacart must pay D.C. $2.54 million to settle a 2020 lawsuit that alleged the company failed to pay required sales taxes and misled District consumers about its service fees over the span of two years, D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine’s (D) office announced Friday.
Racine alleged in the lawsuit that between 2016 and 2018, Instacart misrepresented its service fees as tips that went directly to workers, but in reality were used to subsidize the company’s operating expenses.
Instacart must now pay $1.8 million to resolve the matter, money that Racine’s office says can be used to pay for legal fees and provide restitution to impacted workers and consumers. The company must also release $739,057 in disputed tax payments to the District, Racine’s office said in a statement, after failing to collect and pay D.C. sales taxes on revenue from service and delivery fees from 2014 to 2020.
D.C. sues Instacart, alleging ‘deceptive’ service fees and unpaid sales taxes
Instacart has operated in the D.C. area since at least 2014; in a statement, the company disputed the claims that spurred the lawsuit. | 2022-08-19T17:46:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. Attorney General: Instacart to pay $2.54 million in settlement over fees - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/instacart-racine-settlement-consumers-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/instacart-racine-settlement-consumers-dc/ |
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) arrives for a news conference on Capitol Hill on Dec. 10, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The Atlanta-area district attorney conducting a criminal investigation of Republican efforts to reverse the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia argued in a court filing Friday that Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) should appear before a special grand jury next week despite his appeal to postpone offering testimony.
In the filing, the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, which is leading the probe into the actions of former president Donald Trump and his allies, argued that delaying Graham’s appearance would also “delay the revelation of an entire category of relevant witnesses,” pushing back the timeline of the investigation.
Graham has formally appealed a judge’s order requiring him to testify on Tuesday. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) has expressed interest in questioning Graham about conversations he had in the wake of the 2020 election with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), among other things.
“Senator Graham insists that he seeks to delay his appearance before the Special Purpose Grand Jury not just for his own sake, but also for the sake of the separation of powers, federalism, and ‘for the People,' ” the filing said. “The Special Purpose Grand Jury, however, is the People: a collection of citizens called together to perform their civic duty on behalf of their neighbors and families. … The District Attorney asks that this Court deny Senator Graham’s motion in order that he, for a single day, can assist them in that great task without further delay.”
Willis’s probe began after reports that Trump and his allies had placed calls to Georgia officials seeking to overturn state election results. It expanded to include efforts to send the names of Trump electors in multiple states to Washington in hopes of delaying or halting the certification of a Biden electoral victory.
Willis named Graham, who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, as part of her inquiry into what she has deemed “a multistate, coordinated plan by the Trump Campaign to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.”
Giuliani is target in Ga. criminal probe of 2020 election, lawyer says
While Graham continues efforts to kill his subpoena, a member of Congress who once raised similar objections, Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), testified before the grand jury for more than two hours Wednesday.
“The congressman already provided his testimony,” said his lawyer, Chris Gober. “We don’t anticipate that the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office will seek additional information from us. It is our expectation that our client’s role in this process is over.” Gober declined to provide details.
Like Graham, Hice had sought to kill a subpoena citing constitutional protections of the speech or debate clause. The judge hearing Graham’s claim, Leigh Martin May of the Northern District of Georgia, rejected Hice’s motion. Hice is a Trump ally who echoed false claims of widespread election fraud after the 2020 election and in his failed bid for Georgia secretary of state.
Related arguments from two state Republicans — Georgia’s Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and former state senator William Ligon — also failed in state court. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote that any legislative protections end with the grand jury’s “authority to question witnesses about possible criminal electoral interference by others.”
Willis requested a special grand jury this year. It began meeting in June and has identified more than 100 people of interest. The panel has heard testimony from Raffensperger and his staff, Georgia Attorney General Christopher M. Carr (R), state lawmakers and local election workers.
On Wednesday, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani appeared for six hours before a grand jury, the highest-profile member of Trump’s inner circle to appear before grand jurors. Giuliani had been informed this week that he is a target of the inquiry.
It is not clear what Giuliani said in his closed-door appearance.
Separately, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) filed a 121-page motion late Wednesday alleging that the sweeping probe was being pursued “for improper political purposes,” and asking the court to kill a subpoena requiring his testimony later this month. | 2022-08-19T17:58:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Atlanta-area DA says Sen. Graham’s testimony is crucial in criminal probe - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/19/trump-georgia-election-investigation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/19/trump-georgia-election-investigation/ |
POCOMOKE CITY, Md. — An accidental fire destroyed a radio station on Maryland’s Eastern Shore on Thursday, fire officials said.
The station owned by Birach Broadcasting Corporation and operated by Mike Powell was on the air when the fire broke out, officials said. The building, which was built in 1955, is considered a complete loss, the fire marshal’s office said. | 2022-08-19T18:42:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fire destroys Eastern Shore radio station - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/fire-destroys-eastern-shore-radio-station/2022/08/19/04044728-1fe8-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/fire-destroys-eastern-shore-radio-station/2022/08/19/04044728-1fe8-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Chinese President Xi Jinping is seen on a large screen during an even at Beijing's National Stadium on June 28, 2021. (NOEL CELIS/AFP via Getty Images)
A decade ago, China passed laws dealing with mental illness, seeking to bury the arbitrary practices of the past, when psychiatric treatment was often used as a tool of political control. In 2012, it passed a new criminal procedure code that mandated a judicial review before someone accused of a crime could be involuntarily committed. In 2013, it put into effect a new mental health law that barred involuntary commitment except in cases involving danger to others.
Now, a disturbing new report charges that China’s reform failed and psychiatric hospitals are still being used for political repression in pursuit of the Communist Party’s overriding goal of maintaining stability. The report, by Safeguard Defenders, a nongovernmental human rights group, is based on 144 sources, the majority of them interviews with victims and families who described forced hospitalization in psychiatric hospitals between 2015 and 2021. The report says this limited sample may be only the tip of the iceberg and concludes the reform laws “did not bring about any substantial improvement to the systematic political abuse of psychiatry in China.”
China tries to silence people, deter others from protest, and stigmatize those who dissent or complain, the group says. Patients are subject to “arbitrary detention, beatings, forced medication, electroconvulsive therapy and repeated incarceration.” Many patients are not given psychiatric evaluations or a court review as required by law before they are committed. The bottom line, the report says, is a system “where victims are trapped in a nightmare.”
In one case that attracted international attention, Dong Yaoqiong, known as the “ink girl,” live-streamed herself in 2018 splashing ink on a poster of President Xi Jinping to protest “tyranny.” She was committed to Hunan’s Zhuzhou No. 3 Hospital, a psychiatric institution, according to Radio Free Asia. Released in 2019, she was sent back in 2020, tied to her bed and beaten when she refused medication, the Safeguard report says, adding that she was released and then recommitted a third time and is believed still to be there. Almost a third of the cases it studied involved patients who were sent to psychiatric hospitals two or more times, the group said. In addition to human rights activists, many poor, rural Chinese are being sucked into this system simply for petitioning government offices for redress.
Starting in the 1980s, China’s Ministry of Public Security, the police, administered their own psychiatric hospital system, known as Ankang, of which there are around 25 hospitals. But the report found most of the current abuse occurs in general psychiatric facilities, of which there are more than 1,600 in China. Of the 144 cases examined, only four took place in an Ankang hospital. The “political abuse of psychiatry is widespread geographically and routinely practiced in China,” the report says. The authorities use it “to conveniently punish and remove activists and petitioners from society without the trouble of going through a trial.”
This is life under China’s dictatorship — where reforms are ignored, laws mean little and those who complain are considered crazy. | 2022-08-19T18:43:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | In China, dissenters, and ordinary people, end up in mental hospitals - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/china-psychiatry-mental-health-hospitals-punishment/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/china-psychiatry-mental-health-hospitals-punishment/ |
Election data breaches don’t ‘protect’ democracy. They harm it.
A satellite voting center in Detroit in October 2020. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Local officials around the country are trying to access voting systems under the pretext of protecting election integrity. They’re really doing the opposite.
The Post reported this week on a plot in Michigan by at least one sheriff, one state representative and other unauthorized investigators to coerce county clerks into allowing unobserved access to critical voting equipment, supposedly to prove meddling by Democrats. The conspirators, some of whom said they suspected an implanted microchip was to blame for President Biden’s 2020 win in Michigan, performed “tests” on the tabulators in hotel rooms and returned them at meetings at shopping centers or in parking lots. The effort, now the subject of a state police inquiry, mirrors incursions elsewhere, including in Colorado, Pennsylvania and Georgia.
The extent to which these breaches are connected is unclear. But a subsequent Post article shows they occurred alongside an organized, multistate effort by lawyers allied with former president Donald Trump. These lawyers, including attorney Sidney Powell, allegedly dispatched a forensic firm to Michigan, Georgia and Nevada to copy election data — paying a retainer upfront for the service. They achieved their goal, at least in some jurisdictions, by seeking authorization in courts. And in Michigan, some of the same names appear in these court filings as in those involving the Michigan election equipment plot on which The Post had previously reported.
All this is happening despite an abundance of evidence that the 2020 election was one of the most secure in history. It is even happening in counties where the vote wasn’t particularly close. While safeguards such as post-election audits should make it difficult for those possessing election equipment to alter results, in some cases serial numbers and even passwords have been exposed as a result of the so-called examinations of voting machines — rendering them more vulnerable to exploitation and fraud. The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recommends that any potentially compromised systems be decommissioned and replaced, which puts cash-strapped localities in a difficult spot.
There’s another problem: The mere suggestion that these systems need probing undercuts trust in U.S. democracy among some people. The knowledge that they have been interfered with does the same for others.
The Brennan Center for Justice has issued recommendations to local election officials who want to protect the electoral process — from restricted access to critical systems, to transparency and monitoring procedures, to robust standards for vendors. The federal government can help by making it easier to access grants that could help localities afford the technology required to secure equipment. The center also emphasizes the importance of communicating these steps to the public, to restore any shaken faith.
But necessary as all these actions might be, they could amount to bandages on an open wound in our democracy. The most effective way to fix the problem might also be the least likely: Those causing it, by deliberately casting suspicion on the outcome of the last election and seeding doubt in the next, must stop. | 2022-08-19T18:43:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Election data breaches don’t ‘protect’ democracy. They harm it. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/election-data-breaches-hurt-democracy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/election-data-breaches-hurt-democracy/ |
The last Salem ‘witch’ is finally exonerated — thanks to my 8th-grade class
By Sarina E. Miller
"Accused of Witchcraft," by Douglas Volk (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Sarina E. Miller is a student in North Andover, Mass.
It took more than 300 years, but the story of a forgotten woman convicted in the Salem witch trials has finally been told. And it took my eighth-grade civics class to tell it.
Elizabeth Johnson Jr. was a single 22-year-old resident of Andover, Mass., in 1692 when the Salem witch trials started. By the time the pandemonium reached Johnson’s town, accused women had learned to plead guilty in the hope that they would be spared execution; it was usually the people who claimed innocence who were killed in Salem. But the strategy didn’t save Johnson. Only a last-minute stay from the governor kept her from hanging.
I was a 13-year-old student at North Andover Middle School in 2021 when my mission to clear Johnson’s name started. When my fellow students and I discovered this horrible injustice against Johnson (or E.J.J., as we came to know her), we knew we had to do whatever we could to correct the record. Along the way, we learned about legal processes and our rights as citizens, about why history matters, and, most importantly, about how to give a voice to someone without one — whether in the past, present or future.
Most women who were convicted of witchcraft in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were exonerated a long time ago. Johnson’s first chance came when the initial verdict against her was thrown out after the colony’s governor ruled “spectral evidence” of witchcraft inadmissible, which included the poppet E.J.J. had brought to her trial to ensure a potentially lifesaving conviction. But a second jury found her guilty again — yet sentenced her to death nonetheless, perhaps because of the extreme measures she had taken to make herself seem like a witch.
Guest Opinion: The historical truth about women burned at the stake in America? Most were Black.
Other women successfully petitioned for exoneration once the hysteria died down and the governor halted all executions. But even though Johnson was spared and released from prison, her conviction remained with her through her life. Her petitions failed, or they were too late. She died powerless and voiceless. And while many more women had descendants to petition on their behalf after they were gone, Johnson had none.
Finally, in 2001, the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill exonerating all other witches who had been put to death in the trials. Still, since she was never executed, Elizabeth Johnson Jr., remained, technically, the last witch.
Twenty years after that bill, the eighth-grade civics class ahead of mine, under the direction of Ms. Carrie LaPierre, took up Johnson’s case and started advocating for her absolution. Ms. LaPierre had learned of the E.J.J. oversight from the author of a book on the witch hunts, and she thought it was a “no-brainer” to take up the case as a civic action project for the class.
These students worked with state Sen. Diana DiZoglio (D) to send a bill to the Massachusetts legislature, and then to its Judiciary Committee. My class continued the effort once the year above graduated to high school. We started by writing letters to the committee, but our bill was “sent to study,” which stalled it from moving forward. Despite the setback, we kept fighting for E.J.J.: We were determined to either get a pardon from Gov. Charlie Baker (R), or to get an exonerating amendment passed through the state budget bill. So we wrote more letters and made more phone calls to bring awareness to Johnson’s story. Eventually, with the help of DiZoglio and a handful of other senators, our amendment made it into the budget bill. It was passed and then signed by Baker last month.
Finally, E.J.J. had found justice.
Some might wonder how exonerating a woman who lived three centuries ago has anything to do with today. But I was taught that we study history to understand our past mistakes. Like many of the other people accused of witchcraft, Johnson was vulnerable because she was a woman, single and an outcast in her community. Sound familiar? We find ourselves again living in a time when women’s rights are challenged and when people who are seen as different face persecution.
What inspired me most about this project, though, is that we did more than just study history: We corrected a past wrong by advocating for E.J.J.’s exoneration when she could not do it herself. We gave power to a person who never had a voice of her own. As someone who cares about equal rights for everyone, I hope that absolving Johnson will be a reminder that it is unjust to use a person’s social class, marriage standing, gender or any other identity or trait to deny them their rights. And lifting up E.J.J.’s example will be just the start of me and my peers’ work toward a society where all voices can be heard.
Thanks to a couple of eighth-grade classes, there are, at last, no more Salem “witches.” People say those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it. Why can’t some middle-schoolers who changed history change the future, too? | 2022-08-19T18:43:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | My middle school exonerated the last Salem witch - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/last-salem-witch-exonerated-middle-school/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/last-salem-witch-exonerated-middle-school/ |
United States’ Kendall Coyne Schofield (26) skates during practice at the LECOM Harborcenter rink in Buffalo, N.Y., Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Joshua Bessex)
BUFFALO, N.Y. — While his players and staff jetted to Denmark in preparation for the women’s world hockey championships, U.S. coach John Wroblewski was left behind in Buffalo, where he is essentially climbing the walls of his hotel room waiting to join them. | 2022-08-19T18:44:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Wroblewski itching to join US women's hockey team at worlds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/wroblewski-itching-to-join-us-womens-hockey-team-at-worlds/2022/08/19/ccdc3d2a-1fe5-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/wroblewski-itching-to-join-us-womens-hockey-team-at-worlds/2022/08/19/ccdc3d2a-1fe5-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
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