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Frederick Buechner at a book signing in Grand Rapids, Mich., in 2006.(Buechner family photo)
“If indeed there is a God,” he explained, “which most of the time I believe there is, and if indeed he is concerned with the world, which the Christian faith is saying … one of the ways he speaks to us, and maybe one of the most powerful ways, is through what happens to us.”
Life’s temptation, of course, is to move from place to place on cruise control, which means, for me, focusing on failures in the past or worries about the future. So how, some questioners would persist with Buechner, do we start getting into the habit of fully inhabiting our experience? “Pay attention to moments,” he said, when “unexpected tears come to your eyes and what may trigger them.” He was talking about those sudden upwellings of emotion we get from the sublimity of nature or art, when we see a whale breaching, or are emotionally ambushed by a line in a film or poem. We are led toward truth and beauty by a lump in the throat.
I felt that kind of lump when I heard of Buechner’s recent passing. It was not primarily the evidence of grief. How could anyone die better than at 96, in his own bed, after a life filled with significance and heaped with honors? My unbidden tears were triggered by gratitude to the mentor I had never met. More than anyone else in recent literary history, he showed how a modern person, schooled in skepticism, pursued by appropriate doubts, could find the frequency of grace, as if he were tuning an old radio.
We were encouraged to listen to our lives because Buechner allowed us to listen in on his. His model of ministry was heroic vulnerability. All that took was for him to rip his own heart out and put it on display. This would be hard for anyone, but especially for someone with a reticence that was not just a protective bark, but found, ring by ring, all the way to his core. In his brilliant and moving memoirs, Buechner tells us about the 10-year-old boy, playing indoors with his brother, while his business-failure of a father kills himself with carbon monoxide in the garage. The sensitive child had perceived that “something had gone terribly wrong with his laughter.” On the final page of the family copy of “Gone with the Wind,” his father had written a suicide note: “I adore and love you, and am no good.”
Buechner tells of being a writer whose first novel is given rave reviews. “I had written a book,” he wrote, “that was compared with Henry James and Marcel Proust and, headier still, was labeled decadent.” After moving to New York with great expectations, he finds he can hardly write a word. Though from a secular background, he finds himself almost inexplicably drawn to the Presbyterian ministry. “In the midst of our freedom,” he wrote, “we hear whispers from beyond time” and “sense something hiddenly at work in all our working.” Someone asked him whether he had ever considered putting his talents to work for God, which he had not. And then his whispers organized themselves into a faith. “Something in me recoils from using such language,” he said, “but here in the end I am left with no other way of saying it than that what I finally found was Christ. Or was found. It hardly seems to matter which.”
Rather than arriving at faith along the sawdust trail of American evangelicalism, Buechner came via Princeton University and, eventually, Union Theological Seminary. And when he encountered evangelicals for the first time, the cultural contrast was obvious. He accepted modern levels of doubt about the historicity of scripture and understood the reasons for skepticism about organized religion. But over the decades, Buechner came to find his enduring popularity in evangelical circles. He taught at Wheaton College in Illinois in 1985, and his public papers now reside there.
Buechner’s warm welcome among evangelicals points to a revealing fact. Their literary heroes tend to be decidedly non-evangelical. Neither C.S. Lewis (a traditional Anglican) nor G.K. Chesterton (after his conversion, a tireless Catholic apologist) nor J.R.R. Tolkien (a devout Catholic from boyhood) would be comfortable within the theological and aesthetic confines of conservative Protestantism. Which means those confines are too narrow. Evangelicals prove through appropriation that they are missing out on the power of myth, on the sacramental nature of reality, on what Graham Greene called “the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.”
Buechner fit this company. He understood that faith and doubt are not opposites but integral parts of the human journey. He knew that openness is ultimately a more important virtue than certainty. He presented, especially in his powerful novels, the mixture of sacred and profane at the heart of humanity, even at the heart of holiness.
Now he rests, if there is any justice in the world, in the grace that pursued him for so long. | 2022-08-22T22:53:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Frederick Buechner writings help us find the frequency of grace - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/22/frederick-buechner-appreciation-michael-gerson/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/22/frederick-buechner-appreciation-michael-gerson/ |
Fairfax schools chided after counselor kept job following solicitation conviction
The Fairfax County Public Schools building in Merrifield, Va., as seen on March 4, 2019. (Matthew Barakat/AP)
With the beginning of the school year on Monday, Fairfax County Public Schools is facing questions from parents, education advocates and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) after it was discovered recently that a middle school counselor in the system was convicted of soliciting a minor outside the district and kept his job at a school.
Darren Thornton, who began working at Glasgow in 2020, was arrested in November 2020 in an online chatting operation on charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor in Chesterfield County, according to court records, while working in Fairfax County. He was convicted March 2022 and was eventually given a five-year suspended sentence. Thornton also had to register as a sex offender, with the initial registration on June 21 of this year, the database shows.
Thornton was arrested again in June 2022 in another online chatting operation on charges of solicitation of prostitution and frequenting a bawdy place, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, which reported on the police operation.
A Chesterfield police spokeswoman said Fairfax school system was notified about both of Thornton’s arrests.
In a letter to the school community late last week, Fairfax Superintendent Michelle Reid said she and the board fired the Glasgow Middle School counselor when they were made aware of the conviction. School officials are also trying to get his license revoked.
“ … I want to make this very clear: this entire situation is unacceptable from any perspective. We are deeply concerned about how this happened in one of our schools,” Reid said in the letter. An investigation into the matter is being conducted, she said. The school system declined further comment.
The Virginia Department of Corrections is investigating the incident, a spokesman from the agency said Monday, but declined to answer further questions. The spokesman said the investigation will “examine the full scope of the incident.”
A person answered the phone at a number listed for Thornton on Monday, but replied “No you don’t” when asked by a Washington Post reporter if it was the correct number for Darren Thornton.
Shatter the Silence Fairfax County Public Schools — a group of parents, alumni and current students — said Thornton being retained as a district employee despite his charge and conviction was “disappointing but not surprising.”
“School bureaucrats, at FCPS, cannot be trusted to police themselves. That’s why 25,000 citizens have signed a petition asking the Department of Justice and VA Attorney General to investigate FCPS for systemically covering up child sex abuse,” the group said in a statement Monday. “We also ask our lawmakers in Richmond and Washington to pass new laws to keep children safe and hold school bureaucrats responsible when they fail.”
The Fairfax County Parents Association called on the school system to immediately enforce a new policy that would require every system employee with one-on-one contact with children to be subject to annual criminal background checks.
“The circumstances that finally led to this week’s decision by FCPS to fire this counselor underscore the deep concerns parents have about FCPS’s apparent bureaucratic inability to stay focused on executing not only its key mission of excellence in academics but also its key role as partners with parents in the safety of children while in the custody of the school system,” read the statement from the parent group. | 2022-08-23T00:11:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fairfax County school counselor kept job after solicitation conviction - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/22/fairfax-county-counselor-solicitation-minor/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/22/fairfax-county-counselor-solicitation-minor/ |
Sidwell Friends' Jadyn Donovan averaged 15.2 points, 8.4 rebounds, 3.3 steals and 1.9 blocks per game as a junior. (Terrance Williams/For The Washington Post)
The moment Jadyn Donovan long hoped for had arrived Monday night at Sidwell Friends, so the girls’ basketball guard made a noise of both excitement and relief — “woo!” — as she prepared to finish her five-minute speech in front of friends and family.
“I’m confident that after weighing all of my options and opportunities, and soon to be ending my academic and basketball journey here at Sidwell Friends,” Donovan said, “it is time that I look forward to becoming a part of the NCAA community and more specifically…”
As spectators cheered and prepared to launch confetti, the moment was delayed by Donovan’s two necklaces jamming her black jacket’s zipper. After 20 seconds of laughs, Donovan revealed a navy blue Duke T-shirt.
Donovan, whom ESPN ranks the country’s third-best recruit in the Class of 2023, announced her commitment to play at Duke following her senior year.
“The basketball program is super serious, but the school and the environment, people are there to get a great education,” the 6-foot Donovan said in Northwest Washington. “Duke is just a place for me to honestly just learn literally anything I can.”
Donovan decided she’d attend Duke shortly after her visit to Durham, N.C., in late July. During a conversation with Coach Kara Lawson, an Alexandria native, Lawson said Duke could help Donovan achieve her goals of playing professionally, competing for Team USA and becoming a sports broadcaster.
“This is the best option for you,” Donovan recalled Lawson saying. “I think I’m the best coach for you.”
Donovan’s basketball journey began as a 9-year-old in her co-ed Dupont Park Adventist Church league in Southeast Washington. She endured church services by anticipating her Saturday night games and daily shootarounds.
Donovan shined against boys, causing her coach to nickname her “star.” Donovan didn’t recognize her talent until she won every trophy at a summer camp in Bowie as a sixth-grader. The camp’s facilitator, former Syracuse star Lawrence Moten, motivated Donovan to join competitive teams.
Donovan’s parents, meanwhile, encouraged her to focus on academics, explaining how an injury could end her basketball career. She’s considering studying communications or journalism at Duke.
Her basketball profile grew when she appeared on ESPN’s recruiting rankings as a freshman. The 16-year-old has since climbed the rankings.
Last season, Donovan earned first-team All-Met honors after averaging 15.2 points, 8.4 rebounds, 3.3 steals and 1.9 blocks per game. Sidwell went 30-0 and finished as the country’s top-ranked team after winning the inaugural State Champions Invitational in Florida in April.
This is the second consecutive year a Sidwell player has been ranked in the top-three of her class by ESPN. Last year, Kiki Rice, a freshman at UCLA, was the country’s second-best recruit. The trend of producing top talent will continue. ESPN ranks Sidwell forward Kendall Dudley the fourth-best recruit in the Class of 2024.
Sidwell Friends, with an ideal starting five, evolves into the nation’s top girls’ basketball team
Donovan also considered Arizona, North Carolina, Notre Dame, Tennessee and UCLA. Her future coach, Lawson, played at Sidwell Friends her freshman year before transferring to West Springfield, where she earned All-Met Player of the Year in 1999.
Duke hired Lawson, an assistant for the U.S. women’s team, in July 2020 and finished last season 17-13. The Blue Devils last qualified for the NCAA tournament in 2018 but have attracted local talent recently, including sophomore Lee Volker, who graduated from Paul VI in 2021.
“When I was younger, I was kind of really dreaming big and being like, ‘Oh, you know, this is a cool dream to have, but who knows if you’ll make it?,’ ” Donovan said. “Now to be fulfilling that dream of mine when I was that young, is something super huge for me.” | 2022-08-23T00:24:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sidwell’s Jadyn Donovan, one of nation’s top recruits, commits to Duke - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/22/jadyn-donovan-duke-commit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/22/jadyn-donovan-duke-commit/ |
Michael Malone, wide-ranging novelist and TV writer, dies at 79
He wrote best-selling family sagas and mystery novels, and also examined homophobia and sexual assault as head writer for ‘One Life to Live’
Author Michael Malone wrote best-selling mystery novels and family sagas. He was also known for his work on the soap opera “One Life to Live.” (Marion Ettlinger/Sourcebooks)
Michael Malone, a novelist and television writer who moved seamlessly between genres, writing serious comic novels, comic serious novels and best-selling mystery novels — in addition to working on the soap opera “One Life to Live,” which drew critical acclaim during his run as head writer for its zany humor and sensitive explorations of social issues — died Aug. 19 at his home in Clinton, Conn. He was 79.
He had pancreatic cancer, said his daughter, Maggie Malone.
Mr. Malone went on to write two more Justin and Cuddy mysteries, including “Time’s Witness” (1989), which explored the relationship between racism and capital punishment, and the bestseller “First Lady” (2002), about the “Guess Who Killer,” a serial murderer targeting women in fictional Hillston, N.C. He was working on a fourth novel in the series when he died, his daughter said.
Before he turned to the mystery genre, Mr. Malone was best known for writing comic novels with a sprawling cast of characters and offbeat humor. His 1980 book, “Dingley Falls,” was set in a small Connecticut town and featured characters with names like Habzi Rabies, Rich Rage and Mrs. Canopy, an arts patron who goes to the cemetery to speak at her late husband’s grave. “She did not, necessarily, assume that he lay listening beneath it,” Mr. Malone wrote. “For that matter, he had rarely listened when he had sat across from her at dinner, or before the living room fire. The change was that he no longer got up and went to bed before she finished.”
Mr. Malone said he sought to capture the spirit of a place in his work, and found that crime fiction enabled him to depict a broader cross-section of the communities he wrote about. “I’m interested in presenting a world that is politically and socially engaged,” he told the Guardian newspaper, “and once you’re writing about a police department you’re writing about social problems, you’re into the whole politics of a region. By making your characters policemen you engage them with every rank of society.”
Working under executive producer Linda Gottlieb, with whom he had previously partnered on an unproduced movie, Mr. Malone helped shape an experimental but popular few seasons of the ABC soap opera. The series featured eccentric characters and idiosyncratic storylines — one involved an Egyptologist, a jewel thief and a sex therapist — while also delving into weighty issues such as sexual assault.
In a 1992 interview with the Los Angeles Times, journalist Freeman Gunter, a managing editor of Soap Opera Weekly and veteran of the gay press, described the plotline as “a breakthrough,” saying that it showed “what it’s like to be gay in a hostile world.”
“There was no way ever on God’s green earth that five million people a week would be reading my novels,” he told the North Carolina newspaper Indy Week, “but they might see Viki,” the show’s longtime protagonist, “carrying that AIDS quilt.”
Mr. Malone left the show in 1996 and worked as head writer for the NBC soap opera “Another World” before returning to “One Life to Live” in 2003 and 2004. During his second stint as head writer, he worked on a suspense novel, “The Killing Club,” that was tied into the series, with Mr. Malone and one of the show’s characters, Marcie Walsh, both listed as authors. The book made national bestseller lists and employed some of the attention-grabbing techniques that Mr. Malone picked up from his years working in television.
“My chapters used to close out very quietly; now, they may end with, ‘Get out of the car! There’s a bomb in the car!’” he told January Magazine, a literary publication. “It’s the hook trick that I learned from television. Not a bad lesson to learn, either.”
Mr. Malone graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1964, received a master’s degree from the school two years later and went on to pursue a PhD in English at Harvard University, where he met his wife, Maureen Quilligan, a scholar of Renaissance literature who partly inspired his first novel, “Painting the Roses Red” (1975), about a young woman in 1960s California.
As Mr. Malone told it, he wrote the novel to avoid writing his dissertation, a study of American cinema that later formed the basis of his book “Heroes of Eros: Male Sexuality in the Movies” (1979). He never got his PhD, but he went on to teach at schools including the University of Pennsylvania, Yale and Duke, where he led a film class in which students were divided into teams to write and produce their own 20-minute movies. Their films were honored at a “Golden Apples” ceremony that Mr. Malone modeled after the Academy Awards, with a best-director honor presented by the Duke men’s basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski.
Mr. Malone split his time for many years between Connecticut and North Carolina, where he and his wife settled in the small town of Hillsborough, a literary hot spot that was also home to writers including David Payne, Frances Mayes and Allan Gurganus, with whom he performed an annual two-man stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” “When I got here,” Mr. Malone told the Wall Street Journal, “I started writing like I was set on fire.”
His other novels included “Foolscap” (1991), about a university professor commissioned to write the biography of an aging playwright, and “The Four Corners of the Sky” (2009), a family saga and adventure epic involving a missing treasure, a con man and a naval aviator.
In addition to his daughter, survivors include his wife of 47 years, Quilligan; a sister and half sister; a brother and half brother; and a granddaughter. | 2022-08-23T02:13:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Michael Malone, wide-ranging novelist and TV writer, dies at 79 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/22/writer-michael-malone-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/22/writer-michael-malone-dead/ |
Teacher ‘pay penalty’ hits new high
The trend of educators making less money than other college graduates is getting worse
Analysis by Valerie Strauss
(Economic Policy Institute)
Amid what is being called crisis-level teacher shortages in public school districts across the country, a new report offers a partial explanation: Average weekly wages of teachers increased just $29 — repeat, $29 — from 1996 to 2021, compared with a $445 increase in weekly wages of other college graduates. (The figures were adjusted only for inflation.)
It’s what’s called the “teacher wage penalty,” which the nonprofit and nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has been tracking for years. According to the EPI report, the penalty grew to a record high in 2021: to 23.5 percent, meaning that teachers earn that much less than other college graduates.
In 1996, the teacher wage penalty was 6.1 percent. Average weekly wages for teachers went from $1,319 in 1996 to $1,348 in 2021; for other college graduates, average weekly pay rose from $1,564 to $2,009 over the same period (both in 2021 dollars).
“Over the last 18 years, EPI has closely tracked trends in teacher pay,” the report says. “Over these nearly two decades, a picture of increasingly alarming trends has emerged. Simply put, teachers are paid less (in weekly wages and total compensation) than their nonteacher college-educated counterparts, and the situation has worsened considerably over time.”
School district leaders say a combination of factors have led to today’s debilitating shortages: complaints about low pay; inadequate resources; school shootings; and now, the culture wars. Teachers have become targets for conservative activists and Republican policymakers who are restricting what teachers can say about U.S. history, race, gender and other subjects.
Teacher morale in poll after poll is at its lowest in decades, and many who quit cite a lack of respect for their work and profession — manifested in, among things, low wages. They point to Arizona, where the legislature is now allowing people without college degrees to teach, and Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has called on veterans without degrees to become teachers.
I’m a veteran with a master’s degree, but that doesn’t make me qualified to teach in school. Educators who have studied childhood education, pedagogy, subject matter, adolescent behavior, and school administration should be teaching. Pay teachers better so they don’t quit! https://t.co/xRkbWjsSLS
— Lacy Hollings (she, her, hers) (@LacyHollings) August 15, 2022
For anyone who thinks teachers’ benefits make up for the wage deficit, the numbers don’t work out that way, EPI says. The teacher total compensation penalty was 14.2 percent in 2021 (a 23.5 percent wage penalty offset by a 9.3 percent benefits advantage).
“The bottom line is that the teacher total compensation penalty grew by 11.5 percentage points from 1993 to 2021,” according to the report, written by Sylvia A. Allegretto, a research associate with EPI who worked for 15 years at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California at Berkeley, where she co-founded the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics.
“Surveys report that some college students would like to go into teaching but say the pay is too low and falling behind more and more compared to that of other professions they could choose,” Allegretto said in an email. “So, many forgo teaching. Money matters.
“This profession needs to be elevated to the status it deserves and importance it holds,” she said.
Allegretto did not compare teacher salaries from state to state but, instead, compared wages between teachers and other college graduates within each state. The teacher wage penalty varied; for example, Rhode Island, Wyoming, and New Jersey have the smallest pay penalties — at 3.4 percent, 4 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively. States with the largest: Colorado, 35.9 percent; Oklahoma, 32.8 percent; Virginia, 32.7 percent. Maryland’s was 20.3 percent; and D.C.'s was 19 percent. (You can see a map above and a chart below with percentages from all states. The full EPI report is below as well.)
In the reverse of conventional wage patterns in America, it is male teachers who have seen larger pay penalties than women. “Through the mid-1990s, women in the teaching profession had a relative wage ‘premium’ (or were close to parity) relative to comparable women working in other professions,” the report says. In 1960, women teachers had a 14.7 percent wage premium but by 2021, they had a 17.1 percent wage penalty. Male teachers, on the other hand, already faced wage penalties in the 1960s, and it grew to 35.2 percent by 2021, it says.
Here’s the full report:
Teacher Pay Penalty by Valerie Strauss on Scribd | 2022-08-23T03:27:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Teacher ‘pay penalty’ hits new high - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/22/teacher-pay-penalty-hits-new-high/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/22/teacher-pay-penalty-hits-new-high/ |
Two years ago, I moved in with Laura and her adopted daughter, “Maura.” It took Maura a few years to warm up to me even a little bit.
Laura and I are semiretired and Maura is an adult (40s), and only works when she feels like it, which is fine by me. We are all self-sufficient.
Her mother has questioned Maura to see if there is anything she finds upsetting about me, but she won’t answer. Laura adopted Maura at a very young age and raised her as a single parent.
She didn’t know her birthparents, so Laura is the only parent she has ever known. It’s just so hard for me to understand.
Laura is a wonderful, outgoing, kind and caring person, but Maura can seem so aloof. In my opinion, she only behaves civilly with me when her mother is present.
Saddened: The way I read your narrative, “Maura” was raised by a single mother, has always lived with her mother, and has no other family — and possibly few personal connections outside of the household.
Stop: Couples who manage to have peaceful relationships even with opposing political views do this by recognizing every citizen’s right to think what they want to think, express their views peacefully, and to change their minds if they want to.
If your pal is obsessed with some strange, conspiracy-fueled nonsense that is overtaking his conversation and relationship with you, then you might want to reevaluate the relationship.
Dear Amy: I was touched by the letter from “Grace,” the veterinarian whose pet dog died, but had clients respond that she “should be used to it.”
We often forget that veterinarians and health-care workers are human, too.
Pet Parent: I love this idea. Many readers reached out to express their condolences to “Grace.” | 2022-08-23T04:28:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: My wife’s adult daughter won’t warm up to me - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/23/ask-amy-wife-adult-daughter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/23/ask-amy-wife-adult-daughter/ |
Dear Carolyn: My wife and I discovered by chance that my brother’s wife was impregnated through IVF. They chose not to mention that to us, at least.
It now occurs to us she may have used donor sperm. I can’t think of a good reason the family should not have a right to the truth, but I suspect you probably can.
I would like to add, I’m not impressed with a superior claim to privacy, because we’re talking about a permanent addition to our families, and this amounts to a blurring of our identity. Do close relatives have a right to know who the father is?
Family: You’re so right — I can think of a good reason. Because it’s absolutely none of your freaking business. Wow.
The identity of a family that judges people for living their own lives on their own terms is one begging to be blurred. If you are seriously making a purity-of-line argument with me, then I’m going with the donor as the gene-pool upgrade you all sorely needed. Then I’m taking a shower.
Good God. It’s really obvious why your brother and his wife didn’t disclose their use of IVF or whether they used his sperm for this process. You and your wife are judgmental glass bowls! It’s a baby — a future wonderful human being! Geez that letter ticked me off.
I don’t know if this will help you (probably not!) but you technically don’t know for sure where the sperm came from for any child you’ve ever met. You don’t ask non-IVF parents. (Right????)
Dear Carolyn: What if you just don’t have any people? I never felt like I belonged in my family of origin. I’m married, and feel like I sort of belong with spouse’s family. Even though I have interests and hobbies, I don’t have people.
An old colleague just passed. The amount of people who have come out of the woodwork for him is heartwarming, and yet I’m a little sad because I know if I passed, they wouldn’t for me. From any of my previous jobs, from my hobbies, etc. My family is not a connecting family — when family members have passed, their funerals were sad, poorly attended affairs. What happens if you just don’t have people?
— A Little Sad
A Little Sad: That’s kind of up to you. Do you want people? Enough to do the work?
Not everybody is a connecting type, it’s not just your family — it’s within the range of human variety. People can also feel either happy or unhappy with where they fall along that scale. Happy loners, unhappy connectors, etc.
So you’ve figured out you’re not as connected as your late colleague was. If that feels bad, then you need to decide whether you want to try to change that, which usually means a side-by-side comparison of discomforts: Which feels worse, not belonging — or whatever you would have to start doing to grow some people?
With interests and hobbies already in place, you might need only to put yourself out there a little more.
And look for other people without people. That’s a kindness anyway.
There also isn’t a direct correlation between low turnout and sadness of the affair marking a death. Connection is quality, not quantity, and you can be adored without drawing an out-of-woodwork turnout. And that’s perfectly okay, even preferable, if you’re okay with it. Not everyone wants or has the energy for a wide friend circle. Good crowds come in all shapes and sizes. | 2022-08-23T04:28:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Family feels entitled to know if couple used donor sperm - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/23/carolyn-hax-sibling-pregnancy-ivf-donor/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/23/carolyn-hax-sibling-pregnancy-ivf-donor/ |
In the fiery aftermath of the car explosion that killed his daughter, Alexander Dugin stood nearby in shock. The prominent far-right nationalist ideologue and putative Kremlin whisperer appeared to feature in videos uploaded to social media, his head in his hands, staring in disbelief at the smoldering wreckage on a street outside Moscow on Saturday night. Darya Dugina, 29, the chief editor of a disinformation website called United World International and a political commentator in her own right, died in the blast.
Two days later, Russia’s internal security service, the FSB, identified a supposed Ukrainian secret agent as the culprit and said she had fled to Estonia with her young daughter after carrying out the attack following weeks of preparatory surveillance. Ukrainian officials rejected the claim; one adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Ukrainian television that his nation is “not a criminal state, like the Russian Federation is, and moreover not a terrorist state.” (On Monday, Russian missiles continued to rain down on civilian population areas in various parts of Ukraine.)
Conspiracy theories abound about an incident all seem sure was an assassination. Rumors swirled that Dugin may have been the intended target, either by foreign agents or internal rivals within Russia. Some pundits speculated it was a false flag operation carried out by the FSB — with Dugin even a complicit accomplice — to further darken attitudes toward Ukraine and justify an escalation.
In a statement, Dugin used the tragedy of his daughter’s death to call for a decisive victory over Ukraine. “Our hearts yearn for more than just revenge or retribution,” he said. “It’s too small, not the Russian style. We only need our Victory. My daughter laid her maiden life on its altar. So win, please!”
Dugin’s rhetoric, writings and speeches are said to have shaped the thinking of a generation of Russian political elites, including President Vladimir Putin, in the first decade of the new century. (Though some analysts stress that his influence over the Kremlin can be overstated.) As my colleagues noted, he has a long history of championing a Russian conquest of Ukraine.
Dugin claims to have called for the annexation of Crimea as early as the 1990s and is credited with helping revive the concept of “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia” — the term invoked in the 18th century for lands the Russian empire had captured from the Ottomans, much of which is now in Ukraine — as a nationalist driver for Russian ambitions. He is also the lead propagator of the idea of “Russky Mir,” or “Russian world” — a phrase linked to the expansive, revanchist nationalism of the Putin era, anchored in both imperial nostalgia and Orthodox Christian identity.
“There is no place for Poland on the Eurasian continent. [...]
Russia, in its geopolitical and sacral-geographical development, is not interested in the existence of an independent Polish state in any form,
Those ideological moorings led him to pursue activities that would see him get sanctioned by the United States. “He was active in breakaway regions in the 2008 Russia-Georgia war and in 2014 in Ukraine, where U.S. officials say he recruited individuals with military and combat experience to fight on behalf of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic,” my colleagues reported.
“Ukraine has to be either vanished from Earth and rebuilt from scratch or people need to get it,” Dugin said in 2014 as a political crisis in Kyiv served as the pretext for the Kremlin’s initial land grab next door. “I think kill, kill and kill. No more talk anymore.”
In his 1997 best-selling book, “Foundations of Geopolitics,” Dugin outlined his defining worldview. He sees Russia as a civilization-state at the heart of what ought to be an “Eurasian empire,” a landmass stretching from Vladivostok on the Pacific through Europe. It is fundamentally at odds, in Dugin’s reckoning, with the maritime power of the United States and its lesser sidekick, Britain, and ought to represent a kind of illiberal bulwark against Western liberalism.
He also advised in the book that Russia deploy the tacit influence and disinformation campaigns in Western democracies that we’ve seen in recent years. “It is especially important to introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity,” Dugin wrote, urging Russia to fuel “all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts” to destabilize “internal political processes” in the United States.
Dugin sees Russia’s geopolitical “destiny,” as he put it in an interview earlier this year, as an expansion of its “Eurasian” power — “the assertion of Russia as an independent civilization with its own traditional values. And it will not be complete until we unite all the eastern Slavs and all the Eurasian brothers into one big space. Everything follows from this logic of destiny — and so does the Ukraine.”
By 2011, Putin was pushing the creation of a “Eurasian Union” with Russia and a handful former Soviet states amenable to closer ties with Moscow. Dugin’s embrace of Russian-centric “Eurasianism” led him to eventually cheer on other nations’ versions of the theme, including China’s Belt and Road Initiative. He also cultivated closer ties to Turkish nationalists, some of whom draw on a long tradition of Turkish “Eurasianism.”
Dugin, backed by ultranationalist Russian business magnate Konstantin Malofeev, has found fellow travelers across the world. He cheered on the 2016 election of former president Donald Trump in a conversation with U.S. conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Dugin’s writings were hailed by a motley cast of American white supremacists and far-right extremists.
Dugin also found common cause with Europe’s far right, including influential parties in France, Italy and Austria. He has met far-right Dutch leader Thierry Baudet, and expressed admiration for the politician’s movement in the Netherlands. In a recent interview, Baudet described Putin’s war in Ukraine as a “great” and “heroic” fight against the “globalists” and the “deep state.”
Dugin now finds himself at the heart of the latest conflagration between Russia and Ukraine, with Moscow pinning the blame for the car explosion on Kyiv. Andrii Yusov, spokesman for Ukraine’s chief directorate of military intelligence, told my colleagues that his agency would not comment on the incident. But he added that “I can say that the process of internal destruction of the ‘Russky Mir,’ or ‘the Russian world,’ has begun,” and said that “the Russian world will eat and devour itself from the inside.” | 2022-08-23T04:49:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Alexander Dugin: The global politics of Russia’s nationalist ideologue - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/23/ideology-alexander-dugin-global-far-right/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/23/ideology-alexander-dugin-global-far-right/ |
Australia’s leader goes to indie rock gig, chugs a beer, gets cheers
By Frances Vinall
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the Garma Festival in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, on July 29. (Aaron Bunch/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
MELBOURNE, Australia — Sitting in the crowd, the guy in a dark shirt chugged a beer as he watched an alternative-rock band perform in his hometown.
But this wasn’t any ordinary concertgoer — it was Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese.
Albo, as he is known here, was spotted in the seated section of Sydney’s Enmore Theater, a venue in his electorate where the band Gang of Youths performed on Monday night. He was with his partner, Jodie Haydon, and Australia’s Employment and Workplace Relations Minister, Tony Burke.
And he got a welcome more befitting of a rock star than a politician.
Albanese briefly stole the show as he downed his beer to raucous applause and pointed at the empty cup for his audience. Subsequent Twitter commentary also approvingly noted his Joy Division T-shirt, after a video of his appearance was shared widely.
Australia’s prime minister is something of a cult figure in his area of Sydney’s inner west, an historically working-class region that has steadily gentrified. A local brewery even named a beer in his honor.
Who is Anthony Albanese, the new Australian prime minister?
His gig attendance on Monday was in keeping with his music-loving public image. When he was an opposition lawmaker, “DJ Albo” appeared behind the decks at charity events and on breakfast television. And when Albanese hosted New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in Sydney recently, the pair exchanged a haul of vinyl records.
Albanese has even said he would DJ for Fatman Scoop “if I can” at the American artist’s November performance in Brisbane. The rapper made a surprise appearance on Australian radio on Thursday and ambushed the prime minister with the unusual request.
Yet Albanese’s public carousing this week was met with a markedly different response compared with that of Finnish leader Sanna Marin recently. A leaked video that showed Marin dancing with friends sparked debate in Finland and internationally about the appropriateness of a national leader partying.
Marin, female and 36, faced blowback that did not appear to materialize with Albanese, male and 59. Marin took a drug test and released the negative result, and defended her right to have fun with her friends. “I hope that in the year 2022, it’s accepted that even decision-makers dance, sing and go to parties,” she said on Friday.
Australia ousts conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison
But in Australia, the country that brought the world the “shoey” — drinking alcohol out of someone’s used, sweaty footwear — Albanese’s mere glass of beer was perhaps seen as mild fare.
It is not known if his drinking pace rivaled that of one of his political forbears, former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke, who was recognized with a Guinness World Record for drinking a yard glass of ale in 11 seconds while studying at Britain’s Oxford University in 1954. Hawke, who died in 2019, was once captured on video downing beer at a cricket game at a hair-raising — but crowd-pleasing — rate of knots.
Albanese became prime minister in May after his center-left Labor Party won elections following nine years of conservative rule. He has since focused on pushing for steeper carbon emissions cuts, tackling inflation and smoothing over Australia’s frosty relations with China.
Polls published this week show Albanese enjoying overwhelming popularity three months after the election, leading his conservative rival Peter Dutton 55 percent to 17 percent as preferred prime minister. | 2022-08-23T05:29:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Australia’s Anthony Albanese chugs beer at Gang of Youths concert - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/23/australia-anthony-albanese-beer-gang-of-youths/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/23/australia-anthony-albanese-beer-gang-of-youths/ |
Larry, a cat, lies on a sidewalk before moving vans parked outside No. 10 Downing Street in London. (Hollie Adams/AFP/Getty Images)
MANCHESTER, England — Boris Johnson simply had to go, the Tories — lawmakers and party members alike — agreed. So they gave their once beloved leader the old heave-ho.
The Conservative Party rank-and-file who demanded the mop-headed British prime minister resign in July are no longer so sure, now that they’ve had a good sniff at the candidates to replace him.
Boris Johnson did WHAT?
It’s only August and the Tory grass roots already miss Johnson. (No matter that he is still more or less still in Downing Street as a kind of holiday-making caretaker PM until early September.)
This longing, this regret, has already been given a name by British pollsters: “Boris nostalgia.”
Nostalgic in the sense that the remorseful might be remembering Johnson the backslapping vote-getter, the Mr. Brexit of 2019, speaking to arena crowds about how Global Britain was going to rock — and not Johnson the serial prevaricator of 2022, who was deemed unfit to lead.
A few weeks ago, the survey group Opinium Research published a remarkable poll that found that Conservative Party members, overwhelmingly, preferred Johnson to the two candidates now competing to replace him: 63 percent wanted Johnson to remain leader of the party, and therefore prime minister, compared to 22 percent for Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, who appears to be the front-runner for the top job.
It was even worse for former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak: 68 percent preferred Johnson; 19 percent would take Sunak.
Those were some pretty astonishing numbers, or depressing, depending.
“So over the last couple of months of this leadership contest, we’ve gone from party members thinking Boris should resign, and now, these very same people are saying, overwhelmingly, that they prefer Boris Johnson to the alternatives,” said Chris Curtis, Opinium’s head of political polling.
Curtis offered two explanations: “One is that people have kind of forgotten or moved on from how bad it got for Boris in his dying days in office,” he said. “But I think the more important reason is this lack of enthusiasm for the two main leadership candidates.”
Johnson has spent most of August on one vacation or another. He has not endorsed a replacement. When some zealous supporters threatened to try to get his name on the ballot — to succeed himself, essentially — he told them to desist. Johnson has been mum about his immediate plans for the future, though many expect him to write books, give speeches and burnish his legacy.
He has mostly stayed far away from the hustings, the town-hall style events staged around the country for the 200,000 dues-paying Conservative Party members, the 0.3 percent of the adult British population who will decide who the next prime minister will be.
“People are fickle, aren’t they?” agreed Simon Berry, 49, a management consultant, at the ninth hustings in Manchester.
“I think Boris called us ‘a herd.’ And it is true, a few months ago, it was hard to find a Tory who wanted Boris to stay. But now, there appears to be some buyer’s remorse,” Berry confessed.
But Berry pointed out: “We can’t compare Boris on his best day to the Boris at the end.”
“True,” Baumber said.
Boris Johnson idolized Churchill. The next British PM might look to Thatcher.
Still, regrets. The Tories have a few.
Joe Rice, 71, a retired welder, attended the gathering in the northern city of Manchester. He is from nearby Bolton, which had voted for the center-left Labour Party for generations, until Johnson helped to flip the region to the center-right Conservative Party in a landslide election in 2019.
“I confess I wanted Boris to stay,” Rice said. “I think we will miss him.”
Rice suspected that Johnson was undermined by opponents — inside and outside of the party — still sore about leaving the European Union.
“He got Brexit nearly done,” said Rice. “And they hated him for it.”
“Boris was Boris,” she said. “Done in by his own fatal flaws.”
Rob Reynolds, 36, a civil servant, said Conservative Party members in Northern England have campaigned long and hard, knocking on doors each election, to try to turn seats from red Labour to blue Conservative.
When the “Red Wall” cracked in 2019 and Johnson helped to create an 80-seat majority in parliament, his many fans hoped he would remain in power for years and years.
“I was out on the doorsteps and I can tell you that those Labour supporters who switched? They voted for Boris and Brexit and not the Conservative Party,” Reynolds said. “They blinking loved Boris.”
“It is quite a scary thing to do, to get rid of Boris, because he was a proven winner,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London who studies the Conservative grass roots.
Bale agreed that this “defenestrator’s remorse,” as he called it — the tossing of Johnson out the window — might be as much psychological as political.
“Maybe they feel guilty about what they have done,” he said.
But he pointed out that the Tories have often been rather ruthless about ousting their leaders, when they sense that the no longer can win elections. They chucked Winston Churchill, after all, and Margaret Thatcher, too. (Labour has also shed its standard bearers, most recently Jeremy Corbyn, who was not only knocked out of the leadership but kicked out of the party altogether).
At these hustings, there was a sense in the audience that they always knew that Johnson was a bit of bounder. Not a detail man, certainly. “But he got the big things right” is a common refrain.
At another hustings event in Eastbourne on the south coast of England this month, retired hospice nurse Browen Lightfoot reminisced: “People really loved Boris, but he made a lot of silly mistakes.”
Silly, meaning? She meant all the parties held at 10 Downing Street during the many months of covid lockdown, which resulted in 126 fines for rule-breaking to 83 individuals, including penalties for Johnson and his wife, Carrie.
It’s important to remember this is no general election. In a parliamentary system, the Conservatives are still in control — and just switching leaders.
The Tory membership represents only a thin slice of the electorate — and in comparison to the general population, it’s more affluent, older, and conservative, likelier to favor lower taxes and a smaller state, and less anxious about climate change. The members are mostly from London and the south of England — and 95 percent White.
No matter how much they might miss him, the Tories are realists. There is no turning back.
“I didn’t like the way he was turned out, but it is done,” said John Burke, 77, a retired architect who attended the Eastbourne hustings.
Did he imagine a comeback for Johnson? Burke laughed.
“Why would he ever want to return?” Burke asked, “He was stabbed in the back.” | 2022-08-23T06:21:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Boris Johnson succession: Conservative candidates Truss, Sunak make Tories nostalgic - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/23/boris-johnson-nostalgia-truss-sunak/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/23/boris-johnson-nostalgia-truss-sunak/ |
The timing should tell you everything. The frontrunner to replace Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, is also in charge of Brexit matters. A quarrel with Brussels is a tried and tested way of appealing to Tory voters.
As with the entire Brexit debacle, the dispute perfectly captures how the UK’s hardline approach quickly hits the wall of economic and political reality. In this case, the price for Britain’s scientists and researchers will be high: They’re at risk of losing access to the largest science funding program of its kind anywhere, a near $100 billion pot called Horizon, along with a range of other research programs such as Euratom, which engages in nuclear innovation; Copernicus, the Earth observation effort, and space programs.
Officially, science has nothing to do with product checks in Northern Ireland. Unofficially, of course, it’s all linked. The goal at the time of the UK-EU trade deal was that the UK would become an associated member of Horizon. But the EU held up the Horizon association agreement after Johnson’s government declared its intention to unilaterally rewrite the terms of the divorce that relate to trade on Northern Ireland. The bloc isn’t kidding, either — it has previously shut out Switzerland from the funding program over other bilateral disagreements.
The dispute process triggers 30 days of consultation after which it would go to arbitration. If the EU is found to be in breach of the trade agreement and doesn’t comply, the UK can seek compensation; if the EU refuses to pay compensation, then the UK can pursue specific trade remedies.
There are a number of potential off-ramps before it comes to that. But, as Zach Meyers, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform notes, a lot of the damage has already been done. While both sides suffer from this dispute being dragged out, it’s the UK, as with most Brexit matters, that has more to lose.
The Horizon program (the current incarnation, Horizon Europe, runs from 2021 to 2027) has funded collaborations that have led to advances in medicine, better understanding of Covid-19, improvements in leukemia treatment and innovations in hydrogen cells to fuel zero-emission buses, among other achievements. Before Brexit, more than a third of UK research papers were co-authored with European scientists. Association status would allow UK participants to apply for grants on the same basis as EU applicants, and lead international teams.
rexit has already had a substantial negative impact on UK science. It has meant the departure of scientists and researchers who felt unwelcome or who needed to transfer to the EU to ensure access to funding. The UK’s annual share of EU research support fell by almost a third between 2015 and 2019. Before the Brexit referendum, the UK was receiving 16% of Horizon grants in monetary terms; by 2018, it was just 11%. Some 115 grants from Horizon were terminated in July because of the current row.
No problem, said Johnson; we’ll just replace the funding. Last month, the government rolled out its Plan B, which at least suggests the roughly £15 billion ($17.7 billion) set aside for Horizon over the next decade won’t be funneled to other pressing needs. Britain did a similar thing when it left the EU’s Erasmus student-exchange program and created its own “Turing” plan.
And yet in both cases, the UK version is a poor substitute for the original. Meyers notes that while the UK was getting more out of Horizon in financial terms than it was putting in, it’s the qualitative elements that signify the bigger loss. Horizon’s sheer breadth and prestige meant a lot of economies of scale, including lower overhead than for standalone programs. New partnerships take a while to establish and could be more complicated; regulatory alignment between the UK and EU made collaboration easier in areas like animal testing.
The UK has long been a laggard in R&D spending. And despite having some of the world’s top research universities, too little innovation seems to have been commercialized. It’s also expensive for foreign researchers to get visas and move to the UK.
“It’s in the UK’s interest to make it look like these are alternatives to EU programs, but the reality is they aren’t,” Meyers says. A plan B is better than no plan at all. But setting up a unilateral scheme and saying it’s as good as a multilateral one was always going to require a bigger leap of faith than the government has a right to expect. The UK can still participate in some programs on a “pay-to-play” basis, which will just increase costs for less benefit.
Once in office, if indeed her frontrunner status is confirmed, finding an off-ramp would be the wiser option for Truss. She can talk tough now to win votes, but getting an association deal with the EU would do a lot more to demonstrate seriousness about productivity improvements and growth.
• Britain’s Aspiring Leaders Are Too Quiet on Brexit: Clive Crook
• Johnson Exits But Damage to the UK Will Linger: Max Hastings
• Here’s One Brexit Promise Boris Johnson Can’t Keep: Vince Cable | 2022-08-23T06:29:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Brexit’s Unavoidable Gravity Squeezes UK Scientists - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/brexits-unavoidable-gravity-squeezes-uk-scientists/2022/08/23/401c294a-22a1-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/brexits-unavoidable-gravity-squeezes-uk-scientists/2022/08/23/401c294a-22a1-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
College Kids and Pet Owners Should Beware Monkeypox Too
Time to vaccinate. (Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images North America)
Therese Raphael: A third monkeypox case in a US child was just reported in New York state. And a dog in Paris caught monkeypox from one of its owners, suggesting the virus can spread from humans to animals. But last month the World Health Organization figures were pretty clear that more than 99% of the cases they tracked in a handful of countries came from men having sex with men. What’s going on now? Should we be more worried?
Sam Fazeli: The latest data from the US Centers for Disease Control and the UK’s Health Security Agency still suggest that the virus is overwhelmingly being transmitted among men who have sex with men, although as you say there have been rare cases in children and adults who have not been involved in sexual activity.
What has worried me a little is the case of a US man who had traveled to the UK and contracted monkeypox without sexual contact, 14 days after attending a “large, crowded outdoor event” involving a few hours of close contact with others. His symptoms — diffuse skin lesions and pustules not involving the genitals — suggest infection through skin-to-skin contact. But it is important to note that he was on HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, so was probably immunocompromised, and a smaller amount of virus may have been enough to start an infection.
TR: I want to try to unpack whether we’re winning or losing here. We started tracking monkeypox when the outbreak appeared in May. Since then, more than 14,000 Americans have been infected, more than 16,000 in Europe and some 39,000 globally. The US declared monkeypox a national health emergency in August, not long after the WHO declared it an international public health emergency.
• Why the WHO Rang the Alarm Bell on Monkeypox: Therese Raphael
• What Is Monkeypox and Should We Be Worried?: Raphael and Fazeli | 2022-08-23T06:30:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | College Kids and Pet Owners Should Beware Monkeypox Too - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/college-kids-and-pet-owners-should-beware-monkeypox-too/2022/08/23/8f844a40-22a0-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/college-kids-and-pet-owners-should-beware-monkeypox-too/2022/08/23/8f844a40-22a0-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
Boxes of matsutake mushrooms at a market in Tokyo in 2006. (Itsuo Inouye/AP)
Mushroom traders expected matsutake prices to start dropping around late August, when large quantities of lesser-quality mushrooms hit the market. But this has not happened. Instead, some production bases in Yunnan — the southwestern Chinese province that makes up a third of China’s matsutake output and about 70 percent of exports — have seen the harvest drop by up to 90 percent this year, local officials told the Chinese financial outlet Caixin.
“The harvest last year was already low, but this year it is significantly lower,” said Zhao Jiuen, a mushroom wholesaler in Diqing, a mountainous region in Yunnan.
“There is no sign [prices are] going lower any time soon,” he said, even as he added that the quality of this year’s harvest “sucks, too.”
But climate change may not be the only cause of the matsutake’s precarious decline, Yang Xuefei, a biologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, wrote in a 2012 study published in the journal Fungal Diversity. She said the overharvesting of the species in some regions had contributed to a 5 percent output decline annually since the late 1990s.
In 2020, the matsutake was designated as a threatened species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. A year later, China added it to a protected species list.
In Japan, where the annual yield of matsutake had plunged by 95 percent since 1941, according to one 2008 study, researchers are trying to establish an artificial cultivation technique, but with limited success.
In China, farmers try to help the mushroom grow and maximize financial gain by spraying water in its vicinity and adjusting fallen leaf cover. But those efforts are largely futile in the face of a major drought like the one the country is facing. | 2022-08-23T07:00:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Matsutake mushroom prices soar amid climate change in China - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/23/china-matsutake-mushroom-prices-climate-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/23/china-matsutake-mushroom-prices-climate-change/ |
White House chief of staff Ron Klain. (Al Drago/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
“The president has delivered the largest economic recovery plan since Roosevelt, the largest infrastructure plan since Eisenhower, the most judges confirmed since Kennedy, the second largest health care bill since Johnson, and the largest climate change bill in history.”
— White House chief of staff Ron Klain, in an interview with Politico Playbook, Aug. 19
We keep seeing Klain’s victory-lap quote pop up across social media so it seems ripe for fact-checking. Let’s go through each claim in the order in which it’s presented.
Klain cleverly framed his quote. He name-checks some of the most effective or popular presidents — and then does not say that President Biden topped their achievements, only that it’s the “largest” since then.
It’s important to keep in mind that comparing federal programs separated by decades is very difficult. A simple inflation adjustment can be misleading, given differences in the size of the U.S. population. Economists generally will compare as a percentage of the gross national product (GDP), the broadest measure of the economy, or the cost as a percentage of the nation’s output.
“The largest economic recovery plan since Roosevelt.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” designed to combat the Great Depression in the 1930s, unfolded over a number of years. It included such programs as the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which hired millions of people to construct roads and buildings and also patronized artists to create works in a variety of forms.
Bill Dupor, an economist and vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, calculated that the cost of FDR’s programs accounted for 40 percent of the nation’s 1927 output.
By contrast, the 2009 Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed under President Barack Obama amounted to 6.1 percent of output, he said.
Early in Biden’s presidency, Congress passed a $1.9 trillion covid relief package. That sounds big, but in 2020, under President Donald Trump, Congress approved four fiscal relief packages in March and April as the coronavirus pandemic tanked the economy. Those bills totaled $2.4 trillion. Then, $900 million in additional covid relief was approved in December. That adds up to $3.3 trillion.
The Biden bill amounts to 8.87 percent of output, according to our review of Dupor’s calculations in 2021, beating Obama. But Trump’s covid actions total 15.4 percent of output, easily beating Biden.
So how does Klain make this claim? The White House says he is also adding a bunch of other bills under “economic recovery,” including a massive infrastructure bill, a law promoting semiconductor production in the United States (the Chips Act) and the oddly named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a climate-change and health-care bill.
White House officials say that would be the equivalent of New Deal legislation. Depending on what you count, the New Deal can be said to also include transformational programs such as Social Security, unemployment compensation and a law providing the right to collective bargaining — laws, White House officials said, that cannot just be measured in dollars.
Still, by our math, the total spending for all of the legislation under Klain’s rubric still falls just short of Trump’s $3.3 trillion. But there are several ways to crunch these numbers.
“I take ‘recovery’ legislation to mean ‘recovery from recession’ legislation,” Dupor said in an email. “President Biden signed other fiscal packages into law, including the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act. Those wouldn’t qualify as recovery spending using the above definition, although one could define ‘recovery plan’ differently I suppose.”
That’s what the White House argues.
“President Biden has delivered the largest, most significant recovery in terms of what it will mean for the American middle class, in line with what he ran on,” said deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates. “There is no comparison between the structure and impacts of the historic programs that President Biden has signed into law for the middle class — many of which will endure for the long-term, like having Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices — and those from the Trump years. This is simply apples and oranges.”
In any case, as we shall see, in this first line Klain is counting bills that he then references later in his quote.
“The largest infrastructure plan since Eisenhower”
Here, Klain again references one of the biggest federal investments ever — the Eisenhower Interstate Highways System, passed in 1956. Jeff Davis, senior fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation, said the Eisenhower project was a “phenomenal amount of money for the time,” the equivalent to 5.59 percent of the GDP — about $1.3 trillion of guaranteed budget authority today.
In another calculation, he said, the budget for the highway system, based on a map negotiated by the states in 1947, amounted to 35 percent of an entire year’s federal budget in the year the bill was signed into law.
Davis said the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed under Biden — even when adding in the Chips Act and elements of the IRA — does not come close to those numbers. He said the infrastructure bill has about $383 billion in highway trust fund authority over five years, plus $446 billion in general fund advance appropriations and $15 billion under items, for a total of $844 billion in guaranteed budget authority. (The bill is sometimes reported as valued at $1.2 trillion, but that larger number includes funding for highways and other programs that was already assumed as part of the current spending baseline.)
But Klain did not say Biden’s bill exceeded only Eisenhower, only that it’s the largest since Eisenhower. This appears to be correct.
Amusingly, as vice president, Biden once claimed that $48 billion of transportation funding in the 2009 Economic Recovery Act was the “largest public works project since the Eisenhower Interstate System.” That paltry number is dwarfed by the bill passed in his presidency.
“The most judges confirmed since Kennedy”
Klain is relying on a calculation by the Pew Research Center that as of Aug. 8, the first day of the Senate’s August break, 75 federal judges nominated by Biden had been confirmed, just narrowly beating Presidents Bill Clinton (74), George W. Bush (72) and Ronald Reagan (72). President John F. Kennedy had managed to get 102 judges confirmed by that point, far more than any other recent president. (The list includes judges for district courts, appeals courts and the Supreme Court.)
But by the time Klain made his comment, the numbers had shifted, according to the database maintained by the Federal Judicial Center. As of Aug. 18 in a president’s second year, Biden was still at 75 judges, while Clinton had leapfrogged him with 85. Kennedy still held the record at 105.
“The second largest health care bill since Johnson”
This is the most modest claim, as the health provisions in the bills signed by Biden do not compare to the Affordable Care Act passed under Obama in 2010, let alone the creation of Medicare, health insurance for the elderly, and Medicaid, health care for the poor, under President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965.
But health-care laws are notoriously difficult to pass, as Clinton can attest. The IRA for the first time allows Medicare to negotiate directly on the price of certain drugs — an achievement that eluded Obama and Trump. The IRA also extended subsidies, first contained in the covid relief bill, that made health insurance under the ACA more affordable.
“The largest climate change bill in history”
No argument here. Virtually no climate-change legislation had been previously approved by Congress, except for tax credits for renewable energy and other relatively minor items. | 2022-08-23T07:30:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Assessing Ron Klain’s viral claim about Biden’s achievements - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/23/assessing-ron-klains-viral-claim-about-bidens-achievements/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/23/assessing-ron-klains-viral-claim-about-bidens-achievements/ |
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) speaks to reporters Aug. 11 in Antioch, Calif. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) on Monday vetoed a bill that would have allowed sites for supervised drug use — a program aimed at preventing accidental overdoses — to operate in three of the state’s largest cities.
The legislation would have allowed supervised injection sites to operate in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland through the end of 2027, “providing a hygienic space supervised by trained staff where people who use drugs can consume preobtained drugs.”
Newsom said in a letter to the state Senate that he was concerned about “the unlimited number of safe injection sites that this bill would authorize,” as they “could induce a world of unintended consequences.”
“It is possible that these sites would help improve the safety and health of our urban areas, but if done without a strong plan, they could work against this purpose,” he wrote.
In San Francisco, at least 346 people have died this year from accidental drug overdoses, according to the city’s chief medical examiner. Open drug use on the city’s streets — particularly in the Tenderloin neighborhood, where more than 1 in 5 of the city’s overdose deaths this year occurred — has become a flash point in debates over San Francisco’s embrace of more liberal policies. Mayor London Breed (D) declared a state of emergency in the Tenderloin in December.
The supervised sites aim to give drug users a safe area to inject drugs without fear that they will face legal repercussions, and with the safety net of workers who can intervene in the event of an overdose. The sites typically also provide clean needles and dispose of used ones in an effort to prevent the spread of diseases and to keep used needles off the streets.
Inside a pioneering U.S. site authorized to monitor people using drugs
Opponents of such sites question their effectiveness and say they essentially condone drug use. State Sen. Brian Dahle (R), who represents a rural district in Northern California and is running against Newsom in this fall’s gubernatorial election, said on Twitter that he was “thankful” the bill was vetoed. “Open-air drug sites are not a solution & certainly not compassionate. We must provide better treatment options than handing out drug paraphernalia,” he wrote.
The bill narrowly passed the state legislature despite large Democratic majorities in each chamber — skirting by with the minimum 21 votes in the Senate and by one vote over the minimum in the Assembly, far from the two-thirds vote in each chamber required to override a veto.
The bill’s author, state Sen. Scott Wiener (D), who represents San Francisco, said in a statement that California had “lost a huge opportunity to address one of our most deadly problems” because of Newsom’s veto.
He said the legislation was “not a radical bill by any stretch of the imagination. It simply gives permission to cities — each of which has requested that permission — to pilot safe consumption sites to save lives and get people into treatment.”
Four years ago, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) vetoed similar legislation. He wrote that he had concluded “the disadvantages of this bill far outweigh the possible benefits.”
Newsom’s veto comes amid speculation that he is positioning himself to run for president, despite his declaration in May that he has “subzero interest” in doing so. He aired an Independence Day ad on television in Florida criticizing the policies of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) — who is also considered to be eyeing a presidential campaign — telling Floridians, “Don’t let them take your freedom.”
If Newsom were to run for office, he would need to deflect existing attacks by Republicans that California, and San Francisco in particular, is a liberal haven that is soft on crime. San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin (D) was recalled in June in what was seen as a broad rebuke of his liberal policies amid brazen shoplifting and car break-ins.
Newsom wrote on Monday that he wanted “strong, engaged local leadership and well-documented, vetted, and thoughtful operational and sustainability plans” for the sites. He directed the state health and human services secretary to gather local officials to discuss standards and best practices for the sites’ operation.
He said he remained open to discussions when recommendations for a limited program were brought to the legislature. | 2022-08-23T08:01:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoes supervised drug injection bill - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/23/gavin-newsom-veto-california-supervised-drug-injection/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/23/gavin-newsom-veto-california-supervised-drug-injection/ |
TAMPA, Fla. — Tom Brady returned to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, ending what has been described as an 11-day, prearranged break from training camp for personal reasons.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The Carolina Panthers are turning to quarterback Baker Mayfield to lead their offense.
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Marcus Mariota led Atlanta to scores on two of his three drives in the Falcons’ 24-16 loss against mostly New York Jets backups.
NEW YORK — Aaron Judge connected off Max Scherzer for his major league-leading 47th home run, Andrew Benintendi drove in two runs and the New York Yankees withstood a botched popup by rookie Oswaldo Cabrera to beat the Mets 4-2 for their first Subway Series win this season.
CHICAGO — Albert Pujols hit career homer No. 693, Jordan Montgomery pitched a one-hitter and the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Chicago Cubs 1-0 for their season-high eighth straight victory. | 2022-08-23T08:02:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Monday's Sports in Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mondays-sports-in-brief/2022/08/23/d106ca0a-22b0-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mondays-sports-in-brief/2022/08/23/d106ca0a-22b0-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
Lusail Stadium in Qatar, which has relied heavily on foreign labor to build venues for this year's FIFA World Cup. (Mustafa Abumunes/AFP/Getty Images)
Qatar detained and deported dozens of migrant workers who took part in a protest because their employer did not pay them, according to labor rights activists. The emirate is hosting the World Cup in three months, and it has depended on foreign labor to build infrastructure, including gleaming stadiums, for the flagship men’s soccer tournament.
This month, at least 60 workers were detained for participating in the rare protest, outside the offices of Al Bandary International Group, a major construction and hospitality firm, according to Equidem, a London-based labor rights organization. Some of the demonstrators, who came from countries such as Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Egypt and the Philippines, had not been paid for as many as seven months, Equidem said, adding that most of them have been sent home.
“As far as we are aware, authorities have decided to deport everyone who was at the protest,” said Equidem’s executive director, Mustafa Qadri. “These workers are protesting because their employer had not paid them … this is not an Arab Spring moment.”
A Qatari government official said in a statement that the protesters had been detained for breaching public security laws and that the incident was under investigation.
“All delayed salaries and benefits are being paid by the Ministry of Labour,” the statement said. “The company was already under investigation by the authorities for non-payment of wages before the incident, and now further action is being taken after a deadline to settle outstanding salary payments was missed.”
Al Bandary did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Gas-rich Qatar has a population of about 2.8 million, including 1.7 million foreign laborers, according to Amnesty International. In preparation to host the tournament, the first in the Middle East, Doha launched a modernization project that included expanding its main airport and public transportation systems and building stadiums and hotels.
Mistreatment of migrant laborers in Persian Gulf countries has been well documented, but Qatar, as tournament host, has come under particular scrutiny.
The emirate received approval this month to change the start date of the tournament, an unprecedented move that allowed its national team to kick off the World Cup at night with fireworks.
In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Qatar of bribing top officials at FIFA, the sport’s international governing body, in exchange for hosting rights to the World Cup. The FIFA officials and Qatari organizers denied the allegation.
The Aug. 14 protest came amid calls for FIFA to compensate workers for alleged labor abuses incurred in the lead-up to the tournament. Rights groups such as Amnesty say that includes deaths, injuries and wage theft.
FIFA looked the other way while thousands of migrants were made to work in conditions “amounting to forced labor,” Amnesty wrote in a report this year. It argued that the global body granted the country coveted hosting rights without requiring it to strengthen labor protections.
“All of these abuses are so at odds with the image of the World Cup as a glimmery celebration of humanity,” said Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch.
Facing unbearable heat, Qatar has begun to air-condition the outdoors
“These are the people who have literally built the World Cup from the ground up, from the desert up. They are the ones who must receive financial compensation before the first ball is kicked,” she said.
Doha has made some moves to improve its treatment of foreign workers after being awarded hosting rights in 2010. It overhauled some of its most controversial practices, including adopting a minimum wage and scrapping the country’s kafala employment system, which gave employers the right to prevent workers from leaving their jobs or the country. Workers are not allowed to unionize, and those who strike risk deportation, according to Worden.
The complaints by workers building the infrastructure ahead of soccer’s biggest tournament contrast with the glitz and glamour at the top of the sport. Last week, Paramount paid a record $1.5 billion to retain U.S. broadcasting rights for the Champions League, Europe’s most popular club soccer tournament.
Saudi Arabia, another country with a poor migrant rights record, is reportedly seeking to host the 2030 World Cup. Last weekend, FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, met up with the kingdom’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to watch a boxing match.
FIFA expects the World Cup, which will begin in November, to draw 5 billion viewers around the world. | 2022-08-23T09:02:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Before FIFA World Cup, Qatar deports migrant worker protesters - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/23/qatar-2022-fifa-world-cup-migrant-protest/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/23/qatar-2022-fifa-world-cup-migrant-protest/ |
In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, honour guard soldiers prepare to rise the Ukrainian national flag during State Flag Day celebrations in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2022. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP) (Uncredited/Ukrainian Presidential Press Office)
KYIV, Ukraine — On the eve of Ukraine’s independence day and the half-year mark of Russia’s invasion of its neighbor, there was increasing unease in the country on Tuesday that Moscow could be centering on specific government and civilian targets during the holiday. | 2022-08-23T09:33:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | On eve of Ukraine's national day, fears Russia will pounce - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/on-eve-of-ukraines-national-day-fears-russia-will-pounce/2022/08/23/ea44d0c0-22bf-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/on-eve-of-ukraines-national-day-fears-russia-will-pounce/2022/08/23/ea44d0c0-22bf-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
Pedestrian dies after being struck by vehicle in Maryland
A pedestrian was struck and killed Saturday night by a vehicle in the Oxon Hill area, police said.
Prince George’s County police said a pedestrian who was later identified as Noshua Vann, 38, of Waldorf, was in the street just before 10 p.m. in the 6100 block of St. Barnabas Road when he was struck by a vehicle. The driver stayed on the scene.
Police did not say why Vann was in the road. The case remains under investigation. | 2022-08-23T10:20:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pedestrian dies after being struck by vehicle in Maryland - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/23/pedestrian-killed-maryland/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/23/pedestrian-killed-maryland/ |
Jaylan Gray’s mother died, leaving him to raise his little brother
Jaylan Gray, left, with his brother, Julian Nicholson, in August. (Courtesy of Katy Responds)
Jaylan Gray’s mother died two years ago of a blood disorder, leaving him alone in their Texas house with his little brother, then 10.
“Before she died, she told me not to sell the house,” said Gray, 22, whose stepfather had died several years earlier. “My mom and my stepdad had paid it off and she wanted us to live in it.”
Then, last year, disaster struck at their three-bedroom house near Houston, when the pipes burst in the massive winter storm that left millions of Texans without power for days. The house was quickly flooded from the attic, soaking and ruining ceilings, walls and floors.
Gray hired a contractor to make repairs, but the contractor punched holes in walls throughout the house, then disappeared with about $20,000, he said. Gray didn’t have the resources to pursue the matter.
He filed a police report, but authorities were unable to find the contractor. Gray eventually decided to move on, he said. He didn’t have homeowners insurance to cover the damage because the policy had lapsed, he said.
He wanted to find another way to repair the house so it was livable, but with everything on his plate, he didn’t know where to turn.
“I couldn’t keep up with it — it was just too much,” Gray said about the house, which is in Katy. “I couldn’t afford to make the repairs.”
Overwhelmed, Gray and his brother, Julian Nicholson, moved across town to live with their grandmother. But Julian had to change schools, and both of them wanted to return to the home where they had lived with their parents.
“We were really grateful to her, but I always wanted to move Julian back to the house where we grew up, so he could play football at the same school I did,” Gray said.
“I want to make sure he doesn’t get in any trouble and that things can be smooth as possible for him in school,” he added.
Gray, who had been enrolled in college, stopped taking classes and got a job at a car inspection company to help pay the bills and raise his brother.
“Julian became my priority,” Gray said of his brother, who is 12 now and entering seventh grade. “I promised my mom that I’d look after him and the house, so I dropped out of college.”
“I wanted my brother to feel cared for and loved,” he said, adding that he had no idea what he was going to do with the damaged house, but he decided he was not going to give up on it.
Then in the spring, Kevin and Michelle Duty, who volunteer with the community nonprofit Katy Responds — which helps rebuild homes after natural disasters — heard from a friend about the brothers’ situation.
“It was just heartbreaking to find out what these two had been through,” said Kevin Duty, 56. “For Jaylan to have to take on that much at such a young age was unimaginable.”
Duty contacted the nonprofit’s executive director, Ron Peters, and filled him in.
“We thought Katy Responds would be a good fit to help them,” Duty said, noting that the group relies on community donations and volunteers to renovate homes damaged in natural disasters.
Peters said he immediately agreed to help and contacted several dozen volunteers after he’d taken a close look at the house.
“When I walked in, my heart sank,” he said.
“They’d lost everything to the pipes breaking except for their mother’s dining room table,” said Peters, 59. “There were holes in the walls, the floor was completely ruined, and the air conditioning system was gone. The contractor they’d hired had stolen it.”
Peters told Gray that his group could repair the home free of charge in about three months — just in time for the beginning of the new school year.
“We’ve fixed 160 homes and the stories from each renovation are emotional,” he said. “But this one really touched our hearts.”
Volunteers repaired the roof, hauled away ruined furniture and flooring, put up new drywall, and rewired, plumbed and painted the entire house.
“From the very first day they said they were going to take on this project, I wanted to help,” said Pauline Mabry, 61, who has volunteered with Katy Responds for two years.
“I felt devastated that this young man had to have all of this responsibility after his mom died,” she said. “This is the house where he grew up with his brother. I wanted to help make it new again.”
Mabry said she helped haul out the damaged drywall, baseboards and kitchen cupboards, then tackled a lot of the repainting.
She was joined on several weekends by Gray, who helped paint walls until he was asked to bow out during the final phase of the work.
“We really wanted him and Julian to be surprised at the end result,” Peters said.
When the brothers walked into their renovated home Aug. 12, they could hardly believe what they were seeing. They both cried, Gray said. Volunteers gave them a new kitchen and bathrooms, and Houston’s Lakewood Church donated new furnishings.
The project cost about $50,000. It ran overbudget by about $10,000, said Peters, who is raising funds to cover the rest.
“What they did for us is so much more than I ever imagined,” Gray said. “My goodness, I was blown away. Everybody was so kind to us — they went above and beyond.”
“It makes me happy to see that there’s good people,” Julian told local television crews that were there to capture his reaction.
“I just like the way we’ve been treated,” he said through tears. “I didn’t think anything good would happen.”
She found $36,000 inside a chair she got for free on Craigslist
Gray said their mother, Roslyn Nicholson, would have been thrilled with the home improvements.
Gray said he hopes to return to college someday and pursue his dream to become a park ranger, preferably in Texas.
“I love being out in nature — that would be the ideal job for me,” he said.
Until then, he said he’s content to help his brother with homework at their mom’s dining room table.
“I want Julian’s future to be better than what I went through,” Gray said. “My little brother is my main purpose right now. Just seeing him every morning makes me smile.” | 2022-08-23T10:46:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Home renovated by volunteers for young Texan caring for his brother - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/23/home-renovated-for-two-brothers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/23/home-renovated-for-two-brothers/ |
‘The Staircase’
‘Candy’
‘The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey’
Taron Egerton plays Jimmy Keene, a man who is given the opportunity to shorten his 10-year prison sentence by becoming an undercover informant at a maximum-security prison, in this Apple TV Plus series based on the real-life Keene’s 2011 memoir. Keene’s target: suspected serial killer Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser), who had confessed to murder before walking back his admission.
“ ‘Black Bird’ is most compelling not as a psychological profile of a disturbed anomaly but as a study of societal failure — specifically, how Larry’s unsettling behavior toward girls in the town and his misogynistic views were excused or enabled by his protective family and overlooked by local law enforcement,” Washington Post TV critic Inkoo Kang wrote in a review that praised Hauser’s “standout” performance. The six-episode series also stars Greg Kinnear and Ray Liotta in one of his final roles. (Streams on Apple TV Plus)
This five-episode series from John Ridley (“American Crime”) and Carlton Cuse (“Lost”) takes place in the agonizing days after Hurricane Katrina when health-care providers at Memorial Medical Center were forced to make impossible life and death decisions amid systemic biases and failures that left swaths of New Orleans without power in flooded and sweltering conditions. Based on journalist Sherri Fink’s 2013 book (which is based on her Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting for ProPublica, in collaboration with the New York Times Magazine), the series is a wrenching look at an American tragedy starring Vera Farmiga (“Bates Motel”), Cherry Jones (“Transparent”) and Cornelius Smith Jr. (“Scandal”). (Streams on Apple TV Plus)
Two new shows chronicle the fall of Theranos and rise of Uber — and tally the human cost of tech greed
‘The Staircase’ has more twists than the true-crime doc it’s based on
Samuel L. Jackson offers one of his finest performances in this six-episode adaptation of Walter Mosley’s 2010 novel about a nonagenarian suffering from dementia. When Ptolemy’s memory is temporarily restored by an experimental treatment, he investigates the death of his beloved great-nephew. Dominique Fishback (“Show Me a Hero”) also has a major role as an orphaned teenager who takes on Ptolemy’s care. (Streams on Apple TV Plus) | 2022-08-23T11:04:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | From ‘Echoes’ to ‘Black Bird,’ 8 miniseries to watch before summer ends - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/23/miniseries-to-watch/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/23/miniseries-to-watch/ |
Clothing and other items in the pediatric intensive care unit at Arkansas Children's Hospital in Little Rock. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
Like adults, children who have tested positive for the coronavirus can develop long covid, with 10 percent of youths who were hospitalized with covid-19 experiencing symptoms such as fatigue, weakness, coughing, difficulty breathing and shortness of breath three months later, according to a study published in JAMA Network Open.
Based on data from 1,884 children and youths who were treated for covid-19, the study found that long covid was less likely among those under 18 who did not require hospitalization but instead had been treated in an emergency room and discharged. About 5 percent of those youths had post-covid conditions three months later.
The researchers also found that the more covid symptoms young people had initially, the more likely they were to develop long covid: Nearly 5 percent of those hospitalized with one to three covid-19 symptoms subsequently developed long covid, compared with nearly 23 percent of those who had seven or more covid-19 symptoms when hospitalized.
For adults, long covid often involves problems with the sense of smell or taste (or both), with roughly 50 percent of those with covid reporting problems, according to research published in the journal BMJ based on data from 18 studies involving 3,699 adults. After six months, most adults had recovered the senses, but about 5 percent (12 million to 15 million people worldwide, according to the BMJ study) experience long-lasting smell and taste dysfunction. | 2022-08-23T11:04:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hospitalization, multiple symptoms linked to long covid in children - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/23/children-long-covid/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/23/children-long-covid/ |
Educational aid for prisoners works. Yet it’s politically precarious.
Why all Americans benefit from higher education for those incarcerated
Perspective by Adrian Cox
Kate L. Flach
Graduates of the Goucher Prison Education Program prepare for the graduation ceremony on May 18 at the Maryland Correctional Institution-Jessup in Jessup, Md. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)
A new proposal from the Education Department has approved extending federal Pell Grant eligibility to prisoners beginning in 2023. The proposal to codify Pell Grant eligibility came from numerous studies and experiments in the past decade indicating that inmates who receive degrees while incarcerated are better prepared to reenter society. They are also less likely to reoffend and return to prison.
The recent Pell Grant proposal is not the first time the government has turned to federal student aid and higher education to address the problem of recidivism — the rate at which a convicted person, after being released, would return to prison. President Lyndon B. Johnson first provided such aid in the 1960s. Yet despite decades of effectiveness, prisoner access to Pell Grant aid was revoked in the 1994 Crime Bill. At that time, politicians in both major parties portrayed the aid as handout to the “undeserving” to galvanize support for other small government “tough on crime” policies, and they succeeded. A look back at this history shows how the survival of federal aid programs for educating inmates has always depended more on public opinion than on the actual success of these programs, which have proved extremely effective.
Inmates first received federal assistance toward their postsecondary education because of Title IV of the 1965 Higher Education Act (HEA) signed by Johnson. The goal of the HEA was to provide federal financial assistance for college students from lower-income families. Part of the HEA established student loans as an option to cover university costs, but it also expanded federal financial assistance to offset tuition. Based on the eligibility requirements, prisoners seeking a higher education while incarcerated could take advantage of this student aid.
The HEA was one piece of legislation among many that reflected Johnson’s efforts to build a “Great Society” that could eradicate poverty, reduce crime and abolish inequality. The same year he signed the HEA, Johnson also passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act as part of his “War on Crime,” which increased federal grants to local and state law enforcement. Although Johnson envisioned these pieces of legislation working together, these war-on-crime policies weakened the HEA’s Pell Grant initiatives in subsequent decades.
By the 1970s, the total number of Americans awarded Pell Grants ballooned, increasing from hundreds of thousands of students to more than 2 million. Most federal student aid provided opportunities to college students from low-income families outside the prison system; only about 1 percent of federal student aid went to incarcerated students. Still, the influx of aid dramatically expanded higher education programs in prisons. Between 1973 and 1982, the number of prison programs — including college extension programs offering majors in communications, criminal justice and psychology — nearly doubled from 182 to 350.
For prison officials and advocates, Pell Grants for prisoners showed promising success. Inmates participating in secondary education programs behaved better and custodial officials viewed them as “easier to manage.” These factors, including participation in and completion of a higher education program, aided attempts to seek parole. Programs throughout the United States also reported decreases in recidivism for inmate-students by as much as 57 percent. One program that once had reported 80 percent recidivism, noted rates as low as 10 percent in the early 1980s thanks to prison education opportunities. According to Jon Marc Taylor, a former inmate who became a scholar and award-winning writer, unemployment was the leading factor for increasing recidivism rates. Yet three out of four inmates who received some type of higher education were able to find sustainable employment within the critical first three years after release.
Although this evidence indicated that the program was successful, the efficacy of Pell Grants for prisoners was contested, especially by conservative legislators, who worked throughout the 1970s and 1980s to restrict inmate access to higher education funding. In 1982, Rep. George Whitehurst (R-Va.), for example, sought to place a cap of $6 million on financial aid allotted to inmates, a bid rejected by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. President Ronald Reagan slashed federal spending on higher education by 25 percent, cuts that included Pell Grant spending, and placed more responsibility on students and parents to finance university costs. But even with funding cuts, Pell Grants remained, and inmates continued to benefit.
That changed in the 1990s. A new era of bipartisan support for smaller government “tough on crime” legislation made federal Pell Grants for prisoners a very vulnerable political target. Politicians argued that inmates receiving Pell Grants were effectively diverting student aid from deserving students who hadn’t committed crimes — an argument that drew wide support among working- and middle-class families who, thanks to Reagan-era budget cuts, found tuition expenses increasingly burdensome.
Voters began to view prison education as a scholarship for committing a crime. In a “60 Minutes” television segment called “Prison U,” Massachusetts Gov. William Weld (R) expressed outrage at the idea that, as he stated, “you sell drugs, you murder someone, you rape someone, you go to prison, and you get a free education.” He continued: “You hear kids saying now, ‘Well, you know, if I can’t make it, you know, I can foul up and I’ll go to prison and I’ll get a free education.’ ”
In another example, NBC’s “Dateline” ran a special report in 1994 titled “Society’s Debt?” that pitted deserving college students who were denied Pell Grants against “lucky” inmate students who received them. One full-time working college student expressed frustration with the presumably easy life of inmates, while he and students like him had to balance work and school. “The prisoners,” he said, “they have their cable TV, they have their weight rooms. What do I have? I have school, I have a job, and I have a bed I see four to five hours a night, and that’s it.”
On another occasion, while addressing the Senate, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) read a letter from one father who explained how he was struggling to pay three college tuitions. When he discovered inmates received financial aid that his family was denied, he suggested he should supply his children with weapons and send them out to commit crimes since their postsecondary education in prison would be free.
The 1994 Crime Bill reflected this public discontent with Pell Grant eligibility for inmates. This consequential piece of legislation not only increased prison populations, but it also blocked inmates from receiving higher education financial assistance. In the final year of Pell Grant eligibility in prisons, inmates accounted for $56 million in funding out of $9.3 billion allocated for federal higher education aid. Within three years of the passing of the Crime Bill, only eight prison higher education programs were left standing.
But access to financial aid for all students did not improve after this change in legislation. From 1990 to 2010, state subsidies for higher education declined by 26 percent. During this 20-year time span, institutions made up for the decrease in funding by roughly doubling tuition and fees that students had to shoulder. Even with small increases in Pell Grant funding during the 2000s, the drastic rise in higher education costs has diminished the value of financial aid.
In response to the higher education crisis that this imbalance has caused, President Biden — who as a senator sponsored the 1994 Crime Bill — has proposed doubling the Pell Grant budget and extending grants to inmates once more.
As history shows, it is easy to negatively sway public opinion about prison Pell Grants when access to higher education feels out of reach for many Americans. Yet getting rid of Pell Grants for prisoners did not provide more financial aid for students who weren’t behind bars. If anything, it simply meant more prison spending because of higher recidivism. Instead, increasing access across the board — including for those who are incarcerated — will help make college more accessible for working-class Americans. | 2022-08-23T11:04:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Educational aid for prisoners works. Yet it’s politically precarious. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/23/educational-aid-prisoners-works-yet-its-politically-precarious/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/23/educational-aid-prisoners-works-yet-its-politically-precarious/ |
Trump’s revenge campaign borrows from Joe McCarthy’s playbook
The Wisconsin senator understood that inspiring fear brought him political power
Perspective by Larry Tye
Larry Tye, who runs the Boston-based Health Coverage Fellowship, is the author of "Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy."
Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.), at a 1954 news conference. In 1950, McCarthy successfully targeted several colleagues for defeat, including Sen Millard Tydings (D-Md.). (AP)
Donald Trump’s revenge machine has worked without a break through the summer, ousting Republicans who dared to vote for his impeachment — most recently Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). But while the former president’s machinations are both hardhearted and ethically challenged, they are hardly original.
Trump is resurrecting the blueprint cooked up three-quarters of a century ago by another right-wing Republican, “Low Blow” Joe McCarthy. By 1950, the red-baiting senator from Wisconsin, like the ex-president, already had established himself as the most divisive man in America. Yet he also was determined to become the most feared, just as Trump is today. Both recognized that inspiring dread is the key to political power.
For McCarthy, that meant ousting a titan who had crossed him to warn others not to try the same. The senator couldn’t forget a slight, and none of his colleagues had maligned him more than Sen. Millard Tydings (D-Md.), who called his holy war against communism a mirage. Tydings — among the Senate’s richest members (by marriage) and most pontifical (by not knowing when to muzzle himself) — was a perfect target for the farm-raised McCarthy. While Tydings had risen from a one-room schoolhouse, truth mattered little to McCarthy and he painted the faceoff as Man-of-the-People McCarthy vs. “Mi-Lord” Tydings. McCarthy “was so preoccupied with Tydings,” reported one person close to the Badger State senator, “that he’d sit by the hour figuring out ways to get revenge.”
Taking on a four-term incumbent like Tydings, who even President Franklin D. Roosevelt hadn’t been able to topple, seemed pointless — especially since the Marylander only faced seemingly token opposition in 1950. But for McCarthy, those long odds made it just the attention-getting gambit he sought — a chance to help unseat his opponent and, in the process, bolster the claim that most Americans believed in his anti-Red evangelism.
McCarthy enlisted Bazy Miller, publisher of the Washington Times-Herald and a sometimes girlfriend, to lead a media campaign against Tydings. The Wisconsinite also made three personal appearances in Maryland and went on the radio. He turned over his anti-Tydings speeches and cartoons to the senator’s Republican opponent, John Marshall Butler, and worked to shift the focus of the campaign from butter-and-bread issues like taxes to whether the incumbent was “protecting Communists for political reasons.” And McCarthy’s Senate staff managed the essentials of the campaign, from research and press outreach to ferrying money from Washington to Baltimore.
Crucially, McCarthy was able to tap into a deep-pocketed network willing to contribute wherever he directed. With funds flowing in from Oklahoma and Texas, Maine and Minnesota, Butler’s campaign was able to spend a total of $75,000 ($922,000 in today’s terms) — five times the limit under the Federal Corrupt Practices Act.
At the time, waging a vengeful blitzkrieg against a fellow senator was unheard of. The McCarthy forces were slugging lower and harder than Tydings knew how to, and his campaign simply could not keep up. McCarthy, for example, laid out “instructions for filling out postcards” that echoed those he’d used on his own campaigns, and his staff helped address and mail a half-million of them to voters. Team McCarthy also helped prepare more than 300,000 copies of a four-page tabloid called “From the Record,” which made 18 charges against Tydings — from undermining American war aims in Korea, to underwriting a lecture tour by alleged Soviet spy Owen Lattimore. According to a bipartisan 1951 Senate probe, it contained “misleading half truths, misrepresentations, and false innuendos.” The back-cover photograph made it look like Tydings was enjoying a tête-à-tête with Earl Browder, the former Communist Party boss — but it was an artful fake, one that merged a picture of Browder with a 12-year-old photo of a smiling Tydings.
McCarthy’s strong-arm tactics worked. Maryland voters rendered a clear verdict: 53 percent for the unknown Butler, 46 percent for the seemingly unsinkable Tydings. It was a landslide and an earthquake. Several factors were at play. Voters were angry at the increasingly unpopular President Harry S. Truman, and after so many years in Washington, Tydings had become out-of-sync with Maryland. Still, the biggest factor in the race was Joe McCarthy. “One lighted match might have sufficed to singe Tydings’s reputation; McCarthy ignited a scorching election campaign,” said Tydings biographer Caroline Keith. “McCarthy salted every wound and fostered unity among unlikely allies.”
The message of the crusading McCarthy was unmistakable: sign on, stand aside or beware the battering ram.
The shadow of McCarthyism spread well beyond Maryland during the 1950 midterm elections. McCarthy had 2,000 speaking requests, which was more than all other senators combined. Republicans may not have liked him any more than Democrats did, but they held their noses and, in 15 states, asked him to cast aspersions on their behalf. “Only by ‘mucking’ can we win,” one GOP leader told a reporter. “And only a mucker can muck.” Sen. John Bricker (R-Ohio) put it less delicately in a story McCarthy liked repeating: “Joe, you’re a dirty son of a b---h, but there are times when you’ve got to have a son of a b---h around.”
And again it worked, at least in part. McCarthy’s second biggest enemy, Majority Leader Scott Lucas (D-Ill.), fell after McCarthy urged large crowds to elect Everett Dirksen, which McCarthy said would be “a prayer for America.” In Florida, he was all-in for conservative Democratic challenger George Smathers and adamantly against incumbent Democratic Sen. Claude “Red” Pepper, whom he’d been warning for years was “viciously dangerous.” And from North Carolina and California to Idaho and Utah, McCarthyism, if not McCarthy, was front and center as voters decided.
When the senator’s picks triumphed, the way Dirksen and Smathers did, pundits didn’t look deeper to see that it often was local issues that made the difference, not McCarthy. Instead, to the press, the public and his Senate colleagues, McCarthy had proved to be a dragon-slayer — just like he said he was. Nothing was by accident. Harvey Matusow, an ex-communist-turned-professional-witness who worked for the senator, recalled suggesting nudging a sympathetic reporter to write an article that depicted McCarthy “as a human being, a guy who gets along with children, and is friendly with people in general?” Leaning back in his chair and stewing on the suggestion, McCarthy finally said, “No, Harvey. That wouldn’t be any good. Because as soon as my enemies see me as anything but the villain with three horns who spits fire, I’ll lose my effectiveness.”
Would Trump have known about McCarthy’s machinations? He might not be a student of history, but one of the ex-president’s early teachers was Roy Cohn, the bare-knuckled political fixer who, a quarter-century earlier, was McCarthy’s ingenious and imperious protege. Cohn was the pulsing artery, channeling the senator’s playbook to the eventual commander-in-chief and setting the template for Trump’s recent purge of Cheney and others in Congress who had dared challenge his excesses.
McCarthy’s bare-knuckle tactics and baldfaced lies eventually led the Senate to censure him by a 67-22 vote in 1954. Time will tell whether that, too, is a temple for Trump. | 2022-08-23T11:05:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trump’s revenge campaign borrows from Joe McCarthy’s playbook - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/23/trumps-revenge-campaign-borrows-joe-mccarthys-playbook/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/23/trumps-revenge-campaign-borrows-joe-mccarthys-playbook/ |
After decades in GOP, Colo. senator says: ‘We need Democrats in charge’
Colorado state Sen. Kevin Priola, a Republican for 32 years, wrote that there’s ‘too much at stake right now for Republicans to be in charge’
Longtime Republican Colorado state Sen. Kevin Priola, left, switched his affiliation to Democrat. Priola's decision, announced on Monday, Aug. 22, 2022, enhances Democrats' chances of retaining their majority in the chamber in the November midterms. (AP Photo/Jim Anderson)
Colorado state Sen. Kevin Priola was a Republican for 32 years. On Monday, he announced that he couldn’t be one any longer.
So he defected to the Democrats.
There is “too much at stake right now for Republicans to be in charge,” Priola wrote in a two-page letter explaining his decision, adding: “Simply put, we need Democrats in charge.”
Priola cited two reasons for the switch: Many Republicans peddling false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and the party’s efforts to block legislation that would fight climate change.
Priola has served in the Colorado Capitol since 2009, first as a representative and then, starting in 2017, as a senator. He won a second term in the state Senate in 2020 and is up for reelection in 2024. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post late Monday.
The change in Priola’s party registration does not affect the balance of power in Colorado’s Senate; Democrats already controlled the chamber but now enjoy an even greater 21-14 majority as Republicans gear up to try to wrest control in November, the Colorado Sun reported.
On the whole, Republicans are in the midst of an internal battle between two factions vying to control the party: candidates loyal to former president Donald Trump who are willing to parrot his false election claims, versus rivals who want to move the party past all that, The Post has reported.
Priola decided to leave the GOP altogether. In the letter he posted Monday morning, Priola said he became a Republican in 1990, enamored with Ronald Reagan’s willingness to stand up to the Soviet Union and cooperate with Democrats on immigration.
“I haven’t changed much in 30 years; but my party has,” he wrote.
Priola said he watched in horror on Jan. 6, 2021, as rioters mobbed the U.S. Capitol. He thought the insurrection would lead his fellow Republicans to distance themselves from Trump, he wrote.
Instead, Republicans turned on a handful of their own — including former vice president Mike Pence, who affirmed President Biden’s 2020 electoral win, and Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who voted to impeach Trump after the riot.
“I cannot continue to be a part of a political party that is okay with a violent attempt to overturn a free and fair election and continues to peddle claims that the 2020 election was stolen,” Priola wrote.
He then moved on to the second way in which the GOP had disappointed him: its inaction on climate change. Republicans have repeatedly denied that humans are causing climate change and continue to block legislative efforts to fight it, even as Coloradans endure “near year-round” wildfires and “a seemingly never ending drought,” Priola wrote.
“I believe it’s immoral to saddle the next generation of Coloradans with even worse impacts,” he added.
Gov. Jared Polis (D) called the senator “a strong leader on climate issues,” and Senate president Steve Fenberg (D) hailed Priola as someone who “chose his constituents and Colorado’s future over partisan politics.”
Senate Minority Leader John Cooke (R) told the Colorado Sun that, given Priola’s recent voting record, he wasn’t shocked by his defection. He also dismissed its impact on Republicans’ attempt to seize control of the state Senate in November.
“This event will not change the trajectory of this election cycle, nor the outcome of this year’s fight for the state Senate,” Cooke told the paper, adding that Priola’s constituents “may explore their options for new representation.”
Kristi Burton Brown, chairwoman of the Colorado GOP, also mentioned Priola’s record of voting with Democrats on some issues, accusing him of “lying” to voters about being a Republican.
“It’s clear that Priola has selfishly chosen to make himself the story at the expense of Coloradans he was elected to fight for,” she wrote in a statement. “He will regret this decision when he is in the minority come January 2023.”
Priola doesn’t think so, saying that he remains committed to serving and fighting for his constituents rather than participating in tribal politics.
“Coloradans cannot afford for their leaders to give credence to election conspiracies and climate denialism,” he wrote, adding: “Our planet and our democracy depend on it.” | 2022-08-23T11:05:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Colorado Republican becomes a Democrat, citing Jan. 6, climate change - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/23/colorado-republican-democrat-party-switch/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/23/colorado-republican-democrat-party-switch/ |
Primaries live updates Voters in N.Y., Fla., and Okla. choose nominees for November
Analysis: New York voters weigh the appeal of having a Trump investigator in Congress
On our radar: Democrats Nikki Fried, Charlie Crist battle to take on Gov. Ron DeSantis
On our radar: In upstate New York, a test for Democrats running on abortion to stop GOP wave
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) talks with volunteers during a campaign stop at Holy Apostles Church in New York on June 28. (Jeenah Moon/For The Washington Post)
Welcome to special coverage of another day of primary elections from Post Politics Now.
Today, voters in New York, Florida and Oklahoma choose their nominees for November’s elections as the highly charged primary season winds down. Just four states remain on the primary calendar — Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Delaware — with contests in September. Louisiana holds its hybrid primaries on Election Day, Nov. 8.
In New York, a major fight over redistricting led to delayed congressional primaries, with several marquee races featuring established Democrats facing off against one another. In Florida, Democrats will pick their nominees to take on Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R) in the fall. And Oklahoma is holding runoff primaries, including one that will set the field for November in a special election to complete the term of retiring Sen. James M. Inhofe (R).
In New York’s 12th District, two powerful Democratic committee chairs, Reps. Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn B. Maloney, are facing off against one another.
In New York’s 10th District, a dozen candidates in the Democratic primary are vying for an open seat. They include former House impeachment manager Daniel Goldman and Rep. Mondaire Jones, who moved from another district as part of the redistricting scramble.
In New York’s 23rd District, there is a competitive Republican primary pitting Carl Paladino, a former GOP gubernatorial candidate known for controversial comments, against Nick Langworthy, the state Republican Party chairman.
In Florida, the Democratic gubernatorial primary pits former GOP governor Charlie Crist against a more liberal candidate, Nikki Fried.
In Florida, Rep. Val Demings (D), a former Orlando police chief, is the front-runner in the Democratic field to take on Rubio in November.
Polls close at 7 p.m. in Florida, 8 p.m. in Oklahoma and 9 p.m. in New York (all times Eastern).
Tuesday’s Democratic primary for an open seat in New York City has turned into a bruising campaign between Dan Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who has contributed nearly $4 million to his own campaign, and an array of other Democrats who have accused him of trying to buy the seat, including Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.).
Writing in The Early 202, The Post’s Tobi Raji, Theodoric Meyer and Leigh Ann Caldwell say the race will also test whether Democrats will reward candidates whose calling card is playing a role in investigating Donald Trump, as the former president teases another run for the White House while he faces a slew of legal problems, including the recent search of his Mar-a-Lago resort by the FBI. Per our colleagues:
One of the biggest names in the Senate is up for reelection this year. There’s no real mystery about who will win the Democratic primary on Tuesday to challenge Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla): It’s likely Rep. Val Demings (D), who is leaving her congressional seat to try to become the first Democratic senator from Florida since 2018.
Demings is leaning heavily on her experience as a former police chief in Orlando — trying to nix any Republican attacks that she is weak on crime by virtue of her party affiliation — and on her by-the-bootstraps upbringing as the daughter of a maid and janitor.
As Democrats nationally feel the tide turning ever so slightly in their favor — thanks to improving inflation and their base motivated by the Supreme Court’s decision striking down abortion rights — this contest will be worth watching in November. It’s still early, but some polls in the state point to a tight race.
In recent elections, though, Republicans have almost always managed to win statewide races in Florida by larger-than-expected margins, including Trump in 2020, as the state has become more Republican.
Democrats Nikki Fried and Charlie Crist are competing in the Democratic primary with the hope of facing Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in November’s general election.
Fried, Florida’s commissioner of agriculture, has emerged as one of the state’s most vocal liberal critics of DeSantis, calling the Republican an “authoritarian dictator who is borderline fascist” for his response to the coronavirus pandemic as well as his backing of an election reform bill that she considers voter suppression.
Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.) is hoping for a return to the governor’s mansion. The lawmaker was elected the Sunshine State’s 44th governor — as a Republican — and became the first Florida governor not to seek reelection in decades. He launched an unsuccessful Senate bid instead, running as a politically unaffiliated candidate. He eventually became a Democrat in 2012 and was elected to the House four years later.
Crist is currently leading Fried in the polls, but Democratic turnout is expected to be quite low despite multiple efforts from Fried and Crist to get Florida’s liberal voters out to the polls. They are hoping that disapproval of DeSantis’s conservative policies will motivate voters to back the candidate who has the best chance of defeating him in the general election. | 2022-08-23T11:05:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Primary elections in New York, Florida and Oklahoma: Live updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/23/primaries-new-york-florida-oklahoma/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/23/primaries-new-york-florida-oklahoma/ |
Derrick Henry, shown during the NFL playoffs in January, is not worth a high draft pick this year. (Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
As you head into your fantasy drafts, it’s not enough to have identified a player or two you want to target. It’s also useful to have a sense of players you want to avoid, particularly those whose outlooks appear likely to fall short of their big-name billing.
I’m here to help with a list of four stars — one at each of the major positions — I’m fading in the weeks ahead. Of course, every player listed is worth drafting, but only if he falls far enough past his average draft position (ADP). For this exercise, I’ll be using as a baseline each player’s ADP in the aggregated, half-PPR rankings at Fantasy Pros.
ADP: 4th at RB | Me: 10th
Let’s go ahead and kick things off with the player for whom the biggest things are predicted. I told folks to steer clear of Henry last year, and you’re darn right I’m doing it again. Of course, my powers of prognostication weren’t looking so hot when the Tennessee back was leading all running backs in fantasy scoring though eight weeks, and by a considerable margin at that. However, he then suffered a foot injury that required surgery, keeping him out of action until the NFL playoffs.
Foot injuries are concerning, but this one could be considered a fluke, especially given that Henry had only missed two games over his previous five seasons. But something seemed like it had to give because the Titans were giving him an outrageous workload of 27.4 carries per game, plus 2.3 receptions, for almost 30 touches every week. To spin this forward, Tennessee is inviting a similar outcome if it tries the same tactic, particularly because Henry will be 29 by the end of the season. That’s positively ancient for a running back, and even for someone of his remarkable size, he has racked up a lot of wear and tear with 1,495 career touches, fourth most among players currently on NFL rosters.
If the Titans scale back Henry’s touches, it could keep him spry, but his numbers would suffer because he has become increasingly reliant on volume. His 4.3 yards per carry last season was easily his lowest over the past four seasons, and his rate of broken tackles has plummeted over the same span.
Then there’s the highly questionable ability of the Titans’ offense to deliver Henry a steady stream of easy touchdown opportunities. Quarterback Ryan Tannehill showed his own signs of decline last season and is now 34, and with the departure of wide receiver A.J. Brown, Tannehill is throwing to one of the league’s least-imposing receiving corps behind one of the lowest-rated offensive lines.
Add it all up, and I see way too many red flags to want to spend a first-round pick on Henry. That almost certainly means you won’t be getting him if you follow my advice, but you will be getting a chance to make a draft-day bet on someone with a more palatable risk-reward profile.
ADP: 6th at WR | Me: 11th
During a 2021 campaign in which he finished second only to Cooper Kupp in WR fantasy points per game, Samuel accumulated some remarkable numbers. One of which was his eight rushing touchdowns, an NFL record for his position, on just 59 carries. Another incredible stat was his 18.2 yards per reception, the most among all wide receivers with at least 25 catches, despite his average depth of target being just 8.6 yards, which ranked 83rd in that group.
It’s all very impressive — but the overall performance is also primed for regression. The rushing touchdowns are almost guaranteed to drop, if only because Samuel reportedly wants to be used less in that role and San Francisco should be healthier this season at running back and thus less in need of his services on the ground. In addition, new starting quarterback Trey Lance is a major rushing threat in his own right and is likely to keep some of those end zone visits to himself.
Samuel could remain the NFL’s yards-after-catch king, given that he has led the league in YAC per reception in each of the past two years and was second in 2019. Lance looms again, though, as a potential limiting factor because he projects to be much more of a deep-ball thrower — which should benefit 49ers wideout Brandon Aiyuk in particular — than predecessor Jimmy Garoppolo. With Lance looking to use his legs to extend plays and give Aiyuk time to get open downfield, or to tuck the ball and run with it, Samuel could be missing the good old days when Garoppolo wanted to get the ball out early and often on quick-hitting routes.
ADP: 9th at QB | Me: 13th
Rodgers will turn 39 this season, but Tom Brady has shown that’s maybe not a big deal and Rodgers could still be riding a late-career boost from the psychedelic powers of ayahuasca. At age 38, the Green Bay superstar was still good enough to win his second straight NFL MVP award and finish sixth at his position in fantasy points.
Of greater concern is the loss of Davante Adams, who was traded to the Las Vegas Raiders this spring after finishing in the top six in wide receiver fantasy points per game in each of the past four years. Rodgers helped Adams reach those heights, but the reverse was almost certainly the case as well. In particular, it’s hard to envision Rodgers having as good a rapport with any of this year’s Packers receivers near the goal line; Adams scored 12 of his 29 touchdowns over the past two seasons from less than six yards out.
Green Bay’s new No. 1 wideout, by Rodgers’s own acclaim, is Allen Lazard, a former undrafted free agent who established career highs last season with 40 catches for 513 yards. Other veterans on hand include the mercurial Sammy Watkins and a past-his-prime Randall Cobb, with rookies Christian Watson and Romeo Doubs tasked with eventually forming the mind meld their QB demands. Doubs has looked surprisingly good in training camp and preseason action, but the real strength of the Packers this year is probably at running back, given the estimable presence of Aaron Jones and A.J. Dillon. It would make all the sense in the world for Green Bay to try to wring as much production as possible from its backfield, at the expense of its talent-deficient passing attack.
ADP: 13th overall | Me: 22nd
It’s not that I’ve pushed Kelce down my tight end list, although I do perceive him as holding no more than a razor-thin margin over second-ranked Mark Andrews. It’s just that I have him as far closer to a third-round value than the near-first-rounder his ADP suggests. Thus, as with Henry, I won’t be getting much of the Kansas City stalwart in my drafts.
The Henry comparisons continue with Kelce’s age and declining efficiency. Kelce turns 33 in October and is set to become the oldest non-quarterback with a top-15 ADP since Randy Moss in 2010 (per Sharp Football Analysis). Last season, he posted his lowest yards per reception and yards per route run since 2015, and he had a major tumble from 2020 in fantasy points over expectation (66.3 to 41.3, per RotoViz).
Of course, even on a possible career downslope, Kelce may be able to make up for it this season because of Tyreek Hill’s absence. The big-play wide receiver was traded to Miami and leaves behind 159 targets, some of which might reasonably be expected to get funneled in Kelce’s direction. On the other hand, the Chiefs brought in several receivers, including veterans JuJu Smith-Schuster and Marquez Valdes-Scantling and promising rookie Skyy Moore, and the team could be looking to spread the passing-game wealth.
Defenses seemed in 2021 to have figured out some of Coach Andy Reid’s tendencies, so dealing Hill could have been the first step in a schematic overhaul that might be to Kelce’s benefit. Then again, it might not. The takeaway for me is that there’s too much uncertainty here to feel that Kelce is an especially safe pick, and if he’s not locked into the volume his drafters are expecting, there isn’t a lot of upside at this point in other aspects of his game. | 2022-08-23T11:05:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Stay away from these fantasy busts in your 2022 draft - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/fantasy-football-do-not-draft-list/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/fantasy-football-do-not-draft-list/ |
This image provided by NASA shows an enhanced color composite image of Jupiter obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope on July 27, 2022. The planet's rings and some of its small satellites are visible along with background galaxies. (AP)
The powerful $10 billion Webb telescope is named for James E. Webb who ran the fledgling U.S. space agency from 1961 to 1968. The telescope is an international collaboration led by NASA, alongside the European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency, and was launched in 2021.
In July, NASA released the first set of full-color images and data obtained by the revolutionary telescope, and revealed a glittering cosmic show of colliding galaxies and a dying star, which captured hearts and imaginations on earth.
The two images, composites from several images from Webb, released of Jupiter this week were taken by the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera, which has special infrared filters that showcase details of the planet. Since infrared light is invisible to the human eye, the images were artificially colored to translate them into the visible spectrum and make Jupiter’s features stand out, said NASA. The images were processed by citizen scientist Judy Schmidt.
Unlike the Earth, Jupiter has no solid surface and instead is a gas giant, made mostly of hydrogen and helium. It is thought to have the same basic ingredients as a star, but never grew massive enough to ignite. It also has several rings, but unlike Saturn’s, they are fainter and made of space dust rather than ice.
In a wide-field view, the new images show Jupiter with its faint rings and two tiny moons called Amalthea and Adrastea.
“This one image sums up the science of our Jupiter system program, which studies the dynamics and chemistry of Jupiter itself, its rings, and its satellite system,” astronomer Fouchet said.
Jupiter, where a day is about 10 hours long, has at least 50 moons. The four largest are named: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto were first observed by Italian physicist Galileo Galilei in 1610.
The images also capture Jupiter’s iconic Great Red Spot, which appears white in the photographs as it’s reflecting sunlight, says NASA. The Great Red Spot is in fact a giant storm bigger than the size of Earth, which has been raging for centuries.
In a seemingly renewed age of space exploration, earlier this month NASA also said it had identified 13 candidate landing regions on Earth’s moon, as it prepares to send astronauts back there under its Artemis program.
It will be the first mission to bring crew back to the lunar surface since Apollo in 1969 and will include the first woman and person of color to set foot on the moon.
Meanwhile, an audio clip shared by NASA this weekend of what it called the remixed sounds of a black hole sparked awe. The audio has been edited to be heard by humans and amplified but NASA said the sound, which emanates from a galaxy cluster some 240 million light-years away, defied the misconception that there is no sound in space. | 2022-08-23T11:06:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Stunning Jupiter images shown by NASA's James Webb telescope - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/23/jupiter-photo-nasa-webb-telescope/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/23/jupiter-photo-nasa-webb-telescope/ |
From the L0pht and Cult of the Dead Cow to DARPA and Google, Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko took unorthodox approaches to ‘make a dent in the universe’
Peiter Zatko testified to Congress using his hacker name, “Mudge,” in 1998. He later became a corporate executive, most recently at Twitter. (Chloe Meister/Washington Post illustration; Matt McClain/The Washington Post; Douglas Graham/Congressional Quarterly/Getty; Twitter screenshots; iStock)
These hackers warned the Internet would become a security disaster. No one listened.
That tracks with why Dorsey hired him in the first place — as an expert known for following his own moral compass and telling the truth to urge change, even at personal risk. His longtime motto: “Make a dent in the universe.”
Zatko told The Post that he jumped at the chance to join the platform “to improve the health of the public conversation” after a teen hacker hijacked the verified Twitter accounts of political leaders in 2020. “There was no way I wasn’t going to step up to the plate and take some swings.”
“Mr. Zatko was fired from Twitter more than six months ago for poor performance and leadership, and he now appears to be opportunistically seeking to inflict harm on Twitter, its customers, and its shareholders,” said Rebecca Hahn, Twitter’s global vice president of communications. Agrawal declined to comment.
By age 30, he had written one of the most powerful tools for cracking passwords, still in use, testified to Congress under his hacker handle about the susceptibility of the internet to drastic hacks, and co-founded one the first hacking consultancies backed by venture capital, aiming to bring insights from the cyber underground into major companies with the most to lose.
Twitter hack triggers investigations
“I joined Twitter because it’s a critical resource to the world,” Zatko said from his home in the New York City area. “All news seems to be either from Twitter or goes to Twitter for the coloring and context, and as such, it not only paints public opinion, it can change governments.”
The son of a chemistry professor and a mining scientist, Zatko grew up in Alabama and Pennsylvania, playing violin and guitar, breaking digital copyright locks on electronic games and participating in the early online world of dial-up text discussion boards. Picking both virtual and physical locks was fun, and as he entered Berklee College of Music in 1988, Zatko kept exploring online, sometimes trading his access to Berklee studio space for access to the computer labs enjoyed by budding hackers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Remaining in Boston, Zatko turned a temporary tech-support assignment into a real security job at what was then called BBN Technologies, an elite government contractor responsible for the early internet’s basic plumbing. In those days, the most serious hacking was done inside such big labs, experimenting on mainframes and networks of smaller computers.
In 1996, Zatko joined the L0pht (pronounced “loft”), often held up as the first U.S. hackerspace. The collective included a handful of hardware, software and wireless tinkerers who won renown for issuing public warnings about security flaws in programs.
At the time, most of those warnings were about business software, because the consumer internet was just beginning. Microsoft was helping drive that wave, and it took offense when the L0pht dropped new bug alerts that told talented hackers where to look to break into its wares.
Who is Twitter’s new CEO?
The software giant suggested that the L0pht would do more good if it provided advance notice to let the company develop a software patch for flaws before publishing the findings, letting criminals abuse them, according to records from the time. The group agreed, establishing a model for coordinated disclosure now used by most researchers.
High-ranking government officials, even those outside the intelligence agencies, were just starting to worry about what another country’s hackers could do to the United States. So Clinton White House staffer Richard Clarke helped arrange for Zatko and others from the L0pht to testify to Congress in 1998, even though they insisted on using pseudonyms.
Zatko and fellow L0pht member Christien Rioux, later co-founder of security company Veracode, also joined a larger and wilder group, Cult of the Dead Cow, which coined the term hacktivism, a portmanteau of hacking and activism that the group said promoted human rights by spreading information and fighting censorship and surveillance. (An early member of that group was Beto O’Rourke, now running for governor of Texas.)
Microsoft’s executives played down the potential harm to ordinary users, but after major customers threatened to move more operations to Linux, the company devoted more resources to security. Some Microsoft security experts said in private interviews they were grateful for the Cult of the Dead Cow’s antics.
Three people charged in Twitter hack
Zatko later joined the Pentagon innovation center DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. There he created a “fast track” program to dole out small grants quickly, giving lone hackers a way to help the government.
Zatko returned to the corporate world by working on special projects at Motorola Mobility and Google, which soon bought the company. Zatko also advised Google security team members, including Distinguished Engineer Niels Provos, who led hundreds of specialists.
Twitter CEO apologizes for hack, confirms some private messages were accessed
By the time of that handoff, Provos said, every Stripe employee had a hardware token as a second factor to authenticate themselves for access, and every laptop had its own identity, dictating what the user had permission to do.
After the 2020 Twitter hack, Dorsey lured Zatko away from Stripe, telling him he had been inspired by Zatko’s career, two sources familiar with the conversation said.
Zatko recruited top engineers and pushed for more transparency and accountability. “He can speak geek but also communicate so effectively,” said Renee Rush, a DARPA veteran who came out of retirement to work with Zatko again at Twitter. “He goes between worlds, and he has a vision he can execute. That’s a unicorn.”
The challenge he faced came into sharp focus less than two months into the job, during the assault on Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.
Teenage hacker accused of Twitter hack reaches plea deal
But Zatko didn’t blend into Twitter’s culture. Some who dealt with him said he came off as arrogant, especially when venturing past his areas of expertise.
Once out, Zatko sought a way to legally warn regulators in a position to force changes. His whistleblower papers expose what he considers dangerous lapses at the company and invites regulators to step in, especially the FTC.
Elizabeth Dwoskin contributed to this report. | 2022-08-23T11:06:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Peiter 'Mudge' Zatko's journey from hacker to Twitter whistleblower - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/23/peiter-mudge-zatko-twitter-whistleblower/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/23/peiter-mudge-zatko-twitter-whistleblower/ |
Beirut’s burning grain silos finally fall after weeks of inaction
A view shows the collapsed northern section of the Beirut grain silos, damaged in the August 2020 port blast, in Beirut, Aug. 23. (Issam Abdallah/Reuters)
BEIRUT — The last of the unstable grain silos at Beirut’s port collapsed on Tuesday morning, two years after a deadly blast heavily damaged the structures, which for weeks have been burning and slowly collapsing as a traumatized country looks on.
No injuries were reported as the area was evacuated in anticipation of the collapse, but the sight of the dramatic, large plume of dust emanating from the port harked back to Aug. 4, 2020, when smoke from the port preceded an explosion that killed over 200, injured thousands and left thousands more displaced.
For residents, the silos have been a kind of living proof of the tragedies the Lebanese have been forced to live with over the decades, in which gruesome events that shock the country are left unexplained and no justice is delivered.
On anniversary of deadly blast, Lebanon’s port is again ablaze
The silos that fell on Tuesday were the last of the structurally-unsound northern bloc, according to Emmanuel Durand, a French civil engineer who has volunteered to work alongside rescuers to monitor the structure. Grain which had been fermenting and toasting in the sun for two years, last month burst into flame, weakening the silos and starting the process of collapse — most recently on the second anniversary of the blast.
In April, Lebanon’s government said it had ordered the demolition of all the silos, fearing their eventual collapse. But activists, families of the victims, and engineers fought the government decision, with engineers stressing that the southern bloc remains structurally sound. Families of victims and independent lawmakers have demanded the southern bloc be left as a landmark of what happened until an independent investigation is carried out.
A judicial probe began in 2020, looking into responsibility for the alleged official negligence that allowed 2,750 tons of highly combustible ammonium nitrate to be stored for six years on the edge of a densely-populated city. The probe has been stalled repeatedly, as the judges leading the investigations were mired in court complaints by officials accusing them of a lack of neutrality and arguing for immunity from investigation.
“When you don’t get justice, you’re still hurt and you still don’t have closure,” said environmental activist Samer Khoury, 31. “To me, this is not called PTSD anymore,” he said, referring to post-traumatic stress disorder, but rather CTSD — constant traumatic stress disorder.
"Do you think this photo will change my life?"
If the silos are removed and no longer there as a monument to be seen, Khoury continued, “somehow you will stop thinking about [the blast] or even consider that it happened.”
An urgent draft law was submitted to parliament in July by an independent lawmaker, aiming to classify the silos as a national site for heritage. But when time came to vote on the draft law, the parliament session devolved to name-calling and accusations of voter fraud.
Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri adjourned the session amid the fighting. Berri’s party, the Amal movement, is one of many who has officials named in the judicial probes. | 2022-08-23T12:18:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Beirut port grain silos damaged by blast finally collapse - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/23/beirut-lebanon-grain-silos-collapse/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/23/beirut-lebanon-grain-silos-collapse/ |
By Bob Drogin
David Kay testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Capitol Hill in January 2004. (Susan Biddle/The Washington Post)
Bob Drogin, a former national security reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times, is author of “Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War.”
On Jan. 28, 2004, David Kay sat alone at a polished table in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing room and publicly admitted what no U.S. official previously had said — that America had gone to war in Iraq based on egregiously bad intelligence.
“Let me begin by saying we were almost all wrong,” Kay began. “And I certainly include myself here. … Prior to the war, my view was that the best evidence that I had seen was that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out we were all wrong, probably, in my judgment. And that is most disturbing.”
With that, the quiet, unassuming Texan directly undercut President George W. Bush’s claims that Saddam Hussein’s vast arsenals of chemical, biological and perhaps nuclear weapons posed a direct threat to the United States and its allies, which of course had been the administration’s chief justification for taking the nation to war in Iraq in March 2003.
I was in the Senate hearing room that day and if Kay felt relieved, it didn’t show on his face. But it was a stunning admission. No one from the White House, nor anyone from the U.S. intelligence community, had previously conceded any errors in Iraq.
Kay’s testimony, based on his work as head of the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group, made him an outcast in official Washington. The CIA and the White House never forgave him for going public — or perhaps just for being right when they were wrong. He learned the hard way that speaking truth to power, a supposed American virtue, is rarely rewarded.
Kay faded so far from view that news organizations took more than a week to note his Aug. 13 death from cancer, at age 82.
To me, the self-effacing academic from tiny Winona, Tex., was an American hero. He deserved far more than the ignominy he endured for revealing the truth. His work in Washington dried up and, at one point, he told me he was shooting wedding photos in his forced retirement.
Those directly responsible for the United States’ tragedy in Iraq fared far better. George Tenet, who led the CIA during the 9/11 attacks and the run-up to war in Iraq — the worst intelligence failures in CIA history — was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy defense secretary and an avowed Iraq hawk, went on to lead the World Bank until he was felled by scandal. Other neocons who were cheerleaders for the war simply moved on.
I first met Kay after the 1991 Gulf War, when he led one of the U.N. teams hunting for nuclear, biological or chemical weapons in postwar Iraq. Stubborn in his ways, he once refused, despite a four-day standoff with Iraqi troops, to return evidence documenting illicit nuclear activities.
After that, he became a Washington “graybeard,” a think-tanker on weapons proliferation to whom the intelligence community would occasionally turn to help figure out what the United States’ enemies were up to.
After the March 2003 invasion of Iraq failed to find any weapons of mass destruction, or programs to produce them, Bush ordered the CIA to take over the hunt. Tenet quickly named Kay — an aide had seen Kay interviewed on TV — as head of the new Iraq Survey Group with the remit to find the missing WMDs.
But Kay was a political scientist, not a spy. He had never served in the military or been trained in espionage. He resented using his CIA-issued code name, “Buford S. Vincent.” And he refused the Pentagon’s request to wear military fatigues.
Over the next few months, Kay and his team of scientists, soldiers and spies in Baghdad investigated claim after claim of supposed nonconventional weapons, only to find the “intelligence” based on supposition and inference, not fact. He was distraught to realize that the United States had gone to war based on misjudgments and outright lies.
In late 2003, Kay flew back to Washington to confront Tenet and others with the hard truth. After 9/11, it was said, the CIA and other national security agencies had failed to connect the dots. In Iraq, Kay once told me, they made up the dots.
He was greeted as a heretic, a pariah. On earlier visits to CIA headquarters, he had been given a 7th-floor office down the hall from Tenet. Now, he was banished to a wing under construction, where his windowless room had neither a classified computer nor a secure phone. America’s chief weapons hunter heard about meetings on Iraq’s weapons after the fact, if at all. People avoided him in the halls. “I was contaminated, like Typhoid Mary,” he told me.
After a month, he quit. The CIA offered to let him stay on the payroll as a senior adviser. Kay told me they were trying to buy his silence, and that getting the facts out was more important. After he went public, one of Tenet’s aides bitterly told me Kay was a “traitor” because he had humiliated the CIA.
As the nation grapples with former president Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, it’s worth saluting David Kay for telling an unpopular truth — whatever the cost. | 2022-08-23T12:26:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | What Iraq truth-teller David Kay taught us - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/david-kay-iraq-truthteller-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/david-kay-iraq-truthteller-dies/ |
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) addresses supporters in Jackson Hole, Wyo., on Aug. 16. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
When she was running for reelection, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) faced an unspoken contradiction. She had made clear that she considered House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) unfit for the speakership, yet her presence in the general election would make that outcome more likely, not less. Her primary defeat last week solved that problem but raised another.
During a weekend interview with ABC News’s Jonathan Karl, she explained that she is going after election deniers in Congress:…
Cheney: I’m going to be very focused on working to ensure that we do everything we can not to elect election deniers. … And I’m going to work against those people, I’m going to work to support their opponents; I think it matters that much.
We live in a binary political system, so it follows that if McCarthy — Cheney says “he’s been completely unfaithful to the Constitution and demonstrated a total lack of understanding of the significance and the importance of the role of speaker” — and his party are a menace to our democracy, then democracy defenders must beat them. And Cheney intends to help them do so, in federal and state races.
In short, she’s apparently reached the inevitable conclusion for pro-democracy Americans: You have to make sure Republicans lose and Democrats win until the stench of Trumpism is dissipated.
That means that, like Democrats, independents and pro-democratic Republicans, she’ll be rooting for Democrats to sweep races in which they face Republican election liars. That is a large percentage of the races for Congress, Senate, and even governorships and other statewide elections.
As for 2024, she’s got a list of the unqualified for president:
Karl: So you said you’re going to work against election deniers.
If it’s not Trump and if it’s — if it’s somebody like Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, these are all people that have tied themselves very closely to Trump, will you oppose them? Could you see yourself supporting any of them?
Cheney: It would be very difficult. When you look at somebody like Josh Hawley or somebody like Ted Cruz, both of whom know better — both of whom know exactly what the role of Congress is in terms of our constitutional obligations with respect to presidential elections — and yet, both of whom took steps that fundamentally threatened the constitutional order and structure in the aftermath of the last election.
Cheney: DeSantis is somebody who is, right now, campaigning for election deniers. And I think that, you know, that is something that I think people have got to have real pause about. You know, either you fundamentally believe in and will support our constitutional structure, or you don’t.
That leaves Cheney, and others who still identify with the Republican Party, in a quandary. Who is she supposed root for in 2024?
She plainly is considering her own run. However, after campaigning against the large majority of elected Republicans (who are election deniers), a 2024 run logically would be a search-and-destroy candidacy rather than one aimed at getting the party she has aimed at obliterating (in the short term) to give her the nomination.
The other alternative would be to get behind someone who has not embraced the “big lie” such as Maryland’s Gov. Larry Hogan. Cheney has praised former vice president Mike Pence (for the bare minimum required of an elected official: not participating in a coup), so perhaps she would back him.
For all intents and purposes, Cheney is running against the MAGA GOP to save the republic — and lay the groundwork for the resurgence of something that looks like the GOP of a bygone era. This makes sense if one thinks the MAGA movement is an alien force that has overtaken the party Cheney was raised in and supported.
But as Trump’s grip becomes complete, the gap between the GOP and the MAGA movement disappears, and the chance for a revived, normal GOP becomes slimmer.
Another Republican had a different idea. The Denver Post reports: “Colorado Sen. Kevin Priola, a Henderson Republican, announced Monday morning that he is changing his party affiliation to Democrat.” The moderate Republican imagined “the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol would make the Republican Party distance itself from Donald Trump and 'the political environment he created.” No such luck. So he did the most logical thing: “He said he could no longer support a party that was OK with ‘a violent attempt to overturn a free and fair election and continues to peddle claims that the 2020 election was stolen’ and one where his GOP colleagues ‘would rather deny the existence of human-caused climate change than take action.’ ”
Perhaps it is easier for Priola, who ideologically is closer to the Democratic Party, to make the switch. Nevertheless, at some point, you have to recognize the obvious. “Even if there will continue to be issues that I disagree with the Democratic Party on, there is too much at stake right now for Republicans to be in charge,” Priola wrote. “Coloradans cannot afford for their leaders to give credence to election conspiracies and climate denialism. Simply put, we need Democrats in charge because our planet and our democracy depend on it.”
Cheney thinks she can blow up the MAGA GOP of election liars, conspiratorialists and violent demagogues. Priola says there is no GOP but a Trumpized GOP, so he better sign up with the Democrats, the only reality-based, pro-democracy party.
The latter seems more realistic, but all Americans should root for Cheney’s success since at some point we need some other party, be it the Old Republican Party or a New-And-Improved Republican Party. There is room for both approaches — for now. | 2022-08-23T12:26:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Liz Cheney has to beat MAGA Republicans - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/liz-cheney-campaign-republicans/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/liz-cheney-campaign-republicans/ |
If Factories Don’t Return to US Now, They Never Will
The Chips and Science Act that President Biden signed earlier this month is just the latest indication that the planets are aligning for a return of manufacturing to the US. Proponents have pushed for so-called reshoring for years, but it has never quite panned out. With the supply chain crisis still fresh in people’s memories, this time is different. If reshoring doesn’t become a significant trend over the next decade, it never will. To ensure this return of production isn’t haphazard and doesn’t leave gaping holes in the supply chain, there needs to be some coordination — and it doesn’t have to be by the government.
In the 1980s, the globalism idea seemed to make sense: Build one huge factory where a gazillion widgets could be made at the lowest cost, which at the time usually meant China, and then ship them around the world. Empty industrial parks weren’t a problem, the thinking went, because the US could just import those cheap goods and pay for them with a combination of service-economy salaries and debt. And then there was this drumbeat: Everybody needs to send their children to college because the new-economy jobs will render blue-collar work obsolete. The tedious, repetitive, sometimes dirty work of factories would be done by other countries with lower skills and cheap labor.
The number of manufacturing jobs reflects this school of thought. They peaked in 1979 at nearly 20 million and dropped to just north of 11 million in 2010 before stabilizing at just above 12 million. In 2000, the year before China entered the World Trade Organization, the US imported $100 billion of Chinese goods. That jumped fivefold to $500 billion last year, and the trade deficit with China surpassed $350 billion.
It took a global virus to wake everybody up to the fact that the US doesn’t make enough products at home. And the big lesson learned from the pandemic and the scramble for supplies that ensued was that the weakest link in the chain is maritime shipping. These huge vessels are mostly controlled by a few large companies and, because it takes years to build a container ship, it’s impossible to ramp up capacity in the short term. That leaves price as the only market mechanism to manage a surge in volume, and that became a stark reality quickly. The cost to ship a 40-foot maritime container from China to the US West Coast jumped fivefold to more than $20,000 during the worst of the shipping crisis last fall, according to Freightos, an online shipping marketplace. Not to mention that the huge container ships that ply the oceans spew a trail of carbon and garbage in their wakes.
Once the ships reached their destinations, the US ports and the supporting transportation systems weren’t nimble enough to handle a surge of imported goods. The delays caused companies to put in extra orders to ensure they received supplies and introduced the average person to an obscure logistics term called the bullwhip effect. This is a reason that inventories are now so mismatched.
Making the supply chain more resilient is a chief motivating factor for relocating production close to the end market. This is no easy task. China is now the world’s factory, and the base of low-cost suppliers that has been built up over the decades to support manufacturing in Asia has no equal.Still, the Chips Act is incentivizing companies like Intel Corp. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which are planning to build huge semiconductor factories in Arizona. Texas Instruments Inc. already broke ground in May on a chip plant in Texas. The Inflation Reduction Act will spur investment in electric vehicles and the parts to supply those. While government subsidies can spur action, the move to manufacture in the US must be profitable to sustain the trend.
Generac Holdings Inc., a power generator maker, has shifted some production to its factory in Wisconsin and opened a small plant in Georgia that it’s planning to expand. Premier Inc. teamed up with DeRoyal Industries Inc. to make hospital gowns in Tennessee in a plant that Premier CFO Craig McKasson called “the most automated gown manufacturing capability in the world” during a Raymond James conference earlier this year. The alignment of the planets wouldn’t be complete without automation. This shift of production back to the US won’t work without keeping labor costs in check. The solution isn’t to drive down US wages or to erode health and retirement benefits, which was the corporate playbook for decades. The answer is to employ robots to perform the repetitive and mundane work at a low cost while paying well the people that will always be needed in a factory. This hasn’t been possible before because the technology was limited mostly to automating heavy assembly processes.
There’s always the risk that as the pandemic fades and shipping costs trend downward, the memory of the supply chain pain will also recede. That’s less likely, though, with the continuing disruption from Russia’s war on Ukraine and the harsh lockdowns in China as its leaders doggedly pursue a zero Covid policy.The reshoring activity shouldn’t be haphazard. Although individual companies must make the final decisions on their moves, having clusters of suppliers around manufacturers makes sense. Companies will need to work with community colleges and high schools to secure workers with the skills they need. It will take some coordination to ensure the region’s not left without key components in the supply chain. Trade groups, such as the National Association of Manufacturing, could take the lead for identifying those gaps or bottlenecks in the supply chain and lobby manufacturing to invest to meet that demand.
Regionalization is also a word that should be buzzing at company board meetings. Mexico has certainly become a hot spot of late for locating factories to meet US demand. The Americas as a region can benefit from a move toward more local production. Most of the ingredients exist -- from technology to low-cost labor to the raw materials – for producing widgets with content mostly from within the Americas. For cross-border issues, the federal government obviously would have to play a role. What is lacking is coordination, stable governments and steady currencies.
The pandemic, supply chain snarls, government action and automation have all lined up to give reshoring its best opportunity. If US companies miss this window, it will most likely close for good. | 2022-08-23T12:35:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | If Factories Don’t Return to US Now, They Never Will - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/if-factories-dont-return-to-us-now-they-never-will/2022/08/23/c9758f34-22d7-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/if-factories-dont-return-to-us-now-they-never-will/2022/08/23/c9758f34-22d7-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
The Era of Economic Whiplash Is Just Beginning
The economy is trying to take us for a ride.
How often do you see employment in nonfarm businesses grow by 4.3% over two consecutive quarters, even as their production declined by 2.3%? How do you explain why car dealers employed 21,000 more workers in July than in April even though sales of motor vehicles and parts were roughly $9 billion lower? What would you tell builders who started 34,000 fewer housing units in July than in April but employed 36,000 more workers to do it?
Numbers like these can give economists whiplash, making it harder for them to sketch out a coherent picture of the state of the economy and its direction. They are causing some headaches at the Federal Reserve, which is grappling with how to land the country from its flight of high inflation without crashing it into the ground.
While some of these discrepancies might be dismissed as bad data — an inordinate amount of noise from the momentous shocks produced by the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — they might also tell us something real, rejiggering economic relationships in a way that will complicate the policy response.
“There is measurement noise,” Jason Furman from Harvard’s Kennedy School told me. But “something very weird is going on in the underlying economy.”
Even the standard noise that regularly shows up in the data seems stranger than usual. For instance, GDP is, by definition, equal to gross domestic income. Somebody’s purchase is someone else’s sale.
A modest gap often emerges between readings of the two because they are measured in different ways. But these days the gap is a gaping chasm, wider than anything we have ever seen: While GDP shrank 1.6% in the first quarter, GDI grew 1.8%.
The current thinking seems to be that the GDP reading in the first quarter was off — distorted by some weirdness in inventory accumulation and foreign trade, which are not really central to our understanding of underlying economic strength.
If GDI is “right” and GDP growth turns out to have declined less, or even grown a tad, in the first three months of the year, cleaning up the mismatch between these data would make better sense of the underlying trends. But GDP would have to be hoisted up by a great deal in the last two reported quarters to mesh with standard interpretations of the relationship between economic growth and employment.
Indeed, if the GDP reading is correct, real output per hour of work at nonfarm businesses would have declined 6% over the last two quarters, at an annual rate. Labor productivity has never fallen this abruptly since we started measuring it after the end of the Second World War.
The minutes of the July meeting of the Fed’s brass, released on Wednesday, suggest an institution that is not super sure of its footing: It pretty much assured investors that it will keep raising interest rates until it has evidence that they are slowing the rate of price increases, even if that requires job losses, but it also emphasized the risk of overly aggressive tightening.
To their credit, navigating the crosscurrents is tough when the data misbehaves. How should the Fed interpret a seeming swing in GDP from an expansion of 6.9%, in the fourth quarter of 2021, to a 1.6% contraction in the next? What should it conclude from the fact that real wages are falling but, because of the decline in productivity, unit labor costs are rising faster than prices? Things that usually move together are now moving in the opposite direction: Falling unemployment is usually accompanied by rising job openings. These days both are going down.
We have faced seemingly inconsistent economic dynamics before. We gave them a name in the 1960s: “stagflation,” to describe a then-unprecedented mix of shrinking economic output and high inflation in Britain. But we haven’t had to use the term in half a century.
Since the financial crisis the Fed has had the comfort of knowing unequivocally in which direction to move the temperature gauge, either hot or cold. These days, it has to look down both sides of the street.
“There is an inherent tension,” said Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute who has written for Bloomberg Opinion. “The less the economy weakens on its own, the more the Fed has to tighten. And a big risk is the Fed overtightening.”
Perhaps one can build a congruent narrative in which the seeming inconsistencies straighten out. Businesses might simply be exhibiting whiplash of their own, Furman said, hiring like mad to compensate for their inability last year to hire fast enough to meet rising demand. It might just be a matter of a month or two for them to realize that demand is cooling and to cut back on the hiring.
Why was hiring so difficult? Well, the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan passed in the early days of Joe Biden’s presidency, on the heels of $3.1 trillion in economic stimulus from the Trump administration, fattened workers’ bank accounts to the point that they didn’t have to take the first crappy job on offer — and could stay out of the labor market until a better deal appeared, with better pay.
Covid-19’s shock to supply chains as countries locked down surely contributed to the burst of inflation, even if it was primarily fueled by over-stimulated demand. So did the shift in demand to products from services as people hunkered down to avoid Covid, and the “revenge spending,” as the fear over Covid receded, on everything from restaurant meals to airline tickets.
These unusual patterns of behavior could peter out in time — taking the economy back to when it was easier to read. Long Covid might keep some people out of the labor force. The experience of the last few years might have pushed more folks in the 55-plus range into retirement. But otherwise, normality would look pretty much like it did three or four years ago.
Or maybe not. Fact is, some surprises are probably still in store. Take the emerging battle over workers’ return to the office. We haven’t quite gotten our head around that one. Some economists argue that working from home will boost productivity. Others argue that it will make us less productive.
I guess we’ll find out.
• This Economy Is Proving Too Complicated for Economists: Jared Dillian | 2022-08-23T12:36:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Era of Economic Whiplash Is Just Beginning - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-era-of-economic-whiplash-is-just-beginning/2022/08/23/8bc5f4ca-22d3-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-era-of-economic-whiplash-is-just-beginning/2022/08/23/8bc5f4ca-22d3-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
Some 100 native tree species could die out amid an onslaught of invasive insects, a surge in deadly diseases and the all-encompassing peril of climate change
A fire manager with the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks Fire Service looks for an opening in the burned-out sequoias from the Redwood Mountain Grove. (Gary Kazanjian/AP)
“It’s easy to feel that gloom and doom because … the scope of the crisis is really, really great right now,” said Murphy Westwood, vice president for science and conservation at the Morton Arboretum in Illinois and a lead author of the study. “We’re losing species before they even get described.”
These trees have survived more than 1,000 years. Can they survive climate change?
She pointed to disparities in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s “Red List,” the preeminent global inventory for species’ conservation status. The list includes twice as many mammal species as members of the order Lamiales, which includes ash, teak and jacaranda trees — even though the latter group is nearly five times the size of the former.
“Plant blindness” — the human tendency to overlook the plants that surround us — means that fewer resources are devoted to the organisms that supply Earth’s oxygen, feed its animals and store more carbon than humanity will emit in 10 years. Until several years ago, scientists didn’t even know how many tree species existed (the correct number is 58,497).
“It’s this big swath of life that’s totally unstudied or understudied,” Westwood said.
Researchers are racing to save one of the world's most endangered marine mammals
In the United States, she found, more than two-thirds of species had never been assessed for their extinction risk. Others hadn’t been examined in decades, even as new illnesses and rising global temperatures imperiled their populations.
After five years poring over scientific journals, combing through academic databases and interviewing experts, the researchers uncovered that swaths of America’s forests have silently slipped toward oblivion.
In the rosaceae family — a diverse group that includes hawthorns and apple trees — more than a quarter of species are considered threatened, endangered or critically endangered. Half of all ash species are jeopardized by the invasive emerald ash borer, a jewel-green insect whose larvae feed on the living tissue just beneath a tree’s bark. An emerging disease known as “laurel wilt” is attacking all three native members of the genus persea, imperiling the small, fragrant evergreen trees.
“There are trees that have been living in locations for hundreds and hundreds of years and suddenly they’re dying now,” Adams said.
Bur oaks have not yet fallen into the IUCN’s “vulnerable” category, Adams said. But it’s not difficult to imagine that the rapid changes in temperature and weather patterns could suddenly send a once-healthy species into precipitous decline.
“Gosh.” Adams took a sharp breath. “That’s a horrible thought.”
A disease more lethal than covid-19 has nearly wiped out northern long-eared bats
The decline of American trees is just one piece of a broader crisis ravaging the planet. A 2019 report from the United Nations Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services estimated that 1 million species are in danger of dying out. The global rate of extinction is at least tens of hundreds of times higher than normal and still accelerating, threatening to eclipse some of the largest mass die-offs in Earth’s history.
And trees have an essential role in humanity’s efforts to avert catastrophic climate change. The United States’ plan to halve emissions by the end of the decade depends on forests to offset about 12 percent of its planet-warming pollution. Disease outbreaks, wildfires, droughts, logging and pollution may jeopardize that plan.
“We have a narrow and rapidly closing window to take action,” Westwood said — but there is still plenty the world can do.
Governments can curb the greenhouse gas pollution — mostly from burning fossil fuels — that threatens to warm the planet by 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. Communities can implement stronger policies to protect existing forests and ensure that reforestation projects plant a diverse mix of species that will be more resilient to emerging threats. Researchers can collect endangered species to ensure they are preserved in botanic gardens, and study those garden specimens to develop strategies for protecting their cousins in the wild.
“And then there are things we can all do as individuals,” Westwood said: Plant native species in our gardens. Volunteer in local woodlands. Avoid transporting firewood or other material that might carry dangerous pests.
“It’s not altruistic,” Westwood said. “We’re not doing this because we’re tree-hugging nature lovers.”
People need trees as much as trees now depend on us, Westwood continued. “All of these actions are critical to our own survival as a species, and our future on this planet.” | 2022-08-23T12:36:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Up to 1 in 6 U.S. tree species threatened with extinction, study finds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/23/extinct-tree-species-sequoias/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/23/extinct-tree-species-sequoias/ |
Meet the woman who started an underground abortion network in the 1960s
Heather Booth is an activist and founded the underground abortion service provider known as the Service or Jane. (KK Ottesen/FTWP)
Heather Booth, 76, is an organizer and political strategist who has worked in civil rights, feminist and other movements. While a student at the University of Chicago, she founded the underground abortion service provider known as the Service or Jane. A recently released documentary, “The Janes,” and forthcoming feature film, “Call Jane,” chronicle the organization’s members and impact. Booth lives in Washington, D.C.
How do you explain to people in younger generations, who have been protesting the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe, what it was like before abortion was legal?
I think people should see this remarkable documentary, “The Janes.” It talks about septic abortion wards in hospitals. One of the doctors in the movie talks about calling the morgue every week because women were dying because they so felt they weren’t ready to have a child that they would do either injury to themselves or they would go to someone who would injure them. Lives were threatened, and the promise of a life was threatened.
The New Mexico Provider Trying to Save Abortion for Texas Women
With Roe struck down, is this all going to happen again?
It’s up to us. If we organize, we can change the world. We’re a majority of this country. Almost 80 percent of the country thinks that a politician should not come between a woman and this most intimate decision of our lives, between a woman and her doctor. So we have the popular support. The question is: Will that get converted into organization and action and election?
Can you talk about founding underground abortion service Jane?
In 1965, a friend of mine said his sister was pregnant and nearly suicidal. She wasn’t ready to have a child and wanted an abortion. This was a time when people barely talked about sex in public. I didn’t know anything about what to do about it. But I said I would try to help. Because you help someone who’s in need. I had been in the civil rights movement, a Freedom Summer project, and that’s an important part of the story. Because the fundamental lessons of that summer included: If you follow your moral beliefs and if you organize with love at the center, you can change this world.
So I went to the medical arm of the civil rights movement, the Medical Committee for Human Rights, and met with a doctor. He referred me to Dr. T.R.M. Howard. He made the arrangement. And I thought that was it. I didn’t even think about it that much again. And it wasn’t legal, so I didn’t talk about it with other people. But the woman involved must have talked about it, because then someone else called. And I made the arrangement again with Dr. Howard. And then someone else called.
At that point, I said, “Oh, word is spreading, I better make a system.” And I called Dr. Howard, found out what was involved: What do you do beforehand? Is there any pain involved? What do you do afterwards? How do you follow up? Is there birth control advice I should give? How do you support people in it? How much does it cost? It was $500. We got it down to two for the price of one. Got a scholarship fund. This was ’65. In 1967 I got married. By ’68 I was pregnant with my first child, working full time and in grad school. And it was too much. I could not handle the number of people coming through.
So you were running it by yourself, then?
It was just me. And it was my home number. I don’t even think we had answering machines at that point. Or an answering service. So when I’d go to meetings that I normally went to — on community issues, civil rights issues, women’s issues — at the end of the meetings, I would say, “If you’re interested in working on abortion, come see me.”
And would people come?
And people came. I had about 12 or so women who said they were interested.
And this is illegal at the time?
Yes. I knew it wasn’t legal. I don’t think I quite understood how illegal it was. I only learned later that three people talking about providing an abortion was a conspiracy to commit a felony. But we had several meetings where I transferred [the knowledge]: This is how I do the consulting. This is the arrangement with the provider. This is how you follow up. Here are some of the issues that are asked. This is how I’m keeping track of who’s coming through. And at that point it really became a full operation. And the other women really took over and did an extraordinary job. And more and more people started to come through. Because it wasn’t legal, in giving out a phone number, they said: Don’t give out the name of the person whose phone it was; they said, “Call and ask for Jane.” And then, boldly, they started to advertise. They put signs up in supermarkets and in underground papers: “Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Call Jane,” and had the phone number.
It is estimated that Jane performed about 11,000 abortions.
That’s what they think. It shows how many people need this and seek it. After Roe [v. Wade], it was 1 in 3 people who were pregnant would get an abortion. The numbers then, with greater contraception and greater bans and attacks, became 1 in 4, and now it’s 1 in 5. But even if it’s 1 in 5, people should realize this means it could be your sister, your cousin, your friend. It could be you. And it could have been your mother or your grandmother, because the majority of people who seek an abortion now already have children. And they know what it means to bring a child into the world.
I’m sure you’ve had many discussions with people who agree and disagree and question the work you did there. What do you say to people who say abortion is murder?
What I say is that I value the lives of these real people who are seeking an alternative in their life and aren’t ready to have a child. And while different traditions may have different views, my view is just as a sperm or a zygote, it’s not yet a person. The standard has been, in the world, when there’s quickening. In fact, in Judaism — I’m Jewish — part of the laws we follow say that if the life of the mother is at stake, it is required to have an abortion. So there are different traditions, different beliefs. These are personal decisions that no one can make for someone else and that politicians should not be interfering with.
I also think that when children are born there should be full embracing in a beloved community with child care, with prenatal education, with health care, with ensuring that people of all economic backgrounds have the same freedoms and dignity and respect to have a more fulfilled life.
What does it feel like to see so much rollback in recent years of rights you already fought for, already won?
I think we’re on a knife’s edge right now. On the one hand, there really is a threat of tyranny and a rollback of voting rights, of freedom to decide this intimate decision in our lives about when or whether to have a child, a rollback of democracy and of a more caring society. But on the other, the vast majority of the country still believes we should have a caring society and is sick of all the hate. So it feels like we are in a treacherous moment now — but there also is enormous promise.
If we win two seats in the Senate and still have a House that believes in small-d democracy, that believes in reproductive freedom, that believes in sensible gun laws, that believes we should have a climate that is sustainable, we can see not only the codification of Roe — the president has said that — we could do a number of things now circumscribed because the will of the majority of the public has not yet been organized and heard. So I still believe that if we organize, we can change the world for the better. The future isn’t written. It depends on what we do.
This interview has been edited and condensed. KK Ottesen is a regular contributor to the magazine. | 2022-08-23T12:36:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Meet the woman who started an underground abortion network in the 1960s - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/08/23/abortion-janes-roe-vs-wade-supreme-court/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/08/23/abortion-janes-roe-vs-wade-supreme-court/ |
Three more 'trigger law' abortion bans are coming Thursday
Good morning, and happy Tuesday — today voters in upstate New York will head to the polls in a closely watched preview of both parties’ midterm strategies on abortion. Send primary news and tips to rachel.roubein@washpost.com.
Today’s edition: Anthony Fauci, who announced he’ll step down in December, said he’s not concerned with political investigations. California’s Democratic governor vetoed legislation to allow sites for supervised drug use. But first …
Soon, 36 percent of women of childbearing age could live in a state that mostly bans abortion
Roughly 20.9 million women have lost access to nearly all elective abortions in their home state in the two months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
And more restrictive laws are coming Thursday. That’s when trigger bans in Texas, Tennessee and Idaho are slated to kick in, further outlawing the procedure entirely or heightening penalties for doctors who perform the procedure, Katie Shepherd, Caroline Kitchener and I report.
The new laws will be piled on top of a complex web of abortion restrictions nationwide, where the procedure is available in a state one day and then illegal the next. The seismic shift in who can access abortion in their home state has come even faster than the closest onlookers imagined.
Across the states
Here’s the lay of the land: Roughly 14 states have banned most abortions, such as prohibiting the procedure with narrow exceptions from the time of conception or after fetal cardiac activity has been detected (which can be as early as six weeks of pregnancy). Five more states have similar bans, but they’ve been temporarily blocked by the courts.
If those injunctions are lifted, 36 percent of U.S. women between the ages of 15 and 44 would be largely unable to obtain an elective abortion in their home state.
Now, let’s zero in on the changes looming Thursday. All three states currently have restrictions on the procedure in place, but the upcoming trigger laws will still have an impact.
Tennessee will shift from a “heartbeat” ban to an almost complete ban on abortion with no exception for victims of rape or incest.
Idaho is also slated to move from a “heartbeat” ban to a near-total ban on the procedure — but with exceptions for rape and incest, as well as the life of the pregnant woman. But the Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against the ban, and a federal judge said he’d issue his opinion by Wednesday.
Texas almost immediately outlawed abortion after the Supreme Court’s June decision, but the newest looming law will make providing an abortion a first-degree felony and raise the civil penalty to a $100,000 fine.
The evolving landscape has left patients scrambling. Kaydria — a 28-year old from Jackson, Miss. who spoke on the condition that only her first name be used to protect her privacy — arrived at a Tennessee abortion clinic last week only to find out she was already too far along to receive an abortion, Caroline reported from Memphis.
The staff handed her a piece of paper with a list of clinics in Illinois. The closest option was more than seven hours from Kaydria’s home.
Yet even in some Republican strongholds, antiabortion advocates and their allies in GOP-led legislatures are running up against their limits.
In Kansas, voters overwhelmingly defeated a ballot measure to strip abortion protections from the state constitution.
Days later, Nebraska’s GOP governor announced he wouldn’t call a previously anticipated special session to pass an abortion ban because there weren’t enough votes.
And some legislatures, such as in West Virginia and South Carolina, are divided over whether to include exceptions for rape and incest.
Some activists acknowledge further restrictions will be a tough fight — and view enacting more stringent limits as a long game.
Case in point: Blaine Conzatti, the president of the Idaho Family Policy Center, said he helped draft Idaho’s roughly six-week ban and including exceptions for rape and incest was a “tough pill to swallow.”
Yet, getting rid of such exemptions isn’t likely to come any time soon, even though Republicans control the state’s governor’s office and legislature. The chairman of the House panel overseeing abortion legislation isn’t planning to bring major bills to the floor and said he’s comfortable with the current exceptions in the law.
“I think that’s going to be a generational push,” Conzatti said, explaining that it will take time to convince some reluctant lawmakers as well those who belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a key constituency that supports some exceptions in the cases of rape and incest.
Read our full deep dive on a post-Roe America here.
Anthony Fauci, the nation’s preeminent infectious-disease expert and President Biden’s chief medical adviser, will step down from the federal government in December after more than a half-century of public service, our colleague Yasmeen Abutaleb reports.
In a wide-ranging interview with Yasmeen, Fauci said he wanted to leave his post while still healthy, energetic and passionate about his field and enthusiastic about the next stage of his career. He emphasized that he isn’t exiting the public square, rather, he hopes to teach, lecture, write and use his experience to inspire the next generation of scientists moving forward.
Yet, Fauci acknowledged missteps over the last 2½ years, like when he and other government scientists told Americans they didn’t need to wear masks in the beginning of the pandemic — a blunder that former president Donald Trump seized on near the end of his term and used to criticize the 81-year-old’s expertise.
Throughout the pandemic, Fauci achieved unprecedented fame while enduring withering political attacks and baseless conspiracy theories as the face of the federal government’s coronavirus response under two presidents.
Fauci’s public contradictions of Trump and his advocacy of mitigation measures have made him a villain to the political right. Republicans signaled yesterday that, should they regain control of the House in November’s elections, they would still summon Fauci to Capitol Hill to testify in investigations into the pandemic even after he has left government — a threat Fauci told Yasmeen he’s not concerned about. “There is nothing I cannot defend,” he said.
The veteran scientist has been a political lightning rod before. As leader of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, he’s been on the front lines of several contentious public health crises, including AIDS, the 2001 anthrax scares, Ebola and Zika.
Up next: An interim successor is expected to be named before Fauci departs, and NIH will conduct a national search for his replacement.
House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.):
Calif. governor rejects bill for supervised drug-injection sites
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) vetoed a bill yesterday that would have allowed sites for supervised drug use to operate in three of the state’s largest cities, The Post’s Bryan Pietsch reports.
In his veto of the measure, Newsom said he wanted “strong, engaged local leadership and well-documented, vetted, and thoughtful operational and sustainability plans” for the programs, which are aimed at preventing overdoses. He also directed the state health and human services secretary to help discuss best practices for the sites.
The governor’s decision whether to sign the bill was closely watched as a signal of his political ambitions beyond California. While Newsom has positioned himself in the national spotlight as a defender of popular progressive causes, political observers speculated that he would be reluctant to sign the injection-site bill, which could have been fodder for attack ads from conservatives, the New York Times’s Jill Cowan notes.
California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D), who co-authored the legislation:
The veto is tragic & a huge lost opportunity. These sites are proven to save lives & connect people to treatment. Sad day for CA’s fight against overdose deaths.
Pfizer seeks authorization of its updated booster shot
Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech asked the Food and Drug Administration yesterday to authorize its retooled coronavirus booster shot targeting the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron subvariants for people 12 and older.
The request comes ahead of a potential fall booster campaign to re-up the nation’s waning immunity against the virus ahead of a potential surge in coronavirus cases this winter. Assuming health officials greenlight the updated shots, Pfizer said it is on schedule to begin shipping doses next month.
Federal regulators will scrutinize the shot without data from a clinical study investigating the safety, tolerability and effectiveness of the vaccine, which is expected to begin this month. Preclinical data showed the booster dose generated a “strong neutralizing antibody response,” according to the companies.
In other coronavirus news …
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the use of Novavax’s coronavirus vaccine for adolescents aged 12 through 17. Yesterday’s announcement from the agency comes days after the FDA authorized the dose for the age group late last week.
Wyden seeks information on Medicare Advantage plans’ practices
New this A.M.: Senate Finance Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is seeking information from more than a dozen state insurance commissioners about complaints they’ve received about Medicare Advantage plans’ marketing tactics.
The letter comes amid reports of complaints from those enrolled in the plans. According to Wyden’s letter, the concerns range from alleged aggressive sales practices to fraudulent and misleading advertisements.
Wyden sent letters to 15 states, including Arizona, California, New York and Texas, requesting they provide information by Sept. 16 about any complaints so lawmakers can better understand the nature and extent of the advertising and enrollment issues in the market.
The monkeypox outbreak has officially reached all 50 states, after Wyoming reported its first case of the virus yesterday, according to CDC data.
The Department of Health and Human Services awarded approximately $25 million in planning grants to five new states and territories to expand access to home and community-based services through Medicaid’s Money Follows the Person program.
About half of men who have sex with men report reducing their number of sexual partners and encounters in response to the monkeypox outbreak, according to a new poll from the CDC.
What Are the Real Warning Signs of a Mass Shooting? (By Shaila Dewan | The New York Times)
After Roe, teens are teaching themselves sex ed, because the adults won’t (By Hannah Natanson | The Washington Post)
The $18,000 Breast Biopsy: When Having Insurance Costs You a Bundle (By Lauren Sausser | Kaiser Health News) | 2022-08-23T12:36:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Three more 'trigger law' abortion bans are coming Thursday - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/23/three-more-trigger-law-abortion-bans-are-coming-thursday/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/23/three-more-trigger-law-abortion-bans-are-coming-thursday/ |
Six park-and-pitch camping spots for wonderfully woodsy getaways
Little Bennett Regional Park has Montgomery County’s only campground. (Montgomery Parks)
Car camping falls somewhere between backpacking and glamping. There’s no long hike required, but you won’t be sleeping on a bear-pelt-covered, king-size bed in a custom-built yurt either. Simply park your car, pitch your tent, get out into the wild or stay mild at your site, and fire up some satisfying backwoods fare (s’mores required). These six woodsy campsites across the region make it easy to savor nature without too much hassle.
A beginner’s guide to camping
This pet-friendly park in Frederick County, Md., a 90-minute drive from D.C., is good for parents with younger campers. The best spot for families is the quieter Manor Area, which offers bathrooms with showers and access to drinking water, but you’ll want to spend your active time at the William Houck Area. Located a 10-minute drive to the north, this upper section of the park is home to a variety of trails and Hunting Creek Lake, where you can swim and try your luck for trout, bass, bluegills and more (a fishing license is required for anglers 16 years and older). For a special treat, go to nearby Gateway Candyland (14802 N. Franklinville Rd., Thurmont; gatewaycandy.com), a sweet shop of Wonka-esque proportions selling 500 types of candy, ice cream and epic sundaes.
14039 Catoctin Hollow Rd., Thurmont, Md. dnr.maryland.gov. The Manor Area of the park has 21 basic campsites, including 10 with electrical hookups, and is open through Dec. 11. $21.50 and up per night. Book online at parkreservations.maryland.gov.
Greenbrier State Park
Snuggled into the Appalachian Mountains, a 90-minute drive from the District, Greenbrier is a good starter site for camping newbies because there are plenty of easygoing activities. Nearly 11 miles of trails zigzag through the park; mountain bikes are welcome on many of them. Boats equipped with electric motors are allowed on the 42-acre lake, or visitors can rent rowboats and paddleboats. A white sand beach offers a nice opportunity to take to the water or simply savor a few rays. Campsites are well spaced and well maintained and have easy access to bathhouses; two camping areas allow pets in case you don’t want to leave Rover at home.
21843 National Pike, Boonsboro, Md. dnr.maryland.gov. The park has 164 campsites and is open April through October. $27.75 and up per night. Book online at parkreservations.maryland.gov.
Easing back into group travel with a multifamily camping trip
Little Bennett Campground
Montgomery County’s only campground is just a 45-minute car ride from downtown D.C. Spread across 3,700 acres, Little Bennett Regional Park is crisscrossed with over 25 miles of trails primed for hiking and biking adventures. The Kingsley Trail is a favorite option for families. Just 1.8 miles long, it passes a restored late-19th-century schoolhouse. Campsites have access to bathrooms with showers, as well as drinking fountains and water spigots. A small playground offers tykes a chance to burn off any remaining energy before you slip them into their sleeping bags.
23705 Frederick Rd., Clarksburg, Md. montgomeryparks.org. The park has 63 tent campsites and is open March through November, though bath houses are closed in March and November. $35 and up per night; two-night minimum required. Book online at web1.myvscloud.com/wbwsc/mdmontgomeryctywt.wsc.
Lums Pond State Park
For the family that can’t sit still, set your GPS for this pet-friendly park located a two-hour drive away in Delaware. Seventeen miles of trails are ready to be biked and hiked. Visitors can bring their own watercraft or rent a rowboat, canoe, kayak or pedal boat to pilot across the placid waters of the largest freshwater pond in the state. Toss a line in for striped bass, bluegills and pickerels (fishing permits required). For more adrenalized action, hit up the Go Ape treetop course offering aerial adventures for all ages, including zip-lines over the pond, rope ladders and a Tarzan swing (costs additional fees). Wildlife abounds — from live reptiles and fish at the nature center to a plethora of bird life throughout the park, including ospreys, blue herons and egrets.
1068 Howell School Rd., Bear, Del. destateparks.com. The park has 10 campsites and 70 RV sites that accommodate tents and is open year-round. $15 and up per night. Book online at delawarestateparks.reserveamerica.com.
Paw Paw Tunnel Campground
Have you been bingeing “Ghost Hunters,” “Kindred Spirits” or “Paranormal State”? This campground, a two-hour car ride from the city, is for you. Nearby, the C&O Canal flows through the Paw Paw Tunnel, a half-mile-long feat of engineering constructed out of nearly 6 million bricks. Legend has it that the tunnel is haunted by the spirit of a lock keeper who died in a violent fire in the late 19th century, so keep your eyes peeled and your EMF gauge on. If you want to skip the ghost hunting, there are plenty of opportunities for biking and hiking the towpath alongside the canal. Facilities are limited at the campsite. It is equipped with portable toilets, but no showers; drinking water is available from hand pumps, but only between April 15 and Nov. 1.
Mile 156 Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Towpath, Oldtown, Md. recreation.gov. The campground has 10 campsites and is open year-round. $10 and up per night. Book online at recreation.gov.
Shenandoah River State Park
Right on the South Fork of the Shenandoah River, a 90-minute trip from the city, this campsite offers grand views wherever you look — including over five miles of shoreline, the majestic Massanutten Mountain in the west and the epic spread of Shenandoah National Park off to the east. Stretching over 1,600 acres, the park features more than 24 miles of trails ready for biking, hiking and horse-riding adventures. A dozen campsites are perched on the waterfront. Many campsites at the park include water and electricity, as well as fire rings, picnic tables and lantern holders, and there are shower and bathroom facilities available.
350 Daughter of Stars Dr., Bentonville, Va. dcr.virginia.gov. The park has 31 campsites and is open year-round. $25 and up per night. Book online at reservevaparks.com. | 2022-08-23T12:36:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Car camping spots in the D.C. area - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/23/car-camping-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/23/car-camping-dc/ |
Man sentenced in scheme to defraud Rep. Matt Gaetz’s father of $25M
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in July 2021 in Washington. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
A federal judge on Monday sentenced a Florida businessman to a little over five years in prison for his role in a 2021 plot to defraud the father of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) of $25 million as the congressman found himself under investigation for possible sex crimes.
Stephen M. Alford pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in November. This week, Alford was sentenced to 63 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, according to court documents.
Randall Lockhart, Alford’s public defender, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post. Gaetz has not been charged with any crime.
Florida man charged in connection with overture to Matt Gaetz’s father about the investigation of his son
The scheme was first made public on March 30, 2021, when Gaetz appeared on Fox News hours after the New York Times first reported that the congressman was under investigation. Gaetz claimed the Times’s story was a “planted leak” meant to distract from the real crime — a shakedown of him and his father.
“What is happening is an extortion of me and my family,” Gaetz said.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) addressed new, public allegations that he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on March 30. (Video: The Washington Post)
According to court records, Alford and another man somehow learned that Gaetz was under a Department of Justice probe before the investigation was publicly reported. Don Gaetz — the congressman’s father and a former Florida Senate president — received a text message on March 16, 2021, with a request to discuss the investigation into his son, according to the indictment in Alford’s case.
The Justice Department was investigating Joel Greenberg, a former Seminole County, Fla., tax collector and an associate of Gaetz. During the course of that probe, investigators uncovered information that could implicate the congressman, The Post previously reported. A spokesperson for Gaetz did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Tuesday. The congressman has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
Last May, Greenberg pleaded guilty to six federal crimes, including trafficking a 17-year-old girl. Greenberg has provided investigators with information about the Republican representative as part of his plea deal, The Post reported.
The sex-trafficking investigation that’s zeroing in on Matt Gaetz, explained
The day after receiving the text message, Don Gaetz met with the sender and was provided with a letter outlining the plan, prosecutors said. If the Gaetzes helped fund efforts to locate and rescue Robert A. Levinson — the longest-held American hostage in Iran — President Biden would “strongly consider” pardoning Rep. Gaetz, if necessary, or otherwise direct the Justice Department to halt its investigation of the congressman, court records state.
The plan was deemed “Project Homecoming.”
That same day, Alford met with Don Gaetz to elaborate on the plan and name his price: $25 million, according to court documents.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, Alford and his team insisted that Levinson had been recently spotted and that the funds would help bring him back, records state. Over the next few days, Alford promised to get a proof-of-life video for Levinson and turn Rep. Gaetz into “such a hero,” according to prosecutors.
But the plan soon started to crumble. Don Gaetz was interviewed by the FBI about his contact with Alford on March 20, 2021. According to court documents, during his last meeting with Alford, Don Gaetz wore a wire, capturing the businessman’s promises.
However, when investigators asked Alford in April about the statements he had made, Alford called them “a lie” — grounds to charge him with “making material false promises,” court documents state. | 2022-08-23T12:57:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Stephen Alford sentenced in attempt to extort Rep. Matt Gaetz's father - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/23/matt-gaetz-father-extortion-investigation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/23/matt-gaetz-father-extortion-investigation/ |
Lhakpa and Phurba Dickey Sherpa, the owners of Sherpa House Restaurant and Culture Center in Golden, Co., pose with various household items from Lhakpa’s childhood home in Nepal. (Joni Schrantz/for The Washington Post)
GOLDEN, COLO. — The four-hour round trip commute to school never fazed Lhakpa Sherpa. Granted, this was no ordinary commute for any ordinary person. Before the sun peaked over the Himalayan mountains, Lhakpa loaded his bag and hiked to school from Syangma, a fairly remote Nepalese village neighboring the Mount Everest base camp — crossing creeks, dodging snakes and bears, and plowing through the jungle on his route.
When he finally returned home, famished, his mom assembled a hearty bowl of stew: potatoes and vegetables in a lightly spiced soup.
“Because we lived in a very cold, hard climate in Nepal, the food had to be filling. It had to be a broth. It had to have a lot of stuff in there,” Lhakpa says. “And so Sherpa stew, noodle soup and chow mein really warm you up.”
Memories of home-cooked food stuck with him. Today, Lhakpa lives here in Golden, where he runs Sherpa House Restaurant and Cultural Center, which has specialized in Himalayan cuisine since 2009. The restaurant dishes out Tibetan specialties such as momos and thukpa, or Sherpa stew, and Indian dishes such as chicken tikka masala and daal bhat. But Sherpa House is not just a one-stop shop to chow on food, beer and chai. After walking through the beautifully landscaped courtyard, customers can also purchase traditional Nepalese gifts, admire a room with decor from Lhakpa’s childhood home, and learn about mountaineering from a staff boasting 45 total Everest summits.
One of the most famous Sherpas, Tenzing Norgay, was alongside Edmund Hillary in 1953 when they became the first climbers to reach the summit of Everest. Since then, Sherpas have migrated all over the world. (Sherpa refers to a Nepalese ethnic group with origins in eastern Tibet, and many Sherpas share the last name after the Nepalese government assigned it to them.)
Today, more than 200,000 Nepalese live in the United States; the Sherpa population makes up a small fraction of that number. Nearly 3,500 Sherpas reside in New York City, the largest enclave outside of the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu, according to the Sherpa Association in America. But as bigger cities push out small businesses, a reality heightened at the start of the pandemic, Sherpas are fleeing to places such as Colorado for new work opportunities — and the geography. In recent decades, dozens have opened restaurants in this mountainous state.
Around 500 Sherpas reside in Colorado, according to Lhakpa, who says he meets nearly all of their families at an annual New Year’s celebration in the greater Denver area. Most of them come from the Khumbu region of Nepal, where their proximity to the Himalayan mountains allowed them to connect with American travelers, and for some, plan a move to the United States.
Growing up near the Everest base camp, Lhakpa became immersed in mountaineering culture, and as a result, frequently interacted with American tourists summiting the 29,032-foot mountain. As one of his region’s trek guides, he befriended an American couple from Golden. They invited him to visit their home and eventually, in 1997, sponsored his university education. He has remained in Golden ever since, citing his loyalty to the couple and the vibrant rock climbing community at Golden’s American Mountaineering Center. Slowly, but surely, he brought over his family, including his wife, Phurba Dickey Sherpa, who runs the Sherpa House kitchen.
Before the restaurant, Lhakpa had set his sights on the landscaping business. Under the name Sherpa Landscaping, he recruited other Sherpas in the area to tend to his neighbors’ outdoor projects. But in the winter, work dried up and he had to let his workers go. Leaving Colorado wasn’t on the table, but Lhakpa wanted to keep his Sherpa friends close by. After a few conversations, the idea for Sherpa House was born.
“I said, ‘Oh, we should open a restaurant. It has to be a Sherpa House and Cultural Center so that all the Sherpas work here and can speak the language and eat the food,’ ” Lhakpa remembers pitching his future staff.
Sandwiched between India and mountainous Tibet, Sherpas have developed their own customs and food culture. Sherpa cuisine may be unfamiliar to most outside the region, but it incorporates familiar elements: Chinese, Indian, Nepalese and Tibetan. What distinguishes Sherpa food is the technique of mixing ingredients. When Lhakpa was a child, certain spices and ingredients were hard to come by in the mountains.
“You don’t have a lot of rice, you don’t have a lot of flour, you don’t have a whole lot of potatoes,” he says. “But you have a little bit of a lot of things.”
With limited ingredients came vast ingenuity. Sherpa chefs “put a little bit of everything” into one pot and create their own version of Sherpa stew, which can range from a thinly spiced broth to a thick potato soup teeming with fresh vegetables. The spice should be noticeable, according to Lhakpa, but the ingredient, whether the potato or carrot, must truly shine.
“If you taste Indian food, there’s a lot of spice and a lot of rich creams,” Lhakpa says. “But if you taste the Sherpa food, it’s much lighter.”
Recipe: This chicken noodle soup from Tibet with ginger and green chiles will warm you right up
Three hundred miles southwest in Durango, Karma Bhotia has operated Himalayan Kitchen for 15 years, although he says he never imagined himself in Colorado. Bhotia, who identifies as Sherpa-Tibetan, worked as a cook for eight years in Austria, then, in 2000, moved to Pasadena, Calif., where he rejuvenated a failing restaurant. Sunny Southern California tempted him to open another restaurant, but a friend heard that he was looking for new property and promptly sold him on Durango — which is at the same altitude as Bhotia’s birthplace in Chyamtang, Nepal.
“Durango is a perfect place to go, because you are a mountain guide, and there’s a lot of mountains,” Bhotia recalls his friend saying. Himalayan Kitchen has become a fixture in the Durango community. Bhotia buys local ingredients from Durango yak farmers and cultivates special catering events for locals. Yak meatballs, tandoor-roasted meats and vegetable curries make up the long menu. On his spicier dishes, he can even turn up the heat.
“In Colorado, many world travelers know spicy food, and so I have to upgrade my spice level,” he says. “In California, everyone is more in the city, and they like more mild and subtle [flavors].”
Beyond the mountains and temperate climate, Colorado contains two culinary treasures found in Nepal: yaks and beer. Native to the Himalayas, yaks thrive at high elevations and help climbers transport essential goods in rugged terrain. In the past 10 to 15 years, more ranchers in Colorado have begun raising yaks and marketing them as a more healthful and leaner alternative to beef. One such rancher is Robert Carrell, the owner of Chama Valley Meat Company. He lives in Durango and sells yak meat to Himalayan Kitchen and to Tibetan monks in Santa Fe, N.M. Ten years into raising yaks, he has noticed that his Nepalese customers often request primal yak cuts, which provide a different perspective on “how to use every part of the animal.”
Beer is part of the Nepalese mountain culture, too, and it is heralded as a celebratory swig after a long day of climbing. But in Nepal, Lhakpa noticed that any thin, fermented liquid became known as beer. He wanted to show that this drink could be “found in many different cultures, different flavors, different tastes.” After drinking his way around Colorado’s craft beer scene, Lhakpa started Sherpa Brewery, the first craft beer brewery in Nepal. He also serves the beer on tap at his restaurant in Golden.
To preserve their culture, Sherpa restaurateurs have devoted resources to improving their communities in the United States and back in their homeland. Pemba Sherpa, the owner of Sherpa’s Adventure Restaurant and Bar in Boulder, penned a memoir recounting his winding journey to Colorado and his efforts to give back to his community in Nepal. Others also raised money after the devastating 2015 earthquake in Nepal and traveled back to their villages to build paved roads, schools and cafeterias. In Bhotia’s case, he recalls the feeling of starving as a child back home, so, through the Karma & Jyamu Bhotia Foundation, he helps fund a lunch program and day care at a Chyamtang school.
“Our responsibility is we should, at least before departing this world, leave it better than what you had when you arrived,” Bhotia says.
These days, Lhakpa no longer has to endure a rugged commute or scrape together food to fill his belly. He has built his own extended community in Golden and created opportunities at Sherpa House for fellow immigrants.
But every now and then, Lhakpa glances over to the Rocky Mountains, where he climbs one of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks for pleasure, and those memories of home — the mountains, foothills and creeks — are still fresh in his mind. “And so those are the king of the mountains,” he says of the Himalayas. “But these, these are baby mountains.” | 2022-08-23T13:58:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sherpa cuisine and culture have a foothold in the Colorado mountains - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/08/23/sherpa-restaurants-colorado-nepalese-immigrants/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/08/23/sherpa-restaurants-colorado-nepalese-immigrants/ |
What a stay-at-home parent does in a workday
Perspective by Zeba Rashid
(Courtesy of Zeba Rashid/Washington Post illustration)
Welcome to The Work Day, a series that charts a single day in various women’s working lives — from gallery owners to chief executives. In this installment, we hear from Zeba Rashid, a stay-at-home parent who recorded a day in August.
Name: Zeba Rashid
Location: Manhattan
Job title: Chief home officer
Previous jobs: I worked in public relations for 15 years.
What led me to my current role: When I reminisce on graduating from the George Washington University and making a choice that changed the course of my career forever, I am glad that I conceded a safe and salaried position in finance to be a fashion intern at Vogue. As a bright-eyed, fresh graduate embarking on a risky and thrilling career path, I was excited but also anxious about the reaction of my parents. Despite my career trajectory being outside the South Asian societal norms of being a doctor, lawyer or engineer, my parents were surprisingly supportive of my choices. After all, my father, a cardiologist, always instilled a sense of independence and career ambition in all three of his daughters — ‘‘Be the best at whatever you choose.”
As a Pakistani American bent on breaking cultural expectations, I was determined to succeed and make my public relations dreams come true. From a naive teenager’s dream of walking in Louboutins in Vogue hallways to getting the opportunity to embark on this journey, it all seemed surreal to me.
I can proudly say that I have thrived in my PR career over the past 15 years. Over the span of my career, I cultivated meaningful relationships with my clients, media and industry peers that have transformed into genuine and long-lasting friendships. During this period, I also got married, had two beautiful children and completed my master’s degree. While I continued to work in the industry, creating and managing an ideal work-life balance with two kids and a demanding and high stress career was an uphill battle.
Stepping into 2020, I had no idea that a global pandemic would reorient my priorities. During the pandemic, I had to isolate in our Miami vacation home with a toddler and a newborn baby while navigating through postpartum depression (PPD) while my husband worked as a front-line physician out of state.
A silver lining to virtual working was that it gave me an opportunity to peripherally observe my kids during the day; sometimes, from inside my home office, I would hear them laugh and play, and those moments would really stir up my motherly emotions. For the better part of my life, I had put my career, which was my first love, above my family and most importantly my own mental health.
However, with the increasing uncertainty of the world around me, racial injustice and senseless school shootings, I had to take a step back and deeply reflect on my outlook on life and what I needed in this moment. This is what enabled and empowered me to take the scariest leap of my life, which was to take ownership of my time and happiness. For the first time in my life, I have had the liberty of time to do those little and big things that bring me so much joy, focusing on my philanthropy work with UN Women, my children, my husband (who has supported me unconditionally in every decision that I make), family and friends.
This was a role that turned into something that was always so foreign to me, chief home officer, and my first love had to take the back seat, for now.
How I spend the majority of my day: Driven by my desire to consistently improve my quality of life, my life choices are determined by my goals and objectives, and life for me extends beyond myself to my loved ones. My husband and children are a sacred part of my life, and I’m making sure all touch points in their lives and our home are a tight-running ship. Recently, my days are centered around my children’s summer schedule (I am extremely hands-on in every aspect of their lives), managing our house staff, working with my philanthropy partners for upcoming initiatives, and focusing on preparing all materials and logistics to get my children ready for September. This means working around-the-clock, be it arranging things for my children, meeting with school directors, completing long intake forms, facilitating medical records or dedicating time to myself.
The “me time” I get after dropping my kids off at summer camp is well spent on developing a physical and mental wellness routine for myself, including things like hot yoga and taking time to go for a walk with my coffee. After some well-deserved time to myself, I get back to my kids’ schedule, which means arranging and managing extracurricular activities for them for the remainder of summer and getting them a spot for fall 2022 activities, such as horseback riding, tennis or swimming.
5:30 a.m.: I love waking up bright and early before my kids to refurbish my Zen state of mind with meditation and to get started on my routine. Typically, my children wake up by 6 a.m. and we have some heavenly morning cuddles. I prep their clothes and backpacks the night before, so the mornings are efficient in getting them ready and out the door by 7:30 a.m. Although it’s not always smooth sailing (we occasionally have toddler tantrums), I embrace these moments with my kiddos.
8:30 a.m.-2 p.m.: Noah and Liyana are at camp during this time, so this time block is dedicated to running errands, catching up with friends, and doing my philanthropy work and whatever I need to get done or want to do.
2:30 p.m.: I pick my kids up from camp by 2:30 p.m., and we have lunch. I coordinate pick up and drop-offs for their afternoon activities, and we come home and have free play. More often than not, I have my hands full, and the afternoons are so busy that it passes in a blur.
6 p.m.: As the clock rolls to 6 p.m., it’s time for dinner. I am no domestic goddess by any means, nor do I aspire to be, so cooking and the kitchen was always no zone for me, but I am learning my way! Luckily for me and the kids, my husband is a great cook.
We love going out to dinner once or twice a week, but mostly we prefer home-cooked meals. The evening routine is important so my kids can get ready for bed with bath time, brushing teeth and reading time, and then so they can get to sleep on time.
8:30 p.m.: Some days, once the kids are asleep, I just turn my phone off. If I am up for it, I catch up on emails, texts and calls that I didn’t attend to during the day. I have also been taking time to journal, which I am trying to make a daily practice. I go to sleep with a grateful heart and look forward to another precious morning where my time is on my terms. | 2022-08-23T13:58:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What a stay-at-home parent does in a workday - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/23/workday-stay-at-home-parent/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/23/workday-stay-at-home-parent/ |
Our new national reality is now a dystopian novel
By Paul Starobin
Ryan Inzana for The Washington Post (Ryan Inzana/For The Washington Post)
Imagine that America’s ongoing political strife descends into outright civil war and large numbers of people flee and establish enclaves — “mini-Americas” — in foreign lands. The migrants live in helpless vulnerability; their residency documents might be revoked at any time. But even as they struggle to make sense of their precarious new existence, the divisions that provoked their flight reemerge in their adopted homes.
That’s the witching-hour premise of Ken Kalfus’s new, all-too-timely novel, “2 A.M. in Little America.” The story mostly takes place in one such enclave, in an unnamed, non-English-speaking country. “It’s not a prediction,” he recently explained to me. “It’s a warning.”
We were enjoying a picnic lunch in leafy Peterborough, N.H., where Kalfus, who lives in Philadelphia, was bucolically encamped at a residency program for artists. Eager to explore his thinking behind the work, I spent the day with him. He greeted me in a pronounced Bronx accent and a summer fedora, a can of bug spray in hand.
Review: Ken Kalfus gives readers an unsettling portrait of a humbled America
The Bronx accent is courtesy of his parents, both natives of the borough. Kalfus was born there, in 1954, and grew up on Long Island. He dropped out of New York University — to make time to finish James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” he quipped — drove a taxicab and set about on a writing career.
“2 A.M. in Little America” is Kalfus’s fourth novel. I began by asking how he came to the idea. “I was thinking of the Yugoslavs,” he said. In 1991, Kalfus and his wife moved to Belgrade for a year’s stay, and shortly after their arrival, war broke out between Serbian nationalists and Croatians.
Yugoslavia began to disintegrate — and so, too, the idea of Yugoslavia as a union between south Slavs of varied religious and ethnic identities. “I saw how people started getting trapped into their own narratives, their own histories,” he recalled. As the violence intensified, Kalfus also bore witness to a mad flight for safety anywhere out of the country. A seemingly permanent diaspora — mini-Yugoslavias — took root. “My observation at this time was there was no reason why this could not happen in the United States,” he told me.
Yet it was not until more than a quarter-century later, in 2018, that Kalfus began to write the novel that became “2 A.M. in Little America.” He said the trigger, after years of brooding over “the fragmentation of our public discourse,” was the ascension of Donald Trump to the presidency and the accompanying fallout, as America’s long-standing tensions ratcheted up.
Kalfus completed a first draft in about eight months, gave it to his wife to read, as is his habit, polished the work to his satisfaction — and waited for a publisher to bite. At first, no one did: His previous books, including three collections of short stories, generally met with critical acclaim, but none made the bestseller list. (A short story about a Russian scientist was turned into the HBO film “Pu-239.”)
But then came the Jan. 6, 2021, uprising at the Capitol: America’s tribal furies shockingly on display to the world. The novel sold six days later to Milkweed Editions. “It’s dark,” Milkweed’s publisher, Daniel Slager, told Kalfus’s agent, Christy Fletcher, in an email she read to me, “but brilliant and clarifying, too.” Since May, readers have bought more than half of the 8,000 hardcover copies that have been released, Slager told me, and Milkweed is now preparing a paperback run of 10,000.
My interest in “2 A.M. in Little America” was prompted by my fixation as a journalist with the topic of America’s fall from global preeminence. Kalfus and I agree on a core proposition: The American Century, a term coined in 1941 by Life magazine founder Henry Luce, is over. Today’s America offers not an object of emulation but a cautionary lesson on the perils of endemic polarization.
The American Century exhibited hubris as a national personality trait. In his book, Kalfus plumbs the opposite of this attribute: self-doubt, which is the defining feature of Ron Patterson, the main character and narrator. We meet Ron on the rooftop of an apartment house in a “foreign city,” at his job as a repairman of security equipment. He is bored, though not all that discontented, with his humdrum daily life, accepting of his tenancy in a mid-rise flat, “three to a cell-like room, all of us migrants, all still learning the local language, all with probable visa infractions.”
It’s a familiar description — of how migrants nowadays fleeing to America, from turbulent lands south of the border, say, might experience life in the United States. To see how it might feel on the other side can only make the American reader wince.
New residency requirements imposed on migrants force Ron to move to a different country, and he settles in the Little America of the story’s title. Except that he cannot really feel a sense of belonging to the enclave because of a pervasive atmosphere of suspicion. His confusion in these strained circumstances is inescapable, as when rival clans interpret his spur-of-the-moment decision to walk his dog in a particular empty lot as a sign of tribal loyalties of which he actually has none.
There is no mention of Trump in the story and no mention of Republicans or Democrats. Kalfus, a liberal Democrat, told me that he did not want to write an explicitly political book. His goal, he said, was to focus on the “experience” of forced migration — to show what such a life might be like down to its most quotidian elements.
To put down the book, to re-immerse in the onrushing news stream of our raucous times, is sometimes to feel the world of “2 A.M. in Little America” encroaching on real life. A coup attempt, a jaw-slackening probe of the event with intimations another could be on the way, mass shootings — what fresh horror will pop up on our screens? Is it time to get out?
“You just don’t know where America is headed these days,” a fourth-generation Californian, now resettled in Portugal as part of a growing community of ex-Golden Staters, recently told the Los Angeles Times. “Are we going to be fighting with each other forever?” Yet Portugal is proving to be no paradise. As native Portuguese blame the transplants for surging housing prices, the migrants, the Times reported, “debate over how to define themselves” — exactly the quandary Kalfus poses in his novel.
I mentioned the story to Kalfus. He said that part of what it means to be a “Lost American” — which is how he describes Ron Patterson — is to be stripped of the “privilege” that generations of Americans have considered an entitlement: have passport, will go where we please and do as we please. This decline in status may be a rude awakening, but it seems unavoidable. “We are getting deprogrammed right now,” he said with a rueful chuckle.
So which is it for him: to continue to live in a forever-feuding America or to head for uncertain shores? On July 4, after learning that a gunman had opened fire on a parade in Highland Park, Ill., “I thought, this country is at the end of its rope,” Kalfus told me in Peterborough. “And then I thought, the rope is pretty long.” He isn’t ready to bolt from America — not yet.
Paul Starobin, author of “After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age,” is writing a book on Russia. | 2022-08-23T13:58:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ken Kalfus's new novel rings true in a dystopian America - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/08/23/kalfus-book-america-dystopia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/08/23/kalfus-book-america-dystopia/ |
Story by Loveday Morris
Photos by Aliona Kardash
Daniela Nich and her 18-year-old daughter, Uliana Mikheeva, are returning from Berlin to Kremenchuk to visit their husband and father, who has not been allowed to leave Ukraine. They are on a train that runs from Berlin to the Polish border town of Przemysl, carrying many Ukrainians back home.
“I’m a little bit worried,” Nich, 45, a teacher, says of their decision to return to their hometown straddling the Dnieper River in eastern Ukraine. A previous short visit in the relatively safe western city of Lviv played on her nerves.
Air raid sirens regularly sounded. “It was like fear on my skin,” she says. And Kremenchuk brings more risk. In late June, a Russian cruise missile slammed into a shopping mall in their hometown, killing at least 21 people.
“You never know what will happen; it’s a lottery,” she says. But her mother is elderly and sick and can’t leave the city. They want to spend some time with her.
Uliana shrugs off the danger. “I just want to see my family, my friends,” she says.
“A good team,” Nich says. “One can be nervous, and one needs to be stable.”
Still, the future is a fog, says Nich.
From Przemysl, there are direct trains to the farthest reaches of Ukraine on railway lines that have continued to function. For Nich and her daughter, it’s a more than 20-hour journey on to the country’s far east. Other passengers change trains for a 16-hour ride to Odessa, or 11 hours to Kyiv.
Gennady and his wife Valentina are returning to Kyiv to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.
In car 268 are Valentina and Gennady. The were high school sweethearts. Now they are 75 and will get back to Ukraine just in time for their 50th wedding anniversary. “We are really happy to go home, but we are nervous,” says Valentina, who like some others preferred not to give her last name as she returned to the uncertainty of home. “We don’t know what is waiting for us.”
Their Kyiv apartment was damaged in an explosion, but they’ve been told it can be repaired. They’ll stay with two older grandchildren, whose pictures they proudly share. They were comfortable in holiday apartments that housed Ukrainians in rural Poland. Most were young families; Gennady played with the children, and it felt like a community.
“We just want to go home,” Valentina says, tears welling up.
“Don’t cry; we are already not so young anymore,” says Gennady. They are soon laughing again, recalling their school days.
“We are actually Russian,” says Valentina, who was raised in the Kuban region during Soviet times. “But our motherland is Ukraine. Our children and grandchildren were born here.”
‘If there was a house I could rent in my parents’ region, I would do it’
Kateryna Dobrovolska and her daughter Liliia are going to Odessa to visit Dobrovolska's parents.
‘I realized I missed Ukraine’
Anya is returning home to Kyiv from Wroclaw, Poland, after taking a break from the war. Other Ukrainians on the train are refugees returning home either for a visit or to rebuild their lives.
A Ukrainian family on a train traveling from Berlin to the Polish border with Ukraine.
Loveday Morris is The Washington Post's Berlin bureau chief. She was previously based in Jerusalem, Baghdad and Beirut for The Post. Twitter Twitter | 2022-08-23T13:58:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A train ride back to Ukraine: Stories of fear, longing and love - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/ukraine-war-russia-germany-refugees/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/ukraine-war-russia-germany-refugees/ |
Despite its oil riches, Angola is a miserable place for many to live. The country churns out 1.2 million barrels of crude a day, making it Africa’s second-biggest producer after Nigeria, yet about half of its 33 million people live on less than $2 a day. Graft is rife and most government services are shoddy or non-existent. Responsibility rests with the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA, which has ruled for almost half a century and channeled much of the nation’s wealth into the hands of a tiny, politically connected elite. Opposition parties are capitalizing on disgruntlement with the status quo and soaring food prices, and elections scheduled for Aug. 24 are shaping up to be the most hotly contested since a 27-year civil war ended in 2002.
The MPLA has been credited with ending the war and presiding over an economic expansion that saw gross domestic product expand every year between 2003 and 2015 -- when the end of an oil boom heralded the onset of a five-year slump. Angola also became a byword for nepotism and corruption, with former President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos’s family and his inner circle among the primary beneficiaries. President Joao Lourenco, 68, who succeeded Dos Santos in 2017 and is vying for a second term, has turned on his one-time allies and tried to recover billions of dollars they stashed abroad. He’s also instituted a series of other reforms to shore up Angola’s finances, diversify the economy and attract foreign investment. While he’s won plaudits internationally, his selective anti-graft drive and the slow progress made in addressing rampant poverty and unemployment have eroded his domestic support, particularly among the youth. Lourenco has pleaded with his countrymen for patience, saying it’s a matter of time before his policies translate into better living conditions.
The ruling party’s main challenge comes from the National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola, or Unita, which was on the losing side of the civil war and has been its main political rival ever since. Unita is led by Adalberto Costa Junior, 60, who trained as an electronics engineer and has served as a lawmaker and the party’s spokesman. Widely known as ACJ, he’s pledged to redistribute Angola’s oil revenue and been outspoken about the unacceptable levels of corruption and poverty. His sharp, combative debating style in parliament and in the media have earned him a strong following among young, urban voters. While Costa Junior has pledged to reduce the role of the state in the economy, he’s ruled out replacing civil servants appointed by the MPLA, or reneging on the nation’s debt obligations. He’s complained that the president has excessive powers, and has committed to curtailing them if he wins the post.
Foreign investors will be watching closely to see whether the new administration continues with the planned sale of stakes in oil giant Sonangol EP and other state companies. They’ll also be monitoring whether Angola utilizes windfall revenue stemming from higher crude prices to help settle about $19 billion in debt owed to China -- funding that was mostly used to build roads, hospitals and rail links. The government has sought to diversify its financing away from the Asian nation. It completed a $4.5 billion program with the International Monetary Fund in 2021 and sold $1.75 billion in Eurobonds in 2022. It also aims to increase fuel sales to the European Union, which has been trying to reduce its reliance on Russian oil and gas following the invasion of Ukraine.
While the National Electoral Commission insists the vote will be free and fair, officials from Unita and other opposition parties have questioned the body’s independence and accused it of favoring the MPLA and not doing enough to prevent voting fraud. They’ve also criticized the siting of polling stations and complained that it’s too difficult to register election monitors. State media have devoted 95% of election coverage to the government and the ruling party, and carried live broadcasts of its rallies, according to Carlos Rosado de Carvalho, an economist at the Catholic University in Luanda, who has been monitoring the campaigns. Unita has asked its supporters to maintain a presence around the polling stations to ensure the balloting and counting is fair. The party has ruled out a return to armed conflict but threatened to hold street protests if there is an attempt to rig the election. Several observer missions will monitor the vote, including ones from the EU and African Union.
Eight parties will compete for 220 seats in the single-chamber parliament. The person that heads the lawmaker candidate list of the party that wins the most seats in the National Assembly becomes president. More than 14 million people have registered to vote. | 2022-08-23T14:07:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Here’s Why Oil-Rich Angola is Ripe for Political Change - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/heres-why-oil-rich-angola-is-ripe-for-political-change/2022/08/23/43684c74-22eb-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/heres-why-oil-rich-angola-is-ripe-for-political-change/2022/08/23/43684c74-22eb-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
Merit Pay Is the Solution to Teacher Shortages
With a new school year getting underway, public-school districts in the US are sounding alarms about a looming shortage of teachers. In response, some states have loosened rules to bring more workers, including those who haven’t yet earned a college degree, into the profession. These efforts are worthwhile — but they’re only addressing half the problem.
Although reports of a nationwide “exodus” of teachers are exaggerated, acute shortages have persisted for years in certain areas, especially in low-income and rural districts. District leaders have also reported increased difficulty filling vacancies for full-time math, science and high school teachers. For the most part, money isn’t the issue: Over the past two years, districts have tapped federal relief money to ramp up hiring of substitutes and remote-learning instructors who could step in for teachers out with Covid, but they have been slow to spend the funds. As the pandemic subsides, those resources could be used to hire teachers in high-need areas.
The big challenge is finding them. With enrollment in teacher-preparation programs in steep decline, states are boosting incentives to attract new graduates and to keep experienced teachers in the work force. They’re also experimenting with other ways to broaden the labor pool. Pennsylvania has lifted restrictions to allow teachers licensed in other states, while Arizona permits candidates with subject-matter expertise to work without a teaching credential. In Georgia, retired teachers can return to the classroom and keep their pension benefits. Roughly a dozen states have made it easier to get a teaching license, with both Arizona and Florida waiving long-standing requirements that teachers earn bachelor’s degrees before being hired for full-time positions; in Florida, military veterans without degrees can obtain five-year teaching certificates if they pass an exam in the subject they’re hired to teach.
Policies like these have provoked the ire of unions, which say they convey disrespect for teachers and undermine professional standards. And it’s surely fair to worry about hiring unqualified applicants. Yet in teaching, as in other occupations, merely having a degree is no guarantee of competence — and there’s little evidence that teachers with formal education credentials produce better outcomes for students than those without them.
Rather than dwelling on degrees or other credentials, districts should try to focus more on ability — in part by revamping how teachers are evaluated and paid. Linking teachers’ compensation to their performance would help to raise academic standards, encourage new teachers to pursue professional development, and draw more skilled workers to the profession. Districts in at least 30 states offer performance-based bonuses to teachers, which have led to average gains in student learning equal to an additional three weeks of school.
Programs that offer incentives partly based on students’ standardized test scores have also been found to improve retention rates among Black and Latino teachers and those working in low-income schools. Despite what the unions say, competent educators should have nothing to fear from such reforms. If anything, veteran teachers stand to benefit from the focus on attracting new talent, which should push up salaries across the board.
After two years of disrupted and inadequate learning, confidence in the American public school system is near an all-time low. Expanding programs to recruit new teachers in places where they’re most needed — and paying them what they’re worth — are necessary steps toward giving all students the education they deserve.
• Banning Books Is a Terrible Idea: Stephen L. Carter
• Online Education Just Won’t Die: Andrea Gabor
• A Wake-Up Call for Public Education: Michael R. Bloomberg | 2022-08-23T14:07:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Merit Pay Is the Solution to Teacher Shortages - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/merit-pay-is-the-solution-to-teacher-shortages/2022/08/23/55b9fb54-22e4-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/merit-pay-is-the-solution-to-teacher-shortages/2022/08/23/55b9fb54-22e4-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
DALLAS, TEXAS - AUGUST 06: Former U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC held at the Hilton Anatole on August 06, 2022 in Dallas, Texas. CPAC began in 1974, and is a conference that brings together and hosts conservative organizations, activists, and world leaders in discussing current events and future political agendas. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images) (Photographer: Brandon Bell/Getty Images North America)
Should former presidents who are believed to have committed crimes, either in office or afterward, be indicted?
It is never simply the case that prosecutors in the U.S. indict anyone who they believe is guilty of crime, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Clive Crook has pointed out. For one, it’s misconduct to indict without confidence that a conviction will follow.
On the other hand, we should ignore calls to avoid investigations and prosecutions because of their likely electoral effects. Will Trump’s chances of winning the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, should he seek it, be helped or harmed by enforcing a warrant and seizing boxes of materials that he (allegedly) shouldn’t have had in his possession?(1)What about the possibility of angering Trump’s supporters to the point of civil unrest? Even if prosecutors could know the answer to these questions, the potential political fallout shouldn’t be a factor in their decision about whether to prosecute.
If the rule of law means anything, it is that no one can use the threat of violence as a Get Out of Jail Free card. As Greg Sargent of the Washington Post’s Plum Line blog wrote, “...there will be no appeasing Donald Trump and his most fervent supporters. There will be no point at which they acknowledge that any law enforcement activity related to the court-approved search of the former president’s home is legitimate.”
Indeed, the former president’s devout fans are likely to take that view of any criminal justice action targeting him, no matter the evidence. We know who Trump is. Just as he can’t lose an election without claiming fraud (indeed, he claims fraud even when he wins), he will never voluntarily acknowledge the legitimacy of a legal action against him or his allies. That can’t be the basis for ignoring what otherwise would be a decision to investigate. Or indict.
Prosecution is always a judgment call. And in that sense prosecution decisions are always going to be broadly political. When the person involved is a politician, that is only going to be more obvious. And that’s not bad. The criminal justice system is part of the larger political system. The rule of law, after all, is a political concept, part of a general idea of how self-government should work.
What prosecution decisions shouldn’t be is partisan, which is to say, they shouldn’t be based on the best interests of one political party. Nor should they be personal, where individuals are singled out for prosecution — or spared from it — because of their political affiliation. That’s why the “lock her up” chants directed at Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign (and, eventually, at a host of other opponents) sanctioned by Trump were such a big deal. They were a repudiation of the entire notion that the law shouldn’t be partisan or personal. They were, in effect, a repudiation of the rule of law.
So where does that leave us? Trump’s illiberal behavior and that of his supporters shouldn’t give him immunity. But while a decision to indict Trump would need to be clearly explained, we can’t judge it on whether it is persuasive to voters at large. And there is no way law enforcement can make sure that their actions won’t be misconstrued by Trump and his supporters, or even by the larger block of Republicans who find appeasing the former president their safest path.
Moreover, because any decision to indict or not is inherently political, Trump’s behavior is a legitimate part of that decision. Trump’s implicit claim that he is above the law should factor into prosecution decisions — and make an indictment more appropriate. So should Trump’s active political career. Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon was justified in part because Nixon mostly accepted exile from active politics. Trump is attempting to poison the republic as rapidly as he can. That can’t justify seeking a way to imprison him, but it certainly can be taken into account when deciding whether or not to overlook crimes that come to the attention of the government. Even at the lowest levels of law enforcement, a suspect who reacts to an investigation by rushing to social media with a pledge to continue ignoring the law would be more likely to be prosecuted than one who acts contrite.
In other words, the decision can’t be personal in the sense of Trump being a political opponent of the current president, but it can be — should be — personal in that it must take into account who Trump is and what he is doing. As many have pointed out, claims that this or that action against Trump is unprecedented for a former president get it all wrong; what is unprecedented was a lawless president and former president.
As a non-lawyer, I can’t say whether that’s true for any of the investigations swirling around Trump. What I can say is that through his own actions, Trump has pretty much begged prosecutors to act if they do have a case. Because otherwise it sure will look as if they are succumbing to his intimidation.
Would Locking Up Trump Serve the Public Interest?: Clive Crook
Why Did Trump Take Classified Documents in the First Place?: Timothy L. O’Brien
(1) At least one poll since the FBI seized boxes of material from Trump suggested he was now looking stronger for the 2024 nomination. But ultra-early polling can be misleading because it tends to reflect name recognition and reflect which candidates have been in the news and therefore on top of voters’ minds. All in all, I’d recommend mostly ignoring nomination or general election polls this early. | 2022-08-23T14:08:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trump’s Behavior Strengthens Case Against Him - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/trumps-behavior-strengthens-case-against-him/2022/08/23/2041c1b8-22e0-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/trumps-behavior-strengthens-case-against-him/2022/08/23/2041c1b8-22e0-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
Flowers and messages at the memorial site for the Highland Park July Fourth shooting in Highland Park. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
HIGHLAND PARK, Ill. — Susan Isaacson was at a Highland Park cafe one recent morning when a smoke alarm began blaring.
Her grandchildren — Casey, 7, and Ava, 5, — panicked. “Are the bad men back?” they asked.
Isaacson said her family has not been the same since a shooter fired into the crowd at a local Fourth of July parade, killing 7 and wounding 40 more. “The kids are not settled,” she said.
That sentiment is echoed by parents and officials throughout this tightknit town, who say the community is struggling to regain its sense of safety as children head back to school this week.
“We thought covid was difficult,” said Michael Lubelfeld, superintendent of the town’s elementary schools. “This makes covid look simple.”
Lubelfeld has held nine trainings for teachers on the subject of trauma. And he has made improvements to the school’s security system, including alert systems with panic buttons for all teachers, bulletproof windows and updated security cameras and door locks.
Even so, some parents are demanding armed guards or a prohibition on large bags, subjects of an upcoming school board meeting.
Others are worried about how their still traumatized youngsters will adjust to a new routine.
Jordana Greenberg was at the parade with her family when the shooting began. She said her children — ages 7, 5 and 2 — are still processing what happened.
Her daughter Hazel, 5, has regularly struggled to sleep. She does not want to ride her bicycle anymore. On a recent visit to Madison, Wis., Hazel looked at the top of the state capitol building and asked her mother “Could a shooter get up there?”
Lindsey Hartman, 41, said her family is still shaken by what happened at the parade, when she and her husband Danny dove onto their daughter Scarlett, 4, to protect her. The trauma rears its head in all kinds of ways, she said.
Recently, the family traveled to Wisconsin. One night, as they put Scarlett to bed, they heard a loud popping noise — fireworks from a camp nearby.
Hartman said it was like “muscle memory” and she dove on top of Scarlett, who asked “is the bad man coming to hurt us?”
“A lot has changed, and nothing has changed,” Hartman said. “We are safe from Crimo [the accused attacker], but there is a next shooter around the corner until we get a ban on assault weapons.”
Therapy dogs and questions: How Highland Park’s children are coping
“Parents are traumatized too,” said Laurie Hochberg, a pediatrician who works in the heart of Highland Park.
Hochberg’s office was so close to the shooting that bullets pierced the walls, shattering the floor-to-ceiling windows. Her practice has since bought new and brighter furniture, and all the children who come in get stress balls and extra stickers.
“It’s hard,” she added. “We are working with the whole family to get back to normal.”
Shelley Firestone, a psychiatrist who grew up in Highland Park, has begun hosting free therapy sessions in a local park. Demand, she said, has been steady.
Many people have come to her trying to make sense of the decisions they made at the shooting. One person is still dealing with the guilt of running past victims because they were desperate to find their own children.
Another told how they fled in a car too small to hold everyone, so people piled into the trunk as they sped away.
Talking about these memories with other survivors has offered a space to process the violence. “When they meet each other, realizing that they are not alone and talk in a way that honors each other, that is the healing piece,” Firestone said.
Gerry Keen, 76, a lifelong Highland Park resident, has attended group therapy weekly. She and her husband were at the parade. As bullets whizzed around them, Keen and her husband lay on the ground, pretending to be dead with injured people all around them.
Keen is still suffering flashbacks. She said she sometimes finds herself suddenly shuddering, getting nauseous and forgetting to breathe.
In the weeks since the shooting, the community has canceled a handful of events because of safety concerns. The Ravinia Festival, a summer-long outdoor music festival in Highland Park, canceled the live cannon fire it sets off during its annual performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture performance, recognizing the potentially triggering effect on the community.
Fireworks scheduled for a wedding reception at a Highland Park Country Club were also canceled.
Since the shooting, the Highland Park City Council unanimously passed a resolution to ban all semiautomatic weapons, high-capacity magazines and body armor. A proposal for a gun shop and indoor shooting range in nearby Long Grove, Ill., was withdrawn after the village manager received over 1,000 emails in protest.
But even as the community has struggled, some here said they have also been impressed with the resilience people have shown.
Jeff Gobena grew up in Highland Park. He now owns Tamales, a popular restaurant that has been in business for 16 years. After the shooting, he closed his doors for just two days, reopening with crime tape still up a few yards away.
“The community needed a place to gather, mourn, talk it out and see each other,” he said.
In the weeks since, he has noticed a change in his customers, he said.
“If table three doesn’t get their burrito quickly, people understand,” Gobena said. “The little things don’t matter so much now.” | 2022-08-23T14:08:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Highland Park, site of mass shooting, continues to cope with trauma - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/23/highland-park-trauma/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/23/highland-park-trauma/ |
California’s timber industry is calling on the military to help control fires
Analysis by Anna Phillips
Good morning! Anna Phillips, a national climate reporter for The Washington Post, wrote the top of The Climate 202 today. What are you doing to help the environment today? 🌎 Let us know! But first:
California’s timber industry wants boots on the ground this fire season
As California confronts peak wildfire season with fewer firefighters than usual, the state’s timber industry is pushing federal and state officials to take the unprecedented step of calling in the National Guard and the U.S. military before fires get out of control.
California has sought military assistance in past years when its firefighting crews were overwhelmed. But logging companies say this year the state shouldn’t wait until it needs help. Worsening heat and drought across California have led to dire predictions for this season, which traditionally is at its worst between July and October. At the same time, the U.S. Forest Service, which has long struggled with staffing shortages, has been scrambling to fill positions.
Now, the timber industry is calling for federal and state officials to compensate for the shortage of firefighters with military troops.
“No ifs, ands or buts about it — both our federal and state firefighting forces are understaffed,” said Matt Dias, president and CEO of the California Forestry Association, an industry group that represents timber companies. “Bringing in battalions or bringing in the National Guard is a solid solution.”
So far, the industry hasn’t been able to persuade federal and state officials to fulfill its request.
California is short on help
By the end of July, there were 3,454 Forest Service firefighters in the state, according to the agency, a decrease of 272 from the year before. A spokesman for Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency, said it is also short about 100 hand crews — whose primary responsibility while assigned to a wildfire is establishing fire lines and removing vegetation to control oncoming fire — mainly because of fewer inmate firefighters. The agency is trying to fill the gap with help from the California Conservation Corps and the state’s National Guard.
If there is a bright spot amid the labor shortage, it’s that California has had a relatively modest fire season.
As of Monday, fires had burned nearly 199,000 acres across the state, compared to the five-year average at this point of more than 1 million acres, according to statistics compiled by Cal Fire. The country is at what is officially called Preparedness Level 3, meaning that national fire managers are not yet having to struggle to find crews and equipment.
“We are actively coordinating with the Army in the event that its support is needed again this year,” Forest Service spokeswoman Michelle Burnett wrote in an email. If resources are stretched thin, then the federal government would “call upon the DOD, the National Guard, and our international partners for additional firefighting support, if needed.”
Stationing troops around California in advance of a major fire would be costly, Dias acknowledged. But he said that having more people would lead to a faster and more robust response, possibly preventing small fires from turning into massive and destructive blazes.
California’s worst wildfires have consumed entire towns. Thousands of people have lost their homes and businesses. Some people have died in the fires, including four this year.
Dias said the timber industry has suffered heavy economic losses. In the past two years, forest fires have charred more than 300,000 acres owned by California logging companies, he said. They have raced to cut and sell the burned trees, known as salvage logging, before they decay. But the losses have piled up. Intensifying wildfires in California are the “largest threat” the industry faces, Dias said.
Lenya Quinn-Davidson, a fire adviser with the University of California Cooperative Extension, said she sympathizes with the industry, but she doesn’t think bringing in more people will save the state’s forests. Fast-moving wildfires like the recent McKinney Fire and last summer’s Dixie Fire can’t be fought, she said, but prescribed burns and thinning might make them less severe.
“There’s this notion that if we just had more people, we could get a handle on putting the fires out,” Quinn-Davidson said. “But the conditions out on the landscape are beyond our ability to control them. The answer is really in the proactive work in the offseason.”
Despite getting Congress to spend big on electric vehicles in the Inflation Reduction Act, the White House now has to persuade tens of millions of skeptical Americans to purchase the cars, Evan Halper reports for The Post.
The push is part of the administration’s goal to electrify the transportation sector, but net-zero carmakers are struggling to shake widespread GOP perceptions of the vehicles as a trophy of coastal elites, unreliable, and a headache to charge. The mainstream adoption of clean cars is expected to be tough for some time, although regulators are pushing to add more affordable models to the market. The law's climate components, which pair incentives for buyers with rewards for manufacturers to increase the domestic production of EVs, will help, but a decent supply of EVs and charging stations still won’t appear overnight.
Meanwhile, Ford Motor on Monday announced plans to cut 3,000 jobs as it restructures and reorients its business around electric vehicles, Jaclyn Peiser and Evan Halper report for The Post.
The layoff announcement comes about a month after the company shared healthy second-quarter earnings, with chief executive Jim Farley saying that he was focused on growing Ford's EV business while “improving profitability.” Ford has also said previously that it is on track to make more than 2 million EVs by the end of 2026.
Electric vehicles, which need about 30 percent fewer parts than gas models, use a smaller workforce, according to Brett Smith, director for technology at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., hinting at the prospect of job losses industry-wide while companies wait for new federal policies to kick in.
Another fossil fuel company pulls out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Knik Arm Services has become the latest company to ask the Interior Department to cancel its lease in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, raising questions over whether fossil fuel drilling will continue on the protected lands.
The move comes two months after Regenerate Alaska dumped its own lease in the refuge, leaving the state-owned Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority as the only company to hold a lease in the area.
“Only the state of Alaska now stubbornly holds onto leases acquired during the lease sale that was held at the end of the Trump administration after an irresponsibly rushed and reckless process,” Karlin Itchoak, the Wilderness Society's senior regional director for Alaska, said in a statement. “The state, which has no ability to develop those tracts, is clinging to a false hope of drilling for oil against the wishes of the majority of people in America who want to see the Arctic Refuge permanently protected.”
A key part of the Biden administration’s climate agenda is halting new oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters, but a compromise in the Inflation Reduction Act mandates new lease sales off the coast of Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico. The measure also ties the approval of new renewable energy projects on public lands to ongoing oil and gas auctions — a painful concession for many climate activists.
Up to 1 in 6 tree species on the brink of extinction, study finds
“Amid an onslaught of invasive insects, a surge in deadly diseases and the all-encompassing peril of climate change, as many as 1 in 6 trees native to the Lower 48 states are in danger of being wiped out,” according to a sweeping new assessment published Tuesday in the journal Plants People Planet, The Post's Sarah Kaplan reports.
The new study is the first to list and assess the health of all 881 tree species native to the contiguous United States, an effort conservators call an achievement of itself since conservation research rarely focuses on plants.
The most endangered tree in the contiguous United States is most likely a battered old oak hidden deep in a Texas mountain range – Quercus tardifolia – scarred by wildfire and imperiled by climate change. The threatened list includes soaring coast redwoods, capacious American chestnuts, elegant black ash and gnarled whitebark pine.
Herschel Walker knocks climate law, says, ‘Don’t we have enough trees around here?'
Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker of Georgia is criticizing the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed into law last week, over its investments in clean energy and to curb global warming.
The former pro football player argues that the sweeping bill includes wasteful spending to tackle climate change and says, “Don’t we have enough trees around here?” The Washington Post’s John Wagner reports.
The remarks from Walker, who has gained the support of former president Donald Trump, are the latest comments that have drawn scrutiny from lawmakers and environmentalists.
“They continue to try to fool you that they are helping you out. But they’re not,” he said during an appearance Sunday. “Because a lot of money, it’s going to trees.” The Walker campaign had no immediate comment Monday, but Walker was probably referring to the $1.5 billion allocated through the new climate law for the U.S. Forest Service’s Urban and Community Forestry Program.
Climate and health groups ask EPA to set emission standards for household appliances
More than two dozen environmental and health organizations filed a petition to the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday, calling on the agency to limit greenhouse gas pollution from fossil-fuel-fired household appliances such as furnaces and water heaters by listing them as subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act.
The petition alleges that the lack of standards for the appliances, which contribute to smog, is a dangerous oversight in federal law that could not only threaten air quality but also increase risks to public health by causing cardiovascular and lung illnesses. The groups cite a provision within the Clean Air Act that says that the EPA is required to list any source that “cause[s], or contribute[s] significantly to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare,” and to issue rules for those within one year of the listing.
“Emissions from buildings have a harmful, and frankly scary, impact on human health and contribute significantly to the climate crisis,” Amneh Minkara, the Sierra Club’s building electrification campaign deputy director, said in a statement. “EPA must address this problem head-on by granting our petition and moving forward swiftly to mitigate deadly pollution from heating appliances.”
The list of petitioners includes Earthjustice, Evergreen Action, Rewiring America and the Sierra Club, among others.
Dallas area hit by heavy flooding
The Dallas-Fort Worth area on Sunday experienced an extreme rain event overnight, leaving streets and highways flooded on Monday with water rescues and evacuations ongoing, Zach Rosenthal, Mary Beth Gahan and Annabelle Timsit report for The Post.
The National Weather Service in Fort Worth warned of a continued threat for “life-threatening flash flooding,” adding that the risk of damage from the rainfall is “considerable” and that residents should move to higher ground. In some isolated areas, the downpour produced a 1-in-1,000-year flood — a significant turnaround from the drought that has been afflicting Dallas for several months.
It marks the third unprecedented rain event to occur in the United States in a single week, following floods in St. Louis, eastern Kentucky and southeastern Illinois. Although extreme precipitation has just a 0.1 chance of happening in any given year, human-caused climate change has been tied to more frequent and severe rainfall.
Jeff Lindner, a meteorologist for Harris County, Tex., noted on Twitter that one weather gauge recorded nearly 40 percent of its typical annual rainfall in just 12 hours. Later Monday, that same gauge topped 14.9 inches of rain within the same time period.
10.24 inches in the last 12-hrs on the east side of Dallas is nearly 40% of the entire yearly total at this site of 25.83 inches #txwx pic.twitter.com/XOHzEd2ufl
— Jeff Lindner (@JeffLindner1) August 22, 2022
Rare tornadoes strike desert Southwest, touching down in Arizona, Nevada — Matthew Cappucci for The Post
Expansion of clean energy loans is ‘sleeping giant’ of climate bill — Ivan Penn for the New York Times
Democrats designed the climate law to be a game changer. Here’s how. — Lisa Friedman for the New York Times
Up to 90% of marine species could be at high or critical risk if greenhouse gas emissions continue as-is: Study — Julia Jacobo for ABC News
To everyone liking this on a Monday we are so, so sorry. | 2022-08-23T14:08:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | California’s timber industry is calling on the military to help control fires - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/23/californias-timber-industry-is-calling-military-help-control-fires/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/23/californias-timber-industry-is-calling-military-help-control-fires/ |
Top Democrats and Republicans say the allegations raise national security and privacy concerns and underscore the need for federal privacy protections
(Chloe Meister/Washington Post illustration; Matt McClain/The Washington Post; Joe Raedle/Getty; Jim Watson/AFP/Getty; iStock)
Top Democrats and Republicans in Congress are investigating a former Twitter security chief’s explosive new whistleblower complaint, instigating new political scrutiny of the social network’s data security practices and defenses against foreign influence.
Leaders of three influential congressional committees say they are reviewing disclosures, in which famed hacker Peiter Zatko alleges the company has “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in its cybersecurity defenses, as well as weak efforts to fight spam. The allegations are prompting a new round of Washington head winds for the company adding to the controversies it has faced on Capitol Hill over its influential role in democracy and elections, especially since the company’s decision to permanently ban former president Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the company is embroiled in litigation with Elon Musk over its future.
Reps. Frank Pallone Jr., (D-N.J.) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the chair and top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said if the whistleblower’s allegations are true, they “reaffirm” the need for Congress to pass consumer privacy legislation to safeguard Americans’ data. The committee is “assessing next steps,” they said in a joint statement.
The offices of the top lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Ia.) said they have had early discussions with the whistleblower.
“If these claims are accurate, they may show dangerous data privacy and security risks for Twitter users around the world,” Durbin said in a statement.
The Senate Intelligence Committee also received the complaint and is working to set up a meeting with Zatko, spokeswoman Rachel Cohen said.
Twitter has pushed back on Zatko’s allegations. Spokeswoman Anna Hughes said in a statement the complaint appeared to be “inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lacks important context,” and that the company security and privacy are “company-wide priorities” at the company.
"Mr. Zatko’s allegations and opportunistic timing appear designed to capture attention and inflict harm on Twitter, its customers and its shareholders,” she said.
The documents that Zatko provided could inject new urgency into efforts to create new federal privacy safeguards and other accountability measures, despite years of attempts and failures in Congress to regulate the tech industry. It’s also the second time in less than a year that a former employee at a major tech company publicly provided disclosures to members of Congress Congress, signaling tech whistleblowers could play a larger role in efforts to craft new tech policies.
The political fallout could be exacerbated by Twitter’s long-running tensions with lawmakers over content moderation, especially Republicans who claim that the company has unfairly suppressed their political speech.
“Twitter has a long track record of making really bad decisions on everything from censorship to security practices,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee. “That’s a huge concern given the company’s ability to influence the national discourse and global events.”
Sinking FTC workplace rankings threaten Chair Lina Khan’s agenda
Twitter has had run-ins with Washington regulators over its security practices for more than a decade, dating back to a pair of 2009 incidents when hackers gained unauthorized access to the platform. Following those hacks, the company entered into a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission that required it to stand up a comprehensive security program that was subject to external audits. The company more recently faced political blowback for a 2020 hack, during which hackers gained access to the accounts of influential people including then-presidential candidate Joe Biden and Musk.
Zatko alleges that Twitter violated the terms of that 2011 FTC order by falsely claiming it had a security plan. A former FTC official who worked on the Twitter case said the agency was understaffed at the time of its initial settlement with Twitter, and that the enforcement division had failed to keep a close eye on multiple companies after reaching privacy settlements, including the one with Twitter.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), head of the Senate Commerce panel focused on consumer protection, said the disclosures “appear to demonstrate Twitter’s disregard for FTC’s consumer data requirements.”
“Big Tech has been allowed to ignore the terms of the FTC’s orders for too long — despite significant breaches, spying scandals, and hijacking of high-profile accounts,” he said in a statement. “The FTC must vigorously oversee and enforce its orders or those requirements become dead letter law while our national security and consumer privacy are undermined.”
Rep. Jan Schakowsky ((D-Ill.) said that the allegations show that the FTC “absolutely needs more resources.” Democrats last year proposed boosting the FTC’s budget by $1 billion to create a new digital-focused division focused on policing privacy violations and cybersecurity incidents, but it was ultimately not included in Democrats’ recent spending package.
“The status quo has once again failed American consumers, from coast to coast and here in the heartland,” she said. | 2022-08-23T14:09:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Top lawmakers in Congress investigating Twitter whistleblower's allegations - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/23/twitter-whistleblower-congress-investigation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/23/twitter-whistleblower-congress-investigation/ |
For the past two seasons, the Washington Spirit has played more than half its home matches at Audi Field in Washington. The remainder of the home games take place in Leesburg. (Scott Taetsch for The Washington Post)
The National Women’s Soccer League announced Tuesday that Audi Field will stage the Oct. 29 championship game, marking the first time the District has hosted a women’s pro soccer final.
A six-team playoff, running Oct. 15-23, will determine the finalists. The Portland Thorns, San Diego Wave and Houston Dash are currently atop the 12-team standings, with the Kansas City Current, Seattle’s OL Reign and Chicago Red Stars in postseason position.
Initially scheduled for noon on CBS, the starting time of the final was moved to 8 p.m. Eastern, so the league could showcase its marquee event in prime time on the national broadcast network.
“As we continue to advance the women’s sports landscape in the U.S. and around the world, this is a particularly significant moment for the league and an opportunity our players wholly deserve,” NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman said in a statement, of the evening TV slot.
CBS carried last year’s midday final in Louisville, won by the Washington Spirit over the Red Stars, 2-1, in extra time.
Since launching in 2013, the NWSL has used a variety of venues for the final, including Portland, Ore., twice. Rochester, N.Y., in the league’s inaugural season, has been the only other Northeast venue.
Washington did not host the final over the course of two previous pro leagues: Women’s United Soccer Association (2001-03) and Women’s Professional Soccer (2009-11).
The last time a pro soccer final was held in Washington was 2007 at RFK Stadium for the MLS Cup between the Houston Dynamo and New England Revolution.
Audi Field — the 20,000-capacity venue opened by D.C. United in 2018 — is one of two facilities used by the Spirit, which also plays home games at 5,000-seat Segra Field in Leesburg. For the first seven seasons, the club was based at Maryland SoccerPlex in Montgomery County.
The NWSL championship game is the second notable women’s soccer event to be awarded to Audi Field in recent weeks. On Sept. 6, the U.S. national team will appear at the stadium for the first time for a friendly against Nigeria.
Spirit and United season ticket holders will receive presale access to championship tickets. The public sale will begin Aug. 31. | 2022-08-23T14:50:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Audi Field to host NWSL championship game - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/audi-field-nwsl-championship-game/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/audi-field-nwsl-championship-game/ |
NASA learned what a black hole sounds like. One review: ‘Cosmic horror.’
A scientist behind the project likened the sounds to “a beautiful Hans Zimmer score with the moody level set at really high.”
The sound waves from a black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster were made audible for the first time by NASA. (Video: NASA)
But humans couldn’t hear that note because its frequency was too low — the equivalent to a B-flat, some 57 octaves below the middle C note of a piano, according to NASA. So astronomers at Chandra remixed the sound and amplified it, increasing its frequency by 57 and 58 octaves. “Another way to put this is that they are being heard 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than their original frequency,” NASA said.
A Deep Voice From Deep Space
Experts have cautioned that the sound in NASA’s remix isn’t exactly what you’d hear if you were somehow standing beside a black hole. Human ears wouldn’t “be sensitive enough to be able to pick up those sound waves,” Michael Smith, professor of astronomy at the University of Kent in England, told The Washington Post. “But they are there, they’re the right sort of frequency, and if we amplified it … we would then be able to hear it,” Smith said. He likened it to a radio — “you turn up the sound, the volume is higher, then you can hear it.”
Some experts said the clip was confusing because it gave the impression that the sound “was somehow what you would hear if you were there,” Chris Lintott, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford, wrote Tuesday on Twitter — as if you had a recording device directly translating the sound from the galaxy cluster to Earth.
Arcand said she understood the criticism from some corners that sonification risks oversimplifying a complex process — particularly because the mix of pressure, heat and gas enabling the sound waves within the Perseus galaxy cluster is specific to that environment. But the value of sonification, she said, is that it made her “question things in different ways.”
Supermassive black hole seen at the center of our galaxy | 2022-08-23T14:59:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NASA discovered what a black hole sounds like, publishes space 'remix' - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/23/nasa-black-hole-sound/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/23/nasa-black-hole-sound/ |
By Karl Ritter | AP
Jimmie Akesson, who for almost two decades has sought to move the party from the far-right fringe toward the mainstream, smiles during a campaign speech Monday, Aug. 22, 2022, in the southern city of Helsingborg, Sweden. The long-time leader of the nationalist Sweden Democrats says he’s hoping for a stronger role as a “blowtorch” in Swedish politics after Sept. 11 elections, even if he doesn’t get a seat in the next government. (AP Photo/Kongshaug Productions) (Uncredited/Kongshaug Productions) | 2022-08-23T15:39:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hard right leader aims for greater role in Swedish election - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hard-right-leader-aims-for-greater-role-in-swedish-election/2022/08/23/e9c51398-22f7-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hard-right-leader-aims-for-greater-role-in-swedish-election/2022/08/23/e9c51398-22f7-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
(Washington Post illustration/Midjourney)
When Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize in literature last year, not nearly enough people had read anything by the Tanzanian-born writer. The author of 10 English-language novels, Gurnah had attracted critical praise, but fans knew his stories of East Africa and exile should be reaching a wider audience. In response to the Nobel Prize news, Gurnah’s British editor confessed, “It has been one of the great sadnesses and frustrations of my career that his work has not received the recognition it deserves. . . . I had almost given up hope.”
That hope was well placed. Propelled by the worldwide recognition that the Swedish Academy conferred, Gurnah’s books are finally being reprinted in America, and his latest, “Afterlives,” is being released by Riverhead, the savviest U.S. publisher of literary fiction. Consider this a late invitation you should not ignore.
Now 73, Gurnah fled to England as a teenage refugee after the 1964 uprising in Zanzibar. He began writing fiction in English — his first language was Swahili — and eventually became an English professor at the University of Kent, where he taught for several decades. Throughout his career, he has worked to impress upon a forgetful world the experiences of people displaced and rendered invisible.
“Afterlives” demonstrates how gracefully Gurnah works in two registers simultaneously. The story is at once a globe-spanning epic of European colonialism and an intimate look at village life in one of the many overlooked corners of the Earth. Both parts — reclamations of history and heart — are equally revelatory.
Atrocities committed by Germany in the mid-20th century have tended to obscure the horror of its earlier colonial ambitions, but starting in the 1880s, the Deutsch-Ostafrika was a massive colony that disrupted the lives of millions of Africans. Acknowledging the cultural amnesia he’s working against, Gurnah writes, “Later these events would be turned into stories of absurd and nonchalant heroics, a sideshow to the great tragedies in Europe, but for those who lived through it, this was a time when their land was soaked in blood and littered with corpses.”
Indeed, just detailing such crimes would risk dissolving the victims in slush pools of suffering. But Gurnah avoids that misstep by gently vivifying the lives of a few African characters in all their rich humanity and even their comedy, without sentimentality or condescension. This is storytelling as an act of resistance against colonialism’s effort to homogenize and erase.
Gurnah sets “Afterlives” in East Africa in the early 20th century after “the Germans and the British and the French and the Belgians and the Portuguese and the Italians and whoever else had already had their congress and drawn their maps and signed their treaties.” But since those cruelly oblivious documents took no cognizance of the African people living here, the region remains in a constant cycle of suffering, rebellion and suppression. And so “Afterlives” deftly inverts the old Western narrative, rendering the Europeans as background characters, while placing East Africans in the forefront.
At the center of the story is an Indian African man named Khalifa who lives in an unnamed town. Like almost everyone he knows, he has grown up under the shadow of colonialism. Equipped with some bookkeeping skills, a little English and an enthusiasm for gossip, Khalifa gets a job as a clerk for a local merchant, a kind of landlubber pirate who plays both sides of German rule. By every outward appearance Khalifa’s boss is a “saintly member of the community,” but those who know this Dickensian character better regard him as secretive and ruthless, willing to do whatever pays, including bribing, smuggling, moneylending and hoarding.
Early in the novel, Khalifa’s boss sets him up to marry a young relative. “Khalifa knew that the merchant was making him a gift of her, and that the young woman was not going to have much say in the matter,” Gurnah writes with his usual plaintive wit. “Khalifa agreed to the arrangement because he did not think he could refuse and because he desired it.” But soon enough, Khalifa realizes that his marriage has been arranged not out of generosity to him but in hopes of resolving one of the merchant’s real estate schemes. So lives are redirected along new trajectories for reasons entirely out of the participants’ control.
That erratic pattern remains the rule for Gurnah’s characters, especially a young man named Ilyas, who becomes Khalifa’s best friend. Ilyas was kidnapped as a child by an African mercenary and eventually sent to a German mission school. When he finally returns home, he reunites with his orphaned sister, but soon he feels inspired to enlist with the Germans and help them in the approaching Great War.
In one of the novel’s many clever maneuvers, most of the story takes place in Ilyas’s absence. This sweet, earnest man remains a persistent negative space, a mystery that torments his sister and Khalifa for years. What did he do with the Germans? Did he survive the war? These questions hover on the surface of the plot like a watermark.
But a parallel incident about another young man named Hamza provides a fascinating look at what it was like for East Africans serving their European occupiers. Long before Hamza’s life is woven into the main storyline, we see him struggling to navigate the impossible currents of German desire and disgust. His precarious and humiliating experience as the cherished companion of a powerful officer becomes a haunting metaphor for Africa’s plight in Germany’s geopolitics.
“Afterlives” makes strong demands on readers. Gurnah moves fluidly between the complicated lives of his characters and the reckless actions of old empires. Unless you know early 20th-century African history well, you’ll be googling as you go. But the investment of attention will be fully rewarded. And you’ll fall further under the spell of this novel as its focus gradually narrows to concentrate on the hopes and dreams of Hamza and his wife, who manage to carve out a little oasis using only the purity of their affection.
At one point, pressed to provide details of his past, Hamza says, “You want me to tell you about myself as if I have a complete story but all I have are fragments which are snagged by troubling gaps.” That may be Gurnah’s greatest act of love and artistry: his ability to gather the fragments of broken lives and create a breathtaking mosaic in print.
On Sept. 13 at 7 p.m., Abdulrazak Gurnah will discuss “Afterlives” with Tope Folarin at Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington. Tickets are available to watch in person or online. | 2022-08-23T17:05:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nobel winner Abdulrazak Gurnah's 'Afterlives' - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/08/23/nobel-winner-abdulrazak-gurnah-afterlives/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/08/23/nobel-winner-abdulrazak-gurnah-afterlives/ |
The phrase “$10 gas” is liable to put Americans in the hospital. This is a linguistic hazard, however: The latest energy shock doesn’t concern gasoline prices — which have been falling — but rather natural gas. After long years where natural gas crawled along at $2 per million BTU or thereabouts, it is suddenly back in double figures, briefly nosing above $10 Tuesday morning for the first time since 2008.
Gas is in demand globally because of Russia’s disruption of supply to Europe as part of its war against Ukraine. US export capacity is effectively maxed out, apart from the Freeport liquefied natural gas facility being repaired after an explosion in June. In effect, therefore, the intrigues of Russian supply aren’t really moving US gas prices; high exports are factored in already and, barring Freeport’s expected restart in the fall, they can’t go much higher for now.
Instead, those high gas prices are largely a result of the weather. Often at this time of year, that means hurricanes taking down supply. But this hurricane season has been unusually quiet so far, without a single named storm since early July. Instead, you could say a lack of wind is juicing gas prices: Muggy, hot weather across much of the country has kept those air conditioners humming and, in Texas, slowed wind turbines.
The result has been record quantities of natural gas being burned in power plants. Average gas burn hit an all-time high in the week ended Aug. 10, according to Bloomberg NEF.
This matters because US gas demand is, by and large, relatively flat. Industrial and residential consumption, representing 40% to 45% of demand, has been flat or growing only slowly for years. Commercial demand is up this year but accounts for only about a tenth of the pie. Exports of liquefied natural gas have been the only sustained source of growth in recent years, but they are capped for now. So those power plants working overtime in the heat are the bullish case right now.
Depending on the weather is a longstanding state of affairs in the natural gas market and, given its unpredictability, to be treated with caution. The end of summer is approaching, and while winter isn’t far off, early long-range forecasts point to milder-than-usual temperatures across much of the US. Those can be wrong, of course. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was predicting an above-average hurricane season.
Still, gas futures — while not a prediction of gas prices per se — suggest the current strength is predicated to a large degree on the weather, with all the volatility that comes with that.
On the supply side, it is worth noting this sort of gas curve is the stuff of long-suffering producers’ dreams. The days of inexpensive gas funded by investors willing to burn their own cash are over. Even with that cliff, futures are priced mostly above $5 for years out.
That should encourage more supply. The number of rigs operating in the Haynesville shale area began increasing markedly in the middle of February, coinciding with near-month gas futures rising sustainably above $4, suggesting that’s a profitable threshold in a basin toward the higher end of the cost curve. Meanwhile, high crude prices should mean increasing amounts of associated gas from higher oil production, which accounts for about a third of supply. And even the mighty Marcellus shale basin in Appalachia, constrained by lack of new pipeline capacity, may yet get an extra outlet through the concessions extracted by Senator Joe Manchin for his assent to the Inflation Reduction Act. As so often in the past, a change in the weather and a few extra rigs would be all that’s required to knock gas prices back down.
• The Shale Dividend for Utilities Is Ending: Liam Denning | 2022-08-23T17:05:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | $10 Gas? Don’t Be Alarmed. It’s the Other Kind - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/10-gas-dont-be-alarmed-its-the-other-kind/2022/08/23/c243adfa-2303-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/10-gas-dont-be-alarmed-its-the-other-kind/2022/08/23/c243adfa-2303-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
What would happen if Category 5 Hurricane Andrew hit Florida today
Despite huge advances in forecasts and safety measures, Andrew would remain a tough-to-predict storm. Thirty years later, there are also far more people in harm’s way.
By Bob Henson
Houses damaged by Hurricane Andrew line streets between Homestead and Florida City, Fla., on Aug. 25, 1992. (Mark Foley/AP)
Forecasters and the public alike had no time to waste 30 years ago this month as they confronted one of the fiercest U.S. hurricane landfalls on record.
Hurricane Andrew slammed into southern Miami-Dade County around 5 a.m. Eastern time on Monday, Aug. 24, 1992. Intensifying and accelerating en route, Andrew made landfall less than 36 hours after a hurricane watch was issued for the southeast Florida coast, and less than 24 hours after a hurricane warning went into effect.
A decade later, Andrew — originally rated a Category 4 — was upgraded to Category 5 status, with peak sustained winds estimated at 165 mph.
Andrew took 65 lives and cost $27 billion (1992 USD), making it the most expensive hurricane in U.S. history until it was eclipsed by Katrina in 2005. Andrew’s toll in Florida — including more than 60,000 homes destroyed and an additional 100,000 damaged — led to major changes in how structures are built and insured. Thousands of residents were terror-stricken as their homes disintegrated in darkness. The storm also inflicted heavy damage in the Bahamas and along the central Louisiana coast.
“Hurricane Andrew survivors were psychologically scarred for life,” said John Morales, a broadcast meteorologist at Miami’s WTVJ. Morales’s career started just a year before Andrew at WLTV as the nation’s first meteorologist on Spanish-language television.
If Andrew arrived today, it would be captured by greatly improved forecasting tools and a transformed communications landscape. And it would strike a region where structures are more storm-hardened but also more numerous.
What’s different now
A vastly expanded range of forecast models. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) tracked Andrew with just one global dynamical model and another that blended statistics and dynamics. Other models leaned heavily on climatology, persistence and advection (moving hurricanes in the broad steering flow).
At the time, models extended out five days at best, whereas major models now extend 10 days or more with far sharper resolution.
“Thirty years ago, model guidance was sparse and crude compared to today’s glut of high-resolution global and regional models and their ensembles,” said Brian McNoldy, senior research associate at the University of Miami and hurricane expert for Capital Weather Gang.
Dramatic improvement in official forecasts. NHC forecasts extended out only three days in 1992, and they were just “skinny lines” with locations and intensities.
As late as Friday evening, most model guidance still had Andrew well offshore on Monday evening. In his book “Hurricane Watch,” Bob Sheets, NHC’s director in 1992, recalls the message relayed to emergency managers and the public that night: They should keep an eye out, but “Andrew is unlikely to affect the state before at least Monday.”
Since the days of Andrew, track forecasts have improved in spectacular fashion, in both trajectory and “along-track” speed errors.
“There is roughly the same average error in three-day track forecasts now as there was in a one-day forecast then,” McNoldy said.
Other innovations since Andrew includes the forecast cone, which debuted in 2002, and the extension of public forecasts to five days in 2003. It’s easy to imagine a forecast cone reaching parts of South Florida up to four or five days before Andrew struck.
Still, a storm like Andrew wouldn’t be the easiest to predict. Just four days before hitting Florida, Andrew was barely surviving as a tropical storm northeast of Puerto Rico. In an internal forecast discussion that day, NHC forecaster Hal Gerrish concluded that “some strengthening is possible if Andrew survives through the day.”
Small tropical cyclones can both intensify and weaken quickly. That only adds to the difficulty of forecasting a storm like Andrew, especially its breakneck intensification.
“Andrew would still be a challenging storm in 2022,” said Eric Blake, acting branch chief of NHC’s Hurricane Specialist Unit, in an email. “Our intensity forecasts would be better, but this is a hard forecast with a small tropical cyclone, so the forecasts would likely have higher errors than our five-year averages.”
On the plus side, radars, satellites and dropsondes from reconnaissance flights can now monitor storms far more completely. Some of that data makes it into today’s much-improved dynamical models.
Stronger building codes and enforcement. Andrew’s impact was “eye-opening” for the insurance industry, according to Ian Giammanco, lead research meteorologist for the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS).
“It was thought Florida had a strong code,” said Giammanco in an email. However, it became clear post-Andrew that the code had been poorly enforced. Moreover, it didn’t reflect emerging knowledge from wind engineers.
Today, shutters and impact-resistant glass are mandated, helping to keep winds and debris from getting a toehold inside a structure. In regions especially prone to wind-borne debris, roof decks now must be sealed, helping to keep water out even if the overtopping roof cover fails. Florida now leads the nation in hurricane-related building codes and enforcement, according to IBHS.
“If Andrew were to occur today, we would absolutely see a reduction in the amount and severity of structural damage to homes and businesses,” Giammanco said.
What worries the experts
In other ways, though, southeast Florida may be even more vulnerable to a major hurricane.
Higher sea level. Most of Andrew’s damage was produced by its small core of extreme winds. Larger hurricanes are more prone to generate high storm surge and torrential rainfall, threats influenced by human-produced climate change.
Even a small increment of sea level rise atop a large surge can intensify flood damage.
“With a full six inches of sea level rise since the mid-1990s, an Andrew-like 17-foot storm surge would be able to penetrate further inland and damage more communities,” Morales said.
“There is far more wealth vulnerable to storm surge or rising water,” said Bryan Norcross, a hurricane specialist at Fox Weather who gained widespread acclaim for his 23 hours of coverage at Miami’s WTVJ during the height of Andrew.
A fragmented communications environment. Cellphones and home computers make it easier than ever to access reliable updates from NHC and other trusted sources. It is also easy for inaccurate or misleading information from “social mediarologists” to catch fire.
“I think it’s much more difficult to get a message to people today, to get them to understand what you are saying and what you want them to take away,” Norcross said.
Norcross also warns that a major cell outage could plunge people into a bigger information hole than in 1992. At that time, battery-operated TVs and/or radios were in common use, and hard-wired landline telephones were ubiquitous.
More people at risk. The population of Miami-Dade County has vaulted from around 2 million to 2.7 million since Andrew. Croplands and agricultural towns south of Miami have been engulfed by urban sprawl.
Another point of concern: There have been no major hurricane landfalls on the southeast Florida coast since Andrew. The last one before that was Betsy, in 1965. Hurricane Irma, which toppled Andrew as Florida’s costliest hurricane in 2017, sideswiped the Miami area on its southwest-to-northeast track.
“There is an entire generation of South Floridians who have never experienced major hurricane conditions,” Morales said. “There are also thousands of transplants — folks who have zero experience in dealing with tropical cyclone emergencies.
“Another Andrew in South Florida would lead to great economic loss and potential fatalities, as well as a region left reeling in a multiyear recovery effort.”
Season outlook: Hurricane officials are still predicting an above-average season of hurricane activity. It’s the 7th year in a row they’ve made that prediction. Even though it’s been quiet this year so far, conditions in the late summer and early fall are prime for storms to pick up.
Tips for preparing: The best time to prepare for a hurricane or tropical storm is before you’re in one. We rounded up seven safety tips to make sure you’re ready. Here’s some other guidance about keeping your phone charged and useful in dangerous weather, and what to know about flood insurance.
Understanding climate change: It’s not just you — hurricanes and tropical storms have hit the U.S. more frequently in recent years. And last summer alone, nearly 1 in 3 Americans experienced a weather disaster. Read more about how climate change is fueling severe weather events.
What questions do you have about hurricanes, wildfires, droughts or other climate-related topics? Ask The Post. | 2022-08-23T17:06:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Improvements and fears if Category 5 Hurricane Andrew hit today - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/23/hurricane-andrew-anniversary-improvements-climate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/23/hurricane-andrew-anniversary-improvements-climate/ |
Experts say the probe missed key steps and favored the officer’s perception of events
Sarah Cahlan
Joy Sharon Yi
The entire investigative file of an officer-involved shooting in Overland Park, Kan., was released, giving insight into how police investigated another officer. (Video: The Washington Post)
When 17-year-old John Albers posted threats of suicide on social media in January 2018, worried friends called 911 for help. The high school student was backing his family minivan out of the garage when he was shot 13 times by an Overland Park, Kan. police officer who responded to the call. Within a month, the prosecutor in Johnson County, Kan., Steve Howe, declared that the fatal shooting was justified and charges would not be filed.
An unarmed teen driver is killed by police, followed by a year with few answers
Every year in America, police fatally shoot about 1,000 people. In each case, police — often from the same department — investigate the officer, and it’s rare that details of the investigation are made public. But in the case of the death of Albers, something extremely unusual happened: the city of Overland Park released the entire police investigative file, after being sued by KSHB-TV. In this case, the Overland Park police did not investigate their own officer. Instead, Johnson County launches an Officer-Involved Shooting Investigation Team after each such incident, using officers from other departments in the county.
Written reports and photos from the investigation were made public, as well as videos, including dash-cam recordings that captured the shooting and the police interview with Clayton Jenison, the officer who shot Albers and said he feared he’d be struck by the van.
The nearly 500-page file revealed the investigation was concluded in six days. The Washington Post provided it to five law enforcement experts, veterans of policing, use-of-force investigations and prosecutions. All five found flaws with the investigation, and several said investigators approached the case favoring the perception of the officer, a stance the experts said is common in such cases. The Post’s analysis found steps missing from the investigative report, such as scene diagrams, that some experts said are typically performed in officer-involved shooting investigations.
The Post also created a 3D reconstruction to show Jenison’s position at each of the moments he fired at Albers. The reconstruction was based on available evidence. It used a combination of drone flyovers, laser scanned geometry and low-resolution dashboard cameras to recreate the incident within a reasonable margin of error. Jenison was close to the van when it first backed out of the garage, and then briefly in the path of the van after it spun around, but he moved out of the van’s path each time and then fired, videos included with the file and The Post reconstruction show.
Immediately after the shooting, Jenison said “I thought he was going to run me over.” He later told investigators, “From my memory, it felt it was going fast enough to be a threat and to cause bodily harm to me.” District Attorney Howe noted that officers are entitled to use deadly force “if they reasonably believe it is necessary to prevent death or great bodily harm to themselves or someone else.”
After he shot and killed an unarmed teen driver, a Kansas police officer was paid a $70,000 severance
Ed Obayashi, a California sheriff’s deputy who trains police in conducting investigations of officer-involved shootings, reviewed the case file and said that “the most glaring flaw of the entire investigation is the interview [of Jenison]. All they did was one short interview,” lasting less than 45 minutes. He said a follow-up interview, with questions developed from the advancing investigation, is necessary in every case. “We always go back to the witnesses and reinterview them. There’s no reason the officer wouldn’t consent to a follow-up,” Obayashi said.
In 2020, two years after the shooting, the Justice Department announced it had launched its own investigation of Jenison’s killing of Albers.
Shawn Reynolds, the leader of the investigation as a former deputy chief in Olathe, Kan., and now the police chief in Temple, Tex., declined to discuss the investigation, as did Howe, the district attorney of Johnson County. Presented with a summary of The Post’s findings, Howe said in an email that “many of your conclusions are factually incorrect” but said he could not elaborate because of the ongoing federal investigation, which does not prohibit Howe from discussing the local investigation.
Detectives involved in the case did not respond or would not speak to The Post, nor would anyone from the Johnson County crime lab. Jenison and his lawyer also declined to comment.
The Post took the police investigative file, dash-cam videos, expert analysis, interviews with the Albers family and the 3D reconstruction to create an inside look into how police investigated one of their own. Watch the film above for a deep dive into the case.
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Follow all of our visual forensics coverage. | 2022-08-23T17:06:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Overland Park police shooting investigation examined - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/08/23/overland-park-police-shooting-investigation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/08/23/overland-park-police-shooting-investigation/ |
The small online publication, Crikey, had lobbied Murdoch to sue, viewing it as a necessary test of the country’s free press laws.
Lachlan Murdoch, chief executive of Fox Corporation, in 2019. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of Fox News’s parent company Fox Corporation, filed a defamation lawsuit on Tuesday against the parent company of a small Australian news site that linked his family to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
The June 29 “analysis” piece in Crikey was written by the site’s political editor Bernard Keane. Based on the revelations unearthed by the House committee investigating last year’s attack in Washington, Keane wrote that “the Murdochs and their slew of poisonous Fox News commentators are the unindicted co-conspirators of this continuing crisis.”
The article didn’t mention Lachlan Murdoch by name, and Crikey has argued that most readers would interpret the specific “Murdoch” mentioned in its headline to be his father Rupert Murdoch, the media baron who serves as chairman of Fox Corp. and executive chairman of News Corp.
Crikey, a small news site, had essentially lobbied Murdoch to sue it as a test of Australia’s laws protecting journalistic free speech. “We are concerned that Australia’s defamation laws are too restrictive,” the site’s editor in chief and chairman both wrote in an open letter to Lachlan Murdoch, published in the New York Times on Monday and in Australia’s Canberra Times. “You have made it clear in your lawyer’s letters you intend to take court action to resolve this alleged defamation. We await your writ so that we can test this important issue of freedom of public interest journalism in a courtroom.”
Murdoch’s lawyers obliged. In a statement of claim filed on Tuesday, they argued that Crikey had baselessly accused Lachlan Murdoch of criminal behavior and associations. “Murdoch has been gravely injured in his character, his personal reputation, and his professional reputation as a business person and company director, and has suffered and will continue to suffer substantial hurt, distress and embarrassment,” the filing stated.
Murdoch’s lawyers argued that publicizing the open letter served to “humiliate and harm” Murdoch, to misrepresent his legal team’s communications, and to promote Crikey.
The site had also published reams of correspondence between Murdoch’s lawyers and the site sent this summer in which Murdoch’s team laid out a case for defamation and demanded an apology that Crikey was unwilling to give — though the publication had been willing to publish an editorial clarification and to pay Murdoch’s legal fees, according to the Guardian.
Crikey briefly took down the commentary piece on June 30, the day after it was published, but republished it last week.
Following the filing of the lawsuit, Crikey’s editor in chief Peter Fray said in a statement that the site stands behind the commentary piece and looks forward to taking on Murdoch in court. “We are determined to fight for the integrity and importance of diverse independent media in Australian democracy,” Fray said. “We welcome the chance to test what an honest, open and public debate actually means for free speech in Australia.”
In explaining the site’s decision to release the legal letters, Crikey argued that American media outlets had published “thousands of stories … about the complicity of Fox News in the Trump presidency and Jan. 6, 2021, riots — many of those stories far more accusatory than ours.” But libel is considered to be much harder to prove in the U.S. legal system, where public figures suing for defamation must prove that false statements were published maliciously — either with knowledge that they were untrue or with reckless disregard for the truth.
The lawsuit comes as Fox Corp is facing defamation lawsuits from two U.S. election technology companies that were baselessly accused of abetting voter fraud on Fox News shows after the 2020 presidential election.
In June, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis allowed Dominion’s case against Fox Corp to proceed, after determining that the company’s allegations “support a reasonable inference that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch either knew Dominion had not manipulated the election or at least recklessly disregarded the truth when they allegedly caused Fox News to propagate its claims about Dominion.” | 2022-08-23T17:06:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Lachlan Murdoch sues site over article linking family to Capitol riot - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/08/23/lachland-murdoch-sues-crikey-defamation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/08/23/lachland-murdoch-sues-crikey-defamation/ |
Gary Gaines, Texas football coach in ‘Friday Night Lights,’ dies at 73
The book, by Buzz Bissinger, portrayed Mr. Gaines as a compassionate coach caught in the win-at-all-costs culture of a high school program in football-crazed Texas
Odessa Permian Coach Gary Gaines in 2009. (Kevin Buehler/AP)
Gary Gaines, coach of the Texas high school football team that gained national prominence because the book and movie “Friday Night Lights,” died Aug. 22 in Lubbock. He was 73.
The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, his family said in a statement.
Mr. Gaines made many stops in West Texas during a 30-year coaching career, but was best known for a four-year stint leading the highly successful program at Odessa Permian.
His 1988 team was chronicled in Buzz Bissinger’s best-selling book, which portrayed a program and school that favored football over academics and attributed racist comments to assistant coaches. Mr. Gaines, who was played by Billy Bob Thornton in the 2004 movie, said he never read the book and felt betrayed by Bissinger after the author spent the entire 1988 season with the team.
The book, which portrayed Mr. Gaines as a compassionate coach caught in the win-at-all-costs culture of a high school program in football-crazed Texas, also was turned into a TV series.
Permian lost in the state semifinals in 1988, a season that included the loss of star running back James “Boobie” Miles to a knee injury during a preseason scrimmage. Miles’s character played a prominent role in the movie.
The book described scenes of “for sale” signs being placed in the front yard of Mr. Gaines’s home. His record from 1986-89 was 47-6-1.
Mr. Gaines led Permian to the fifth of the program’s six state championships with a perfect season in 1989, then left to become an assistant coach at Texas Tech.
He later coached two of Permian’s rivals, Abilene High and San Angelo Central, before returning to college as the coach at Abilene Christian. Another four-year run as Permian’s coach started in 2009, and Mr. Gaines also was a school district athletic director in Odessa and Lubbock.
Mr. Gaines was born in Crane, Tex., on May 4, 1949, and played football at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Tex. Survivors include his wife, Sharon; two children; and several grandchildren. | 2022-08-23T17:06:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Gary Gaines, Texas football coach in ‘Friday Night Lights,’ dies at 73 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/23/gary-gaines-friday-night-lights-coach-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/23/gary-gaines-friday-night-lights-coach-dead/ |
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) is fighting a subpoena to testify in a criminal investigation in Georgia about Donald Trump's election fraud claims. (Meg Kinnard/AP)
In the Georgia criminal probe into President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss there, a grand jury has heard from some notable Republicans: Georgia’s secretary of state, former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and members of Congress.
Next, investigators want the testimony of Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.). The prominent Republican senator isn’t from Georgia, but he was an ally of Trump’s, and prosecutor Fani Willis (D) has written that Graham could be crucial to understanding “a multistate, coordinated plan by the Trump Campaign to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.”
But Graham has fought testifying based on one particular part of the Constitution that he says protects him: the speech or debate clause. A federal appeals court put his testimony on hold while the argument is considered. But it’s failed for other lawmakers.
Here’s what to know about the speech or debate clause and how it could affect a major investigation into Trump’s election plot.
Why investigators want to talk to Graham
Shortly after it was clear Joe Biden won Georgia — and the election — Graham called up Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. Graham was a prominent election doubter, and he asked Raffensperger whether the secretary of state could throw out all mailed ballots in parts of Georgia, Raffensperger has said. The request by a sitting U.S. senator to throw out thousands of legally cast votes caught Raffensperger off guard.
Graham says he was asking because he was interested in how election officials gauged whether ballots were legitimate, and he denies he asked the secretary of state to throw out votes.
“It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” Raffensperger told The Washington Post in an interview after the election.
Graham’s intentions on that call could make or break his argument about whether he has to testify.
Graham talked to Raffensperger again in December. Graham is a witness, not a target — meaning investigators want to know what he knows, but they aren’t considering charging him with a crime. (Giuliani, by contrast, is a target.)
How Graham is fighting against testifying
He’s arguing he is constitutionally protected from investigations into his official duties as a U.S. senator.
Graham is right that there is a clause in the Constitution, called the speech or debate clause, that says a member of Congress can’t be prosecuted for what they say or do for their job.
The most clear-cut interpretation is that a lawmaker’s speech is protected when he or she is talking on the Senate floor, or say, in a committee hearing. That work is in the realm of the “legislative sphere” and thus protected, says Mike Stern, a former lawyer for the nonpartisan counsel’s office in the House of Representatives.
The intention behind this clause, says Georgetown University law professor Josh Chafetz, is “to prevent various sorts of harassment that would interfere with members of Congress performing their official duties.”
But there are gray areas to this, and Stern says Graham’s calls with Raffensperger could fall into that category.
Graham could claim he was talking to Raffensperger about election security because he was genuinely interested in this issue and wanted to gather facts to consider proposing legislation. (In fact, that is what he’s claiming.) That would probably be constitutionally protected speech, even if Raffensperger found the call political in nature.
But the burden of proof is on Graham to show he was focused on his legislative duties rather than helping out a political ally, Stern said.
From what we know publicly, Graham was by Trump’s side as the then-president tried to overturn his election loss. Graham asked the Justice Department to investigate a baseless voter fraud claim in Pennsylvania, he was in close contact with Trump leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and he was the main senator defending Trump during his trial in the Senate for impeachment. In other words, Graham appeared to be a willing ally to Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss.
Still, the whole point of this clause, Chafetz said, “is to prevent courts from poking their noses too far into congressional business.” That could bode well for Graham.
What happens if Graham loses his argument
Graham could be one of several Republican lawmakers to claim that his speech is protected and still be forced to testify in this investigation. Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), who echoed Trump’s voter fraud claims and ran unsuccessfully for secretary of state as an election denier, also tried the speech-or-debate clause defense recently and lost.
It seems that the courts are trying to figure out whether there should at least be parameters around Graham testifying, Stern said. A federal district court judge said she was unconvinced by Graham’s defense and said he should testify. But Graham appealed to a higher court, the 11th Circuit. And on Sunday, that court agreed with Graham that it’s at least worth pausing his testimony to figure out what questions might be unconstitutional.
This is a unique case that combines a state prosecution with questions about federal lawmakers’ powers, so it could take a while to sort out whether Graham can testify, Stern said.
The most recent, high-profile example of a senator losing the speech-or-debate defense came in a 2017 corruption trial for Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.).
One of the questions raised was whether Menendez improperly talked to government officials about millions in Medicare fees that a political donor of his owed. Menendez claimed he was inquiring about these fees for legislative purposes and thus his phone calls couldn’t be considered in court. Menendez lost that battle — but ultimately wasn’t convicted.
On our radar in New York: Who is Jerry Nadler? | 2022-08-23T17:07:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What the Constitution's speech or debate clause means for Lindsey Graham in Georgia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/23/lindsey-graham-georgia-speech-or-debate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/23/lindsey-graham-georgia-speech-or-debate/ |
Women are dancing in solidarity with Finnish PM Sanna Marin
(Jussi Nukari/Lehtikuva/Reuters/Washington Post illustration)
Political opponents berated Marin, 36, last week after videos surfaced of the Finnish leader partying with her friends at a private event. They called her decision to party during the country’s economic crisis unprofessional and irresponsible. Some critics also suggested that Marin was abusing substances and demanded she take a drug test to prove otherwise. (The prime minister agreed to a drug test, which came back negative, BBC News reported.)
But many women have rushed to the dance floor and posted videos on social media tagged with #SolidarityWithSanna to call out what they see as unfair, sexist treatment of Marin. They argue that the criticism she’s faced has been unjustifiably doled out because she’s a young woman in a sphere dominated by older men. And the clips have been viewed more than 100,000 times on TikTok alone.
Amid last week’s controversy, employees at Alt for Damerne, which translates to “Everything for the ladies,” scoured their devices for their own dance clips. Then, they posted the videos on the magazine’s official account, with a caption that translates to “In solidarity with Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin ... we at Alt for Damerne editorial office emptied the camera roll for clips that never ... should have seen the light of day.”
“We wanted to emphasize the fact that you can be a great prime minister, CEO, editor, nurse — insert job title — and hit the dance floor on weekends, too,” Stottrup said. “If we want to have more diversity ... we have to expand our view on what a politician can look like. We have to accept the whole package and not just what we historically have been used to.”
Melani McAlister, a professor of American studies and international affairs at George Washington University, said the backlash against Marin reminded her of how Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was chided in 2019 when a video resurfaced of her dancing in college. (Ocasio-Cortez responded with a new video of her dancing in front of her office.)
“Someone thought that this could become an issue even though it’s clearly a tempest in a teapot,” McAlister said of Ocasio-Cortez’s viral clip. “The fact that she’s female, the fact that she’s young, and ... the fact that she’s a minority positions her to have to be securely upright to deserve or to be seen to deserve her position of power.”
McAlister said that although critics demand a higher standard from young women and others who are underrepresented in politics, Marin’s partying isn’t anything out of the ordinary and is socially comparable to how older male politicians golf. As more young adults take up government positions, she said, constituents will have to adapt to what the age group does outside of work.
“As long as [Marin] manages to continue to call this out for what it is, then good for her,” McAlister said. “She’s not letting it get more traction than it should have.”
Vitriol from Finnish rivals of Marin may seem contrary to the reputation of the Scandinavian country, which has often been considered one of the top industrialized nations for gender equity, said Eiko Strader, a GWU sociologist and assistant professor. But country rankings do not tell the whole story.
“Finland seems to be doing much better than other countries, but if you look at labor market indicators like earnings and managerial representation, Finnish women still lag behind Finnish men, because social and cultural norms that cannot be captured through standardized measures shape our everyday lives,” Strader said in an email.
Stottrup said that although sexist attacks lobbed at female politicians are likely to persist around the world, supporters will continue to band together.
On our radar in New York: Who is Mondaire Jones? | 2022-08-23T17:07:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Women dance in solidarity with Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/23/sanna-marin-women-dancing-solidarity/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/23/sanna-marin-women-dancing-solidarity/ |
The Nets said Tuesday that the team's leadership met a day earlier with Kevin Durant and business partner Rich Kleiman in Los Angeles and agreed to move forward with our partnership. (Seth Wenig/AP)
The saga surrounding Nets star Kevin Durant’s next destination reached an anticlimactic conclusion Tuesday, when the team announced that it will keep the 12-time all-star in Brooklyn.
General Manager Sean Marks announced the news in a statement saying Durant and the Nets, “have agreed to move forward with our partnership. We are focusing on basketball, with one collective goal in mind: build a lasting franchise to bring a championship to Brooklyn.” The announcement includes the Nets’ logo alongside that of Boardroom, the media company that Durant created with manager Rich Kleiman.
Durant was reportedly being pursued by the Boston Celtics, Miami Heat, Toronto Raptors, and most recently, the Memphis Grizzlies. His decision to stay with the team comes two weeks after Durant reiterated his request to be traded, and told Nets owner Joe Tsai to choose between him or Marks and Coach Steve Nash, according to the Athletic.
Tsai responded with a tweet showing his support for the front office and the coaching staff.
A two-time champion and two-time Finals MVP, Durant will continue a tenure in Brooklyn that’s been defined by drama.
Durant, who left Golden State to team up with Kyrie Irving in Brooklyn shortly after tearing his Achilles during the 2019 Finals, pulled the plug on the venture just three years later. Hours before the NBA’s free agency period opened June 30 and just two weeks after the Warriors won their first title since his departure, Durant formally requested a trade following an exhausting 2021-22 season that ended with a humbling first-round sweep by the Boston Celtics.
Durant’s Brooklyn tenure has unfolded in a blur, in part because it so closely aligned with the coronavirus pandemic. The four-time scoring champion sat out the 2019-2020 season as he recovered from his Achilles’ injury, and he opted against rushing to return for the Disney World bubble. During the condensed 2020-2021 season, Durant played 35 games due to injuries and coronavirus protocol absences before turning in a sensational postseason run that ended with a second-round loss to the eventual champion Milwaukee Bucks. This season, Durant again missed time with an injury that limited him to 55 games and turned in one of the most forgettable postseason showings of his career against the Celtics.
Along the way, the Nets swung a blockbuster trade with the Houston Rockets for James Harden in 2021, then reversed course by trading the all-star guard to the Philadelphia 76ers at February’s trade deadline. A key driver of Brooklyn’s instability was Irving, who missed significant time over the past three seasons with injuries, personal absences and eligibility issues related to his refusal to take the coronavirus vaccine. While Durant was careful to always defend Irving in public, it was clear that the Nets needed major changes following their disappointing showing against the Celtics. In one sign of how quickly Brooklyn unraveled, Durant’s trade request came less than a year after he inked a four-year, $198 million extension.
In the beginning, Durant appeared to view the Nets as an opportunity to be the face of his own franchise again, to expand his business and media portfolio in a major market and to construct a roster filled with his friends. Brooklyn pledged to cultivate a player-friendly culture, even deferring to its stars on matters like playing time and injury management.
That philosophical approach backfired this season, as Irving’s vaccination saga overshadowed the Nets’ season, contributed to Harden’s departure and placed a huge burden on Durant’s shoulders. Organizational inexperience was the root cause of many of Brooklyn’s shortcomings: Tsai only took full ownership of the franchise in 2019, Marks was a relatively new executive with no previous experience managing A-list superstars and Steve Nash was a first-time coach when he was hired in 2020.
Time and again after landing Durant and Irving, the Nets often looked like they had bitten off more than they could chew. While Brooklyn had the NBA’s second-highest payroll last season — trailing only Golden State — it was the only one of 16 playoff teams that didn’t win a single game in the postseason.
Even so, Durant has played at an MVP-caliber level when healthy throughout his Nets tenure, averaging 29.9 points, 7.4 rebounds and 6.4 assists per game this season. Yet with only one playoff series victory during his time in Brooklyn, the undisputed highlight of Durant’s post-Achilles period was his central role on USA Basketball’s gold medal winning team at the Tokyo Olympics. Otherwise, he was forced to watch as major rivals like LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Curry won championships while the Nets repeatedly fell short of expectations. | 2022-08-23T17:07:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kevin Durant will stay in Brooklyn after trade request - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/kevin-durant-stays-with-brooklyn-nets/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/kevin-durant-stays-with-brooklyn-nets/ |
Clip of Black Little Leaguer covered in cotton-like material sparks outrage
The Midwest Region team participated in the opening ceremony of the 2022 Little League World Series. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
An incident involving Little League players that was shown on ESPN produced a strong reaction among a number of observers online Monday as it went viral.
The scene showed a young Black player sitting with a blank expression as White teammates affixed a cotton-like substance to his hair. As ESPN’s camera lingered on the moment during a nationally televised Major League Baseball game, network announcers made light of what they saw, but some who viewed it expressed concern about what seemed to them to be an act of racial insensitivity.
It happened Sunday evening during the 2022 MLB Little League Classic, a game between the Baltimore Orioles and Boston Red Sox staged at Historic Bowman Field in Williamsport, Pa. The 2,366-seat stadium is the site of the Little League World Series, which is also being televised by ESPN. The children seen in the viral clip were players from the Davenport, Iowa, area who are representing the Midwest region in the 12-and-under tournament and were in attendance for the Orioles-Red Sox game.
“During the broadcast of the MLB Little League Classic, a Midwest player was shown with filling from a stuffed animal given away at the game on his head,” Little League International said Monday in a statement. “After speaking with the team, as well as reviewing photos, multiple players on the Midwest Region team were taking part in this while enjoying the game. As only one player appeared on the broadcast, Little League International understands that the actions shown could be perceived as racially insensitive.
An official with the Midwest team — which appears to be composed primarily of White players — declined to comment on Monday, saying he had been asked by Little League International to refer media inquiries to the youth-baseball organization.
Taking issue with the Little League International statement was Carolyn Hinds, a Toronto-based film critic and journalist who reacted to the viral footage by tweeting that it was “exactly what we think it is and some people need to be taken to task.”
When reached later by phone, Hinds said Little League officials did not “address the issue” presented in the clip. She wondered if the actions were “something that happens regularly with this team,” and what kind of lessons about racial tolerance were being imparted by the players’ parents.
Regarding Little League’s claim that the Black child’s mother perceived no “ill-intent,” Hinds wondered if he was adopted, because “if this child’s mother is Black, I don’t see how she could be okay with what happened to her son.”
As with some other observers, Hinds found several elements of the scene jarring, including the use of a material that closely resembled cotton — conjuring associations with slaveholding plantations in the United States and in her native Barbados — and the lack of “respect for his bodily autonomy.”
“As a Black person, and a Black woman, just the whole idea of someone putting cotton in any Black person’s hair immediately upset me,” Hinds said. “For us, the history of cotton in and of itself is tumultuous.” In addition, she asserted, Black people are “very sensitive about who touches our hair.”
For another online commenter, the sight of the child’s hair having the material attached to it struck a deeply personal chord.
Khari Thompson, a reporter at Boston sports-radio station WEEI, explained by phone that while growing up near Chicago in northwest Indiana, he was one of the few Black kids in his various classrooms.
“I was used to standing out for how different I looked, how different my hair looked, and people would try to touch it, play around with it when I’d ride on the school bus,” he said. “It got to a point where people would try to hide loose change in my hair.”
“I just kind of took it,” he added, “because I felt very alone in my situation.”
Those experiences gave Thompson a huge amount of sympathy for the child in the clip, and for the 31-year-old reporter it did not matter much if, as Little League officials suggested, White teammates not seen on camera were undergoing similar treatment.
“To a White kid, sticking cotton in your hair — what imagery and history does that evoke?” Thompson asked. “Yeah, sure, it’s fun. It’s nothing. But that’s not the case for somebody like me or somebody like him. … When you are the one person that looks like you and has hair like you, it carries a different meaning.”
“It’s on the adults to do something about that,” he added, “and it’s really distressing to see … that nobody did anything about that. That’s horrifying to me.”
Even without the racial aspect, Hinds said, the scene was unsettling because “you can look at his face and see that he’s very, very uncomfortable.”
“I was angry,” she added, “but I also felt really bad for him.”
ESPN announcer Karl Ravech appeared to have a different reaction to what he was seeing.
“That’s just Little Leaguers being Little Leaguers right there,” Ravech said of the scene.
Hinds faulted the producers of the telecast for not cutting away once it became apparent what was happening.
“They don’t look at these situations,” she said, “and step outside of themselves and say, ‘Is this a problem?’ They are not thinking to themselves, ‘If this was my kid, my friend’s kid, my niece, would I be okay with this?’ ”
A coach with the Midwest team did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The children are back in action on Tuesday, when they take on the Southwest Region squad in the tournament’s consolation bracket. | 2022-08-23T17:07:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Black player with cotton-like material in hair at LLWS sparks outrage - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/little-league-cotton-incident/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/little-league-cotton-incident/ |
The No. 9 jersey of Sonny Jurgensen (shown in 2013) will be retired by the Commanders on Jan. 8. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
The Washington Commanders’ final regular season home game will be notable for more than being an NFC East clash with the Dallas Cowboys.
The Commanders announced Tuesday they will retire the No. 9 jersey worn by Hall of Fame quarterback Sonny Jurgensen in a pregame ceremony Jan. 8 at FedEx Field. Details will be announced closer to the Week 18 game, which is subject to NFL flex scheduling. The time will be announced no later than six days before kickoff.
“I am very humbled by this recognition, it is an honor of a lifetime to have my jersey retired with a franchise I spent 55 years of my life with,” Jurgensen said in a statement released by the team. “Thank you to [owners] Dan and Tanya [Snyder] for this honor and for supporting me and my family during our time in Washington.
“From hanging up my cleats to hanging up my clipboard and headset a few decades later, my time spent in Washington meant the world to me.”
Jurgensen, who turned 88 Tuesday, played 11 seasons with the franchise, which acquired him in a 1964 trade with Philadelphia, where he spent his first seven seasons. Jurgensen joined Washington’s radio broadcast team in 1981 and spent 38 years as a color analyst, memorably teaming with Sam Huff and Frank Herzog.
“Additionally, I want to thank my coaches and teammates including Coach [Vince] Lombardi, Leonard Hauss, Billy Kilmer, Bobby Mitchell, Jerry Smith and Charley Taylor, and my special radio and TV partners Sam Huff, Frank Herzog and others,” he said. “Thank you to the fan base for cheering on the Burgundy & Gold every single Sunday, without you we wouldn’t have the ability to play or talk about this special game for a living. Lastly, a special thank you to my wife Margo for always being by my side and for the unconditional support.”
An instant hit in Washington, Jurgensen was an essential cog in one of the NFL’s top offenses, teaming with receivers Taylor and Mitchell and playing with the team until 1974. Over his last few seasons, he was mostly a reserve behind Kilmer, and “I like Billy” or “I like Sonny” bumper stickers adorned cars around the region.
Although he never won a playoff game and only played in one during his final season, Jurgensen was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1983. Over 18 NFL seasons, he appeared in 218 games, starting 147. He completed 2,433 of 4,262 passes for 32,224 yards, and his 255 touchdowns rank 21st all-time. He led the NFL in passing five times and was selected to five Pro Bowls.
In 135 games for Washington, he completed 1,831 passes for 22,585 yards and 179 touchdowns. He is second on Washington’s all-time list in completions (behind Joe Theismann), passing yards (behind Theismann) and passing touchdowns (behind Sammy Baugh).
Jurgensen, who also spent six years as a television analyst with CBS, ended a 62-year NFL career in 2019 when he retired from the radio booth, saying then that it had been “a great 55 years in Washington.”
Sonny Jurgensen announces retirement from radio broadcasts
“No member of the Washington franchise will ever wear the number 9 again, which is truly a nod to Sonny’s incredible accomplishments on and off the field,” Tanya Snyder said in the team’s statement. “Dan and I are thankful for the 55 years Sonny dedicated to the franchise. People will remember him as one of the greatest quarterbacks in franchise history and the radio voice of the team for our three Super Bowl victories.
“He represents true excellence and professionalism and serves as a role model for future Washington players. We look forward to honoring his legacy with his friends and family later this season. He will forever be a part of the Burgundy & Gold.” | 2022-08-23T17:07:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Commanders to retire Sonny Jurgensen's number - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/sonny-jurgensen-number-retired/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/sonny-jurgensen-number-retired/ |
Will Zalatoris’s Tour Championship withdrawal will cost him millions
Will Zalatoris is out of the Tour Championship because of a bad back. (Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
Will Zalatoris has withdrawn from the season-ending Tour Championship because of two herniated disks in his back, the PGA Tour announced Tuesday. Zalatoris also will not be able to play in next month’s Presidents Cup, where he was likely to be chosen by captain Davis Love III to compete in the biennial event between teams from the United States and the rest of the non-European world.
Zalatoris, 26, is one of the sport’s rising stars. He won his first PGA Tour title at the FedEx St. Jude Championship on Aug. 21, the first tournament of the PGA Tour’s three-event FedEx Cup playoffs. But he injured his back at last week’s BMW Championship and withdrew after four holes during Saturday’s third round. At the time, he was only four strokes off the lead.
At the Tour Championship, the golfers start with an assigned score based on their ranking in the FedEx Cup points list. Zalatoris ranks third so he was slated to start the tournament at 7 under par, three strokes behind Scottie Scheffler and one behind Patrick Cantlay.
The Tour Championship's wacky scoring system, explained
The PGA Tour said the starting positions for the remaining 29 golfers in the field will not be affected by Zalatoris’s withdrawal. If all 29 finish the tournament, Zalatoris will be assigned 30th place and receive the $500,000 bonus that comes with it. That’s well below what he stood to make if he had played: The Tour Championship winner receives $18 million, the biggest purse on the PGA Tour and more than any of the four majors, and even the second-place golfer receives $6.5 million.
Still, because he qualified for the Tour Championship for the first time, Zalatoris will receive an invitation to next year’s Masters, U.S. Open and British Open, and his win at the FedEx St. Jude Championship will get him into next year’s PGA Championship.
Zalatoris began 2022 ranked 37th in the Official World Golf Rankings but has ascended to his current ninth-place standing thanks to nine top-10 finishes and the one victory. He has only three missed cuts this calendar year and was thought a shoo-in to be one of Love’s captain’s choices for the Presidents Cup, which will be announced after the Tour Championship. | 2022-08-23T17:07:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Will Zalatoris withdraws from Tour Championship because of back issues - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/will-zalatoris-withdraws-tour-championship/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/will-zalatoris-withdraws-tour-championship/ |
Usain Bolt hopes to truly make his unique victory celebration (shown after winning the gold medal in the 200-meter race at the 2016 Summer Olympics) truly his own. (David J. Phillip/Associated Press File)
“This is not Usain Bolt’s first application for his victory pose,” Washington-based trademark lawyer Josh Gerben told The Post in an email. “He had obtained a trademark registration for the logo back in 2009 for a variety of products, but that registration was canceled in 2017 because Bolt did not file proof he was actually using the trademark to sell goods in the United States (which is a requirement to maintain a federal trademark registration).” | 2022-08-23T17:08:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Usain Bolt hopes to trademark his victory pose - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/08/23/usain-bolt-trademark/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/08/23/usain-bolt-trademark/ |
The CEO of Tapestry on the business of fashion and future or retail
From COVID-19 and labor shortages to supply chain issues, the fashion retail industry has been forced to contend with a variety of disruptions. On Monday, Sept.12 at 1:00 p.m. ET, Joanne Crevoiserat, CEO of Tapestry, which owns brands such as Coach, Kate Spade New York and Stuart Weitzman, joins The Post’s Robin Givhan to discuss the business of fashion and the future of retail.
CEO, Tapestry | 2022-08-23T17:09:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The CEO of Tapestry on the business of fashion and future or retail - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/09/12/ceo-tapestry-business-fashion-future-or-retail/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/09/12/ceo-tapestry-business-fashion-future-or-retail/ |
Police investigating death of 5-year-old girl in Capitol Heights as a homicide
Police are investigating the death of 5-year-old in Capitol Heights. (Prince George's County Police)
Prince George’s County police are investigating the death of a 5-year-old girl who suffered blunt force trauma, authorities said.
Police identified the girl as Pradeline Delinois.
Officers with the Capitol Heights Police Department found the girl on Aug. 18 after they received a report of an unresponsive child in the 5100 block of Cumberland Street. Officials rushed her to a hospital, police said, where she was pronounced dead.
Prince George’s County police is leading the investigating, as it does for all homicides in the town of Capitol Heights. | 2022-08-23T17:49:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pradeline Delinois, 5, dead in Capitol Heights homicide, according to police - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/23/child-homicide-prince-georges/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/23/child-homicide-prince-georges/ |
Washington Nationals pitching coach Jim Hickey visits with Patrick Corbin on Aug. 1. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
From June 16 through July 20, 2019, the Washington Nationals went 27 consecutive games without a loss by a starting pitcher. The run, which helped pave the way to a wild-card berth and a World Series title, was the longest by a team since 1916, when New York Giants starters also went 27 games without a loss during their MLB record 26-0-1 winning streak. Flash forward three years and Washington’s starting pitchers are making a different kind of history.
Heading into Tuesday’s series opener against the Seattle Mariners, Nationals starters have gone 39 games without a win. That’s the longest such streak since at least 1901 and four games more than the next-longest drought during that time, set by the 1949 Washington Senators.
MASN reporter Dan Kolko mentioned the remarkable streak ahead of the Nationals’ game in San Diego on Saturday. The broadcast showed a graphic of the longest streaks since 1901 early in the game, before Josiah Gray earned a no-decision despite allowing only one run over five innings. Gray was the last Nationals starter to record a win, thanks to his masterful 11-strikeout performance against the Philadelphia Phillies on July 6. Since then, he is 0-3 with four no-decisions.
Collectively, Washington’s starters are 0-23 with a 6.85 ERA since July 6, while the team is 11-28. Patrick Corbin has been the worst of the eight different Nationals pitchers to start a game during that stretch, posting an 0-7 record with a 9.82 ERA in eight starts. Corbin, who failed to make it out of the first inning in two of his last five starts, is three defeats shy of becoming baseball’s first 20-game loser since the Detroit Tigers’ Mike Maroth in 2003.
Aníbal Sánchez is 0-5 with a 6.43 ERA in seven starts during the streak. During the Nationals’ streak of 27 games without a loss by a starting pitcher in 2019, he and Corbin were a combined 6-0 with a 2.68 ERA.
A particularly ugly stretch for Nationals starters came earlier this month, when Gray, Corbin and Cory Abbott combined to allow 19 earned runs in three straight losses to the Phillies.
“We got to get some better starting pitching,” Manager Dave Martinez said after the last of those defeats. “We’re always behind, and it’s tough for morale.”
Washington’s starting pitching has been better of late — Sánchez, Paolo Espino, Gray and Corbin combined to allow only six earned runs in four games against the Padres over the weekend — but it’s yet to translate to a win. Carl Edwards Jr. and Erasmo Ramirez have three wins apiece out of the bullpen during the streak.
For the season, Nationals starting pitchers have a league-worst 5.95 ERA. Their 23 wins are the second-fewest in baseball, but still eight more than the Pittsburgh Pirates. Houston Astros starters have combined for a league-best 61 wins.
As for the record streak the Nationals recently surpassed, the 1949 Senators went 35 consecutive games without a win by a starting pitcher from June 22 through July 30. Sid Hudson ended the drought with a complete game victory over the St. Louis Browns on July 31, and the significance of the right-hander’s performance wasn’t lost on Washington Post reporter Morris Siegel.
“Big Sid rode herd on the Browns,” Siegel wrote after Hudson scattered five hits in Washington’s 7-3 win. “He gave ’em a walk in the second inning, two hits in the third, two more in the sixth and their final safety in the eighth to become the first Nat pitcher to start, finish and win a game since June 21 when he himself turned the trick against the White Sox.”
The Senators finished 50-104, last place in the American League. | 2022-08-23T18:23:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nationals starting pitchers have gone 39 games without a win - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/nationals-starting-pitchers-losing-streak/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/nationals-starting-pitchers-losing-streak/ |
Malaysian ex-premier Najib loses appeal, begins 12-year sentence
Former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak speaks to supporters outside a courtroom in Putrajaya on Aug. 23. (Ahmad Luqman Ismail/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
On Tuesday, a five-member panel of judges from Malaysia’s Federal Court concluded that Najib’s appeal was without merit and that the original High Court decision had been correct. His sentence is to be served at Kajang prison on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, and he is to be assessed a $47 million fine.
“This is a simple and straightforward case of abuse of power, criminal breach of trust and money laundering,” Chief Justice Maimun Tuan Mat said as she announced the decision, according to the Associated Press.
Najib’s imprisonment is the latest in a string of stunning developments in the case revolving around 1MDB, also known as the 1Malaysia Development Berhad, a state fund co-founded by the former prime minister during his first term in 2009. The U.S. Justice Department later found that at least $4.5 billion of the fund had been misappropriated by high-level officials in a global scandal.
The enormous scale of corruption drew in international finance groups including Goldman Sachs, which reached a $3.9 billion settlement with Malaysia to resolve criminal charges related to 1MDB in 2020. Money from the graft was involved in funding the Martin Scorcese film “The Wolf of Wall Street” and used to buy hotels in Beverly Hills and Vincent van Gogh paintings, according to investigators.
A member of Malaysia’s political elite, Najib is the third member of his family to serve as prime minister, following his father and uncle. He was educated at a British boarding school and studied economics at the University of Nottingham, before becoming the youngest member of Parliament at the age of just 23 following the death of his father.
Entering the prime minister’s office himself in 2009, he had pledged both economic and political reforms. However, by the time he was forced from office after losing an election in 2018 — the first time the ruling coalition, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), had lost since independence — he was enmeshed in the 1MDB scandal and increasingly seen as an authoritarian.
Opposition leaders welcomed Tuesday’s court decision and noted the bravery shown by court officials — including Maimun, the country’s first female chief justice, who had been accused of bias by Najib’s lawyers and received death threats from his supporters.
However, Tuesday’s ruling could prove a muted victory for those seeking to hold Najib accountable. There is still the prospect of a royal pardon for the former prime minister, who remains popular with a segment of society and influential in UMNO, which is back in government as part of a coalition. The whereabouts of Jho Low is still unclear, with Beijing denying reports he is in China.
According to reports in local media outlets, Najib was in court when Tuesday’s verdict was read out, accompanied by his wife and three children. Some accounts said that he appeared shocked by the decision.
“The world of politics and public service has its advantages and disadvantages,” he wrote, according to a copy of the note to his family posted to his official Facebook page. | 2022-08-23T18:32:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Najib Razak, former Malaysian prime minister, sent to prison over 1MDB graft case - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/23/najib-razak-prison-1mdb-appeal-12-years/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/23/najib-razak-prison-1mdb-appeal-12-years/ |
A general view of atmosphere at the 37th Film Independent Spirit Awards on Sunday, March 6, 2022, in Santa Monica, Calif. The awards will now feature gender neutral film and television acting categories and raise its budget cap to $30 million. The organization announced Tuesday that its categories will now be “best lead performance” and “best supporting performance. The budget cap, meanwhile, is intended to reflect the rising costs of film production. (Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File) | 2022-08-23T18:41:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Independent Spirit Awards make acting awards gender neutral - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/independent-spirit-awards-make-acting-awards-gender-neutral/2022/08/23/6b7c25a2-2311-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/independent-spirit-awards-make-acting-awards-gender-neutral/2022/08/23/6b7c25a2-2311-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
What Herschel Walker’s clueless campaign says about the GOP
Georgia Republican US Senate candidate Herschel Walker (Erik S. Lesser/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) (Erik S Lesser/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
In the race for U.S. Senate in Georgia, Republican nominee Herschel Walker is forcing people to ask: Just how clueless is too clueless to serve in Congress? And what would it mean if our national legislature was filled with people like Walker?
The former football star’s campaign has been a series of howlers and head-scratchers, the latest of which is his argument against the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act: “They continue to try to fool you that they are helping you out. But they’re not ... Because a lot of money it’s going to trees ... Don’t we have enough trees around here?”
The possibility that Georgians are fed up with all their trees notwithstanding, no one says that Walker is the first office-seeker to lack even the most rudimentary understanding of policy or the issues he would confront. And there is in fact some money in the IRA to promote trees, including urban “heat islands” where a lack of shade trees increases temperatures.
But Walker’s comments on policy have been particularly colorful, including his thoughts on China hurting our environment by taking “our good air" and his proposal to address school shootings with “a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women that’s looking at social media." Then there’s his recent debunking of evolution: “If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) recently predicted his party might not win control of the chamber, saying “candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome” of these races. No one doubted that Walker was one of the candidates he had in mind.
Yet Walker is hardly the only one; since so much rides on former president Donald Trump’s endorsement in GOP primaries and the most important qualification for winning that endorsement is an embrace of his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, from coast to coast we’ve seen the party’s nominations won by crackpots and halfwits, perhaps more than ever before.
What would it mean if a bunch of these people actually won?
The greatest danger lies in executive positions such as governor and secretary of state, where they would have the power to steal elections and create all kinds of other disasters. But it’s not immediately clear that a Republican-controlled Congress dominated by the party’s worst and dimmest would be appreciably different from one led by its best and brightest, or at the very least its marginally clever.
There are multiple ways to be a terrible legislator, and being a dolt is only one of them. For instance, until 2021, Georgia was represented in the Senate by Republican David Perdue, who in his six years in the chamber wrote just a few bills that became law, including one to create a parking lot at the National Zoo and another renaming a post office. Georgians were left to wonder what, if anything, Perdue was actually doing in Washington, and when given the chance they tossed him out.
Perdue wasn’t too dumb to legislate; the job just didn’t seem to grab his interest. The truth is that while it doesn’t hurt to be smart if you’re a senator, you don’t have to be. You can let other people write the laws, and just have your party’s leadership or the hosts on Fox News tell you which way to vote when the time comes.
Today’s Republican Party also contains a cadre of extremely smart politicians educated at the most prestigious universities, people such as Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas (Princeton undergrad, Harvard Law School), Tom Cotton of Arkansas (Harvard undergrad and law school) and Josh Hawley of Missouri (Stanford undergrad, Yale Law School), who spend most of their time trying to Own the Libs, because they see that as the path to success in their party.
Which may be the smart thing to do if you’re a Republican who wants to run for president. And it shows the problem: When there are few incentives to do the hard work of legislating to address complex policy challenges, even the smart people see advantage in pretending to be stupid.
There’s a critical imbalance here as well: As members of the party that believes in government, Democrats know their supporters expect them to produce results, and as we’ve seen this year, that takes a lot of doing. Some may be better at it than others, but all are expected to demonstrate their commitment to the process.
Liberal voters also tend to value intellect in a way conservative voters just don’t. They may not always choose the smartest person (if they did, Sen. Elizabeth Warren would have been their 2020 presidential nominee). But they’re far less likely to fall for a politician telling them that all their problems can be solved by nurturing their resentment of supposedly snooty “elites.”
So the truth is that while Walker would probably displace Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) as the widely acknowledged dopiest member of the Senate if he were elected, that’s not why he’s such a threat. It’s not even Walker’s extraordinary record of telling easily disprovable lies. It’s the fact that if he wins it could mean Congress being in control of a party that elevates people like him.
The problem isn’t Walker, it’s that the GOP is dominated by politicians who in one way or another resemble him. His party doesn’t just tolerate ignorance and dishonesty, it often seems to want nothing more. And for now, there’s little reason to believe that will change. | 2022-08-23T18:42:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | How much of a threat is an even dumber Congress? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/herschel-walker-dimwitted-campaign-senate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/herschel-walker-dimwitted-campaign-senate/ |
President Biden shakes hands with Sen. Joe Manchin III after signing the Inflation Reduction Act on Aug. 16. (Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg)
Just 1 in 4 Americans believe that President Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act will actually reduce inflation, while 71 percent say the law will either have no impact or make things worse. The majority is right to be skeptical. The nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model found that the bill’s effect on inflation will be “statistically indistinguishable from zero.”
This is not surprising. The real purpose of the bill is not to reduce inflation but to reduce climate change. Fully 85 percent of the law’s spending goes toward climate and clean energy. So, what will the bill’s effect be on the climate?
Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of the book “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet,” did a little digging to see how much Biden’s law will affect global temperatures. He took the energy and climate analytics firm Rhodium Group’s estimate of how much the law will reduce average greenhouse-gas emissions, compared it with the reduction in emissions under current U.S. policy — and found that the act will reduce emissions by an additional 1.7 billion tons by 2030. Sound like a lot? Not really. According to the United Nation’s climate model, Lomborg says, that will reduce the rise in global temperature by a grand total of … 0.0009 degrees. That’s next to nothing.
Of course, this is the most pessimistic estimate. It assumes that the law produces no more emissions reductions after 2030, when its funding expires. But what if we take the most optimistic view and assume that the emissions reductions from the law continue every year for the next 70-plus years, until the end of the century? Then, Lomborg says, the total reduction in emissions would be 37.5 billion tons, which would reduce the growth in global temperatures by 2100 by a whopping … 0.028 degrees.
The irony is that Democrats thought they were pulling a fast one on ordinary Americans, just 1 percent of whom believe that climate change is the most important issue facing the country. They thought that by calling the bill the “Inflation Reduction Act,” they could hoodwink the country into believing that the bill is designed to address one of their biggest concerns, rather than the biggest concern of climate activists. | 2022-08-23T18:42:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The Inflation Reduction Act will have no real effect on the climate - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/inflation-reduction-act-climate-change-effect/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/inflation-reduction-act-climate-change-effect/ |
A Nicaraguan exiled in Costa Rica holds a poster with a Vatican City flag during a protest of the detention of the Rev. Rolando Álvarez, who was taken into custody on Aug. 19. (Mayela Lopez/Reuters)
Dictatorship, and resistance to it, are recurrent themes of Central America’s history. Crucial to that story has been the role of the Roman Catholic Church, still the largest Christian denomination in the region, whose priests, nuns and bishops have offered support — material and moral — to democratic movements, often at the risk of punishment or death. The latest dictator to bully and threaten church leaders for political reasons is Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. On Aug. 19, Mr. Ortega’s police arrested the Rev. Rolando Álvarez, the bishop of the country’s seventh-largest city, and placed him under house arrest in Managua, the capital. Meanwhile, five priests and two seminarians were sent to the notorious jail for political prisoners, El Chipote. This attack on the country’s preeminent religious institution is a major escalation of repression that leaders from Washington to Rome must condemn and counteract.
Mr. Ortega’s crackdown began in 2018, to shut down a massive wave of protests that enjoyed support from students, middle-class professionals and many former members of his own Sandinista political party. Church leaders offered to mediate, many of them making clear their sympathy for the movement. Brushing aside dialogue, the regime unleashed its security forces and 355 people were killed, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Among the 180 political prisoners still languishing at El Chipote and other sites are politicians who had the temerity to consider opposing Mr. Ortega’s rigged reelection in 2021.
Bishop Álvarez stands accused of having “persisted in his destabilizing and provocative activities,” as a government statement put it. No doubt the bishop’s behavior did not suit the dictatorship. As far back as 2015, he led environmentalist protests against the government’s plans to allow gold mining in northern Nicaragua. At that time, the government heeded his protests and abandoned the mine project. What the Ortega regime cannot abide, apparently, are Bishop Álvarez’s more recent calls for electoral reform and the release of political prisoners, which he backed up by staging a protest fast in May. The arrest of Bishop Álvarez and other clergy are of a piece with the regime’s shutdown of seven church-owned radio stations on Aug. 1 and the ouster, in March, of the Vatican ambassador in Managua, Archbishop Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag. In April, Bishop Silvio Baez, the auxiliary archbishop of Managua, left the country, ostensibly because Pope Francis had recalled him to the Vatican. Bishop Baez was a target of frequent death threats and had been injured in an attack by pro-government demonstrators in 2018.
Thus far, the Vatican has looked to avoid confrontation in its response to the Ortega regime’s assault. Consistent with that, the pope said Sunday that events in Nicaragua give him “worry and pain,” but he did not condemn or even mention the arrests specifically, calling instead for “open and sincere dialogue.” Bishop Baez, by contrast, tweeted: “With a pained, indignant heart I condemn the nighttime kidnapping of Monsignor Álvarez. Once again, the dictatorship has surpassed even its own evil and its diabolical spirit.” Speaking truth to power that way might not be enough to end repression in Nicaragua by itself. But there can’t be progress without it. | 2022-08-23T18:42:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Nicaragua’s regime cracks down on the Roman Catholic church - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/nicaragua-catholic-church-repression-ortega/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/nicaragua-catholic-church-repression-ortega/ |
A health department official measures a dose of the polio vaccine on July 25 in Rockland County, N.Y. (Rockland County Department of Health)
The virus that causes polio is highly contagious. It spreads person-to-person through contact with the feces of an infected person or droplets from a sneeze or cough, and less often with contaminated water and food. It can cause paralysis and death. For 40 years, there has been no sustained community transmission in the United States. Now, it appears to be back in New York City and environs, as well as in London, another warning of what happens when people forsake vaccines.
The last case of wild polio virus occurred in the United States in 1979, and in 1994, the World Health Organization declared the Americas region polio-free. With only a few minor exceptions since, polio was vanquished in the United States because of high uptake of an effective vaccine given to young children.
But in June a previously healthy, unvaccinated man in his 20s in Rockland County, N.Y., was hospitalized with fever, stiffness and leg paralysis, and subsequently tested positive for polio. He had a strain derived from the oral polio vaccine, which is effective at stopping person-to-person spread, but has a risk. It contains a live but weakened strain that can change into a paralytic form after being excreted into the environment and allowed to circulate for long enough in populations that are under-vaccinated, or not at all. The oral polio vaccine has not been used in the United States since 2000. (The inactivated polio vaccine used in the United States cannot revert or cause illness.)
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Rockland County patient likely was infected by virus that had been earlier brought from overseas. Genomic sequencing of the virus linked it to a strain circulating in wastewater “in Israel and the United Kingdom.” The polio virus has now been detected in wastewater samples in New York’s Rockland and Orange counties, in New York City, and in London, where it triggered a citywide polio immunization booster campaign for all children between ages 1 and 9.
About 70 percent of polio infections in children are asymptomatic. Those infected can shed the virus for days or weeks and transmit it to others. The CDC says, “Even a single case of paralytic polio represents a public health emergency in the United States.”
Vaccines are highly effective at preventing paralysis — the unvaccinated young man in Rockland County would not have been paralyzed if he had been vaccinated. The WHO recommends a 95 percent vaccine coverage to control the disease. In the United States, for children up to age 24 months, coverage was 92.7 percent among infants born during 2017-2018. But in Rockland County it was just 60.3 percent this month, and in some areas of the county, coverage was as low as 37.3 percent. This is catastrophic. To some extent, vaccine hesitancy is to blame, driven by ignorance and disinformation. Vaccines work, and people ignore this truth at their peril. | 2022-08-23T18:42:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | A case of polio in New York is a reminder to get vaccinated - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/polio-vaccine-new-york-virus/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/polio-vaccine-new-york-virus/ |
A student browses through books in the Presidio Middle School library in San Francisco in 2019. (Paul Chinn/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)
In Florida, some teachers are pulling books off classroom shelves and worrying about keeping photos of their same-sex spouses on their desks. In a Texas school district, principals and librarians were briefly told to remove 41 titles — including an adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary and the Bible — before a review deemed them acceptable. As children return to school, educators are not only grappling with the nationwide teacher shortage and a rise in student absenteeism. In many jurisdictions, they must also navigate confusing new policies and proposals to restrict speech in educational settings.
According to a report from PEN America, “educational gag orders” — legislation that limits discussion or teaching in schools and colleges — have become far more common across the country. More than 130 bills have been introduced in 36 states this year, primarily related to content on race, gender and LGBTQ identities. Notably, many of these proposals include harsh penalties, such as loss of funding and fines for institutions, and, for teachers, firing and even criminal charges. Republican lawmakers are behind the vast majority of these schemes; just one proposal tracked by PEN America had a Democratic sponsor.
Nearly 20 such bills have passed in the past two years, including Florida’s infamous Parental Rights in Education Act. Dubbed by critics as the “don’t say gay” law, it bars schools from teaching students up to third grade about topics related to gender identity and sexuality. Though it spurred national alarm, it was just one example of a multistate trend.
School libraries have become a particular flash point. A number of new policies at both the state and district levels make it easier for books to be challenged or require school districts to provide parents with lists of all new purchases. These come on top of an unprecedented wave of book banning: The American Library Association documented more than 700 challenges to school, library and university materials in 2021, directed at over 1,500 publications — mostly by Black and LGBTQ writers.
Of course, not all content is appropriate for every age level, and parents have an important role to play in education. Yet, taken together, these efforts have an enormous chilling effect on schools. Because rules are often vaguely written and rarely contain detailed review processes, educators are incentivized to avoid any material that could contain politically fraught themes — a factor that experts say is at least partially responsible for the exodus of teachers in key states.
Students are also being deprived of important opportunities to learn about society — and see a diverse range of identities and experiences reflected in lessons. A recent survey from Rand Corp. found that 1 in 4 teachers had been told by school or district officials to limit discussions about race and racism. U.S. history is also a frequent target of state legislators and school boards eager to promote a sanitized version of the nation’s past.
Education should be about presenting students with challenging ideas — and giving them the tools to confront and engage with these concepts in thoughtful ways. The rise of policies to silence teachers and whitewash curriculums harms schools, students — and, ultimately, democracy. | 2022-08-23T18:42:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | School speech crackdowns in Texas, Florida, elsewhere hurt education - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/school-speech-book-bans-education-teachers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/school-speech-book-bans-education-teachers/ |
Serena Williams appears at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Beverly Hills, Calif., on March 27, 2022, left, and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, appears at a service of thanksgiving for the reign of Queen Elizabeth II in London on June 3, 2022. The first episode of “Archetypes,” a podcast by Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, features a discussion between her and Williams on motherhood. The podcast is Meghan’s first release as part of an exclusive deal with Spotify. (AP Photo) (Uncredited/AP) | 2022-08-23T18:44:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Serena Williams tells Meghan of baby’s injury before match - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/serena-williams-tells-meghan-of-babys-injury-before-match/2022/08/23/98a94404-2309-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/serena-williams-tells-meghan-of-babys-injury-before-match/2022/08/23/98a94404-2309-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
Canada-U.S. migration data tells a story beyond easy cliches
Vehicles enter the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel en route to Canada in March 2020. (Paul Sancya/AP)
Immigration between Canada and the United States was once so routine, it was barely considered worthy of comment. From the 1920s to the end of World War II, Canadians were a plurality of immigrants to the United States, and until the 1930s or so, the United States was the second-largest source of immigrants to Canada, after Britain. When Ernest Hemingway went to Toronto to work as a reporter, or Elizabeth Arden moved to New York to pursue her beauty business, no one would have accused them of some bold, political act.
These days, however, with most migration to both countries coming from outside the continent, the rare border crossers who remain seem intriguing. A person who trades the United States for Canada, or vice versa, is often seen as manifesting something profound and important about the comparative political-cultural identities of the countries; an evaluation of their divergent flaws and virtues.
Immigration data from the past 20 years provides some evidence to support the cliche that American emigration to Canada is primarily a left-wing thing: that is, the numbers appear to suggest that an increased portion of Americans will reliably pack up and “move to Canada” whenever a Republican president gets elected. Here’s how the numbers break down:
During George W. Bush’s eight-year administration, the number of Americans who obtained permanent residency in Canada rose from a rate consistent with the late Clinton years (5,602, in the first year of Bush’s first term), to nearly double that by the time of the 2008 election (10,187). Under Donald Trump’s shorter presidency, we see a similar, yet less dramatic, increase. Barack Obama’s last full year in office, 8,485 Americans gained permanent residency in Canada, while in 2019, Trump’s final year, the number had risen to 10,780. (Immigration rates all over the world plummeted amid the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, so the low numbers of Americans who migrated that year should not be considered representative of larger trends.)
So … advantage Canada? Were all those stories about Canada “gaining” from repulsive American presidents true? Not quite, because the Canadian numbers tell only half of a larger continental story.
Even when U.S. emigration rates to Canada are high, they’re almost always eclipsed by the flow of Canadians moving the other way — a flow that doesn’t seem to correlate with anything observably political.
During the past two decades, the three highest peaks of Canadians getting U.S. green cards all occurred during the Bush years, with 21,752 in 2001, 19,352 in 2002 and 21,878 in 2005. Canadian emigration then noticeably declined during the Obama years and was a mixed bag during the Trump era. The year 2018 was the first time in the 21st century that the number of Canadians gaining permanent residency in the United States dipped under 10,000 (9,898), but otherwise the numbers hovered around late-Obama norms. And 2018 was also the only year in the past two decades in which Canada experienced a narrow net gain in cross-border migration, making a small “profit” from the more than 10,000 Americans who came, compared with the 9,000-plus Canadians who left.
I was very critical of the sensationalistic headlines common in the Canadian press during the Trump administration, which often grossly exaggerated the degree to which Americans were “fleeing” into Canada. But it’s nevertheless true that we’ve seen a shift over the past 20 years in which the once notoriously high levels of Canadian “brain drain” to the United States have mellowed and narrowed. The story of why the Canadian outflow decreased during the mid-2000s to early 2010s specifically is a phenomenon that has escaped much mainstream analysis, in part because it doesn’t easily fit into one of the tidy morality fables that tend to substitute for meaningful analysis of U.S.-Canadian relations.
It’s also the case, however — as the chart above illustrates — that out-migration from both countries tends to rise and fall in both places roughly simultaneously, which suggests the trends might just correlate with some third, apolitical variable — say, a strong North American economy providing both countries the means to prioritize recruiting educated workers from each other, or even the internet just making cross-border romances easier.
Among the many missed opportunities of the unambitious and rushed renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was the possibility of bringing some sort of Schengen-style regime to Canada and the United States making it easier for nationals in one country to live and work in the other. Although the numbers might be small as a proportion of overall immigration, the settlement of around 20,000 migrants across the border every year isn’t nothing and remains a testament to the deep economic and personal ties pulling Canadians and Americans toward each other, despite gratuitous bureaucratic barriers.
It’s in everyone’s interest for that total to be higher. | 2022-08-23T19:20:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Canada-U.S. migration data tells a story beyond easy cliches - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/canada-us-immigration-data-republican-presidents/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/canada-us-immigration-data-republican-presidents/ |
Angels owner might sell the team after long run of middling results
Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno is looking into selling the team. (Mark J. Terrill/AP)
Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno announced Tuesday that he is exploring selling the team, hiring an investment bank to assist him in the process.
“Although this difficult decision was entirely our choice and deserved a great deal of thoughtful consideration, my family and I have ultimately come to the conclusion that now is the time. Throughout the process, we will continue to run the franchise in the best interest of our fans, employees, players, and business partners.”
Moreno, who earned his fortune in billboard advertising, purchased the Angels for $180 million from the Walt Disney Co. in 2003, becoming the first Mexican American owner in major U.S. professional sports. The franchise was coming off its lone World Series title in 2002, and though the Angels made five playoff appearances in Moreno’s first seven seasons as owner, they have yet to return to the Fall Classic, have not made the MLB postseason since 2015 and have not won a playoff game since 2009.
Still, Forbes estimates that the Angels are worth $2.2 billion, the ninth-highest valuation in baseball.
Moreno has not hesitated to sign big-name players such as Albert Pujols, Josh Hamilton and Vernon Wells, but those high-priced signings have come at the expense of the franchise’s overall infrastructure, with the team’s scouting, analytics and player development systems seen as lacking. The current Angels feature two of the game’s biggest and highest-paid stars in Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, but the former’s career is in jeopardy because of a rare back disorder while the latter will be a free agent after the 2023 season. Moreno’s decision not to trade Ohtani this season so that the franchise could start a rebuilding project was seen as a mistake.
In 2019, the Angels signed infielder Anthony Rendon to a seven-year, $245 million contract, but he has been plagued by injuries over the past two seasons, and his sizable contract is seen as another impediment to progress for the Angels.
“The infrastructure needs to be improved. There’s a lot of things that need to be improved there,” Joe Maddon, who was fired as Angels manager on June 7, told the Tampa Bay Times in a story published Sunday. “These guys can’t do it alone, obviously. It’s the non-sexy stuff that has to get better. It’s not just bright, shiny objects — they have that.
In May, the Anaheim City Council voted to cancel the sale of Angel Stadium to a Moreno-affiliated management company, which had plans to redevelop the area around the stadium. The deal to sell the stadium to Moreno’s company led to the resignation in May of Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu after it was revealed that he was the subject of a federal criminal investigation over his dealings with the Angels. | 2022-08-23T19:55:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Angels owner Arte Moreno to explore selling the team - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/arte-moreno-might-sell-angels/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/arte-moreno-might-sell-angels/ |
Riley Adams had a .192 batting average, .284 on-base percentage and .321 slugging percentage in 88 plate appearances before he was optioned to the Class AAA Rochester Red Wings in early July. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
SEATTLE — A year ago, Riley Adams was an early face of the Washington Nationals’ rebuild, a 25-year-old catcher who was productive on offense and walked up to Blink-182. Landing him for struggling closer Brad Hand felt like a full-on heist, especially after Adams beat the division rival Atlanta Braves with a towering homer at Truist Park. And no matter what happens from here, it will always be a good trade for the Nationals, as the Toronto Blue Jays got a handful of appearances from Hand while Washington received a potential part of its future.
But progress is rarely linear in this sport. Sometimes it looks like the results of a polygraph test. Sometimes it is a straight upward slope, then sometimes it trends straight down. For Adams, a strong end to 2021 gave way to a rough start to this season. Backing up 24-year-old Keibert Ruiz, Adams had a .192 batting average, .284 on-base percentage and .321 slugging percentage in 88 plate appearances before he was optioned to the Class AAA Rochester Red Wings in early July. The plan was for Adams to find a rhythm with more consistent at-bats, catch and play first, perhaps preparing him to replace Josh Bell after the trade deadline.
The plan, though, was derailed by a wrist injury that kept him out for most of last month. But after the Nationals demoted catcher Tres Barrera on Monday, Adams is set to join ahead of a two-game series against the Mariners in Seattle, according to a person with knowledge of the roster move. With first base filled by Luke Voit and Joey Meneses, it’s likely Adams settles back into his role behind Ruiz, staying at catcher for now despite a 6-foot-4, 249-pound frame.
For most of his baseball life, scouts and coaches have tried to move Adams to first, feeling his size would prohibit him from being a strong receiver. But Adams has pointed to Jacob Stallings (6-foot-5, 255) and Sean Murphy (6-foot-3, 228) as counterarguments. Stallings won the Gold Glove in the National League last year. Murphy won in the American League. Pitchers like Adams because he is a big target, which was part of why the Nationals (41-82) used him as Patrick Corbin’s personal catcher earlier in the season. But to fix himself in Washington’s long-term vision — and to avoid a return to the minors — Adams has to keep improving there and in his limited chances at the plate.
These are the general asks for a backup catcher: Don’t let the defense or game-planning slip in a maximum two starts per week. Chip in on offense, even if a bulk of reps come against coaches or a pitching machine in the cage. Adams has felt those expectations, struggled with them, and is about to have another chance. In a small sample, according to Statcast’s advanced defensive metrics, his pitch framing has left a lot to be desired. His bat, meanwhile, has flashed its potential alongside encouraging patience.
Of the 12 players acquired at last July’s deadline, four are with the Nationals: Adams, Ruiz, starter Josiah Gray and outfielder Lane Thomas. Otherwise, outfielder Donovan Casey was designated for assignment earlier this month and cleared waivers, returning to Rochester; reliever Mason Thompson has been up and down and is currently with the Red Wings, too; right-handed pitcher Gerardo Carrillo returned from shoulder issues in July and is relieving for the high-Class A Wilmington Blue Rocks; catcher Drew Millas was slowed by injuries then slid from Class AA Harrisburg to Wilmington; right-handed pitcher Seth Shuman is resting because of elbow soreness after posting a 3.32 ERA in 14 outings for Wilmington; right-handed pitcher Richard Guasch struggled in Harrisburg, was demoted to Wilmington and is now on the 60-day injured list; shortstop Jordy Barley has struggled in Wilmington; and Aldo Ramirez, a 21-year-old righty, is recovering from season-ending Tommy John surgery.
That list is an acute reminder of how not all trade returns work out — and even if they do, the wins can materialize slowly. Aside from Trea Turner, the Nationals netted the dozen young players with veterans on expiring contracts. With Hand, Yan Gomes, Josh Harrison, Daniel Hudson, Jon Lester and Kyle Schwarber, the outgoing value was limited, so the incoming value matched. And while it may seem prudent to give the acquired players every opportunity, the Nationals don’t have to act as if they made major concessions to attain them.
Take Casey as an example. He arrived in the four-player package for Turner and Max Scherzer, joining Ruiz, Gray and Carrillo. Last fall, he was added to the 40-man roster to protect him from being selected in the Rule 5 Draft. But after he was called up and didn’t debut in April, he had a rough summer in Rochester, his strikeout rate spiking to 33.3 percent. So the club DFA’d him, deciding it didn’t have to keep Casey on the 40-man because of a high-profile trade.
Casey is 26 and has to climb his way back up. Adams, the same age, is at the stage of trying to stick. | 2022-08-23T19:55:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Catcher Riley Adams returns to Nationals in Seattle - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/riley-adams-nationals-return/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/riley-adams-nationals-return/ |
Man charged in shooting deaths of two landscapers in Alexandria
Authorities have charged a 27-year-old man with murder in the fatal shootings of two landscaping workers in Alexandria, police announced Tuesday.
Francis Deonte Rose was arrested last month on burglary charges and has been held in jail. The Alexandria Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office added two counts of second-degree murder and two firearms charges on Tuesday, court records show.
Family members of the victims said Juan Carlos Anaya Hernandez, 24, and his stepfather, Adrian de Jesus Rivera Guzman, 48, had just started the workday when they were gunned down outside the Assembly Alexandria apartments. Police said they were fatally shot about 7:30 a.m. on July 16.
A police spokesman said Rose was involved in a burglary at the apartments and described the landscapers as “innocent bystanders.”
Rose had been released from law enforcement custody in neighboring Arlington County several months earlier, after prosecutors dropped drug and weapons charges against him. The move came after a judge suppressed evidence in the case, ruling that police had illegally searched Rose’s bag. Rose had missed probation hearings in D.C. this year related to a 2019 firearms offense to which he had pleaded guilty.
Second-degree murder is punishable by a minimum of five years in prison and a maximum of 40 years in Virginia. Rose also was charged with two counts of using a firearm in the commission of a felony, which carries a separate penalty of three years for someone who has not been convicted previously of that offense.
An attorney listed for Rose in court records, Taso R. Saunders, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Alexandria Commonwealth’s Attorney Bryan Porter did not respond to a message seeking comment. | 2022-08-23T19:59:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man charged in shooting deaths of two landscapers in Alexandria - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/23/man-charged-landscapers-shooting-alexandria/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/23/man-charged-landscapers-shooting-alexandria/ |
Precipitation extremes are now more feast or famine because of climate change.
Analysis by Matthew Cappucci
A seating area is visible in a flooded portion of the Trinity River near downtown Dallas on Aug. 22.
Five weeks. Five instances of 1,000-year rain events. If it seems like the weather across the Lower 48 as of late has been bonkers, you’re not imagining things. It’s been a maelstrom of weather extremes, a seesaw fluctuating wildly from significantly dry to record wet conditions.
Parts of the United States, especially in the West, are gripped by an inveterate and devastating drought yet many drought-stricken areas have experienced rare and extreme flooding over the summer — bringing fiercely different precipitation extremes to the region in a matter of hours.
On Monday, parts of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex awoke to torrential downpours that dropped totals of 10 to 16 inches, bringing calamitous impacts and prompting widespread water rescues. Entire neighborhoods near the suburb of Mesquite were left beneath water, and at least one person died.
What happened in the Dallas area came after the city and 29 percent of the state were gripped in a top-tier “exceptional” drought which impacted crops and drove water shortages. Some farmers were forced to thin their herds in a process called “culling” according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. DFW International Airport was 11.11 inches behind for rainfall since January 1.
While no single weather event is caused by mankind’s influence on the atmosphere, the weather facing the nation bears the fingerprint of a warming world. While it seems contradictory, both drought and flooding are closely tied to human-driven warming, and are altering our environment and how we interact with it.
What is a 1,000-year rain event?
We haven’t been taking measurements for 1,000 years, so how can we know what constitutes a 1,000-year rain event? It comes from constructing what’s called a probability distribution, and requires some basic grade-school statistics.
Using an available data set of, say, 100 years or so, we can plot the frequency of rain events of varying magnitudes for a given time window. Once that’s done, we can note the shape of whatever distribution results. Think back to the bell curve in math class — most of the data is clumped around the middle, with more extreme events on the edges as frequency trails off. Finding the likelihood of an extreme weather event is similar.
From there, meteorologists and statisticians extract “recurrence intervals,” or the average frequency with which a given extreme event should occur. That means a 1,000-year rain event has an 0.1 percent chance of happening in any given year. A 100-year event would have a 1 percent chance, and so on.
Nowadays, however, our climate is evolving rapidly enough that previously-defined recurrence intervals based on historic data may no longer apply. Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University, explained that today’s climate is making some of these reference points relics of the past.
“Recurrence intervals start to lose their meaning for ‘nonstationary’ systems,” he wrote, “in this case because there is a trend toward greater extremes in a warming climate.”
In a 2017 paper, he found the return period of a 7.4-foot storm surge flood in New York City had decreased from once every 500 years in preindustrial times to once every 25 years since. It could become a once-per-five-year event toward the middle of the century. Precipitation extremes follow a similar trend.
Five 1,000-year rain events in five weeks
It’s normal that somewhere will see a 1,000-year rain each year. It’d be abnormal if that wasn’t the case. But five in five weeks is extreme, and hints at an overarching trend.
On the morning of July 26, St. Louis awoke to historic flooding in the city. A staggering 7.87 inches of rain fell in six hours during the morning commute, inundating vehicles and prompting hundreds of water rescues. It came from training thunderstorms, or storms moving along a stalled frontal boundary. A total of 8.64 inches was logged for the day, becoming St. Louis’s wettest day on record. It crushed the previous record of 5.59 inches on May 16, 1995, by a wide margin; records date back to 1931. Some places west of the city received close to 13 inches.
On July 27, rains began in eastern Kentucky north of Hazard and quickly turned fatal. Rainfall rates topping 2 inches per hour contributed to rapid rises on area rivers, including the North Fork of the Kentucky River at Whitesburg, which rose 11 feet in five hours. That was 6 feet above the previous record. The water probably kept rising, but the sensor was washed away. It was another 1,000-year rain event that tragically killed 38 people.
On the night of Aug. 1, training thunderstorms in eastern Illinois dumped 8 to 13 inches of rain in about 12 hours near the town of Effingham. Fortunately the landscape was able to handle the rainfall, but there were some reports of flash flooding.
On Aug. 5, heavy storms dumped 1.46 inches of rain on Death Valley, Calif. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s just 0.01 inches shy of the all-time daily record. Given the rapidity with which it fell, it was classified as a 1,000-year rain event. Death Valley averages just 0.11 inches of rain in August; 1.46 inches is equivalent to nine months’ worth of rainfall. According to the Park Service, the flooding destroyed a water system that serves numerous park residences and facilities. A number of vehicles were also damaged.
On Aug. 22, moisture pooling on a stalled frontal boundary over Dallas translated to training thunderstorms. DFW International Airport saw both its wettest day and wettest hour on record. Flash flood warnings were issued across the city.
All five events stemmed from stationary fronts and anomalously-humid air masses.
The fingerprint of climate change
It’s well-established that a warmer world is a wetter world. That’s due to something called the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship. For every degree Fahrenheit the air temperature warms, the air can hold about 4 percent more water. That’s leading to higher humidity and heat indexes — which can be taxing on the human body — but is also manifesting in precipitation extremes.
We’re seeing this quite prominently in rainfall rates, meaning the wetter atmosphere is leading to heavier instantaneous downpours. Dallas, for example, saw its highest one-hour total on record between 1 and 2 a.m. Monday morning, with 3.01 inches coming down. Records at DFW International extend back to 1953, but 7 of the top 10 wettest one-hour totals have occurred in the 2000s.
No weather is caused by climate change. Weather will always be weather. But the signature of a warming world is now perceptible every day in the conditions we regularly face.
For many people, the concept of a changing climate might seem distant and removed — a 2 millimeter rise in sea levels a year or a subtle uptick in global temperatures may appear inconsequential. But human influence is affecting the dynamics of weather systems, the periodicity of the jet stream and the moisture-holding capacity of the atmosphere.
As is becoming evident in the Lower 48 and across the world, 1,000-year floods may happen a lot more than once every 1,000 years. “Unprecedented” may, in fact, become precedented. And the uptick in extremes and changing conditions means our environment is evolving faster than our infrastructure. That’s the crux of the problem. | 2022-08-23T20:13:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The role climate change plays in 1000 year extreme rain events - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/23/flood-united-states-climate-explainer/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/23/flood-united-states-climate-explainer/ |
This image provided by A2H Engineers, Architects, Planners on Aug. 18, 2022, shows digital rendering of the National Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame in Marks, Miss. Organizers are aiming to complete the building in two or three years. The project is the culmination of a 50-year effort to build a hall of fame for R&B musicians such as James Brown, Aretha Franklin and B.B. King. (A2H Engineers, Architects, Planners via AP) (Uncredited/A2H Engineers, Architects, Planners) | 2022-08-23T20:13:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | R&B Hall of Fame headed to small Mississippi Delta town - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/randb-hall-of-fame-headed-to-small-mississippi-delta-town/2022/08/23/e0267e42-231c-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/randb-hall-of-fame-headed-to-small-mississippi-delta-town/2022/08/23/e0267e42-231c-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
Archives told Trump in April that FBI would examine more than 100 classified documents returned from Mar-a-Lago
Former president Donald Trump returned more than 100 classified documents, comprising more than 700 pages, to the National Archives in January, according to a letter released by the Archives on Tuesday.
The more than 100 documents turned over in January were among the materials in 15 boxes of records recovered by the Archives from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago club earlier this year, after nearly a year of back and forth over missing presidential documents between Trump’s legal team and the agency charged with preserving the nation’s federal records.
The Washington Post first reported in February that the Archives discovered records in the boxes recovered from Mar-a-Lago at the very highest levels of classification, including some that can be viewed by only a small number of government officials.
Steidel Wall also noted in her letter that the Archives afforded Trump’s legal team additional time to review the materials after first advising it on April 12 that the agency planned to provide the FBI access to the documents. | 2022-08-23T20:14:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Archives told Trump in April that FBI would examine more than 100 classified documents returned from Mar-a-Lago - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/23/trump-classified-documents-national-archives/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/23/trump-classified-documents-national-archives/ |
Former Bethesda lead Jeff Gardiner debuts new studio Something Wicked
(Washington Post illustration; Something Wicked Games)
What do you get when you bring together the game designers who worked “Fallout: New Vegas,” “Fallout 3,” “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” and “Dragon Age: Inquisition?” Apparently, you get Something Wicked.
On Tuesday, former senior Bethesda staffer Jeff Gardiner announced the formation of his new studio, Something Wicked Games, at the Gamescom 2022 video game trade fair in Cologne, Germany. Gardiner was a senior producer on “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” lead producer on “Fallout 4” and project lead of “Fallout 76.”
In August 2021, the industry veteran announced his departure from Bethesda.
“I decided to take a break from the industry,” Gardiner told The Washington Post. “But this whole time I was doing that, this game idea was building, building, building.”
That game idea is “Wyrdsong,” an upcoming occult historical fantasy role-playing game from Something Wicked Games, Gardiner’s newly formed studio. Gardiner is the CEO and one of the co-founders of Something Wicked.
“Wyrdsong’s” announcement trailer features an armored figure wearing a tabard with the red cross insignia of the Knights Templar, and an ominous voice hinting about two worlds, “one before the shadow and one behind the eye.” Something Wicked said the game is set in Portugal during the Middle Ages and will focus on the Knights Templar, a medieval Catholic military order that has become fodder for pop culture reimaginings, particularly in video games. The Assassin’s Creed franchise, for example, is about the protagonists waging a clandestine global war against the Templars, their ancient enemies.
Gardiner said he wants “Wyrdsong” to make people question the nature of reality, referencing the two worlds referred to in the trailer. Another concept that will be explored in “Wyrdsong” is choice; Gardiner explained that the game’s name nods to this (wyrd is Old English for destiny or fate).
“We’re really going to dig into choice and consequence in a very deep and meaningful way that hopefully no other RPG has ever done before,” Gardiner said.
A decade later, ‘Skyrim’ modders are now developing their own games
Gardiner has assembled a strong studio to back him up. He’s joined by co-founder Charles Staples, formerly lead designer of “Fallout: New Vegas” and design director of “The Outer Worlds” at Obsidian Entertainment. Rounding out the staff are Leonard Boyarsky and Tim Cain, two legends in the computer RPG space who worked on “Fallout” and “Fallout 2” and laid down the foundation and aesthetic of the entire franchise. Boyarsky and Cain also started Troika Games together with fellow Interplay alumnus Jason Anderson, where they made two more cult classic RPGs: the steampunk fantasy “Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura” and the dark urban fantasy “Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines.”
Along with a veteran team of celebrated designers, Something Wicked has also secured $13.2 million in seed funding from NetEase. The studio is fully remote — a point of pride for Gardiner. There are 13 Something Wicked employees right now working from Maryland, Montreal, Washington, Minnesota and Florida.
“We are very, very open to employment,” Gardiner said, in reference to the studio’s search for remote talent. “Anywhere we can get the best people.”
A video game studio moved to a four-day workweek. It ‘saved us,’ employees say.
“Wyrdsong” is still a long way off, and Gardiner is a big believer in slow, sustained growth. The studio’s plan is to have 30 staffers by year two, and to cap out at 70 employees to ship the game. Gardiner referred to that range as the “magical amount of people” for a team that can work on big projects like an AAA developer but still have some of the flexibility of an indie studio.
“Remember, most Bethesda games early on were made with very few people,” Gardiner said. “Skyrim was made with around a hundred people.”
A brand new, fully remote AAA developer with millions in seed funding and some of the most high profile names in the RPG space, Something Wicked, like “Wyrdsong,” is living in two worlds, trying to combine the best practices of independent game development with AAA production values and goals. Time will tell if fate is kind to them. | 2022-08-23T20:15:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Something Wicked, new studio from former Bethesda lead, debuts at Gamescom - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/23/wyrdsong-something-wicked/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/23/wyrdsong-something-wicked/ |
Ada Limón is the 24th poet laureate of the United States. The Mexican American author has published six poetry collections. On Wednesday, Sept. 14 at 2:30 p.m. ET, Limón joins Washington Post Live to discuss her new role, her acclaimed body of work and how poetry helps readers reclaim their humanity.
U.S. Poet Laureate | 2022-08-23T20:16:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ada Limón on reclaiming humanity through poetry - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/09/14/ada-limn-reclaiming-humanity-through-poetry/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/09/14/ada-limn-reclaiming-humanity-through-poetry/ |
Police are investigating a stabbing at the Metro Center station. (Omari Daniels/The Washington Post)
A man was stabbed and critically injured Tuesday afternoon inside the Metro Center station in downtown Washington, according to D.C. police.
The victim was reported to be unconscious, a police spokeswoman said. A woman also reported being injured, though police said her connection to the incident was not immediately clear.
Police said the stabbing occurred about 3:15 p.m. and appears to have happened on a station platform. Metro tweeted that Red line trains headed toward Glenmont were bypassing the Metro Center station. Metro warned passengers to expect delays in both directions. | 2022-08-23T20:34:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man critically injured in stabbing at Metro Center station - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/23/metro-center-stabbing-police/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/23/metro-center-stabbing-police/ |
The library site on South Dakota Avenue NE, where neighborhood activist Lillian J. Huff successfully lobbied for the first library in 1983. (John Kelly/TWP)
Diane Huff-Lyons is pretty sure her late mother, Lillian, would be pleased to know that the new library building in the District’s Riggs Park neighborhood was renamed in her honor. But something else would have been even more important to her: that to make that happen, her friends and neighbors had come together, formed a committee, organized for a common goal and achieved it.
That’s what really would have made Lillian J. Huff proud: community activism.
After all, it’s not community inactivists who get things done. It’s not community disorganizers who push for change. It’s people like the namesake of the Lamond-Riggs/Lillian J. Huff Library on South Dakota Avenue NE.
The $20 million library building was dedicated in June, replacing an earlier library that went up in 1983. And that library wouldn’t have existed without Huff.
“When we were in school, she was always fussing. We had to go far to go to the library,” Huff-Lyons said.
The Huff family — kids Diane and James and their parents, Lillian and James — lived in the 5100 block of 12th Street NE. The closest library back then was the Woodridge branch, two miles away off Rhode Island Avenue NE.
“She said, ‘We’re going to get a library in this community,’ ” Huff-Lyons said. “She kept on and kept on.”
Huff was born in 1931 and grew up in Tampa. She came to Washington in 1953 to attend Howard University. After settling in Riggs Park — on the District’s northeast edge, between Riggs Road NE and North Capitol Street — she threw herself into the life of her community, becoming president of the Lamond-Riggs Citizens Association.
“She was a precinct captain of Precinct 66,” Huff-Lyons said. “When they had elections, she always worked at the poll.”
Huff was a delegate to the 1972 Democratic National Convention, where she supported Sen. Edward Kennedy. She backed home rule for the District and co-chaired Walter Washington’s 1978 mayoral campaign.
She led the District’s delegation to the White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services in 1978 and was appointed by Jimmy Carter to the White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services. She was vice president of the Federation of Friends of the D.C. Public Library and the first president of the Friends of the Lamond-Riggs Library.
Huff’s work was both political and personal. In the early 1970s, she organized a summer cultural arts program at Bertie Backus Junior High so neighborhood kids had something to do.
“We had drama. We had music — instrumental and singing. We had dance. We had creative writing,” Huff-Lyons said.
There were field trips, too: to Hershey Park and the museums on the National Mall.
“All the kids, when they turned 18, she made sure they registered to vote,” Huff-Lyons said. “She had the cards. They came to the house and filled out the cards, and she turned them in.”
Growing up, Diane and her late brother got used to their mother’s activism. The family attended the Florida Avenue Baptist Church.
“After church, we’d walk to Mayor Washington’s house and go visit him and his wife,” Huff-Lyons said. “There was a time Jesse Jackson had a house next to Mayor Washington. If he was there, we would go visit him and his wife, too.”
She added: “If somebody was going to run in the District, they went to see Miss Huff, especially in Ward 5 or Ward 4. They would talk to her first to see if they were ready.”
Huff’s grandson, James, lived with her for a couple of years after college. She called him “Jay” or “Jay Bird.” He called her “Granny.” Sometimes, James would walk to the library his grandmother pushed for.
“It meant a lot to me, just to have it,” he said.
Huff died on Sept. 17, 2018. At 23,500 square feet, the new library building is nearly 5,000 square feet larger than the one it replaced. It includes meeting rooms of the sort Huff spent a lot of time in, incubating ideas on how to improve the city.
James lives in Los Angeles. Diane lives in North Carolina. I asked Huff-Lyons what she’d like people to know about her mother.
“I want them to know that she was about community and children and families,” Huff-Lyons said. “And that she wanted to have a library there so kids wouldn’t have to go so far to have the resources that they need. That library is beautiful.”
Said grandson James: “She had a lot of love in her heart and soul, not only for her community but for people of all classes. She wanted people to have access to knowledge.”
Knowledge, Lillian J. Huff knew, opens doors. And it took activism to build those doors — those floors, those walls, those book-filled shelves — in the first place. | 2022-08-23T20:34:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A new library in Northeast D.C. honors activist Lillian J. Huff - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/23/riggs-park-huff-library/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/23/riggs-park-huff-library/ |
Will Bolsonaro stage a coup? Bernie Sanders is warning of the worst.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) at a rally in Cambridge. Mass., on Aug. 21. (M. Scott Brauer/Bloomberg News)
Earlier this summer, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) met with civil society leaders from Brazil who warned that President Jair Bolsonaro might not accept a loss in elections set for October. This has been widely discussed in international media, and Sanders came away from the meeting convinced that it’s not just idle chatter: The threat of a Bolsonaro coup is real.
Such fears have prompted Sanders and his staff to draft a resolution that would seek to get ahead of any such eventuality. It would express the view of the Senate that if Bolsonaro loses and refuses to step down, the United States will view it as an unacceptable outcome.
The resolution — which we have viewed in draft form — declares that the United States will immediately recognize the election outcome that international monitors deem free and fair. And it warns that the United States will reevaluate its relationship with any government that assumes power through undemocratic means, including a military coup. It says this could imperil future U.S. aid.
“It is absolutely imperative that the U.S. Senate make it clear through a resolution that we support democracy in Brazil,” Sanders told us in an interview. “We look forward to a free and fair election.”
Such a Senate vote, Sanders said, will make it crystal clear that, in the event of an undemocratic outcome in Brazil, the United States will “not be supportive with military aid” and “we will not be recognizing an illegitimate government.”
Sanders’s office confirms that the resolution is backed by some prominent foreign policy-focused Senate Democrats, such as Tim Kaine (Va.), Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.) and Jeff Merkley (Ore.). And Sanders is working to round up additional support in hopes of holding the vote in early September, well in advance of Brazil’s October election.
There is reason to believe Brazil could be facing a crisis. Polls have shown challenger Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva leading Bolsonaro by considerable margins, and while Bolsonaro denies plans for a coup, he has relentlessly attacked the country’s electoral system as vulnerable to manipulation.
Bolsonaro has also flirted with arguments that the military should have a greater role in administering elections. “If need be, we will go to war” over the election, he has said.
Earlier this year, Bolsonaro traveled to Russia to meet with Vladimir Putin, then went to Hungary and met with its prime minister, Viktor Orban. The visits underscore Bolsonaro’s role in an emerging cross-national alliance of right-wing authoritarians, strongmen who get elected then rig their country’s political system to remain in power with an approach sometimes called “competitive authoritarianism.”
Sanders sees this kind of evolving right-wing authoritarian internationale as one reason the Senate should forcefully express the United States’ insistence on a free and fair election.
“What we are seeing all across the world are massive attacks and rollbacks to democracy,” Sanders told us, citing Russia, China, Hungary and “the growth of right wing movements throughout Europe, where people are giving up on democracy and moving toward authoritarianism.”
“We have groups that have done that right here in the United States,” Sanders said.
All of which raises complications. Sanders told us he hopes to win over as many senators from both parties to support the resolution as possible: “I’m seeking the support of 100 members of the United States Senate.”
But given Donald Trump’s alliance with Bolsonaro, it’s an open question how many Republicans will join. And Republicans might balk at a resolution that dares to suggest a Trump ally is anti-democracy (which would be even more perverse at a time when they are shielding Trump from accountability for his effort to destroy our own democracy).
Still, Sanders suggested that Republicans may see the wisdom of joining such a resolution. “I would hope my Republican colleagues understand that … we have got to use our capabilities as a world leader in making sure other countries move forward in a democratic way.”
Which raises another interesting nuance: Such talk about exporting democracy is often associated with throwing around U.S. military power in the world. But Sanders appears to intend this as a positive, non-military way U.S. power can exert a pro-democracy influence abroad, in keeping with his calls for a progressive internationalist movement that champions liberal democracy everywhere as the answer to global authoritarianism and the problems of the future.
Such an effort, Sanders argued, won’t be enough without dramatic efforts at home and abroad to “strengthen democracy by making governments more accountable to the needs of working people.”
But for now, Sanders said, it is critical to draw a line against autocracy and authoritarianism where it poses immediate threats: “The United States should make it clear that we support the democratic process in Brazil and countries around the world.” | 2022-08-23T21:22:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Will Bolsonaro stage a coup? Bernie Sanders is warning of the worst. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-coup-bernie-sanders/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-coup-bernie-sanders/ |
Liz Cheney is a smart and brave Republican
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) speaks Aug. 16 at the Mead ranch in Jackson, Wyo., after losing the Republican primary. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The Aug. 18 front-page article “Trump tightens hold on the GOP” quoted Republican Florida state Rep. Anthony Sabatini as saying, “There are other Liz Cheneys in the conference. They’re just smarter, and they keep their mouths shut.”
Mr. Sabatini fundamentally misconceives the issue. That Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) has chosen to speak out against former president Donald Trump’s relentless lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and his fomenting the Jan. 6 insurrection is not because of any lack of “smartness” on her behalf. To the contrary, as anyone who has listened to Ms. Cheney’s statements as part of the Jan. 6 committee’s hearings knows, she’s plenty smart.
Her decision to publicly repudiate Mr. Trump is rather because her top loyalty is to supporting the Constitution and the American freedom and democracy it embodies, rather than to any individual person. By speaking out, Ms. Cheney is seeking to preserve the constitutional democracy our forebears created. She is a true patriot.
By defending as “smart” Republican politicians’ refusal to condemn Mr. Trump’s attacks on our democracy, Mr. Sabatini is unjustifiably elevating politicians’ personal and political self-interests over their solemn oaths of office and duty to support and preserve our democracy. In the United States’ system of government, in which elected politicians perform a critical role, this is indefensible.
Gary M. Ratner, Bethesda
The writer is co-founder and a member of the steering committee of Lawyers Defending American Democracy. | 2022-08-23T21:22:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Liz Cheney is a smart and brave Republican - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/liz-cheney-is-smart-brave-republican/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/liz-cheney-is-smart-brave-republican/ |
Put curiosity on hold and let Justice work
An itemized receipt for property seized in the execution of a search warrant by the FBI at former president Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate includes “Miscellaneous Secret Documents” after being released Aug. 12 by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Jim Bourg/Reuters)
Whatever the results of the federal judge ruling’s on unsealing the affidavit regarding searching Mar-a-Lago, I am dismayed that we do not trust professionals at the FBI and Justice Department to perform due diligence in taking this remarkable step ["Parts of Mar-a-Lago affidavit likely to be unsealed,” front page, Aug. 19].
Yes, individuals and groups, including the media, want transparency, and, as media lawyer Charles Tobin said, “You can’t trust what you cannot see.” However, as Daniel Richman, Columbia University law professor and former federal prosecutor, noted, “It’s unusual that a judge would potentially unseal an affidavit before an investigation concludes,” listing the many hazards in doing so.
We need to put our curiosity on hold and let the experienced professionals do their job.
Ruth Salinger, Bethesda | 2022-08-23T21:22:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Put curiosity on hold and let Justice work - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/put-curiosity-hold-let-justice-work/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/put-curiosity-hold-let-justice-work/ |
Trump’s dangerous document narcissism
Former president Donald Trump delivers remarks in Washington on July 26. (Al Drago/Bloomberg News)
To the catalogue of Donald Trump’s malign personality traits, add one that might be called “document narcissism.” According to the New York Times, Trump insists he has a right to keep classified documents because they’re “mine.”
Trump’s lawyers are right to be worried about the Justice Department’s criminal investigation of the former president’s retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. That’s not because the probe is “overbroad” and “political,” as Trump’s lawyers claimed in an overheated motion on Monday — but because it is very specific and based on multiple “confidential witnesses,” as the federal magistrate who approved the search warrant just affirmed.
This case reflects the central nightmare of the Trump post-presidency. He seems to believe, in the words of the French King Louis XIV, “L’etat, c’est moi,” meaning: “I am the state.” Trump’s stationery still bears the presidential seal. He still appears to covet the permanent power of a leader like China’s Xi Jinping, of whom he said in 2018: “He’s now president for life. … Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”
Trump at Mar-a-Lago is like Lear in angry exile. He has left the throne, but imagines that he can keep its privileges. He rages at enemies and broods over his lost realm. The Times article portrayed him rummaging last year through boxes of classified documents, relics of former power, before deciding what to return to the National Archives.
A former Trump administration official who knows him well likens Trump’s retention of classified documents to “a toddler who takes a toy and sees how much the other kid is upset and decides, I’m going to take it anyway. The more someone wants to take it back, the more he wants to keep it.”
Trump’s presidency was a war against what he imagined was a “deep state” of FBI agents, intelligence officials and Justice Department lawyers conspiring to smear him and block his election and reelection. In the words of his lawyers’ motion, these antagonists behaved with “complete disdain and bias against President Trump and his supporters, while they were entrusted with probing the farcical Russian collusion claims.”
A field commander in Trump’s battles against the intelligence community has been a former congressional staffer named Kash Patel, now one of Trump’s representatives in dealing with the National Archives. I profiled Patel’s role as Trump’s advocate against the intelligence agencies last year, and again recently. After bringing Patel to his National Security Council staff in 2019, Trump wanted to make him deputy FBI director, then deputy CIA director.
“Trump also had the idea of making Patel a Special Assistant for White House Oversight — a position that would seek to expose the deep state” in the White House entourage, said Charles Kupperman, a former deputy national security adviser, who was in the room with Trump when he made the proposal in 2019. When Kupperman and White House counsel Pat Cipollone objected, Trump relented, the official said.
A spokeswoman for Patel didn’t respond to a query about Kupperman’s account of the 2019 incident but accused the author of being a “disinformation fountain” for “radical-left politicians in D.C.”
Trump’s notion of supreme personal power — his document narcissism — might have caught up with him in the Mar-a-Lago search. His problem isn’t simply with the Biden Justice Department, but with informants who are presumably within his own circle. U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart, who granted the warrant, made that clear in his order delaying a final judgment about unsealing the affidavit that accompanied the warrant.
“I agree with the Government that the Affidavit ‘contains, among other critically important and detailed investigative facts: highly sensitive information about witnesses, including witnesses interviewed by the government,’” Reinhart wrote. Notably, he said that revealing details could “impede the ongoing investigation through obstruction of justice and witness intimidation or retaliation.” He also cited obstruction as “one of the statutes for which I found probable cause” in authorizing the search.
No wonder Trump’s lawyers filed a motion designed to slow things down, portraying the case as a political vendetta and aimed at slowing the review of documents. They simply ignored the gravity of the charges — calling the search “a shockingly aggressive move” against “the clear frontrunner” in 2024, “should he decide to run.”
The Trump lawyers asked for a “special master” to sift the evidence, and that might be a useful way to tamp down public concern about bias. But the Trump team’s own chronology confirms the former president’s slow compliance with document requests. Initially, he even resisted letting the FBI review the 15 boxes of documents he had sent to the National Archives in January, which included some codeword, “Special Access Program” documents, the government’s most sensitive secrets, according to a May 10 letter from the acting archivist. The Aug. 8 FBI search turned up more than a dozen additional boxes, including 11 sets of highly classified material.
Whatever those documents contain, Reinhart shared Justice’s worry that they weren’t being given back promptly or securely held.
Trump’s motion also cites the veiled threat he sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland: “President Trump wants the Attorney General to know that he has been hearing from people all over the country about the raid. If there was one word to describe their mood, it is ‘angry.’ The heat is building up. The pressure is building up.”
Trump concluded with a seemingly generous offer: “Whatever I can do to take the heat down, to bring the pressure down, just let us know.” | 2022-08-23T21:22:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The serious legal threat to President Trump in the Mar-a-Lago probe - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/trump-classified-documents-legal-threat/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/trump-classified-documents-legal-threat/ |
Appeals court upholds D.C. law making it easier to discipline police
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), center, and D.C. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III, right, prepare for a news conference. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
A panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has upheld a provision in a city law that makes it easier for the police chief to discipline officers, a measure that lawmakers passed more than two years ago amid social unrest over police practices.
The provision strips the city’s police union of power in the disciplinary process, removing what city leaders contend were obstacles to quickly ridding the force of officers involved in serious misconduct.
The labor group sued the District in federal court, arguing the provision unfairly turned police into a “distinct class” lacking the same collective bargaining rights as other city employees. A federal judge dismissed the case, and on Friday, a three-judge panel from the federal appellate court unanimously affirmed the lower court’s ruling, saying the union’s “constitutional claims lack merit.”
D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), who helped craft the provision, said he is “sensitive to this being a labor issue,” but he made no apologies for giving the chief more leeway to discipline and fire police officers.
“Police have the ability to take lives under the color of law, and they have to be held to a higher standard,” Mendelson said Tuesday. “What we have seen across the country is that has become increasingly difficult to get a bad cop off the street.” He added that in law enforcement agencies across the country, “accountability has been difficult to achieve through the disciplinary process.”
D.C. police union sues District over changes in disciplinary process for officers
The chairman of the police union, Greggory Pemberton, did not respond to a request for comment on the decision. The attorney who argued the case on behalf of the union also did not respond to an inquiry. The union could ask for a review by the full appellate court.
The union argued in its lawsuit that the provision over discipline upended four decades of practice in the District, which historically gave the police labor group a say in how officers were held accountable and the mechanisms they could use to appeal. The union called the law a “reactionary concession to anti-police rhetoric and protests.”
Patrick Yoes, the national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said in a statement his organization is working with Pemberton to “seek a path forward on this issue,” though he did not elaborate on what that might entail.
Yoes said the court ruling “is going to have a chilling effect” on policing in the District and potentially across the country, if other cities follow suit. He said the law would exacerbate struggles police departments are having with hiring and retaining officers, as they work to quell concerns over violent crime.
“There are going to be real-life consequences on public safety in our national capital and elsewhere,” the statement says.
Circuit Judge Gregory G. Katsas, joined by two other judges, wrote the opinion rejecting constitutional objections raised by the union. The judges said the union “could not reasonably have expected its agreement [with the District] to forever limit the legislature’s power to adjust the scope of collective bargaining.”
The dispute between the police union and District complicated recent contract negotiations, though last month officers, detectives and sergeants overwhelmingly approved a new labor agreement that includes raises. The contract, which does not contain language governing discipline, needs to be approved by the D.C. Council before it is ratified. A date for that vote has not been set. The new disciplinary provision will take effect with the new contract.
Changes in the police disciplinary process were part of emergency legislation unanimously passed by the Council in July 2020 and later signed by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D).
It was enacted without public comment to quickly address outrage following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which fueled weeks of demonstrations in the District and across the country. The law also made changes to the department’s use of force policies, added civilians to boards that review officer conduct and mandated that police body camera videos be made public in shootings by officers.
The Council-appointed Police Reform Commission recommended changes in police disciplinary procedures in its April 1, 2021, report. It concluded that “freeing MPD from negotiating with the union over disciplinary issues will result in a process that upholds officers’ due process rights while improving the odds that officers will be held accountable for wrongdoing, and through far less secretive procedures.”
D.C. leaders say new contract will help recruit, retain police
D.C. police leaders will now be able to eliminate the right of officers to appeal disciplinary rulings to independent arbiters, who the current and former police chief have said too often reversed their decisions to suspend or fire officers. The chiefs said that forced them to reinstate terminated employees, or pay them lucrative settlements in return for them resigning.
Officers will still be able to appeal discipline through the D.C. Office of Employee Appeals, and ultimately through the courts.
Dustin Sternbeck, a D.C. police spokesman, said Tuesday the police chief is not yet ready to discuss any changes he might make to the disciplinary process. | 2022-08-23T21:31:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Appeals court upholds D.C. law making it easier to discipline police - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/23/appeals-court-upholds-police-discipline/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/23/appeals-court-upholds-police-discipline/ |
Climate and Indigenous activists walk into the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and 3rd Street NW during an Oct. 15, 2021, climate change protest by the U.S. Capitol. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Democrats and many environmental groups have been celebrating the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the climate movement’s biggest legislative success, but Cavalier-Keck and many other people living in communities threatened by a warming planet said they feel this deal came at their expense. Once again, she said, she feels they were a bargaining chip and ultimately, they were sacrificed.
To secure the support of Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) for the Inflation Reduction Act, the climate, energy and health-care package that President Biden signed into law last week, Democratic leadership reached a side deal with Manchin that would overhaul the process for approving new energy initiatives and expedite the Mountain Valley Pipeline project — which Cavalier-Keck has been opposing for years.
“They didn’t have all the players at the table,” said Cavalier-Keck, an enrolled citizen of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation in North Carolina. “I went through the stages of grief — anger, sadness, depression, hopelessness, and then I was like ‘We’ve got to stand up. We’ve got to do something.’”
Cavalier-Keck, 44, is planning to rally in Washington on Sept. 8, recruiting other Indigenous, Black and Appalachian community members who are fearful of what this side deal could mean for their homes and the planet. Representatives for Manchin, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) did not respond to a request for comment.
Though the days’ details are still being planned, Cavalier-Keck said organizers hope to secure meetings with lawmakers during business hours and then rally at 5 p.m. at the Robert A. Taft Memorial and Carillon, north of the U.S. Capitol, on Constitution Avenue between New Jersey Avenue and First Street NW. There will be music, art and testimonies from people directly affected by the Mountain Valley Pipeline project, among others in communities affected by human-induced climate change, Cavalier-Keck said.
The landmark Inflation Reduction Act will significantly advance the fight against climate change, spending about $370 billion to bring the country closer to achieving the emissions cuts scientists say are required to avoid the devastating consequences of the Earth’s warming.
The White House said environmental justice leaders were key to developing the bill, calling it “the most significant investment in climate, clean energy, and environmental justice in U.S. history and defeating the special interests who for decades have blocked progress.”
Rally organizers argue the side deal “guts bedrock environmental protections, endangers public health, fast-tracks fossil fuels, and pushes approval for Manchin’s pet project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline,” according to a messaging guide from the People vs. Fossil Fuels coalition sent to community members and climate activists.
“Just the fact that something has passed has given people some sense of optimism,” said Russell Chisholm, the Mountain Valley watch coordinator for Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights (POWHR), a coalition representing groups from West Virginia and Virginia that has been in opposition to the Mountain Valley Pipeline project. “And there’s also a deep frustration of how that came about and the compromises in there, and everyone is really struggling with that right now.”
“They rode the roller coaster of compromise all the way into the ground and left us to burn in the flames,” said Ashley Engle, 38, who lives in a rural community outside Tulsa, is enrolled with the Absentee Shawnee tribe of Oklahoma and also descended from the Lakota nation. “This is not only not enough, but it’s really harmful, and we need Biden to step up.”
Hundreds gathered in front of the White House on Oct. 11 to protest the use of fossil fuels. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Eric Lee/The Washington Post)
The project, first proposed in 2014 and mostly finished, is a key priority of Manchin’s. It would transport Appalachian shale gas about 300 miles from West Virginia to Virginia. A proposed 75-mile extension would reach central North Carolina.
Manchin and supporters have argued that this project, designed to carry 2 billion cubic feet of gas a day, would increase the nation’s exports of liquefied natural gas, which the United States is sending to help Europe during the war in Ukraine.
The project is now years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. A spokesperson for the pipeline did not respond to a request for comment, but told the Virginia Mercury that “MVP is being recognized as a critical infrastructure project that is essential for our nation’s energy security, energy reliability, and ability to effectively transition to a lower-carbon future.”
Joe Lovett, executive director of Appalachian Mountain Advocates, said his organization will continue to challenge the pipeline in court. Nevertheless, he said, the Inflation Reduction Act’s passage was progress for the climate movement.
“It’s a first step this country has been unwilling to take,” Lovett said. “I just wish [Manchin] understood that the Mountain Valley Pipeline is counter to all the aspirations of climate in that bill.”
Indigenous activists come to D.C. with a message for Biden: Declare a national climate emergency
In southern West Virginia, Maury Johnson stopped using his well water in 2018 for cooking, drinking and washing clothes because of turbidity, meaning the water was clouded with sediment. When it was clean enough, he’d use it for bathing. But last August, he said, it became “nonusable for anything” and he turned off the pump.
He blames the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which he said is crossing a section of his 150 acres of land that has been in his family for several generations. A Mountain Valley Pipeline representative said there was no support for Johnson’s claim that the project impacted his water, according to an August 2021 filing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Johnson plans to join his neighbors and other climate advocates in the nation’s capital next month to rally against this pipeline and other fossil fuel infrastructure.
“This is more than just about the Mountain Valley Pipeline,” said Johnson, 62, a retired farmer and educator, and co-chair of POWHR. “This is about the Gulf Coast, North Alaska and every community that has been sacrificed for decades. We can’t continue to sacrifice communities and people.”
Facing catastrophic climate change, they still can’t quit Big Oil
“It’s going to cut out tribes. It tramples on our rights to have meaningful consultation,” Braun, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux and a national pipeline campaign organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network. “We, as Indigenous people, have already sacrificed a lot for this country. We’ve sacrificed in lives. We’ve sacrificed in lands and water.”
Falcon, 39, a climate advocate with the Ikiya Collective, an Indigenous woman-led collective of organizers in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, will be rallying in D.C. next month, in hopes someone in power will hear their concerns — and act.
“It’s a long-standing tradition of front-line folks having to leave the fights in their own communities … to go and advocate for themselves in D.C.,” said Falcon, an enrolled citizen of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribal Nations. “Because D.C. is not listening.” | 2022-08-23T21:31:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Appalachian, Indigenous pipeline foes say climate deal ‘left us to burn’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/23/protest-dc-manchin-climate-bill/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/23/protest-dc-manchin-climate-bill/ |
Five years after removal, Confederate statues may go to L.A.
Tucked into the corner of an East Baltimore impound lot teeming with discarded lampposts and street signs, four Confederate-linked monuments have sat for five years since they were removed from public parks across the city in the middle of the night.
Ever since that night on Aug. 17, 2017, when they were hauled off to the lot and hidden away, city officials and historians have debated what to do with the bronze statues erected to honor Confederate figures. No home emerged until a Los Angeles visual art space called LAXART asked to borrow them for a new exhibit.
The large-scale exhibit, called Monuments, will open in the fall of 2023 and places contemporary art created by renowned Black artists alongside decommissioned Confederate statues removed from American cities after the 2015 killing of churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., by a white supremacist and the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
Eric Holcomb, division chief of Baltimore’s Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation, said city officials are excited about the exhibit planned by nonprofit LAXART curators Hamza Walker and Kara Walker, and Museum of Contemporary Art at Los Angeles curator Bennett Simpson.
“The interpretation of these monuments by this museum is actually going to be healthy and beneficial for the whole country, and it’s going to move us forward in terms of our conversation about race and conversations about history,” Holcomb said. “We believe the monuments are going in really good hands with really smart people.”
The city’s law office still needs to approve a loan agreement with the museum before the statues, some weighing seven to 14 tons, are loaded onto a truck and shipped to California. Baltimore is not paying any transportation costs, Holcomb said.
Then-Mayor Catherine Pugh (D) in 2017 ordered the four statues, which were installed from 1887 to 1948, to be taken down from their pedestals across the city “quickly and quietly,” she said at the time. They included the Lee-Jackson Monument located in Wyman Park Dell, the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Mount Royal Avenue, the Confederate Women’s Monument on West University Parkway, and the Roger B. Taney Monument in Mount Vernon.
The message the statues conveyed to Baltimore residents about slavery and the Civil War was wrong, Holcomb said, and the statues also posed a safety risk to people who threatened to pull them down.
The threat to remove statues of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in Charlottesville resulted in the Unite the Right rally in which a counterprotester was killed when a man drove into a crowd.
Five years after the Baltimore statues’ removal, the monuments in the city-owned lot off Pulaski Highway in the Pulaski Industrial Area are secured in a metal fence and Jersey barrier enclosure. An art conservator inspected the statues in 2021 and determined that each was in good condition, according to Monica Lewis, a city spokesperson.
The Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument, though, is still marked by red paint thrown on by protesters before it was removed.
Holcomb estimated that the city received 24 offers to use the monuments. The Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation asked each person or group how they planned to interpret the statues and most wanted to use them to positively convey the Lost Cause myth that the Civil War was an honorable fight over states’ rights rather than a war over slavery, and that Jackson and Lee were great soldiers, Holcomb said.
The Maryland division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization for male descendants of Confederate soldiers that opposed the removal of the statues in 2017, did not respond to a request for comment.
The Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation decided that LAXART was the best alternative use for the statues because it would help change the message of the monuments through artists’ interactions with them. The exhibit will feature educational talks, performances, activities and workshops by art historians, politicians, artists and activists. The contemporary art on display will feature existing and newly created paintings, sculptures, photographs and videos.
Perhaps the exhibit will become successful and travel the country, Holcomb said, or maybe the bronze statues will be melted and recast to celebrate legendary Baltimoreans, as Mayor Brandon Scott proposed when he was a city council member. But for now, the Maryland Historical Trust, which has an easement on three of the four monuments, does not want the statues destroyed, Holcomb said.
Scott did not respond to a request for comment via a spokesperson. | 2022-08-23T21:31:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Five years after removal, Confederate statues may go to L.A. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/five-years-after-removal-confederate-statues-may-go-to-la/2022/08/23/722fd330-1f6a-11ed-8d30-84c409e82eb3_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/five-years-after-removal-confederate-statues-may-go-to-la/2022/08/23/722fd330-1f6a-11ed-8d30-84c409e82eb3_story.html |
Hyundai and Kia recall some SUVs over fire risk
Hyundai, Kia recall some large SUVs
The Korean automakers are recalling more than 281,000 vehicles in the United States because of the problem, but they haven’t figured out how to fix it yet. The automakers reported 25 fires or melting incidents in the United States and Canada caused by the problem, but no crashes or injuries.
Excess inventory weighs on Macy's
Macy’s trimmed expectations for the year on Tuesday despite topping second-quarter expectations as it faces a glut of unsold inventory that has afflicted almost the entire retail sector.
Nearly every major retailer has said in recent weeks that shoppers are making fewer trips to the store and that when they do, they’re looking for deals. Some are trading down to cheaper alternatives.
Soaring prices have forced families to become more cautious, doing without new clothing, electronics, furniture and almost everything else that is not absolutely necessary.
“The consumer’s got some pretty sour news out there,” Macy’s chief executive Jeff Gennette told the Associated Press on Tuesday.
New-home sales tumbled in July
Sales of new U.S. single-family homes plunged to a 6½-year low in July as persistently high mortgage rates and house prices further eroded affordability.
New-home sales tumbled 12.6 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 511,000 units last month, the lowest level since January 2016. June’s sales pace was revised down to 585,000 units from the previously reported 590,000 units.
Sales rose in the Northeast, but dove in the West, Midwest and South.
Economists polled by Reuters had forecast that new-home sales, which account for a fraction of U.S. home sales, would fall to a rate of 575,000 units.
Sales dropped 29.6 percent on a year-on-year basis in July. They peaked at a rate of 993,000 units in January 2021, the highest level since the end of 2006.
ExpressJet Airlines, a small regional carrier that was once among the world’s biggest by fleet size, filed for bankruptcy with plans to liquidate after ceasing operations. The company, based in Georgia, listed assets and liabilities of no more than $50 million each in its bankruptcy petition. ExpressJet laid off most of its workforce before filing for bankruptcy, according to court papers. The carrier struggled to scale its operations after losing a contract to fly for United Airlines in 2020, court papers show. It shut down for about a year after losing the deal, then grappled with lower travel demand and rising fuel costs after relaunching.
The Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog needs watching | 2022-08-23T21:44:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hyundai and Kia recall some SUVs over fire risk - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/hyundai-and-kia-recall-some-suvs-over-fire-risk/2022/08/23/d501d068-22e8-11ed-ba29-39afcd3965a2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/hyundai-and-kia-recall-some-suvs-over-fire-risk/2022/08/23/d501d068-22e8-11ed-ba29-39afcd3965a2_story.html |
Tamika Palmer, mother of Breonna Taylor, cries as she stands with her friend Tooshy Hamilton, left, and sister Stephanie Baskin during an unveiling of a Breonna Taylor painting in March. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
In a guilty plea filed Tuesday, former Louisville detective Kelly Goodlett admitted to helping falsify a search warrant, then filing a false report in the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor. The plea marked the first conviction in the case, which, along with the murder of George Floyd and other acts of police brutality, set off a summer of racial justice demonstrations.
Goodlett pleaded guilty to the federal charge of conspiracy, which could lead to a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Taylor, 26, died of gunshot wounds in 2020 after plainclothes police burst into her apartment during a drug probe.
Goodlett’s attorney, Brandon Marshall, and Ben Crump, attorney for Taylor’s family, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
On Aug. 12, Goodlett’s plea was confirmed during an online hearing before Magistrate Judge Regina S. Edwards in the U.S. District Court of the Western District of Kentucky. Goodlett was released from that hearing on a $10,000 bond and ordered to remove all firearms from her home and give up her passport.
Goodlett resigned from the police department after she and three former colleagues, Sgt. Kyle Meany, former detective Joshua Jaynes and former detective Brett Hankison, were charged in Taylor’s death in March 2020. Meany’s termination was announced by the department last week. But unlike the others, Goodlett was not indicted. Rather, her charges were filed in a sealed “information,” which analysts said usually indicates that a defendant has agreed to a plea deal with the government.
Two years after Breonna Taylor’s death, her family still wants answers: 'We still don’t know what happened’
Meany, Jaynes and Hankison have pleaded not guilty, court records show. Hankison was the only police officer to also be charged at the state level, and was acquitted of wanton endangerment charges this year for shots that entered a neighboring apartment. Like Goodlett, Jaynes and Meany are charged with falsifying the search warrant affidavit. Prosecutors allege that the two men knowingly included outdated and false information, and Goodlett’s testimony could be crucial in their cases.
Brett Hankison found not guilty of endangering Breonna Taylor’s neighbors in shooting | 2022-08-23T21:44:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Breonna Taylor case: Kelly Goodlett admits to misleading judge - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/23/breonna-taylor-goodlett-plea/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/23/breonna-taylor-goodlett-plea/ |
Judiciary suspends work amid crisis
Iraq’s judiciary suspended its activities Tuesday after supporters of the powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr stepped up pressure on it to dissolve parliament, as one of the worst political crises since the U.S.-led invasion dragged on.
Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, who cut short a trip to Egypt to deal with the crisis, has urged all sides to remain calm and renewed calls for a national dialogue.
Sadr’s followers began gathering for protests outside the headquarters of the Supreme Judicial Council and Federal Supreme Court in Baghdad. The followers have sent threats by phone, the judiciary said in a statement.
80,000 displaced by new rebel offensive
A new offensive by Mozambique’s Islamist extremist rebels in the embattled northern province of Cabo Delgado has increased the number of displaced by 80,000 and undermines the government’s claims of containing the insurgency.
That claim proved to be hollow as the fighters have struck farther south than ever before, burning villages and beheading civilians in the Ancuabe, Chiure and Mecufi districts, which had previously been untouched by the conflict since it began in October 2017.
Despite the military support that Mozambique is receiving from troops sent by neighboring countries and Rwanda, the rebels are far from defeated. The foreign troops were deployed in Cabo Delgado a year ago, following the extremists’ seizure of Palma in March 2021.
India's air force fires officers in missile incident: The Indian air force said the government has fired three officers for accidentally firing a missile into Pakistan in March, an incident that the two nuclear-armed rivals handled calmly as there were no casualties. Military experts have in the past warned of the risk of accidents or miscalculations by the neighbors, which have fought three wars and engaged in numerous smaller armed clashes, usually over the disputed territory of Kashmir.
111 Haitian migrants intercepted: Bahamian authorities said they have detained 111 Haitian migrants found on an overloaded sloop in waters around the archipelago. There are 92 men, 14 women and five children in the group, officials said. The arrests come as a wave of Haitians are fleeing their country amid increasing violence, kidnappings and economic woes. Hundreds have boarded boats bound for the Bahamas, Florida or Puerto Rico, with dozens dying in capsizings. | 2022-08-23T21:45:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Digest: Aug. 23, 2022 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug-23-2022/2022/08/23/d84dcc02-22d1-11ed-87c7-c807d6645a61_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug-23-2022/2022/08/23/d84dcc02-22d1-11ed-87c7-c807d6645a61_story.html |
Saudi Arabia approves Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard acquisition
The General Authority for Competition in Saudi Arabia is the first regulatory body in the world to announce its approval of the deal.
The General Authority for Competition (GAC) in Saudi Arabia approved Microsoft’s planned $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard on Sunday. It is the first regulatory body in the world to publicly announce its approval.
The GAC posted a copy of its No Objection Certificate on Twitter in both Arabic and English. The ruling can also be found on the GAC’s website.
For the past year, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and other regulatory bodies from around the world have deliberated over the surge of high-profile gaming acquisitions. Industry giants such as Microsoft, Sony and Take-Two Interactive have been aggressively acquiring studios in what has been described as the great consolidation of video games industry.
Among those cases, the Microsoft and Activision Blizzard merger has been especially contentious. If it goes through, the gargantuan $68.7 billion merger will be most expensive video game acquisition ever and the third biggest corporate deal of the decade.
Some Activision Blizzard employees have welcomed the merger in hopes that Microsoft leadership will clean house at the embattled game publisher, according to Bloomberg. The video game giant was sued by labor regulators in California last year; the state agency alleged that Activision Blizzard cultivated a “pervasive ‘frat boy’ workplace culture” that resulted in women leaving the company as well as the death of one employee by suicide in 2017.
Workers at Activision Blizzard have staged multiple walkouts in response to the lawsuit, over layoffs, and following the lifting of vaccine mandates at the company. Some employees have also called for CEO Bobby Kotick to step down.
Sony, one of Microsoft’s chief rivals in the gaming space, has publicly critiqued the merger. In comments submitted to Brazil’s antitrust regulator, Sony argued that the acquisition would eventually lead to Microsoft holding a monopoly over the market due to the massive popularity of Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty franchise.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (or PIF), which has been investing heavily in various ventures to diversify the country’s assets beyond oil, has also been buying large stakes in various video game companies. This push into the game industry is being led by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who chairs the PIF. According to a 2018 profile in the New Yorker, the crown prince is a fan of Call of Duty.
When news of the Microsoft and Activision Blizzard acquisition broke, the PIF enjoyed a $1.1 billion boost thanks to its previous investment in Activision Blizzard. Similarly, on Aug. 19, Swedish holding company Embracer Group announced its acquisition of eight properties for an estimated $780 million, a power move made possible due to a $1 billion injection from the PIF via Savvy Gaming Group.
Saudi money remains a contentious subject in the game industry, due to Saudi Arabia’s history of violence and abuse directed toward dissidents, women, minorities, migrant workers and others. In June 2020, Riot Games announced that its “League of Legends” European Championship was partnering with Neom, Saudi Arabia’s planned smart city in Tabuk Province. The game’s fans lashed out against the company, and broadcast talent for the esport organized a strike in protest. In response, Riot canned the partnership just 16 hours after introducing it. | 2022-08-23T21:47:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Saudi Arabia approves Microsoft and Activision Blizzard acquisition - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/23/saudi-arabia-microsoft-activision-acquisition/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/23/saudi-arabia-microsoft-activision-acquisition/ |
Atlanta officers who shot Rayshard Brooks won’t face charges
By Emmanuel Felton
A casket bearing the remains of Rayshard Brooks is loaded into a hearse after his funeral at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on June 23, 2020, in Atlanta. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
More than two years after the shooting death of Rayshard Brooks sparked protests and drew scrutiny of the Atlanta Police Department, a state-appointed prosecutor announced Tuesday that neither of the two officers involved will face charges.
Special prosecutor Pete Skandalakis said that after reviewing images from police body cameras and area security footage, investigators concluded that the officers had “committed no crimes.”
“This case of Devin Brosnan and Garrett Rolfe is not like the George Floyd case,” he said. “This is not a case in which an officer was kneeling on a prone suspect for nine minutes. It’s nothing like that. Nor is it like the Ahmaud Arbery case, where armed citizens were chasing a person down through a neighborhood. This case, its facts, are different.”
Still, he added: “You can’t ignore the fact that all of this was happening about the same time.”
Brooks, 27, was shot and killed on the night of June 12, 2020, during the height of the racial justice protests that followed the murder of Floyd in Minneapolis. Video soon emerged showing Brooks running away when he was shot by Rolfe, an officer. The day after the shooting, Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields resigned from office, Rolfe was fired, and Brosnan, another officer on the scene, was pulled off street patrols.
Four days later, Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard announced that Rolfe had been charged with felony murder, aggravated assault and other offenses, while Brosnan was charged with aggravated assault and other related counts. Soon after, a number of Atlanta police officers called in sick to protest the decision to charge the men.
But in August 2020, Howard was defeated in his bid for reelection and his replacement, Fani Willis, accused him of tainting the case, pushing forward charges before the investigation had been completed. Critics have accused Howard of pursuing the case in an effort to bolster his reelection chances. Willis petitioned for the Georgia attorney general’s office to take over the case. He selected Skandalakis to prosecute it.
Andre Dickens, Atlanta’s freshman Black mayor, issued a statement saying he respected the work of the special prosecutor but felt for the Brooks family.
“My heart continues to ache for the family of Rayshard Brooks,” he said. “He was a father whose absence will forever be felt by our community.”
The Atlanta Police Department issued a statement saying the two White officers involved in the shooting, who are on administrative duty, would get to undergo training to be recertified for street patrols.
The incident started when Atlanta Police Department officer Brosnan first approached Brooks’s car, where Brooks was asleep and blocking the drive-through lane of a Wendy’s in southwest Atlanta. Rolfe arrived some minutes later and conducted a field sobriety test on Brooks that found that his blood alcohol content was above the legal limit, according to a report by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
As Brosnan and Rolfe tried to take Brooks into custody, a fight broke out between the three men. Video of the scuffle showed that Brooks grabbed Brosnan’s Taser and attempted to flee. Rolfe ran after Brooks, and Brooks turned around and fired the Taser toward Rolfe. Rolfe then fired three shots at Brooks.
Skandalakis said investigators reached their conclusion that no crime had been committed after looking at the video and concluding that Rolfe had to make a life-or-death split-second decision.
“We do not look at this with 20/20 hindsight,” he said. “We look at it with what information the officers had in a dynamic situation that is quickly evolving.”
He added that he did not believe the shooting was racially motivated.
Rolfe’s disciplinary record showed a history of citizen complaints and that he had formerly been disciplined for issues including in a use-of-force incident. In May 2021, the Atlanta Civil Service Board reinstated Rolfe to the Atlanta Police Department, concluding that he “was not afforded his right to due process.”
Dickens said Tuesday that the Atlanta Police Department has improved training on how to de-escalate confrontations since the shooting.
“Through engagement with community advocates, the Atlanta City Council, the Atlanta Police Department and others, we have listened and moved forward proactively with significant reforms,” he said. “We are continually investing in training to ensure our officers make up the most qualified and proficient force in the country.” | 2022-08-23T21:57:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Atlanta officers Brosnan and Rolfe won't face charges in Rayshard Brooks shooting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/23/rayshard-brooks-atlanta-shooting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/23/rayshard-brooks-atlanta-shooting/ |
Longtime high school football coach Gary Gaines died in Lubbock, Tex., after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. (Kevin Buehler/AP)
Gary Gaines, the coach whose high school football team was portrayed in the book and film “Friday Night Lights” died Monday, according to multiple reports. He was 73.
“Following a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease, it is with great sadness that the family of Coach Gary Gaines announces his peaceful passing this afternoon,” his family said in a statement to local media.
Gaines, a longtime coach in West Texas, is best known for leading the football team at Permian High in Odessa. His program’s 1988 season was chronicled in Buzz Bissinger’s best-selling book “Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream,” which inspired a 2004 film starring Billy Bob Thornton as Gaines and a television series.
In the book, Bissinger explored the football team and its place in the community, including depictions of “For Sale” signs placed in front of Gaines’s home after a loss and racist comments made by his assistant coaches. That season, Permian lost star running back James “Boobie” Miles to a preseason knee injury, but reached the state semifinals where it lost to a Dallas Carter High team considered one of the best in state history.
The best sports books to read, according to the Post Sports staff
The 1988 season occurred during the second of Gaines’s three stretches at Permian. He won a state title as an assistant with the team during his first run in 1980. He later left, then returned as the Panthers’ head coach in 1986, winning a state championship in 1989 — the same year he left for an assistant coaching role at Texas Tech and the year before Bissinger’s book was released. Gaines rejoined Permian in 2009 and led the program until his retirement in 2012.
“I was there when he was inducted into the Texas High School Coaches Hall of Fame,” former Permian assistant Ron King told the Odessa American. “I just can’t find the words to pay respects. It’s a big loss for the coaching profession. There are a lot of coaches he took under his wing and mentored.”
Despite the success of the team and the media it inspired, the book upset some in Odessa, where a local bookstore canceled a book signing after threats against Bissinger. Gaines reportedly never read the book or watched the movie.
Bissinger, who later visited Gaines and other members of the 1988 team, addressed his relationship with the coach in a 2004 interview with ESPN, noting that Gaines “had been very loud in his cries of betrayal.”
“The one person that I should’ve told much more about what was in the book was the head coach [Gaines]. I feel that I was wrong in not doing that, and I’ve thought about that for 14 years,” Bissinger said. “… I wasn’t there to apologize for what I had written but, you know, if I had done him harm or upset him that bothered me. My intent, at least in my mind, had been to treat him sympathetically. At the very end, he asked me what was in the book. I was vague, and I was wrong. I should have said, ‘You know, Gary, frankly, there’s a lot of things in here that I’ve discovered that I’m going to have to report on,’ as opposed to blindsiding him.”
Gaines also served as the athletic director at two West Texas school districts before his final stop at Permian. He is survived by his wife and two children. | 2022-08-23T22:10:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Gary Gaines, 'Friday Night Lights' coach, dies at 73 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/gary-gaines-dies-friday-night-lights/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/23/gary-gaines-dies-friday-night-lights/ |
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