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By Molly Hennessy-Fiske
An amphibious vehicle drives through the flooded streets of St. Bernard Parish near New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on Sept. 3, 2005. (DAVID J. PHILLIP/AP)
At the urging of Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry, the state’s bond commission voted 7-6 Thursday to temporarily block a $39 million line of credit to the city for a power station to combat flooding in an area ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — until the Democratic mayor and council rescind vows to defy the state’s new abortion ban.
New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell remains defiant.
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month, Louisiana enacted one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans: outlawing abortion after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy without exceptions for rape and incest; allowing the procedure only when a pregnant person’s life is in danger. Opponents legally challenged the measure, passed in 2006 in anticipation of the Supreme Court ruling. It was initially blocked in court, but ultimately allowed to take effect last month.
“The idea that you seek to punish all the people living in a certain area because you are at odds with some of their elected officials, that's not a reasonable approach,” Edwards said when the vote was delayed last month.
Jimmy Harris, a Democratic state senator from New Orleans serving as a proxy on the commission, told its members the power station project is expected to help protect about 384,000 people. Harris said he had just received a text about a storm underway that had prompted a flood advisory for the city.
The historic peak of hurricane season is mid-September, with the busiest stretch from late August to mid-October. A given season averages 14 named storms, seven of which might be hurricanes, but this year forecasters have predicted 14 to 20 named storms, including three to five major hurricanes. | 2022-08-19T20:00:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Louisiana board holds flood aid for New Orleans amid abortion battle - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/19/abortion-new-orleans-flood-hurricane/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/19/abortion-new-orleans-flood-hurricane/ |
This image provided by Boston-based RR Auction, shows an authenticated Apple-1 Computer prototype from the mid-1970s that a Bay Area collector, who wishes to remain anonymous, made the winning $677,196 bid on Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, the auctioneer said. The prototype was used by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 1976 to demonstrate the Apple-1 to Paul Terrell, owner of The Byte Shop in Mountain View, California, one of the first personal computer stores in the world, Boston-based RR Auction said in a statement. (RR Auction via AP) (Uncredited/RR Auction) | 2022-08-19T20:14:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jobs' Apple-1 computer prototype auctioned for nearly $700K - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/jobs-apple-1-computer-prototype-auctioned-for-nearly-700k/2022/08/19/a197a59c-1fee-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/jobs-apple-1-computer-prototype-auctioned-for-nearly-700k/2022/08/19/a197a59c-1fee-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
A ride to a friend’s house ends in gunshots, and a life forever changed
By Raya Elfadel Kheirbek
Jordan Monroe recovering at the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center. (Family photo)
Raya Elfadel Kheirbek is a professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and chief of the division of palliative medicine and geriatrics at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
We’ve sadly grown used to hearing about random gun violence on city streets, where shootings take innocent lives every day. But gun violence today can take place anywhere, including a quiet suburban neighborhood. And even if victims survive, many must deal with devastating lifetime consequences, with little help from the community at large.
Let me tell you about Jordan Monroe. When I first met the 24-year-old gunshot victim in the intensive care unit of the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) three months ago, he was heavily sedated and connected to several lifesaving devices, including a ventilator and artificial lung machine. A chest tube drained blood from his lungs and several lines carried intravenous medications to treat infections and stabilize his heart and blood pressure. His condition was grave, and we were preparing his family for the worst.
I visited Monroe frequently as the days flowed into nights, providing an extra layer of palliative support and helping to control his pain as he was weaned from life support and inched toward regaining full mental capacity. As I slowly, through his family and large network of friends, got to know the amazing person within the patient, I fought to control my anger over the senselessness of his ordeal, and my feeling of vulnerability as a mother of young adults.
A musician and budding video producer, Monroe had been driving to a friend’s house in suburban Largo, Md., with his fiancee and her 5-year-old son. As they stopped at a light, two men approached the car. One jumped into the back seat, pointing a gun at Monroe’s head and demanding everything the couple had. Monroe turned and attempted to fight. Gunshots sounded, and the gunman fled.
Monroe was unresponsive when admitted to UMMC with gunshot wounds to his neck and back. He had several vertebral body fractures with bony fragments displaced into the spinal canal, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down.
An ambitious young Black man, Monroe had been the first in his family to attend college, taking several semesters at Morgan State University. Pursuing an interest in photography, choreography and filmmaking, he had produced a Nike Spec ad featuring Miss Maryland, and his career was about to take off.
During his childhood in Baltimore, Monroe had watched his mother, Sabrina, fight hard to protect him and his brother from drugs and gun violence. Sabrina protested cuts in after-school physical education programs at the boys’ elementary school, not giving up until a social worker finally handed her a list of centers offering after-school and summer drop-in programs for Baltimore City students.
Sabrina understood the statistics working against her sons, which continue to get scarier: Gun deaths in Maryland have risen 53 percent since 2010, more than double the increase nationwide. In an average year, guns kill 724 Marylanders and wound 1,747. Black residents are 17 times more likely than White residents to die from gunshots.
Ultimately, Sabrina could not protect Monroe from random violence on a suburban street. She died last year, leaving her son heartbroken. Now, Monroe faces the devastating likelihood that he will never walk again or play catch with his fiancee’s son. Yet he and his family remain positive, sustained by prayers and trust in his treatment team.
We try to celebrate the small triumphs. Monroe has regained movement in his left arm, allowing him to operate a motorized wheelchair. He’s able to speak in a whisper and point on his iPad to communicate.
The future is uncertain, but Monroe’s experience casts a spotlight on the permanent toll that gun violence takes on the “fortunate” survivors and their families. A study published in the June issue of Annals of Internal Medicine found that those injured by gun violence spent nearly $2,500 more a month in medical bills during their first year of recovery than other patients. They also saw a 40 percent increase in pain diagnoses, a 51 percent rise in mental health conditions and an 85 percent increase in substance-use disorders compared to a control group. Family members, meanwhile, take on the burdens of caregiving, including job loss, anticipatory grief and financial hardships.
Preventing tragedies like Monroe’s remains crucial as we seek to curb the violence plaguing our cities and towns. Instituting gun safety policies with areas of genuine agreement between gun owners and non-owners will be an important first step. Just as importantly, we must work toward a comprehensive system of caring that addresses all dimensions of suffering and responds to the survivors’ complex physical, psychological, spiritual and financial needs.
For now, Monroe’s friend set up a GoFundMe page to help cover his lifelong medical expenses.
“I have to come to grips with the fact that I might never know why this happened to me, but I am going to keep on living the best I can,” Jordan wrote to me on his iPad recently. Then he raised his left hand to show me a name tattooed on his inner wrist: “Sabrina.” His face lit up, and he whispered, “She is always watching over me.” | 2022-08-19T20:15:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Gun violence can happen anywhere, even on a quiet suburban street - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/gun-violence-carjacking-victim-story/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/gun-violence-carjacking-victim-story/ |
No, Gary Abernathy, we will not get over it
Trump supporters at an Aug. 6 rally in Waukesha, Wis. (Lianne Milton for The Washington Post)
Gary Abernathy’s cynicism is insufferable. In his Aug. 18 op-ed, “It is time for critics to accept the GOP for what it is,” he asserted that we should accept the Republican Party for what it is as if its current incarnation were something acceptable. He averred that those who are shocked at the Republican Party’s continued support for former president Donald Trump are naive adherents of Democrats’ propaganda and that Democrats are more concerned with seeking power than they are about the threat that Mr. Trump poses to American democracy.
He also claimed, in defiance of poll after poll, that most Republicans acknowledge that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 presidential election. The fact is that anyone who cares about the future of our country should be appalled that the Republican Party has become a slavish cult of Mr. Trump dedicated to propagating falsehoods and undermining democracy.
Jaime Esteva, Alexandria
Gary Abernathy suggested ways that we can heal the country. He said that the left should stop calling Republicans “cultists” and that we should embrace the new normal in the Republican Party. The idea that people who ignore the facts, stand in lines for hours to hear former president Donald Trump ramble, deny the 2020 election’s results, wear MAGA shirts and hats while using Trump flagpoles to attack the police and storm the U.S. Capitol might be misnamed with the term “cultist” is laughable and unconvincing. The obsessive praise and defense of a person who refused a peaceful transfer of power and the subsequent punishment/banishment (oops, sounds like cancel culture) of those who dissent appear to be a textbook example of cultism.
I’m all-in with constructive attempts to heal, and I acknowledge that the new Republican Party is all about one person. But to heal, I suggest that Mr. Abernathy and others begin with a clear rebuke of all who continue to lie about the 2020 presidential election, which Mr. Trump lost by 7 million votes. The suggestion that the left should embrace a new normal that includes the insurrectionist Mr. Trump as an acceptable choice for president is equal parts horrifying and revealing.
James Upperman, Gainesville
Gary Abernathy argued that critics of today’s GOP should stop “pitiably pining” for the small-government, fiscally conservative GOP of the past and instead accept the “populist, Make America Great Again party” that the GOP has become — a party with no discernible policies other than to cultivate culture warfare and bring former president Donald Trump and his loyalists back into power.
Mr. Abernathy did not address that this new iteration of the GOP has nominated scores of election deniers to run for important state and federal offices or that so many of its leaders hail the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as persecuted patriots. He ignored that the deranged rhetoric of the fringe is infecting even the old guard of the party — witness GOP Sen. Charles E. Grassley’s statements that the IRS will use its new funding to send thousands of IRS agents armed with AR-15s to harass small-business owners. He turned a blind eye to the fact that this party has embraced Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban as a model for governance.
Mr. Abernathy, the GOP you want us to accept is the party that has embraced a leader whose character is unworthy of any public office. It has devolved into a cesspool of hateful extremism. Today’s GOP is a danger to democracy. No, we will not just get over it.
Christopher McMurray, Alexandria | 2022-08-19T20:15:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | No, Gary Abernathy, we will not get over it - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/no-mr-abernathy-we-will-not-get-over-it/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/no-mr-abernathy-we-will-not-get-over-it/ |
Roberta Shapiro’s Aug. 14 Local Opinions essay, “D.C. is a world-class city without world-class health care,” cited data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that are not available to the general public. However, data from the CMS ratings based on surveys of hospital patient satisfaction, known as the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, or HCAHPS Star Ratings, are freely available at the website.
The metrics for the HCAHPS survey include communications with doctors and nurses, responsiveness of staff, cleanliness, care transition, discharge information and overall satisfaction. The data are collected directly from patients, not from hospital administrators.
The results of the July 2022 HCAHPS survey indicate that patients in D.C., Maryland and Virginia are highly dissatisfied with hospital care. For example, in ranking hospital patient satisfaction in 50 states, Maryland has scored at the bottom since the survey’s inception in 2015, when Maryland was tied with Nevada for 50th, or worst place. Maryland has remained near the bottom, ranking 47th in the July 2022 survey, with none of the Maryland hospitals receiving five stars.
The persistent low ranking of Maryland hospitals by patients should be of great concern to legislators, hospital administrators and, especially, hospital patients.
Anna C. Palmisano, Rockville
The writer is founder of Marylanders for Patient Rights. | 2022-08-19T20:15:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Poor health care is not limited to D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/poor-health-care-is-not-limited-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/poor-health-care-is-not-limited-dc/ |
Ali Jo McKinney, 9, a rising fifth-grader at Valley Institute Elementary in Washington County, Va., receives a high five from Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) on June 6 at Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center in Abingdon, Va. (Laura Vozzella/The Washington Post)
The Aug. 16 editorial “Shrouded in secrecy” opined that the email tip line for complaints regarding the content of Virginia school instruction should be open to the public.
It should not. The emails undoubtedly contain information that would reveal the identity of the students or parents who made the complaints, who would then be subject to harassment and retaliation. This cannot and should not be made public.
Tom Hafer, Arlington | 2022-08-19T20:15:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | There is a reason to keep the Virginia school tip line secret - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/reason-keep-tip-line-information-secret/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/reason-keep-tip-line-information-secret/ |
We are poised to repeat history’s disasters
New York City's mounted police form a line on Feb. 20, 1939, outside Madison Square Garden to hold in check a crowd that packed the streets where the German American Bund was holding a rally. (Murray Becker/Associated Press)
The response to Douglas Brinkley’s appreciation of historian David McCullough in the Aug. 17 letters “Mr. McCullough’s legacy” emphasized that American history truly matters. At this critical moment, with our nation at the crossroads of a democracy on the brink, it is crucial to understand that U.S. history is no longer separate from the currents and waves of global history. In 1948, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill paraphrased George Santayana: “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” That so few Americans appear cognizant of the rise of fascism in Europe in the last century — and fail to connect Adolf Hitler’s rallies and the fanatical devotion of tens of millions who blindly followed him and the politicians who abetted his rise until it became impossible to challenge him — makes our prospects going forward all the more terrifying.
We also forget how close to home Hitler’s poison spread, e.g., the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. After World War II, with their cities in ruin, reduced to ashes, millions of Germans protested, “I just didn’t know.” But like so many of our fellow citizens today, they didn’t want to know because they’d been consumed by mass psychosis.
It’s no longer enough for The Post to issue warnings about democracy on the brink both here and abroad. The Post must present history’s images of disasters that we appear poised to repeat.
Robert E. Honig, Potomac | 2022-08-19T20:15:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | We are poised to repeat history’s disasters - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/we-are-poised-repeat-historys-disasters/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/we-are-poised-repeat-historys-disasters/ |
What Ukraine teaches us about the world
A Ukrainian soldier on Aug. 8 near the Kherson front line in Mykolaiv region, Ukraine. (Wojciech Grzedzinski for The Washington Post)
The Aug. 17 front-page article “Road to war: U.S. warnings doubted” did a masterful job detailing U.S. decision-making leading up to the war in Ukraine. The article laid out critically important principles that governed U.S. policy in this current crisis and that have relevance to crises in other parts of the world, particularly the Middle East.
First, the world continues to be a dangerous place with bad actors such as the Russians (and the Iranians) willing and able to challenge the existing world order. We need to take their words seriously and prepare accordingly. Second, in meeting these challenges, the United States needs allies that are both willing and able to defend themselves, if given the means to do so by the United States. We have few such allies in this world, but Ukraine and Israel are at the top of the list. Third, alliances with like-minded countries are critical to pushing back against aggression. President Biden and his team correctly united our European allies in a common strategy against the Russians. Similarly, in his trip to the Middle East, President Biden focused on new coalitions — one among Israel, India, the United States and the United Arab Emirates, and another between the Sunni Arab states and Israel.
U.S. leadership continues to be indispensable to peace and security in the world. As the Ukraine crisis demonstrates, our ability to lead is strengthened by ensuring we have strong and capable allies and alliances.
Ester Kurz Scheibel, Bethesda
The writer a former director of legislative strategy at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
The article on the causes of the war in Ukraine understated President Biden’s most important contribution. On Dec. 8, 2021, he assured Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the world, that the United States would not stand in Russia’s way with the use of its ground troops in the looming war. “That is not on the table,” Mr. Biden promised Mr. Putin. That short statement made war inevitable.
Henry Wingate, Madison, Va. | 2022-08-19T20:15:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | What Ukraine teaches us about the world - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/what-ukraine-teaches-us-about-world/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/what-ukraine-teaches-us-about-world/ |
Where is the accountability for burn pits?
President Biden embraces his grandson, Robert “Hunter” Biden, son of the president's late son Beau Biden, during a signing ceremony for “the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promises to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act of 2022,” in the East Room of the White House on Aug. 10. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
I applaud Congress in finally passing legislation to deal with veterans’ health issues related to burn pits and service in the Middle East [“Biden signs bill to aid veterans exposed to toxins from wartime burn pits,” news, Aug. 11]. It is also noteworthy that the bill included veterans who had similar issues going as far back as the Vietnam era. It is shameful that it has taken so long to address many of these issues for our veterans.
What neither Congress nor the administration is talking about are responsibility and accountability for how this situation of using burn pits continued for decades. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley both had senior command positions in the Middle East in the past two decades. The military commanders during this period should have to answer to Congress and the American people for this process that has terrible environmental and health effects. The military spends hundreds of billions of dollars on sophisticated equipment but burns hazardous waste in open pits, exposing the military, civilians and environment to the effluent.
The president believes his son’s health issues were caused by this process. If so, why is he not pursuing accountability for this? It seems as if the government never admits responsibility. It is quick to go after corporations or private entities for health and environmental issues with great fanfare but rarely acknowledges any responsibility or accountability itself. No one is fired; no one is indicted. The federal government continues to be one of the largest polluters in the country. The taxpayers continue to foot the bill.
Tom Mathis, Fort Lauderdale, Fla. | 2022-08-19T20:15:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Where is the accountability for burn pits? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/where-is-accountability-burn-pits/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/where-is-accountability-burn-pits/ |
Where the gap between rent and the minimum wage is the widest
A “For Rent” sign outside an apartment building in New York's East Village last month. (Gabby Jones/Bloomberg News)
Zumper is a website targeting renters. Find a place, list a place, that sort of thing.
As a function of its services, it has a good handle on what rent costs in different places. Late last month, for example, it offered an update on the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment nationally: a new high of $1,450 per month.
In other words, the median cost of a one-bedroom in the United States at that point was precisely 200 times the federal minimum wage. So if you want to rent a median-priced apartment while earning minimum wage, you simply have to work five full-time weeks a month. Oh, and spend no money on anything else at all.
The increase in rental costs over the past few years has been sharp. Wages have also gone up, of course, though not as rapidly and not uniformly. So I was curious: How do rental costs compare to the lowest-possible wage mandated around the country? Not just the national picture but a local one?
There is data that gets at the question. The government’s Housing and Urban Development agency compiles county-level data on median rents. Sites like the Economic Policy Institute have data on minimum wages. All that’s left to do is compare the two.
Well, after a few caveats. For example, the federal data is not as current as data from something like Zumper. Nor is the minimum wage hard and fast; certain occupations, like those that depend on tips, often have lower minimum wages than the federal standard. Still, we can develop a sense of how this question is answered around the country.
As you might expect, the places with the highest median rents are big cities like San Francisco and New York. (On the maps below, larger circles indicate higher values.) For 2022, the HUD data indicates that the highest median rent was in San Mateo County, Calif., on the San Francisco Peninsula. There, the median was $2,879.
Below, you can see just the fifth of counties with the highest median rents. I’ve broken it out by 2020 vote in part because it helps illustrate the difference between urban and suburban or rural counties. Also because, as we’re about to see, politics plays a role in our original question.
So San Mateo has the highest rents. But it also has a higher-than-normal minimum wage: $16.20 per hour. Minimum-wage workers there, then, need only to work, uh, about 178 hours to afford rent. Still not great.
San Mateo is still among the counties where a minimum-wage worker would need to work the most hours to cover median rent. The place where minimum-wage workers need to log the most hours isn’t shown on our continental-U.S.-biased map: It’s Honolulu, where it takes 187 hours to pay for a month’s rent.
Notice how adjusting for the minimum wage also shifts the hot spots on our map. Three states in the middle of all that Midwestern red — Illinois, Missouri and Arkansas — stand out as not having a lot of counties where you’d need to work a lot of hours.
All of them also have minimum wages that are higher than the federal standard. If you’re working a minimum-wage job in southern Iowa, it might behoove you to slip south into Missouri.
Notice how the map of the fifth of counties where the most hours of work are required differs from the map of the highest-cost counties. Many of the states that have higher-than-federal minimum wages are blue states; many blue counties similarly have increased their own local minimums. So while red counties make up 423 of the 782 counties with the highest median costs for a one-bedroom dwelling, they make up 521 of the counties where minimum-wage earners have to put in the most work.
It’s also useful to note the change in rental costs since the pandemic began. In nearly every county, the number of hours needed to pay for median rent has increased since 2019 — on average by seven hours. The increase in median price has been higher in blue counties (up $100 on average vs. about $60 in red counties).
The biggest spikes were in three North Carolina counties. In Buncombe County, the median rent climbed by 45 percent. (The big spike in North Dakota is Divide County, where median rent climbed 70 percent — but is still relatively low compared to the national figure.)
I am fairly old and perhaps things have changed, but the rule of thumb I was offered in my youth was that rent should make up no more than 30 percent of your salary. In other words, you should be able to afford rent after working no more than 52 hours in a month (assuming you work 173 of them).
There are 201 counties where the minimum wage is high enough and the median rent low enough that you can do so.
If you’re curious, 193 of them voted Republican in 2020. | 2022-08-19T20:16:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Where the gap between rent and the minimum wage is the widest - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/rent-minimum-wage-gap/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/rent-minimum-wage-gap/ |
Kateryna Semenova, 65, outside her home in Nikopol, across the river from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, on Aug. 19. Her home had been damaged by a Russian rocket. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)
Yulia Firsova, 52, who heads the housing association for Zhivtsova’s building and two others in the area, said only around 20 percent of the apartments are still inhabited. | 2022-08-19T20:18:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Near Ukraine nuclear plant, shelling causes the most immediate fears - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/ukraine-nuclear-plant-zaporizhzhia-neighbors-nikopol/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/ukraine-nuclear-plant-zaporizhzhia-neighbors-nikopol/ |
71-year-old killed was not intended target of shooting in Lanham, police say
Police said the woman was the passenger in a car during a shooting between two other cars.
A 71-year-old woman who was killed in Lanham on Thursday evening was not the intended target of gunfire between two vehicles, Prince George’s County police said.
Patrol officers were called to the area of Martin Luther King Jr. Highway and Business Parkway for a shooting a little after 9 p.m., according to police.
Officers soon learned that Deborah Armstrong, a passenger in an uninvolved vehicle, had been taken to a hospital with a gunshot wound. Armstrong, of Bladensburg, was later pronounced dead.
Two men slain in Prince George’s in Sunday shootings
A Prince George’s police spokesperson said Armstrong was the only person hit in the shooting.
Detectives are trying to find suspects and determine a motive.
Efforts to reach Armstrong’s family Friday afternoon were not immediately successful. | 2022-08-19T20:39:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Deborah Armstrong, 71, killed by a stray bullet in gunfire between two vehicles - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/lanham-shooting-woman-killed/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/lanham-shooting-woman-killed/ |
What I’m reading this summer
Stock Photo: A row of vintage worn books (iStock)
I would love to know — but I don’t — what my four grandparents read. Because both of my parents were readers, I expect their parents were, too. One was a judge, another a fireman, the third a Latin teacher and one a homemaker. They all lived in Ashtabula, Ohio, and were all born in the last decade of the 19th century or the first decade of the 20th.
What I wouldn’t give to know what was on their bookshelves.
As for me, in this hot and worrisome August, I am listening to Winston Churchill’s “The World Crisis” and “The Gathering Storm,” perfect accompaniments to the unpredictability of world conflict.
My tastes have changed over time, but my favorite books through the years have much in common. From undergraduate days, I read Augustine’s “Confessions”, Richard Dawkins’s “The Selfish Gene”, Machiavelli’s “The Prince” and Montaigne’s “Essays”. In my frolic and detour years: Robert Blake’s “Disraeli” and “The Real War” by Richard M. Nixon. “War and Peace” and “Moby Dick” sustained me in my third year of law school — commitments everyone who has endured that experience will understand.
Thriller writer Robert Ludlum arrived on my radar somewhere in my 20s and swallowed hours of my time thereafter. So did John le Carré and anything by James Clavell. I later went down a Larry McMurtry rabbit hole, and barely escaped, after reading “Lonesome Dove”; another discovery was Evelyn Waugh’s “The Sword of Honour” trilogy, which turns on the moral complications of World War II.
Then, around 40, I read Churchill’s “History of the English-speaking Peoples” , a book that is now thumbed into crumbling pages and retaped bindings. I inhaled the first two volumes of William Manchester’s Churchill trilogy, “The Last Lion,” and somewhere in there crept “Trinity” by Leon Uris to make me feel guilty about my admiration of all things English.
But on I went. A taste for Charles Dickens arrived with middle age. “Bleak House” transported me so thoroughly that leisurely vacations since always include one Dickens book. In there, as well, was John Irving’s magnificent “A Prayer for Owen Meany” and his haunting “The Cider House Rules”. Along the way, too, was a lot of John Steinbeck, who I met first on paper and then again on audiobooks during rambles during the shutdown. Steinbeck might have made me a socialist if I’d read him when I was younger.
Bernard Cornwell’s 20-plus Sharpe novels and the Jack Aubrey novels by Patrick O’Brian taught me the outlines of the Napoleonic wars. Andrew Roberts’s “Napoleon: A Life” filled in the key facts. Peter Hopkirk’s “The Great Game,” which covers the European fight over Central Asia, still resonates. Lots of sports helped to change the scenery, including George F. Will’s wonderful “A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred” and Mark Frost’s superb “Game Six”, about the 1975 World Series.
Obliged to read Plutarch in high school, I came back to him after Colleen McCullough’s seven novels of the late Roman Republic. Same with “I, Claudius.” Much closer to home: Michael Shaara’s historical fiction about Gettysburg, “The Killer Angels” was the gateway drug to all of Bruce Catton’s nonfiction books about the Civil War; and then Doris Kearns Godwin’s “Team of Rivals” and James M. McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom.” I was very late to listen to Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” but better to have listened to her read it than to have read it myself.
All praise to Jefferson, Lincoln said, but he might have added “and to audible books” had he known they were coming. They have made possible so much more reading as we drive and walk and exercise. “The Once and Future King” is a joy among many such listens. So was “The British Are Coming” by Rick Atkinson and the tragedy of James Garfield’s medical care in “Destiny of the Republic,” by Candice Millard. I have a weakness for such popular histories of medical calamities as Steven Johnson’s “The Ghost Map” (about cholera in England in the 1850s) and John M. Barry’s “The Great Influenza” (about the 1918 flu pandemic after World War I). But they helped me keep my wits through our own pandemic.
Fantasy epics such as “The Wheel of Time” by Robert Jordan and the Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson are long explorations of political theory and archetypes; memoirs by Dick Cheney (“In My Time”), William P. Barr (“One Damn Thing After Another”) and Donald H. Rumsfeld (“Known and Unknown”) recount the reality of statecraft and governance.
To laugh? Bill Bryson of course, and his “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” — and to learn effortlessly what I could not grasp in high school: some science via “A Brief History of Nearly Everything.”
And the one book everyone ought to read who has lived the past quarter century: Lawrence Wright’s “The Looming Tower.”
My list is not for everyone, of course. But now my grandchildren won’t have to wonder as I did. | 2022-08-19T20:40:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Hugh Hewitt's list of most influential books - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/hugh-hewitt-book-list-summer-reading/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/hugh-hewitt-book-list-summer-reading/ |
Walmart expands abortion coverage, travel support for employees
Walmart expands abortion coverage
In a memo sent to employees on Friday, the company said its health-care plans will now cover abortion for employees “when there is a health risk to the mother, rape or incest, ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage or lack of fetal viability.”
The new policy will also offer “travel support” for workers and dependents covered under their health-care plans so they can access services that are not available within 100 miles of their locations, Donna Morris, the retailer’s chief people officer, said in the memo.
Walmart employs nearly 1.6 million people in the United States. In Arkansas, where the company is based, abortion is banned under all circumstances unless the procedure is needed to protect the life of the mother in a medical emergency. There are no exceptions for rape or incest.
A Walmart spokesperson did not reply for a request for comment on whether the company’s health plan — or travel support — will cover elective abortions.
Previously, the company’s benefits plan had covered abortion only in cases “when the health of the mother would be in danger if the fetus were carried to term, the fetus could not survive the birthing process, or death would be imminent after birth,” according to a copy of the policy viewed by the Associated Press but not confirmed by Walmart. Many companies — including Meta, American Express and Bank of America — have said they will cover travel costs for their employees in the aftermath of the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade.
Prosecutors seek input from Theranos victims
The Justice Department is seeking input from victims of the frauds at blood-testing start-up Theranos committed by Elizabeth Holmes and her second-in-command, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani.
The U.S. attorney’s office in San Francisco on Thursday issued a “call for information” from victims following the separate convictions of the former executives for their roles in the collapse of the company once valued at $9 billion. The federal judge in San Jose, who presided over the trials will use the information in determining their sentences.
The victims include investors at all levels who poured more than $700 million into Theranos, some of whom hail from ultrawealthy families and Silicon Valley venture capital firms, as well as thousands of patients who got inaccurate blood-test results from the start-up’s clinics inside Walgreens stores.
The trials for Holmes and Balwani were split because Holmes accused the ex-Theranos president, who was also her boyfriend, of sexually and verbally abusing her.
Wayfair, an online furniture retailer, said on Friday it would cut about 870 jobs, or 5 percent of its global workforce, as it looks to cut back operating expenses and realign investment priorities. Retailers from Wayfair to Restoration Hardware and Target in recent earnings reports noted weaker sales of furniture as U.S. consumers spend less on big-ticket items like furniture in a time of four-decade high inflation. Discretionary spending is quickly decelerating, according to Oliver Wintermantel, an equity analyst at Evercore ISI. Earlier this month, Wayfair reported a larger-than-expected second-quarter loss, hurt by soaring supply chain expenses and declining demand for furniture from pandemic highs.
Deere, the world's largest farm equipment maker, on Friday lowered its full-year profit outlook and said it has sold out of large tractors as it continues to grapple with parts shortages and high costs. Deere has struggled to make enough tractors to meet strong demand from farmers and is paying premiums in freight to assembly machines depending on where it has parts available, executives at the company said. Total costs and expenses rose 24.4 percent year over year, resulting in quarterly earnings missing expectations despite strong sales. | 2022-08-19T21:45:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Walmart expands abortion coverage, travel support for employees - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/walmart-expands-abortion-coverage-travel-support-for-employees/2022/08/19/d1ad9a66-1fad-11ed-b25f-fb4ac1c3f4c0_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/walmart-expands-abortion-coverage-travel-support-for-employees/2022/08/19/d1ad9a66-1fad-11ed-b25f-fb4ac1c3f4c0_story.html |
Raw oysters were recently linked to 2 deaths. Here’s how to limit risk.
A plate of freshly shucked oysters might be a treat for many bivalve fans — but they could be a health risk under the wrong conditions.
This summer, two men in Florida died after consuming raw oysters from Louisiana, apparently placing them among the 100 people who die annually from vibriosis, which is caused by vibrio bacteria found in coastal waters where oysters grow (a figure that includes not just food-related illnesses but those who are infected when water enters a their bodies through a wound or cut), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Yes, you need to wash your produce. Here’s how.
Rodney Jackson, described as a “community leader” in Pensacola, died Aug. 9 after being sickened by oysters he purchased at a local market. After first experiencing “mild symptoms,” he decided not to go to the hospital because of long wait time, according to the Pensacola News Journal, but later had trouble breathing and was taken to the intensive care unit, where he died.
A few weeks earlier, Roger “Rocky” Pinkney of South Florida died two days after eating the bivalves while celebrating his birthday at a Fort Lauderdale seafood restaurant. He arrived at a hospital with a fever and abdominal pain, the South Florida SunSentinel reports. There, he was diagnosed with vibrio vulnificus and underwent emergency surgeries and a double amputation.
The vibrio vulnificus bacterial strain can cause mild symptoms such as diarrhea in healthy people, experts say. But in people with underlying conditions, it can cause life-threatening blood infections. For most people, most of the time, eating raw oysters is safe. But doctors and health officials say that people with certain health issues need to be especially careful.
Know your risk — People with liver or kidney disease, diabetes, and people whose immune systems are weakened by diseases like HIV or by drugs used in cancer treatment are particularly vulnerable to being seriously sickened, experts say. Not everyone with these risk factors who encounters the bacteria will get sick, said Fred Lopez, a professor of medicine and a specialist in infectious diseases at Louisiana State University, but most seriously ill vibriosis patients have them. “We need to be educating people that if they have these underlying conditions, they should not be eating oysters from waters where there is vibrio,” he says.
Know your oysters — Vibrio bacteria is naturally occurring, and it concentrates inside oysters and other shellfish as they filter the water around them. It flourishes in warmer water, which the CDC describes as above 68 degrees. Many people know the potential risk in eating oysters from Gulf states in the warmer months, and the CDC says that most vibrio-related deaths take place between May and October. In 2003, California banned the sale of raw Gulf oysters harvested between April 1 and Oct. 31 unless they have been treated to kill the bacteria.
But Lopez notes that warming temperatures might mean that common wisdom doesn’t hold. “Climate change may not just be lengthening the period but also extending the geographical extent,” he said, noting that even the Chesapeake Bay might see temperatures that would allow the bacteria to thrive.
And an oyster with vibrio bacteria doesn’t look or smell any different from one without, so if you are at a higher risk, you should check with your oyster purveyor to see where the supply is from.
Ignore the myths — You might have heard that dousing raw oysters with hot sauce or lemon juice kills the harmful bacteria. That might be possible, Lopez said, but only for the stuff on the surface of the oyster. The internal tissue of the oyster still might carry it.
The secret to superior fried oysters: Listen closely
Try them cooked — Cooking oysters properly kills off bacteria, rendering them safe to eat, even for vulnerable people. The CDC recommends that shucked oysters be boiled or fried (at 375 degrees) for at least three minutes. Or you can broil them three inches from heat for three minutes, or bake them at 450 degrees for 10 minutes. This isn’t a culinary crime by any stretch — cooked oysters can be delicious (like these grilled ones, featuring garlic, butter and Worcestershire). | 2022-08-19T21:45:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Raw oysters linked to two deaths -- here's what you need to know about safety - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/08/19/raw-oysters-were-recently-linked-2-deaths-heres-how-limit-risk/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/08/19/raw-oysters-were-recently-linked-2-deaths-heres-how-limit-risk/ |
The novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, under a microscope at Fort Detrick, Md. (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases/National Institutes of Health/AP)
A study published this week in the journal Lancet Psychiatry showed increased risks of some brain disorders two years after infection with the coronavirus, shedding new light on the long-term neurological and psychiatric aspects of the virus.
The study’s findings were a mix of good and bad news, said Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Oxford and the senior author of the study. Among the reassuring aspects was the quick resolution of symptoms such as depression and anxiety.
Between 7 million and 23 million people in the United States, according to recent government estimates, have long covid — a catchall term for a wide range of symptoms including fatigue, breathlessness and anxiety that persist weeks and months after the acute infection has subsided. Those numbers are expected to rise as the coronavirus settles in as an endemic disease.
The study group, which included 185,000 children and 242,000 older adults, revealed that risks differed according to age, with people 65 and older at greatest risk of lasting neuropsychiatric effects.
Six months after infection, children were not found to be at increased risk of mood disorders, although they remained at greater risk of brain fog, insomnia, stroke and epilepsy. None of those effects were permanent for children. With epilepsy, which is extremely rare, the increased risk was larger.
The study’s reliance on a trove of de-identified electronic health data raised some cautions, particularly considering the tumultuous time of the pandemic. Tracking long-term outcomes may be hard when patients may have sought care through many different health systems, including some outside the TriNetX network.
Taquet said the researchers used several means of assessing the data, including making sure it reflected what was already known about the pandemic, such as the drop in death rates during the omicron wave.
The study follows earlier research from the same group, which reported last year that a third of covid patients experienced mood disorders, strokes or dementia six months after infection. | 2022-08-19T21:45:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New study suggests covid increases risks of brain disorders - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/19/long-covid-brain-effects/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/19/long-covid-brain-effects/ |
Mehmet Oz’s problem isn’t the memes. It’s the authenticity.
Mehmet Oz, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, steps off the stage during a Republican Jewish Coalition event in Philadelphia on Aug. 17. (Matt Rourke/AP)
Mehmet Oz is one of those candidates where you can’t figure out why he’s running.
Why does he want this? He’s wealthy. He was famous. He had already reached the end of one of the many paths that leads to the American Dream, parlaying low-key charisma and his medical degree into a comfortable and lucrative career. So why is he seeking to be elected to the Senate from Pennsylvania? Why does he want to be one of 100 senators in a divided chamber?
His website leads with that question, in fact. Why is he running? Well, because: “America’s heartbeat is in a code red in need of a defibrillator to shock it back to life.” He was a cardiologist, you see.
The explanation continues from there, centering mostly on the coronavirus pandemic.
“The American public was patronized and misled instead of empowered,” Oz — endorsed by Donald Trump — writes. He laments the “at least half a million American people” who died from covid-19 (more than a million have), saying that many of those deaths were preventable.
“I tried to fund clinical trials to re-purpose an already widely used drug for possible benefits against Covid-19, but they were banned,” the essay continues, suggesting that this was part of a pattern of expert voices being silenced. The incident to which he refers appears to be his embrace of hydroxychloroquine.
It’s not uncommon for a candidate’s website to lead with a discussion of the prompt for his or her candidacy. But, again, this question is more salient for Oz than others. He was famous! He had money! Why does he want this?
The question comes up in part because it’s not clear that Oz particularly likes running for office. In July, Politico ran an article questioning why his campaign hadn’t begun, well, campaigning, given that he’d already locked up the nomination in May. A few weeks after the Politico piece, Fox News polling reinforced why Oz needed to do better. He was trailing his opponent, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, which wasn’t good. But, worse, only about a third of Republicans expressed enthusiasm about voting for him. By contrast, three-quarters of Democrats were enthusiastic about Fetterman.
All of that was before Oz’s particularly bad past few weeks. Fetterman’s been hammering him repeatedly (and cleverly) as a carpetbagger: a resident of New Jersey parachuting in to win a Senate seat. That Oz has homes in both states doesn’t help — nor does the recent flap over just how many properties Oz owns. (He assured everyone that it was only 10.) And then there was l’affaire des crudité, in which a cringe-y video from April suddenly resurfaced and became a target of a truly impressive number of jokes. Fox News host Tucker Carlson tried to score points off it, which is not a good sign.
The lesson here, though, is that all of this is of a piece. Oz’s hard-to-rationalize campaign and his string of stumbles (and some trips) are all downstream from the same thing: Oz isn’t doing a good job of conveying authenticity.
Look, it’s easy to stereotype Pennsylvanians. My family lives in Pittsburgh (after stints in Johnstown and other places), and I’m pretty familiar with the rhythm and energy of the place. Pennsylvanians often like to lean into this sort of New-Yorker-slash-Midwesterner realist vibe, conveying a sense of salt-of-the-Earth sensibleness that’s coupled with a little sports-talk-radio color.
It is very much how Fetterman presents himself — and convincingly. He’s a politician and every politician is fake to some degree, but Fetterman has been able to bat away questions about how real he actually is. That’s helped enormously by running against Oz, whose vibe is very much not Pennsylvanian. It’s not Jersey, either, but more what he actually is: a rich celebrity who has been in a lot of makeup chairs.
Donald Trump was a rich celebrity, too. But even with his incessant reliance on falsehoods and misinformation, he represented himself authentically. He was a brash, loud, gaudy rich guy, but his alliance with working-class America was centered not on economic class but on worldview. He didn’t hide his wealth; in 2016, he even leveraged it to claim that he knew how the systems of power and money worked and could therefore disrupt them. But he often authentically hated all the things that his base hated, justifiably or not, and that came through.
A column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this week evaluated Oz on similar terrain. Its author, Salena Zito, became famous for her articulation of the above element of Trump’s appeal. But despite the generous frame — that Oz wants to leverage anti-elite sentiment — the article did not convey a strong sense that Oz was likely to be successful. The crudité guy is going to out anti-elite Fetterman, who literally wears hoodies and baggy shorts in every waking moment?
All of this is admittedly qualitative. But it’s not unimportant. In an interview published this week, former Missouri secretary of state Jason Kander described how his own Senate campaign in 2016 — in which he narrowly lost to a Republican incumbent in that red state — depended on his authentic representation.
“I got famous for the gun ad,” he said, referring to an ad in which he assembled a rifle while blindfolded, “and people thought that the gun ad was me somehow throwing an olive branch to pro-gun voters. It wasn’t — it was a full-throated argument for gun control.”
“But it was a cultural message, and that message was ‘Hey. You and I don’t agree. But you can see how I reached my conclusion, and by the way, we would get along fine. I could show up at your neighborhood, and I could drink beer with you and your buddies, and whenever I left, you’d be like 'that guy is all right’,” he continued. “And that’s what most of politics is when it comes to winning over persuadable voters.”
Again: this stuff can be overstated! A lot of candidates who present as authentic to voters get crushed. Kander lost. But everything that’s tripped up Oz in recent weeks is downstream from that same thing. He thinks people are worried about buying crudité? He owns how many properties? He’s not even from here?
And that, in turn, exacerbates the original question. Why does he want to serve in the Senate and why does he want to do so from this particular state?
Cook Political Report this week updated its projection in the Senate race to succeed retiring Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R) to suggest that it was no longer a toss-up. In 2016, Pennsylvania narrowed backed Donald Trump. In 2020, it narrowly backed Joe Biden. Cook’s estimation, it seems, is that Fetterman is more likely to follow in that pattern than is Oz. | 2022-08-19T21:46:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mehmet Oz’s problem isn’t the memes. It’s the authenticity. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/oz-pennsylvania-republicans-fetterman/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/oz-pennsylvania-republicans-fetterman/ |
The 13 regions at the moon’s South Pole are a long way from where Neil Armstrong explored
NASA identified the 13 regions at the moon's south pole where it would like to land astronauts as part of its Artemis program. (NASA)
NASA has yet to launch the rocket that would carry astronauts to the moon, and it hasn’t yet selected the crew that would explore the lunar surface as part of its Artemis program. But it has already identified where on the moon the astronauts would land.
The space agency announced Friday that it has selected 13 possible regions at the South Pole of the moon, where there is ice in the permanently shadowed craters, and is a long way from the territory explored by Neil Armstrong and the other Apollo astronauts.
The first human mission to land on the moon in some 50 years is now scheduled for as early as 2025, and would be the first crewed lunar landing since the last of the Apollo missions in 1972. NASA has vowed to return humans to the lunar surface — an audacious plan born during the Trump administration that has been embraced by the Biden White House.
While it has suffered some setbacks and delays, the program is the first deep-space, human exploration program since Apollo to survive subsequent administrations. But unlike Apollo, Artemis is designed to create a permanent presence on and around the moon. And NASA has forged ahead with a sense of urgency, as China also aims to send astronauts to the moon.
In a briefing Friday, NASA officials said they chose the landing sites using data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter — a robotic spacecraft that has been mapping the lunar surface since 2009 — as well as other studies of the moon.
“Selecting these regions means we are one giant leap closer to returning humans to the moon for the first time since Apollo,” Mark Kirasich, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for the Artemis campaign development division, said in a statement. “When we do, it will be unlike any mission that’s come before as astronauts venture into dark areas previously unexplored by humans and lay the groundwork for future long-term stays.”
NASA had already announced it was going to return to the lunar South Pole. But the specific sites, all in a cluster of six degrees latitude of the South Pole, were chosen, NASA said, because they provide safe landing spots that are close enough to permanently shadowed regions to allow crew to conduct a moonwalk there as part of their six-and-a-half-day stay on the moon.
That, NASA said, would allow astronauts “to collect samples and conduct scientific analysis in an uncompromised area, yielding important information about the depth, distribution and composition of water ice that was confirmed at the moon’s South Pole.”
Water is important to sustain human life, but also because its component parts — hydrogen and oxygen — can be used for rocket propellant.
The Apollo missions went to the equatorial regions of the moon, where there are long stretches of daylight — for as long as two weeks at a time. The South Pole, by contrast, may only have only a few days of light, making the missions more challenging and limiting the windows of when NASA can launch.
“It’s a long way from the Apollo sites,” said Sarah Noble, Artemis lunar science lead. “Now we’re going somewhere completely different.”
The announcement comes as NASA is preparing the first of its Artemis missions, now scheduled for Aug. 29. That flight, known as Artemis I, would mark the first launch of NASA’s massive Space Launch System rocket that would send the Orion crew capsule, without any astronauts on board, into orbit around the moon for a 42-day mission.
Earlier this week, the space agency rolled the rocket and spacecraft to pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and officials say everything remains on track for a two-hour launch window that opens at 8:33 a.m. NASA has reserved backup launch dates for Sept. 2 and 5 if there is a delay.
One of the main objectives of the flight is to test Orion’s heat shield, Mike Sarafin, NASA’s Artemis mission manager, has said. The heat shield is intended to protect Orion and future crew from the extreme temperatures it will encounter when it enters Earth’s atmosphere at 24,500 mph, or Mach 32.
The mission would be followed by a flight with four astronauts who would orbit the moon, but not land, as soon as 2024. A human landing, the first since the last of the Apollo missions in 1972, is now tentatively scheduled for 2025.
That mission depends on a number of factors, including the development of SpaceX’s Starship rocket and spacecraft, which would rendezvous with Orion in lunar orbit and then ferry astronauts to and from the surface of the moon.
“I feel like we’re on a roller coaster that’s about to pass the top of the largest hill,” Jacob Bleacher, NASA’s chief exploration scientist, told reporters Friday. “Buckle up, everyone, we’re going for a ride to the moon.” | 2022-08-19T21:48:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NASA reveals where it wants the next Americans to land on the moon - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/19/nasa-moon-landing-spots-artemis/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/19/nasa-moon-landing-spots-artemis/ |
D.C. to resume scheduling second doses of monkeypox vaccine
Workers sit outside of D.C. Health’s first monkeypox vaccination clinic in June. (Gavino Garay/Reuters)
The District on Saturday will resume giving second doses of the two-dose monkeypox vaccine regimen by using an intradermal injection technique that will stretch limited supplies of the vaccine.
The city will also begin administering first doses using this technique, which uses less vaccine than the previous method, at its Friday walk-up clinics and clinics held by partner agencies that already have relationships with clients who may be at risk for monkeypox.
Vaccinations offered through the new intradermal strategy “elicit a similar immune response and provide the same level of protection as the previous administration technique, while allowing for additional doses of vaccine to be made available,” D.C. Health officials said in a statement Friday afternoon.
Public health officials previously announced plans to give first doses only as a strategy to blanket the at-risk community with some protection, critical considering the city’s status as a hot spot with more cases per capita than any state. The city now has 350 cases of monkeypox as of Wednesday.
But the federal government this week said a single dose could be turned into five when injected intradermally, between the layers of skin rather than below the skin, allowing more people to get vaccinated with a limited supply.
Starting Saturday, residents who are eligible for a second dose will receive invitations from the District to make appointments.
The D.C. Department of Health this week began publishing monkeypox data online, including case counts and demographic information about who is testing positive and who is seeking the vaccine. There has been a disparity between the number of Black men testing positive and the number getting vaccinated, which is one data point that prompted D.C. to change vaccination eligibility criteria.
Instead of limiting vaccines to the most at-risk — gay and bisexual men who had recently had multiple sexual partners — the agency expanded eligibility to people of any sexual orientation or gender who have had multiple sexual partners in the past two weeks. | 2022-08-19T22:24:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. to resume scheduling second doses of monkeypox vaccine - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/dc-monkeypox-vaccine-doses/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/dc-monkeypox-vaccine-doses/ |
Family of slain library police officer demands accountability
Maurica Manyan, 25, was killed by a retired D.C. police lieutenant who was supposed to be training her in what witnesses described as a joke gone wrong.
Maurica Manyan's son, Damauri, holds a picture of his mom at a news conference Friday. Manyan, 25, was shot and killed during a training session conducted by a retired D.C. officer at the Anacostia Library. (Emily Davies/TWP)
Standing across the street from the library where their 25-year-old daughter, sister and mother was killed three weeks ago, family members of late library police officer Maurica Manyan criticized the D.C. government for its role in her death and vowed to fight until each person involved in the incident is “held responsible to the fullest extent of the law.”
“It’s tragic we have to be here, but I had to come support my family,” said her brother, Radcliffe Manyan, voice shaking. “I can’t really talk too much.”
Manyan was fatally shot Aug. 4 during training to become a full-fledged library police officer. The incident occurred at the end of a training session at the Anacostia neighborhood library, when the class was posing for a photo and Manyan had paused to fix her hair and take off her face mask, according to charging documents. At that point, retired D.C. police lieutenant Jesse Porter walked out of the photo line, picked up his handgun, and shot her in the chest, according to the documents. He has been charged with involuntary manslaughter.
Manyan’s attorneys and family blamed District officials for allowing Porter into the library with a loaded gun, which they said was not necessary for the training. They said they are investigating which policies and procedures were violated and by whom.
Hours after Manyan was killed, the D.C. library’s public safety director submitted his resignation. George Williams, the library spokesman, declined to provide Douglass Morency’s resignation letter — calling it a personnel document. D.C. officials declined to comment Friday, citing an ongoing investigation.
Morency on Friday said his “resignation had absolutely nothing to do with this tragic incident.” He said he accepted a job offer at another organization on July 28, and was out of the country on a preapproved vacation at the time of the incident. Morency said he learned of the shooting “via text messages from friends” on Friday, the day after he submitted his resignation.
On Friday, Manyan’s legal team said they are trying to “get our hands on the communications surrounding that resignation,” which she suggested was forced. They have not yet filed a lawsuit.
Witnesses interviewed by police said Porter meant to be playful and thought he picked up his training gun and not a live firearm, according to charging documents. But Manyan’s family and legal counsel said Friday that they believe the shooting was a result of more than a joke gone tragically wrong.
“We want to make it very clear that we are taking the position that this is not an accident,” said Chelsea Lewis, an attorney representing the family.
Lewis condemned a judge for releasing Porter on home detention soon after the incident, saying the retired lieutenant was receiving “white-glove treatment.” Porter, 58, left the D.C. police force in 2020 after about three decades. Library officials said they hired Porter’s private company — Porter Consulting and Expert Tactical Training — to train the library police. His attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
Manyan will be laid to rest Saturday. It is unclear if her son, Damauri, knows that she’s gone.
On Thursday, Damauri saw a picture of his mom and asked his grandma, Sherene Manyan, if he could send her a text.
“I need to tell you something,” Sherene Manyan recalled saying to the 4-year-old, taking away the phone.
He looked at her, eyes wide. “No, no, no,” he replied.
Sherene Manyan obliged and stayed quiet.
On Friday, Damauri clutched a framed picture of his “Maur Maur,” cradling it like a baby. His shirt read “Mom’s Little Man.” | 2022-08-19T22:24:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Maurica Manyan's family wants more answers into her fatal shooting at a D.C. library - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/maurica-mannyan-shooting-library-officer-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/maurica-mannyan-shooting-library-officer-dc/ |
Youngkin seeks nearly $400M in tax cuts, takes swipes at Washington
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin spoke at a joint meeting of the legislative money committees in Richmond on Aug. 19. (Daniel Sangjib Min/AP)
RICHMOND — Gov. Glenn Youngkin vowed on Friday to give Virginians nearly $400 million in additional tax relief, with the potential 2024 presidential candidate contrasting his state’s strong financial position with what he described as Washington’s failures to budget responsibly and rein in inflation.
In an address to legislative money committees, Youngkin (R) reported that the state wrapped up its fiscal year on June 30 with a $3.2 billion cash surplus — something he attributed to over-taxation imposed by his Democratic predecessors and efficiencies he has brought to state government.
While some of that money was anticipated and already spoken for in the current budget — for uses ranging from a highway widening project to a rainy-day fund deposit — Youngkin said he plans to set aside $397 million of it for unspecified tax cuts.
That would be on top of the $4 billion in tax cuts included in the two-year budget that took effect July 1.
“It’s not our money. It belongs to the hard-working taxpayers of Virginia,” Youngkin said in a 25-minute speech in which he frequently knocked national leaders for “recklessly” running deficits and stoking “skyrocketing inflation.”
Youngkin said he intends to assign the $397 million to a “taxpayer relief” fund when he proposes adjustments to the current budget in December. The General Assembly will take up his plan in the session that begins in January.
Legislators from both parties who gathered for the governor’s remarks shared his upbeat assessment of the state’s finances, with Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Janet D. Howell (D-Fairfax) calling the financial report “the best I’ve heard in my 30 years” in the legislature.
But she thought it “premature” to promise tax cuts nearly six months before the General Assembly starts tinkering with the two-year budget approved earlier this year.
“We’re in such unsettled waters,” she told reporters. “Hopefully we’ll be able to do some tax relief, but it’s not necessarily in the bag and I wouldn’t want people to get their hopes up.”
In remarks to reporters after his speech, Youngkin stood by his recent criticism of the Department of Justice and FBI for its search of former president Donald Trump’s home, where federal agents seized sets of classified documents.
Youngkin had noted in his speech that the state budget boosted law enforcement spending by $400 million, saying “Demeaning police is no way forward. In Virginia, we support our law enforcement officers.”
A reporter asked Youngkin if that support extended to the FBI and Justice Department given his tweet in the aftermath of the search that said: “Selective, politically motivated actions have no place in our democracy.”
Youngkin replied that he thought Attorney General Merrick Garland had taken “a very inconsistent approach to his job,” suggesting that he had given a pass to protesters outside Supreme Court justices’ homes.
Youngkin sidestepped a question about one of his appointees to the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors, Bert Ellis. The Cavalier Daily reported this week that as a student at U-Va. in the 1970s, Ellis helped bring William B. Shockley, a scientist who claimed Black people were genetically inferior to White people, to campus for a debate.
Youngkin said he had not seen the reporting but seemed to suggest that it was unfair to judge the 1970s controversy by today’s standards. He noted that the reporting on Ellis been done by “the same newspaper that wants to remove Thomas Jefferson in all regards from the University of Virginia.”
“I think we’ve got to get past this,” he said. “I think the reality is that we had Founding Fathers in this nation that were imperfect.”
Ellis did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In his address to lawmakers, Youngkin saved his swipes for Washington and painted a rosy picture of bipartisan relations in the state Capitol, despite early clashes with Democrats.
“I am confident that when we put politics aside and forget about who gets the credit, we will once again get this done together,” he said.
At least a few legislators from both parties rolled their eyes at Youngkin’s references to Washington, seeing them as further evidence that the governor who assumed his first elective office just seven months ago is exploring a run for president.
A former private equity executive who poured $20 million of his personal fortune into last year’s race, Youngkin vaulted from political unknown to oft-mentioned 2024 contender after winning seemingly blue Virginia.
He has been publicly coy about his intentions but has been meeting with Republican megadonors and making out-of-state political appearances.
“I don’t know why he feels the need to blame Washington, D.C. to give a report about the state economy going well,” Sen. Adam Ebbin (D-Alexandria) said after the speech. “We have Washington to thank for helping weather the storm of the pandemic and the reason that our state is in such good financial shape, in part, is due to the [pandemic] aid from the federal government.”
Youngkin said the $3.2 billion surplus was the result of $2 billion in “unplanned” revenue and $1.2 billion in unspent appropriations.
The state has known for months that revenue would exceed the conservative forecasts made in the depths of the coronavirus pandemic. Youngkin noted that the state budget already counts on much of that money.
Youngkin told reporters he was not sure what types of taxes he planned to reduce. He also clarified that he would not seek to implement all $397 million in tax breaks in the current budget cycle, saying, “Some of that tax reduction will take place over time.”
“This $400 million is a down payment,” he said.
Senate Minority Leader Thomas K. Norment (R-James City) said he’d support putting some money aside in a tax relief fund, but spoke of that money almost as an extension of the state’s rainy day fund, noting that the legislature would have “some control” over how it would be used.
Del. Barry Knight (R-Virginia Beach), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, agreed with the goal — and the notion that legislators could shift gears if need be.
“It’s a wonderful place to park $400 million,” he said. “It kind of sets the tone for what we may be looking at going forward.” | 2022-08-19T22:24:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Youngkin seeks nearly $400M in tax cuts, takes swipes at Washington - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/youngkin-tax-cuts-budget/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/youngkin-tax-cuts-budget/ |
An outbreak has sickened 65 people, with symptoms that include diarrhea, fever and vomiting. No deaths have been reported.
A sign in front of a Wendy's restaurant on Aug. 10 in Petaluma, Calif (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Several high-profile E. coli outbreaks have been linked to romaine lettuce. The Food Safety Modernization Act, which was signed into law in 2011, required farmers to test irrigation water, which can be contaminated with feces and bacteria. But the FDA has delayed its implementation.
“E. coli outbreaks associated with lettuce, specifically the ‘prewashed’ and ‘ready-to-eat’ varieties, are by no means a new phenomenon,” said Bill Marler, a lawyer who specializes in foodborne illness cases. “In fact, the frequency with which this country’s fresh produce consuming public has been hit by outbreaks of pathogenic bacteria is astonishing.”
What to know about E. coli symptoms and how to prevent infection
The outbreak joins several other high-profile incidents of allegedly contaminated food this year. The FDA and CDC investigated a multistate outbreak of salmonella infections linked to certain Jif brand peanut butter products produced at a facility in Lexington, Kentucky, prompting many recalls. Abbott Nutrition recalled 5 million units of baby formula after at least four infants became sick, two of whom died. A listeria outbreak related to Big Olaf Creamery of Sarasota, Fla., led to ice cream recalls in many states, and organic strawberries were the source of a hepatitis A outbreak this spring.
The source of the recent E. coli cases has been slow to emerge as state and local public health officials have interviewed people about the foods they ate in the week before they got sick.
The CDC is trying to determine the full scope of the outbreak, which agency officials said could extend beyond the four known states. Public health investigators are using the PulseNet system, a national database of DNA fingerprints of bacteria that cause foodborne illnesses, to identify illnesses that may be part of this outbreak.
The CDC estimates that 48 million people get sick each year in the United States, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases.
Foodborne illness results in $3 billion in health-care costs. Nearly half of the illnesses come from produce, according to the CDC. Then, in descending order, it is meat and poultry; dairy and eggs; and fish and shellfish. | 2022-08-19T23:16:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Wendy's is likely source of multistate E. coli outbreak, CDC says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/19/ecoli-midwest-romaine-wendy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/19/ecoli-midwest-romaine-wendy/ |
‘Neighborhood beef’ behind fatal shooting of teen at ‘Moechella’, judge says
A 15-year-old was charged with first degree murder while armed in the June 19 slaying of Chase Poole at the music festival around 14th and U streets.
Emergency responders convene at the intersection of 14th and U streets after the June 19 shooting that killed a 15-year-old boy and wounded three others. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)
A 15-year-old fatally shot during the Moechella music festival on 14th and U streets earlier this summer was killed in a “neighborhood beef,” according to a D.C. Superior Court judge who ordered the teen suspected in the shooting to remain detained by the city’s Department’s Youth and Rehabilitation Services.
The order from Judge Darlene M. Soltys came Friday after she heard nearly an hour of testimony from a D.C. police detective investigating the killing of 15-year-old Chase Poole.
The hearing was the first time a potential motive was revealed publicly in the shooting that stunned the city and left three others wounded in June.
The Washington Post was permitted to watch the court proceeding on the condition that the identity of the teenage suspect, who prosecutors charged as a juvenile in the murder, was not revealed. The Post does not generally identify juvenile suspects in criminal cases.
The teen suspect’s parents and older sister sat in the front row of the courtroom as he sat at a table next to his attorney and across from the judge and prosecutor. The teen’s attorney, Lydia Wade, entered a plea of not guilty, or not involved, on behalf of her client.
Prosecutors charged the teen, also 15 and of Northeast Washington, with multiple offenses, including first- and second-degree murder while armed, illegal possession of a weapon and multiple assault charges. A police officer was shot in the leg and two other adults were also injured that night.
Teen killed, D.C. officer shot after concert linked to Juneteenth celebration
The June 19 day-long festival drew thousands of people to the popular neighborhood in Northwest Washington. The music celebration was billed as a peaceful demonstration to elevate Black American culture and protest gentrification during the Juneteenth celebration.
As music-loving crowds continued to grow, with people dancing in the streets and sidewalks to music blaring that summer Sunday afternoon, police began trying to shut down the festival about 8:30 p.m., arresting one person for possessing a BB gun. Then, about 8:48 p.m. gunshots were fired. Surveillance video footage captured a person with his hands and arms extended, shooting into the crowd and sending revelers scrambling.
D.C. Police Detective Gabriel Truby testified that four 9-millimeter shell casings were found at the scene. Chase, whose body was found lying over a concrete slab on a nearby Metro bus island at 14th and U streets, was struck once in the upper body by one of the bullets, Truby said. The seventh-grader died later that evening at a hospital.
For nearly two months, police had been searching for the shooter who Truby said investigators identified from security footage that captured the incident. Truby testified that after the suspect was seen shooting the gun, another video captured the same person tucking the gun in his waistband before running up to 14th and V streets.
Truby said detectives were able to identify the teenager as the suspected shooter by his clothing and hairstyle. The shooter was wearing a black hoodie with the word “NASA” written on a sleeve and across the chest. The shooter was also wearing Nike Air Jordan 5 sneakers and had dreadlocks that extended to his ear. Detectives used footage from several surveillance cameras as well as the body-camera footage of one officer who was nearby when the shooting occurred to identify the suspected shooter. Trudy said police then showed the video clip of the teen to two individuals who both identified the teen as the suspect.
U Street ‘Moechella’ event shooting investigation
Truby also testified that days after the shooting, the suspect tried to trade a gun on Instagram and was holding a gun that looked similar to the type of firearm used in the shooting. And about a week after the shooting, Truby testified, the suspect was in a local music video wearing the same hoodie and sneakers seen on the gunman at the time of the shooting.
But Wade argued the detective did not provide any photographs or videos that showed her client involved in the shooting. Wade said witnesses who identified her client only identified him as the person in the video and photograph attending the festival, not any videos of him shooting at the concert.
Wade also argued there were no eyewitnesses or DNA linking her client to the shooting. Wade pointed out that based on Truby’s testimony, police officers chased down and grabbed another person who they initially believed was the gunman minutes after the shooting. But Truby said that person was not the shooter and was never charged.
Prosecutor Jeanine Howard argued the teenager was a danger to the community and had drastically cut his hair to alter his appearance during the time police were searching for him.
The judge determined there was enough evidence to hold the teenager in a youth detention center until trial.
“I have evidence,” Soltys said, “to believe this person killed a 15-year-old kid and wounded three other people in the middle of a music festival in the middle of our city. I have no choice but to order detention to protect the community.” | 2022-08-19T23:16:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ‘Neighborhood beef’ behind fatal shooting of Chase Poole, 15, at Moechella, judge says. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/chase-poole-moechella-festival-music/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/chase-poole-moechella-festival-music/ |
Kyle Fitzsimons, seen with a bloody face in a widely shared photo from the Capitol riot, pushed his way to the front line and assaulted three police officers, according to testimony
Sgt. Phuson Nguyen, a 19-year veteran of the D.C. police, said he had already been hit once with some sort of chemical spray; he moved to the back of the tunnel and cleared his eyes, then returned to the front line with a gas mask on. Surveillance and police body-cam video played in court showed Fitzsimons reaching to pull Nguyen’s mask off while another man sprayed what Nguyen thought was bear spray directly into his face. Then Fitzsimons released the mask back onto Nguyen’s face, trapping the chemical irritant inside, the officer said.
“At that point I was choking under the mask,” Nguyen testified. “I also got knocked down at the same time. … In my head, I thought that was it for me. I thought that’s where I’m going to die. … In my head, I told myself, ‘If you want to see your family again, you need to gather yourself.’” He said he broke the seal on his mask and a colleague dragged him to safety.
Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, who has testified before Congress about his ordeal, said Fitzsimons grabbed his left arm and tried to yank him out of the tunnel while he was leaning in the opposite direction, and video showed the two men struggling. Pain shot through his left shoulder, “one of the worst pains I felt in my life,” Gonell said. He said he suffered a partially torn rotator cuff and labrum, underwent surgery, and now faces a forced medical retirement from the Capitol Police.
D.C. Officer Sarah Beaver was also in the tunnel, after retreating from an earlier lost skirmish on the Capitol’s perimeter. Video showed Fitzsimons hurling an unstrung archery bow, which he told a reporter he brought to the District as a sign of peace, into the tunnel and hitting Beaver in the head. She was wearing a helmet and was unhurt, though briefly staggered. But spending hours in the small tunnel, Beaver said, “I couldn’t breathe and I was afraid if I passed out, I was going to die.”
Fitzsimons’s attorney, Natasha Taylor-Smith, a federal public defender from Philadelphia, said video evidence did not clearly show Fitzsimons grabbing Nguyen’s gas mask or Gonell’s shield. She said that Nguyen was “simply mistaken” about which rioter grabbed the mask, and that Fitzsimons was severely stunned by chemical spray coming from both sides when he allegedly snagged Gonell’s arm or shield.
Because the photo of a bloodied Fitzsimons was widely published, Taylor-Smith said, he “has become the poster child for January 6.” She said he did not bring any weapons to the Capitol, though prosecutors counted his bow as a weapon, and she criticized Gonell, saying he wrote a book, conducted multiple interviews and tried to profit from his experience. Gonell denied that.
Though the assault and obstruction charges carry maximum sentences of 20 years, federal sentencing guidelines suggest a possible range of 63 to 78 months in prison for Fitzsimons if he is convicted. The range could rise to 87 to 108 months if Gonell’s shoulder injury is classified as “permanent.”
Fitzsimons did not attempt to conceal his distrust of the results of the 2020 election or his desire to be heard in Washington. In December 2020, he posted a request on the “Lebanon Maine Truth Seekers” Facebook page trying to organize a caravan to D.C. on Jan. 6, the page’s administrator said. He got no takers.
Fitzsimons also left three voice-mail messages for Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) that month, Golden’s chief of staff testified, one of which started, “So what’s going on with the election fraud?” Fitzsimons continued, according to the voice mail played in court: “I will be down in D.C. on the 6th. I don’t think I’ll see you there. Maybe I will. Maybe I will.”
When Fitzsimons returned to Maine after Jan. 6, he called into the Lebanon Select Board meeting and regaled the board with his experience. “I couldn’t imagine a more peaceful revolution,” Fitzsimons said. He also gave an interview to the Rochester Voice, based in New Hampshire, and provided pictures of himself at the Capitol but neglected to mention his hand-to-hand combat with police, according to prosecutors.
Fitzsimons, a butcher by trade, told the Voice’s Harrison Thorp that after he attended President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, he went to his car and put on his white butcher’s coat, with his name embroidered on the chest, along with his rubber apron and a fur pelt. He also said he carried an unstrung archery bow “to signify his peaceful intent.”
He was soon captured on video climbing the stage set up for the pending inauguration of Joe Biden and holding the bow. Fitzsimons was seen on video shouting “Freedom” before winding up at the West Terrace tunnel. During his confrontation with Nguyen, the video shows an unidentified man reaching over Fitzsimons’s shoulder with a powerful spray and unleashing it near Fitzsimons’s face. At the same time, a police officer was also aiming spray at Fitzsimons, the officer’s body-cam video showed.
Another protester who attacked Gonell, Mark Ponder, smashed a pole into the officer’s shield, shattering the pole and the shield. Gonell spoke at Ponder’s sentencing in July, when Ponder received a 63-month prison term.
Beaver said that all manner of police equipment had been ripped off officers and then hurled back into the tunnel at the police. “I was hit with police batons,” she said. “I saw a gun flying into the tunnel. Fire extinguishers. I got a whole can of bear spray.”
“No one ever got through the West Terrace tunnel that day,” Beaver said. “We made sure that didn’t happen.” | 2022-08-19T23:17:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kyle Fitzsimons TKTKTK of assaulting policeon Jan. 6 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/fitzsimons-jan6-trial-police-assault/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/19/fitzsimons-jan6-trial-police-assault/ |
Tim Scott’s book of miracles
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) holds a copy of his latest book, “America: A Redemption Story,” during a launch event at Seacoast Church in Mount Pleasant, S.C., on Aug. 6. (Meg Kinnard/AP)
The flaw that hampered Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) may surprise you. Until he was an adult, Scott had buck teeth so severe that his high school nickname was “Teet,” and his embarrassment a constant shadow.
Dr. Monte S. Harrington asked the young man how much he truly could afford to pay for braces, and an agreement was reached: Scott would pay $40/month until his braces came off. No wonder Scott seems always to be smiling. | 2022-08-19T23:17:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Tim Scott’s memoir shows how he finds hope in America' bleakest days - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/tim-scott-new-book/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/tim-scott-new-book/ |
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill on Aug. 2, 2022. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
As of that month, the committee disclosed spending just $23 million on ads, with more than $21 million going into text messages and more than $12 million to American Express credit card payments, whose ultimate purpose isn’t clear from the filings. The committee also spent at least $13 million on consultants, $9 million on debt payments and more than $7.9 million renting mailing lists, campaign finance data show.
Trump's dominance in GOP comes in focus, worrying some in party
The NRSC still has tens of millions of dollars in reserved airtime, and its next filing, which covers the month of July and is due to the FEC on Saturday, will show millions more in ad spending. On Friday the NRSC said it rebooked airtime in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona.
That big spending is coming from a super PAC aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), which this week announced a whopping $28 million rescue effort in Ohio, where Republican candidate J.D. Vance raised a dismal $1 million in the second quarter and has spent less than $400,000 on ads.
Pa. race no longer a tossup as Fetterman memes zero in on Oz's wealth
“Everything came together at once, and everyone woke up like, ‘Oh my God,’” said one Republican consultant. “It’s been an absolutely disastrous two weeks for GOP Senate stuff on all fronts.”
After The Washington Post discussed this story with the NRSC on Friday, five Senate campaigns reached out to praise the committee’s help.
Democrats more hopeful for midterms — but brace for GOP spending surge
Michael Scherer contributed reporting. | 2022-08-19T23:17:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | GOP spending under fire as Senate hopefuls seek rescue - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/gop-senate-rescue-midterms/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/19/gop-senate-rescue-midterms/ |
UPDATE 3-Unidentified attackers seize control of hotel in Somali capital
MOGADISHU — Unidentified armed attackers have taken control of a hotel in the Somali capital after two car bomb blasts and gunfire, police and intelligence officers said Friday.
“Two car bombs targeted Hotel Hayat. One hit a barrier near the hotel and then the other hit the gate of the hotel. We believe the fighters are inside the hotel,” a police officer who identified himself as Ahmed told Reuters.
Two intelligence officers, who did not want to be named, confirmed the incident.
Abdikadir Abdirahman, director and founder of Mogadishu’s Aamin ambulance services, told Reuters that they had so far carried nine wounded people away from the hotel.
There were no more details about casualties. A witness said that the explosions subsided and sporadic gunfire was still heard from the hotel’s direction.
The al-Qaeda-linked group al-Shabab group has claimed responsibility for the attack, according to a translation by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors Islamist militant groups’ statements. Al-Shabab has been fighting to topple the Somali government for more than 10 years. It wants to establish its own rule based on a strict interpretation of Islamic law.
“The unsung heroes of Somali Police Special Unit have rescued many people from Hayat Hotel in Mogadishu,” the agency later added. The agency also posted a picture showing smoke billowing from above the scene.
Friday’s assault is the first major attack since President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud took office in May.
Al-Shabab has claimed responsibility for similar attacks in the past. In August 2020, it said it was behind an attack on another hotel in Mogadishu in which at least 16 people were killed. | 2022-08-19T23:19:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | UPDATE 3-Unidentified attackers seize control of hotel in Somali capital - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/e7b93644-2002-11ed-8d30-84c409e82eb3_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/e7b93644-2002-11ed-8d30-84c409e82eb3_story.html |
Nicaragua arrests Catholic bishop in escalating crackdown on dissent
Ismael López Ocampo
A cross is seen outside La Merced church in the colonial city of Granada, Nicaragua, on Wednesday. (Oswaldo Rivas/AFP/Getty Images)
Spies, harassment, death threats: the Catholic Church in Nicaragua says it's being targeted by the government
Álvarez, 55, has recently been the most influential Catholic critic of the government, speaking out in radio and newspaper interviews about what he has condemned as Ortega’s authoritarian behavior. After his arrest, the archdiocese of Managua said his physical condition had deteriorated but “his courage and spirits are strong.”
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres is “very concerned by the severe closure of democratic and civic space in Nicaragua and recent actions against civil society organizations, including those of the Catholic Church,” a deputy spokesman told journalists on Friday, after the bishop’s arrest. He called on the Nicaraguan government to guarantee “freedoms of association, thought, conscience, and religion, and to release all people arbitrarily detained.”
Nicaragua strips universities' legal status in new crackdown on dissent
“With a pained, indignant heart I condemn the nighttime kidnapping of Monsignor Álvarez,” tweeted Báez, who is living in the United States. “Once again, the dictatorship has surpassed even its own evil and its diabolical spirit.”
Pope Francis has not commented publicly on the bishop’s detention or any other recent government moves against the Catholic Church, to the dismay of some Latin American human rights activists. The Vatican’s permanent observer to the Organization of American States, Monsignor Juan Antonio Cruz Serrano, expressed concern this month about the developments and called for dialogue.
Ortega, 76, helped lead the Marxist Sandinista revolution that triumphed in 1979, toppling the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship. He headed the government until 1990, and then returned to power in 2007. Last year, he won an election after eliminating all possible opposition. Human rights organizations say his government has detained more than 160 political prisoners.
The United Nations estimates that more than 120,000 Nicaraguans have fled the country since 2018, the largest exodus since the civil war of the 1980s.
Álvarez himself left the country during the civil war, moving to Guatemala, where he studied for the priesthood. In 2011, he was named bishop of Matagalpa, one of the least developed areas in Nicaragua. In 2015, he led major demonstrations against government plans to allow mining in a northern area of the country, charging that it would pollute the groundwater. The government backed off.
The bishop “went on horseback to the most remote parts of the mountains to visit the sick and celebrate Mass,” said Emiliano Chamorro, a journalist who accompanied him on several trips. “People love him. He’s a true pastor.” | 2022-08-20T00:00:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nicaragua's Ortega government arrests Catholic Bishop Rolando Álvarez - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/nicaragua-bishop-rolando-alvarez-arrest-ortega/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/nicaragua-bishop-rolando-alvarez-arrest-ortega/ |
Students wait outside Everest College in Industry, Calif., in April 2015, hoping to get their transcriptions and information on loan forgiveness and transferring credits to other schools. Everest was part of the now-defunct Corinthian Colleges, which had been accredited by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools. (Christine Armario/AP)
The federal government relies on accreditors to deem colleges worthy to participate in the federal student aid program. Without an accreditor’s seal of approval, students cannot obtain federal education loans that are critical for many schools, especially for-profit colleges.
In a statement, the accrediting council said it is “disappointed” by the department’s decision.
“We believe it is deeply flawed and that ACICS has been in substantial compliance with any objective, consistent, and reasonable interpretation of the recognition criteria,” the company said. “We are evaluating all of our options … including any decision to appeal the Deputy Secretary’s decision in federal district court.”
“The Deputy Secretary’s decision is not grounded in ACICS’s history or reputation, but rather its continued, long-standing inability to come into compliance with minimum standards expected of an accreditation agency over the course of years,” Kvaal said. “The story with ACICS is long.”
The council was once one of the nation’s largest college accreditors, with nearly 300 schools under its watch. Many of those colleges switched accreditors when the council lost its recognition in 2016, but some of the most troubled institutions remained.
Staffers took issue with the council’s accreditation of Reagan National University, a school in South Dakota that a USA Today investigation in 2020 revealed had no students, faculty or classrooms.
Another council-accredited school, Fairfax University of America — formerly known as Virginia International University — was nearly forced to close in 2019 after a state audit criticized its online education program. Education Department staffers questioned why the ACICS had failed to step up before state regulators intervened.
“It’s great to see the Department take this long-overdue action to protect students and taxpayers. We are talking about an entity that accredited a school that didn’t even exist and continues to rubber stamp some of the worst for-profit colleges,” said Eric Rothschild, director of litigation at the National Student Legal Defense Network. “Students count on accreditors to validate that the schools where they spend their time and money will meet a baseline level of quality. Today’s determination is an important step in that direction.” | 2022-08-20T00:48:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Education Dept. drops ACICS as a college accreditor, again - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/19/acics-accreditation-recognition-colleges/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/19/acics-accreditation-recognition-colleges/ |
FILE - Bill Paxton arrives at the Critics’ Choice Television Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on May 31, 2015, in Beverly Hills, Calif. The family of the late actor has agreed to settle a wrongful death lawsuit against a Los Angeles hospital and the surgeon who performed his heart surgery shortly before he died in 2017, according to a court filing Friday, Aug. 19, 2022. (Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File) | 2022-08-20T00:48:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bill Paxton family settles lawsuit with hospital over death - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/bill-paxton-family-settles-lawsuit-with-hospital-over-death/2022/08/19/2aba115c-2017-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/bill-paxton-family-settles-lawsuit-with-hospital-over-death/2022/08/19/2aba115c-2017-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Nikki Rachelson remembers waking up in the middle of the night one summer and knowing something was wrong. It was Aug. 6, 1955, in Boston, and her head was pounding. Her body ached.
“I bet I have polio,” she told her husband. A vaccine had just come out for the virus. But Rachelson, 25, was too old to be eligible.
Global Polio Eradication
Nikki Rachelson in the early 1950s before contracting polio.
Courtesy of Barbara Rachelson
A painful spinal tap at a nearby hospital confirmed Rachelson’s fears.
She spent six months in the hospital often thinking she might die. She never regained full control of her legs. That hardly slowed her down. And she reveled in being able to drive.
“We just tried to live our life as normally as we could,” she said.
Rachelson with her daughters in Greeley, Pa., in the early 1970s.
Long considered a virus of the past in most countries, polio is charting an ominous return, cropping up in sewage from Britain to Jerusalem and even paralyzing one man in Rockland County, N.Y., this summer.
The virus, transmitted by mouth or through feces, reproduces in the blood and then invades the nervous system. At its worst, it attacks the anterior horn cells, which tell the muscles what to do.
Killing those cells is like “cutting the wire to a lamp,” said Walter A. Orenstein, an associate director at the Emory Vaccine Center focused on polio eradication. “The electricity is out and the muscle becomes flaccid. You can’t use it.”
Before the vaccine came, polio infection was a dreaded specter. In the United States, 20,000 people were paralyzed each year, including a president.
“It was just a terrible disease,” Orenstein said. During outbreaks “people would panic. Pools closed. Activities decreased.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941. He became paralyzed after contracting polio in 1921.
M.L. Suckley/AP/FDR Library
West German singer and actress Heidi Brühl stands next to children ailing from spinal polio at an air base in Munich on Oct. 19, 1958.
Heinrich Sanden Sr.
A 27-year-old woman suffering from polio is placed in an iron lung in Syracuse, N.Y., on Nov. 30, 1954. She was later transferred to a smaller respirator to give birth to her daughter.
In April 1955, a teary President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced a polio vaccine made by American virologist Jonas Salk had been developed.
People lined up for the injections in droves. The shot was quickly administered in much of the Western hemisphere and Europe, amid a mass vaccination campaign, with celebrities and public officials urging the public to get the jab.
First- and second-graders at St. Vibiana's school were among the first to get vaccinated against polio with the Salk vaccine in Los Angeles on April 18, 1955.
Elvis Presley receives a Salk polio vaccine shot in New York City on Oct. 28, 1956.
The line of people waiting for polio shots at Municipal Stadium in Evansville, Ind., in 1959.
Shortly after Salk’s announcement, another scientist, Albert Sabin, rolled out his vaccine, which was given orally. Since so many people in the United States were already inoculated, Sabin traveled to the Soviet Union — at the height of the Cold War — to vaccinate tens of millions of children, said David M. Oshinsky, a professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the author of “Polio: An American Story.”
Albert Sabin, who discovered a polio vaccine, asks 5-year-old Luiz Inacio Gama to open wide at an anti-polio hospital.
While the Salk injection is most common in the United States and Europe, the Sabin vaccine, also known as the oral polio vaccine, became the inoculation of choice in places without robust health care access. It’s easy to administer. You don’t need needles, and you don’t have to train people or keep it at a certain temperature. “All you do is put a little droplet on a kid’s tongue,” said Oshinsky.
A girl swallows a lump of sugar coated with a dose of the Sabin polio vaccine, served in a paper cup in Atlanta in 1962.
Salk and Sabin’s vaccines helped eradicate live polio in much of the world. Billions of doses have been administered.
A child cries as she receives the polio vaccine during a polio eradication campaign in Mumbai in 2005.
India, one of the world’s most populous countries, reported its last polio case in 2011. The virus was declared no longer endemic in Nigeria, which has a population of more than 200 million people, in 2015.
But the virus is still endemic in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where many don’t trust the vaccine and health-care workers face danger, even death, when trying to inoculate certain populations.
A Pakistani policeman stands guard as health workers look on during a door-to-door polio immunization campaign on the outskirts of Islamabad on April 26, 2019.
Aamir Qureshi/Getty Images
A health worker administers polio drops to a child during a polio vaccination campaign in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2022.
Rehan Khan/Shutterstock
Experts now fear dips in vaccination rates and an uptick in detection mean polio won’t be contained to those communities for long.
“Vaccines have become a victim of their own success,” said Orenstein. If the vaccine works, people think the virus is gone, meaning there’s no need to get vaccinated for it.
Only a tiny fraction of polio infections lead to paralysis, making scientists particularly concerned about the case in New York; it could mean many more cases have gone undetected.
Scientists are also concerned that shifting attitudes around inoculation could make a polio outbreak harder to stamp out.
“What I am worried about today is that the pushback against the covid vaccine may well have an impact on other childhood vaccines in the United States,” Oshinsky said. “It’s very possible this could impact the polio vaccine.”
Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, holds a rack of test tubes in his lab in Pittsburgh.
Editing and production by Reem Akkad and Kainaz Amaria. Photo editing by Robert Miller. Video editing by Drea Cornejo. | 2022-08-20T01:31:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The history of polio and the vaccines that nearly eradicated it - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/polio-vaccine-history-photo-video/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/polio-vaccine-history-photo-video/ |
Kevin Sieff
Mexico's attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, during a news conference in Mexico City on Oct. 22, 2014. (Yuri Cortez/AFP/Getty Images)
MEXICO CITY — Mexican authorities arrested the country’s former attorney general on Friday and accused him of torture and forced disappearance in the mass kidnapping of 43 students in 2014, as the government made its boldest move yet to resolve one of the most severe human rights scandals in recent decades.
The search for the disappeared points to Mexico's darkest secrets
International legal and forensic experts have disputed that narrative, as have the attorney general’s office and a truth and justice commission established by the current president, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador. Encinas said Thursday that the students probably unwittingly stole a bus loaded with drugs or money that was part of the gang’s courier system for sending narcotics to the United States. The military and federal and state police took no action to stop the mass kidnapping, he said — even though they were aware of it thanks to surveillance systems and an army spy who had infiltrated the student group.
“Federal and state authorities at the highest levels were indifferent and negligent," said Encinas, the undersecretary for human rights, at his Thursday news conference. His remarks suggested that authorities might be willing to take on powerful people and institutions involved in the attack or coverup, such as the military. He said, however, that there was no evidence pointing to Peña Nieto’s involvement.
A lawyer fought for justice after a Mexican massacre. Then the government made her a suspect.
Gabriela Martinez and Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul in Mexico City contributed to this report. | 2022-08-20T01:31:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mexico arrests attorney general in Ayotzinapa student disappearances - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/mexico-disappeared-students-ayotzinapa/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/19/mexico-disappeared-students-ayotzinapa/ |
Shilese Jones flies into void left by Simone Biles at U.S. championships
Shilese Jones delivered a strong floor routine at the U.S. Gymnastics Championships, helping her to the lead after the first day of competition. (Mike Carlson/AP)
TAMPA — When Simone Biles competed at the U.S. national championships through much of the past decade, it wasn’t really a contest — at least not for first place. Even her competitors sometimes admitted the real race was for the silver medal.
That’s no longer the case. The senior elite field this year in Tampa includes two returning Olympians, Jade Carey and Jordan Chiles, plus a pair of world all-around medalists in Leanne Wong and Kayla DiCello. Konnor McClain, 17, has won three all-around gold medals this year. Shilese Jones soars with excellent amplitude on each apparatus, and Skye Blakely excels with her powerful tumbling both on floor and beam. Entering the competition, any combination of these gymnasts on the podium wouldn’t have seemed surprising. Together, they delivered a thrilling competition mostly free of major errors from the best athletes.
The margins at the top of the standings stayed tight throughout Friday evening at Amalie Arena, but Jones, a 20-year-old who has never competed at the world championships or the Olympics, emerged as the headliner. Her highflying release elements on bars and powerful yet controlled tumbling on floor gave her the best marks on each of those apparatuses — even ahead of Carey, the floor gold medalist in Tokyo. She sits in the lead with at 57.200, but less than a point separates her from McClain, whose strong beam performance helped her to a mark of 56.400 after the first of two nights of competition.
For female gymnasts, college doesn't mean the end of elite careers
“I’ve been dreaming about it, and I knew it was possible,” said Jones, who had previously planned to only try for the Olympics once but, after missing out on Tokyo, is already looking toward Paris.
They’ll have to repeat those strong routines Sunday to vie for the all-around title. Results at nationals depend on cumulative scores across both days, so consistency bolsters a gymnast’s chances, especially in a race as wide open as this one. The top five gymnasts are separated by just 1.55, so any significant mistake will shuffle the standings.
Chiles (56.150) sits in third, just ahead of DiCello (55.950). Carey landed in fifth, mostly because the others performed so well and her beam and bars scores weren’t on par with the other top Americans. But she capped the evening with a strong floor routine, earning a 14.050, only topped by Jones (14.100) who followed her in the final rotation.
“We’re in a really great place,” Carey said of the U.S. women. “It’s nice to see a lot of big gymnastics again.”
Donnell Whittenburg, still chasing an Olympic spot, in hunt at U.S. nationals
After performing a strong bars routine and a beam set with a couple minor errors, Wong scratched the rest of the competition and her status for Sunday remained uncertain.
The drama around the top spot is an unfamiliar predicament at this competition. Biles won the U.S. all-around title seven times during her senior career, only missing out on the crown in 2017 when she skipped the season after her Olympic debut. Biles won her first senior title by a narrow edge as a 16-year-old in 2013. After that, her margins of victory were massive, nearly five points better on average in a sport that can often be determined by tenths.
Now these athletes — a 21-gymnast field without anybody who’s won a senior national all-around title — are next in line, all hoping to join a distinguished list of champions from this marquee event.
After their freshman seasons of NCAA gymnastics, Carey and Chiles appeared in an elite competition for the first time since the Tokyo Games. Chiles was particularly pleased with her showing on bars — earning a 14.250, the second-best score — because she’s dealt with a recent shoulder injury. Both Carey and Chiles are eying the Paris Games, and their ambitions of making the world championships team are the first step toward that goal. But they’re being challenged by their peers, particularly the impressive performances of Jones and McClain. Jones had the best scores on bars (14.850) and floor, while McClain topped the field on beam (14.800).
“For me, I just think all competition is the same, honestly,” Jones said. “I just worry about myself and know that I have to hit, and if I hit I can be on top.”
DiCello, an 18-year-old from Boyds, Md., missed months of training this winter because of a back injury. Finally healthy, she was solid, avoiding major errors. Blakely fell on a difficult element in her beam routine — a backflip with a full twist — but was strong the rest of the night.
Biles hasn’t retired from the sport, but since Tokyo, she has yet to give an indication that she’s planning a return. For now, the U.S. women’s team will aim to maintain its excellence without her. The massive cushion Biles had in individual competitions translated to the team’s margin ahead of its peers. The Americans won the gold at each world championships and Olympics from 2011 to 2019, then took the silver behind the Russian Olympic Committee in Tokyo when Biles withdrew after the first rotation of the final.
“Simone’s an anomaly and obviously the best gymnast of a lot of our times,” Alicia Sacramone Quinn, the strategic lead of the three-person high performance team, said before this competition. “And I think that we have some work to do to close that margin.” | 2022-08-20T02:37:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Shilese Jones flies into void left by Simone Biles at U.S. championships - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/08/19/shilese-jones-flies-into-void-left-by-simone-biles-us-championships/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/08/19/shilese-jones-flies-into-void-left-by-simone-biles-us-championships/ |
When asked, I shared the rental catalogues and budgets with members of the family so they could handle the details if they wanted to.
Buzzkill: Sincere congratulations on providing summers at the shore for your family for an impressive 30 years.
Anonymous: I agree with you that sweatpants and T-shirts are not “appropriate” for a memorial service.
Been There: It can be extremely challenging for expectant parents to advocate for themselves. | 2022-08-20T05:18:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: I funded the family vacation for 30 years but I can't this year - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/20/ask-amy-family-vacation-organizing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/20/ask-amy-family-vacation-organizing/ |
Dear Miss Manners: I feel that my soon-to-be MIL may have some ill will or jealousy toward me. My fiance is the only boy, so naturally she coddled him, but I wouldn’t say he’s a mama’s boy.
I do not find her less of a woman because she does not cook for her family, but I grew up watching my mom work full time and come home to cook, so I do the same. I finished college early, went into the military and have been on my own ever since. I make my own money and am financially stable. If I splurge and buy myself something nice, it’s because I feel I earned it.
His parents took a trip to Italy, and afterward, I received a small box in the mail. Inside was a small 3-by-3 frame — no picture, no card or note. My fiance told me it was from his mom, who had told him she got me something in Italy. While I appreciate the thought, it almost seemed disingenuous due to the lack of communication.
The empty, noteless frame is odd, but at least your mother-in-law was making an effort. Miss Manners suggests that you not read too much into it. Perhaps it is intended for your wedding picture.
This is no guarantee that everything will go smoothly from there on out. But cliches such as “The best defense is a good offense,” “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” and any others that are code for keeping a discontented mother-in-law under control are useful. | 2022-08-20T05:18:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Miss Manners: I think my future mother-in-law is jealous of me - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/20/miss-manners-mother-in-law-jealous/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/20/miss-manners-mother-in-law-jealous/ |
Walmart, largest U.S. private employer, expands abortion coverage for staff
Walmart is expanding health-care benefits to employees seeking abortion services, a senior executive said Friday. (Angus Mordant/Bloomberg)
Walmart is expanding its employee health-care plans to cover more situations in which staffers may seek an abortion, making the nation’s largest private employer the latest to offer enhanced access to reproductive health services after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
Arkansas-based Walmart, which has 1.6 million employees in the United States, said it would cover abortion if there is a risk to the health of the mother and if a fetus was conceived as a result of rape or incest. It will also pay for abortion if there is a miscarriage, a lack of fetal viability or an ectopic pregnancy, when a fetus implants outside the uterus. The company will additionally provide “travel support” for employees and dependents if they require access to a health service covered by Walmart’s insurance plan but there is no viable provider is not within 100 miles of their location.
Walmart’s top human resources officer said in an internal memo that the new benefits are effective immediately.
A trigger ban on abortions — with the exception of when the life of the mother is at risk — took place in Arkansas after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe, which established a fundamental right to the procedure. About 53 percent of Walmart’s employees in the United States are women. It operates more than 2,000 stores in states that have either banned abortion or imposed near-total restrictions on the procedure.
Last year, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) signed into law the trigger ban on nearly all abortions, though he said that he supports exceptions for rape and incest. There was no immediate reaction to Walmart’s move by senior GOP leaders in Arkansas, though the move was criticized by some antiabortion activists.
Other companies that have offered support to employees seeking to terminate a pregnancy include Walt Disney, which employs some 80,000 people in Florida, a state with a near-total ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Dick’s Sporting Goods has said it will reimburse employees up to $4,000 in travel expenses to the nearest location where abortion is legal. Lyft and JPMorgan, as well as Walmart competitors Target and CVS, have made similar moves.
Walmart and the Walton family — the descendants of company’s founder and owners of a large stake in the retailer — have a history of supporting conservative causes and politicians. Walmart donated two to three times more to the GOP than the Democratic Party in many electoral cycles before 2008, according to the Open Secrets campaign finance watchdog.
In more recent years, the retail giant and the family have expanded their contributions to include liberal politicians and moderate Republicans. In 2020, the company gave roughly comparable sums to Republican and Democratic politicians; that year, the founding family contributed more to Democratic congressional candidates.
This year’s donations from individual family members to GOP politicians include $17,400 to Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R), who supports abortion rights and recently finished ahead of a candidate backed by former president Donald Trump in a Senate primary. They have also given $250,000 to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump Republican group.
Walmart was one of dozens of companies that halted donations to lawmakers who voted against the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory after the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. | 2022-08-20T06:14:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Walmart expands abortion coverage for staff after Roe overturned - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/20/walmart-abortion-ban-arkansas-roe/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/20/walmart-abortion-ban-arkansas-roe/ |
Arrest is made in a 1993 rape and murder, D.C. police say
DNA was studied, police said.
A man has been arrested in the 1993 death of a woman in Southeast Washington, D.C. police said.
Debra McManus, 39, of Southeast, was killed Oct. 23, 1993, near Fourth and Trenton Street SE, the police said. They said she had been strangled.
William Ransford, 58, of Southeast, was arrested Thursday and charged with second degree murder, according to the police.
DNA testing was used in the investigation, police said, in an affidavit that supported their request for an arrest warrant.
In the affidavit is an account of an interview with Ransford, in which he denied ever having seen the victim of the homicide. According to the account, he told police there was “no way” that his DNA could be associated with the victim. | 2022-08-20T06:40:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Arrest is made in 1993 rape and killing, D.C. police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/20/arrest-1993-rape-murder-southeast/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/20/arrest-1993-rape-murder-southeast/ |
A surfing student practices standing on a surfboard next to an instructor in Khao Lak, a series of tourist-oriented villages in Thailand. (Matt Hunt/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images)
BANGKOK —Beaches brimming with sunbathers. Coves crowded with boats and snorkelers. Trails busy again with hikers and their porters.
More than two years after the coronavirus pandemic brought international travel to a halt, most countries in Southeast Asia have reopened their borders with minimal requirements for vaccinated travelers. Millions arrived over the summer, fueled by pent-up wanderlust. The return of these tourists is a relief for an economically battered region — but it comes with its own costs.
While the pandemic crippled Southeast Asia’s $393 billion tourism industry and erased millions of jobs, it also allowed many of its natural landscapes and heritage sites to recover from years of being trampled and polluted. Now, some government officials and community leaders are pushing against a return to the unbridled tourism that scientists warned for years was causing irreparable environmental harm. At the same time, those who rely on tourist revenue are desperate to welcome back visitors — as many of them as possible.
“The industry is very much in flux right now,” said Liz Ortiguera, chief executive of the Pacific Asia Travel Association, a nonprofit that advocates for sustainable travel. A growing number of governments and businesses are asking for ways to make tourism less destructive, she said, but as the pandemic fades, the revival of some ecologically damaging mass tourism is “a given.”
A month after Thailand closed its borders in 2020, a herd of dugongs — among the most endangered marine mammals in the world — were seen floating serenely in the shallow waters off the country’s southern coast. Leatherback turtles took the place of tourists in Phuket, nesting on the beaches at rates that shocked local scientists.
“The pandemic was an excellent opportunity, in a way, to show what happens when humans are able to give nature a break," Varawut Silpa-archa, Thailand’s minister of Natural Resources and Environment, told The Washington Post.
In 2020, Thailand closed all 155 of its natural parks to visitors for the first time ever. While they were reopened in July, Silpa-archa has ordered that every park shut down for at least a month every year. He has also banned single-use plastics from the parks and said he “will not hesitate” to shut down a destination long-term if tourists wreak havoc. He has little concern for potential opposition from businesses.
“To be blunt, I really don’t care if they agree," he said. “My job is to preserve nature for our future generations.”
Recent attempts by other countries to regulate tourism have been less successful. In June, Indonesian officials ran into local opposition after proposing that visitors to the ancient Borobodur Temple in Java be limited to 15 at a time and that tickets for foreigners be raised from $25 to $100 to fund conservation. When the government announced plans to hike ticket prices for the Komodo National Park in East Nusa Tenggara, hundreds of tourism workers went on strike. Price increases for both locations are now on hold.
“The challenge,” said Steven Schipani, a tourism industry specialist at the Asian Development Bank, “is that there’s so much sunk investment.”
The number of annual tourist arrivals to Southeast Asia doubled from 2010 to 2019, peaking just before the pandemic at 137 million. This growth was expected to continue at least until 2030, in large part because of a rising regional middle class. In Southeast Asia, businesses and government agencies made major investments to prepare for and profit off these visitors. Much of that infrastructure — airports, hotels, sewage systems — is still in place, said Schipani.
Asia is slowly reopening to travelers. Here’s where you can go.
“There’s capacity for 140 million people,” he noted. And there’s “immense pressure” to make sure that capacity is fulfilled.
In 2018, then-Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte closed the white sand island of Boracay for six months, saying overtourism had transformed it into a “cesspool.” Since reopening, the island has kept certain sustainability measures in place, though these are now being tested. Over Easter weekend in April, Boracay exceeded its daily visitor cap multiple times, authorities said.
Nowie Potenciano, 44, runs several restaurants and a boutique hotel on the island. The tourists returning to Boracay in recent months have been quite literally “hungry” for new experiences, he said, with many ordering more food than they might have in the past. He’s glad they’re back but doesn’t think things can return to “business as usual" post-pandemic.
“It’s something we’re all still figuring out,” Potenciano said. “How do we maintain the volume of visitors without upsetting the delicate balance of the entire island?”
In 2019, nearly 40 million tourists visited Thailand, and many spent time along its dazzling Southern coast. Research shows that from 2017 t0 2019, at least two locations in the south — Patong Beach and Maya Bay — regularly exceeded their “carrying capacity," which refers to the number of people a place can reasonably accommodate without damaging the environment or local community.
Somyot Sarapong, who works for an ecotourism agency in Bangkok, lived and worked on the Phi Phi Islands in the 1990s but left in 2003 when outside developers started to erect tall, concrete hotels on the beachfront that displaced locally run resorts. When Sarapong, 56, returned in 2019 to visit friends, he no longer recognized the place he used to consider a “slice of heaven.” Brightly colored fish, once so abundant, had become hard to spot.
“It gave me the feeling of my first day at Phi Phi,” Sarapong said.
China is key to saving the planet from climate change. But it can’t quit coal.
Sarapong wants to see the government do more to stave off overtourism, though some experts in sustainability are skeptical that officials will do what’s necessary.
But Thon Thamrongnawasawat, a marine scientist at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, believes there’s reason to be optimistic.
“When you drive at a very high speed, it’s hard to slow down. With covid, it’s like the car engine stopped," he said. “Now we’re starting again and we can go carefully, slowly."
The pandemic allowed more Thai people to reacquaint themselves with the beauty of their own country, Thamrongnawasawat added. When it comes to protecting it now, he added, “we have a much, much better chance than before.” | 2022-08-20T06:50:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Travel to Southeast Asia rebounds as calls for sustainable tourism grow - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/20/southeast-asia-tourism-covid-sustainability-climate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/20/southeast-asia-tourism-covid-sustainability-climate/ |
Car leaves road, kills man in parking lot, police say
Victim was on foot in the Seven Corners lot, police said.
A man was killed in a parking lot in Fairfax County when a car swerved from a nearby road and struck him, the county police said.
Albert Swett, 62, of Maryland, was walking through a parking lot in the Seven Corners area at about 8:40 a.m. Thursday when two cars collided on Wilson Boulevard, the police said.
One of the cars left the road and veered into an adjacent parking lot in the 6200 block of Arlington Boulevard, according to the police. It struck the victim, crossed a median, crashed into a parked vehicle and finally came to rest in a mulch bed.
Swett died at a hospital, police said. No other injuries were reported. | 2022-08-20T07:54:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Car leaves road kills man in parking lot, police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/20/fairfax-pedestrian-killed-parking-lot/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/20/fairfax-pedestrian-killed-parking-lot/ |
SAVANNAH, Ga. — Former Boston Red Sox star Bill Lee collapsed in the bullpen while warming up for a Savannah Bananas exhibition game, but the 75-year-old pitcher walked off the field with assistance.
NEW YORK — A documentary on the 2008 U.S. men’s basketball team known as the “Redeem Team,” with executive producers including LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, will premiere on Netflix this fall.
TAMPA, Fla. — Shilese Jones grabbed the lead at the U.S. gymnastics championships, riding a dynamic bars routine to post an all-around total of 57.200.
SOTOGRANDE, Spain — Jessica Korda extended her lead to six shots going into the final day of the of the Aramco Team Series in Sotogrande and also won the team event.
MASON, Ohio — Top-ranked Daniil Medvedev moved into the Western & Southern Open semifinals as he prepares for his U.S. Open title defense, beating 11th-seeded Taylor Fritz 7-6 (1), 6-3. | 2022-08-20T08:25:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Friday Sports in Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/friday-sports-in-brief/2022/08/20/e08f1600-2056-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/friday-sports-in-brief/2022/08/20/e08f1600-2056-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Man is slain in Prince George’s, police say
Victim was shot around 10 p.m. on Harry Truman Drive.
A man was fatally shot Friday night in Prince George’s County, the police said.
He was found shortly before 10 p.m. in the 200 block of Harry S. Truman Drive, according to the police.
The site is in a largely residential part of the Largo/Kettering area and is near Prince George’s Community College.
The death is part of a sudden spate of killings in the county. Three fatal shootings have been reported in the past three nights. Last weekend, five were reported from Friday through Sunday. | 2022-08-20T09:43:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man is killed on Truman Drive - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/20/man-shot-killed-prince-george/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/20/man-shot-killed-prince-george/ |
Mystics guard Natasha Cloud drives against Storm guard Jewell Loyd during Game 1 of their WNBA first-round playoff series Thursday night, (Lindsey Wasson/AP)
SEATTLE — Natasha Cloud was having the game that she had spent the entire offseason preparing for Thursday night. In Game 1 of a best-of-three WNBA first-round playoff series, the Seattle Storm put its defensive focus squarely on limiting Elena Delle Donne and Ariel Atkins. The approach meant Cloud, the league’s assists leader, would need to assume more of a scoring responsibility.
So she did, making jumpers and floaters and getting to the rim with aggressive dribble-drives. She totaled 16 points on 6-for-10 shooting, making both of her three-point attempts. The only knock on her Game 1 performance was four turnovers, the last of which was an errant pass on a critical possession with her team down a point and less than 30 seconds remaining.
The mistake was pivotal in the Storm’s 86-83 win that put the Mystics one loss from an early end to their playoff run, and it dominated the postgame conversation. It also overshadowed an otherwise strong game from the Mystics’ floor general.
“Obviously, I didn’t shoot how I wanted to during the season, but I just kind of stayed the course and trusted that my work was eventually going to show,” Cloud said. “Just understanding that Seattle was going to make me score the ball and owning that and taking that on.
“I know people want to focus on that one turnover, but it doesn’t come down to the last possession. It comes from an accumulation of things that we watched on film. We gave that game away.”
Game 2 of the No. 4-vs. No. 5 matchup is set for Sunday.
A day after the loss, Cloud stood at practice and voiced displeasure with a bit of lack of energy during the workout. Coach Mike Thibault said that the team was tired and lethargic during the early walk-through portions but that things picked up as the session went on.
Cloud, who averaged a career-best 10.7 points and 7.0 assists in the regular season, willingly embraced the scoring role Thursday. While Delle Donne was a force, scoring 26 points, Cloud and Atkins (16 points) both supplied secondary scoring.
“There was a huge stretch where she just kept us in the game with her scoring,” Delle Donne said. “And I think teams try to dare her to be a scorer, and she certainly can be. So when she’s on the attack and she’s scoring the basketball, it just changes everything.
“She’s just such a massive piece for us and continues to bring the energy, her voice, when I’m sure she’s exhausted at times and doesn’t feel like it. She just continues to put her head down and work and do it.”
The Mystics believe they let Game 1 slip away. Players acknowledged the little things cost them — a missed long rebound here, a turnover there, not playing with enough pace at times.
“When it’s a loud environment like that and everything else, we have to be more exact,” Thibault said. “I thought defensively we did a pretty good job for what we were trying to do. I thought we bailed them out a little bit.”
For Game 2, expect Cloud again to be at the center of everything the Mystics do offensively. The Mystics believe the Storm will continue to put much of their defensive focus on Delle Donne and Atkins, leaving opportunities for Cloud, a pass-first point guard, to score. But that’s what an offseason spent working with her trainer, James Clark, and playing with Athletes Unlimited was all about: being more versatile and punishing opponents for not respecting her shot. Game 1 was the moment she had been training for.
“I know that this is in me,” Cloud said. “But my goal isn’t to score 26 points like Elena. My goal was to be 10, 10 and 10. I have the ability to do that.
“Those minor mistakes, we can make adjustments and we can be that 1 percent better going into Sunday. So coming in here, the goal is the same — we’re going to win the game. To have that confidence, that swagger about us that we are going to take this [expletive] back home to D.C. That’s what I want to exude. I want to exude confidence.” | 2022-08-20T09:56:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Backs to the wall, Natasha Cloud and Mystics move past Game 1 miscues - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/20/mystics-storm-playoffs-game-2/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/20/mystics-storm-playoffs-game-2/ |
Bike advocates, lawmakers want to save Potomac bridge as demolition begins
Completing the new Nice-Middleton Bridge would be part of Gov. Larry Hogan’s transportation legacy, even as other big projects are moving slowly.
Advocates for the bike path are exploring ways to keep the original bridge as a dedicated bike and pedestrian crossing. (Maryland Transportation Authority)
While inquiring about creating a trail crossing over the lower reaches of the Potomac River, Maryland’s U.S. senators and House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D) asked state transportation officials this summer to delay demolishing an 80-year-old bridge.
The Maryland Transportation Authority is finishing construction of an adjacent four-lane bridge, designed to ease congestion and meet modern safety standards. The state’s response to the lawmakers, outlined in a single-spaced three-page letter, was unequivocal. Maryland Transportation Secretary James F. Ports Jr. wrote that maintaining the existing bridge was “not an option.”
The word “not” was underlined. In an addendum, Ports wrote in blue pen, “Hope you all are having a great summer.”
Ports’s letter and the disclosure at a recent Maryland Transportation Authority board meeting that demolition was underway appear to be the final blow to a long-running quest by pedestrian and bike advocates. They had spent months working to preserve the old Nice-Middleton Bridge as part of a connection in a future network of trails. A demolition that has pitted federal lawmakers against state transportation leaders now has advocates exploring one last gambit, while citing environmental concerns: Challenging a state plan that would involve blowing up the bridge with underwater explosives.
As he prepares to leave office, many of term-limited Gov. Larry Hogan’s (R) signature transportation initiatives are far from complete. The Federal Highway Administration this month missed a target date for providing final environmental approval for widening parts of the Capital Beltway and Interstate 270. The Purple Line light-rail project in the Washington suburbs is mired in delays. And it will fall to the next governor to determine whether to build a new Chesapeake Bay Bridge.
By comparison, the $463 million Nice-Middleton Bridge replacement is a smaller project, but one that’s likely to be nearly complete in the coming months, creating a smoother connection for drivers between fast-growing Charles County and King George County in Virginia.
Stalled federal loan increased the cost of Potomac River crossing
At the July 28 transportation authority board meeting, Eric Brenner, a former chair of a state bike and pedestrian advisory committee and an advocate for preserving the old bridge, cast the refusal to reconsider the demolition as a push by state officials to ensure their preferred plan is carried out before the governor’s successor arrives in January. Brenner testified as a member of the public.
Both candidates to replace Hogan said they support exploring options to keep the current bridge.
Democratic nominee Wes Moore said he had “serious concerns” about the demolition plan. He urged the state to pause the dismantling of the bridge until a study can be conducted.
“With potentially millions of federal dollars on the table to support its transformation into a community asset, it is in the taxpayers’ best interest to seriously consider the proposal before proceeding with a costly, multimillion-dollar demolition,” he said in a statement.
Del. Dan Cox, the Republican nominee for governor, said in a text message that since the new bridge won’t likely accommodate walled-off bike lanes, he is interested in keeping the old bridge as a bike path “and will work towards that purpose as governor.”
Leaders of the transportation authority, which manages the state’s toll roads, say demolition is simply a question of practicality: No one stepped up to bear the cost of maintaining the old bridge, and leaving it standing could create engineering problems for the new span. Debris from the demolition will be used to create a fish reef in the Chesapeake Bay, which they say will have significant environmental benefits.
In a statement, Hoyer, whose district includes the bridge, said he was disappointed by the authority’s refusal to reconsider its plans and study a pedestrian-friendly crossing.
“As we continue our fight against climate change, it is critical that we consider all forms of transportation alternatives that move us away from carbon emissions while still supporting mobility around our local communities,” he said. “While I believe this is a missed opportunity, I will continue to advocate for infrastructure solutions that benefit our environment and community.”
When Hogan advanced a plan to replace the bridge in 2016, his office said in a statement the new crossing would include a separated path for bikes and pedestrians. But the transportation authority jettisoned that idea as a cost-savings move in 2019, freeing up money to invest in a stretch of Interstate 95.
Dismayed by that decision, a group of advocates began to explore the possibility of keeping the current bridge as an alternative. It was old, but they reasoned it might be strong enough for use by people walking or cycling, even if no longer suitable for heavy trucks.
Their hopes were briefly buoyed when the U.S. Department of Transportation delayed approval on a key loan for the project while questioning pedestrian and cyclist safety. The loan was ultimately approved without changes to the design of the bridge.
It was then that Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D), Ben Cardin (D), and Hoyer wrote to Ports.
“An independent study, conducted by an entity with experience in similar bridge repurposing projects, is in the taxpayer’s interest to ensure that we are not wasting an opportunity to provide bicycling and pedestrian transportation options at a competitive cost or potentially lower cost than demolition,” they wrote in the July 14 letter.
Ports responded the next week to dismiss the idea. At the authority board meeting on July 28, William Pines, the authority’s executive director, went through a long list of issues that would need to considered if the old bridge were left standing. They ranged from “vagrancy management” to how the flow of water would be affected.
“A couple things that are notably absent from the congressional delegation letter were any appropriations of funds to actually conduct this additional study, any interested entity who is committed to taking ownership of the bridge, and nor was there any commitment to appropriate the financial assistance or funds needed to support retaining the existing bridge,” Pines said at the meeting.
Pines said contractors had begun the demolition work to keep the project on schedule, even though the new bridge is months from opening to traffic. John Sales, a spokesman for the authority, said the existing bridge remains safe. The contractor on the bridge project referred questions to the transportation authority.
The new bridge, about 40 miles south of downtown Washington, will include some provisions for cyclists, including special joints suitable for bike tires and a warning system that will alert drivers when a cyclist is crossing. State officials also say there are few connecting trails in the area around the bridge.
Md. Gov. Hogan launches next step to build new span of Bay Bridge
Activists pushing for a car-free crossing say they envision a 50-mile network of trails in Maryland and Virginia that would link the Potomac Heritage Trail and potentially the conversion of a rail line that could become abandoned as power plants transition from coal. One proposed 200-mile loop would use the bridge and ferries to cross the region’s waterways.
The advocates’ last option, they said, could be to challenge the state’s plans to use explosives to complete the demolition, a procedure they argue was not contemplated by the initial environmental review. Brenner said advocates are looking into last-ditch efforts that could halt plans already set into motion.
“The requirement for a new environmental assessment seems really clear,” Brenner said at the board meeting, “and you sort of hate to threaten that.” | 2022-08-20T10:14:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Maryland bike advocates, lawmakers want to save Potomac River bridge - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/08/20/maryland-nice-bridge-demolition/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/08/20/maryland-nice-bridge-demolition/ |
Why a small film fest in Martha’s Vineyard became Black Hollywood’s hot spot
The Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival sits enviably at the confluence of Black culture, industry sea change and everyone’s dream vacation. Just ask the Obamas.
From left, actress Yara Shahidi moderates a panel with directors Mariama Diallo and Nikyatu Jusu at the Martha's Vineyard African American Film Festival on Aug. 7. (Arturo Holmes/Getty Images for MVAAFF)
MARTHA’S VINEYARD, Mass. — It felt like a movie. In one scene, there’s Oscar winner Viola Davis bringing the sun at a VIP cocktail hour overlooking the Vineyard Haven Marina. In another, there’s actress Regina Hall breezing through the crowd at the annual white party in Oak Bluffs. Don Cheadle having dinner in a quiet corner at a local fave off Circuit Avenue. Spike Lee playing through Farm Neck Golf Club two days after former president Barack Obama was there with NBA legend Ray Allen.
Or maybe it was just the middle of August on Martha’s Vineyard, the tiny island in the Atlantic that for the past two decades has played hostess to “the summer’s finest film festival” celebrating Black stories.
Never heard of it? Well, here’s who has: Tyler Perry, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, Jordan Peele, Tracee Ellis Ross, Jennifer Hudson, Kasi Lemmons, Larry Wilmore, Al Sharpton, Eric Holder — you get the picture. Steadily growing in size and prestige since incubating 20 years ago in the Brooklyn apartment of co-founders Stephanie and Floyd Rance, the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival sits enviably at the confluence of Black culture, industry sea change and everyone’s dream vacation. Just ask the Obamas.
“Surprise!” said Michelle Obama at the festival’s opening night screening of “Descendant,” the Netflix documentary produced by the Obamas’ company, Higher Ground, about the legacy of the last known slave ship to arrive in America. As the oh my gods and we love yous from the shocked audience died down but the cellphones stayed up, the moment came into sharp focus. With the backdrop of summer on the Vineyard — a traditional escape for well-to-do Black folks from Washington to New York for more than a century — Barack and Michelle Obama, the former first couple turned filmmakers, were bound to show up looking tan and relaxed and powerful still.
“One of the powers of this festival, and the work that the Rances have done, is to lift up stories that too often have been lost in the flow of time,” said Barack Obama, who schooled the crowd on how stories weave the past, present and future together, specifically for African Americans. The former president then underscored another reason he was there — just one day after his 61st birthday no less: “I’m looking out at this audience and we got a bunch of movers and shakers and influentials.”
Ask regulars, newbies and the folks in-between what makes Martha’s Vineyard in August such a “special place,” as the former first lady called it, and the answer can be found somewhere in her husband’s words. It’s about history, being seen — and the stars who come out to the film fest don’t hurt.
Held during the first and second weeks of August, the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival celebrates short films illuminating Black lives. Hollywood has taken notice. In addition to the packed schedule of independent films, big studios now show up to promote their projects to an audience of “influentials” dressed in their best lightweight fabrics.
It started with two 20-year-olds from Brooklyn who’d head to the Vineyard to ride bikes, jump in the water and eat fried food. In 2001, the couple — filmmaker Floyd Rance, and Stephanie Rance, who was in marketing — were planning a one-off film festival in Barbados while Floyd was there shooting a movie. Then 9/11 happened and international travel was a non-starter. With a stack of VHS tapes ready to be screened but nowhere to see them, they thought why not do the Vineyard? The inaugural MVAAFF had “no promotion, no marketing, no nothing,” Floyd said. “Just some heart and some grit” and about half a dozen people in a conference room.
“This wasn’t on either of our vision boards,” Stephanie said. HBO came on as an early partner, paving the way for other heavy hitters such as Netflix, ESPN, META and JBL. In 2018, the festival received accreditation from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a qualifying festival for the short film category at the Oscars, further solidifying its status.
The duo used to spend months leading up to the summer cold-calling sponsors; now their phones are the ones ringing. But don’t call it the Black Sundance. “Sponsor fest” it is not, Floyd said, alluding to past criticism that independent film festivals have gone too corporate in recent years. The Rances want to stay true to their event’s roots as a film festival for filmmakers — a place that can support another Ava DuVernay, who was there before she became BFFs with Oprah Winfrey.
“People can come and rub elbows and make an impression on folks,” Floyd said.
The Rances described the Vineyard as the Hamptons without the pretense. A little island with no paparazzi where stars can let their hair down, where you might spot an A-lister in a ripped T-shirt grabbing an ice cream from Mad Martha’s. “It’s a magical place,” Stephanie said.
“Once you get there it’s like, ‘Oh my god I get it.’ It’s an exhale.”
It’s also where “see and be seen” means something more. People are here to be seen — there’s no doubt about that — but the seeing is different. It’s an overdue acknowledgment, the privilege of validation.
Take the boarding line for the hour-long flight from LGA to MVY: half the plane is going to the festival, and that half recognizes Russell Simmons immediately. But the woman who claims the guy who founded Def Jam was sitting in her front row seat does not, even after Simmons poses for a photo with a fan.
Now consider the line outside of Donovan’s Reef at Nancy’s restaurant on a Friday evening just before sunset. Veteran actress Vanessa Bell Calloway (most recently seen on “This is Us”) tells a husband to get his wife a holdover drink as she waits for a specialty cocktail from Donovan, the summer’s preferred bartender. “Happy wife, happy life,” she says. That’s when another young man shouts “Someday at Christmas.” “Oh that was a good one,” she tells him of the TV movie she directed last year. “I wrote it,” he says, and now the two are having a moment. That’s the vineyard. Not networking in the strictest sense. Just existing. Seeing each other.
And when “the August people” come for the film fest celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, there is plenty to see.
“This thing is just getting bigger and bigger. I don’t know what they’re going to do. They’re going to outgrow this space,” laments an Uber driver with pride as he meanders down one of the two-way streets sans traffic lights that crisscross the island, heading from the 800-seat performing arts center next to the high school to a private dinner for former attorney general Eric Holder and Radio One founder Cathy Hughes.
But with all the elbows being rubbed, rubbing one another the wrong way was also inevitable. The festival is about uplifting Black stories, and Stephanie Rance got some flack when it was announced that the embattled Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which administers the Golden Globes, would be there for a panel on its diversity efforts. “I told them this would be a tough crowd,” Rance said as the conversation between Hollywood power publicist Cassandra Butcher and new HFPA president Helen Hoehne pulled no punches.
The facade of the Golden Globes is now crumbling, but their legitimacy has long been in question
“We need you guys, but you guys need us, too,” said Butcher, who called the association, to task for its lack of Black members and inappropriate behavior during their infamous pre-awards show news conferences.
“I cannot change the past. I can only change the present and future,” said Hoehne, who added that she didn’t want to “sugar coat” the issue, pointing to the association’s new strict code of conduct, sensitivity training and diversity, equity and inclusion executive. “What happened in the past was wrong. I want to acknowledge that because it’s painful. I hear your pain. We are cleaning up.”
KJ Matthews, a Black entertainment journalist who joined the organization post-controversy in October, was clear: “As long as I’m a member there I promise you that type of behavior won’t happen.”
The exchange underscored another valuable thing about the film festival beyond the glitz and the glamour: the opportunity to see people onstage who looked just like the people in the audience. The Hollywood power players from Netflix, Paramount, Amazon and executives of the academy traveling some 3,000 miles away from the industry’s central nervous system to make their presence felt — to let others know that they’ve got eyes and ear in the rooms where things happen.
“We need us everywhere,” said Shawn Finnie, executive vice president of member relations and awards at the academy. Finnie, along with his colleague Jeanell English, executive vice president of impact and inclusion, spoke at the closing brunch to a restaurant filled with both power players and first-time filmmakers alike.
The pair, two Black executives at the 95-year-old organization that administers the Oscars, knew a little something about the difference between perfection and progress. “It’s hard work,” Finnie said to a room of storytellers sipping mimosas on an island. Another movie. Another scene. But before the closing credits, Finnie wanted every filmmaker at the restaurant to stand up and be acknowledged.
“Before the awards you are enough. Without the awards you are enough,” Finnie said. “Your story matters if only you see it.” | 2022-08-20T11:28:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival is Black Hollywood's go-to - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/20/marthas-vineyard-african-american-film-festival/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/20/marthas-vineyard-african-american-film-festival/ |
By Blake Rogers Wilson
James Baldwin in New York in 1963. (Dave Pickoff/AP)
“What part of the South does James Baldwin come from?” a reader named Helga Schneider, of Munich, Germany, wrote to Negro Digest in December 1963. It was a reasonable question: Baldwin himself had said he was “a Southerner” earlier that year.
Baldwin was born in New York City in 1924 and moved to France in 1948. With the release of the semi-autobiographical bestseller “Go Tell It on the Mountain” in 1953, he had the resources to become what he called a “transatlantic commuter,” living between Europe and the United States. So in early 1955, when Howard University professor Owen Dodson invited Baldwin to assist with the premiere production of Baldwin’s first play, “The Amen Corner,” the 30-year-old embarked on a revelatory journey toward his Southern roots.
William F. Buckley Jr. vs. James Baldwin: A racial showdown on the American dream
Baldwin was a child of the Great Migration, raised by a mother from Maryland and a father from Louisiana, though the South, with its history of lynchings and racist justice, had “always frightened” him. But as he shared his fears with Brown, Baldwin came to realize that the South, by and large, was “also a part of my identity.” Brown told him, “You’re just one generation away from the South, you know.”
As the late Cheryl A. Wall noted in “Women of the Harlem Renaissance,” “members of Baldwin’s parents’ generation established social organizations in the North that maintained relationships among migrants premised on links to communities in the South.” Though his baptism into the theater was a success, being viewed as a disconnected Northerner struck a chord that he would begin to work through by the end of the decade.
But first, Baldwin would return to Europe, where he would finish his second novel, “Giovanni’s Room.” On a walk in Paris with a group that included Richard Wright, Baldwin recalled noticing a front-page photo of Dorothy Counts wading through a hostile mob to desegregate a Charlotte high school. For Baldwin, who had attended an integrated public high school in New York, observing the violent backlash against school desegregation from abroad produced a combustible mixture of feelings that ignited in him a desire to take on a more active role in the civil rights movement. (Scholar Ed Pavlić has noted incongruities in Baldwin’s timeline here, but regardless, there was something kindling inside Baldwin.)
In two essays published in 1958 and 1959 about that trip, Baldwin painted a sobering picture for Northerners of Southern life. On the eve of the sit-in movement and Freedom Rides, Baldwin wrote that “what is happening in the South today will be happening in the North tomorrow.”
Those essays were published in Baldwin’s 1961 collection “Nobody Knows My Name.” After it came out, the Chicago-based Negro Digest reprinted an article by journalist Margaret Leonard Long, a White Georgian, who lambasted the perceived fad of Black writers bleakly exposing the South. “James Baldwin,” she wrote, “plunges the white Southerner into wretched shock somewhat alleviated by hot surges of indignant identity with Negroes.” Baldwin, she argued, “ought to come on back home” and actually live in the South, noting that “his Deep South origins and happen-so birth in Harlem are sufficient for any ancestor-worshiping Southerner to claim him as rightfully our own.”
The mothers of Malcolm X, MLK and James Baldwin: Book explores how they shaped their sons
In May 1963, Baldwin sat down with Clark for a public television interview. When Clark asked Baldwin about his background, he opened with his birth at Harlem Hospital and the first home he remembered. Then he added, “I am, in all but technical legal fact, a Southerner. My father was born in the South … my mother was born in the South, and if they had waited two more seconds, I might have been born in the South.”
Baldwin’s affirmation of this identity completed the journey that began during his time at Howard, when he was dismissed as an uninformed Northerner. As an ascendant voice during turbulent times, he set the record straight as to why he was so invested in the struggles of the South. His proclamation also spoke to the world of cyclical poverty inherited by the children of Southern migrants born in the North, dispelling notions that life was magically better above the Mason-Dixon Line. Despite his initial apprehensions about the South, he asserted a heritage that ultimately imbued him with the region’s language and spirit.
Blake Rogers Wilson is a Virginia-born, D.C.-based historian and PhD candidate for U.S. history at Howard University.
The joy of Juneteenth: America’s long and uneven march from slavery to freedom
He won Powerball’s $314 million jackpot. It ruined his life. | 2022-08-20T11:28:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | James Baldwin affirmed his Southern identity after visiting D.C., South - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/08/20/james-baldwin-southerner-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/08/20/james-baldwin-southerner-dc/ |
She has become a symbol of resilience and redemption, and won the public relations war with the royal family
Analysis by Roxanne Roberts
Mariana Orozco, left, and her mother, Anjelica Lozano, are among the fans of Princess Diana who enjoyed a walk through a traveling exhibit about her earlier this month in Virginia. (Doug Kapustin for The Washington Post)
“I felt sorry for her. I remember thinking, ‘Don’t do it,’” said Lois Wren, 67. Like so many women at the exhibit, Wren remembers waking up at 4 a.m. to watch the royal wedding. She was old enough to worry that the newly minted princess was walking into the lion’s den. “So tragic,” she said, shaking her head. “So tragic.”
Diana and the media: She used them, and they used her. Until the day she died.
How Britain and the world mourned Diana, the ‘people’s princess’ | 2022-08-20T11:28:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Princess Diana died 25 years ago, but she endures as a role model for women - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/20/princess-diana-death-anniversary/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/20/princess-diana-death-anniversary/ |
This undated image shows a painting owned by the Massachusetts Historical Society of one Elizabeth Freeman. The story of the enslaved woman who went to court to win her freedom more than 80 years before the Emancipation Proclamation has been pushed to the fringes of history. A group of civic leaders, activists and historians hope that ends Sunday, Aug. 21, 2022 in the quiet Massachusetts town of Sheffield with the unveiling of a bronze statue of the woman who chose the name Elizabeth Freeman when she shed the chains of slavery 241 years ago to the day. ( Massachusetts Historical Society via AP) (Uncredited/Massachusetts Historical Society) | 2022-08-20T11:28:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Statue honors once-enslaved woman who won freedom in court - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/statue-honors-once-enslaved-woman-who-won-freedom-in-court/2022/08/20/4ac9c63e-2078-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/statue-honors-once-enslaved-woman-who-won-freedom-in-court/2022/08/20/4ac9c63e-2078-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Protesters wave signs and demonstrate in support of abortion access in front of a New Orleans courthouse on July 8. (Rebecca Santana/AP)
The human toll of denying abortion to people who want or need one can be, and often is, appalling. The state legislatures racing to impose sweeping abortion bans, enabled by the conservative Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade in June, have done so despite abundant research on the devastating impact these policies have on Americans’ well-being and livelihoods. Now more evidence is emerging of the suffering they are already causing — for real women, real girls, real families and real lives.
In Louisiana, a woman whose fetus cannot survive outside the womb — it is missing the top of its skull, a fatal condition known as acrania — is now barred from ending her pregnancy in the state. “It’s hard, knowing that I’m carrying it to bury it, you know what I’m saying?” Nancy Davis told local news outlet WAFB-9.
The state’s draconian new antiabortion law, which took effect automatically after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, allows for some exceptions in rare cases, including to prevent death or devastating injury to the woman and if a pregnancy is “medically futile.” But acrania is not among the conditions that qualifies for an exception, according to a Louisiana Department of Health list. And doctors said other potentially deadly afflictions are also not listed.
Even though the health department said its list of exceptions is a work in progress and would be updated, it’s not clear that will happen in time for Ms. Davis. She is roughly 12 weeks pregnant and cares for three children at home, including a toddler. If Louisiana refuses an abortion, she would need to drive to Florida or another state to undergo the procedure, a trip that would be costly and time-consuming.
Other examples have emerged of the misery that harsh antiabortion laws, enabled by the court, are causing, and many more will continue to make headlines. Granted, similarly heart-wrenching cases were common enough even before the court’s decision, given the preexisting legal hurdles in some states. A 16-year-old girl in Florida is currently blocked from terminating her pregnancy by a judge’s determination that she is “not sufficiently mature” to do so — even though she has the consent of her legal guardian for the procedure to go ahead. That inane ruling — in the case of a girl recently traumatized by a friend’s death, and by her plausible account unready to care for a child — was also possible before Roe was overturned.
A landmark study by the University of California at San Francisco found that people unable to have abortions suffer from long-lasting economic struggles, including greater probability of eviction and bankruptcy, and of struggling to provide food, housing and transportation. They are also more prone to physical and mental health problems, and are more likely to end up raising a child alone.
The study, based on 1,000 women from 30 clinics who mirror the abortion-seeking population in the country, also concluded that children born as a result of an abortion’s denial are more likely to grow up in poverty than subsequent children born to the same woman.
Behind each of those findings is a human tragedy, to which court-emboldened antiabortion crusaders are apparently blind. | 2022-08-20T11:28:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | After Roe v. Wade, tragic stories mount about those seeking abortions - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/20/after-roe-abortion-ruling-state-bans-stories/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/20/after-roe-abortion-ruling-state-bans-stories/ |
Taliban fighters mark the first anniversary of taking over Kabul in front of the U.S. Embassy there on Aug. 15. (Ebrahim Noroozi/AP)
“Bread, work and freedom” — it’s a fair list of what’s necessary for a decent life. It was also the list of demands that about 40 Afghan women chanted in protest outside the Ministry of Education in Kabul on Aug. 13, before being beaten and dispersed by rifle-wielding Taliban personnel. Ousted from their jobs and denied the right to speak, to attend high school or to move freely in public, Afghan women and girls have probably suffered even more than their male compatriots since the U.S.-supported government collapsed and the Taliban seized power a year ago this month. Yet they are hardly the only victims of Taliban repression: So are independent journalists, political opponents and alleged violators of the self-styled Islamic Emirate’s moral code.
This was foreseeable and, indeed, foreseen, by those, including President Biden’s military advisers, who counseled against his plan to pull all U.S. troops out by Aug. 31, 2021. Costly, bloody and unsatisfactory as the 20-year U.S. commitment was, keeping a small force, bolstered by NATO allies, might have preserved a measure of stability and hope for continued freedoms. However, after the nightmare a year ago at Kabul’s airport, including a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service personnel and as many as 170 Afghans who had flocked to the site to escape the advancing Taliban, the president vigorously defended his judgment, adding: “I take responsibility for the decision.” That was a forthright but potentially hollow gesture, unless the Biden administration deals with the ramifications. A year after leaving, the United States still has obligations to the country over which it once exercised de facto dominion.
The first duty is to banish all illusions about the Taliban. Once it took over, it was pragmatic to maintain dialogue, especially regarding practical matters such as the exit of U.S. citizens. Despite the repressive record of the Taliban’s last reign, between 1995 and 2001, it made sense to keep an open mind regarding new commitments it had made, both to the United States and the wider international community. Now, though, its broken promises are too numerous and blatant — including regarding rights for women, having an “inclusive” government and — perhaps most relevant to U.S. security — ending ties with foreign terrorist groups.
The July 31 U.S. drone strike that killed al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul, where he was living under apparent official protection, settled the latter point. The Taliban’s harboring of a main intellectual author of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks reminded the world that the group had provoked the 2001 U.S.-led intervention by making Afghanistan a terrorist haven. Yet it was sadly predictable, given that the Taliban’s powerful interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is himself wanted by the United States for terrorism, including in connection with a January 2008 attack on a hotel in Kabul that killed a U.S. citizen and five others. While its security apparatus has proved capable of suppressing peaceful protests, the Taliban has failed to protect its people from deadly terrorist attacks by the Islamic State’s Afghanistan affiliate, known as ISIS-K. On Wednesday, 21 people died in the bombing of a Kabul mosque. No group has claimed responsibility for that attack.
The Taliban has governed this way despite enormous incentives to moderate. Respecting human rights and shunning terrorist groups might have helped win diplomatic recognition and economic support, including access to the $7 billion in reserves the United States has frozen. In February, Mr. Biden took steps toward releasing half that amount for humanitarian purposes and, under certain conditions, recapitalization of the Afghan central bank. (The rest would have been held to settle claims that families of 9/11 victims might bring against the Taliban.) After the al-Zawahiri revelations reconfirmed the risks of funding a government including men such as Mr. Haqqani, Mr. Biden has reverted to a total freeze on all $7 billion.
On balance, it was the right call. We say “on balance” because another tragic development over the past year has been the near-total collapse of the cash-starved Afghan economy. ISIS-K’s attacks notwithstanding, guns have mostly fallen silent across the land — no small blessing for ordinary Afghans. But hunger stalks the country. This raises the next U.S. responsibility: to aid ordinary Afghans generously through international agencies autonomous from the Taliban. The World Food Program, a United Nations agency, says 8.7 million Afghans face emergency levels of food insecurity. As it reaffirmed the $7 billion asset freeze, the Biden administration announced $80 million in new food aid, along with $40 million in education funds and $30 million to support women and girls. The U.N. agency said in June 2021 that it needed $234 million through the end of that year, which implied that the United States and its allies must do yet more.
Admittedly, preventing outright starvation while denying recognition to the Taliban and striking anti-U.S. terrorist groups from “over the horizon" are minimum short-run goals — hardly long-term strategies. Yet they may be all the United States can accomplish while preparing to shift gears in the unlikely event that the Taliban does change.
In the meantime, there is other unfinished business. The Biden administration points with pride to last year’s historic airlift of 124,000 people, including roughly 76,000 Afghans, many of whom had worked with Western countries and feared possible Taliban reprisals — and others who had not — who have come to the United States. As of May, 9,000 more people had gotten out on flights chartered by the State Department or private organizations. Though this does not redeem other policy failures, Americans can be proud of the military’s performance in August 2021 as well as efforts, official and voluntary, to resettle Afghans in this country. The next step should be passage of the bipartisan Afghan Adjustment Act, pending in Congress, which would provide Afghans a path to permanent immigration status.
Still, it was disconcerting to learn last week from a House Foreign Affairs Committee Republican staff report, confirmed by the State Department, that more than 800 U.S. citizens and 600 permanent residents had been evacuated since the last U.S. troops left, a far higher count of left-behinds than previously acknowledged. There is still a backlog of more than 70,000 Afghans who applied for Special Immigrant Visas before September 2021 and remain in Afghanistan, senior administration officials acknowledged at a State Department briefing July 18. Of all the responsibilities left over from the war in Afghanistan, none is higher than the duty the United States still owes to translators, contract employees, journalists, human rights workers and others who stood with us, and for our shared cause, during 20 long, hard years. | 2022-08-20T11:29:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | U.S. must fight starvation and help those left behind in Afghanistan - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/20/us-strategy-afghanistan-one-year-anniversary/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/20/us-strategy-afghanistan-one-year-anniversary/ |
Posters of former president Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are displayed during the first day of the CPAC conference in Orlando on Feb. 24, 2022. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
For as long as we’ve been doing our quarterly rankings of the Republicans most likely to be the party’s nominee in 2024, No. 1 has been an easy pick. Trump still commands extensive loyalty in the GOP, as evidenced by Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) historically large primary defeat.
But commanding that loyalty and being the guy at the top of Republicans’ ballots for the third straight election aren’t quite the same thing. And for the first time, we’re giving the slight edge — and the top of our list — to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The search of Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago last week was momentous. Exactly how it breaks politically, though, we don’t yet know.
There is some indication this development might actually have rallied the GOP to Trump, at least temporarily. The sense of persecution, long fed by Trump, has proved an invaluable political commodity, and he’s got plenty of grist for that mill — whatever the actual legitimacy of his highly speculative claims of political targeting.
But the political impact of the Mar-a-Lago search won’t be measured in the polls conducted in the past couple of weeks. This is a long game. And the legal jeopardy Trump faces could well reinforce some of the reasons DeSantis appears to have gained on him in earlier surveys. Namely: Trump’s uncertain electability and the political baggage he totes along with him.
Crucially, we have yet to see Trump face a truly Trumpian opponent. In 2016, pretty much everyone was going after Trump on the assumption that they had to offer an alternative to his brand of politics — or because they were losing and needed to do something. Today, lots of Republicans are emulating Trump’s in-your-face, own-the-libs style. And nobody has done that more successfully than DeSantis.
It’s not difficult to see Republicans coming to view DeSantis as a more serious version of Trump — and potentially a more electable one.
This isn’t an easy call. But throw in the perhaps-undersold possibility that Trump won’t actually run in 2024, and we put DeSantis at No. 1 by a hair.
Also mentioned: Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.), Sen. Ben Sasse (Neb.), Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.), Cheney, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie.
10. Donald Trump Jr.: As we’ve said before, this applies only to a scenario in which his father doesn’t run. But that’s a scenario in which some polls show him running as high as second (with the caveat that we don’t have a lot of good polling). He’d clearly have a base to work with, but capitalizing on that is another matter. And it’s not just about lobbing bombs from the sideline, which is his true talent. (Previous ranking: 7)
9. Mike Pompeo: The former secretary of state returns to this list, showing all the signs of a guy who will run. Those include running digital ads in Iowa and South Carolina. Also worth watching: He recently became one of the highest-profile Trump officials to testify to the Jan. 6 committee. And afterward, he seemed to temper his denial about having discussed removing Trump from office using the 25th Amendment, saying merely that it hadn’t been discussed “seriously.” It’ll sure be interesting to see how Trump backers respond to whatever testimony Pompeo provided. (Previous ranking: N/A)
8. Rick Scott: The senator from Florida is often dismissed because of his awkward personal style. But he’s been positioning himself for the national stage by launching his own platform (which Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has distanced himself from). And if Republicans can win back the Senate, perhaps Scott gets some credit as head of the Senate GOP’s campaign arm? That’s a double-edged sword though, given it’s quite possible Republicans blow a good opportunity. (Previous ranking: N/A)
7. Nikki Haley: The former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina governor is a real contender on paper. She’s also leaning hard into the idea that she’ll run, having repeatedly cited the idea of electing a woman as president. (You’ll notice she’s the only woman on this list.) But races aren’t won on paper. Haley often disappears from the national discourse, and it’s still not clear what her campaign would be about. (Previous ranking: 4)
6. Ted Cruz: The senator from Texas has been out front in criticizing the FBI’s search of Trump, including an early push for the search warrant. He has also floated impeaching Attorney General Merrick Garland and the FBI agents had been turned into “stormtroopers.” (Previous ranking: 6)
5. Glenn Youngkin: It still seems like a bit of a stretch for someone to launch a presidential campaign just a year into his one term as governor. (Virginia doesn’t allow governors to seek reelection). But he’s clearly putting himself in the mix, and 2022 could play into his hands. Imagine a world in which flawed candidates cost the GOP winnable races — and possibly the Senate — in states like Arizona, Georgia, Ohio or Pennsylvania. At that point, the guy whose 2021 win was supposed to be a road map for the party — a road map disregarded in these Senate primaries — might look pretty attractive. (Previous ranking: 8)
4. Tim Scott: The senator from South Carolina has faced some criticism from the right for his endorsement of moderate Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). But if anyone can get past that kind of thing, it might be the broadly liked South Carolina senator. He’s also raising massive sums — $9.6 million last quarter — for what should be an easy reelection bid, and he can use that money to run for president. Scott’s recentl book included a blurb that said he was preparing a presidential run, but the publisher later said it was an error and that Scott hadn’t approved the line. (Previous ranking: 5)
3. Mike Pence: Pence offered some interesting comments this week, opening the door to testifying to the Jan. 6 committee and saying, “The American people have a right to know what happened.” He has walked a fine line on criticizing Trump for that day, despite the insurrectionists endangering his life. We shouldn’t expect him to thoroughly denounce the man who picked him as vice president, but he’s certainly got a vested interest in the party moving in a different direction. The hard part is facilitating that without completely alienating the Trump backers he’d need in 2024. (Previous ranking: 3) | 2022-08-20T11:29:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The top 10 Republican presidential candidates for 2024, ranked - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/20/top-ten-republican-2024-candidates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/20/top-ten-republican-2024-candidates/ |
Coca growers block soldiers ordered to destroy the crop in Caño Indio, Colombia, on May 11. (SCHNEYDER MENDOZA/AFP via Getty Images)
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — It’s the largest producer of cocaine in the world, the source of more than 90 percent of the drug seized in the United States. It’s home to the largest Drug Enforcement Administration office overseas. And for decades, it’s been a key partner in Washington’s never-ending “war on drugs.”
Now, Colombia is calling for an end to that war. It wants instead to lead a global experiment: decriminalizing cocaine.
It’s a radical turn in this historically conservative country, one that could upend its longstanding — and lucrative — counternarcotics relationship with the United States. U.S. officials past and present are signaling concern; the drug was responsible for an estimated 25,000 overdose deaths in the United States last year.
“The United States and the Biden administration is not a supporter of decriminalization,” said Jonathan Finer, the White House deputy national security adviser, who met with Petro here before his inauguration.
“It would incrementally kill the cooperation,” he said. “It would be devastating, not just regionally, but globally. Everyone would be fighting from the outside in.”
Billions of U.S. dollars have funded a strategy focused largely on destroying the cocaine trade at its point of origin: the fields of rural Colombia. U.S. training and intelligence have propelled Colombia’s decades-long military efforts to eradicate coca, the base plant for cocaine, and dismantle drug trafficking groups. And yet more than a half century after President Richard M. Nixon declared drugs “America’s public enemy number one,” the Colombian trade has reached record levels. Coca cultivation has tripled in the last decade, according to U.S. figures.
Felipe Tascón, Petro’s drug czar, said the Colombians aim to take advantage of a rare moment in which most governments in the region — including the cocaine-producing countries Colombia, Peru and Bolivia — are led by leftists.
Domestically, Petro’s administration is planning to back legislation to decriminalize cocaine and marijuana. It plans to put an end to aerial spraying and the manual eradication of coca, which critics say unfairly targets poor rural farmers. By regulating the sale of cocaine, Tascón argued, the government would wrest the market from armed groups and cartels.
“Drug traffickers know that their business depends on it being prohibited,” Tascón said. “If you regulate it like a public market … the high profits disappear and the drug trafficking disappears.”
He aims to reframe his job not as “counternarcotics” or “anti-drug” but rather “drug policy.”
“The government’s program doesn’t talk about the problem of drugs,” he said. “It talks about the problems generated by the prohibition of drugs.”
Tascón has spoken about his plans with his counterparts in Peru. Ricardo Soberon, head of the Peruvian anti-drug agency DEVIDA, said it was too early to say whether Lima would support decriminalization, but he would welcome a regional debate about new approaches. Petro could find an ally in Bolivia, where in the early 2000s the government of Evo Morales began allowing farmers to legally grow coca in limited quantities.
As the most important U.S. ally against cocaine, Colombia is an unlikely pioneer in decriminalizing it. But it’s also the country that has suffered the most from the war on drugs. Tascón said it’s the country where the need for a new strategy is perhaps the most urgent.
The point was driven home by Colombia’s truth commission. The panel, appointed as part of the country’s 2016 peace accord between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, recommended in June that the government move toward “strict legal regulation of drugs.”
In a report, the commission said the militarized approach against drug trafficking intensified the fighting in the half century of conflict that killed hundreds of thousands of Colombians.
The Washington-based National Security Archive, an independent nonprofit, provided the commission with declassified documents showing the U.S. government knew its approach would lead to many years of bloodshed in Colombia.
“We see no chance that the growing and trafficking of narcotics in Colombia could be suppressed and kept that way … without a bloody, expensive, and prolonged coercive effort,” read one 1983 cable from the CIA provided to The Washington Post by the archive.
“One way to stop this war from happening again is to rethink the way we relate to coca and cocaine,” said Estefania Ciro, who led the truth commission’s drug policy researchers. “The important thing is not that the markets exist or that there is coca, but the violence that the cocaine market produces.”
Finer, Biden’s deputy national security adviser, said the Petro administration’s approach to drug policy overlaps with the holistic strategy the Biden administration announced last year for Colombia. But not on decriminalization.
“Colombia is a sovereign country. It will make its own decisions,” he said. “This is a relationship that is bigger and broader than just our cooperation and our collaboration on counternarcotics.”
A delegation of U.S. officials, including the assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs and the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, plan to meet with Petro administration officials here next week.
USAID Director Samantha Power, who attended Petro’s inauguration here, said U.S. officials “have clearly heard [his] message.”
Jim Crotty, a former deputy chief of staff at the DEA, argued that a legal cocaine trade “is not going to get rid of the illegal trade.”
“As we’ve seen before in Colombia and elsewhere, there’s always someone to fill that vacuum,” Crotty said.
Colombians are currently allowed to carry small amounts of marijuana and cocaine. But proposed legislation aims to go much further, decriminalizing and regulating their use.
Decriminalizing cocaine will face an uphill battle in a divided Congress. Taking the debate to the international stage will be still more difficult.
But it’s a discussion Latin America has already had — on marijuana. In 2013, Uruguay became the first country in the world to legalize the production and sale of recreational cannabis.
“We have to open up the debate and break the taboo,” said Milton Romani, who served as secretary general of Uruguay’s national drug board at the time. “It might be a long road, but I don’t think it’s impossible.”
Colombia would have the “moral authority” to lead this effort, he said, “because so many people have died for this.”
Mellington Cortés has seen this bloodshed firsthand.
In 2017, he was one of hundreds of coca farmers who were gathered in the Nariño department, protesting forced coca eradication by security forces, when police started firing into the crowd. One gunshot struck him. Another killed his brother, one of seven protesters who died that day. The killings are still under investigation.
The 45-year-old continues to grow coca, which pays more than twice the $130 a month he made as a driver.
“It’s a secret to no one that we grow coca to survive, to maintain our families, our children,” Cortés said. “There are no other resources here. We’ve been forgotten.” | 2022-08-20T11:29:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Colombia cocaine: Petro pursues decriminalization - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/20/colombia-cocaine-decriminalize-petro/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/20/colombia-cocaine-decriminalize-petro/ |
Two city residents decided to revive a century-old brand, Mt. Pleasant Club Whiskey
Two D.C. men revived the Mt. Pleasant Club Whiskey brand after one of them came across a bottle that had been found inside the wall of a home. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for The Washington Post)
As he walked through a Mount Pleasant home he was thinking of buying in November 2019, Troy Hughes came across an unusual bottle of liquor sitting in the dining room labeled “Mt. Pleasant Club Whiskey.”
The homeowner, 82-year-old Noel Gessner, told him that her husband and his brother found it decades earlier stashed inside a wall when they were replacing the slate shingles on the back of the residence.
Hughes asked to keep the bottle if he bought the house. Gessner agreed.
“I considered keeping it, but then I said, ‘No, I think it would be nice for the next owners of the house to have it,’ ” Gessner said.
Hughes bought the place. And he and a friend would soon set out to track down where the bottle came from — and ultimately revive its historical brand.
In 2021, Hughes, 52, and John Loughner, 40, launched Reboot Beverages, to sell liquor. The two aren’t distillers; for now, they’re using spirits distilled by others in D.C. and Virginia, then bottling it and applying the Mt. Pleasant label.
But they have begun using a process called “secondary barreling,” which involves putting whiskey in previously used barrels for additional aging, to put their own spin on things. Eventually, they hope to work with distillers on particular recipes.
The history hunt began in earnest during a fireside conversation one night in January 2021, when Hughes and Loughner agreed they would together investigate the Mt. Pleasant Club Whiskey bottle’s origins. Their research led them to the whiskey’s original seller, William D. Barry, who owned the Reliable Family Liquor Store, located at 2024 14th Street NW, and was an influential figure in the D.C. liquor scene in the early 1900s. Barry died in August 1936.
Hughes and Loughner found a May 1905 Washington Post advertisement for Mt. Pleasant Club Whiskey and soon connected with Ray Barry, the great-grandson of William Barry.
Ray Barry, a D.C. native, said he’s known about his family’s history in the whiskey business for at least 50 years. When cleaning out his father’s home in December, Barry said, he found another Mt. Pleasant Club Whiskey bottle. He said when he was researching the whiskey online last year, he stumbled on Hughes and Loughner’s work to revive the brand.
“I knew my great-grandfather was pretty influential,” Barry, 76, said. “I think it’s neat that they’re revisiting this history and bringing it to light.”
Hughes, an attorney, and Loughner, a data analytics consultant, said they were not able to find the whiskey’s original formula, and they did not have professional experience in making spirits. But Hughes said he has a friend from college who lives in Halifax, Va., and built a cabin on the site of the Springfield Distillery there. When Hughes and Loughner launched their company, Hughes turned to the friend for help.
The first release, 19th Street Batch, was distilled and bottled in Virginia, while the second, Kilbourne Place Rye, was distilled in the District. Hughes and Loughner purchased the barrels full of alcohol and then had them bottled by One Eight Distilling in Ivy City. Hughes said he hopes to work with it and other distillers in D.C. going forward.
Loughner and Hughes said they will release limited whiskey batches, each with 200 to 700 bottles. Loughner said each release will be named after streets in the Mt. Pleasant area to explain the neighborhood’s history to consumers. The first batch went on sale on Sept. 21.
The 19th Street Batch is named after the street where the bottle was found, while the Kilbourne Place Rye is named after a street just a few blocks down. The 19th Street Batch, made from ingredients in Virginia, features mostly corn, with elements of barley and wheat. Hughes said now that he and Loughner have connections in the District, the two would like to keep as much of the operation as possible in D.C.
“We’re going to incorporate local history into the release, really the character of each street,” Loughner said. “When we got this launched, we knew we wanted to contribute a portion of our profits back to the community.”
The pair sell the whiskey at three locations: Sportsman’s Wine & Liquors, Irving Wine and Spirits, and Cleveland Park Fine Wines & Spirits. Loughner also said the liquor is available at three restaurants in D.C.: Atomic Billiards, Beau Thai and Purple Patch.
“We knew that we wanted to start small and hyper local. The brand is called Mt. Pleasant Club Whiskey, so we wanted to start in our neighborhood,” Loughner said. “Since each batch is very limited in terms of how many bottles we’re producing, that doesn’t lend itself to wide distribution.”
Loughner said he plans to continue selling two to three batches a year in a limited release and expand over time. He said he would eventually like to open a tasting room in the neighborhood.
“My wife is tired of me buying so many whiskey bottles,” Loughner said. “I took a class in Louisville specifically around barrel aging, secondary finishing, warehousing, and how whiskey matures in bottles. I’m going to go back and take more classes from this place because it was fascinating.” | 2022-08-20T12:07:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Mt. Pleasant Club Whiskey was rebooted in D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/20/mount-pleasant-club-whiskey-reboot/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/20/mount-pleasant-club-whiskey-reboot/ |
Spanberger flips the script on policing in race against auxiliary deputy
Yesli Vega, left, Republican candidate for the Virginia 7th Congressional District, and Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va). (Nathan Howard/Getty Images and Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
The ad sounded just like a Republican attack straight out of 2020: "She voted against our police and sheriffs,” a narrator says.
But the digital ad — released this week — is in fact from Virginia Democrat Abigail Spanberger, accusing her Republican opponent in the 7th Congressional District race, Prince William County Board Supervisor Yesli Vega, of not funding police by voting against the county budgets. “Yesli Vega won’t keep us safe," the ad’s ending note says.
The only hitch: Vega herself is a former police officer — and still in uniform as an auxiliary deputy with the Prince William County Sheriff’s Office.
“I find that laughable to be honest with you,” Vega said of the ad in an interview, saying she voted against the budgets due to her opposition to tax hikes.
The ad offers a preview of how policing is likely to play a key role in a highly competitive race between two women with law enforcement backgrounds. And it comes at a time when Spanberger is co-leading a push in Congress with Rep. Tom Rice (R-S.C.) to increase Justice Department grant funding for local police departments to hire and train more officers through an existing program, part of a broader package of police-funding bills slated to go up in Congress.
It’s the kind of effort Spanberger could almost single-handedly point to in swatting down a “defund the police” attack from Republicans, even as the bills have led to some criticism from the more liberal wing of her party and from civil rights groups, which want to see more of a focus on police accountability.
Spanberger had been a vocal critic of the “defund the police” rhetoric in the 2020 cycle during a tense intraparty debate following the deluge of attacks from Republicans, particularly in swing districts like hers. But she said her bill is not a response to that rhetoric and is principally about the needs of police departments in her district — needs that she argued Vega, even if in uniform, voted against locally.
“There’s a verifiable place where we in positions of elected office have the ability to support police," she said. "Every single time I have been given the opportunity to vote to increase support to federal law enforcement, or local law enforcement via federal grant dollars, I have done so.”
The two candidates took diverging paths in law enforcement to end up on the same campaign trail.
Spanberger, the daughter of a federal law enforcement officer, took a similar route as her father, working as an investigator with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service before becoming a CIA officer focused on counterterrorism. Those experiences have informed much of her work in Congress, ranging from providing a law-enforcement lens to explain why she supports certain gun-control measures to speaking on the threats of domestic terrorism.
In Va. swing districts, Democrats stand firm on gun restrictions
Vega has frequently told the story of what inspired her to become a police officer: The gang MS-13 shot her brother and killed his friend when they were teenagers. Vega, a daughter of Salvadoran immigrants, joined the Alexandria Police Department in 2011, rose to become a hostage negotiator with the Manassas Park department and ultimately ended up in the Prince William sheriff’s office. She appears in uniform at the end of every campaign message to supporters — putting her background as a police officer at the center of her campaign with pledges to fight crime and trafficking and illegal immigration at the southern border.
“These are the issues I’ve had to walk in,” Vega said, “and so I’m passionate about public safety. I’m passionate about law and order, and really that’s where my heart is when it comes to being a police officer.”
The day after Spanberger’s ad dropped, Vega held a law-enforcement round table she said focused on police officer shortages — which she blamed in part on “anti-police” rhetoric among Democrats — and how in her view the drug and human trafficking at the border can still affect the 7th District. The next day, she unveiled endorsements from nine sheriffs, representing the majority of sheriffs in the district.
One, King George County Sheriff Chris Giles, said Vega’s background as a local law enforcement officer was the biggest draw for him — but more specifically, he said, she had firsthand experience understanding how a lack of mental health resources in a community impacts law enforcement.
“That was one of the biggest things that really helped me realize that she understands the mental health problem because she works in law enforcement,” he said, “and she wants to help the best way she can — at least that’s what she’s telling me — at the federal level.”
Vega became a county board supervisor in 2020. She said she has never voted in favor of one of the county budgets since taking office because she opposed tax increases included in them, particularly during the pandemic and a time of high costs and rising inflation. She also pushed this year to hire more police officers, an effort that did not ultimately succeed on the Democratic-majority board save for some added civilian positions.
Yesli Vega: a new provocateur in Prince William County
Asked what she thought of Spanberger’s bill in Congress that would offer federal grants to hire more officers, Vega said: “This is election-season Abby who is willing to do and say whatever she needs to say because for her it’s about self-preservation. For me it’s about literally putting my life on the line to defend the community I love.” She decried Spanberger’s vote for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which included a provision to make it easier to sue law enforcement.
But Spanberger said Vega’s own comments in recent weeks have called into question her support for law enforcement. She pointed to recent comments in Vega’s campaign messages calling the FBI “corrupt” for its search of former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, plus Vega’s past sympathy for Jan. 6 rioters, saying they have been unfairly persecuted.
“I carried a gun every single day for a couple years. I have written my fair share of search warrant, arrest warrant affidavits. I have a set of experiences as well. That’s why I find [Vega’s] position on commitment to law enforcement so frankly offensive,” Spanberger said.
Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington, said that while Republicans have had a firm hold on the “law-and-order” messaging in recent decades, Jan. 6 may have changed that. Now, he said, Democrats have an opening to undermine their Republican opponents’ professed commitment to law-and-order and flip the script on them — exactly what Spanberger has sought to do.
“One of the realities of politics is that the best defense is a good offense," he said. "Two years ago, a lot of Republicans tried to attack Democrats for the comments of the minority who talked about defunding the police. Now, a lot of Democrats are likely to attack Republicans for not being supportive enough of the police, particularly in the wake of January 6.”
More recently, some congressional Republicans have made that easier for Democrats by calling to literally defund the FBI following its search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. Vega, like many Republicans, immediately sought to discredit the court-approved search, saying in campaign fundraising emails that the FBI was part of the “deep-state” and that the search was “for no reason." The FBI seized 11 sets of classified documents, and as The Washington Post reported, agents were searching for some documents related to nuclear weapons.
Vega said she would not support defunding the FBI but would support an audit of the agency if elected, calling the search politically motivated.
“Any person who would call FBI agents and law enforcement officers corrupt and deep state, that’s disqualifying,” Spanberger said.
Farnsworth said Spanberger’s efforts to turn the tables on Vega, focusing on those comments, could energize the more liberal base of the party that might otherwise not be too thrilled with her leading the charge to increase police funding in Congress.
Spanberger and Rice’s bill was part of a public-safety and police-funding package — including the Invest to Protect Act by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) — that got delayed at the end of July. The Congressional Black Caucus and Progressive Caucus wanted to see more police accountability provisions added to the bills if they were going to include more funding for police. Numerous criminal justice and civil rights groups echoed those concerns, including the ACLU.
“We do not need to repeat the mistakes of the past and spend more public dollars without public accountability for the outcomes,” Udi Ofer, director of the ACLU’s justice division, said in an email to The Post.
A vote on the legislative package was delayed so that negotiations to include more guardrails for the funding could continue, and it’s unclear when the package may go up again. Spanberger said talks have been constructive and that she did not view police accountability and funding as “mutually exclusive,” seeing value in doing both, or using funding as a tool to allow departments to have more resources for de-escalation training or body cameras.
The legislation was popular with a number of law enforcement leaders in her district, including Culpeper Police Chief Chris Jenkins, who invited Spanberger for a ride-along earlier this year. Jenkins said smaller police departments in the district could use the grant money to hire quality, community-oriented officers and enhance training, ingredients he said were essential for building trust with residents.
The chief said he had nothing against Vega, but based on the work Spanberger had done in Congress — including a bill she led to increase resources to increase mental health and substance abuse resources — he had decided to throw his support behind her.
“I haven’t seen anybody in a long time that is more supportive of law enforcement and our community,” said Jenkins, who identifies as Republican but notes he doesn’t vote based on party.
He added: “At the end of the day, I think there’s a group of people who will vote party lines, and I think there’s another group of people who like myself who will decide the election based on who they think the best candidate is for whatever their issues are." | 2022-08-20T12:07:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Spanberger flips the script on policing in race against auxiliary deputy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/21/virginia-7th-policing-spanberger-vega/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/21/virginia-7th-policing-spanberger-vega/ |
Ali Hazelwood’s sort-of-secret life as a best-selling author
By Stephanie Merry
(The Washington Post illustration; David Livingston/Getty Images)
Ali Hazelwood is hiding in plain sight. Search the best-selling romance author’s name online, and you’ll see plenty of photos of the smiling, spectacled brunette, not to mention a TikTok of her gamely autographing a fan’s chest (caption: “when getting the signed book isn’t enough”). But she’d rather not divulge her real name.
So who is the woman behind the pseudonym? Here’s what we know: She was born and raised in Italy and retains a charming accent. She’s a neuroscientist and professor living with her husband somewhere in the United States. And her age is …
“Can you just say I’m in my thirties?” she asks over Zoom. “I’m sorry. Is that weird? Am I being weird?”
“Weird,” like a lot of her words, comes out with an “a” on the end: weird-a. But the answer is no. Pen names are not at all out of the ordinary, particularly in the world of romance. And yet, she still seems conflicted about the whole thing.
The truth, as she explains it, is that she didn’t intend to keep her scientist identity separate from her author identity, because she didn’t intend to become an author. Creative writing — specifically the writing of erotic fan fiction about Star Trek’s Mr. Spock — was just a hobby, a way to unplug from the stressful world of academia.
Spock, though? Really? The one played by Zachary Quinto? Oh no, she clarifies, Leonard Nimoy too.
“Even as a kid, I loved Spock so much,” she says with reverence. “He’s just this broody, emotionless science man, but every two or three episodes, something happens, and they just make him feel all the emotions.”
Hazelwood’s fan fiction showed her potential. One story, inspired by Kylo Ren and Rey from the Star Wars franchise, had enough depth and humanity — and the setting of STEM academia was different enough from “a galaxy far, far away” — that when literary agent Thao Le stumbled across it in 2020, she thought it already read like an original story.
“Honestly, if you didn’t know it was inspired by characters from ‘Star Wars,’ you wouldn’t even recognize them,” Le says.
One fortuitous Twitter connection later and the pair were turning Hazelwood’s fan fiction into “The Love Hypothesis.”
“She was the one who helped me make the leap from writing fictional characters making out to writing my fictional characters making out,” Hazelwood says.
And now here she is, less than a year after her debut became a bestseller and days from releasing her second novel, “Love on the Brain.” Both are about female scientists who fall for, well, broody, emotionless science men. Hazelwood also published three novellas this year. (“I should be doing research,” she says, “but I’m doing this other thing.”)
Hazelwood’s novels fall into the growing genre of “STEMinist” fiction that also includes recent feel-good bestsellers “Lessons in Chemistry,” by Bonnie Garmus, and “The Soulmate Equation,” by Christina Lauren. “Love on the Brain” revolves around two scientists, Bee Königswasser and Levi Ward, who are working on a NASA project to create a helmet that uses transcranial magnetic stimulation to reduce an astronaut’s “attentional blinks,” which, as Bee describes it, are “those little lapses in awareness that are unavoidable when many things happen at once.”
There are plenty of breathless encounters in “Love on the Brain,” but the flirty banter isn’t typical romance stuff. It might consist of a scientific debate about why couples are destined to break up. “Emotions are transient by nature,” Bee schools Levi. “They’re temporary states brought on by neurophysical changes that aren’t meant to be long-lasting. The nervous system must revert back to homeostasis.” To which Levi responds: “What about prairie voles? They pair bond for life.” Swoon.
How the romance genre found its happily ever after
“The Love Hypothesis” has been hugely popular on TikTok, where young women sing its praises and quote its “spicy” passages. And that begs the question: Do Hazelwood’s students really not know about her alter-ego? What about her co-workers?
“No one has ever said anything to me,” Hazelwood says. “I don’t think they know. Maybe they don’t read romance. And there are many authors whose faces I wouldn’t know.”
It didn’t even occur to Hazelwood that she was living “this weird Hannah Montana life” until “The Love Hypothesis” started taking off, but by then she wasn’t sure how she would even broach the subject of her book with people who know her as a scientist.
“If, one day, someone comes into my office and says, ‘you wrote this,’ I’m going to own it,” she says. “Right now, the hard thing is just bringing it up to people, like, ‘oh, by the way, I wrote this book.’”
Pen names are common in the romance genre, which has historically been stigmatized and minimized despite massive and growing popularity. (Three romance authors — Colleen Hoover, Emily Henry and Taylor Jenkins Reid — are currently dominating the paperback bestsellers list.) But Hazelwood says she isn’t keeping her identity secret because she’s ashamed of writing about sex.
On TikTok, crying is encouraged. Colleen Hoover’s books get the job done.
She’s proud of writing romance. Ten years ago, maybe she would have been embarrassed, but the fan communities she belongs to have changed that.
“I found my people, and by finding my people I was able to accept myself better,” she says. “I find writing and reading stuff incredibly hot and, you know, it's something that makes me happy.”
Hazelwood has also found her people at book events, though she doesn’t do many readings. (She’s under the likely mistaken impression that her fans won’t appreciate her accent.)
“It’s a weird thing, because I’m not hiding,” she says, before stopping and starting a few times, weighing her words.
“The people who know me as Ali Hazelwood, the readers, I don’t want them to know my real name,” she says. “But I don’t mind if people who know my real name find out I’m Ali Hazelwood.”
That’s good, because with another romantic comedy ready to take TikTok by storm, it feels like it can only be a matter of time. | 2022-08-20T12:59:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ali Hazelwood talks 'Love Hypothesis,' 'Love on the Brain' - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/08/20/ali-hazelwood-romance-author/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/08/20/ali-hazelwood-romance-author/ |
Mergers are hard. Most of them fail. David Zaslav, the chief executive of the Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc., seems determined to beat the odds. Since overseeing the company’s April merger, he’s made a string of tough calls to bring new discipline to its content strategy, from killing the barely-launched CNN+ streaming service and the completed $90 million movie “Batgirl” to corporate lay-offs and reorganizations.The longer-term plan is shaping up to be a handful of expensive “appointment TV” galleons (produced by HBO) and a flotilla of cheaper reality “comfort viewing” options (produced by Discovery+). This weekend, the strategy faces its first big test: HBO’s well-funded “Game of Thrones” prequel, “House of the Dragon.”
With “Game of Thrones,” HBO caught lightning in a bottle. Who knew that so many viewers would flock to a show based on an unfinished 1990s series of 1,000-plus page fantasy novels inspired by the English Wars of the Roses? It may be hard to remember now, but people were once surprised that a show in which sibling incest played such a prominent role could find a wide audience. It ended up with 164 Emmy nominations.
“Dragon” is HBO’s second attempt to see if the unlikely magic (and revenue) can be rekindled. Producers sank $30 million into a pilot for a prequel series starring Oscar-nominated actress Naomi Watts. “It felt very adult, sophisticated and intelligent, and there was a thematic conversation at the center of it about disenfranchisement in the face of colonialism and religious extremism,” HBO executive Francesca Orsi told the Hollywood Reporter. That makes it sound a bit more like HBO’s pre-Thrones comfort zone (like “The Wire” and “The Sopranos”), and quite a bit headier than the original series. “Thrones” showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss famously dismissed themes as “for eighth-grade book reports.” Executives dracarysed the Watts project last year.
Under Zaslav, HBO seems willing to make a more straightforward bet. There’s no need to subvert expectations or blow anyone’s minds. Just give people more of the same. And they are probably not wrong; there are lots of viewers out there who simply want more of the original series, or, as one actor reductively put it, “t-ts and dragons.”
Whatever the source of its appeal, “Thrones” made an estimated $285 million in profit per episode over eight seasons. That kind of money makes its final season budget of $15 million an episode budget look fairly reasonable. “Thrones” is still one of the most-streamed shows on TV, three years after its head-scratcher finale, and Zaslav says viewership of the original series is actually rising with the marketing push for the new show.
Despite the cost savings he’s looking for in other parts of the business, Zaslav has said “Thrones” and its spin-offs are an area they see as a worthy investment. “Dragon” was greenlit without a pilot, and reportedly cost $20 million an episode. George R.R. Martin, who wrote the books and works on the TV shows, has compared the franchise to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has made about $38 billion, and a top producer has compared it to “Star Wars,” which has had a lot more time to pile up more than $69 billion. If those parallels are fair, there’s a lot of revenue yet to be captured: “Thrones” has only made about $4.4 billion so far. For comparison, that puts it just below “Seinfeld” in the top-grossing media properties of all time, or a little more than half a “PAW Patrol,” which premiered two years after “Thrones.”
That kind of money would represent a huge win for Warner Bros. Discovery, although at that point they may as well change the name of the whole company to “HBO.” But can they do it?
While “Dragon” looks sumptuous in previews, there are reasons to think some viewers may find it challenging. Unlike the original series, the story (loosely based on the period of English civil war known as The Anarchy) does not lend itself to heroes; absent major changes to the source material, there is no equivalent of the Stark family that fans can feel good about rooting for. This may give it a gritty historical realism that appeals to critics and core fans, but make it less accessible to a wider audience. In Marvel and Star Wars movies, there is generally a clear hero.
And unlike the worlds of Star Wars and Marvel, the world of Westeros is very adult. There’s gore, and orgies, and yes, all that incest. That makes it harder to cash in on merch and spin-offs — and also limit the appeal of having “Thrones” and now “Dragons” bumping elbows with softer Discovery Plus reality TV fare. Think “90 Day Fiancé” and “For the Love of Kitchens.” No spoilers here, but I don’t think we’re going to see many little girls dressing up as Rhaenyra Targaryen this October.
Given the profitability of family-friendly franchises, it seems odd that on a recent earnings call, CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels indicated that the company doesn’t plan to prioritize content aimed at kids. (One of the straight-to-streaming films Zaslav recently killed was a Scooby-Doo feature.) That would seem to be an area where some of the hoped-for merger synergies would materialize: Warner Bros. owns the Looney Tunes, DC Comics and Harry Potter franchises, and HBO has been exploring “Thrones” spin-off series that might work for a younger crowd — most notably, a series based on Martin’s simpler, more PG-13-rated “Dunk and Egg” novellas.Nonetheless, it makes sense that Zaslav is pushing Warner Bros. Discovery to be much choosier about which projects to splash out on, and that he’d go all in on Westeros. If it even earns half of what Marvel has earned, it would easily become the most profitable TV franchise of all time. Yes, that kind of success could take HBO further and further from its old core of intellectual urbanite fare like “Treme” and “Succession,” and would seem to leave Discovery as little more than the producer of new “Deadliest Catch” seasons. But no doubt those are problems Zaslav would love to have. If you find yourself riding a dragon, the best thing to do is hang on. | 2022-08-20T14:31:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Can ‘House of the Dragon’ Ignite a Big Media Merger? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/can-house-of-the-dragonignitea-big-media-merger/2022/08/20/d1d74010-2088-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/can-house-of-the-dragonignitea-big-media-merger/2022/08/20/d1d74010-2088-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Both sides may have been exaggerating a little. Here’s what has happened with duplex and triplex construction in parts of Minneapolis that were previously restricted to single-family houses since the new rules took effect.
Minneapolis had 425,336 residents as of mid-2021, the Census Bureau estimates, and 199,143 housing units as of April 2020. By my count the end of single-family zoning has so far allowed for the permitting of at most 97 new units (the above table shows numbers of buildings, not units), some of which haven’t been built yet. If things continue at this pace, ending single-family zoning will have increased the city’s housing supply by just 1% by 2040.
Happily, there are other kinds of residential construction in Minneapolis, where more than twice as many new housing units were built in the 2010s than in the 2000s (nationally it was 34% less) and, after a dip in late 2020 and early 2021, permits have returned to their brisk late-2010s pace.
As is apparent from the chart, almost all of this housing is in structures with five or more units. Spend some time in Minneapolis, as I did last week, and it’s apparent that most of these have well more than five units — among the buildings with more than five units permitted so far this year, the average size is 75 units. Apartment buildings have been going up in commercial districts and transit corridors citywide, chiefly of the boxy, three-to-six-story, wood-framed type that have transformed almost every American city over the past decade. Closer to downtown, where the city requires that new buildings be at least 10 stories, they’re taller and not made of wood.
For a city that’s hemmed in by suburbs and has little undeveloped land other than parks, Minneapolis has been pretty successful at adding housing. The 2,317 new housing units permitted in the city in the first half of the year were more than those in the Northern California trio of San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland combined, for example. It’s a lot less than the 11,996 new units in Austin, Texas, the 5,542 in Seattle or the 4,707 in Denver, but among Midwestern cities Minneapolis comes in a solid fourth, behind one much-larger city (Chicago) and two (Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Omaha, Nebraska) that still have a fair amount of undeveloped land within or adjacent to the city limits.
As already noted, Minneapolis was building at a similar pace before Minneapolis 2040 began to take effect — and the highest-profile element of the plan, the end of single-family zoning, is responsible for only about 1% of the new units permitted since January 2020. A Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis tracker that compares city housing production with a “synthetic control” based on other large cities finds that permits for multifamily buildings have actually underperformed the control over the past year, although not by a statistically significant amount.
So the plan isn’t revolutionizing housing in Minneapolis, but that’s not really what it was meant to do. “It’s a mild land use plan that took on enormous emotional significance mainly because the overall conversation around land use in the country was so ossified,” wrote urban planner Alex Schieferdecker (who was also the first to note that Minneapolis is outpacing San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland in housing production this year) in an assessment published in June. “It’s a forward-looking document at a time when those are remarkably rare and the crises that we collectively face seem so immediate.”
It’s also about more than just eliminating single-family zoning. Parking minimums — requirements that developers provide a certain number of off-street parking spaces for each unit — went by the wayside in May 2021, and there are signs that this is encouraging the construction of more buildings in the 10- to 50-unit range, which in the first year after the change had a median of only about a quarter of a parking space per unit, much lower than larger buildings. Jason Wittenberg, a planning manager with the city’s Community Planning and Economic Development department, who provided me with the city data cited here, said one of the most important changes is still underway: codifying the city’s already extensive efforts to encourage denser development. Apartment buildings of more than four stories outside the downtown area that in the past required (and often received) negotiated height increases and zoning variances will under the new zoning code be explicitly permitted in transit and commercial corridors, thus “increasing the level of predictability around development,” Wittenberg said. “If you bring a project to the city that follows adopted standards, we’re trying to provide a high probability that you are walking away with a building permit.”
Lack of predictability in housing development in the US is often the result of legal challenges to new construction, and the implementation of Minneapolis 2040 was briefly stalled this summer by a judge’s ruling in a lawsuit filed by the Minneapolis chapter of the National Audubon Society and two local anti-development groups. The judge subsequently put things back on track, but the litigation remains a cloud over the plan. Another cloud is the turmoil and increased violent crime that Minneapolis has experienced since the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin, which likely played a role along with the pandemic in the big drop-off in new permits in late 2020 and early 2021.
Also, while from the perspective of the coasts Minneapolis is an oasis of housing affordability, with the median rent on a one-bedroom dwelling just $1,002 in July, according to Apartment List, and rents overall down 2.6% since March 2020, big economic disparities, mostly along racial lines, mean many Minneapolis residents worry that new development will displace them. In neighboring St. Paul, voters in November approved a rent control ordinance that applies to new construction as well as existing rentals, after which the number of new housing units permitted fell to 342 in the first half of this year compared with 1,633 during the same period in 2021 — not a great result for housing affordability. Minneapolis residents also voted in favor of rent regulation in November, but the ballot measure they approved merely gave the city council the authority to enact controls, which it has yet to do. The council has approved inclusionary zoning requirements in conjunction with Minneapolis 2040 that require developers of larger buildings to either set aside some units for lower-income renters or make in-lieu payments or land donations to the city, an approach that while increasing the number of apartments explicitly set aside as affordable may reduce the supply and raise the price of housing overall.
There’s a lot going on in Minneapolis, in other words, beyond just the end of single-family zoning. Still, the shift away from it is significant. Only in the US is the detached single-family house “considered to be so incompatible with all other types of urbanization as to warrant a legally defined district all its own, a district where all other major land uses and building types are outlawed,” Sonia Hirt, a University of Georgia professor of landscape architecture and planning, wrote in her 2014 book “Zoned in the U.S.A.” I understand the appeal of quiet, leafy residential neighborhoods, but it’s clear from Europe and some older US cities that these can be perfectly compatible with and even enhanced by well-designed commercial and multifamily buildings.
Last Wednesday I rode around Minneapolis on a succession of bike-share bicycles (one of which is pictured in the photo atop the Bloomberg.com version of this column) to look at a few of the new duplexes and triplexes. I needed a map and a spreadsheet from the city to find them, while I encountered large apartment building after large apartment building along the main thoroughfares and the Midtown Greenway without even trying.
Smaller multifamily buildings are what has become known as the “missing middle,” once a significant part of the country’s housing mix and now only a tiny fraction of new construction. In the end, I saw only one new triplex, in a neighborhood that already had a lot of multifamily housing although on a block that before 2020 maxed out at duplexes. The several new duplexes I found fit in quite well with their single-family neighbors — more so than a couple of expensive-looking new single-family houses I came across. With street grids and back alleys full of garages the norm in residential Minneapolis, there didn’t seem to be any significant parking issues (although I’m sure there have been complaints). In the Como neighborhood near the University of Minnesota, where duplexes were already allowed on some residential blocks before 2020, there are so many new ones going up that one can perhaps speak of a neighborhood in transition. Elsewhere, they’re sparsely distributed, providing a few more people access to backyards and quiet, leafy, walkable neighborhoods in a city that, in the summer at least, is among the nation’s most livable. That’s a victory, even if it’s not a revolution. | 2022-08-20T14:31:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What Happened When Minneapolis Ended Single-Family Zoning - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-happened-when-minneapolis-ended-single-family-zoning/2022/08/20/d17937d6-2088-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-happened-when-minneapolis-ended-single-family-zoning/2022/08/20/d17937d6-2088-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Mental health, teacher shortages and monkeypox join list of covid concerns
Lauren Lumpkin
Kindergarten teacher Lindsey Lienau reads “The Night Before Kindergarten” to her students during a kindergarten orientation at Lyles-Crouch Traditional Academy in Alexandria, Va., on Aug. 19, 2022. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
Across the Washington region, thousands of children are getting ready to return to school. Teachers are preparing lessons and setting up their classrooms. Parents are booking last-minute doctor’s appointments for children behind on routine vaccinations.
The past few years have been difficult, with challenges including the coronavirus pandemic that forced some of the most drastic shifts in teaching and learning, and instances of school violence and culture war clashes.
Those issues — and others — are still on the minds of parents and teachers. In response to a Washington Post survey, parents and teachers said they were concerned about the lingering mental health challenges the pandemic caused for their children, students and themselves. Some also were concerned by the seeming disrespect shown by some students, parents and politicians for education and the work done in schools. Others fear a new health risk with the spread of the monkeypox virus, and the possibility of re-emerging coronavirus outbreaks continue to haunt many of them.
Still, many parents and teachers say they are optimistic about the new school year, hopeful that the past year of in-person learning has made a difference in students’ academic, social and emotional standing.
Parents and teachers: How are you feeling about the new school year? Tell The Post.
“That’s the big question,” said David Potasznik, an ESOL teacher at Rockville High School in Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools. “We’re hoping ... but the fact remains that we’re behind where we would have expected.”
Many of the students Potasznik teaches are newcomers to the school district, so he’s uncertain whether they learned virtually or in-person during the year before. Montgomery County dropped its masking requirement in the spring; that move can help Potasznik teach students English, since they can see his mouth as he forms words. But Potasznik, 68, is in an age group that is more vulnerable to the coronavirus. He has both shots of the vaccine and two boosters, and he says he has avoided contracting covid-19 thus far. As the school start date has approached, he has considered whether to prioritize his health by masking or to forgo masking to better model speech patterns for his students.
“I guess I’m just going to have to see what it’s like in a week and make a call,” Potasznik said.
Advika Agarwal, a rising 11th-grader at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Md., was looking forward to seeing her friends back in the classroom and to work on environmental issues around the school district, including starting more composting programs at schools.
She says she is mostly positive about the upcoming school year but is concerned about coronavirus transmission rates increasing. She said she has seen emails from the school system’s PTA members about reinstating a mask mandate. Regardless of the school system’s decision, Agarwal said she plans to continue to wear a mask and sanitize her hands frequently.
“Cases are kind of coming down and then going up again, and it’s just kind of unpredictable,” Agarwal, 16, said.
Like many districts around the country, and most in the D.C. metro area, Montgomery County has made masks optional. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relaxed its covid guidelines this month, recommending that schools end quarantines for staffers and students exposed to the coronavirus and discontinue test-to-stay programs that allowed exposed students to stay in school if they repeatedly tested negative for the coronavirus and showed no symptoms of covid-19. The CDC’s guidelines are not mandatory, but many schools systems use them to set their own policies and, consequently, also have relaxed their covid rules.
In Virginia’s Prince William County, where school starts Monday, Marion Lasswell’s concern centers mostly on her two children still in grade school — and she has one starting college — and especially on her daughter, a high-school senior. Her son is in seventh-grade, is on the autism spectrum and receives an Individualized Education Program. For both children, she doubts their ability to behave appropriately with friends and in classroom settings: “They’ve been socially isolated for such a long time, I just don’t know how they would deal with other people.”
Lasswell’s children underwent fully virtual schooling for about two years. Although they went back to the classroom last year, her children kept their masks on and were very strict about social distancing, so she doesn’t feel that the year of brick-and-mortar instruction made much of a difference in teaching them how to speak to other children their age.
She said she feels less anxious about her son after an open house Thursday during which she watched him “interact with other kids, which was a little reassuring.” She is still apprehensive for her daughter, though, because the girl struggled intensely during isolation.
“We moved here just before the pandemic struck, so she hasn’t really been able to make friends as easily,” Lasswell said. “And in that age group, they already have their cliques and stuff.”
What parents should say to teachers (according to teachers)
As districts continue to adjust to the realities of the two-year-old coronavirus pandemic, there are concerns about a different virus: monkeypox. Dominique Moore, a teacher at Johnson Middle School in Southeast Washington, said there has not been much guidance about dealing with a potential outbreak.
Nathaniel Beers, a general and developmental-behavioral pediatrician at Children’s National Hospital in D.C., said that despite the low numbers — only two cases had been confirmed in children as of Aug. 10 — parents do have concerns about monkeypox.
Monkeypox is different from many other childhood viruses, such as the flu, coronavirus and chickenpox, in that is requires not just respiratory transmission, but direct and sustained contact and is most likely spread with direct contact with a lesion.
Beers, who supervises the Children’s National program that places school nurses in D.C. public and charter schools, said that nurses’ most recent training includes an update on monkeypox, how to identify it and reminders about taking precautions as they care for children.
Most viruses are contagious for a short time, but people with monkeypox may have to isolate for two to four weeks, he said. “It’s not ideal, given the last two and a half years that we have had to have a virus that would cause prolonged periods of time that a child was unable to return to school.”
Beers said he does not expect to see widespread monkeypox disease in schools and day cares. Instead, spread is more likely to be seen on college campuses, “where people are living in congregant settings and young people are making questionable decisions,” Beers said.
Beyond the health questions, some parents and teachers also have academic concerns about their students.
“The two years that they were virtual, they were literally cheating. They would look up the answers on Google,” Lasswell of Prince William said. “I’m not sure if they have the quality of education or are caught up to where they need to be.”
Nonetheless, she is beginning the 2022-2023 school year with optimism, she said. She is determined to feel hopeful for what the fresh school year will bring. “I’m worried but hopeful. Concerned but hopeful,” she said, emphasizing each “but.”
Jenna Portnoy contributed to this report.
Metro area systems begin classes Monday. Here’s what to expect in your school:
School system and city leaders launched an urgent effort this summer to bring roughly 30,000 children — or a quarter of public and private school students — up to date on routine vaccinations for illnesses including polio and measles.
Students over age 12 also will need to be vaccinated against the coronavirus to attend school this year, a measure that was passed by the D.C. Council and has drawn some criticism for its potential to exacerbate academic disparities between Black and White children. Students who do not comply with the requirement will be barred from school.
Students have 20 days after the first day of school, however, to comply. The Office of the State Superintendent of Education will host weekly vaccination events next month.
D.C. schools, like other districts nearby, also will soften some coronavirus protocols to mesh with updated guidance from the CDC. But D.C. schools will continue to enforce a “test-to-return” policy, which requires students and staffers to show proof of a negative coronavirus test for the first day of class.
D.C. also is feeling the effects of a nationwide shortage of teachers. D.C.’s public school system serves more than 50,000 students and employs about 4,000 teachers on average each year. Leaders expect to start the school year with about 150 open positions, and central-services staffers will fill teacher gaps during September. Substitute teaching contracts also will be expanded.
But those measures do not address the root causes of teacher resignations, including an evaluation system that feels punitive and inflexible, said Lucia Cuomo, an ESL teacher in Northeast Washington.
“I think it’s time for policymakers and school districts to reevaluate how teachers are treated all around,” Cuomo said, “to reevaluate how change is being implemented and to revaluate how teachers are being financially rewarded.”
Maryland’s largest school districts — in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties — are bringing students back Aug. 29 amid hundreds of teacher and staff vacancies.
As of Friday morning, 187 full-time teacher positions were open, with 34 applicants in the process of being hired, Montgomery County officials said. Also, 457 staff positions were open. Seventy bus driver positions were open, with 41 candidates being trained.
The teacher openings will be filled with substitute teachers, many of which are retired teachers, until the positions are filled permanently, and Schools Superintendent Monifa McKnight has pledged not to increase class sizes.
Prince George’s County has about 900 vacant teacher positions and 400 vacant support staff positions, officials said. Teacher gaps will be filled with substitute teachers and retirees; with increased pay. Extra pay also will be offered to teachers who cover more classrooms.
Prince George’s County Public Schools, with roughly 128,000 students, has 168 bus driver openings. Parents have been warned to expect delays during the first few weeks of school. Bell times have been shifted at some schools to make sure students get to class on time.
Parents also will be allowed to enter school buildings this school year, but many parent-teacher meetings are likely to be conducted virtually. The school system has a mask mandate for students and staffers on school grounds, with coronavirus transmission levels being periodically reviewed. The school system will provide coronavirus rapid tests to symptomatic students.
Masks are optional in Montgomery County Public Schools. The school system’s new coronavirus protocols fall in line with the CDC’s latest relaxed guidance for schools. MCPS also will provide coronavirus tests to students who are in high-risk situations, such as during confirmed outbreaks, and to symptomatic students.
In Northern Virginia, school will begin this year with few coronavirus precautions, some stopgap measures to solve teacher shortages and, in the Alexandria district, extra precautions to ensure student safety.
Both Fairfax County Public Schools — the state’s largest system, with roughly 179,000 students — and Alexandria City Public Schools, which enrolls close to 16,000 students, send children back into classrooms Monday.
Neither district is requiring masking, per state law. Alexandria is requiring that staffers be vaccinated against the coronavirus; Fairfax is not. The vaccine is not required for students.
The Loudoun school system and the Arlington system do not return children to classrooms until Aug. 25 and Aug. 29, respectively. Loudoun enrolls slightly more than 81,000 students, and Arlington enrolls roughly 27,000. Loudoun is not requiring employee vaccination, but Arlington is; neither district is requiring students to be vaccinated.
All four districts experienced a rise in teacher resignations over the past academic year, but officials said staffing gaps are shrinking closer to the start of the school year.
Arlington was down to 56 full-time-teacher vacancies as of Aug. 18. Alexandria has shrunk its teacher vacancies to about 4 percent (60 or so positions). Fairfax is 99 percent staffed with teachers, and Loudoun is 98 percent staffed.
Each district will rely on short- and long-term substitute teachers to ensure that all classes are staffed.
Alexandria’s start of classes also will bring increased safety measures, after a run of safety incidents involving students in the 2021-2022 school year, including the fatal stabbing of an 18-year-old near Alexandria City High School in May.
The district is instituting a policy requiring students to have their school identification cards with them each day. Secondary schools also will receive additional “school security officers … to support school administrators,” the district has said. The district also has expanded cellphone service at Alexandria City High School.
Other area news: Virginia Board of Education delays review of history standards | Prince George’s teachers union reaches tentative deal with schools | Montgomery County Schools working to fill hundreds of teacher, staff vacancies | 2022-08-20T14:31:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hopeful but careful: Parents and teachers address new school year - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/20/back-to-school-parents-teachers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/20/back-to-school-parents-teachers/ |
Vanessa Bryant, Deshaun Watson’s accusers, demand more than a fresh start
Vanessa Bryant, left, leaves a federal courthouse with friend Sydney Leroux. (Damian Dovarganes/AP)
More than two and a half years later, Kobe Bryant’s widow is still grieving.
She wears all black while walking into a courtroom, dark sunglasses masking her eyes from the shutter of a photographer’s lens. And once inside, Vanessa Bryant can’t stop the flow of tears as she shares her pain with a jury, or even listens to testimony during her civil case against the law enforcement and first responder branches of Los Angeles County. Following the helicopter crash in January 2020 that killed her husband, her 13-year-old daughter and seven others, a handful of sheriff deputies and firefighters shared macabre photos of Kobe Bryant’s remains.
She will not simply move on from that.
Likewise, more than two years have passed since quarterback Deshaun Watson laid naked on a spa massage table in Houston, and at least one of his alleged victims is still waiting for an apology.
She has since quit her career as a massage therapist, though she had operated a successful business for 11 years. Lauren Baxley no longer feels safe alone with a client, because she says Watson, who was then the face of the Houston Texans, attempted to turn what should have been a professional therapeutic session into his personal happy ending. Just as a multitude of other massage therapists have claimed.
Baxley, too, will not just move on.
The myth of moving forward tells us that over the passage of days, months, years, it’ll all get better. The hurt will heal, and the memories will fade to the back our minds. And eventually, there must come a time when we all will, and must, move on with our lives.
This idea, that time heals all wounds, seems comforting, and maybe that explains why the simplistic proverb has lasted for so long. But we’ve recently seen vivid reminders of why this hopeful expression has never actually aligned with real life: Bryant’s continued fight against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and Baxley’s refusal to just take a settlement and go away.
There lies the problem with moving forward. While the news cycle may spin back to football and fans may want to simply remember Kobe as a Los Angeles Lakers great, Watson’s accusers and Vanessa Bryant are telling us that they’d rather pursue something that feels closer to accountability. They want action, not just more time.
That hasn’t stopped the apologists and enablers in Watson’s world from trying to rush the healing process along.
On Thursday, the NFL and the NFL Players Association agreed to a settlement over punishment for Watson, who’s now the Cleveland Browns’ problem. Watson will serve an 11-game suspension and pay a fine of $5 million. Following this resolution for his violation of the league’s personal conduct policy, he unwisely stepped in front of a group of reporters. Decked out in his new company colors of orange and brown but more so appearing to be clothed in cellophane, Watson repeated “move forward" or “push forward” no less than six times during the opening minute of answering questions.
Sally Jenkins: Deshaun Watson is the star the NFL deserves: A cynical, empty narcissist
“I’m moving on with my career, with my life, and I’ll continue to stand on my innocence," Watson said, conflicting a previous empty apology he’d served up less than a week before in a softball interview.
In his haste to get to healing — his own — Watson didn’t stop there.
“I have to do what’s best for Deshaun Watson at the end of the day. And I know what happened. I was in those situations. But I have to continue to push forward and keep moving forward.”
Moving forward and stopping short of taking any responsibility for the damage done to the massage therapists must be Team Watson’s primary talking point, as his agent, David Mulugheta, demonstrated on Twitter.
“Deshaun has always stated he is innocent of sexual assault. Nothing has changed in what he said. He also said he is remorseful, the decisions he made have created this situation. The settlement allows him to move forward with his life and career,” Mulugheta posted.
Although the first civil lawsuits against Watson were filed more than 17 months ago, and Baxley’s alleged encounter with him occurred in June 2020, she hasn’t been so quick to “move forward” or “push forward" with her life and her career.
Baxley’s lawsuit against Watson is still pending and in a first-person essay for The Daily Beast, she explains why she hasn’t simply moved on.
“I have rejected all settlement offers, in part because they have not included any sincere acknowledgment of remorse and wrongdoings, nor have they included any promises of rehabilitative treatment,” Baxley writes. “Watson still refuses to admit that he harassed and committed indecent assault against me.”
Baxley remains the only holdout from a group that’s agreed to financial settlements with Watson, and her actions shoot down any cynic’s theory that women like her were just in it for a big payday. What would moving on look for Baxley? Only she would know, but time clearly hasn’t repaired her world that has been “eternally harmed."
And though in her lawsuit Vanessa Bryant seeks damages from salaried employees in Los Angeles County, which prompted the judge to suggest she settle the case because punitive justice won’t exist here, she forges ahead. She is worth hundreds of millions, so this isn’t about getting paid. It’s about demanding justice.
Not all wounds cure over the calendar; Bryant’s panic attacks and anxiety didn’t come with an expiration date. So, moving forward for Bryant might start by ensuring every sheriff or firefighter responsible for such indecency would answer for sharing the crash-site photos, and making sure they never emerge on social media.
Time keeps chugging along for those of us who have followed both cases. As always, a new injustice will emerge and it will enrage us, then we’ll turn our attention to the next one, and the one after that, and the one that follows. But look at Bryant’s face, and read Baxley’s words. They aren’t ready to move on.
Vanessa Bryant’s pain persists, and so does her pursuit of moving on | 2022-08-20T14:32:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Vanessa Bryant, like Deshaun Watson's accusers, isn't ready to move on - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/20/vanessa-bryant-lawsuit-los-angeles/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/20/vanessa-bryant-lawsuit-los-angeles/ |
It may be sweltering, but the end of summer gives you a glimpse into an overlooked time of year in the city
Advice by Shannon Sims
Southern Decadence in September 2017. (Shutterstock)
NEW ORLEANS - If you come to New Orleans in February, you’ll find Mardi Gras beads hanging from the trees. In April, you’ll see dads roaming the city in Hawaiian-ish Jazzfest shirts. And in October, the bachelor and bachelorette parties descend, easily identified by stumbling visitors clutching Bourbon Street cocktails in matching wares.
But here in the dead of summer in the depths of the South, all’s quiet. If you were looking to visit New Orleans without tourists, your moment is now.
A local's guide to New Orleans
In spite of the sweltering heat and very real hurricane potential, late-summer New Orleans can offer the intrepid visitor deals you can’t get the rest of the year, festivals unlike any other and a glimpse at an overlooked phase in the life of the city.
Take advantage of tasting menus
August is notorious among service industry workers here: It’s the month their tips collapse to a fraction of what they see in spring or fall. I experienced this firsthand when I waitressed on Bourbon in a former life. I remember spending August stressed, delivering redfish platters and frozen milk punches to my one or two lunch tables, pining for the flush days of May, when tips paid the rent.
There aren’t any big spenders around because the corporate conferences aren’t in town, and the regulars are absent because football season hasn’t started — and it’s damn hot. The restaurant workers of one of the country’s best eating cities are in crisis every year right about now.
Enter COOLinary, the restaurant week-style event that spans the entire month, offering rarely-seen discounts at many of the city’s top restaurants, with two-course lunches for $25, or multi-course dinners for $45. At Compere Lapin, by award-winning Chef Nina Compton of Top Chef fame, a three-course dinner of chilled corn soup, pork belly and peach galette sees a deep discount off the usual $57.
At the elegant, seafood-forward GW Fins, a trio of tempura red snapper, parmesan-crusted sheepshead and bourbon pecan pie with ice cream costs $15 less than usual. And there was never a better time to try the cocktails at Jewel of the South, which was recently declared Best Restaurant Bar in the U.S. and co-founder Chris Hannah named U.S. Bartender of the Year, and where a $45 four-course dinner gets you everything from smoked trout roe to Wagyu beef tongue.
Escape the heat in museums
When all you want to do is get inside and into the air conditioning, the museums and art galleries of New Orleans deliver, and they make it an outright bargain to do so this time of year.
A collaboration among many of the city’s museums results in Museum Month, an August special where the cost of membership to any one of the participating museums gets you access to all of the others. This year, the long list includes the Louisiana Children’s Museum, the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the multi-day (if not multi-week) worthy National WWII Museum, a must visit. Don’t miss “Louisiana Contemporary” at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, an annual juried exhibition from the state’s artists.
Celebrate Pride at Southern Decadence
Like most cities around the United States, New Orleans has an LGBTQ+ Pride festival in June. But in keeping with its spirit of excess, New Orleans has for the past 50 years also celebrated Southern Decadence, a six-day celebration of all thingscolorful and gay at the summer’s end.
On one Sunday, the day before Labor Day, the French Quarter fills with hundreds of thousands of people wrapped in leather, lace and feather boas for a finale parade and street parties. And as inevitably happens on hot afternoons in New Orleans, there’s a rainstorm — soaking the celebration and turning it into an even more rowdy show, exactly what the crowds want. The people-watching is unparalleled.
A tale of two Mardi Gras
Southern Decadence has been on hiatus since the pandemic began, and while it’s back this year, organizers are urging people to take precautions due to monkeypox concerns. The Bourbon Street Extravaganza, a free concert that’s one of the festival’s biggest events, has been canceled.
Get a head start on oyster season
There’s an old-timey rule in Louisiana that says that you’re supposed to eat Gulf oysters only during the months that have an “r” in their name: September through April. From May to August, it was thought better to avoid the local delicacy, or else risk serious food poisoning.
“That had more to do with the fact that when this rule came out there wasn’t refrigeration at the time, so they didn’t want people to get sick,” explains champion oyster shucker Jay Gallet, who reigns over the curved marble oyster bar at Superior Seafood and Oyster Barin the Uptown neighborhood. “It’s just an old saying,” confirms Carolina Bourque, Oyster Program Manager at the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. Today it’s possible to safely eat Gulf oysters year-round in Louisiana, but Bourque and Gallet both add that the non-”r” months are when the bivalves are reproducing, which can lead to milky, unappetizing oysters.
That makes September a great time for oysters, but last year the month ended up a disaster for the industry. Hurricane Ida rolled through the region on August 29, 2021, destroying oyster beds and damaging the homes and boats of the local oyster harvesters. This year, they’re back and open for business. Try them raw at happy hour for $1 each at Superior, shucked by Gallet himself. He points to Sidecar Patio & Oyster Bar, Seaworthy and Cooter Brown’s as other spots to find a cleanly shucked, salty delight.
Shed some layers at the Burlesque Festival
The sultry air of New Orleans summer may make people want to take their clothes off, but it’s in late September when the real de-robing happens, at the annual New Orleans Burlesque Festival. Leveraging Bourbon Street’s reputation for the risque, the event showcases performers from around the world and includes an all-male revue and a peppering of live music and comedy interludes. The three days are highlighted by a main event that crowns the “Queen of Burlesque” to traditional jazz. What better way is there to kick off the impending bachelor and bachelorette party season? | 2022-08-20T14:32:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What to do in New Orleans in the summer - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/new-orleans-travel-summer/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/new-orleans-travel-summer/ |
The D.C. author started writing the book ‘I Have a Choice’ before people across the country lost their right to choose
The cover of the children's book written by Ben Romano and illustrated by Emma Adams. (Emma Adams)
Ben Romano’s timing could be seen as really, really bad — or perfect.
The D.C. resident started writing a children’s book early in the pandemic. He had never written one before, but that didn’t matter. He had an idea, one he felt was important. And as a songwriter, he knew he just needed to find a way to convey his thoughts to others.
He started searching for the right words to teach children that they have autonomy and the power to make decisions. The ones he picked flowed in a lyrical, Seuss-like rhythm:
I see lots of choices all over the place, floating out there in the wide open space.
Some choices are big, some choices are small.
So many choices, I can’t choose them all.
Once Romano found the words for the book, he started looking for an illustrator. That took time — time that saw him get married, lose his job and start doing freelance work. For the book, he considered using a service that provides free illustrations, but he eventually decided against that. He was hoping to find someone he could collaborate with when he swiped through TikTok, saw a video that featured the work of Emma Adams and thought, “She’s the one.” He reached out to Adams about the book, and they started discussing the characters and scenery.
Then, the country changed.
A leaked draft opinion let the public know that the Supreme Court was about to overturn Roe v. Wade, and suddenly, the book took on a different weight. Suddenly, Romano was trying to publish a children’s book titled “I Have a Choice” at a time when people across the country were losing their right to choose.
Romano could have chosen to see that as a reason to get discouraged. He chose instead to see it as a reason to move with more urgency.
“It felt like synchronicity,” he told me on a recent afternoon. “There was this concept of choice that was so important, and then this moment happened, and it became that much more important.”
Adams said she was “immediately intrigued” when Romano told her about the book’s concept.
“It felt like an important message that everyone could relate to in some way,” she said. “Then, Roe v. Wade was overturned, and it became something much bigger in my mind. This book pushes the importance of having a choice and what it means to exercise that right. I think it is a message many need to hear right now.”
“Right now” marks a difficult time in the country for children’s literature. The past few years have seen Republican lawmakers and parents push to have books that touch on controversial subjects, or simply make them uncomfortable, swept off shelves and kept from children. An article that ran in The Washington Post on Wednesday detailed the book-blocking legislation that has already taken hold in numerous states and addressed how “mounting book challenges, bans and clandestine removals, all of which reached historic highs during the past school year, are also eroding students’ freedom to read.”
From that article: “The start of the 2022-2023 school year will usher in a new era of education in some parts of America — one in which school librarians have less freedom to choose books and schoolchildren less ability to read books they find intriguing, experts say.”
She wrote a book on body safety for kids. Will it get past the adults?
Few issues are more controversial right now than abortion rights, and trying to get a book that appears associated with that topic into the hands of young children won’t be an easy task.
In that sense, Romano picked an awful time to try to publish his first children’s book.
But in another sense, one that considers the divisions the nation’s children are witnessing, he couldn’t have picked a better time to remind people about the power of having a choice.
When Romano started working on his book, he hadn’t considered book bans or abortion rights. But the 28-year-old now recognizes that those two issues — both of which have seen choices taken from people — will affect how his book is received. The reaction to previews of the book that he has shared online have already shown him that.
“A lot of people were saying, ‘This is important right now’ and ‘People need to see this right now,’” he said. “That sense of urgency is about this moment we’re in.”
One comment on a Facebook page he created for the book reads: “So excited that you are creating something so important! I want to read this book to my little girl and let her know that she has choices in this world where it may not always seem like it.”
None of the pages in the book directly addresses abortion. They show a young girl going about her day and making choices, such as what color shoes to put on. That her family is made up of all women is a choice he and Adams made.
Romano, who took the last name of his wife, a rabbi in Virginia, when they got married in October, said he believes women should have a right to choose what happens to their bodies and that he hopes the book will help parents have difficult conversations with their children.
A few days after the Supreme Court opinion was leaked, Romano created a GoFundMe page to raise money to publish the book. That crowdfunding page describes the book as offering “a new way for kids and families to think about and speak about choices in their home.”
“It's not so much about good or bad, right or wrong, it's about feeling good about the choices we make and understanding that we have the ability to choose in challenging situations,” the page reads. “Let's empower our next generation to be thoughtful in their choices. To be okay with who they are, and proud of who they are becoming.”
Romano hopes to publish the book next month.
Already he’s accepted that whether people buy it or ban it is beyond his control. That’s their choice. | 2022-08-20T15:49:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The flawed and perfect timing of a children’s book about choice - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/20/childrens-book-choice/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/20/childrens-book-choice/ |
A Republican who believes Trump lost looks to put Colorado’s Senate race in play
Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet faces a tougher-than-expected reelection race after Republicans nominate businessman Joe O’Dea over an election denier
From left, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack, and Sens. Michael F. Bennet and John Hickenlooper talk to reporters about the Colorado Outdoor Recreation & Economy Act on Aug. 16 at Camp Hale, Colo. (AP)
DENVER — Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.) has seen difficult campaign cycles. He barely survived the Republican tsunami in 2010, chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2014 when his party got wiped out and, in 2016, won reelection against a flawed opponent with not-quite 50 percent of the vote.
Until recently, Bennet’s bid this year for a third term had attracted little national attention. But two things have changed that:
The other is the Republican opponent Bennet has drawn, drawing new focus on the Senate race in Colorado. In an election season in which Republican primary voters in toss-up states like Arizona and Pennsylvania have elevated election deniers and other questionable candidates, Denver business executive Joe O’Dea stands out as an exception.
To win the GOP nomination, O’Dea defeated Ron Hanks, a state representative who had participated in the Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, though he did not go into the Capitol with the rioters. That a Trump follower was defeated in the June primary is perhaps not surprising. Colorado voters have shown an especially deep dislike for Trump. His vote percentages in the state in 2016 and 2020 were in the bottom 15 of all 50 states. There was also a surge of unaffiliated voters who participated in the Republican primary, which also likely contributed to a statewide ticket that GOP officials say is their strongest in years.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Thursday there’s a better chance of Republicans winning control of the U.S. House of Representatives than the Senate, noting the “candidate quality” matters in statewide races.
O’Dea is still an underdog against Bennet, and even if he were to prevail, Republicans may need to pick up another Senate seat or two to win back the majority, given current trends in some key races.
Republicans see Nevada as a good opportunity to gain a Senate seat, but their hopes for winning the Democratic-held seat in Georgia have been hurt by the candidacy of their nominee, Herschel Walker. And a recent poll in Arizona showed Sen. Mark Kelly (D) leading Republican election denier Blake Masters.
Meanwhile, other polls show Democratic candidates leading in the GOP-held seats in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and even in increasingly red Ohio, Republicans may not be a sure thing, given the uneven performance so far by GOP nominee J.D. Vance.
One sign of the perceived potential for Republicans in Colorado came last week when the independent Cook Political Report with Amy Walter shifted its rating from likely Democrat to lean Democrat. A congressional colleague of Bennet’s said privately he believes the incumbent will prevail but said the contest with O’Dea is “a real race.”
Bennet, whose memories of 2010, 2014 and 2016 remain fresh, doesn’t disagree. The effects of rising gasoline and food prices, the history of midterm elections costing the party in power and the unpopularity of President Biden in Colorado and nationally adds up, he said, to a “tough combination.” But he said there is a big difference from those past cycles that he hopes will play to his advantage. “I think that we have a record of accomplishment that looks different than any of those prior years,” he said.
Bennet, who sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, spoke during an interview at a Denver coffee shop a few days before Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act. The big climate, health care and tax bill that was passed on party-line votes in the House and Senate was a signal Democratic achievement after Congress had enacted several other laws — a gun safety bill, a semiconductor production bill and a measure to help veterans exposed to toxic burn sites — with both Democratic and Republican votes.
McConnell has said the GOP will be “all in” for O’Dea, as many see him as setting up a favorable contrast with Bennett. A political novice, O’Dea is a construction magnate and self-made executive with deep roots in Colorado. He dropped out of college to set off on his own to build a company that now employs “300 families,” as he put it during an interview in his campaign office.
Asked if he has always thought of himself as a Republican, he said: “I’ve always thought of myself as a conservative. I’m probably not what you call a fringe Republican.” O’Dea doesn’t question the legitimacy of Biden’s victory in 2020 and calls the Jan. 6 riot “a black eye on our country.”
O’Dea said he did vote for Trump in 2016 and 2020, but he hopes neither Trump nor Biden will run in 2024. He said he would try to help someone else become the Republican presidential nominee. Asked if he would he vote for Trump if he was the 2024 GOP nominee, O’Dea hedged: “I wouldn’t vote for Biden,” he said. “We’ll have to see. You know, that’s a hypothetical.”
O’Dea said he decided to run for the Senate because he saw “our freedoms get encroached on” by government. “I call it death by a thousand cuts,” he added. “Government getting in the way of business, getting in the way of employees being able to live their lives freely, and more and more encroachment into what we do, and rules and regulations and red tape, and none of it adds value.”
He said he believes the climate is changing but favors “prudent” rather than “urgent” action. Asked on his stance over environmental regulations, particularly with regard to fossil fuels, he said, “I would default to those people that know — oil and gas people.”
Unlike many in his party, O’Dea opposed the Supreme Court’s June decision overturning Roe v. Wade. He calls himself “personally pro-life” but supports abortion rights for up to about 20 weeks of a pregnancy and supports exceptions for rape, incest and both the life and health of the mother in later months. He said he would not support a national law banning abortion if he were in the Senate.
But Bennet’s newest television ad takes on O’Dea for saying he would have voted for all three of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, who provided the key votes to overturn Roe, and that his challenger opposes a new law in Colorado guaranteeing abortion access.
O’Dea said he would not have supported the new gun safety bill nor the Inflation Reduction Act, points that Bennett jumped on.
“My vote for the bipartisan gun bill is popular in Colorado,” Bennett said. “His opposition to the bipartisan gun bill is unpopular in Colorado. My vote for the reconciliation package is extremely popular in Colorado. His view that he doesn’t like anything in that reconciliation package is incredibly unpopular.”
O’Dea said he and Bennet “could not be more different,” an indication that he intends to draw a personal contrast between a fourth-generation Coloradan who worked his way up in the business world and an incumbent who was raised in Washington as the son of a diplomat, went to elite schools and who was first appointed to the Senate rather than running for and winning the seat outright.
“I know what it's like to have to put, you know, food on the table for a family,” O’Dea said. “I know what it's like to sign checks. I know what it's like to put a payroll on my own credit card so I can make sure I pay my help. All those things I understand. That's a big contrast to where he's come from.”
Bennet dismisses the blue-collar vs. privileged contrast. “He will invent whatever he wants to invent,” Bennet said. “I’ve represented Colorado for 14 years. My positions on these issues are clear. … Joe O’Dea’s cartoon version of who I am is not who I am. I think my record is very clear. I know what I believe, and I don’t have to think about it.”
Colorado hasn’t yet become as competitive as contests in some of the other states that have been in the forefront of the fight for the Senate. And O’Dea remains relatively untested as a candidate. But if the political climate worsens further for Democrats, the Bennet-O’Dea race could become critical in who controls the Senate in January. | 2022-08-20T16:02:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Colorado GOP nominee who thinks Trump lost is trying to unseat Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/20/colorado-senate-race-sundaytake/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/20/colorado-senate-race-sundaytake/ |
Bishop Daniel Payne of the African Methodist Episcopal Church founded the Bethel Literary and Historical Association in 1881. (Library of Congress) (Library of Congress)
When some of the District’s leading Black intellectuals gathered near the A.M.E. Metropolitan Church in the spring of 1896, they were not in the mood to pull punches. Frankly, they’d had enough. | 2022-08-20T17:16:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In 1896, Black readers accused The Washington Post of prejudice - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/20/bethel-historical-association/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/20/bethel-historical-association/ |
(Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
One provision advised that school personnel speak with the student about the level of support they receive or anticipate receiving at home before contacting the student’s parent, according to the memo. The guidelines also advised schools to develop a gender-support plan with the student and their family “if the family is supportive of the student” — using an MCPS intake form that, according to the filing, which would be kept confidential.
Gender transitions at school spur debate over when, or if, parents are told
Grimm also wrote that the parents’ complaint has no “specific allegations” about the application of the guidelines “in counseling their own children.”
The parents complained the guidelines instructed school employees to “withhold information” from them about their children’s gender identity. But Grimm concluded in the memo that the guidelines do not exclude parents or encourage children to distrust them. The parents’ reading was “unsupported,” he said, and the guidelines were designed to be flexible.
“The Guidelines carefully balance the interests of both the parents and students, encouraging parental input when the student consents, but avoiding it when the student expresses concern that parents would not be supportive, or that disclosing their gender identity to their parents may put them in harm’s way,” Grimm said in the memo.
Frederick W. Claybrook Jr., an attorney representing the parents, said he has advised his clients to appeal the decision.
“They are the ones that are to give guidance to their children and to help them through this very important step,” Claybrook said. “Not necessarily to the exclusion of schools, but schools can’t do that to the exclusion of parents, either.”
A Montgomery County Public Schools spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We don’t want our trans kids to be mistreated or bullied or harassed in any way,” Claybrook said. “But we want the parents to be able to help in the transition, to help in the process, not to be excluded from it.” | 2022-08-20T17:16:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | County’s guidelines about student gender don’t violate parents’ rights - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/20/gender-transition-identity-montgomery-county/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/20/gender-transition-identity-montgomery-county/ |
Man slain outside 7-Eleven in Manassas
Dalton Jakob Moore and another man were both shot. A second victim is expected to survive.
Two men were shot outside a Manassas area 7-Eleven on Friday night, and one of them died at the scene, Prince William County police said Saturday. The shooter remained at large.
Police said Dalton Jakob Moore, 25, and another 25-year-old man were outside the 7-Eleven at the corner of Sudley Manor Drive and Williamson Boulevard around 8:28 p.m. when a third man approached them. After a short discussion, the third man shot both Moore and the other man and then fled in a light-colored sedan, police said.
Moore was pronounced dead at the scene. The other victim was hospitalized with non-life-threatening wounds.
Officer Adam Moore, a Prince William police spokesman, said he could not discuss whether the shooting was random or if the gunman was known to the two victims. He said the suspect was described as a White male of Hispanic ethnicity, heavyset, with short dark hair and a beard, last seen wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and black shorts. Anyone with information about the shooting is asked to call Prince William police at 703-792-7000 or submit a tip to pwcva.gov/policetip. | 2022-08-20T17:34:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Dalton Jakob Moore shot to death outside 7-Eleven in Manassas; suspect at large - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/20/manassas-711-slaying/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/20/manassas-711-slaying/ |
“It was a deserved loss. We didn’t play a good game today,” Terzić said. “It was a very poor performance from us ... Still, when you’re winning 2-0 up to the 88th minute, you have to win the game. And how we conceded the goals was really stupid. So annoying. And yeah, that’s how it is. We’re left with empty hands.” | 2022-08-20T17:34:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Dortmund stunned at home with 3-goal comeback from Bremen - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/soccer/dortmund-stunned-at-home-with-3-goal-comeback-from-bremen/2022/08/20/278bdfac-20a2-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/soccer/dortmund-stunned-at-home-with-3-goal-comeback-from-bremen/2022/08/20/278bdfac-20a2-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Part of a foot, in a shoe, was found floating in the Abyss Pool hot spring in Yellowstone National Park on Aug. 16. (Diane Renkin/National Park Service/AP)
According to the Associated Press, the fatality joins more than 20 other deaths in the hot springs of Yellowstone since 1890. Before July, the most recent death was in 2016, when a 23-year-old man walked off a boardwalk and fell into Norris Geyser Basin, the hottest thermal region in the park. In 2000, a person died after falling into a hot spring in Lower Geyser Basin.
The number of incidents involving the springs is minuscule, given that Yellowstone is the oldest national park, having been founded in 1872, and that it is one of the busiest in the national park system. The number of park visitors surged to nearly 5 million last year — the busiest year on record, representing a 28 percent increase from the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. However, damaging floods earlier this year have cut down the number dramatically.
In maps, photos and videos, see the full force of Yellowstone’s floods
Yellowstone has more than 10,000 hydrothermal features, 0f which hot springs are the most common. They form when rain seeps through bedrock, becomes superheated by magma and rises back to the surface. Convection currents circulate the water, keeping it from heating enough to cause an eruption.
Glacier National Park reports three climbing deaths over three days | 2022-08-20T17:35:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Foot found in Yellowstone hot spring appears related to July death - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/20/foot-yellowstone-hot-spring/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/20/foot-yellowstone-hot-spring/ |
This image taken by the U.S. Air Force shows U.S. Army troops from the 1st Combined Arms Battalion, 163rd Cavalry Regiment, board a C-17 Globemaster III during an exercise at Ali Al Salem Air Base, Kuwait, Aug. 10, 2022. The U.S. Air Force said Saturday, Aug. 20, it was the subject of a “propaganda attack” by a previously unheard-of Iraqi militant group that falsely claimed it had launched a drone attack targeting American troops at an air base in Kuwait. (Staff Sgt. Dalton Willians/U.S. Air Force, via AP) (Staff Sgt. Dalton Williams/U.S. Air Force) | 2022-08-20T17:35:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | US Air Force targeted in 'propaganda attack' in Kuwait - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-air-force-targeted-in-propaganda-attack-in-kuwait/2022/08/20/4ec7d24e-20aa-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-air-force-targeted-in-propaganda-attack-in-kuwait/2022/08/20/4ec7d24e-20aa-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Regardless of whether the system gets a name, heavy rainfall will drench much of Texas
PTC4 as viewed via the GOES East weather satellite around 2 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday. (RAMMB/CIRA) (RAMMB/CIRA)
Tropical storm warnings are in effect from Boca de Catan, Mexico, to Port Mansfield, Tex.
Although PTC4′s coastal effects are expected to lessen as it dissipates late Sunday or Monday, its real impact won’t come until the middle of next week. That’s when copious rainfall, in some places accumulating half a foot or more, could blossom over Central Texas, southern Oklahoma and Arkansas.
The storm now
Otherwise, plentiful shower and thunderstorm activity is evident, and radar indicates a spattering of heavy downpours approaching the coastline. The storm is also displaying healthy outflow aloft, or the exhaust of “spent” air at high altitudes. That’s where the storm is exhaling air that it has already extracted heat and energy from. The more it breathes out, the more warm, humid air it can ingest from below. That supports its maintenance or intensification.
PTC4 is running out the clock. It has a few more hours left before making landfall, and its odds of consolidation into a tropical storm are waning. That won’t change the actual impacts, though.
Isolated to widely scattered heavy downpours will pivot ashore in southern Texas and northern Tamaulipas through this evening, when the center of circulation should come ashore. Because the system is poorly organized, there aren’t any well-structured, unbroken spiral rain bands. Instead, it’s also struggling with a bit of mid-level dry air on the northern half of the storm, thinning out precipitation coverage. That’ll reduce overall amounts to a general inch or two, but not much more — at least in South Texas.
Remnant moisture to fuel Texas-size downpours
Thereafter, the exceptional tropical moisture dragged north by PTC4 will remain in place over Texas. A new system — a surface low forming along a stalled stationary front near the Red River, or the Oklahoma border, will tap into that humidity, resulting in days on end of heavy rainfall. | 2022-08-20T19:05:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tropical storm warnings for parts of Texas, Mexico as storm nears - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/20/tropical-storm-mexico-texas/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/20/tropical-storm-mexico-texas/ |
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray confronts a rise in threats against the FBI stemming from the search for classified documents at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago
Hannah Allam
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray speaks during a news conference Aug. 10 at the FBI field office in Omaha, Neb. (Charlie Neibergall/AP)
In the face of this vitriol, the FBI issued a joint intelligence bulletin warning of an increase in threats, quietly hardened its facilities and scrubbed personal information from websites to protect personnel from possible danger. As he absorbed all this, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray stayed largely out of public view, in keeping with a norm for the nation’s top law enforcement agency.
The past two weeks have presented Wray with one of his most significant leadership challenges in the five years since Trump nominated him to lead the FBI. Despite calls for a more forceful response, including from some former law enforcement officials, Wray has avoided jumping into the public fight over the Justice Department’s investigation of Trump’s handling of classified documents.
Wray is no stranger to Trump’s tirades, and his playbook has been to ride out controversies with a quiet professionalism. In the video call, Wray stuck to that approach.
“I respect Chris for being properly circumspect, but there are also times when a leader — any leader — has to talk to his or her troops, and to the public, to knock down baseless and reckless accusations,” said Chuck Rosenberg, who was a senior Justice Department official when Wray headed the department’s Criminal Division, and was a senior aide to two prior FBI directors, Comey and Robert S. Mueller III. “I think you can do so while being faithful to your obligation not to talk about ongoing investigations.”
Former FBI officials said Wray is probably more reluctant to speak out because of the intense scrutiny and backlash Comey faced when he broke with FBI tradition and, in the midst of the 2016 presidential election, publicly revealed details about the federal investigation into Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state. Some critics say Comey’s actions made the public perceive the FBI, which has long strived to be seen as independent, as politicized.
“Everyone is on our side,” Trump told one adviser two days after the search. In another rant several days after the search, he described the FBI in profane terms, calling them “f--kers” who were out “to get him,” according to a person who heard his comments. The former president has grown somewhat paranoid since FBI agents were on his property, positing they might have left behind recording devices, a person who spoke to him said.
John F. Kelly, one of Trump’s former White House chiefs of staff, said Trump repeatedly told him he wanted an FBI director who was “loyal” to Trump. “I need someone who is loyal,” Trump said, according to Kelly.
Still, Trump had around him in the White House a coterie of lawyers who were defensive of the FBI and Justice Department, particularly former White House counsels Pat Cipollone and Donald F. McGahn.
Some others in the Republican Party have grown concerned about the anti-FBI tide, an escalation of long-simmering rhetoric about a perceived “tyrannical” federal government that “true patriots” must curtail. Lawmakers throughout the party have cast the Mar-a-Lago search as the work of a “banana republic," or a “dictatorship.” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, likened the federal government to “the Gestapo.”
Yet by keeping details of the investigation and search private, the Justice Department risks letting Trump and his allies set the terms of debate. Bolton, for instance, said the FBI needed to give the public more information or Trump will “just step on them. ... It will play into the narrative he likes that he’s being picked on.”
On Aug. 10, two days after the Mar-a-Lago search, Wray visited the FBI’s field office in Omaha, where he was asked by reporters about the rising threats. He said that “violence against law enforcement is not the answer, no matter who you’re upset with."
"There has been a lot of commentary about the FBI this week questioning our work and motives,” he wrote. “Much of it is from critics and pundits on the outside who don’t know what we know and don’t see what we see. ... As always, the way we maintain the trust and confidence of the American people isn’t by joining in the public commentary. We do it through our work. By showing, when all the facts come out, we stuck to the process.”
On Capitol Hill, Republicans rejected the notion that their fiery condemnations of the FBI’s conduct in searching Trump’s residence contributed to the uptick in threats against federal agents. Asked whether Republican leaders bore any responsibility, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told reporters Friday: “None whatsoever.”
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), a former FBI agent, said he shares in some of the skepticism about the FBI’s conduct but has been urging all colleagues “to reserve judgment until we see the affidavit,” to help clarify reasons for the search. Fitzpatrick said it’s imperative to preserve public trust in national security institutions.
Carol D. Leonnig and Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report. | 2022-08-20T19:05:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | As the FBI comes under threat, its leader tries to stay out of fray - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/20/fbi-comes-under-threat-its-leader-tries-stay-out-view/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/20/fbi-comes-under-threat-its-leader-tries-stay-out-view/ |
PM Update: Heavy showers expected Sunday afternoon
Dancing in the fountain at Georgetown Waterfront Park. (Jeannie In D.C./Flickr)
Today was definitely the more preferable weather day of the weekend. Starting tonight, more unsettled conditions will lumber into the region in the form of a few slow-moving frontal systems. The first half of Sunday has a better chance at being dry before persistent showers develop during the afternoon and evening.
Through tonight: Clouds will increase overnight as temperatures and humidity levels remain elevated. Low temperatures will range from the upper 60s to around 70 degrees, with nearly 100 percent humidity. With little wind to speak of, some areas of patchy fog may develop, especially west of the city.
Tomorrow (Sunday): We won’t see much in the way of sunshine Sunday, as clouds will probably rule the day. Temperatures will top out in the mid-80s, with high humidity levels as well. Scattered showers and thunderstorms, with some heavy downpours, will develop in the afternoon and evening, persisting into the overnight period as well. Lows Sunday night will be in the upper 60s to low 70s. | 2022-08-20T20:37:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | PM Update: Heavy showers expected Sunday afternoon - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/08/20/pm-update-sunday-showers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/08/20/pm-update-sunday-showers/ |
Detective witnessed man try to set person on fire, police say
A man was arrested late Friday night after a D.C. detective witnessed him allegedly attempt to set a person on fire, police said Saturday.
Seymour Brown Jr., a 46-year-old resident of Northeast D.C., was arrested and charged with assault with intent to kill.
D.C. police said in a news release Saturday that a detective was driving along the 1200 block of Bladensburg Road NE around 11 p.m. Friday when he witnessed the suspect douse a woman in gasoline.
According to the police report, the suspect was holding a cigarette lighter and stated, “I’m going to burn you.” When officers went to apprehend Brown he also had two sets of garden shears with a three-inch blade, the police report said.
Brown was placed under arrest at the scene. | 2022-08-20T21:55:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. man arrested for allegedly threatening to set person on fire - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/20/assault-fire-police-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/20/assault-fire-police-dc/ |
Want to see how climate change is stressing bees? Look at their wings.
A bumblebee lands on a poppy flower in 2020. (Michael Probst/AP)
The plight of the bumblebee has been well documented. In recent years, researchers and advocates have reported worrying population declines across North America and Europe as climate change menaces the fuzzy insects.
But scientists have been limited in their ability to pinpoint what specifically has stressed bumblebee populations in the past, and what factors will imperil the them in the future.
In a foreboding paper published this week, a team of British researchers found that four bumblebee species they studied appear to have become increasingly stressed by climate change over the past century. The stress appeared consistently higher in the latter half of the century, they found, tracking with rising global temperatures and more frequent extreme weather.
To arrive at their results, the scientists measured the wings of thousands of bumblebee specimens collected over more than 100 years and housed in a network of natural history museums. Using digital cameras and special software, they looked for subtle asymmetries in the wing structure — a signal of environmental stressors that could affect bee growth and reproduction. They then compared their findings with historical climate data to find out if harsh weather may have made life harder for the insects.
The hotter and wetter the weather, the more likely the bees were to grow lopsided wings, according to the researchers.
The conclusions suggest that bees could face mounting threats as weather worsens and world governments struggle to curb carbon emissions that fuel climate change. The prospect of bee numbers plummeting further is a major concern because the insects play a key role in pollinating wildflowers and crops, including staples such as tomatoes, potatoes and peppers.
“This should reinforce the message that human contributions to high rates of changing climate can affect wildlife in many different ways, and we are putting these organisms at risk — which in the case of bees are crucial insect pollinators,” Richard Gill, a scientist at Imperial College London and co-author of the research paper, told The Washington Post. “They are amazing creatures that provide so many ecosystem services that we take for granted and we get essentially for free.”
The study could also offer researchers important tools for predicting when and where bumblebees are most at risk, and help them make decisions about how best to protect them.
“The key thing really is that there is a way to measure bumblebees’ stress, at least comparatively,” Richard Comont, science manager at the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, a British conservation group, told The Post. “This opens the possibility to compare populations, and potentially different species, to decide which to focus conservation efforts on in the future.” Comont wasn’t involved in the study.
Gill added: “This is critical for predictive modeling into the future, to target conservation efforts, and to understand which species are most at risk, and subsequently which plants and crops that they pollinate are at risk as well.”
Bumblebee populations have dropped throughout the United States and Europe as Earth has heated up. Research from 2020 found that the number of areas populated by the insects had fallen 46 percent in North America and 17 percent in Europe. Places with steep declines also experienced dramatic swings in climate, including higher temperatures and more-intense heat waves.
Gill’s team chose to look at bumblebee wing shapes because a previous body of research showed that other organisms — not just bees but butterflies, lizards and rodents — can grow asymmetrically when they experience environmental stress. The phenomenon is called “fluctuating asymmetry,” and it has been observed in some animals when they’re exposed to temperature changes, pesticides, infections and other hazards.
The bees’ wings in particular were useful to the researchers because they could examine the museum specimens without damaging them.
The team started by taking pictures of the bumblebees — more than 6,000 in total — with cameras equipped with macro lenses that allowed them to zoom in closely without losing focus. Then they used software to mark the photographs with numbered coordinates that enabled them to precisely measure small but significant differences in wing shape. For the year each specimen was collected, the team looked up average temperature and total rainfall, then compared the data.
“This way we could see whether climatic conditions may contribute to the level of wing asymmetry,” Gill said.
“This showed that years that experienced relatively high temperatures had higher wing asymmetry, but this was particularly evident when there was also a relatively high rainfall for such warm years,” he said. In warmer and damper years, he said, “bees showed the highest wing asymmetry, which is a proxy for high stress during development.”
Gill said the team’s work showcased how scientists could tap into museum collections to understand what drives population declines.
“They hold secrets,” he said, “that once unlocked can provide us with many insights.” | 2022-08-20T22:08:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Climate change may cause bees to grow lopsided wings, scientists say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/20/climate-change-bumblebee-wings/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/20/climate-change-bumblebee-wings/ |
At least 20 dead after Islamists storm hotel in Somalia
Islamist militants and security forces exchanged fire for hours in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, after the militants stormed a hotel, leaving at least 20 people dead, according to police and witnesses.
In addition, at least 40 people were wounded in the late Friday night attack, and security forces rescued many others, including children, from the scene at Mogadishu’s popular Hayat Hotel, they said Saturday.
The Islamist extremist group al-Shabab, which has ties to al-Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the attack.
It’s the latest of al-Shabab’s frequent attempts to strike places visited by government officials.
Vehicles slam into crash scenes, leaving 32 dead in Turkey: At least 32 people were killed in southeast Turkey when vehicles crashed into first responders who were at the scenes of earlier accidents, authorities said. Sixteen people, including emergency workers and journalists, died when a bus crashed into an accident site, the governor of the province of Gaziantep said. Another 20 people were wounded and received treatment. Separately, a truck hit an accident site with first responders some 150 miles east in the Derik district of Mardin. Sixteen people died and 29 others were reported injured.
U.S. Air Force says report of attack on Kuwait base is a lie: The U.S. Air Force said it was the subject of a "propaganda attack" by a previously unheard-of Iraqi militant group that falsely claimed it had launched a drone strike targeting American troops at an air base in Kuwait. The statement by the Air Force's 386th Air Expeditionary Wing came hours after a group calling itself al-Waretheen, or "The Inheritors," put out an online statement claiming that on Aug. 12, it targeted Kuwait's Ali Al Salem Air Base. The statement included a video showing a drone being launched from a stand but offered no evidence of an attack or any damage done at the base.
Hong Kong protesters plead guilty to subversion charges: Six Hong Kong residents who belonged to a pro-independence student group have pleaded guilty to charges of subverting the state under a Beijing-drafted security law, according to local media outlet HK01. Members of the group Returning Valiant, ages 15 to 25 at the time of their arrest last year, are accused of conspiring with other people between January and May 2021 to organize or participate in overthrowing or undermining the mainland Chinese and Hong Kong governments. | 2022-08-20T22:08:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Digest: Aug. 20, 2022 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug-20-2022/2022/08/20/23412532-208f-11ed-8013-9144b80a9a1f_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug-20-2022/2022/08/20/23412532-208f-11ed-8013-9144b80a9a1f_story.html |
The music festival is celebrated annually at Chuck Brown Memorial Park to honor the D.C. legend
Myra Anderson dancing at the 8th annual Chuck Brown Day, at Chuck Brown Park, in Washington, D.C. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
“Hold up!” DJ Kool shouted from the stage.
“Wait a minute!” the crowd responded at Chuck Brown Memorial Park, in the signature call-and-response fashion of go-go swing.
David Jordan, 53, of Northwest Washington, dandled his 6-month-old son on his lap as the rest of his family played on a blanket. Muriel Langford, 70, of Southeast Washington, bopped with the music while seated on a bench near the stage alongside her girlfriends. And Myra Anderson, 37, got up from her lawn chair, waved her hands in the air and swayed back and forth. She’d driven almost three hours from Charlottesville.
They and more than a thousand others came out Saturday afternoon to the corner of the Northeast Washington park named for the “the Godfather of Go-Go” to celebrate the musician and his contributions.
“We know that to celebrate someone’s legacy, it takes intentionality,” Department of Parks and Recreation Director Delano Hunter, a native Washingtonian, said. “To celebrate Chuck Brown is to celebrate the fabric of who we are as a city.”
The annual festival, put on by DPR and D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), underscores the city’s appreciation for Brown’s music and legacy, Hunter said.
Chuck Brown Band, still crankin’
This year also marked 10 years since the musician’s death, a moment that “feels like yesterday,” Wiley Brown, 32, Brown’s son, said. Brown said he remembers being onstage with his father as young as 4-years-old. He’s now a vocalist in his father’s Chuck Brown Band, and he performed Saturday. Seeing the fans every year at the event for his dad means “the world,” he said.
“It’s nothing but love when you come to Chuck Brown Park on Chuck Brown Day,” Wiley Brown said. “That’s a testament to how much love he poured out, and it’s still being given back.”
Chuck Brown Day began when Chuck Brown Memorial Park, a section of Langdon Park, was dedicated in 2014, Hunter said. The free and open event features live performances, food trucks, activities and games for children. Nearly 4,000 attendees come throughout the day, the director said.
This year’s performances, hosted by DJ Kool, included musicians Rare Essence, Uncalled 4 Band, Doug E. Fresh and the headliner, Chuck Brown Band.
The park was transformed into a balloon-lined backyard barbecue bumping with go-go music and bodies. Children played in the moon bounce as a fan blowing water kept passersby cool. Attendees feasted on fried fish and devoured ice cream cones in the heat.
DPR and the Department of Behavioral Health both set up booths, and The Chuck Brown Foundation hosted a free bookbag giveaway for students.
By 2 p.m., the scheduled start of the festival, picnics filled the grounds of the park. Families lounged on blankets and lawn chairs next to ice-filled coolers.
Jordan, who was seated toward the front, grew up listening to Brown and has been attending go-go concerts since he was 16, he said. He brought his children to be inspired by Brown’s legacy and go-go music as much as he has been.
“He’s always been in my life … that’s why I brought them,” Jordan said of Brown as he pointed to his children. “So they can experience the music, the culture and just enjoy themselves.”
“It’s a D.C. thing,” Jordan added with a smile.
Go-go scene memorializes Chuck Brown with new music
Hunter said D.C. prides itself on being the birthplace of Brown’s iconic go-go genre, a type of hip-hop-inflected funk with a strong backbeat. Gathering fans together every year “epitomizes Chuck Brown’s legacy,” he said.
“It was all about togetherness. It was about having a good time, celebrating each other,” Hunter said of Brown and his music. “The event and the dynamics have sort of taken on the persona of Chuck Brown.”
Wiley Brown said the moment anyone hears his father’s music “you can’t sit still.” Some of his favorite tunes include “Day-O,” “Chuck Baby,” and of course, “Bustin’ Loose,” he said.
“It’s very melodic. He incorporated all the things he loved as a kid such as jazz, 50s, ragtime,” Wiley Brown said. “He was able to take those things that influenced him and put his own spin on it … then it became a sound for the town.”
When the Uncalled 4 Band kicked off their performance, people stood up from their chairs, nodding their heads and dancing to the music. Some crowded toward the front, feet moving and mouths grinning. | 2022-08-20T23:26:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Chuck Brown Day celebrates the legend for the eighth time - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/20/chuck-brown-day-eighth-annual/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/20/chuck-brown-day-eighth-annual/ |
Ukrainian artist turns anti-tank ‘hedgehog’ into symbol of resistance
Varvara Logvyn is painting the military equipment in the traditional Petrykivka style to “defend our culture.”
Ukrainian street artist Varvara Logvyn paints national ornaments onto antitank obstacles, known as hedgehogs, in Independence Square in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Aug. 15. (Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Varvara Logvyn might look like any other open-air artist working in Kyiv’s historic Independence Square — a cart full of paint at her side, a dirty palette in one hand and a brush in the other — except she doesn’t direct her attention to a canvas, but to a large, steel antitank obstacle known as a hedgehog.
In a video posted to Logvyn’s Instagram last week, the 38-year-old artist can be seen hunching over one of several unwieldy gray barricades, which resemble massive scatter jacks, and adding bursts of color: red berries inspired by a Ukrainian war song, “Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow,” and green leaves.
Logvyn has spent some 80 hours over the last two weeks painting the hedgehog in the highly-detailed style known as Petrykivka painting, a form of traditional decorative art originating in the village of Petrykivka in eastern Ukraine. Having studied the form for nine years, Logvyn remains faithful to its folk art techniques: She uses brushes made of cat and squirrel hair, and says that she sometimes she has to lie on the ground to properly execute the technique, which requires that brushstrokes go in the same direction. She plans to finish this work by Aug. 24, in time for Ukraine’s Independence Day.
Reached via Zoom in Kyiv, Logvyn says that decorating the all-too-contemporary “canvas” of a hedgehog in an old-fashioned style is “my way to talk with the world about Ukraine, about our war, about our values. We have to defend our culture. Culture is the basis of a nation, and [Petrykivka painting] shows that Ukraine is very bright.”
At the beginning of Russia’s invasion in February, Logvyn took refuge in the west, returning to Kyiv in April, when she was startled to see steel hedgehogs everywhere. Sometimes known as Czech hedgehogs — because they are said to have originated in that country in the 1930s — the obstacles stop advancing tanks by turning under the treads of an advancing tank, lifting the vehicle off the ground and leaving it trapped and vulnerable.
To Logvyn, they serve not as a sign of security but as a constant reminder of danger. “I’ve never seen my city like that. I was terrified,” she says.
So when the annual municipal holiday of Kyiv Day arrived in May, Logvyn decided to try her hand at making the steel obstacles a little more approachable. She painted one with the blue-and-yellow colors of Ukraine’s flag as what she calls a “gift to my city.” Now, as the nation enters its eighth month of armed conflict, she’s at it again. This time, she’s showing that Ukrainians aren’t just defending their physical cities with military weapons. They’re defending their cultural identity too, with a spirit that can’t be quashed.
A post shared by Varvara Logvyn (@varmural)
Before the war, Logvyn ran a fireworks business; these days, she’s helping the military with pyrotechnics, but she’s spent her life surrounded by art. Logvyn grew up in Shostka in northeastern Ukraine, where her mother was an art teacher and artist. After her parents gave her a wooden board decorated in the Petrykivka style as a present, she became interested in it and studied under a mentor for nearly a decade. Now, she uses it to make gifts for her friends and family. She hopes the painted hedgehogs, her largest project to date, will “improve people’s emotional and psychological feelings, because everyone is exhausted from the war.”
Many artists in Ukraine have reimagined public spaces in response to war. Earlier this week a group of artists painted sunflowers on the charred exteriors of bombed out cars that were recovered from Irpin. Across Ukraine, murals have popped up condemning the war: On a wall in Zaporizhzhia, a Ukrainian soldier flips off a Russian warship; in Kyiv, a figure evoking the Virgin Mary — and holding a Javelin missile — looks down on a street.
Logvyn, however, has taken a tool of war itself as her canvas. Watching her paint on the video is uncanny: She takes something harsh and ugly treats it with a painter’s touch — with a tenderness you might reserve for porcelain.
Hedgehogs, which dotted the coast of France during the Normandy Invasion, are most commonly associated with World War II. In a city just outside Moscow, a bright red monument, made to look like oversized hedgehogs, marks the furthest point that Nazi troops advanced into the city.
Under Logvyn’s brush, her hedgehogs have become symbols of Ukrainian resilience. Just days after the invasion, civilians got to work fabricating the steel devices — including two others Ukrainian artists, Volo Bevza and Victoria Pidust, who made dozens of hedgehogs that were shipped around the country.
Logvyn plans to paint more hedgehogs, with colors representing countries who have helped Ukraine. She calls painting the steel structures soothing. “It’s kind of like meditation for me,” she says. “It’s the only way I can live in these circumstances. Before the war, I did art because I wanted to. Now, it saves me from my thoughts.”
Here’s why Sean Hannity shouldn’t be anchoring convention coverage | 2022-08-20T23:39:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In Kyiv, this Ukrainian artist is painting anti-tank hedgehogs - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/20/ukraine-hedgehog-painter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/20/ukraine-hedgehog-painter/ |
Mystics center Shakira Austin defends against Storm forward Breanna Stewart in Game 1 of a playoff series Thursday in Seattle. (Lindsey Wasson/AP)
SEATTLE — The Washington Mystics needed one more stop, and Shakira Austin needed one more inch. With a minute left and the Mystics leading by a point during Game 1 of their first-round WNBA playoff series at Seattle, Storm guard Jewell Loyd missed a shot. Austin, the third overall pick in this year’s draft, boxed out Tina Charles and went up for the rebound.
Her 6-foot-6 frame came up just short.
Loyd’s shot clanged long off the rim, just past Austin’s outstretched arms and into Charles’s grasp with 48.4 seconds remaining. The extra possession gave Loyd another chance, and she buried a pull-up 17-footer with 38.1 seconds left to give the Seattle Storm a one-point lead. The Mystics would never lead again, and the Storm took the opener of the three-game series, 86-83.
A day later, Austin was still dejected.
“Every little thing matters,” she said. “I took that loss hard. I felt like if I were to just rebound that ball, it probably would have been a different game.
“Just my expectations for myself, regardless of what Coach might have for me or the team might have. I know what I can do for a team, and I felt like I could have finished the game for them a little better.”
Austin, who played at Maryland and then Mississippi in college, has provided Washington more than anyone expected during her rookie season. Mystics coach and general manager Mike Thibault traded the No. 1 overall pick to Atlanta for No. 3 — along with another pick and a pick swap — partially because he had a veteran roster and wouldn’t need a rookie to play big minutes.
Austin, though, has forced her way onto the court. She started 32 games and is sure to be named to the league’s all-rookie team. Rhyne Howard, the No. 1 overall pick, is the favorite to be named rookie of the year after ranking 12th in the league with 16.2 points per game, but her Atlanta Dream didn’t make the postseason.
Austin is a starter on a playoff team, ranks 16th in the league with 6.4 rebounds per game and 19th with 0.8 blocks per game. She also averaged 8.7 points even though the team ran no sets for her; most of her scoring comes from effort and in the flow of the game.
Austin finished Thursday’s loss with 12 points and seven rebounds.
“Shakira Austin, when you get to this point in the season, you’re not a rookie anymore,” Storm forward Breanna Stewart said. “She came in, and she made hustle plays. She got some rebounds. She understands her spots. And if you can figure that out early in your career in the WNBA, it’s definitely going to help you out a lot.”
Austin has been tested by some of the WNBA’s top post players and has held her own. Her defense is a big part of why the Mystics went 3-0 against the first-place Aces and why Washington allowed the fewest points per game in the regular season. Perimeter defenders Natasha Cloud, Ariel Atkins and Alysha Clark can be aggressive knowing Austin is protecting the rim.
Thibault thought Austin got tired down the stretch of her first playoff game, but she played a huge part in limiting Charles, who led the league in scoring last year, to nine points.
“She’s bigger, for one,” Thibault said. “She’s a legit 6-6. Tina’s 6-3, 6-4. So it’s not like you’re giving up size anywhere. So you can battle her on the boards. Shakira’s got quick feet. So when Tina pops out, it’s not like Shakira’s a fish out of water out there guarding on the perimeter. She’s got good footwork.”
Thibault was happy overall with the team’s defense, acknowledging there were a few mistakes. The transition defense can improve, he said, but big-time players such as Stewart and Loyd made tough shots. He doesn’t expect significant changes on the defensive end, outside of being a bit more disruptive in getting in a shooter’s space and coming up with a few more deflections.
Charles is a proud player, so it wouldn’t be a surprise for her to come out more aggressive and look to get her offense going. Austin expects to be ready and wants to make up for what she felt was a game-changing mistake.
“When you have a kind of a crafty player who can still bang with you, I try to just get them out of their spots,” Austin said. “I try to be aggressive with the heavy deny. Just try to get her off the block as much as I can so that she can’t back down.
“But when she wants to play the dribble game, I’m a pretty fast post player. I can guard one through five. She can bump with you, so just being able to take away her tendencies and just try to keep her from being a main factor is just something I’m trying to do.” | 2022-08-21T01:10:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Shakira Austin is key in Mystics' playoff series vs. Seattle Storm - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/20/shakira-austin-mystics-storm/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/20/shakira-austin-mystics-storm/ |
St. Louis Cardinals’ Yadier Molina, left, and Albert Pujols (5) celebrate a 13-0 victory over the Colorado Rockies following a baseball game Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
PHOENIX — St. Louis Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina was put on the restricted list Saturday and is expected to miss the next two games. | 2022-08-21T01:11:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Cards catcher Molina missing 2 games for 'business matters' - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/cards-catcher-molina-missing-2-games-for-business-matters/2022/08/20/4d98bd1e-20e3-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/cards-catcher-molina-missing-2-games-for-business-matters/2022/08/20/4d98bd1e-20e3-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
Brody Malone competes on the rings during the U.S. Gymnastics Championships on Aug. 20 in Tampa. (Mike Carlson/AP)
TAMPA — A year ago, Brody Malone ascended to become the standard-bearer in U.S. men’s gymnastics. And Saturday, at his sport’s marquee annual event, he won a second straight national all-around title to prove he still holds that status.
Behind him, there’s a veteran and a newcomer, both with super-difficult vaults and additional promise for the American men’s program. Malone won the crown by a comfortable margin with a 176.590 total that was about five points ahead of Donnell Whittenburg, a 28-year-old hanging on to his unfulfilled Olympic hopes. Whittenburg edged Asher Hong, an 18-year-old from Texas, after the rising talent had a disastrous final rotation of the competition on high bar.
Both Malone and Whittenburg secured spots on the world championships team based on their performances at Amalie Arena, while the other three members of the squad will be determined after a selection camp. Hong certainly will be in contention — in addition to the all-around, he also had top-three finishes on vault, floor and rings — but he missed his chance to grab automatic qualification in the waning moments of the meet. As the final competitor on high bar, the apparatus he slipped off Thursday, Hong struggled through parts of his routine, then fell on his dismount — the final element of his evening but his first major lapse.
Malone delivered a solid set of 12 routines across two days of this meet, and he maintained distance from Whittenburg and Hong, who each received a large boost from the U.S. program’s bonus system that rewards difficulty. Malone also won the national titles on floor and high bar, his signature event, despite minor errors on that apparatus Sunday.
Fellow Tokyo Olympians Yul Moldauer (fifth with a 169.139) and Shane Wiskus (seventh with a 167.429) were further behind. Both had major mistakes — Wiskus on floor and Moldauer on pommel horse — and that helped Hong and Whittenburg hold onto the top-three spots they grabbed after the first night of competition. Hong entered Sunday in second, but his low final score pushed him less than four-tenths of a point behind Whittenburg. Moldauer and Stanford’s Colt Walker (sixth) both would have been ahead of Hong and Whittenburg if the bonus system were not in place.
Malone soared onto the scene last year, winning the all-around titles at the NCAA championships, elite nationals and Olympic trials. Before 2021, he had never competed in the senior division at U.S. championships, the marquee event for top-tier gymnasts in this country. By the time he headed to Tokyo, he was the clear top all-around gymnast on the U.S. squad, even though he had never made an appearance at the world championships.
Sam Mikulak, a three-time Olympian, won six national all-around titles before Malone assumed the top spot in the U.S. men’s program. Both Mikulak and Malone qualified for the Olympic all-around final, with Malone finishing 10th ahead of Mikulak in 12th. Mikulak knew the Tokyo Games would be the final competition of his gymnastics career, while the other members of the four-member team — Malone, Moldauer and Wiskus — were soaking in their first Games and looking toward the Paris Olympics in 2024.
“I wanted to step up and lead USA Gymnastics,” Malone said. “Not just me — Yul and Shane also. Just lead us to start pushing difficulty and push for a medal.”
The Americans haven’t finished on the podium at world championships or the Olympics since 2014, but with Russia banned from international competition, the U.S. men will be in contention for a medal this year. The national team staff has implemented an aggressive bonus system that rewards athletes for competing difficult routines at domestic meets and is meant to help the Americans catch up with the world’s top teams.
Hong and Whittenburg received a considerable boost from this initiative, primarily because of their difficult vaults. Both performed a vault with a roundoff entry onto the table, then a double tuck with a full twist after pushing off from their hands. That’s among the most difficult vaults in the world, and under the new system they each received a bonus of 1.780. Hong had better execution on that vault — and a harder second vault, which is required to contend for medals on the apparatus — and he secured the event title.
To start his evening, Whittenburg executed a difficult set on rings and secured the best two-day total of the competition. His best two events — rings and vault — were his first of the evening, and he rose into second place. Whittenburg rotated through his weaker events, Hong surpassed him in the standings until the final tally.
Whittenburg fell twice on floor Thursday but still entered the second day of competition in third, largely thanks to the bonus system. He returned Sunday and delivered a well-rounded showing, this time with an excellent floor routine, en route to a spot on the world championships team for the fifth time.
Even with all bonuses removed — as they will be for world championship team selection decisions and at international competitions — Malone stood far above the rest of the field. But his ambitions stretch far beyond this meet and into the fall, when he could continue leading the U.S. men by finally returning to the medal podium as a team. | 2022-08-21T02:20:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Brody Malone remains atop U.S. gymnastics with second all-around title - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/08/20/brody-malone-us-gymnastics-championships/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/08/20/brody-malone-us-gymnastics-championships/ |
Ukrainian service members observe an area near a front line in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine on Aug. 18. (Dmytro Smolienko/Reuters)
Anxiety continued to surround the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine on Saturday following stark warnings by both sides of a potential attack on the facility, with fear coursing through the region and rippling around the globe.
The specter of a possible attack on the plant, the largest in Europe, loomed large over the grinding war, with Russian and Ukrainian officials accusing the other nation of courting calamity and risking a nuclear disaster.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of conducting “blackmail with radiation” in an address to the nation. Russian President Vladimir Putin has, in turn, accused Ukraine of shelling the plant and risking a “large-scale catastrophe,” an assertion unsupported by evidence.
Even as the situation surrounding the plant remained perilous, Russian authorities were also said to be ramping up their security in Crimea amid reports of drone attacks in the region, which Moscow annexed in 2014.
“Russian authorities are visibly increasing security measures in Crimea, indicating growing worry among Russian authorities and civilians about the threat of Ukrainian strikes on rear areas previously believed to be secure,” the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based group, said in an assessment Friday.
The governor of Sevastopol said Russian forces had shot down a drone approaching the headquarters of its Black Sea fleet. The claim could not be independently verified.
The status of some Russian forces also came into question following a new report about damage stemming from recent explosions at an air base in the Crimean Peninsula. Ukrainian officials have previously said that their special forces were behind multiple explosions hitting targets within the Russian-occupied region.
A Washington Post analysis found that at least six explosions rocked the Saki air base, near Crimea’s western Black Sea coast, over nearly an hour earlier this month.
The news agency Reuters reported Friday that an unnamed Western official said the explosions at the Saki base knocked more than half of the Russian Black Sea fleet’s naval aviation combat jets out of commission.
Speaking on Friday, a senior U.S. defense official said they did not “have an overall assessment” of “the total impact of the recent attacks.”
“Certainly, we are seeing this overarching picture of Russian forces being much more vulnerable than they thought they were, and we are seeing movements of Russian forces as a result to try to protect their capabilities,” said the official, who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Pentagon.
The official said the U.S. government was concerned about the situation around the Zaporizhzhia plant and watching it closely, saying that any “fighting near a nuclear power plant is dangerous.”
“We see Russia’s current actions in and around this plant as really the height of irresponsibility,” the official said.
Zelensky, in his address to the nation, said that Ukrainian officials and others were working out details for sending a group — including representatives from the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — to visit the plant.
World leaders want U.N. experts to visit the plant. António Guterres, the U.N. Secretary General, said that “any potential damage to Zaporizhzhia is suicide.”
Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the IAEA, called for restraint amid “this highly volatile and fragile situation,” saying tensions needed to be lowered “to help ensure nuclear safety and security and prevent any radiological consequences for the population and the environment.”
Putin supports sending IAEA officials to the plant, according to a Kremlin readout of a phone call he held with French President Emmanuel Macron, but finding a formula for an inspection acceptable to both sides in the war has proved elusive.
While fears about the impact of a potential attack on Zaporizhzhia reverberated worldwide, the threat also loomed in the region surrounding the plant. Although many people had left — some a few months into the war, others since shelling began — others have stayed put, enduring the shelling and waiting out the uncertainty.
Officials from both countries lobbed accusations at each other on social media over the weekend. On Saturday, Oleg Nikolenko, spokesman for the Ukraine Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tweeted a call for “the entire diplomatic community in Vienna” to boycott Mikhail Ulyanov, the Russian ambassador there.
Ulyanov had tweeted “No mercy to the Ukrainian population!” in response to a post about American aid to Ukraine. He said his words were being misinterpreted and argued that he was criticizing “the policy of pumping Ukraine with weapons combined with the rejection of diplomacy (leading to further suffering).”
Nikolenko said Ulyanov used “genocidal language” and was “calling for the elimination of the Ukrainian nation,” while Ulyanov tweeted that efforts to link his words “with a call for genocide are outrageous and absolutely unacceptable.”
On the ground in Ukraine, meanwhile, nine people in Mykolaiv were injured on Saturday — four of them children — following Russian strikes on a tower block there, the regional governor said.
In the city of Kharkiv, the regional governor said, overnight Russian rocket attacks struck “critical infrastructure facilities,” damaging homes and commercial buildings but not killing anyone.
Zelensky, in another address over the weekend, emphasized that the war was far from over, saying, “We still need to fight.”
“We must all be strong enough to endure and go all the way to Ukrainian victory,” he said.
Ukraine is one of the world’s largest exporters of grain, though huge amounts were trapped in the country since Russia’s invasion earlier this year.
On Friday, the World Food Program chief told the Associated Press that the United States was preparing to buy 150,000 metric tons of grain from Ukraine in the next few weeks for an upcoming shipment of food aid, though the destinations were not confirmed.
Alex Horton in Washington, and Loveday Morris and Ievgeniia Sivorka in Nikopol, Ukraine, contributed to this report. | 2022-08-21T02:43:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ukraine: Anxiety surrounds Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant amid fears of attack - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/20/ukraine-nuclear-zaporizhzhia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/20/ukraine-nuclear-zaporizhzhia/ |
Dear Carolyn: My mom can’t shut up about my ex-boyfriend at family gatherings. I broke up with “Andrew” nearly four years ago. We were together for more than a decade from the time I was 21. Though we’re now friends, he could be quite cruel at times. I deeply regret spending the best years of my life in that relationship.
Every time there’s a family gathering, my mom waits until she has a maximum audience and then asks me at the top of her lungs, “So what has Andrew been up to?” I REALLY hate when she does this. It gives people the impression that we’ve gotten back together, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I don’t really want to explain my reasons for still being on friendly terms with him, either.
I’ve asked her repeatedly to stop asking me about my ex in front of other people. I’ve told her she’s free to ask me privately if she cares to know, but I don’t want her to do it before an audience I see only a couple of times a year. Whenever I make this request, the conversation ends in a huff. I text her before family get-togethers to repeat this request. Yet she does it without fail. My sister has also told her to knock it off.
It’s really frustrating because the relationship sapped me of every ounce of energy I had for so long. Since I ended it, I’ve accomplished things in my career that I never thought possible.
But my mom is a person who can’t stand to be alone. I think she sees it as a failing that I’m a single woman in my late 30s who has never been married or had kids.
How do I get my mom to respect my boundaries? Or if I can’t, how can I avoid giving her whatever reaction she’s clearly looking for?
— Really Frustrated
Really Frustrated: If I read this correctly, only you and your sister know your mom’s seemingly innocent Andrew questions repeatedly, ritually — and contemptuously — defy explicit requests for her not to do that.
Why are you shielding her from the consequences of her own actions?
What she’s doing is bizarre and rude. It’s okay to respond accordingly.
That does risk giving her “whatever reaction she’s clearly looking for,” and with it an opening to garner the sympathy of the onlooking relatives. Specifically, if you treat this as a gambit to shut your mother down, then you open yourself to becoming the other half of a transaction that obviously gives her some satisfaction — a sense that she’s doing her job as your mom, maybe. That she knows better than you do what’s good for you.
So it’s important to look at any actions you take solely as shutting down your own participation completely, leaving the transaction incomplete. If you can regulate your emotions and deliver the message kindly and calmly, then say, “Oh, Mom, you know I don’t like that question.” Conveniently, it’s true, it’s your prerogative, and there’s nothing shameful about it. It’s also pretty tame in the moment, but gains power and impact with repetition — verbatim, every time she asks.
You: kind, calm and firm.
Mom: still asking that same question.
In front of everyone. Time after time after time.
It’s not her best side, and she’ll be the one choosing to show it. A quick shrug and a change of subject can also dispatch her follow-up attempts to pin the “problem” on you, if she goes that route.
If you’re not collected enough for that kind of exchange, then respond instead with five syllables of nothing: “He’s … okay, I guess?” The interrogative form does all the work of asking aloud — with none of the actual asking — why mom still thinks you can speak for a four-years-ago ex. Leave center stage open for the full absurdity of her quest.
Now, these are all just strategies for your own self-restraint, so you don’t complete the transaction and over-explain everything/disingenuously make nice/get emotional. That means you won’t be addressing the fundamental problem between you and your mom that drives her to push.
It may be too that you can’t address it, because she won’t let you. Fair enough, and her loss.
But you have a powerful tool for that problem, as yet unused: “Why?” You’re telling her over and over what you want (a natural impulse) but you’re not asking her what she wants so badly that she’s zombie-crossing your boundaries to get it. Clearly she wants to be heard and hasn’t found a way to besides this dysfunctional path.
So even though you don’t owe her another word on this, it is a viable option just to hear her. Not indulge, not obey, not respect even — just hear. “Mom: You keep asking about Andrew, against my wishes. Why?” Point to the functional path, and see if she can take it. If she still “can’t shut up,” then stop being there to hear it. | 2022-08-21T04:13:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Mom 'can’t shut up' about daughter’s ex-boyfriend - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/21/carolyn-hax-mom-boyfriend-daughter-shut-up/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/21/carolyn-hax-mom-boyfriend-daughter-shut-up/ |
Ukraine live briefing: Drone attacks in Crimea as Russian officials consider boosting security
A law enforcement officer stands guard in a street following a reported combat drone attack on the Russian Black Sea Fleet's headquarters in Sevastopol, Crimea August 20, 2022. REUTERS/Stringer (Stringer/Reuters)
Spotlight: Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant
Drone attacks were reported in Russian-occupied. Kyiv and Moscow signaled support for allowing inspectors to visit the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant amid concerns of an attack on the facility. Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
Drone attacks, including one on the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, were reported in Crimea on Saturday. The governor of Sevastopol, a Russian appointee, said a drone hit the roof of the fleet’s headquarters after Russian forces were unable to shoot it down. But he later reversed his claim, saying in a “clarification” on Telegram that the drone was struck and landed on the roof, catching fire. “There was no defeat,” he wrote. The claims could not be independently verified.
Russian officials in Crimea are considering “strengthening security” on the peninsula amid the attacks, according to the Washington-based think tank Institute for the Study of War, with forces there on “high alert.” Russian forces in Crimea are finding themselves “much more vulnerable than they thought they were,” a senior U.S. defense official said.
This week marks six months since the invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky noted in his nightly address. It will also mark the nation’s Flag Day. He also hinted at the prospect that Russia this week “may try to do something particularly nasty, something particularly cruel. Such is our enemy.”
The daughter of key Putin adviser Alexander Dugin was killed in an explosion Saturday night in the Moscow region, according to Russia’s state-run media outlet Tass. Daria Dugina was reportedly driving her father’s car from a festival they attended when the vehicle erupted in flames, a friend of Dugin’s told Tass.
Attempted Russian ground offensives north of the city of Kharkiv failed on Saturday, according to ISW. Shelling continued in and around the city.
Russia accused Ukraine of poisoning its soldiers late last month but provided no evidence, Reuters reported. Russia said botulinum toxin type B had been found in the bodies of a number of soldiers. An adviser to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, Anton Gerashchenko, wrote on Telegram that Moscow did not say “whether the poisoning could have been caused by expired canned meat,” noting that Russian soldiers have long complained of inadequate supplies.
Ukraine paraded defunct Russian tanks through the streets of Kyiv on Saturday. The display of “rusty Russian metal is a reminder to all dictators how their plans may be ruined by a free and courageous nation,” Ukraine’s armed forces said. Residents of the capital posed for photos next to the tanks, even as air raid sirens rang out, The Washington Post’s Liz Sly reported.
The city of Kharkiv will be under curfew all day on Ukrainian Independence Day, said its regional governor, Oleh Synyehubov. Starting Monday, the nightly curfew in Ukraine’s second-largest city will run from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., and this week, it will also run from Tuesday night to Thursday morning.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said he supports allowing U.N. experts to inspect the Zaporizhzhia plant “as soon as possible” and agreed to provide “necessary assistance” during a call with French President Emmanuel Macron. However, Moscow has rejected broader requests to withdraw its military from the site, and has accused Ukraine of shelling the facility and preparing to cause a “radiation leak” there — claims Ukraine and the United States have likened to a “false flag” operation.
Two more ships carrying grain and sunflower oil have left Ukraine, Turkey’s Defense Ministry said Saturday. The ships left the port of Chornomorsk, close to Odessa in southwest Ukraine, bringing the total number of ships to leave under a Turkey- and U.N.-backed deal to 27.
The United States has presented to NATO officials instruments of ratification for Sweden’s and Finland’s accession to the military alliance, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said. The war has seen moves to expand NATO, and Blinken said handing in the documents was “the final step in our process to have these important partners become vital NATO Allies.”
The Post’s Claire Parker outlines what to know about Europe’s largest nuclear power plant and the risks of fighting there, as warnings of a possible imminent attack on the plant in southeastern Ukraine have sent some nearby residents fleeing over the threat of nuclear catastrophe.
A Russian soldier’s journal: ‘I will not participate in this madness.’: The damning 141-page journal of Russian paratrooper Pavel Filatyev, who spent more than a month fighting in Ukraine, describes an army in disarray, The Post’s Mary Ilyushina reports from Riga, Latvia. Filatyev went to Ukraine “after his poorly equipped unit was ordered to march from its base in Crimea for what commanders called a routine exercise,” she writes.
His journal, which is “the most detailed day-by-day account to date of the attacks on Kherson and Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine as seen through the eyes of a Russian soldier,” details “commanders clueless and terrified, equipment old and rusty, troops pillaging occupied areas in search of food because of a lack of provisions, morale plummeting as the campaign stalled.” | 2022-08-21T07:16:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russia-Ukraine war latest updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/21/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/21/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/ |
Alexander Dugin, a far-right writer and ideologue known as “Putin’s brain,” is seen in 2016 in his studio in Moscow. (Francesca Ebel/AP)
The daughter of Alexander Dugin, a far-right Russian nationalist who helped shape the ideas behind President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, was killed when the car she was driving exploded near Moscow, according to Russia’s main investigative authority.
A Toyota Land Cruiser “went off at full speed on a public highway” and caught fire, it said, adding the fire was likely caused by an “explosive device” installed in the vehicle. The driver, identified by the committee as “journalist and political scientist Daria Dugina,” died at the scene.
Dugina, 29, was reportedly driving her father’s car from a festival they both attended when the blast occurred, engulfing the car in flames, a friend of Dugin’s told the state-run media outlet Tass. Andrey Krasnov said he believed her father was the target of an attack, “or maybe the two of them.”
Dugin, a scathing critic of the United States, with close ties to the Kremlin, is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s Rasputin” or “Putin’s brain.” Although he doesn’t hold an official government position, he has long called for the reabsorption of Ukraine into Russia, and Russia experts say his language and thinking about Russia’s supposed rightful place in the world have been echoed by the Kremlin and in recent speeches by Putin.
His daughter has also spoken publicly in support of the war in Ukraine and Russian imperial expansion. In March, she was sanctioned by the United States as part of a list of Russian elites and Russian intelligence-directed disinformation outlets, alongside her father who has been designated for sanctions since 2015.
“The car caught fire immediately [following the explosion]. She lost control, because she was driving at speed, and flew to the opposite side of the road,” Krasnov told the Russian state media outlet, describing it as a “very grave event.”
The blast occurred around 9 p.m. local time near the village of Bolshie Vyazemy, southwest of Russia’s capital, Moscow, the committee said.
The Kremlin has not yet commented on the incident.
The Treasury Department, upon adding Dugina to the sanctions list, said she was the chief editor of a disinformation website called United World International, which had suggested that Ukraine would “perish” if it was admitted to NATO.
The website was developed by a Russian political influence operation called “Project Lakhta,” which Treasury officials say has used fictitious online personas to interfere in U.S. elections since at least 2014.
Russian national accused of fraud conspiracy aimed at political interference
Dugin was a leader of the Eurasian Youth Union, which actively recruited individuals with military and combat experience to fight on behalf of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, a separatist enclave in eastern Ukraine that has played a central role in Putin’s justification for war.
Why is Ukraine’s Donbas region a target for Russian forces?
Ukrainian officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment as the incident appeared poised to create a new flashpoint.
Denis Pushilin, a prominent separatist leader and key figure in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, immediately blamed Ukraine for Dugina’s death without providing any evidence for his claims. | 2022-08-21T08:08:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russia: Daria Dugina, daughter of Putin ally, killed in car explosion - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/21/daria-dugina-car-explosion-moscow-putin/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/21/daria-dugina-car-explosion-moscow-putin/ |
Man killed by car in Prince George’s
Victim was hit on Oxon Hill Road, police said
A man was hit by a car and killed Saturday night in Prince George’s County, the police said.
He was struck about 9:45 p.m. in the 6100 block of Oxon Hill Road.
The man was in the roadway when struck by a car that was traveling on Oxon Hill Road, according to the police. It was not immediately clear why the man was in the roadway or why he was hit, and police said they are investigating.
The road is a main thoroughfare in the Oxon Hill area, and the site of the incident is near a Capital Beltway interchange. | 2022-08-21T08:34:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man hit by car and killed in Prince George's County, police sat - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/21/pedestrian-killed-car-prince-george/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/21/pedestrian-killed-car-prince-george/ |
The apocalyptic weather is not without precedent, as the reemergence of centuries-old “hunger stones” in the continent’s river beds attest. But as climate change makes such crises more frequent, it’s worth remembering an important point: Historical episodes of meteorological mayhem have sown chaos, fueling everything from social unrest to pandemics.
Consider the drought that hit central Europe in AD 69. The Roman historian Tacitus remains our best source on this disaster. He wrote that the legions sent to deal with the restive German tribes that year were in a “bad temper” because “the Rhine [was] scarcely navigable by reason of a drought unprecedented in that climate.” This explained the soldiers’ other grievances: “want of pay and food.”
And judging from what went down in Rome in AD 69, the Rhine God was angry indeed. That was the infamous “Year of the Four Emperors,” when ill-fed legions joined a civil war between the different factions vying for supremacy in Rome. The soldiers in Germania threw their lot with a portly contender named Vitellius, who was eventually overthrown after a bloody battle. Vitellius ended up dead, as did tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers alike.
A little more than a century later, another bout of extreme weather generated entirely different problems. After several years of brutal heat in the early 1470s — what one Belgian chronicler referred to as “an unprecedented and anomalous drought [that] afflicted the whole world” — rivers dried up, crops failed, and many people went, well, crazy. In Spain, political leaders blamed the “conversos” — Jews who had converted to Christianity — for the bad weather and burned them at the stake. It was neither the first nor last time that bad weather begat antisemitism.
Temperatures must have been excruciating. In France, townspeople huddled in cellars not long after sunrise, hoping to escape the heat. One French chronicler noted that the wine grapes were “roasted and the leaves of the vines had fallen to the ground like after a severe frost.”(1) Throughout the continent, forest fires erupted, much as they have now. A Swiss account from late July 1540 reported that it was “unbearably hot [with] everybody complaining of water shortages. Forests were burning everywhere around.”
Climate change has ushered in a new era. Beginning in 2003, Europe has sustained a number of crushing heat waves and droughts, with 2022 arguably the worst on record. The historical record would tell us to watch out: Extreme weather, whatever the cause, leaves chaos in its wake. That’s cold comfort indeed.
• Help the World’s Cities Prepare for Extreme Heat: The Editors
• The Summer of Our Discontent: David Fickling
(1) There were some upsides. When winemakers pressed the desiccated fruit, they ended up with a potent beverage closer to sherry than regular wine. It apparently got people drunk quickly. There was much rejoicing. | 2022-08-21T08:47:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Europe’s Drought Could Have a Long Afterlife - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/europes-drought-could-have-a-long-afterlife/2022/08/21/5c462d12-2127-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/europes-drought-could-have-a-long-afterlife/2022/08/21/5c462d12-2127-11ed-9ce6-68253bd31864_story.html |
By Widlore Mérancourt
Amanda Coletta
People stand on the roof of a building destroyed by the earthquake of Aug. 14, 2021, outside Les Cayes, Haiti. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
Now, one year later, Dorvilier, a public school director, is still living with eight family members under a plastic sheet. His closest neighbors are, too. His school — one of seven in Corail that was pulverized by the quake — has not been rebuilt, and the new school year is just weeks away.
A lament for Haiti: ‘It is as if we are cursed’
Sandra Lamarque, the Haiti operations coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, said access to health care in the southwest was already limited before the quake, and there hasn’t been a sustainable reconstruction effort for facilities that were damaged or destroyed. She visited Les Cayes in June.
“Nothing has changed a year later, or very little has changed,” she said.
Last year’s earthquake was stronger than the temblor that killed more than 220,000 here in 2010, but it caused less damage because its epicenter was farther from Port-au-Prince, the densely populated capital. Still, it struck many remote and hard-to-access towns and the Caribbean nation’s breadbasket.
In Haiti, a brutal reckoning over an all too familiar task: Rebuilding
Haiti’s gangs use TikTok, Instagram, Twitter to recruit and terrorize | 2022-08-21T10:10:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | An earthquake hit Haiti one year ago. Many homes are still flattened. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/21/haiti-august-2021-earthquake-recovery/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/21/haiti-august-2021-earthquake-recovery/ |
On a road trip to find untapped votes, the Democratic challenger for governor faces armed protestors, shouting matches and a stolen catalytic converter.
Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke speaks to more than 300 supporters at a town hall meeting in Gov. Greg Abbott's hometown of Wichita Falls, Tex. (Nick Oxford for The Washington Post)
SPEARMAN, Tex. — Everyone in this 3,087-person Panhandle city knows that Beto O’Rourke is coming to campaign for governor today. It’s a major event, a big-time politician coming all the way out here, deep into rural oil country, where the landscape is dotted with pump jacks and cattle and grain elevators, and the worst drought in 10 years has sucked up all the water in the Canadian River so it’s just a dry bed of red dirt.
“People are buzzing! It’s a big buzz,” says Suzanne Bellsnyder, who owns the one coffee shop downtown. Local gossip networks have already alerted her that Beto (he’s achieved one-name celebrity status in these parts, like Cher) is next door having lunch. It’s a Saturday afternoon, and he’ll be speaking in a park, with the temperature hitting 105 degrees.
People are buzzing in a good way? Like, excited?
She smiles. Well, what do you think? Beto mustered only 8 percent of the vote here in 2018 when he ran as the Democratic candidate for Senate against the Republican incumbent, Sen. Ted Cruz. That’s 138 votes out of 1,710 cast in all of Hansford County. “We don’t even have a Democrat primary,” says Bellsnyder, who is the former chair of the county’s Republican Party. “I mean, they hold one, but 12 people vote or something.” (Fact check: It was actually eight people in 2018 and 14 in 2022.)
The buzz had started in right-wing Facebook groups, where a protest was being planned. There was chatter about whether to bring guns. “Did you see the guy with the AR-15?” Beto asks me a few days later. “He was wearing it, coming toward the door, which is not unusual for us.” It’s also not unusual for a dozen shouting Republicans to confront Beto outside a town hall meeting of 337 people and then post videos on Twitter saying they’d run him out of town.
Maybe it’s a fool’s errand or just a kamikaze mission of hope, but Beto is holding more than 70 public events in 49 days trying to convince people in mostly small, rural and often incredibly red towns around the state that he should be their next governor. It’s part of a campaign strategy fueled by the fact that four years ago he came closer than any Democrat in a generation to winning a statewide office in his Senate race — within 220,000 votes, or 2.6 percent. Which in Texas counts as close.
Beto is targeting GOP strongholds that former president Donald Trump won with 70, 80 or even 90 percent of the vote just two years ago, making his schedule public and inviting the entire community to join. If there are votes out there to push him over the top, that means turning over every couch cushion in every corner of the state — even in conservative oil, agriculture and ranching country where many people are thrilled with two-term incumbent Republican governor Greg Abbott, who signed a trigger law banning most abortions and who has spent the summer busing migrants to D.C. and New York City, while blaming it all on President Biden.
Could a victory for Beto lie not in liberal cities such as Austin or Houston but in spending these last precious three months of the campaign driving his Toyota Tundra to the least populous, most Republican parts of the state, mining for untapped votes?
“I mean, there’s a reason to do this,” Beto says in Spearman, sweating through his white button-down. Having been married for 17 years, Beto often says, he knows no two people agree on everything, but he’s hoping people around here might at least like his plans to repair Texas’s power grid or to pay teachers more.
If nothing else, maybe they’ll respect that he came.
“I understand that if we’re only interested in those who are already with us, we’ll never get there,” he says, “We’ll end up in the same place every Democrat has for the last 28 years.” That’s how long it’s been since Texas had a Democrat as governor, when Ann Richards held the job.
It’s a long shot, but maybe. Last week a video of Beto cursing at a heckler at one of his events drew national attention. “It may be funny to you … but it’s not funny to me,” he snapped when an Abbott supporter laughed while he described how 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde had been massacred by an 18-year-old with a legally purchased AR-style rifle. As far as encounters go at his town hall meetings, it was pretty tame.
He also got a fundraising bump in late May after he interrupted Abbott during a news conference in Uvalde, shouting, “You are doing nothing!” after the governor said that tougher gun laws were not the answer and had shifted the focus to mental health.
Recent polls have Beto pulling within five to six percentage points of Abbott’s lead, a five-point gain from where he was in April — and still a football field away from the margin of error. In July, he set a record for the most money ever raised by a Texas candidate in a single quarter, an astounding $27.6 million in four months, most of it through hundreds of thousands of small donations — and $3 million more than Abbott. Still, the governor has $40 million more than Beto ready to deploy on advertising in the fall.
From outside Texas — and certainly among Republicans in Texas — there can be a weariness to seeing Beto back on the trail. This is his third at-bat for a major office in five years: failed Senate run, failed 2020 presidential bid, and now taking on Abbott in what’s predicted to be a terrible election year for Democrats, with an unpopular Democratic president, and in a state where Republicans win the vast majority of elections.
Beto’s no longer the party’s rising star. He’s got a reputation: that guy who runs and loses.
In these rural areas, Beto is essentially drilling for oil. “There are a lot of votes out there,” Beto says. “There are 7 million people who didn’t cast a ballot who were eligible in 2020.” There are the first-time voters and the Democrats who need an extra push to vote in the midterms and the people who don’t stick to party lines. “I would say they are persuadable,” he says.
And then there are the votes no political scientist could tell him how to find. In Dumas, a Panhandle city that’s 55 percent Hispanic, truck driver Pablo Campos tells Beto he woke up at 3:30 a.m. so he could complete half his work shift and have enough time to go to the town hall gathering during his break. There, Mary Jane Garcia, 47, a devout Catholic, stood up to talk about the “spontaneous abortion” that saved her life when she miscarried at 17, and how scared she is that her daughters might be denied that medical care.
Over in Quanah, a city of 2,272, Darby Sparkman, 23, was astounded to see 64 people at Beto’s town hall meeting, since she’s an election worker and “like 10 people vote Democrat.” Edith Aguirre, 26, was among the nearly 200 people who showed up in Bowie, a growing city of 5,534 in verdant North Texas, where the radio stations veer from country to worship to worship country. She was brought here as a child from Mexico so her father could work in the oil fields. She’s not a citizen and can’t vote but brought her sister, Ashley, who turns 18 this year. They wept while talking about how Ashley will be the first voter in her family.
Beto’s visiting many of these small towns for the second, fifth or seventh time. Crowds have been rapturous and far bigger than expected, like the 1,000-plus people who came out in highly conservative Lubbock, or in Whitesboro, a majority-White city of 4,217 near the Oklahoma border, where campaign staffers had to rent another room at the church they’d booked to accommodate the extra 200 people who showed up — for a total of 410 (along with 100 Republican protesters outside, who brought a band). Eventually, a sweat-drenched Beto answered questions standing in a doorway between the people in the pews and the overflow crowd next door.
That frenzied scene eclipses anything from his Senate run, says Glenn Melancon, Democratic chair of Grayson County, who introduced Beto in Whitesboro. He was a sensation in 2018, but he was new and unproven — a relative nobody around the state, even as El Paso’s three-term congressman. Now people across Texas feel as if they have a relationship with him. “The first time around, there’s some excitement,” Melancon says, “but then he came back and he came back, and more and more people get to know it’s not a show. It’s real.”
If deeply conservative places like Spearman are his path to victory, though, it’s going to be a bumpy road.
Beto is holding his town hall gathering in a park. According to Beto’s press director, Chris Evans, the owner of the restaurant they originally booked called and explained that his staff might have signed off, but he was not okay with it.
By the time Beto arrives, people in MAGA and NRA hats, carrying “Pro-life” and “Build the Wall” signs or wearing “Team Jesus” T-shirts make up three-quarters of the 70-person crowd. Beto’s staff has invited them to join the town hall meeting in the shade.
One attendee is wearing a T-shirt that reads “Come and take it,” the Texas independence slogan that’s been adopted to counter Beto’s forceful declaration, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” at a 2019 presidential debate a month after a 21-year-old white supremacist drove six hours to a Walmart store in El Paso with an AK-47 and killed 23 people, on a mission to stop a “Hispanic invasion.” Beto flew home that day from the campaign trail and went straight to the county hospital. He says he still keeps in touch with a woman whose husband was shot while trying to raise money for a girls soccer team to go to Arizona. Her father-in-law also was shot and died.
“Marcela said, ‘Why does anyone need a gun like that?’” Beto says during a lunch break. “And I just knew that if I were to be honest with Marcela, the answer is nobody needs to have an AK-47. Nobody.”
Back in Spearman, Beto is just over a minute into his usually 30-minute introductory speech when the shouting starts.
“You don’t protect the Second Amendment!”
“I am encouraging your right to speak right now,” says Beto. “And I’m glad that you’re here and I’m glad that you said that.”
“You’re trying to take our rights away!”
He rolls with it. “Okay, let’s get right into the question-and-answer portion!” Everybody but the shouting people laughs.
For over an hour he takes the barrage. If he cares about kids, why doesn’t he care about unborn babies? (“I just very strongly and very much trust women to make their own decisions … about their own bodies.”) How’s he going to pay for his free-college plan for people who agree to be nurses or teachers in rural areas? (Legalize cannabis and tax corporations more.) Doesn’t he know people need AR-15s to shoot feral hogs or to hunt deer and birds? (“Well, you know what? You must be a pretty poor shot,” Beto snaps back. Even the guys in MAGA hats laugh at that.)
Leaving the town hall gathering, Gyene Spivey, Republican chair of Hansford County, who organized the protest, says Beto didn’t change any minds, but she respected his right to try. “We love God, we love country, we love our families. We don’t want harm on him. We just don’t want him as our governor.”
Debriefing with his staff later, Beto is in a good mood. He lives to debate. Plus, they got a whole two people to sign up to volunteer.
But there are signs that Spearman exhausted him. He pulls over on a farm road to commune with beautiful brown horses and a pony. “This will be the best part of my day,” he says. And when he arrives at the next stop in Pampa, an oil boom Panhandle city of 16,474, he beelines to the Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center, located in the old pharmacy where the folk music legend once worked.
Beto’s been reading Guthrie’s autobiography with his younger son, Henry, 11, and there is this quote he’s been thinking about a lot. The sentiment goes, Beto says, “‘I don’t like a song that makes you feel fat or skinny or too old or too inexperienced or too this or too that,’” and it’s a lot like what Beto wants to do with his campaign, to help Texans find common ground rather than alienating those who are transgender or immigrants. Guthrie was a uniter, he says. “This guy was for everybody.”
There are more protests down the road in Quanah, where “Come and take it” flags are placed in the windows of his town hall meeting, and in Bowie, where a few dozen Abbott supporters shout “Abbott!” every time someone opens the door.
Things turn tense at the end of that long night in Whitesboro. Beto has stayed around to take photos with constituents. About 60 protesters have stuck it out, too, and a dozen march into the church.
“Hey Beto, we’ve been waiting to talk with you!” says a man with a handgun on his hip. A younger guy has a semiautomatic rifle over his shoulder. Beto meets the man with the handgun in the church aisle and engages with him as he repeats a conspiracy theory that the children in Uvalde died because Biden and the Democratic establishment ordered that the police be held back.
“I think you’re operating in a different reality than the one that we live in right now,” says Beto, only giving up reasoning with the man after he refuses to acknowledge that any police officers died after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
“I want to tell you personally, you’re not welcome in this town. You’re not welcome in this county,” says the man.
“There were a lot of people here who welcomed me into this town and this county,” says Beto, as his road campaign manager Cynthia Cano ushers him out the door.
“Beto, Beto, why are you running away?” protesters shout as Beto inches his truck through the throng. “Why wasn’t he in an electric vehicle and wearing a mask?” one says.
It takes about two minutes for word to spread in Muenster, a hamlet of 1,580 that resembles a German village, in a county he certainly will not win, that Beto’s in town. A white-haired woman shouts, “you’ll never get my AR!” An out-of-towner tells him, “the women and the people with common sense need you,” then refuses to give me her name because she doesn’t want people in her small town to know she likes Beto.
It’s a rare leisurely lunch stop for Beto and his three core staff members — Cano, Evans and videographer Jon Groat. The quartet use his Toyota Tundra as a mobile office and have basically been living on the road since November — but for a brief hiatus in February when someone stole their catalytic converter.
Each day starts with Beto throwing his running clothes over the suitcases in the back of the truck to dry. He drives. Cano sits up front planning events, prepping him for town halls and shooting videos of Beto eating burritos or making a spontaneous detour to a reservoir. Evans and Groat take the back seat, hunched over their computers with noise-canceling headphones.
This is pretty much how they did it in 2018. Only this time, Beto says, they’re more organized. They’ve invested in data to better target voters. Over the past five years they’ve built an army of 80,000 volunteers who knocked on 100,000 doors in June.
He’s also gotten more aggressive. In the Senate race, Beto says, “I wish I’d done more to prosecute the case against Ted Cruz and help people realize how dangerous it was for him to stay in office.” Now, everything he says, he links back to Abbott. “People need to know why their electricity bills are going up, why their property taxes are going up, why the lights didn’t turn on last February,” he says. “It’s Greg Abbott, and just be really clear about that.”
When Beto dropped out of the presidential nomination race in November 2019, he said he didn’t think he’d run for public office again.
He taught a couple college courses on Texas politics. He founded a voting rights organization, Powered by People, aimed at turning Texas blue. He sat around with his family, like everyone else during the pandemic.
But the grid failure in February 2021 that killed hundreds of people outraged him. He started thinking about running for governor, he says, when Democratic lawmakers fled the state in the summer of 2021 to block voting restrictions — only to watch Abbott sign them into law a few months later. Beto entered the race in November.
Before he was a fundraising juggernaut, Beto was a kid who played bass in a punk band. His first true taste of the road was the tours of North America they did on his summer breaks from Columbia University.
This tour, he says, reminds him of those tours. “Driving from town to town, showing up, telling your story, listening to other people’s stories, meeting people in restaurants, bars, cafes, church halls.”
He’s waiting for takeout in the Italian Bistro where he just held his Clarksville town hall, where the heat from 210 bodies — at least 100 more than they were planning for — had overwhelmed the air conditioning.
″Punk rock is about bypassing corporate control of what you listen to and whose story you’re hearing. And the barrier to entry to be able to start a band or put a record out or book a tour — you just do it yourself,” he says. “And this campaign is just, you know, the four of us driving in this truck, going from town to town, showing up, running our own sound system.”
It’s also about going into places where you know you won’t be accepted, and saying what you need to say, in case there’s maybe one person out there who thinks the same way you do and who needs to know they’re not alone.
The takeout arrives, and Beto jumps back into his truck. | 2022-08-21T10:19:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Beto O'Rourke's campaign for governor is taking him deep into rural Texas - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/20/beto-orourke-rural-texas-governor-race/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/20/beto-orourke-rural-texas-governor-race/ |
Gary Busey attends a screening of "This Must Be the Place" in New York. Busey has been charged with sexual offenses at a New Jersey fan convention this month. (Charles Sykes/AP)
Police said that during the weekend of the event they responded to a sexual offense report which led investigators to charge Busey, of Malibu, California on August 19. Police said the investigation is ongoing and have appealed for anyone with information to come forward.
Busey has starred in more than 150 movies including Point Break," “Under Siege,” “Lethal Weapon” and the 1978 film “The Buddy Holly Story,” which earned him an Oscar nomination for best actor. | 2022-08-21T10:19:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Actor Gary Busey charged with sexual offenses at Monster Mania Convention - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/21/gary-busey-charges-monster-mania-con/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/21/gary-busey-charges-monster-mania-con/ |
Transgender girls allowed to play girls’ sports in Utah, judge rules
Protesters hold up signs in March at the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City. (Samuel Metz/AP)
A Salt Lake City judge on Friday temporarily halted a Utah law that banned transgender girls from competing in girls sports. The decision came as he considered a lawsuit by the families of three transgender students and opened the door for those students to compete in girls’ sports this school year, though a state-created commission will make that determination.
The law, which includes a section outlining the ban, took effect in July after Utah’s Republican-led legislature overrode a veto by Republican Gov. Spencer Cox. Anticipating a potential injunction against the law, Republican lawmakers prescribed the creation of a commission that will determine whether a transgender girl has an unfair advantage — considering the child’s height and weight, for instance, as it weighs those decisions.
In granting the preliminary injunction Friday, Judge Keith Kelly of the Third Judicial District Court in Salt Lake City said the attorneys representing the families of the three transgender girls showed the law has already caused harm by “singling them out for unfavorable treatment as transgender girls.” He added that the injunction allows transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports “only when it is fair.”
The injunction comes two days after the state legislature’s Education Interim Committee inquired about how the Utah High School Activities Association, the organization that oversees state high school activities, handles complaints about transgender students’ participation in sports.
David Spatafore, the association’s legislative representative, said it has received a handful of complaints, including some in which parents argued that a “female athlete doesn’t look feminine enough.”
FINA vote restricts transgender athletes in women’s competitions
Per one complaint, a competitor “outclassed” the rest of the field in a girls’ state-level competition last year. Afterward, the parents of the competitors who placed second and third complained to the association, questioning the winning student’s gender.
Spatafore said the association asked the winning student’s school to investigate, and after examining the student’s enrollment records dating back to kindergarten, it found that “she’d always been a female.” Spatafore said he did not reveal the sport, classification or school the student attended to protect her identity. The association did not inform the family of the accused student.
In a recent phone interview with The Washington Post, Spatafore said matters related to transgender student eligibility have been “one of the more critical, one of the more controversial and one of the more time-consuming issues that we’ve been involved in,” particularly over the past three years. He said the association started receiving “a handful” of complaints last year, the timing of which he suspects was tied to the attention surrounding Lia Thomas, a transgender woman who competed for the University of Pennsylvania swimming team.
“We’ve been governing high school sports for 75 years. We’re not new at that. But this is a new issue,” Spatafore said. “It’s become such a hot-button issue that we are preparing ourselves to have a number of complaints.”
Of the 75,000 participants in Utah scholastic sports — a total that counts multisport athletes once for each sport they play — just four are transgender, Spatafore said.
The Utah law is part of a spike in policy proposals and codified laws that restrict transgender girls from participating in K-12 athletics. Nationwide, 17 other states have passed similar laws, although some are also being challenged in court.
While some proponents of an outright ban argued that the Utah law does not go far enough, opponents said the complaints that Spatafore and the UHSAA must consider are an anticipated effect of such laws.
“It’s not surprising to me,” said Susan Cahn, a professor of history at the University at Buffalo whose research focuses on transgender athletes and gender-testing of female athletes. “What I think it does is make the point that not everyone can see, which is that these laws are dangerous to cisgender girls and women as well. [The bills] are often proposed as a way of protecting girls’ sports and women in sports, but I think it gives new legs to an old accusation, an old suspicion, which is the belief that someone really good at sports is possibly a male. And so it undercuts actual girls who are now going to possibly get investigated whether they’re trans or not.”
Most Americans oppose trans athletes in female sports, poll finds
Suspicion over the sex of certain athletes goes back decades.
In the 1940s, female athletes were required to bring medical “femininity certificates” to substantiate their sex ahead of international competitions. In 1966, the International Association of Athletics Federation, the governing body for international track and field, required female athletes to submit to a gender test that came to be known as the “nude parade,” during which their bodies — particularly their genitals — were inspected. Complaints over that practice led to chromosome tests and, later, DNA tests. The IAAF stopped mandatory gender testing in 1991 and the International Olympic Committee discontinued the practice in 1999.
That history and the current reality are why Cahn sees laws such as the one blocked in Utah as part of a broader push to restrict women’s rights.
“It’s a step along a path that conservatives have been developing for a long time now,” Cahn said. “It just seems like they’ve figured out that anti-trans stuff sticks more than anti-gay legislation. I think anti-trans stuff is more potent politically, and it’s part of a bigger project of restoring what I see as a male-dominant society where men are in charge.
“I think [these laws] do a disservice to women’s sports. And they’re not only about sports — I think it’s about undermining the validity of trans existence.” | 2022-08-21T10:19:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transgender girls allowed to play girls’ sports in Utah, judge rules - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/21/transgender-girls-utah-sports/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/21/transgender-girls-utah-sports/ |
Scientists blame climate change as consumers mourn the potential loss of a seafood delicacy
Jeffrey Jackson, left, and Leo Tuiasosopo, center, maneuver a crab pot while Ashlan Prout prepares to send nonlegal crabs down a discard chute in October 2020. (Courtesy of Gabriel Prout)
Okay, not that last one. But everyone agrees on one point: The disappearance of Alaska’s snow crabs probably is connected to climate change. Marine biologists and those in the fishing industry fear the precipitous and unexpected crash of this luxury seafood item is a harbinger, a warning about how quickly a fishery can be wiped out in this new, volatile world.
Gabriel Prout and his brothers Sterling and Ashlan were blindsided. Harvests of Alaskan king crab — the bigger, craggier species that was the star of the television show “Deadliest Catch” — have been on a slow decline for over a decade. But in 2018 and 2019, scientists had seemingly great news about Alaska’s snow crabs: Record numbers of juvenile crabs were zooming around the ocean bottom, suggesting a massive haul for subsequent fishing seasons.
Prout, 32, and his brothers bought out their father’s partner, becoming part owners of the 116-foot Silver Spray. They took out loans and bought $4 million in rights to harvest a huge number of crabs. It was a year that many young commercial fishers in the Bering Sea bought into the fishery, going from deckhands to owners. Everyone was convinced the 2021 snow crab season was going to be huge.
And then they weren’t there.
Scientists, despite earlier optimistic signs, found that snow crab stocks were down 90 percent. The season opened and the total allowable harvest went from 45 million pounds to 5.5 million pounds. Commercial fishers couldn’t even catch that quantity.
In October 2021, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game closed the king crab season entirely to harvesting, for the first time since the 1990s.
“It was a struggle,” Prout said. “We were pulling up close to blank pots. We’d be searching several miles of ocean floor and not even pulling up 100 crabs. We were grinding away and barely caught what we were allowed to catch.”
King crabs are massive, up to 20 pounds each, with thick, spiky shells that diners need tools to crack. Snow crabs are between 2 and 4 pounds and have thinner shells that can be cracked with your hands. Snow crabs are the biggest crab industry in Alaska and, while still a splurge (in a normal year around $25 per pound), they tend to be much less expensive than kings. Both have sweet, briny white meat that pulls out in long pieces.
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Go to Joe’s Stone Crab in D.C. for an order of those sweet, luxurious crab legs and you’re likely to have palpitations: $199.95 for 1½ pounds of king crab. King crab is served chilled with drawn butter and is cracked tableside. But still, that price tag is startling.
For restaurateurs seeking new sources to make up for Alaska’s shortfall, there’s an additional headache: The U.S. government in March banned imports of Russian fish and seafood products, along with other consumer items such as vodka and diamonds, as part of its expanding sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
At Klaw, a hot new restaurant in Miami, managing partner George Atterbury has worked with Troika Seafood, a Norwegian seafood wholesaler, to bring in live red king crab from Finnmark County, Norway’s northernmost county. They are flown overnight via Norse Atlantic Airways into Fort Lauderdale. Each of the prehistoric-looking animals, which can have a five-foot leg span, is tracked with a QR code.
“We house the live king crab in a separate facility within our restaurant in 2,000-gallon tanks,” Atterbury said. “The costs fluctuate aggressively, but we understand that we can only pass a small percentage to the customer as we are price-sensitive on what is reasonable.”
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The collapse of two of three major crab stocks in Alaska — there’s a third, bairdi crab, also called tanner crab, which is doing fine, but is a much smaller industry — is more than a gastronomic inconvenience for the one-percenters. It is the main source of income for many of the 65 communities that make up the Western Alaska Community Development Quota Program, which allocates a portion of the annual fish harvest of certain commercial species directly to coalitions of villages that, because of geographic isolation and diminished access to sources of income, have had limited economic opportunities, says Heather McCarty, a fisheries consultant in Juneau.
The program was established to provide economic and social benefits for residents of western Alaska, alleviating poverty in what often are Indigenous communities.
“I work in the Pribilof Islands for an Aleut community of 450 people, which is heavily invested in the crab quota,” McCarty said. On the island of St. Paul, Trident Seafoods has one of the largest crab processing plants in the world, employing as many as 400 workers during peak snow crab season in February. This February, it was quiet.
“The whole community of St. Paul is run on the fish tax. It’s 85 percent of the revenue of the community,” she said. “They had some [financial] reserves last year, but it’s not going to go well in the future. King crab has been declining for a while, but snow crab had been quite successful and took a nosedive that nobody expected.”
She says what happened with snow crabs is an example of the kind of rapid changes in resource availability that climate change is making commonplace beneath the sea. In some cases, the abrupt changes are apparent when species flourish. “There’s been a record return of sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay,” she said. “It does seem that these rapid changes can have extreme consequences.”
But what happened to those snow crabs?
“We don’t have data to specifically say what happened,” said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Bob Foy, the science and research director of the agency’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center. “What we know is that we had extreme heat wave in 2019, and we had numerous fish and crab stocks moving into areas they hadn’t been historically. The fishery moved its effort toward the northwest.”
But movement alone doesn’t explain it. Crabs are a benthic species, meaning they crawl around on the ocean bottom and are not able to migrate as quickly as many finfish.
“The biomass of crabs up there at St. Lawrence Island [northwest of mainland Alaska in the Bering Sea] didn’t change much. What that suggests is there was a large mortality event or they moved into deeper water beyond our survey or into the Russian shelf,” Foy said, but he sounds skeptical about that last possibility. “The magnitude of biomass could not all have moved without us detecting it. We believe we had a very large mortality event, which points to an extreme event that we have never seen before in the Bering Sea.”
He said the crabs, perhaps because of heightened sensitivity to their ecosystem, are like the canary in a coal mine — for the climate and those who make their living from crabbing.
Crabbers are waiting to hear whether the state’s $200 million snow crab industry will be severely curtailed for the 2022-2023 season, and on Oct. 15, they find out if the king crab season is closed entirely for a second year.
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Jamie Goen, the executive director of the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers trade association, said the crab collapse is affecting blue collar workers and small family businesses the most. For commercial fishers, nothing like farmers’ “crop insurance” is available, and although the U.S. Department of Commerce is directing nearly $132 million to Alaska for fishery disasters, it will take years for money to reach those affected, Goen said. And if reports of crab deaths are greatly exaggerated and the crustaceans have instead permanently migrated northward to colder waters, fishing farther north in the Bering Sea is too dangerous for Alaskan owner-operator vessels, in part because there are no Coast Guard services there to respond to medical emergencies or boat trouble.
The Prout family is diversifying by “tendering” cod and herring, essentially acting as a courier to transport caught fish to the canneries so the commercial fishers can keep fishing. They’re hauling other people’s catch to work off that $4 million loan.
“To recoup a 90 percent loss, there aren’t a lot of options,” Gabriel Prout said via satellite phone from aboard the Silver Spray, en route from Cordova to Kodiak to tender cod. “It’s a bleak time for the industry. A lot of people will sell their vessels or sell their quota to make ends meet. Dad is handling this remarkably well, but he’s always an optimistic person.” | 2022-08-21T11:11:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Alaskan king and snow crab populations have plummeted - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/21/alaska-crab-climate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/21/alaska-crab-climate/ |
More than a dozen studies in recent years have measured the ‘positive’ and ‘restorative power’ of such memories
If the word “nostalgia” only conjures up the idea of wistful looks back, think again, because the tenderhearted emotion doesn’t have to function as a backward-looking mood, researchers say.
Studies indicate that, in moderation, nostalgia can help move us past our current troubles, whether it be stress from a global pandemic or challenges at home or work. It’s all in how we use it.
“Nostalgia is a first-aid emotion, very useful to have in your emotional toolbox in case you feel lonely or in a low mood,” said Ad Vingerhoets, a clinical psychologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.
More than a dozen studies in recent years have measured the predominantly “positive,” “restorative power” of nostalgia, showing it to be a “buffer” against emotional unhealthiness and an “important resource for maintaining and promoting psychological health.”
Nostalgia is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition,” but experts say its benefits run much deeper.
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“Far from keeping people living in the past, nostalgia can be a powerful resource both for coping with difficult times and for propelling us positively into the future,” said Erica Hepper, a lecturer of psychology at the University of Surrey in England and the author of multiple nostalgia-related studies. “Nostalgia is part of the fabric of everyday life.”
At the same time, nostalgia isn’t about positive vibes alone.
“Nostalgia is a bittersweet emotion,” said David Ludden, a professor of psychology at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Ga. “It’s a useful tool for boosting our mood when we’re feeling down. But always thinking about the past while ignoring the present isn’t healthy. To thrive, we need to deal with current challenges.”
Ludden explained that leaning too much into the past could undermine innovation and stunt social progress.
Used for good, however, experts say and studies indicate that nostalgia can promote empathy and psychological resilience, foster creativity, curb loneliness, build deeper connection, and encourage a sense of community and volunteerism. It has also been shown to evoke inspiration. “Nostalgia makes us feel safe, loved and reminds us that others care about us,” Hepper said. One study found that waxing nostalgic can even make one feel physically warmer.
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The powerful emotion has also been shown to reduce physical pain and improve one’s mood by releasing endorphins. “Recalling to mind a pleasurable experience from our past triggers the same positive emotions we felt when we actually lived the experience, providing a rush of nostalgic pleasure from the past for us to savor in the present,” offered Hal McDonald, an English professor at Mars Hill University in North Carolina.
Perhaps most noteworthy, nostalgia gives life meaning.
“Because nostalgic memories focus on important, meaningful experiences or relationships, they remind us that we are capable of living a meaningful life, connected to others,” Hepper said.
Nostalgic reverie can also make one more optimistic about current circumstances, or provide an opportunity to learn from past mistakes.
“When we ‘revisit’ our personal past, we can recall how we coped with problems and got through adversity,” said Krystine Batcho, a psychology professor at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y.
Nostalgia can “remind us that life isn’t always like this, that we have had rewarding and meaningful experiences in the past,” said Clay Routledge, a professor of psychology at North Dakota State University and the author of “Nostalgia: A Psychological Resource.”
Routledge has spent much of his career studying the effects of nostalgia, which he said can help put our present situation into a broader context, “to see beyond the sadness or pain we feel right now.”
And although research shows that the emotion is pervasive — one study said that over 80 percent of British undergraduate students reported feeling nostalgic at least once a week — the emotion can be induced more often if desired. “Nostalgia is like a psychological store, which people can dip into when they need a psychological boost or reinforcement,” Hepper said.
Turning to certain media, for instance, has been shown to be a nostalgic experience for many.
“It might seem counterintuitive, but a bit of escapism in nostalgic music, movies and other media can be healthy,” Batcho said. “When we listen to old songs or watch old movies, we benefit from the feelings we had when we originally enjoyed them and from the memories of the people we enjoyed them with in the past.”
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Beyond turning to a bygone media, Vingerhoets said visiting a childhood neighborhood or taking a trip down memory lane through photos can help induce the emotion as well. “Nostalgia can be triggered by a variety of other factors, like smells, food and social gatherings with old friends such as a school reunion,” he said.
Of course, relying on nostalgia too often or for long periods of time can turn the first-aid remedies of nostalgia into a crutch and erode the benefits that come from experiencing the emotion more naturally. “Memories that catch us by surprise tend to pack a much more powerful emotional punch than those memories that we retrieve voluntarily,” McDonald said.
Instead, balancing forward-thinking priorities while still learning from the past is the best way to reap the full benefits of this unique and powerful emotion.
“We engage in nostalgic reverie when the current situation isn’t good. Doing so reminds us that things were better in the past. If we stop there, though, nostalgia really doesn’t help,” Ludden said. “But if sweet memories of the past can reassure us that the future can also be brighter than the present, then nostalgia can be a real psychological resource.”
Daryl Austin is a health and history journalist based in Utah. | 2022-08-21T11:50:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | When looking back helps us move forward, or how nostalgia can be good - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/21/nostalgia-restorative-first-aid-emotion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/21/nostalgia-restorative-first-aid-emotion/ |
A dying woman’s forced C-section launched a fight over fetal rights
By Jodie Tillman
Angela Carder at her wedding in 1986. The next year, she was forced to have an emergency C-section as she was dying of cancer. (Family photo)
In June 1987, Angela Carder was 26 weeks pregnant and dying of cancer. Sedated and on a ventilator, she was fading so fast that no one could ask her what she wanted to do about the fetus inside her.
So lawyers for George Washington University Medical Center put the question to a D.C. Superior Court judge. He ordered an emergency Caesarean section over the objections of her family and doctors, who believed she would not have wanted it. The baby died two hours after the operation; Carder, 27, died two days later.
In 1990, the District’s highest court found that the judge should not have ordered the surgery because there was insufficient evidence Carder wanted it. A pregnant woman, the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled in a precedent-setting decision, had a virtually unlimited right to decide the course of medical treatment for herself and her fetus.
The Carder case served as one of the most dramatic and tragic examples of how perceived conflicts between maternal and fetal rights can unfold. Thirty-five years after her death, these conflicts have taken on renewed importance, following the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
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That June ruling has left states to decide how to balance a pregnant person’s medical autonomy against a desire to preserve fetal life. News reports suggest doctors in some states are struggling to navigate new and confusing abortion restrictions, especially in cases where pregnant women and other pregnant individuals are sick or face complications.
“This case is truly, incredibly significant as we read it post-Roe,” said Dana Sussman, acting executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, an organization whose founder worked on the Carder case.
Sussman said pregnant women have less autonomy in their health-care decisions when fetal rights are prioritized, even in cases of wanted pregnancies. “More than abortion is at stake when we talk about Roe,” she said.
Carder, whose family lived in Clarksville, Md., had survived two long episodes of cancer since she was first diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma at age 13. She had multiple operations and lost a leg and half her pelvis. Her oncologists told her she was in remission and could get pregnant, according to a 1988 article in The Washington Post. And not long after she was married in 1986, she did.
All appeared well until she was in her sixth month of pregnancy and began to have trouble breathing. Doctors found a huge tumor in her lung. She would not be cured.
At 26 weeks, her fetus was considered potentially viable. However, her own doctors believed the fetus had a poorer prognosis than that of a healthy pregnant woman. And they believed they might have more time. On June 15, 1987, they suggested experimental chemotherapy or a powerful blast of radiation that might keep her alive for a few more weeks. Twenty-eight weeks, they told her, gave her baby a better shot at survival. Carder agreed.
But the next day, her condition deteriorated rapidly. She was in so much pain that she had to be heavily sedated. Would she want the Caesarean now, at 26 weeks, even though the chances of the fetus dying or being born with severe defects were high? No one had the chance to ask.
Her doctors initially believed they would perform a postmortem C-section, according to Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy in their 1997 book “The Right to Privacy.” The family objected. Her doctors agreed that the fetus’s chances of surviving were slim and said they would respect the family’s wishes.
But when they notified a hospital administrator, the hospital lawyers got involved. They called in a judge, arguing that the fetus was “clinically viable,” a hospital source told The Post in 1988. “We figured everything would be post-mortem,” the source said. “We never thought we’d get to where we did.”
Superior Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan convened a makeshift court at the hospital. A lawyer assigned to represent the fetus argued that the issue was “not a question of the woman’s right to refuse treatment. This is the question of the state’s obligation to protect this baby.” Sullivan also heard emotional testimony from Carder’s family about what she would have wanted.
Carder had agreed to chemotherapy and radiation a day earlier because she thought she had longer to live, said her mother, Nettie Stoner. “The only reason she would agree to any of this was because she thought she was going to live to hold this baby even though she knew she was terminal,” Stoner said.
Sullivan, though, had heard conflicting information about the fetus’s chances of survival. He said he still couldn’t tell for sure what Carder herself wanted, so he “ruled for the fetus.”
“It’s not an easy decision to make, but given the choices, the court is of the view that the fetus should be given the opportunity to live,” ruled Sullivan, now a federal district judge.
Carder’s doctor went to the intensive care unit to inform Carder, who was now less sedated, but still groggy. When he asked if she wanted the operation performed, she said yes. But half an hour later, he returned to her room with another physician and her parents and asked again. Unable to make a sound due to the tube in her windpipe, she twice mouthed the words, “I don’t want it done.”
Sullivan said her intent was still unclear, and he let his original ruling stand. A three-judge panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals, which convened by an emergency conference call at the request of Carder’s lawyer, upheld the decision.
Five doctors refused to perform the operation before a sixth one reluctantly agreed, according to “The Right to Privacy.” The baby was delivered at 1.7 pounds, The Post reported, “with fingers the size of matchsticks and lungs so terribly undeveloped they could not function normally.”
It was a girl, and Carder and her husband, Rick, had agreed to name her Lindsay Marie. When Carder came to, the family told her Lindsay had died. She wept. She was dead two days later. The Caesarean operation was listed as a contributing factor.
Lawyers acting on Carder’s behalf requested a ruling from the full appeals court. In a 7-1 ruling in 1990, the court held that only in “rare and exceptional” cases would a state interest in the fetus be so compelling as to override the mother’s wishes. “Indeed, some may doubt that there could ever be a situation extraordinary or compelling enough to justify a massive intrusion into a person's body, such as a Caesarean section, against that person's will,” the judges wrote.
The dissenting judge, meanwhile, argued that “when the unborn child reaches the state of viability, the child becomes a party whose interests must be considered.”
Carder’s parents also sued George Washington Medical Center. As part of a 1990 settlement, the hospital agreed to enact groundbreaking policies to protect the rights of pregnant women without court interventions.
Carder’s family doesn’t talk much about those days in the hospital or the legal fight that followed, said her sister, Sherri Ashby. Nettie Stoner died in 2013; Carder’s father, Dan Stoner, is now 86. The family lost touch with Carder’s husband, Rick, years ago.
Ashby said she never stopped believing that her sister should not have had to undergo the procedure. “We wanted to let her die with her baby,” Ashby said.
She thinks often of her sister, and sometimes about Lindsay. “Nowadays, that baby might have lived,” she said. Ashby said she and her husband would have helped raise her, along with their own children.
Carder was buried in the same coffin as her baby girl, behind St. Mary of the Mills Catholic Church in Laurel, Md. “They wrapped Lindsay in a bundle,” Nettie Stoner told The Post in 1988, “and put her in her mother’s arms.”
Jodie Tillman is a freelance writer based in College Park. | 2022-08-21T11:50:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Angela Carder, dying of cancer, was forced into C-section in fetal rights case - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/08/21/angela-carder-fetal-rights-cancer/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/08/21/angela-carder-fetal-rights-cancer/ |
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), left, speaks with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) during a committee meeting on Capitol Hill on Aug. 3. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
“There’s a palpable sense of excitement and relief about that,” she said in an interview here after visiting a local tech business. “People really would like a sense of community again. … People solve things all the time at the community level without asking each other what political party they belong to.” | 2022-08-21T11:51:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Purple politics could keep the Senate blue - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/21/maggie-hassan-bipartisan-midterm-message/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/21/maggie-hassan-bipartisan-midterm-message/ |
Migrants, who boarded a bus in Texas, are dropped off near the Capitol building in D.C. on Aug. 11. (Stefani Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)
A recent slowdown in the stream of buses bearing migrant asylum seekers to D.C. from the southwest border has paused talk about what Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has called a “humanitarian crisis.” Don’t be misled. It is likely that many more buses are on their way, owing to the Republican stuntmen who govern Texas and Arizona, and that D.C. will again be overwhelmed by migrants needing at least temporary shelter as well as medical and other assistance. That means the city, along with federal agencies and nonprofit organizations now handling the problem with little support, need to prepare now.
The buses are an act of political gamesmanship initiated this spring by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R); Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) promptly followed suit. Their aim is to embarrass the Biden administration and generate headlines on the surge in illegal border crossings, which the GOP is using as a political cudgel in the midterm elections.
Some 7,000 migrants are thought to have arrived in D.C. since the spring. Others are being bused to New York City, where Mayor Eric Adams (D), by verbally sparring with Mr. Abbott, has positioned himself as a convenient foil for a Texas governor seeking a third term in office.
Some of the migrants — from Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and elsewhere — have suffered trauma in their trek north. Many have immediate needs on arrival, for food, shelter and medical attention. The large majority who arrive in Washington are transients who intend to board a bus, train or plane for another destination. But hundreds have stayed, and many more will do so in the coming months.
The National Guard last month refused Ms. Bowser’s first application for help in processing the migrants. She has made a second, more streamlined request: National Guard members — an official said just 50 of them would suffice — to help out for 90 days with logistics, as they did when D.C. was ramping up its coronavirus testing program. Unlike governors, Ms. Bowser does not control the National Guard in her jurisdiction.
But the National Guard, if it arrives, would be a Band-Aid, not a solution. Border crossings, and D.C.-bound buses, are likely to spike if federal courts allow the Biden administration to lift a pandemic-era health measure under which migrants are routinely expelled back into Mexico. For Ms. Bowser, expecting others to fill the void is not policy; it is avoidance.
She must step up. The city will need to spend its own money to supplement the support now offered to arriving migrants by volunteers and nonprofit agencies. Montgomery County has been helpful in establishing a 50-person “respite center” where migrants can stay for two or three nights after arriving. The city must also apply for federal funding to stand up a migrant resource center similar to one recently opened in San Antonio with a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The federal government also needs to do more. FEMA’s reimbursement funding to a nonprofit, SAMU, which helps migrants as they arrive, comes with strings attached, covering only a portion of bus or train fare for migrants, even penniless ones, to reach their final destinations. The migrant problem belongs to everyone, and so does the burden of relief. | 2022-08-21T11:51:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Washington D.C. must prepare for more migrant buses - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/21/washington-dc-migrant-bus-preparation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/21/washington-dc-migrant-bus-preparation/ |
The president isn’t featured in ads. He goes largely unnamed on campaign websites and Twitter accounts. And candidates in key races in battleground states are either not asking him to come – or avoiding him when he does.
Then-President-elect Biden campaigns for Democratic U.S. Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael G. Warnock at a drive-in rally outside Atlanta in 2021. Democratic candidates have been lukewarm about appearing with the president during the midterm campaign. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
“No comment from the campaign at this time,” said a spokeswoman for Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo), who is a Republican target in a state that Biden won by more than 13 points.
Several Democratic candidates didn’t say they were opposed to Biden appearing with them in their states. But they weren’t exactly warmly embracing the idea, either.
“Well, I mean, I welcome anybody to come to Arizona and let me, you know, show them around the state and, you know, the issues that we’re facing,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz) said when asked if he wanted Biden to campaign with him. “So, yeah, I mean, it doesn’t, doesn’t matter who it is.”
Plans for a Biden road show
White House officials are preparing to use the coming weeks to showcase some of Biden’s recent accomplishments, which include a sweeping law that lowers prescription drug prices, addresses climate change, and reduces the deficit.
“A lot of these things, Democrats have been trying to accomplish them for a long time,” said Cedric L. Richmond, a senior official at the Democratic National Committee and former senior White House adviser. “Who wouldn’t want the person who was finally able to do that to come and campaign for them?
“If they are reluctant, I think it’s political malpractice,” he added. “If you don’t want Biden, it’s malpractice.”
A Biden adviser pointed to several appearances the president has made this year with candidates in competitive races, including Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), and Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio). Rep. Matthew Cartwright (D-Pa.) was planning to appear with Biden on a Pennsylvania trip that was canceled because of Biden’s covid diagnosis.
History isn’t on his side
James Thurber, an author, historian, and professor who founded American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, said Biden faces a similar challenge to past presidents trying to persuade a skeptical electorate. But he also is in a position in which the country is far more polarized and Biden’s predecessor is so active in sowing doubt about him.
When Biden appears in Montgomery County, Maryland, on Thursday — his first political rally in months — he will be in friendly territory, and joined by the state’s marquee candidate.
Biden also is planning to travel to Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Aug. 30 to talk about efforts to reduce gun violence. Some of the state’s top candidates — gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro and Senate candidate John Fetterman — have appeared with Biden previously, although it is unclear whether they will be there for the event.
A spokeswoman for Ohio’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee Nan Whaley said she “would welcome anyone who believes in her vision for Ohio” but said they hadn’t asked Biden or Harris to come. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich.) recently held a virtual event with Biden around the Chips legislation — which is expected to provide a particular boon for Michigan — but it’s unclear if they would hold an in-person campaign event.
Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.) was one of the few candidates who said flatly that she would want Biden or Harris to campaign with her.
TV ads already targeting Biden
He has been attacked in greater frequency than even Trump was at this point in 2018, in part because Republicans have run more ads so far this year. But even now, Trump is mentioned almost as frequently as Biden, a rarity in politics as prior presidents tend to feature infrequently in midterm ads.
Less than 3 percent of the ads mention Biden in a positive light, and usually only as a fleeting message.
Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), who is running for reelection in a district that Trump carried in 2020, recently took out an ad in which he says, “I was the only Democrat to vote against trillions of dollars of President Biden’s agenda because I knew it would make inflation worse.”
Kaptur, the Ohio congresswoman who has held her seat for nearly four decades and is the longest-serving woman in the House, is running a new ad in which she explicitly blames Biden for “letting Ohio solar manufacturers be undercut by China” and touts how she is working with Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio).
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Annie Linskey contributed to this report. | 2022-08-21T11:51:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | As Biden turns toward midterms, he may not be the top surrogate - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/21/biden-turns-toward-midterms-he-may-not-be-top-surrogate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/21/biden-turns-toward-midterms-he-may-not-be-top-surrogate/ |
Distinguished pol of the week: Fetterman shows how to run as a populist
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for the state's U.S. Senate seat, speaks after being introduced by his wife, Gisele Barreto Fetterman, right, during a rally in Erie, Pa., on Aug. 12. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)
Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, is running a brilliant campaign in the race to replace retiring Republican Sen. Patrick J. Toomey. Fetterman has grasped a central tenet of electoral politics: Voters choose candidates with whom they identify.
Fetterman has the good fortune to be running against TV snake-oil salesman Mehmet Oz, infamous for hawking quack medical remedies. Oz is also a multimillionaire who has been living in New Jersey, purchasing a home in Pennsylvania less than a year ago. And Fetterman has been skewering him nonstop for his phoniness, out-of-touchness and lack of Pennsylvania street cred.
His latest anti-Oz barrage is all about vegetables. Oz filmed a disastrous video in which he shopped for “crudités” at a grocery store. Fetterman’s response:
The Democrat raised $500,000 from that round of mockery.
Oz was also caught saying that, despite reports that he owns 10 homes, he “legitimately” (?!) owns only two properties. Fetterman responded:
Dr. Oz claimed he has only two houses. Survey says.... pic.twitter.com/CLJbhQCH7U
Fetterman has used MTV’s “Jersey Shore” star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi to paint Oz as a carpetbagger from New Jersey. He also has supported Oz’s induction into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
All this has driven Oz’s negative ratings up, his fundraising down and Republicans’ angst sky-high. The National Republican Senatorial Committee recently slashed ad spending in Pennsylvania by a stunning $7.5 million.
Fetterman has opened up a significant lead, 11.5 percent in FiveThirtyEight’s poll average, in a state that Republicans had not unreasonably thought they could hold. Cook Political Report has changed the race from “Toss-Up” to “Lean Democratic.” Cook Political Report’s Jessica Taylor writes: “Fancy French appetizer plates aside, a simple glance at Oz compared to the hoodie-and-shorts clad tattooed Fetterman, and it’s not surprising to discern who comes across as more authentic and relatable to voters.” It didn’t help that Oz “spent much of the end of June into early July on vacation in Ireland, and post-primary traveled frequently to Palm Beach.”
Thanks to his clever and opportunistic assault on Oz, Fetterman has come across as the more energetic, engaged and certainly good-humored of the two, despite the stroke he suffered just before the primary.
Fetterman’s campaign holds a few lessons for Democrats. First, find a relatable candidate, not necessarily one with poll-tested positions or known for what passes for eloquence in political circles. Then, let him run as a genuine article. Second, humor is among the most effective techniques. What is Oz supposed to say — “Stop laughing at me!”? There is no real rebuttal to well-targeted mockery.
And lastly, recognize that Republican “populism” is a facade. Whether it is multimillionaire Oz or Yale Law School graduate and millionaire J.D. Vance in Ohio or one of the Ivy League-educated Republican senators, the notion that the GOP MAGA panderers represent the average American is farcical. (Their policies, including taxing the poor, protecting corporations from paying at least something in taxes, repealing the Affordable Care Act and sunsetting Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid surely are not “populist” in any sense of the word.)
Fetterman is a walking, talking, veggie-tray-buying rebuttal to the argument that Democrats have to change their policies to appeal to non-college-educated voters. Fetterman’s center-left policies (e.g., pro-choice, capping insulin at $35, supporting the Inflation Reduction Act) are popular. It’s his cultural persona and personal connection that have made a difference in the race.
For his successful campaign strategy, depicting Oz as a phony out-of-stater and showing Democrats what a real populist looks and sounds like, we can say, “Well done, Mr. Fetterman.” | 2022-08-21T13:00:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | John Fetterman is running a brilliant campaign - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/21/distinguished-pol-john-fetterman/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/21/distinguished-pol-john-fetterman/ |
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND - OCTOBER 12: The Rocket Lab Mission Control room during the opening of the new Rocket Lab factory on October 12, 2018 in Auckland, New Zealand. The new building includes a new Mission Control Centre, which will oversee launches from Rocket Lab’s Mahia Peninsula launchpad and chief executive Peter Beck says 16 flights are planned for next year. (Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images) (Photographer: Phil Walter/Getty Images AsiaPac)
Space scientists have waited nearly four decades to send a taxpayer-financed spacecraft on a death plunge into the atmosphere of Venus. On Tuesday, Rocket Lab USA Inc., a private space launch provider, announced that the wait is nearly over. But rather than rely on a government space agency to pay the fare, Rocket Lab will finance the mission itself, launching in May 2023. If successful, it will become the first private spacecraft to visit another planet.
It won’t be the last. Thanks to the emergence of private, low-cost rockets and satellites, space science is about to undergo a welcome revolution. No longer will scientists need to rely solely upon taxpayer and government largesse to explore the solar system. Instead, private institutions and funders will increasingly play a crucial role in paying for exploration and basic science beyond Earth. Human knowledge will grow as a result of this shift. Eventually, so too will the bottom line.
Historically, science was a private endeavor pursued by those who had the leisure time, money and motivation to do it. Benjamin Franklin’s groundbreaking work on electricity was a hobby; so, too, were the flying machines constructed in the Wright brothers’ Ohio bicycle workshop. If an individual lacked money, institutional support from universities, scientific societies and museums might fill the gap, as the Smithsonian did for Robert Goddard when he ran short building the first liquid-fueled rockets in the early 20th century.
World War II and the Cold War changed the funding equation. To ensure that innovation remained an engine for the US economy, and for national security reasons, Congress centralized scientific funding in institutions like the National Science Foundation.
Aerospace funding and research was concentrated in the military and in civilian programs like NASA. Some of it, like the moon landings, had an obvious application (beating the Soviets). But other research programs were tilted more to science for science’s sake. For example, on Dec. 14, 1962, NASA’s Mariner 2 spacecraft conducted the first successful mission to another planet when it flew by Venus. Over the next half-century, NASA and Congress supported dozens of additional robotic explorers, including pioneering flybys of every planet in the solar system.
Fortunately, innovation is starting to erode the government’s lock on space exploration. Over the last two decades, private and public entities have developed a new class of small, cost-efficient satellites knowns SmallSats and CubeSats. These miniaturized craft are built to standardized dimensions, some as small as a Rubik’s Cube, and typically weigh just a few pounds. Unlike the custom-built satellites that have dominated the space age and can cost hundreds of millions of dollars or more, CubeSats often utilize off-the-shelf consumer-grade components and can cost much less than $1 million. Though they certainly aren’t as capable as their larger, bespoke counterparts, the lower cost means that that they can be developed and launched more quickly and less expensively.
Similarly, companies like Rocket Lab and SpaceX have created a private rocket-launch marketplace that’s driven down the cost of reaching space substantially. For example, the cost of launching 1 kilogram on NASA’s workhorse Space Shuttle, retired in 2011, was roughly $30,000 (in 2021 dollars). Today, a SpaceX Falcon 9 can launch a kilogram for around $1,500. Meanwhile, the number of rockets being launched annually has doubled over the last decade, thereby providing opportunities for smaller satellites that would have never made it into space a decade ago.
Those falling costs are inspiring space scientists, space agencies and space entrepreneurs to rethink what kind of science is possible. In June, Rocket Lab launched Capstone, a microwave oven-sized NASA CubeSat that’s taking an unusual, deep space route to orbit the moon (it will arrive in November). The entire mission cost just less than $30 million, one-third of which went to Rocket Lab for the launch and orbital insertion on its spacecraft. Peter Beck, the president and chief executive officer of Rocket Lab, recently told a conference that he views the project as demonstration that, for “tens of millions of dollars” someone can “go and visit an asteroid, go and visit the moon, go and visit another planet.”
As Beck notes, that’s never existed before. Now that it does, private companies, individuals and universities can contemplate space exploration without asking for government money. Beck is a good example. He’s long spoken publicly of his fascination with Venus. To fulfill his curiosity, Rocket Lab is collaborating with a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on its Venus mission. As planned, it will launch on the same rocket platform responsible for Capstone and carry a small probe with a roughly 1 kilogram scientific payload. It’s scientific patronage, a model of funding from an earlier age, and it’s just the start.
The price of launching into space will continue to fall over the next few years, and scientists are already thinking seriously about how to take advantage of the savings. Private companies, keen to market their rockets or explore asteroids and planets for possible future mining and other resource extraction, can team up with them on low-cost, high-risk missions. Foundations and universities that fund science can begin imagining grants that pay for deep space exploration. And wealthy individuals with an interest in funding something that others haven’t will have a new, prestige-enhancing way of funding science.
It’s a scientific revolution of sorts, one that will expand not only human knowledge but human ambition.
• Macron’s Moonshot Looks Like a Long Shot: Laurent & Hughes
• Bold and Risky, the Webb Mission Is Already a Success: Editorial
• Milky Way’s Black Hole Challenges the Laws of Physics: Faye Flam | 2022-08-21T13:22:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Who Needs the Government to Go to Venus? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/who-needs-the-government-to-go-to-venus/2022/08/21/008aa32e-2152-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/who-needs-the-government-to-go-to-venus/2022/08/21/008aa32e-2152-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
By Netana Markovitz
If you find yourself anxious about going to the doctor’s office, you’re not alone. A study from the National Cancer Institute found that some patients avoid going to the doctor because of concerns about communication with their physician.
A doctor’s visit may unleash stressors that feel out of your control. For example, the routine of stepping on the scale at the beginning of every appointment triggers anxiety for many people. Doctors say patients can ask not to be weighed, or to hold off on the measurement. It’s okay to say, “I’d like to not be weighed prior to seeing my physician, and I’d like to be able to discuss with them if knowing my weight is necessary today,” said Tracy Richmond, an adolescent medicine physician and director of the Eating Disorder Program at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Once the physician enters the exam room, it can sometimes feel as though you and the doctor have different agendas. Perhaps you’ve been mulling over that cough that won’t go away, but the doctor is asking a million questions about a mole on your arm. What can you do? Richmond said it’s helpful to explain your goals and priorities upfront. She said patients can say, “Here are the things that are top on my priority list [for this appointment]. … Are there things that you think should be on my priority list?” That allows you and the doctor to have a list of items that you know will be covered.
Maja Artandi, a professor of primary care and population health at Stanford University School of Medicine, suggested going even further, by bringing in a brief, organized list of top concerns you’d like to cover in the visit. “As a primary care doctor, l really want to understand what the most important thing is for the patient before I start telling them about what I think is important. I think if the patient has a list and is prepared for the visit, that’s a good thing,” Artandi said. “I would say if you want to bring a list, focus on your top three concerns.”
When making the list, it’s possible you may need a second or third appointment to cover everything in depth, especially if there are several major topics to get to. “We only have a limited amount of time, and we might not be able to address everything on the list,” Artandi said. “If someone really wants to address everything … they need to be prepared to make another appointment.”
She went to one doctor, then another and another
Writing or stating your priorities upfront can also help avoid the disappointment of bringing up a concern in the last few minutes of a visit, only to feel as though the physician does not have time to fully address the issue. “The worst part for a clinician is having the most important issue brought up at the end … then they’re like, ‘Oh no, how am I going to address this adequately when I have other patients waiting?’ [Stating concerns] upfront and explicit makes it so much easier,” Richmond said.
You can also help increase the effectiveness of the visit by bringing in data. Have high blood pressure? Bring in a log of your home blood pressure readings, if you have done them. Taking multiple medications? Consider bringing in the bottles to review with your doctor. If that’s too much of a hassle, be sure to write down the names and the doses you take to ensure they’re up to date in your medical record.
Physicians especially want to know if you feel you might be having a harder time maintaining your health, so don’t sugarcoat things in the discussion. “It’s the patient’s health, not a report card,” Artandi said. “It’s all part of the patient’s health journey. We are there to help them, especially if they don’t do so well.”
Of course, if you don’t feel like you’re being heard or aren’t sure you agree with what the doctor proposes, you can ask your doctor for other options or to see if their colleagues might have other thoughts.
Tammy Chang, an associate professor in family medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School, said it’s okay for patients to ask doctors to seek the opinion of colleagues. “It’s the art of medicine,” she said. “There’s very rarely just one, single path forward,” she said. “And so I think empowering patients means giving patients options and hearing options from different points of view. Doctors don’t work in isolation anymore.”
“I always tell my patients that they are the main person — it’s their health that we are concerned about. So if they need to ask questions, get a second opinion, or need to clarify something — that should be welcomed,” Artandi said. “If the doctor sees this as offensive, then that is definitely a red flag. We all work together as medical professionals to help our patients.”
In a change, patients can now read the clinical notes written by their physicians
Finally, some patients find that it can be hard to follow everything the doctor is saying — either because there’s just too much information being provided or too much medical jargon. Chang suggested taking notes during the visit — or even bringing a friend or relative to take notes for you. And you can always ask your doctor to explain in simpler terms if you don’t understand what they’re saying.
“It can be really complicated. And so we should write things down and then if there’s any part that doesn’t make sense either in the visit or after, the patient should never feel uncomfortable calling for clarification,” Chang said. “As a doctor, I really appreciate that.”
Under new federal rules, patients also have the right to view all doctor’s notes about their visits, often through online patient portals, so you can read and review what was discussed.
Chang’s takeaway is that navigating appointments can feel stressful, but going into a visit with information and expectations of what you want can help.
“I think it’s good for patients to understand that it is really a collaboration,” Artandi said. “We as medical providers are really there to help our patients to have the best health they can have, but it’s a partnership.” | 2022-08-21T13:22:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How to stress less about going to the doctor - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/21/doctor-visit-anxiety-prepare/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/21/doctor-visit-anxiety-prepare/ |
Actress and comedian Nicole Byer made her own path in Hollywood as an unabashedly fat, Black, sex-positive woman. Now the Emmy nominee is reaping the benefits of being herself.
Nicole Byer’s wholesome “Nailed It!” has won her an enthusiastic young fan base, but her comedy routines can be brash forays into her sexual exploits and observations on race. The Netflix baking competition earned her an Emmy nomination. (NETFLIX)
She is juggling four podcasts, getting read for a table read for another production and working on testing new stand up material.
She is nominated for two Emmy’s this year. Byer is the first Black woman to be nominated for an outstanding Host for a Reality or Competition Program for her work on Netflix’s “Nailed It!,” an amateur baking competition where failure to execute the design of a renowned pastry chef is the norm. She is also nominated for an Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special Emmy for her Netflix stand-up special “Big Beautiful Weirdo.”
“Give me an Emmy please,” she captioned a post of clips on Instagram after learning of the nominations. (She also was nominated for two Emmy’s last year.)
“It’s hurtful when you realize — Oh, Hollywood understands one type of Black,” she said. “Like, Emma Stone, Emma Roberts — all these girls get to exist, and they don’t have to be one thing. They can be anything they want. And we have to be just one thing.”
Byer grew up in a predominantly White neighborhood in Middletown Township, N.J. She credits her mom, Lillie Byer, a Mississippi native, with noticing her comedic talents and steering her toward theater. That is where she discovered the power in being able to make people laugh.
From 2019: Nicole Byer on ‘Nailed It,’ a new podcast and her next big project
That was followed by offers to perform stand-up comedy at colleges and universities. Byer was initially reluctant to take those jobs because stand-up was so unfamiliar to her, she said, but her manager convinced her to take a chance — and the money.
It was at MTV where she got her chance to produce a scripted show. Byer’s series “Loosely, Exactly Nicole” captured her life as a 20-something, unconventional-looking actress trying to land roles in Hollywood while figuring out adulthood. In one episode, Byer re-created an audition during which a White casting director told her to sound and act “Blacker” for the role, an experience Byer has carried with her since her early days in entertainment.
“We’re not like a monolith. I sound Black because I am Black,” she said. “I think when people say, ‘Be Blacker, be sassier’ … I don’t know, I just want to do me.”
Instead, Byer says, she’s focused on building an empire. Conan O’Brien’s company, Team Coco, is now the production home for her dating podcast, “Why Won’t You Date Me?” She plays Nicky Coles, a real estate agent, on “Grand Crew” — an NBC comedy series with an all-Black cast depicting everyday life of upper-middle-class people without Black tragedy being at its core. Byer also stars in the recently released movie “Mack & Rita,” alongside Diane Keaton and Loretta Devine. | 2022-08-21T13:22:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nicole Byer gets Emmy nods for 'Nailed It' and 'Big Beautiful Weirdo' stand-up - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/21/nicole-byer-emmy-profile/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/21/nicole-byer-emmy-profile/ |
Teen wins national award for his tree-planting nonprofit
By Noble Brigham, The Virginian-Pilot | AP
Evan Nied stands for a portrait on Aug. 9, 2022 among trees he planted with his nonprofit Planting Shade in Virginia Beach, Va. Nied has travelled the country with the goal of planting trees. (Billy Schuerman/The Virginian-Pilot via AP)
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — Evan Nied’s Instagram biography says he’s “The Literal and Figurative Embodiment of the Lorax,” the title character of Dr. Seuss’ 1971 children’s book who stands up for trees.
He’s receiving his award in San Francisco and attending a retreat with other winners. He’s excited to learn from them. | 2022-08-21T13:22:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Teen wins national award for his tree-planting nonprofit - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/teen-wins-national-award-for-his-tree-planting-nonprofit/2022/08/21/661f166c-2151-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/teen-wins-national-award-for-his-tree-planting-nonprofit/2022/08/21/661f166c-2151-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
Trading Post owner aims to blend in with Elkton businesses
ELKTON, Va. — Michael Melnyk, a “picking” enthusiast and antiques trader, got his start around 20 years ago at the vast Bellwood Flea Market near his hometown of Chesterfield.
Over the past two decades, picking has mostly been a hobby, but has now turned into much more. Melnyk worked as a mason for 25 years and a commercial truck driver for five years before opening a new shop for antiques, collectibles and unique items in downtown Elkton, graced with a rustic wooden sign with hand-painted letters.
Recently expanding the store’s hours to be open on Sundays, Melnyk said weekend business has been good. One recent Sunday, Michael Melnyk said, was the best individual sales day yet. | 2022-08-21T13:22:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trading Post owner aims to blend in with Elkton businesses - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trading-post-owner-aims-to-blend-in-with-elkton-businesses/2022/08/21/6f69f700-2151-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trading-post-owner-aims-to-blend-in-with-elkton-businesses/2022/08/21/6f69f700-2151-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
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