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Members of Washington’s former marching band examine a group portrait of themselves at FedEx Field in 2013. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
In July 2021, Xavier Summers, a sousaphone player in the ensemble formerly known as the Washington Redskins Marching Band, bought a house in Prince George’s County, in no small part because it was located eight minutes from FedEx Field. The NFL’s oldest band had been sidelined during the coronavirus pandemic, but indications were that it would return. After driving 218 miles round trip from his previous home in Delaware to Landover for weekly rehearsals and home games for nine years, Summers looked forward to the easier commute.
“The one thing you don’t want to give up is that thing you’re passionate about,” Summers, a consultant whose father, Eric, was the band director until this year, and whose brother was also in the band, said of his long-distance commitment to the group. “Then they didn’t bring it back.”
To be clear, there will be a marching band at Washington Commanders home games this season, but even beyond the new uniforms and revised fight song, which the 60-person ensemble of part-time paid employees debuted at the team’s first preseason game this month, the group will bear little resemblance to the all-volunteer band that was twice as large and provided the soundtrack for Washington’s NFL team for more than 80 years.
Twenty members of the former band, all of whom were required to re-audition, were selected for the new band. Summers and many of his former bandmates declined the opportunity for myriad reasons, including what they considered the team’s disregard for the former band’s leadership. While the Commanders celebrate the return of one of the franchise’s most recognizable traditions and new members prepare to build on that legacy, some musicians from the former band feel discarded and lament what’s been lost.
“This isn’t the band coming back,” Lynn Haase, who joined the former band as a tenor saxophone player in 2016, said recently. “This is a band coming back.”
‘The band is a family’
After relocating his team from Boston to D.C. in 1937, Redskins founder and showman George Preston Marshall invited local musical groups, including the Chestnut Farms Chevy Chase Dairy Band, to perform at games at Griffith Stadium. By the following season, Marshall’s team had its own band and a fight song, which was composed by Barnee Breeskin and featured lyrics by Marshall’s wife, silent film star Corinne Griffith.
The band was a family affair — in the figurative and literal sense — from the start. It remained that way for generations.
Wendy Harrell, who played the mellophone in the former band, met her husband, a trombone player, shortly after successfully auditioning for the group in 2001. They were married in 2007 and have two musically inclined sons they figured would join them in the stands with instruments one day.
“Up until covid hit, we thought we would be in the band for a long time,” said Harrell, a lifelong fan of the team.
Few members of the former band are more revered than 93-year-old Don Bartlett, who joined in 1969 and whose oldest son marched next to him during his final two years of high school. Even after a heart attack seven years ago left Bartlett unable to carry his brass tuba, he continued to serve as line chief, attending every rehearsal and game.
“The band is a family,” said Chris Howell, a saxophone player who joined in 2009 after seeing the group perform in the Greater Manassas Christmas Parade. “It was an opportunity to belong to something more than yourself. From sitting in the locker rooms before the game and standing around at rehearsal, you really get to know an awful lot of people really well.”
The band, which totaled roughly 120 members before the pandemic, was a mix of enthusiastic amateurs who worked IT and government jobs by day and people who made a living playing and teaching music in the D.C. area. The volunteer ensemble was a regular presence, spanning three stadiums and the team’s ups and downs. With the introduction of an in-stadium DJ and an increased reliance on recorded music during games in recent years, the band’s playing time diminished, but its loyal members cherished the camaraderie and the chance to represent the burgundy and gold.
“Even when the team wasn’t doing well,” said David LaMay, who played clarinet and saxophone, “the band was.”
“Between us, it was the biggest party this side of New Orleans,” said 60-year-old Jonathan Cooper, a saxophone player who joined the band shortly before the team left RFK Stadium after the 1996 season. “We loved playing with each other, and whatever the team asked us to do, we’d do.”
Changes announced
In March 2020, the band went on hiatus along with the rest of the sports world. The NFL’s covid protocols limited the number of personnel allowed on the field the following season, but Joey Colby-Begovich, who was hired as the team’s vice president of guest experience that March, worked with drum line leader Myles Overton and longtime band liaison Tony Cardenas to organize an 18-member drum line to perform at home games. Team president Jason Wright said the marching band would return as part of the team’s rebrand in 2022.
Team leadership decided members of the new band would be paid, as the franchise’s cheerleading squad, which was replaced by a coed dance team in 2021, had been for years. After consulting with military and college bands about how it could create a robust sound with a smaller, professional ensemble, the Commanders settled on a 60-person band.
The team communicated these changes to Cardenas, who shared them with members of the former band. Haase created a private Facebook group for band alumni to keep in touch and organize a reunion. She also contacted Colby-Begovich and, at his request, admitted him to the Facebook group to field questions from her fellow band members about what the changes would mean for them.
Colby-Begovich shared information about compensation ($20 an hour for rehearsals and $25 an hour for performance days) and employee benefits, including access to a human resources representative, and said the band would receive similar attention as the dance team going forward. He mentioned the team would hire a music director and explained that anyone interested in being part of the new band would be required to audition virtually. Those selected would be required to re-audition every year. (The former band held auditions for a select number of spots that opened up after each season, but existing members were not required to re-audition.)
“I have no ill will toward them,” Bartlett said of the changes, “but I was sad and disappointed that all of a sudden our traditional band was just cut off.”
Several band members expressed frustration that Overton — who had more than 35 years of experience as a drummer in the U.S. Marine Drum and Bugle Corps and the U.S. Army Band — and his similarly qualified fellow band leaders, including Eric Summers, Cardenas and longtime drum major John Carpenter, were not given any special consideration for their decades of dedication and institutional knowledge, though all were invited to apply for the music director position.
“We were stunned,” Haase said of the lack of continuity in leadership.
“Once we found out our leaders were not being asked to return and they were hiring people who were never in the band and didn’t understand our history, we were upset,” Harrell said.
Eric Summers joined the band as a sousaphone player in 1982 and became the ensemble’s second Black director after George White died in 1998. He said he didn’t learn that he wasn’t part of the team’s plans for the new band until the music director position was posted in March. The listing indicated the music director was responsible for selecting the band director, the role Summers had held for more than two decades.
“It would appear that if I would have been there 23 years as a leader, if I would have to reapply for something that I had been doing very effectively for all those years, I would have gotten notice,” said Summers, who grew up a few blocks from RFK and used to watch Washington’s band practice behind D.C. General Hospital. “That’s why it feels like such a slap in the face.”
Xavier Summers wrote a letter to Colby-Begovich advocating on behalf of his father. He said Colby-Begovich later apologized for the miscommunication, but by that point the team had already hired Jeffrey Sean Dokken, the maestro and conductor of the Symphony Orchestra of Northern Virginia, as music director.
Eric Summers, who retired in June after a more than 40-year career as a band director and assistant principal in D.C. and Prince George’s County public schools, opted not to apply for the Commanders’ band director position because it was more akin to the drum major’s role in the former band.
“It is important for all band members to know — past and present — that they are a part of our team’s history and legacy, and we honor and respect that legacy,” Colby-Begovich said through a team spokesman.
‘Hail and Farewell’
More than 100 musicians auditioned for the Commanders’ band, including husband-and-wife mellophone players Corey and Elle Emerson. The couple had been members of the former band since moving to the D.C. area in 2018, and both made the cut for the new ensemble. After the uncertainty of the pandemic, Corey Emerson said he was excited to learn that the band was returning, albeit with a different look.
“We’re still getting to know each other, whereas when we joined the band before, there were people who had been in there for decades,” Emerson said. “That part, I think, will come in time. Everyone is very positive, and we’ve come together as a group pretty quickly. I’m excited about where we go from here.”
“I hope they have as great an experience as we did,” said Harrell, who hasn’t ruled out auditioning in the future. “I also know it takes time to form those bonds and become the type of group that we had been for so long.”
Saxophone player Kevin Epps, who graduated from Bridgewater College in May, is one of the new faces in the band, which is one of two in the NFL along with Baltimore’s Marching Ravens. He described the experience thus far as “phenomenal.”
“The section leader for the saxophone section is a member of the old band, and he’s been really accepting of us and more than willing to help us out,” Epps said.
Xavier Summers said his father wouldn’t have discouraged him from auditioning for the new band, but he ultimately decided against it. He also declined an invitation to the “Hail and Farewell” banquet the team hosted at FedEx Field on June 25, an event that was organized after a former band member contacted Commanders co-CEO Tanya Snyder. Following a catered reception on the club level, more than 50 former band members gathered on the concourse to perform a variety of familiar tunes, including the team’s original fight song.
“Every song we played, we looked at each other and realized that this was the end,” Haase said. “We’re not going to be together anymore.”
In the weeks since the event, former band members have kicked around the idea of establishing an alumni band that could perform at events in the area. Several former band members have planned a postgame jam session in a parking lot near FedEx Field after the Commanders’ season opener Sept. 11.
“I’m pretty sure we’ll have the majority of the band there, because that’s the kind of family and the culture that was cultivated,” Xavier Summers said.
Bartlett, who didn’t audition for the new band, has satisfied his musical fix over the past three years by playing in the Kena Shriner’s Band in Manassas, using an old fiberglass sousaphone that’s significantly lighter than the brass instrument he carried around on Sundays in his younger days.
“I don’t think they’d be interested in having an old line chief who can’t march,” Bartlett said of a possible return as a member of the Commanders’ band. “But I’d be first in line if we could ever get the old band back together.”
What to read about the Washington Commanders
Exclusive: An employee of Washington’s NFL team accused Commanders owner Daniel Snyder of asking for sex, groping her and attempting to remove her clothes, according to legal correspondence obtained by The Post. A team investigation concluded the woman was lying in an attempt to extort Snyder.
Capitol Hill: Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), the chairwoman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, announced that the committee intends to issue a subpoena to compel the testimony of Snyder.
Kevin B. Blackistone: If NFL players care about social justice, why haven’t they rebuked the Commanders’ defensive coordinator?
Penalized: The NFL fined Commanders head coach Ron Rivera $100,000 and docked the team two OTA practices in 2023 for excessive hitting during their offseason program this year, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. | 2022-08-25T13:23:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Washington Commanders’ new marching band ostracizes some former members - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/washington-commanders-marching-band/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/washington-commanders-marching-band/ |
Myanmar arrests former British ambassador and her husband
Military junta says the couple is being held on immigration charges
By Regine Cabato
Myanmar artist Htein Lin poses in his studio in Yangon in 2015. He is married to former British Ambassador Vicky Bowman. (Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty Images)
Myanmar’s military junta has arrested a former British ambassador and her husband, according to several people aware of the situation. A government spokesman said Thursday evening that the couple were being charged with violating the country’s immigration act.
Vicky Bowman served as British ambassador from 2002 to 2006 and is now the director of the Myanmar Centre for Responsible Business. Her husband, Htein Lin, is a prominent artist and former political prisoner.
The couple were arrested at their residence in Yangon and have been sent to the notorious Insein prison, according to local reports.
A brief statement from a foreign affairs spokesperson in London said authorities were “concerned by the arrest of a British woman” and providing consular assistance.
The arrest is likely to deepen the isolation of Myanmar’s military junta, known as the Tatmadaw, which seized power in a coup last year. The military has cracked down on dissent, arresting thousands of protesters and political figures, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
Human Rights Watch called for the couple’s release, saying the arrest was “outrageous and unacceptable.”
“Once again, the Tatmadaw show why they are among the worst of the worst rights abusers in Southeast Asia,” deputy Asia director Phil Robertson tweeted.
On Thursday, Britain imposed sanctions on businesses linked to the military, although the announcement appeared unrelated to the arrests. Britain is also backing a genocide case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice for its treatment of Rohingya Muslims, and has expressed support for Myanmar’s National Unity Government, a shadow administration operating in exile.
Britain was among many countries to condemn the junta’s recent execution of pro-democracy activists. Its top diplomat in the country, Pete Vowles, said last month he was “forced by the junta to leave but glad we didn’t cave to pressure to legitimise their brutal coup.”
Cabato reported from Manila, and Tan, from Singapore. | 2022-08-25T14:22:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Myanmar arrests former British ambassador Vicky Bowman - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/25/myanmar-arrest-vicky-bowman-ambassador/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/25/myanmar-arrest-vicky-bowman-ambassador/ |
18-hole golf course is centerpiece of Loudoun’s Stoneleigh community
The entrance to Stoneleigh is marked by a new stone wall. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
Lying at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Stoneleigh Golf and Country Club community in Round Hill, Va., offers residents seclusion from the commotion of daily life in Loudoun County.
“It’s close to Purcellville so you have that town feel, but really it’s remote,” said David Clark, a resident since July 2019 and the homeowners association treasurer. “It’s tucked away. We can sit outside at night, and we can’t hear any traffic.”
Clark said his family moved from Leesburg to Stoneleigh for its “laid-back” and “quaint, rural” atmosphere.
The 18-hole championship golf course of the private Stoneleigh Golf and Country Club weaves naturally between Stoneleigh’s 139 single-family homes. Each home has been custom-built as families have gradually bought up the 150 lots, ranging from one to five acres each, over the past 30 years.
These homes, each with their own architectural style, are enveloped by trees and greenery. Calm ponds cut through the rolling terrain, while small farm buildings and little stone walls — some more than 100 years old — dot the well-maintained landscape.
The private country club, which most residents belong to, Clark said, offers amenities to keep families busy. Alongside golf, there are courts for tennis and pickleball and an outdoor pool, home to the Stoneleigh Stars swim team.
The golf course, finished in 1992, was designed by Hall of Fame golf course architect Lisa Maki, who created it after the links-style golf courses in Scotland. Streets throughout the neighborhood, such as Turnberry Drive and Prestwick Court, are named after Scottish golf courses.
Another perk for club members, Clark said, is the Tavern, a restaurant for a casual bite for lunch or dinner. He and his family pop in during the week, and especially on holidays, he said, when the Tavern holds special events, like a Mother’s Day brunch.
Other country club events include movie nights, Fourth of July celebrations, corporate outings and weddings.
Access to the club requires a membership. The full membership involves a one-time $7,500 fee and a monthly fee of $395 for access to all club amenities and events, according to membership director Clinton Chapman.
Stoneleigh residents don't automatically get a membership to the club, and it’s not required that they have a membership. Non-Stoneleigh residents can also become members.
Stoneleigh’s location right off Route 7 is “ideal,” Clark said. “We can easily go to breweries or wineries to listen to music and relax and not have to worry about traffic.”
Also nearby is Sleeter Lake Park and places for horseback riding, such as Red Gate Farm. Directly across Route 7 is Hill High Marketplace, home to Mom’s Apple Pie at Hill High and More Better Restaurant & Beer Garden, where Blair Kaiser’s sons work.
Kaiser’s family moved in next to the Clark family in July 2019, also for Stoneleigh’s location.
The retired Air Force pilot needed to move his family back to the Washington region, where they lived from 2004 to 2011, as he became a United Airlines pilot out of Dulles International Airport and his wife became an operating room nurse at Inova Loudoun Hospital.
Stoneleigh was a great option, Kaiser said, as it’s easily accessible to their jobs in Dulles and Leesburg via Route 7, while also offering lots of land without the “windy, gravel roads” seen in other nearby rural neighborhoods, he said.
“My commute to Dulles Airport is 30 miles, and 95 percent of the time, the Waze navigation app tells me I’ll get there in just 30 minutes; it’s incredible. There’s not a single stoplight,” Kaiser said.
Pam O’Beirne, former HOA treasurer and president, and her husband started building their retirement home in Stoneleigh in 1998.
While there are still some retirees, O’Beirne said, at least 50 to 60 percent of the homes are now owned by younger couples with children. “A lot of us older people that came in the ’90s have moved on because our kids are grown, and the properties are big,” she said.
One major advantage of Stoneleigh is how “charming” it is, O’Beirne said, with its pre-Civil War character and mountaintop views.
The original stone manor house — now part of the Tavern restaurant — has the year 1852 etched on the largest chimney and was built and occupied by the James family, known stonemasons of Loudoun County at the time. The Jameses sold the property to William E. Dodd, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, in 1913, and it operated as a dairy farm and fruit orchard, O’Beirne said.
After the property changed hands several times, Bob Lewis, Bruce Brownell, and their Stoneleigh partners purchased and developed this community that opened in 1992.
Some original structures remain, including a red barn that was set afire during the Civil War, and the Founder’s Cottage, from the mid-1700s, that’s now an Airbnb.
Annual HOA fees are $100 for the upkeep of Stoneleigh’s front entrance and mailboxes, O’Beirne said.
Living there: Stoneleigh is bounded by Route 7 to the north, Turnberry Drive to the west and south and Stoneleigh Golf and Country Club to the east.
According to Leslie Carpenter, a real estate agent with Compass, there are two homes on the market: one at $1,325,000 with five bedrooms and four and a half bathrooms, and the other at $1,350,000 with five bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms. In the past year, 10 homes have sold, and the average sales price was $1,130,501. They ranged from $900,000 for a four-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bathroom home that lacked updates and a finished basement, Carpenter said, to $1,400,000 for a five-bedroom, five-and-a-half-bathroom home.
Schools: Mountain View Elementary, Harmony Middle, Woodgrove High
Transit: The Purcellville Connector’s closest bus stop is at the Loudoun Valley Community Center around five miles away. The Purcellville Park and Ride is around six miles away. The closest Metro station, Wiehle-Reston East on the Silver Line, is about 35 miles away. | 2022-08-25T14:52:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Neighborhood profile: Stoneleigh in Loudoun County, Va. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/24/18-hole-golf-course-is-centerpiece-loudouns-stoneleigh-community/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/24/18-hole-golf-course-is-centerpiece-loudouns-stoneleigh-community/ |
Cade Cavalli will debut for the Nationals after dominating in his last seven starts for the Class AAA Rochester Red Wings. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Once Cade Cavalli could hold a baseball, all he wanted to do was play with the big kids. Tristian, his brother, was three years older and Cade’s idol. When their mom, Becky, asked Cade who to invite to his birthday parties, he would give her lists of Tristian’s friends and none of his own classmates. She worried about whether Cade would become his own person. And when Cade joined Tristian’s youth team, when he was the best shortstop and could already hit, she and Brian, Cade’s dad, worried what the other parents might think.
“You watch your kids a lot and you always look for signs of what they may be like as adults,” Becky said in an interview before this season, long before it was announced that Cavalli would make his major league debut at Nationals Park on Friday night. “But once I realized that Cade was just so driven, that he just wanted to set his pace and move faster and faster, I wasn’t as concerned anymore.
“That was Cade. Wanting to prove himself was Cade being himself.”
From April: Cade Cavalli imagined this life
Behind Cavalli, now 24, no longer the child who wanted to tail his brother like a shadow, is an enduring antsiness. When he first tested life as a full-time pitcher, he was a soon-to-be college sophomore in the Cape Cod League, hurting his arm because he couldn’t resist throwing during games when he was supposed to be off. After he led the entire minor leagues in strikeouts in 2021, he started watching YouTube videos that taught him meditation and breathing exercises. He wanted to learn how to sit still. In those quiet moments, though, in a hotel near the Washington Nationals’ spring training facility in West Palm Beach, Fla., he would picture himself on a major league mound.
Up until this point, that was just a vision. He would face Mike Trout in the eighth inning of his imagination. He would celebrate a tight win, leaping off the diamond to hug teammates who streamed from the dugout. But at 7:05 p.m. Friday, Cavalli will find the rubber and stare down the Cincinnati Reds. He will have a real opponent with real stakes.
He will have stepped into the teeth of his wildest dreams.
But for Cavalli, for a planner who used to fill notebooks with a single-minded goal of being here — who once predicted this future in an elementary school assignment, even if he promised to be a doctor and professional baseball player — ascension is no surprise.
Nationals starting pitchers are winless since July 6
With six weeks left in the season, the last-place Nationals had good reason to promote him from Class AAA Rochester, where he had a 1.47 ERA in his last seven starts. They are staking a portion of their rebuild on whether Cavalli can make the giant leap from the minors, a trial that begins now but will stretch across multiple years. Yet if there’s pressure in that, it is probably equal to his self-imposed expectations, the idea that only Cade Cavalli can keep Cade Cavalli from success.
“Whenever someone asks me about pressure from the outside, from the rankings sites, whatever, I think about the pressure I have always put on myself,” Cavalli said this past spring, leaning so far forward that he almost fell from a folding chair by a practice field in West Palm Beach. “It’s never been a bad thing. To me, it’s been a good thing and one reason why I am where I am. I hold myself to a high standard. I want to be great, you know?”
Since he was picked in the first round of the 2020 draft, everyone has wanted him to be something, if not Max Scherzer or Stephen Strasburg than the next iteration of a dominant starter in D.C. Contenders in Washington have typically been built around a strong rotation. Cavalli, then, is supposed to be part of a new foundation, joining starters Josiah Gray and MacKenzie Gore, and whoever else emerges from the system or through free agency down the line.
If Luis García returns from the injured list Friday, the Nationals would glimpse a potential core in the middle of the diamond. García, 22, would be at second base with CJ Abrams, 21, playing shortstop. Before the top of the first inning, Keibert Ruiz, 24, would slide on his catcher’s mask and squat behind the plate. But only one player will hold the ball and an unchecked power to dictate the game.
That’s how Cavalli has envisioned it all along. | 2022-08-25T14:53:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Cade Cavalli is ready for the pressure of Major League Baseball - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/cade-cavalli-nationals-pressure/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/cade-cavalli-nationals-pressure/ |
Formula 1 CEO doesn’t see ‘a girl coming into F1 in the next five years’
Lella Lombardi of Italy during a 1980 endurance race in England. (Bob Thomas/Popperfoto/Getty Images)
The head of Formula 1 can’t foresee a scenario in which a woman races an F1 car in the next five years — unless a “meteorite” hits the Earth.
Stefano Domenicali, head of Formula One Group, said Wednesday in a news conference that the auto racing organization is making progress on fostering a talent pipeline for female drivers to enter its male-dominated grid but urged patience.
“Realistically speaking, unless there is something like a meteorite, I don’t see a girl coming into F1 in the next five years,” he said, according to Sky News. “That is very unlikely.”
Domenicali is not the first F1 executive in recent years to suggest progress will come slowly for a sport in which only two women have ever competed at the Grand Prix level. It has seen its popularity climb with the 2019 release of the Netflix docuseries “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” but has struggled to shed its reputation as a boy’s club.
Formula One set to open 2022 season with new rules and new-look cars
In Formula 1, 20 drivers compete in Grand Prix races around the world to accumulate points, which determine the winners of the World Championships for drivers and for constructors. Only drivers who finish in the top 10 earn points. Each team races two cars and two drivers.
For as long as F1 World Championship Grands Prix have existed — over 70 years — only two women, both Italians, have made race starting grids. In the 1950s, Maria Teresa de Filippis competed in the Monaco and Belgian Grands Prix, and in the ’70s, Lella Lombardi became the only woman to score a Grand Prix point, though it was actually a half-point.
Some industry executives say women aren’t as physically able as men to race the dangerous, high-speed cars at competitive levels; others say female drivers wouldn’t be taken seriously by the fan base — or sponsors, whose funding powers the capital-intensive sport. Bernie Ecclestone, the 91-year-old British billionaire who led Formula 1 racing until 2017, said something of the sort in 2016.
Some efforts are taking shape to remedy the gender imbalance. In 2018, a group of private investors launched the W Series, a women-only auto racing competition with the goal of “bringing more females into the grassroots of the sport.” The idea was to create a free-to-enter pipeline for female talent in motorsports so it wouldn’t be “another 40 years before a woman has the experience and qualifications to start a Championship Formula 1 Grand Prix again.” Caitlyn Jenner, an Olympian and transgender rights advocate, bought a W Series team in 2022.
W Series drivers race in Formula 3 Tatuus T-318 cars during Grand Prix weekends in partnership with Formula 1. A crucial difference is that F3 cars are less powerful than F1 cars. Formula 3 is the sport’s third-class racing tier — the pipeline through which young talent attempts to reach Formula 2 and Formula 1.
“We are working on that to see what we can do to improve the system. And you will see soon some action,” he added.
Lewis Hamilton, an F1 star who drives for Mercedes, recently expressed frustration that there is no clear “progression” from the W Series into Formula 3 or Formula 2, according to the racing news site PlanetF1.
“I feel it’s great we have W Series, but we as a sport need to do way more for young girls getting into the sport,” the site quoted Hamilton as saying during a July meeting with the W Series team in Hungary.
Thanks for having me @WSeriesRacing pic.twitter.com/eWAQBEU8eZ
Lewis Hamilton, the top driver in Formula One, feels alone in the battle against racism
Female racecar drivers have spoken out on the issue for years — though some with reservations about the prospects of more gender-balanced grids.
The first and so far only W Series champion, British driver Jamie Chadwick, said in June that while she set “a goal of competing in Formula One,” she didn’t know whether it was possible for female drivers to race at that level in current conditions — because it mostly hadn’t been done.
“To get into Formula One you have to go through the feeder series — Formula Three and Formula Two — and it is extremely physical,” Chadwick told the PA news agency. “We don’t know exactly what women are capable of in the sport. If you are aged 15 or 16, and go into car racing, without power steering and driving big heavy cars, a lot of women do struggle, even though they have been successful in go-karting,” she added.
Chadwick said the sport should study whether changing the structures of the cars — for example, wider cockpits and thinner steering wheels — would help female drivers’ performance.
Abbi Pulling, a W Series driver and member of the Alpine F1 team’s affiliate program, disagreed with Chadwick in an interview with the Guardian in July. “That’s Jamie’s opinion, but … we definitely believe a female can be fit enough to race at those levels,” she said. “I think it’s possible a female can be in F1 in the next five years.”
Susie Wolff, who in 2014 became the first woman to participate in a Grand Prix weekend in more than 20 years, cast doubt on the oft-repeated idea that women have less muscle mass than men and so can’t compete in F1 championships.
When she drove for Williams Racing in practice sessions at the Silverstone Circuit in Northampton, England, in 2014, Wolff said, she realized that wasn’t as big an obstacle as she thought. “Already on my first lap out of the pits I knew it was going to be manageable,” she said, according to CNN.
“I think we are at a slight disadvantage in terms of physical strength but it’s something that can be overcome and it’s something that won’t stop us being successful in F1,” Wolff said at the time.
Beyond technical questions, a perception issue is also at play, according to Toto Wolff, CEO of Mercedes-AMG Petronas, one of the top three F1 teams, and husband of Susie Wolff. Her “final chance was denied,” Wolff said this month in an interview with the Financial Times. “She was within a few tenths of [Williams driver] Felipe Massa,” he said, but the F1 team “never dared to make that call.”
Cindy Boren contributed to this report. | 2022-08-25T14:54:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali: No female drivers in the next five years - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/formula-one-female-drivers-domenicali/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/formula-one-female-drivers-domenicali/ |
Novak Djokovic announced Thursday he will not play in the final Grand Slam of the year. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP)
Novak Djokovic’s apparent refusal to receive a coronavirus vaccination cost him the chance to compete for his 22nd Grand Slam singles title when he announced Thursday that he will not be able to participate in the U.S. Open that begins Monday.
“Sadly, I will not be able to travel to NY this time for US Open,” Djokovic wrote on social media. “... Good luck to my fellow players! I’ll keep in good shape and positive spirit and wait for an opportunity to compete again.”
Djokovic’s refusal of the vaccine caused his deportation from Australia in January before he could make a bid to win his fourth consecutive Australian Open title. The three-time U.S. Open champion, who won the event most recently in 2018, was allowed entrance into France and England for the next two Grand Slam tournaments this spring and summer. At the French Open in Paris, he lost a four-set quarterfinal match to Rafael Nadal. In England, he won Wimbledon for a seventh time.
Asked by reporters in late June at Wimbledon whether he would continue to refuse vaccination given the potential cost of history-making major championships, Djokovic, who has twice had Covid-19, said simply, “Yes.”
According to an update to international travel guidelines announced Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, non-U. S. citizens and non-U. S. immigrants “must show proof of being fully vaccinated with the primary series of an accepted Covid-19 vaccine before you board your flight to the United States. Only limited exceptions apply.”
The U.S. Open draw, which is set to be released Thursday, now looks more favorable for Nadal, who won the 2022 Australian Open and has one more career title, with a record 22, than Djokovic. However, health has been a problem for Nadal, who withdrew from Wimbledon ahead of his semifinal against Nick Kyrgios because of an injury to an abdominal muscle.
The absence of Djokovic, the sixth-ranked player in the world, takes some of the luster from the U.S. Open, where Djokovic lost to Daniil Medvedev in last year’s final. John McEnroe, the ESPN tennis analyst and four-time U.S. Open champion, was characteristically blunt about Djokovic’s absence before it became official.
“I don’t think it’s fair,” McEnroe told reporters Tuesday. “I think it’s a joke. I would have had the vaccine and gone and played, but he’s got very strong beliefs and you have to respect that.
“At this point, in the pandemic, we’re 2½ years in, I think people in all parts of the world know more about it, and the idea that he can’t travel here to play, to me is a joke.”
“That’s the question that we all want to know the answer to,” McEnroe said. “Obviously, Rafa Nadal has benefited from that. If a guy has won the Australian Open eight or nine times, you would think [Djokovic blew] a chance in a way. | 2022-08-25T14:54:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Novak Djokovic won't play in U.S. Open - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/novak-djokovic-us-open/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/novak-djokovic-us-open/ |
Man fatally shot in Hyattsville, police say
A man was shot and killed late Wednesday evening in Hyattsville, Md., police said.
Around 9:20 p.m., officers were dispatched to the 2300 block of University Boulevard about a shooting and found a man with a gunshot wound. He was pronounced dead on the scene.
A Prince George’s County police spokesperson said the man was found in a parking lot.
Detectives later learned that a second man with a gunshot wound sought treatment at a nearby hospital. Police did not detail what connection there have been between the two shootings. | 2022-08-25T15:27:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man killed in Hyattsville, Prince George's police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/25/hyattsville-fatal-shooting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/25/hyattsville-fatal-shooting/ |
Three men found unconscious outside Hyattsville apartment, police say
Medics gave the men Narcan, an antidote for opioid overdoses, but they could not be revived.
Three men were found dead outside of an apartment building on Wednesday evening, Hyattsville police said.
Just before 11 p.m., emergency medical services responded to a 911 call to the 5700 block of Queens Chapel Road. Officials found three men outside of an apartment building.
Medics administered Narcan, an antidote for opioid overdoses, and performed CPR on the men but were unable to revive them, police said. According to police, there was no visible sign of trauma to the men’s bodies.
Hyattsville police are investigating the incident. | 2022-08-25T15:53:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hyattsville police investigating deaths of three men - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/25/hyattsville-three-men-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/25/hyattsville-three-men-dead/ |
This Jan. 1, 2020, photo captured by NASA’s Aqua satellite shows thick smoke blanketing southeastern Australia. (NASA/AP)
Australia’s fire season in late 2019 and early 2020 was extreme. It blew smoke some 20 miles into the sky, not unlike what a nuclear blast might cause. Smoke from the fires circled the globe and hovered in plumes over the Pacific.
Now, a new study published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports suggests the smoky aerosols caused the highest temperatures in the stratosphere in about three decades and probably damaged the ozone layer — which has been slowly recovering since the substances that deplete it were largely phased out through the 1987 Montreal Protocol.
The stratosphere, just above where airplanes fly, doesn’t normally vary much in temperature because of events on the Earth’s surface — with the exception of volcanic eruptions.
But a sudden and unexpected warming of the global stratosphere was detected in the first few months of 2020 — reaching up to 3 degrees Celsius around Australia and around 0.7 degrees Celsius globally. The researchers say it was the highest temperature recorded in the stratosphere since Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, sending aerosols from sulfate and smoke high into the air.
Lilly Damany-Pearce, a researcher at England’s University of Exeter who led the study, said that both the stratospheric warming and a sizable ozone hole that spread over most of the Antarctic continent in 2020 were likely to have been caused by the violent fire-induced thunderclouds, or “pyrocumulonimbus” events, which injected enormous plumes of smoke into the lower stratosphere.
She said smoke particles are about 50 times more efficient at absorbing sunlight than volcanic sulfate particles — because of the black soot in smoke aerosols. Sunlight heats the air containing the smoke particles, causing this smoke-laden air to rise in a process similar to that which causes hot-air balloons to rise.
“It is plausible that the good work carried out under the Montreal Protocol … could be undone by the impact of global warming on intense fires,” study co-author Jim Haywood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Exeter, said in an email.
The ozone layer helps absorb incoming ultraviolet radiation from the sun, shielding life on Earth from its harmful effects, such as skin cancer and cataract formation. The ozone hole that formed over Antarctica following the fires in 2020 was the longest-lasting and among the largest and deepest in decades, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
Olaf Morgenstern, a scientist at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, said the impact of the Australian fires on the stratosphere — including a smoke plume that drifted over the South Pacific — is “unprecedented as far as the observational record goes.”
Morgenstern, who was not involved in the study, explained that smoke aerosols don’t remain in the upper atmosphere for as long as the harmful human-manufactured chemicals, which can linger in the atmosphere for as long as 80 years.
“The big issue here is that, under global warming, the frequency and intensity of wildfires is expected to increase, which would lead to more” fire-induced stratospheric warming and ozone depletion in the future, Haywood said.
“I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that we had these massive fires in Australia. They are part of the trend,” Morgenstern said, pointing to this past summer of devastating blazes in Europe — also fueled by similar waves of extreme heat and widespread drought conditions that led to Australia’s Black Summer fires.
Previous research has shown the 2020 Australian fire season was so extreme that it altered large-scale wind patterns more than 10 miles overhead. Another study last year observed temperature and ozone changes from satellite data.
The big contribution of the latest paper, according to Martin Jucker, a climate expert at Australia’s University of New South Wales who was not involved in the study, is that the researchers put satellite observations from the period into a state-of-the-art climate model “to prove that the bush fires were actually the reason for what we observed.”
“Heating the stratosphere doesn’t really have a direct impact for us at the surface [of the Earth], but keeping the ozone from recovering or destroying the ozone for a year has a real impact at the surface,” he said. “Before the 2019 bush fires, I don’t think we even thought [fires] could have such an impact. That a bush fire could be as impactful as a volcano.” | 2022-08-25T16:02:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Australia fires damaged ozone layer, warmed stratosphere, study says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/25/australia-wildfire-ozone-layer-damage-climate-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/25/australia-wildfire-ozone-layer-damage-climate-change/ |
Unlike U.S. intelligence officials, presidents are not ‘read in’ or ‘read out’ of classified matters, complicating any potential prosecution, experts say
A worker moves a box out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House grounds on Jan. 14, 2021, before President Donald Trump's departure from Washington. (Erin Scott/Reuters)
Prosecutors scrutinizing Donald Trump for possible mishandling of classified information will have to do so without a key legal and factual element that has long been a staple of such cases, according to intelligence experts. That’s because, unlike the vast majority of federal workers who access secret information, presidents are not made to sign paperwork on classified documents as part of their joining or leaving the government.
Typically, when a person gets access to restricted information, they are “read in” — a process that includes signing documents at the outset, in which they acknowledge the legal requirements to not share information on sensitive programs with unauthorized people or keep classified documents in unauthorized places. When they leave such jobs, they are “read out,” again acknowledging in writing their legal responsibilities and declaring that they do not have any classified documents in their possession.
David Priess, a former CIA officer who is publisher of Lawfare, a national security website and podcast producer, said presidents are not read out of classified programs when they leave office. That, he said, “is because presidents are not formally read in.”
Said Priess: “There’s a myth out there that presidents have a formal security clearance. They don’t.”
The “commander in chief has the ability to classify or declassify documents,” Priess said, by virtue of having been elected president by the American people. “A former president might receive access to limited classified material after leaving office to assist with writing memoirs or at the discretion of the current president, but a formal security clearance isn’t involved.”
Email shows White House lawyer agreed in 2021 that documents Trump had should go to Archives
In past classified mishandling cases involving non-presidents, the formal paperwork of being read in and out of classified matters has been an important part of the investigation. When former general and CIA director David H. Petraeus pleaded guilty in 2015 to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information, for example, the court papers stated that he had repeatedly signed documents saying that he would not improperly share or keep classified material.
Petraeus signed at least 14 such nondisclosure agreements over the course of his career in the military and intelligence work, including a declaration in 2006 that he “shall return all materials that may have come into my possession or for which I am responsible because of such access, upon demand by an authorized representative of the United States Government or upon the conclusion of my employment or other relationship with the United States Government.”
That same declaration says Petraeus understood that if he did not return such materials upon request, that could be a violation of the Espionage Act — the same section of the criminal code cited in the FBI’s search warrant for Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home earlier this month.
In 2012, as Petraeus left the CIA, he signed a document that declared, “I give my assurance that there is no classified material in my possession, custody, or control at this time.” That document later became part of the case against him.
The return of those boxes from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in January set off alarm bells in the government that the former president or his aides had mishandled and kept significant amounts of sensitive national defense information. But Trump’s unique position as a former president means that the criminal investigation may, by necessity, end up more focused on what Trump did starting in May, when he received a grand jury subpoena for any remaining material bearing classified markings, rather than his actions regarding items handed over in January.
“It is yet another reason why criminally investigating and prosecuting a former president has complexities,” said Brandon Van Grack, a lawyer in private practice who previously worked classified mishandling cases when he was a federal prosecutor. “What it highlights is the criminal case is focused on what happened after May, not about what happened before then.”
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on how the apparent lack of a read out or read in for Trump might affect prosecutors’ legal analysis of the facts in the Trump case.
John F. Kelly, a onetime chief of staff to Trump who has said he disliked classification rules and distrusted intelligence officials, said government officials should have given the 45th president some kind of farewell debriefing about classified matters and documents when he left the White House.
“It would have been important to read him out because it would have been in some hopes that he would not violate all these rules on classified materials. The important message would have been, ‘Once you’re not the president anymore, all the rules apply to you,’ ” said Kelly.
A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment about whether the former president received any kind of exit briefing about classified material. Trump has criticized the FBI for raiding his home, and his defenders have claimed that he declassified the material he took with him before leaving office — though no evidence has been made public that he went through the process for doing that.
On Monday, Trump’s lawyers filed court papers seeking to have a special master appointed to review the material seized in the August search — a curious request given that such appointments are generally done to handle matters of attorney-client privilege, not classified information, and the request didn’t come until two weeks after the search, meaning law enforcement officials have already been reviewing the seized material for a significant period of time.
A federal judge in Florida who received that request has asked Trump’s legal team to clarify why they made it, giving the lawyers until Friday to respond.
Mishandling of national security evidence is not the only crime being investigated in the Mar-a-Lago probe, and Trump’s unique status as a former president may not lesson his legal risk to the other two potential criminal charges listed on the search warrant: destruction of records and concealment or mutilation of government material.
“Because the president himself is the ultimate classifying authority, it makes sense that agencies do not formally read presidents in to classified programs,” Deeks said. “In terms of former presidents, Congress itself has recognized in statute that former presidents would still have access to at least some of their records, though Congress also has made clear that former presidents do not own those records personally.” | 2022-08-25T16:10:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Security clearance is different for presidents, which affects Trump case - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/25/trump-classified-legal/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/25/trump-classified-legal/ |
What a museum director does in a workday
Perspective by Sally Tallant
Sally Tallant with her colleague Lauren Haynes. (Courtesy of Sally Tallant)
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 Sally Tallant, a museum director who recorded a day in August.
Name: Sally Tallant
Location: Queens
Job title/current role: President and executive director of the Queens Museum
Previous jobs: I’m lucky to have made a career in the arts. Initially, I started out as an artist, which led me to teach at several art schools and universities in Europe. Those experiences led me to become an educator and curator in London, first at the Hayward Gallery and then at the Serpentine Gallery, where I worked as head of programs from 2001 to 2012. My work then led me to oversee the Liverpool Biennial in 2012, where I was the director until 2019. That year, right before the pandemic, I moved to New York to join the Queens Museum.
What led me to my current role: I believe that art and education hold the power to transform how we experience and construct the world around us. A focus of my work has been to make arts and culture accessible for everyone, to create spaces where diverse voices are valued and represented. The Queens Museum is a unique cultural institution defined by the ongoing conversations we have with our communities. It has been a great privilege to have the opportunity to shape the vision of the museum and its future along with my team. We are in the process of building a new children’s museum on-site, an exciting journey to imagine a new vision for intergenerational arts engagement to be enjoyed by future generations in Queens.
How I spend the majority of my day: I spend a lot of my time in meetings. Every day I meet with my team, supporters and museum trustees as well as a wide range of constituents that include artists, educators, politicians and community members. Together, we make possible all the exhibitions, programs, community and education events that happen at the Queens Museum. Most days I also meet with colleagues from New York and around the world, especially if they are passing through the city. My evenings tend to be filled with exhibition openings, talks and events — as well as dinner plans with friends or colleagues.
7 a.m.: Early-morning swimming session — it helps me wake up and start the day with a clear head!
8 a.m.: Breakfast at home. My go-to is fruit and toast with Marmite (as a Brit, Marmite is a must — I bring it in large quantities from the U.K.).
10 a.m.: All-staff potluck breakfast. This was a special breakfast to welcome new staff, paid interns and fellows, and it was a great way to gather in person which feels so important now after years of social distancing. I brought delicious croissants from my local bakery Cannelle in Long Island City.
11:30 a.m.: I attended an event in the museum galleries organized by artist Suzanne Lacy and our community organizer Gianina Enriquez and the leaders of the La Jornada and Queens Museum Cultural Food Pantry: Patricia Aldana, Adriana Aquino, Emma Confesor, Karina Mendieta, Maria Morales and Maritza Terrones.
2 p.m.: Check-in with artist Charisse Pearlina Weston. Charisse will have her first solo museum exhibition at the Queens Museum this fall. She has been busy working on-site, setting up for the show and making a large-scale installation that will be tremendous — I can’t wait for people to see it.
4 p.m.: I attend a gathering at the Met with colleagues across the cultural sector to celebrate a historical investment in culture by the city. The event is hosted by Laurie Cumbo, commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and members of the Cultural Institutions Groups — a diverse coalition of organizations across all five boroughs.
7 p.m.: I return from Manhattan to host a welcome celebration for Lauren Haynes, our brilliant new director of curatorial affairs and programs at Anable Basin in Long Island City.
9 p.m.: I normally end my day by streaming films or series to unwind. I am currently watching “Westworld | 2022-08-25T16:24:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What a museum director does in a workday - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/25/workday-museum-director/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/25/workday-museum-director/ |
Lachlan Murdoch, chief executive officer of Fox Corporation and co-chairman of News Corp., attends the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 11, 2019. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Media mogul Lachlan Murdoch oversees Fox News, a network that assisted former president Donald Trump in spreading the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. As a result, Murdoch — who along with his father, Rupert Murdoch, runs Fox Corp. — gets a lot of bad publicity.
He doesn’t like it one bit either, to judge from a spat brewing in Australia.
Lawyers for Lachlan Murdoch have spent a good part of the summer threatening Australian news outlet Crikey over a June 29 opinion piece by Bernard Keane with the headline, “Trump is a confirmed unhinged traitor. And Murdoch is his unindicted co-conspirator.” In a letter the next day, a lawyer for Murdoch listed 14 “defamatory imputations” stemming from the piece, including that “Mr Murdoch illegally conspired with Donald Trump to incite an armed mob to march on the Capitol to physically prevent confirmation of the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.” Though the piece doesn’t directly identify Lachlan Murdoch, his lawyer agues that he is “reasonably identified” by context.
The threat kicked off a spirited exchange of lawyer letters over the past several weeks, with Crikey responding that Keane’s piece doesn’t contain the “imputations” alleged by Lachlan Murdoch and, in any case, it didn’t cause “actual harm of a serious kind to Mr Murdoch.” Counsel for Lachlan Murdoch demanded a published apology, which Crikey countered with a proposal for a “statement” laying out the disagreements between the parties. That was rejected.
After much back-and-forth, Crikey placed an ad in the New York Times and the Canberra Times daring Lachlan Murdoch to sue. “We await your writ so that we can test this important issue of freedom of public interest journalism in a courtroom,” said the Crikey ad.
Crikey didn’t have to wait long.
In inviting the suit, Crikey argued that Australia’s defamation laws are “too restrictive.” Indeed, as Matt Ford outlined in a December 2018 piece in the New Republic, Australia’s libel laws are very different from ours. Down under, legal standards require that media outlets bear the burden of proving that their reports are true, whereas in the United States, defamation plaintiffs must prove that they are false.
Crikey’s alleged defamation, moreover, would enjoy a much greater level of protection under U.S. law, though a successful defense would still not be guaranteed. In 1970, the Supreme Court issued a ruling — Greenbelt Cooperative Publishing Association v. Bresler — that protects rhetorical hyperbole of the sort that appeared in Keane’s piece. At issue in the case was a newspaper story that quoted people who characterized the actions of a local developer as “blackmail.” Even “careless” readers, concluded the court, “must have perceived that the word was no more than rhetorical hyperbole, a vigorous epithet used by those who considered [the developer’s] negotiating position extremely unreasonable,” as opposed to a literal assertion that the developer was guilty of the crime of blackmail (extortion).
In a U.S. case, Crikey’s lawyers could invoke this precedent to argue that no reasonable reader could conclude that Lachlan Murdoch — any Murdoch — was actually an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal crime in the United States. “The phrases ‘unhinged traitor’ and ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ are used in a loose, figurative sense to headline a column that is labeled ‘analysis,’” notes Clay Calvert, an expert on media law at the University of Florida. “No reasonable reader would take them as assertions of literal facts regarding criminal activity.”
Under Australian law, there’s “no specific doctrine” laying out a hyperbole defense for defamatory statements, according to David Rolph, a professor at the University of Sydney Law School. “It would be a rare defamation case in Australia involving media reporting where a publisher was not found to convey defamatory meaning because the court found the ordinary, reasonable reader would understand the allegations merely to be hyperbole.”
The Murdochs have some familiarity with the hyperbole doctrine, considering that Fox News rode it to a court victory in 2020. Former Playboy model Karen McDougal sued Fox News over commentary by Tucker Carlson accusing her of committing “extortion” against Donald Trump. She’d done no such thing, but the federal judge in the case tossed the complaint: “Accusations of ‘extortion,’ ‘blackmail,’ and related crimes, such as the statements Mr. Carlson made here, are often construed as merely rhetorical hyperbole when they are not accompanied by additional specifics of the actions purportedly constituting the crime,” wrote U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil.
Boldface added to highlight a relevant feature of the Crikey story, which supplies no “additional specifics” alleging criminal activity by the Murdochs. To the contrary, the final line in Keane’s opinion piece suggests that they are responsible not for a crime, but for a crisis: “The Murdochs and their slew of poisonous Fox News commentators are the unindicted co-conspirators of this continuing crisis.”
Though Crikey attracted some attention for challenging Lachlan Murdoch to file suit, it showed less bravado in its initial dealings with the mogul’s lawyers. Just 20 minutes after receiving the initial letter from Murdoch’s lawyer, Crikey took down the Keane article as a “goodwill gesture,” according to a subsequent letter from Crikey’s attorney. The site later reposted the piece.
Just goes to show you: It’s a lot easier to practice fearless journalism when the courts have your back. | 2022-08-25T16:24:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Lachlan Murdoch threatens Australian news site with defamation suit - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/lachlan-murdoch-australian-site-defamation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/lachlan-murdoch-australian-site-defamation/ |
By Erin Henk
The author's all-female dorm room at the Luxembourg youth hostel. (Photos by Erin Henk for The Washington Post)
I wanted revenge any way I could get it. Not traditional retribution per say, but pandemic-style travel vengeance. My travel dreams ground to dust over the past two years, I wanted to see a little bit more of the world, as if I could make up for lost time.
My husband and I agreed that I would take a solo trip while he took our 5-year-old to his grandparents’ house in southwest France. With all the expenses involved in flying from our home in Beirut to visit my husband’s family in France, I needed to find somewhere hassle-free and inexpensive to explore.
I decided on Luxembourg, a tiny slice of Europe with three official languages and a reputation as a tax haven. It wasn’t the cheapest destination I researched, but I’d never been there, and the train was a reasonably priced, straight-shot ride from Paris.
But my search for hotels left me crestfallen. It could easily cost 500 euros (about $498) for a three-night stay. When a youth hostel came up in my search on Booking.com, I dismissed it. Days later, my frustration mounting, I clicked: 82.50 euros (about $82) for three nights in a shared, all-female dorm room, breakfast included.
I hadn’t actually slept in hostels since I traveled around Guatemala in my early 20s. Now I was a 42-year-old mother. Yet the pandemic has forced us to rethink life as we knew it. If I would have to rough it a little to make this trip possible, so be it. I clicked again, reserving my bed.
The morning of my train, I strolled along sun-dappled streets to Gare de l’Est with my backpack, ebullient with a sense of freedom I hadn’t felt in a long time. Then, as the train pulled away from Paris, I felt a pang of concern. Should I have packed a sleeping bag? Or my own sheets?
In the hostel lobby, everyone looked younger than I was. I was uncomfortable, but also slightly relieved when I saw a trolley stacked with bedding wrapped in plastic. I hoped not to be judged by Guy, the receptionist, as I handed over my ID. He couldn’t have been nicer.
I entered my room, and the door slammed behind me like a gavel summoning my self-consciousness. It was intimate, smaller than my college dorm. I was expecting something that would allow me to easily retreat into anonymity. Instead, there were two sets of bunk beds, a toilet and a shower, which would at least save me from walking the hallway in a towel.
Luxembourg City’s youth hostel, which is just one of more than 3,000 locations within the Hostelling International network, was extensive. Its restaurant, Melting Pot, resembled a cheerful school cafeteria. A three-course prix fixe dinner menu was available for 11 euros (about $11), and it included locally sourced dishes such as leek soup and spaghetti Bolognese. Three local beers were on tap. Outside, a patio offered a charming view of the old city’s corniche. A game room held a pool table, and a ping-pong table sat by the main entrance. I was surprised to see a children’s playground, too.
My first morning, I noticed two men wearing bike shorts filling their CamelBaks in the cafeteria sink. Reinhold, 69, and Peter, 64, were on an 11-day cycling trip from Amsterdam to Koblenz, Germany, and were staying in shared hostel rooms the entire trip, because it was more affordable. But Peter had an issue with the breakfast. Compared with other hostels, he said, it “lacked love.”
Having expected nothing more than bread, I had been pleasantly surprised by the spread of ham, cheese, yogurt, fruit and cornflakes, as well as the espresso machine.
I began to notice older solo travelers and those traveling in groups. And families like Juan and Mariana from Canada on a three-week tour of Europe with their teenage sons. They would be staying in private rooms in hostels for cost and convenience, they said.
“It’s just where you sleep, right?” Mariana said.
She had a point. Since having my son, I had dismissed hostels as viable lodging options. I assumed they were relegated to my past, because no one would ever stay in a hostel with a preschooler. However, Guy told me that, although the majority of the hostel’s guests are backpackers, older adults are frequent guests, and families are common, and were even pre-pandemic.
“We have a family staying every day,” he said.
Nete and Nils from Bruges, Belgium, were traveling with their three children, ages 2, 4 and 6, to Switzerland. This was their first hostel stay as a family. “We already said that we’d do it again,” Nete said. The kids loved exploring, and they even found communal toilets to be a fun adventure.
Perhaps I’d been too narrow in my thinking. In Rolf Potts’s “The Vagabond’s Way: 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery, and the Art of Travel,” to be published in October, he writes about bringing his newly retired parents to youth hostels with him in China and the Czech Republic. “Indeed, hostels are no longer just for youth,” he writes. “They’re an enjoyable, inexpensive lodging option for anyone willing to forgo a few comforts and embrace their communal energy.”
During my final dinner, self-consciousness evaporated, I watched children chase each other around the patio as dusk settled in. A group of gregarious middle-aged men enjoyed a bottle of chilled rosé. Kids played on the swings while their parents looked on from a nearby bench. A couple played cards; another ate next to a stroller. Some loners sat with a pint, their books open on the table.
I actually felt inspired. My quest pushed me to reexamine my preconceptions. In doing so, I had found a way that could make more travel possible for my family. Plans to go to cost-prohibitive places such as Scandinavia and Japan suddenly seemed more within reach. After all, a hostel was affordable, potentially multigenerational — and not a bad way to exact revenge.
Henk is a writer based in Beirut. Find her on Twitter (@ErinHenk) and Instagram (@erinkhenk). | 2022-08-25T16:24:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Youth hostels aren't only for the young - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/25/youth-hostels-families-cheap-lodging/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/25/youth-hostels-families-cheap-lodging/ |
He collaborated in writing and recording Holly’s ‘Peggy Sue’ and ‘That’ll Be The Day’
Bassist Joe B. Mauldin, Buddy Holly and drummer Jerry Allison as Buddy Holly and the Crickets. (John Rodgers/Redferns/Getty Images)
Jerry Allison, the drummer in the 1950s rock band Buddy Holly and the Crickets whose rough-hewed style on “Peggy Sue” and “That’ll Be the Day” and on later recordings by the Everly Brothers set the template for percussionists including Mick Fleetwood and Ringo Starr, died Aug. 22 at his home in Lyles, Tenn. He was 82.
The cause was cancer, said Crickets guitarist Sonny Curtis.
“We always tried to keep everything relatively simple,” Mr. Allison told music blogger Scott K. Fish. “That was part of the plan. I have run across a lot of drummers in the 25 or 30 years — however long it’s been — and they play every lick they know. And a lot of them, they play so much you can’t even pick it up on a recorder.”
In truth, Mr. Allison, along with his idols Earl Palmer and Charles Connor — Little Richard’s drummers — innovated many of rock-and-roll’s classic drum licks. On Holly’s recordings, Mr. Allison not only played on a four-piece drum kit, but sometimes used his sticks on a cardboard box or simply played a lone cymbal, as on “Well ... All Right.” On Holly’s love ballad, “Every Day,” the percussion came from him slapping his thigh. On “Not Fade Away,” Mr. Holly played a Bo Diddley beat while Mr. Allison wove snare fills in and out of the guitar rhythm.
His work on “Peggy Sue,” is a deceptively simple use of paradiddles, a rudiment that most beginning drum students are taught to practice with a metronome. Mr. Allison recorded it on a lone and highly reverbed snare drum — the variation in tone and dynamics came from producer Norman Petty pulling the drums in and out of the mix — and he later moved the same rhythm between the snare and the tom-toms when the Crickets performed the song on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in December 1957.
Several drummers have noted that the “Peggy Sue” paradiddles require stamina to consistently play in time at a fast tempo. Years later, Fleetwood borrowed the pattern for the Fleetwood Mac song “Second Hand News” (1977).
“Peggy Sue,” which Holly initially thought should be done to a cha-cha or Latin rhythm, was originally going to be titled “Cindy Lou” for Mr. Holly’s niece. However, Mr. Allison had his sights set on a young woman from Lubbock, Tex., Peggy Sue Gerron, who would first hear the song during a Crickets concert in Sacramento, where she attended college.
“My heart pounded, and my cheeks were on fire,” she wrote decades later in her autobiography, “Whatever Happened to Peggy Sue?” “With people all around me bouncing, swaying and singing my name over and over, I sank down in my seat, covered my face with my hands, and cried out to myself, ‘What have y’all done to me?’ ” (Mr. Allison and Gerron, who married and quickly divorced, honeymooned in Acapulco, Mexico, with Holly and his new bride, Maria Elena Santiago.)
“That’ll Be The Day” was co-written by Mr. Allison and Holly after hearing John Wayne utter the title phrase in the 1956 western “The Searchers.” With an earworm of a melody and lyrics that hide their bitterness behind Holly’s nonchalant delivery, the much covered tune is among rock-and-roll’s ultimate kiss-off songs:
Well, that’ll be the day
When you say goodbye
Yes, that’ll be the day
When you make me cry
You say you’re gonna leave
You know it’s a lie
Cause that’ll be the day
When I die
The song, now ranked 39 on Rolling Stone’s list of 500 greatest rock songs, sold more than 1 million copies and was later covered by performers including Linda Ronstadt. It was also placed in the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry of culturally significant music in 2005.
Mr. Allison, who rarely took a lead vocal, had a minor solo hit, “Real Wild Child,” which he released under his middle name Ivan, with Holly on guitar. The tune peaked at No. 68 on the Hot 100 in 1958 and was later covered by punk rocker Iggy Pop in the ’70s.
In 1958, Holly moved to New York with his new wife, and his bandmates decided to stay in West Texas. The Crickets soldiered on with singer Earl Sinks and brought Lubbock guitarist Sonny Curtis into the fold. Holly died in a plane crash while on tour in February 1959 with fellow headliners Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson Jr., known as the Big Bopper.
In the early 1960s, the Crickets became the tour band for the Everly Brothers and Allison contributed the distinctive tom-tom fills to their recording “(’Til) I Kissed You” (1962).
Jerry Ivan Allison was born in Hillsboro, Tex., on Aug. 31, 1939. He began drumming in his junior high marching band and by high school was working with Holly, who was three years his senior, sometimes just as a duo.
“We’d be playing at things like supermarket openings,” Mr. Allison told the Lansing (Mich.) State Journal in 1979. “Sometimes we’d get as much as $10 apiece.”
Holly and Mr. Allison, both fans of the popular doo-wop group the Spiders, rejected a series of insect names including the Beetles before settling on Crickets because, Mr. Allison said, they “make a happy sound.” Ironically, an English group would later choose the rejected name — with a different spelling, Beatles — in homage to the Crickets.
The Crickets’ recordings, post-Holly, included Curtis’s song “I Fought the Law,” later a hit for the Bobby Fuller Four and English punk rockers the Clash, and “More Than I Can Say,” co-written by Mr. Allison and Curtis, and later covered by Bobby Vee and Leo Sayer. Vee, a Holly-esque singer whose career took off after the Texas singer’s death, teamed up with Mr. Allison on the 1962 album, “Bobby Vee Meets the Crickets.”
In the ’60s and ’70s, Mr. Allison and Curtis focused on songwriting, starting a Nashville-based publishing company, Mark Three. The company’s copyrights included Curtis’s “Love Is All Around,” the theme to “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
In later decades, Mr. Allison continued to play oldies and rockabilly shows with a rotating crew of Crickets and accompanied singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith on her 1997 album “Blue Roses From the Moons.” Mr. Allison, who owned the Crickets’ name, officially retired the group in 2012.
When not performing, recording or writing songs, Mr. Allison farmed with his wife of 63 years, the former Joanie Sveum, in Lyles, Tenn. Mr. Allison had no children.
Reflecting on the success of “Peggy Sue,” Mr. Allison once said: “When you listen to that song, tell me what in the world — why anybody would buy a song with those lyrics? But it’s the interpretation that comes across and that driving rock and it just bites you, you know?” | 2022-08-25T16:25:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jerry Allison, drummer for Buddy Holly and the Crickets, dies at 82 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/25/jerry-allison-drummer-crickets-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/25/jerry-allison-drummer-crickets-dead/ |
School’s back from summer. Teacher’s out forever.
Welcome to The Daily 202! Tell your friends to sign up here. Happy Birthday to Elvis Costello! At some point I’m gonna need you to explain what in the world “the everlasting cigarette of chastity” is, sir.
Add the teacher-shortage crisis to the list of social ills the coronavirus pandemic did not create but dramatically worsened. By some estimates, there may be 280,000 fewer public-school staff, including teachers, than before covid hit. The Department of Education says all 50 states are affected.
The strains of the pandemic — the remote learning, stressed-out students, enforcing pandemic mitigation like mask-wearing and distancing, irate parents, to name just a few — clearly didn’t make things better for public-school educators.
But like the mental health crisis in young people, which covid turned from already really awful to catastrophic, the teacher crisis predates the pandemic. And the full repercussions for American education (and politics) aren’t clear yet in this back-to-school month.
All of this means policymakers can’t rely on a kind of laissez faire, “oh, things will return to normal by themselves” approach to addressing the problem, which was years — even decades — in the making.
Back in 2018-2019, teachers went on strike in states like West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, North and South Carolina and Kentucky. The most common demand was pay increases. The results were mixed, but the point is not all was happy in teacherland well before 2020.
There was also a grim 2016 report from the nonprofit Learning Policy Institute, highlighted here by my colleague Valerie Strauss. It laid out how teacher-education enrollment — a.k.a., the people expressly learning to lead a classroom — fell 35 percent from 2009 to 2014. In raw numbers, that meant slipping from 691,000 to 451,000. “[A]nd nearly 8 percent of the teaching workforce is leaving every year, the majority before retirement age,” Valerie noted.
Earlier this month, my colleague Hannah Natanson took stock of the teacher-shortage landscape. It wasn’t pretty.
“The Nevada State Education Association estimated that roughly 3,000 teaching jobs remained unfilled across the state’s 17 school districts as of early August. In a January report, the Illinois Association of Regional School Superintendents found that 88 percent of school districts statewide were having ‘problems with teacher shortages’ — while 2,040 teacher openings were either empty or filled with a ‘less than qualified’ hire. And in the Houston area, the largest five school districts are all reporting that between 200 and 1,000 teaching positions remain open.”
You can add that particularly American plague, shooting incidents at schools.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told Education Week in an interview published Tuesday that “the teacher shortage is a symptom of a teacher respect issue.”
“In order for us to address the teacher respect issue, we have to provide better salaries, better working conditions for teachers, and have teacher voice be a bigger part of our reimagining of education,” Cardona said.
President Biden’s administration has pushed school districts to tape American Rescue Plan funds to provide incentives, like signing bonuses, as well as bring back retired teachers, Cardona said.
Will that work? Hannah’s reporting suggests it’s a mixed bag.
“Nevada’s Clark County School District, which serves 320,000 students, is one of many school systems taking a scattershot approach to staff shortages by trying several solutions at once. In hopes of shrinking its roughly 1,300 teaching vacancies, the district has raised the starting teacher salary by $7,000 and is offering a $4,000 ‘relocation bonus’ to new teachers who move from out of state or more than 100 miles. In an interview, Superintendent Jesus F. Jara said the district is also granting employees a “retention bonus” of up to $5,000 for staying in their jobs.”
“But, with school slated to start in a week, the district is still only 92 percent staffed, Jara said. And — despite ‘around-the-clock’ efforts from his human resources team — he does not believe the district will close the gap in time.”
And maybe, since this has been years in the making, that counts as a return to an unpleasant normal.
Biden to step back onto the campaign trail in Maryland
“Today, President Biden is stepping onto the campaign trail with a planned rally in Rockville, Md., hosted by the Democratic National Committee. The event comes as once-dreary prospects for Democrats appear to be improving in the upcoming midterm elections. The rally will offer Biden a chance to tout recent legislative successes and frame the choice voters face in November,” John Wagner and Mariana Alfaro report.
“Olivia Dalton, who most recently served as the communications director at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, will join the White House press office as principal deputy press secretary, filling the job Karine Jean-Pierre held before she was elevated to press secretary,” Tyler Pager reports.
Some background: “Dalton worked for then-Sen. Joe Biden for two years before he became vice president and then served in the Obama administration. She worked on the Biden transition and served as press secretary to first lady Michelle Obama during the 2012 campaign.”
Putin to expand Russian military
“Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree to increase the size of Russia’s military from 1.9 million to 2.04 million people, Russian media reported Thursday. In Ukraine, the death toll from Russian strikes on a train station and residential area in the village of Chaplyne rose to 25, including two children, as search and rescue operations concluded,” Adela Suliman and Rachel Pannett report.
“About two dozen boxes of presidential records stored in then-President Donald Trump’s White House residence were not returned to the National Archives and Records Administration in the final days of his term even after Archives officials were told by a Trump lawyer that the documents should be given back, according to an email from the top lawyer at the record-keeping agency,” Josh Dawsey and Jacqueline Alemany report.
“The offer to military veterans left unemployed by the coronavirus pandemic was tantalizing: A year of online courses courtesy of the federal government. Graduates would be set up for good jobs in high-demand fields from app development to graphic design,” Lisa Rein and Yeganeh Torbati report.
But “many schools proved unable to attract students or deliver promised services. In addition to Future Tech, nearly 90 schools have had their approvals yanked, according to VA officials, including several that were actively serving about 100 veterans. Some schools were cut off amid allegations of predatory practices, while others simply went out of business.”
“It’s unclear if the bombing at Abbey Gate could have been averted. The event was a low point in the United States’ exit from Afghanistan and the treacherous operation that began when Taliban foot soldiers swept into the capital 11 days prior. For the American military personnel involved, much of their experience throughout those two weeks is still coming into focus now, a year later, as they process the suffering they witnessed, and cope with lasting feelings of anger, guilt and grief,” Dan Lamothe reports.
“The House and Senate have just weeks after their August break to pass a short-term funding patch that keeps the government open after Sept. 30. While a shutdown isn’t likely, Republicans and even some progressives have suggested that approving a bipartisan stopgap won’t be easy if it includes certain energy permitting provisions meant to button up the climate portions of Democrats’ signature party-line domestic policy bill,” Politico's Caitlin Emma reports.
How China could choke Taiwan
“Taiwan’s geography leaves it vulnerable to a blockade. Its population, industry and ports are concentrated on its western flank, closest to China. China could impose a blockade, by sending ships and submarines to prevent vessels from entering or leaving Taiwan’s ports. It could use warplanes and missiles to dominate the skies,” the New York Times's Chris Buckley, Pablo Robles, Marco Hernandez and Amy Chang Chien report.
“Even a limited blockade would threaten one of the world’s busiest trade routes. Much of the shipping traffic in the Taiwan Strait goes to the ports of Kaohsiung and Taichung on the island’s west.”
“Between two million and four million Americans aren’t working due to the long-term effects of Covid-19, according to a new Brookings Institution report released Wednesday,” the Wall Street Journal's Sumathi Reddy reports.
“The regulation, which takes effect on Oct. 31, is meant to protect DACA by codifying the program and replacing a 2012 memo that first created it. The Obama-era program currently offers work permits and protection from deportation to more than 600,000 undocumented immigrants,” Politico's Sabrina Rodriguez reports.
“President Joe Biden announced a highly anticipated plan Wednesday to offer student loan relief to more than 40 million people, a move supporters hope will have life-changing ramifications for borrowers, particularly women, who hold two-thirds of student loan debt, and women of color, whose loan debt is highest,” the 19th's Nadra Nittle reports.
“The state of Utah is suing the Biden administration over its decision to restore the size of two national monuments that were shrunk by then-President Trump.The size of the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears monuments, both located in Utah, were cut by nearly half and about 85 percent, respectively, during the Trump administration,” the Hill's Rachel Frazin reports.
“Biden said in a statement that he had selected Kim Cheatle, who rose through the ranks during 27 years with the agency and served on his security detail when he was vice president. Cheatle, currently an official with PepsiCo, will become the agency’s second female chief in its 157-year history,” Matt Viser reports.
Who has student debt in America, visualized
“About 1 in 5 Americans hold student loans. More than half of those 45 million people with federal student loans have $20,000 or less to pay, with about a third of all borrowers owing less than $10,000. Seven percent of people with federal debt owe more than $100,000,” Alyssa Fowers and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel report.
Democrats sense a shift in the political winds, but it may not be enough
“Democratic leaders, once beaten down by the prospect of a brutal midterm election in the fall, are daring to dream that they can maintain control of Congress this November,” the NYT's Jonathan Weisman reports.
“But the House map in 2022 favors Republicans, thanks to Republican-led redistricting and a slew of retirements of Democratic lawmakers. That means the shifting political winds are more likely to merely blunt any Republican wave in the House rather than save the Democratic majority.”
“Worse than the cost is the moral hazard and awful precedent this sets. Those who will pay for this write-off are the tens of millions of Americans who didn’t go to college, or repaid their debt, or skimped and saved to pay for college, or chose lower-cost schools to avoid a debt trap. This is a college graduate bailout paid for by plumbers and FedEx drivers,” the WSJ editorial board argues.
More on student loan forgiveness: Who qualifies for Biden’s plan to cancel $10,000 in student debt?
At 3:45 p.m., Biden will leave the White House for Montgomery County, Md., where he will attend a DNC fundraiser at 5 p.m.
Biden will speak at a rally for Democrats in Rockville, Md., at 7 p.m. before returning to the White House at 8:25 p.m.
We heard this is true
I paid my student loans off so Biden is letting me pick out one thing from the oval office
— pj (@pjayevans) August 24, 2022 | 2022-08-25T16:25:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | School’s back from summer. Teacher’s out forever. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/25/schools-back-summer-teachers-out-forever/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/25/schools-back-summer-teachers-out-forever/ |
Chet Holmgren (left) is guarded by Jabari Smith Jr. during an NBA Summer League game. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
Oklahoma City Thunder rookie Chet Holmgren will miss the upcoming NBA season with a right foot injury, the team announced on Thursday. The No. 2 pick in this year’s draft, Holmgren sustained a Lisfranc injury Saturday while defending LeBron James during a pro-am game in Seattle.
Holmgren entered the June draft as one of its most intriguing prospects. At 7-foot-1, he blended his size with an impressive offensive repertoire and his ability to impact the game on the defensive side of the ball, although his lack of bulk at 195 pounds was a concern for some teams.
Those concerns didn’t deter the Thunder come June, when Orlando’s surprise selection of Paolo Banchero with the No. 1 pick left Jabari Smith available at No. 2, and threatened a Holmgren slide down the draft board. But Oklahoma City stayed the course and selected the Gonzaga freshman rather than taking Smith.
In Oklahoma City, Holmgren landed on a team committed to a patient developmental approach and one which could help shield him from questions about his physique early in his career. The team also added a pair of lottery picks in Ousmane Dieng and Jalen Williams.
Another angle of Chet Holmgren’s foot injury at the recent Pro-Am.
Thoughts? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/ATuN43vF5S
Holmgren was expected to evolve into an exciting offensive contributor in Oklahoma City alongside Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Josh Giddey, and quickly flashed that ability during his Summer League debut, where he scored 23 points on 4-of-6 from 3-point range, plus seven rebounds, six blocks and four assists in almost 24 minutes. He averaged 14.0 points and 8.4 rebounds in five games at the Las Vegas Summer League.
Months earlier, Holmgren, the highest-ranked recruit to sign with Gonzaga, was named West Coast Conference Defensive Player of the Year and Newcomer of the Year. He helped lead the top-seeded Bulldogs to the Sweet 16, where they lost to Arkansas.
“We know Chet has a long career ahead of him within our organization and the Oklahoma City community,” Presti said. “One of the things that most impressed us during the process of selecting Chet was his determination and focus. We expect that same tenacity will carry him through this period of time as we work together and support him during his rehabilitation.” | 2022-08-25T16:25:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Chet Holmgren, Oklahoma City Thunder rookie, out for the season - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/chet-holmgren-injury/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/chet-holmgren-injury/ |
Kris Ward guided the Spirit to its first NWSL title last fall but had a 1-6-9 record this year. (Scott Taetsch for The Washington Post)
Kris Ward was fired as coach of the reigning NWSL champion Washington Spirit this week following an incident with players at training last Friday that left it, “apparent to me, and to all, that a change was necessary,” club president Mark Krikorian said Thursday.
Krikorian declined to go into detail, but people familiar with the situation said Ward berated a player, prompting others to vocally come to their teammate’s defense.
Tension within the team was already at a breaking point and Ward’s job was in jeopardy amid a 1-6-9 record and 15-game winless streak, said one person, who, like others who knew of the matter, requested anonymity to speak on it.
Krikorian, who said he did not witness the incident, said he conducted meetings with players over the weekend and notified the NWSL and its players’ union of the situation. Ward was disinvited from a team retreat over the weekend, one person said.
Ward, who was fired Monday morning by Krikorian and owner Y. Michele Kang, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Meghann Burke, executive director of the NWSL Players Association, confirmed Krikorian contacted the union Sunday. The league office did not have an immediate comment.
Ward’s dismissal came about one year after then-coach Richie Burke was suspended by the Spirit for alleged verbal and emotional abuse of players. After a league investigation, he was fired. In recent years, several other NWSL coaches have been ousted for their treatment of players.
Ward was on Burke’s staff and, upon Burke’s ouster, was named interim head coach. He led the team to its first championship and received the permanent job.
‘He made me hate soccer’: Players say they left NWSL’s Spirit over coach’s verbal abuse
One person close to the situation said Ward’s behavior was not nearly as bad as other fired coaches but he had lost the trust of his players and his relationship with many them was deteriorating. Coupled with the Spirit’s poor results, that person said, it had reached a breaking point.
“We’ve been following quite closely how the results have gone and they haven’t been great,” Krikorian said. “So I think probably a combination of factors have led to this decision. … It was fairly clear that a change was necessary.”
Krikorian said he discussed the direction of the team with the players. “Ultimately, those decisions will rest with me,” he said, “but I won’t be doing my job if I’m not involving players and if I’m not involving staff in all of the different elements.”
Krikorian said he has selected an interim coach, pending background checks, though he did not announce who he had picked. Angela Salem, a first-year assistant, is running practices and will oversee Saturday’s match in Houston.
The interim coach, people close to the situation, is unlikely to become the permanent guide, and the Spirit plans to conduct a broader search in the offseason. Among the possible candidates is Mark Parsons, who coached Washington, the Portland Thorns and, until recently, the Dutch national team.
Krikorian, who coached Florida State to three NCAA titles before stepping down early this year, said he has no plans to reenter the coaching field.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “That was my previous life. I’m onto the next one.” | 2022-08-25T16:25:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kris Ward fired after Spirit training incident, team president says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/kris-ward-fired-spirit-training-incident/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/kris-ward-fired-spirit-training-incident/ |
FILE - This Feb. 5, 2021, photo provided by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections shows James Coddington. Oklahoma executed Coddington on Thursday, Aug. 25, 2022, for a 1997 killing, despite a recommendation from the state’s Pardon and Parole Board that his life be spared. He received a lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester and was pronounced dead at 10:16 a.m. (Oklahoma Department of Corrections via AP, File) (Uncredited/Oklahoma Department of Corrections) | 2022-08-25T16:26:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Oklahoma executes James Coddington for 1997 hammer killing - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/oklahoma-executes-james-coddington-for-1997-hammer-killing/2022/08/25/c8e18c26-248a-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/oklahoma-executes-james-coddington-for-1997-hammer-killing/2022/08/25/c8e18c26-248a-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
Don’t rage on Twitter just yet
Advice by Jen A. Miller
On July Fourth weekend, I hopscotched across central and Upstate New York on a road trip from New Jersey to Niagara Falls. After an overnight in Binghamton, N.Y., I moved on to Rochester, where I went to a Red Wings minor league baseball game and a diner for a hot dog and Genesee cream ale.
It was a nice night, but the room at a Holiday Inn I came back to was less than desirable. The air conditioning wasn’t cooling properly. The closet door was off its hinges. When I cut my finger on a sharp piece of metal protruding from the shower curtain rod, I knew I couldn’t stay.
Not every hotel room is going to be a winner, but that doesn’t mean you have to put up with sharp pieces of metal in the shower — or bugs or noise or unsafe hotel room conditions — in every situation.
Ask for a fix
Hotels are slammed by the same staffing shortages as everywhere else, so a less-than-tidy bathroom or a messy breakfast area may not be a sign that a hotel is on its last legs.
Start with the front desk, NerdWallet travel expert Sally French said. “You don’t need to tweet at the main corporate Twitter account that their hotels are dirty, because the person managing corporate Twitter can’t do anything about it,” French said.
Always be polite “because the person at the front desk is a human, too,” she said. “Have some level of understanding of the situation you’re in and how much power they have to fix it.” That goes with managing expectations, too. Thin towels in a $2,000-per-night hotel room may be something to complain about, but for a $50-a-night room? Not so much.
French also recommended documenting the problem by taking pictures. If you’re calling from your cellphone, you’ll also have a log of how many calls you made and when. That way, if the issue isn’t fixed, you can escalate to hotel management or, if it’s part of a hotel chain, the chain’s customer service, and show that you tried to resolve the issue directly.
Ask for something back
If you can’t change hotels, or you’re annoyed but don’t think it warrants moving to another hotel, you can also ask for something that will make up for the inconvenience. For example, on a 2019 cross-country road trip, I stopped at a hotel with mandatory valet parking, but none of the valets working then could drive stick, so I had to park the car myself. In exchange, the hotel waived the $50-per-night parking fee.
When Sonja Sherwood and her husband went on a trip to New Paltz, N.Y., for what was both their anniversary and the first night away from their son since he was born, a getaway and a good night’s sleep were both a priority. They had a beautiful day on a lake followed by watching a meteor shower, “but it’s an old hotel, and there was water hammer in the pipes,” she said, describing it as a constant “clunk clunk clunk.” Not great for sleep.
Hotels have gone to the robots
She asked the front-desk clerk if they could switch rooms and told him their tale of woe, that “we were parents getting away for the first time, and a full night’s sleep was our anniversary gift to each other,” she said. He upgraded them to the penthouse.
Get a refund
If a situation is untenable or unsafe and staying is not an option, you can ask for a refund. Sometimes firmness is required. On a trip to Stockholm, Kayt Sukel, who has been to six continents and is no stranger to bumps along the travel road, got a hotel room with a door that wouldn’t shut, let alone lock. She and her son had arrived to the hotel late, and after checking in, the front desk clerk disappeared. She found a maintenance man, who told her that the clerk couldn’t be contacted and that she couldn’t switch rooms. She went to another hotel instead.
“But I did not leave until he refunded me every last cent,” she said.
Trying to work it out with the hotel is your best option, said French. If you booked the room through a third-party site, a refund is not impossible to get, but it can be harder because the third party needs to get the money back from the hotel first before it can refund you.
A beginner's guide to travel insurance
You can try to dispute the charge with your credit card, but that process can also take time because the card issuer has to investigate and may not decide in your favor, French said. Instead, see if your card already includes travel insurance coverage. A lost or damaged luggage policy, for example, may extend beyond airline problems and also apply to a hotel breaking your bag when it was left in the checked luggage room. And of course if you purchased travel insurance, see if the condition of your room is covered; this usually applies if you have “cancel for any reason” coverage. This type of insurance would allow you to cancel, even mid-trip, and get reimbursed for “a significant percentage,” which is why taking pictures is also important, French said.
As for my Rochester hotel room: I did get a refund, eventually.
I was supposed to stay in the hotel for two nights, but I checked out after one and moved on to the next stop on my road trip a day early. Given the condition of the rest of the hotel — broken elevator and smashed wine bottle in the stairwell that hadn’t been cleaned up — I didn’t think that getting another room would be any better, nor that this was something the people working at the front desk could control.
Instead, I emailed management directly with photos. I also pointed out that I am a member of that hotel chain’s rewards program and that I booked the room with their hotel-branded credit card — all things that can help, said French.
The best credit card for every vacation style
Within hours, I was promised a refund. But when my points didn’t arrive five days later, or a week later, or a month later, I asked the hotel chain’s corporate customer service to step in. Their response was that the hotel manager said that I was lying, and that they had never promised me a thing.
So I took French’s advice and my screenshots from emails promising me a refund to social media. I tweeted about the situation and despite being angry, frustrated and accused of lying by the hotel manager, I did so without all caps yelling, cries of malfeasance or even mentioning the name or location of the hotel: just that I’d stayed in one of the mega chain’s hotels and thought this situation was “weird,” included those screenshots and tagged the hotel’s corporate account.
The account asked me to direct-message them the details and viola, I had my refund. I already applied it to an October trip to Maine. | 2022-08-25T16:27:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bad hotel room? How to ask for an upgrade or refund. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/hotel-refund-upgrade/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/hotel-refund-upgrade/ |
‘Mike’ is an entertaining but not illuminating look at the embattled boxer
Mike Tyson’s story is retold in a dramatized, unauthorized Hulu series, but there’s not much new to tell
Review by Helena Andrews-Dyer
Trevante Rhodes, right, plays boxing legend Mike Tyson in "Mike." (Alfonso Bresciani/Hulu)
Love him or hate him? That question is at the core of Hulu’s entertainingly hectic new miniseries about boxing legend, convicted rapist and pop culture touchstone Mike Tyson.
-But unlike the real-life champ with a killer right uppercut, “Mike” pulls its punches, never weighing in on which version of the superstar the audience should root for — which Mike should leave the ring victorious. Is he the steely-eyed villain, the lovable rogue, the misunderstood little boy with a lisp so desperate for love he found it in a fist? The series is a split decision.
The show’s executive producers say “Mike” isn’t about who or what, but why. Piecing together Tyson’s story from “factual accounts, interviews, footage of real-life events,” the purpose of the eight-part drama “is to go beyond the sound bites and tabloid headlines, to create a deeper, more nuanced look at his complicated life,” according to a statement released by the show’s executive producers ahead of the its Thursday debut.
“‘Mike’ never attempts to portray Mike Tyson as a hero or a villain. Rather it aims to ask the viewer to reexamine a unique, sweeping, complex, contradictory life and decide for themselves what they think and how they feel,” the statement continued.
In his corner, Tyson, who was not consulted or compensated for the series, has been characteristically vocal about how he feels. It’s a thumbs down.
“Don’t let Hulu fool you. I don’t support their story about my life. It’s not 1822. It’s 2022. They stole my life story and didn’t pay me. To Hulu executives I’m just a [n-word] they can sell on the auction block,” the 56-year-old posted on Instagram earlier this month.
Mike Tyson fought for the first time in 15 years. So much had changed.
So where does that leave the folks watching, caught between the latest series that serves as a ’90s pop culture love letter and the real-life subject who’d rather leave it locked in a drawer, or at the very least get a royalty check? With a case of whiplash, as a creative team that includes writer-director Steven Rogers (“I, Tonya”) and director Craig Gillespie (“Pam & Tommy”) clearly want to reveal Tyson’s true character without reveling in caricature, while simultaneously backing off from summary judgment.
It can be gut-wrenching, as when young Mike (Zaiden James) sits next to his mother as a White man behind a desk tells her that her son is “retarded,” another starting bell to a childhood marked by poverty, neglect, domestic abuse and bombed-out buildings in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The show can also be heartwarming, as when 14-year-old Mike (B.J. Minor) cries silent tears after winning his first real fight, realizing that he won’t be on the wrong side of a fist ever again. Then there’s grown-up Mike — embodied with incredible care by “Moonlight’s” Trevante Rhodes — who, well, ate up all those earlier versions of himself after losing his mentor and trainer, Cus D’Amato (Harvey Keitel), and later his mother (Olunike Adeliyi).
Sprinting from one big defining moment to the next, punctuated with boxing scenes that are tertiary to the main tale, it’s hard to figure out what, if anything, the audience is supposed to glean from this immersive exhibit of “This is Your Life: Mike Tyson.” Nothing is revealed, only dramatized, which is certainly entertaining — but illuminating? Sure, some Mikes seem easy to love — as D’Amato tells the former reform school kid in one of their many father-son moments — but other Mikes much less so, and connecting them harder still.
The miniseries uses a 2017 stage performance similar to Tyson’s one-man Broadway show, “Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth,” as a narrative framework, so Rhodes’s Tyson appears to be telling us his story himself. The device lends an air of authority to the greatest (and lowest) hits he shares from the stage, a meta-version of what’s happening with the series as a whole. But this is an unauthorized take. Despite all the fourth-wall breaking and tongue-in-cheek asides, in the end, we don’t learn anything that can’t be gleaned from a Wikipedia page or Tyson’s own highly publicized words.
Which isn’t to say that Rhodes doesn’t blaze as both storyteller and star. The actor slips into Tyson’s physicality and musicality with dexterity, echoing the fighter’s tightrope walk between awkward shyness and ferocious bravado. Equally scene-stealing is Adeliyi as Tyson’s suffer-no-fools single mother, Lorna Mae, playing her as both sympathetic and cringe-inducing. She’s the woman who can’t figure out why her son can’t get right, the one who told him he’d never amount to anything, the one who wanted him to come back home when he moved in with D’Amato.
It isn’t until the fifth episode (the last available for screening) that the show switches off Tyson’s take and turns the tale over to Desiree Washington (Li Eubanks), the 18-year-old beauty pageant star whom the boxer was convicted of raping in 1992. All previous episodes are titled after some layer of Tyson’s character — “Thief,” “Monster,” “Lover,” “Meal Ticket.” But in this installment, “Desiree,” the champ is finally viewed through the lens of someone who has his own clear picture of who he is.
In that half-hour, Tyson addresses the camera only once, after assaulting Washington, to ask, “Don’t love me no more?” The answer is obvious, but there are three more episodes to go.
Mike premieres Thursday with Episodes 1 and 2 on Hulu. New episodes debut weekly. | 2022-08-25T16:27:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ‘Mike’ is an entertaining but not illuminating look at the embattled boxer - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/tv/2022/08/25/mike-tyson-hulu-series/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/tv/2022/08/25/mike-tyson-hulu-series/ |
The judge who approved the search warrant for Trump’s home will decide whether to make the redacted version of the affidavit public
President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, which was searched by the FBI on Aug. 8. (Steve Helber/AP)
The Justice Department submitted to a federal judge on Thursday a redacted version of the affidavit that supported its application for a search warrant for former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence earlier this month.
The document remains under seal, and it’s unclear whether the judge will release it publicly or whether the redacted version would reveal any illuminating details about the high-profile investigation.
The affidavit likely contains key information about the investigation into classified documents that were kept at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private resort after he left office, including why FBI agents suspected crimes may have been committed. Justice Department lawyers argued in court last week that making the affidavit public could jeopardize the safety of witnesses and undermine an probe that is still in its “early stages.”
Still, Federal Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart — who has read the full affidavit and signed off on the FBI’s application for a search warrant earlier this month — said from the bench last week that he believes parts of the document could be made public without impeding the probe.
He gave the Justice Department until noon on Thursday to propose a redacted version of the affidavit that it felt could be made public without revealing details that could hamper the investigation or harm witnesses. Reinhart will now decide whether that proposed version should be made public, kept sealed — or has too many or too few redactions.
“I’m not prepared to find the affidavit should be fully sealed,” Reinhart said last week in a West Palm Beach courtroom. “I believe based on my initial careful review of the affidavit many times that there are portions that could preemptively be unsealed.”
In unredacted form, it would provide the most comprehensive rationale for why the government pushed to search Trump’s property — and what investigative steps it had taken beforehand. It would show who the government had interviewed, what they believed was potentially on the premises and why they believed there was probable cause that crimes had been committed.
Trump’s position on the release of the affidavit has been unclear. He has publicly called for the release of the full document while denouncing the investigation — which originated as a dispute with the National Archives — as politically motivated. But his lawyers did not file a motion in court making their case to either unseal the affidavit or keep it sealed. | 2022-08-25T16:45:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Redacted Mar-a-Lago affidavit from Trump search submitted to judge - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/25/trump-affidavit-mar-a-lago/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/25/trump-affidavit-mar-a-lago/ |
The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, after it was destroyed in the Oklahoma City bombing. (AP)
Consider the events of this month alone: Members of a militia in Michigan were convicted of a plot to kidnap the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer. We’ve seen numerous threats and attempts at violent attacks against the FBI. And the Internal Revenue Service launched a new security review in response to threats of violence toward its workforce.
There is an unsettling historical fact associated with the IRS’s security review: It is the first time the agency has seen the need for this since far-right domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh bombed a government building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.
Threats of political violence appear to be rising. Donald Trump continues to treat his effort to incite the violent overthrow of the government as a righteous cause, and a large swath of his party is embracing him in that project.
What’s more, with Trump under investigation for hoarding highly classified documents, escalating threats toward the FBI have done nothing to dissuade Republicans from throwing around virulently hyperbolic rhetoric about alleged federal law enforcement thuggery. And Republicans have launched a new wave of wild-eyed nonsense about the IRS amid still more threats.
In eerie ways, a good deal of this echoes the 1990s. And as luck would have it, Nicole Hemmer, a historian of the American right wing, is set to release “Partisans,” a new book on the 1990s that traces many pathologies in our current politics back to that decade.
So I reached out to Hemmer to discuss the parallels between then and now. An edited and condensed version of our exchange follows.
Greg Sargent: The IRS announced their first security review since the Oklahoma City bombing. Militia members were just convicted for a plot to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan. Threats against federal agents are rising.
I’m having bad flashbacks to the 1990s. Are you?
Nicole Hemmer: I am having those same flashbacks. The 1990s are a decade when militia activism in the United States and far-right violence were surging.
Sargent: Can we attempt a taxonomy of today’s right wing? How do you define the different components?
Hemmer: You have a violent far right that believes the government is fully illegitimate, and that violence is the proper response to any kind of government action or presence: The Oregon wildlife refuge occupation, the attempts to kidnap Whitmer.
You have groups like Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, who are violent but also have clear political goals. And then you have a more mainstream right-wing political movement that has become more and more attracted to violence in recent years. Like Marjorie Taylor Greene. But also Donald Trump himself.
In 2016, he was encouraging police brutality, encouraging people to beat up protesters. He was tapping into violence and giving it his stamp of approval. We see rising interest in violence over the course of his presidency.
Sargent: It seems to me today’s climate is more similar to the 1990s than, say, to the Barack Obama years. The tea party was about racist backlash and Obamacare “death panels.” But the enemies in the 1990s were globalists, federal agencies, law enforcement — just like today.
Hemmer: That shift back to the enemies of the 1990s — Donald Trump plays a pretty big role in bringing that language back and mainstreaming it.
Sargent: In a sense the 1990s created the politics of today.
Hemmer: You’re right that the 1990s are the origin of a lot of these arguments. The militia movement itself really comes to the fore in the 1990s.
But things change. In the 1990s, the foreign country most in the sights of the far right was Japan, and now it’s China. Now, you have social media and a kind of meme language that transfers over into mainstream politics. Language like “cuck” has become pretty familiar even though it used to belong to the fringes. The shift in media is really important.
Sargent: Doesn’t Trump bring overt insurrectionism to the table?
Hemmer: In the 1990s, you had a kind of insurrectionist culture on the right. Pat Buchanan — the symbol of his movement was the pitchfork. They were going to overthrow the Republican Party and then take over the government. In 1992, he was running against George H.W. Bush, and called him “King George” and said they were staging a new American revolution.
So the language was there.
Sargent: In the 1990s, a series of escalations preceded Oklahoma City: The showdowns between federal law enforcement and far-right groups at Ruby Ridge and Waco radicalized McVeigh and others on the right.
Is there a parallel to the present? For many on the right, Jan. 6 displayed the power of political violence to shake the government’s foundations while creating a new set of martyrs, via the killing of Ashli Babbitt and the treatment of Jan. 6 defendants as “political prisoners.”
Hemmer: In the case of Waco and Ruby Ridge, you really did have big mistakes and oversteps by law enforcement. But Ashli Babbitt was shot because she was breaking into a place with a violent mob that was posing a real threat to lawmakers. Right now, we’re seeing people on trial because they broke the law in overt ways. The underlying facts are pretty different.
But yes, that idea of martyrdom at the heart of extremist politics is very dangerous. It justifies quite a bit of violence. The myth of martyrdom at the heart of the 1990s militia movement and this movement today is a pretty ominous similarity.
Sargent: Do you think we should be worried about another Oklahoma City?
Hemmer: Yes, I do. There’s so much violent rhetoric. There’s so much rhetoric about the federal government being out to get you.
You are going to be a political prisoner. You’re going to be silenced. You’re going to be jailed. That feeds into a politics of violence.
We’ve seen acts of terror and acts of violence domestically over the past 10 years. There’s no reason to believe it won’t escalate.
Sargent: The key threshold that’s being breached right now seems to be this: Candidates fetishizing guns go beyond brandishing them as cultural signaling. They are used to act out the idea that political opponents must be eliminated.
We’re seeing that now in Republican candidates like Blake Masters and Eric Greitens.
Hemmer: There were some figures in the Republican Party in the 1990s who — there wasn’t a lot of daylight between them and the militias. But at the time we’re talking about a tiny handful of Republicans, as opposed to many, many more now who have moved in a pretty radical direction.
Sargent: Then there’s the big elephant in the room: Fox News. What’s the Fox effect?
Hemmer: Fox News has done a lot to promote the idea of “political prisoners” in the aftermath of Jan. 6, to promote ideas of white nationalism and White genocide, which really helps to feed far right violence.
The reason the Fox effect is so strong is that Fox is seen as part of the conservative elite, as part of the conservative establishment. If you turn on Fox News and hear those messages, that gives them a cast of legitimacy that has real power.
Sargent: Civil society getting out there and even more forcefully defending our institutions and the rule of law is critical. Although the prognosis is grim for that having that much of an effect.
Hemmer: The prognosis is grim. But you’re right about that as a starting point. We are in a moment where there is not consensus on things like democracy, on things like opposition to extremism, opposition to fascism.
One step that often gets skipped is actually making the case for why we want those things: Why do you want a democratic society? Why do you want a nonviolent society? You’ve got to build that consensus back. It’s a generational project — not one that’s going to be solved overnight. | 2022-08-25T17:20:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | An expert on the right urgently warns: Beware of another Oklahoma City - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/trump-right-wing-threats-fbi-oklahoma-city-bombing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/trump-right-wing-threats-fbi-oklahoma-city-bombing/ |
(The Washington Post illustration; Sony; iStock)
Sony announced a price increase for the PlayStation 5 in select markets Thursday, citing a challenging economic environment. The company has hiked the console’s prices in Continental Europe, the United Kingdom, China, Australia, Mexico and Canada, effective immediately. Japan’s price change will go into effect Sept. 15. The price of a PS5 in the United States remains unaffected.
In a post on the official PlayStation blog, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan explained that Sony increased the console’s price due to “high global inflation rates, as well as adverse currency trends.” Some of the new prices include 549.99 euros for the standard PS5 in Europe (up from 499.99 euros) and 60,478 yen (up from 54,978 yen, both with tax included) for the standard PS5 in Japan, Sony’s home country. A full list of the regional price changes for the standard PlayStation 5 and the digital edition are listed in the blog post.
The PS5 is nearly two years old now (it was released in November 2020) but due to high demand, supply chain issues, a global microchip shortage and online re-sellers, Sony’s coveted gaming system famously eluded the reach of many prospective customers.
A feel for the game: How Sony worked with developers to design the PlayStation 5's new tech
This unusual pricing change — video game consoles traditionally get cheaper over time rather than more expensive — isn’t the year’s first. In July, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, made a similar move when it announced a $100 price increases for both versions of its virtual reality headset, the Quest 2, adjusting the product’s prices to $399.99 for the 128 GB model and $499.99 for the 256 GB. The cost of the Quest 2’s accessories and refurbished headsets also increased. Meta wrote that the price changes were made to fund the company’s future VR ventures and “keep driving the VR industry forward,” on its website. At the time of the announcement, the Quest 2 was also nearly two years old.
The video game industry enjoyed a surge in profits and popularity at the beginning of the pandemic due to lockdown orders and social distancing. For years, video games were seen as a recession-proof industry. But now with global inflation, the easing of pandemic restrictions and supply chain difficulties coupled with a looming recession, analysts are less certain about the industry’s near-term outlook. | 2022-08-25T17:29:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sony announces PlayStation 5 price hike for major regions except U.S. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/25/playstation-5-price-increase/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/25/playstation-5-price-increase/ |
Ukraine live briefing: Zaporizhzhia plant disconnected from grid; Biden to ...
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant currently under control of Russian occupying forces. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s largest nuclear power plant was cut off from the country’s electricity grid, setting off a mass power outage in the adjacent area after fires damaged its last functioning transmission line, Ukraine’s nuclear power company said Thursday.
The incident renewed fears about safety at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is also the largest atomic energy plant in Europe and is located in an area now occupied by invading Russian forces.
Fighting in the vicinity of the plant has led to acute worries of a potential catastrophe and to calls from many world leaders for U.N. nuclear experts to be allowed to visit the site.
Russian and Ukrainian officials traded blame for shelling at the plant, which they said had resulted in the disconnection from the power grid — the first time it has ever been cut off. Officials, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, have warned that such a disconnection itself could lead an extremely dangerous situation by disrupting the plant’s normal operation and potentially making it difficult to cool the reactors.
“The actions of the invaders caused a complete disconnection of the ZNPP from the power grid — for the first time in the history of the plant,” Ukraine’s nuclear energy company, Energoatom, said in a statement.
On Thursday morning, the mayor of Enerhodar, where the plant is located, said the city was on the “verge of a humanitarian disaster” as shelling left it without electricity or water. He later said officials were working on restoring power to the city.
The Russian-installed “governor” of the occupied region, Yevhen Balytskyi, blamed Ukraine’s military for the outages, a charge echoed by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, which said shelling by Ukrainian forces caused a network to short circuit resulting in “a blackout in the Zaporizhzhia region.”
The nuclear plant is now being powered from a neighboring geothermal plant and Enerhodar, under Russian control, was expected to get its power back in a few hours, a spokesman for the power company Energoatom, said.
Ukrainian plant workers have continued to keep the nuclear site operational while under the control of the occupying authorities.
The Zaporizhzhia plant is a major source of power for Ukraine. Before the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, it provided one-fifth of Ukraine’s electricity and nearly half of its nuclear energy.
U.S. Undersecretary of State Bonnie Jenkins, a senior official responsible for arms control and international security, in a briefing with reporters on Thursday said she was aware of reports of a power outage but could not independently confirm them.
Jenkins renewed calls for the Russian military to vacate the plant and allow for international nuclear experts to visit, saying a power outage can have an “immediate impact, obviously” for Ukraine’s citizens.
In a statement, Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, said that the plant twice lost power during the day but that it was currently back on, said
Grossi said the incident further underscored the “urgent need for an IAEA expert mission to travel to the facility” and that he was prepared to go there himself in coming days.
“Almost every day there is a new incident at or near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant,” he said. “We can’t afford to lose any more time. I’m determined to personally lead an IAEA mission to the plant in the next few days to help stabilize the nuclear safety and security situation there,” he said.
On Tuesday, Zelensky called for international pressure to compel the occupying Russian forces to leave the plant and the surrounding area. “We need to put pressure on Russia, give them an ultimatum from the international community that they should leave,” Zelensky said, adding: “This is dangerous for the whole world.”
Experts have been struggling to understand if the damage at the plant was due to deliberate sabotage or perhaps the result of a mistake by soldiers the area, but the experts said having IAEA inspectors on-site would improve the situation.
“At a minimum, the IAEA can assess the safety of the plant," said Jon Wolfsthal, a former senior director for arms control and nonproliferation at the U.S. National Security Council during the Obama administration.
“It can determine whether or not there’s been any damage to the reactor containment," Wolfsthal said. "It can determine whether the backup safety systems are online and functioning. It can provide assurance to the Ukrainians and to the Russians and to the nearby population, and the rest of Europe, that there are still multiple backup systems in place or alert the world if those systems are not in place.” | 2022-08-25T17:33:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ukraine's largest nuclear plant is cut off energy grid - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/25/ukraine-nuclear-plant-energy-grid/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/25/ukraine-nuclear-plant-energy-grid/ |
California’s decision to ban the sales of combustion engine cars is the latest victory in the transition to electric vehicles
Electric cars are parked at a charging station in Sacramento, on April 13, 2022. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP)
Five years ago, having an electric vehicle was along the lines of bringing your own bags to the grocery store or eschewing plastic straws: Some people did it, but those who did were either passionate environmentalists (often driving the snub-nosed Nissan Leaf) or wealthy technophiles (often driving the Tesla Model S). EVs felt like a novelty or a purity test — they certainly didn’t feel like an inevitability.
But over the past few years, everything changed. There was the Super Bowl ad for EVs, featuring Will Ferrell smashing his fist through a globe and shouting, “We’re going to crush those lugers!” (Ferrell was referring to Norway, the country which sells more EVs per capita than any other country in the world.) There was the announcement by six automakers and 30 countries that they would phase out gasoline-powered car sales by 2040, and the call by President Biden to make 50 percent of new car sales emissions-free a decade sooner. There was the release of the Hummer EV — a monstrous, electricity-guzzling house on wheels that many environmentalists abhorred — the Ford F-150 Lightning EV and even the Mustang Mach-E EV. Automakers, in short, took their most treasured brands — even brands that appeal to a swath of America that is decidedly not crunchy and environmentalist — and rolled out all-electric models.
In short, the transition from gas-powered, internal combustion engine vehicles to electric vehicles no longer feels niche, or speculative. It feels inevitable.
And this week, another profound development: California, which already leads the nation with 18 percent of new cars sold electric, is expected to approve a regulation to ban the sales of new gas-only powered vehicles by 2035. In addition to EVs, only a limited number of plug-in hybrids will be allowed to be sold. This is a big deal: California’s car market is only slightly smaller than those of France, Italy and the United Kingdom — and while many countries have promised to phase out gas car sales by such-and-such date, few have concrete regulations like California. Sixteen states have traditionally followed California’s lead in setting its own independent fuel standards — they could soon follow.
Going from 18 percent to nearly 100 percent EV sales in just 13 years may seem almost impossible. But Corey Cantor, an electric vehicles associate at the research firm BloombergNEF, points out that in 2019 only 7 percent of new cars sold in California were EVs. In a few short years, that number has more than doubled.
“When things move that quickly, it’s pretty surreal,” Cantor said.
Of course, roadblocks remain. Producing hundreds of thousands of electric cars will require supplies of critical minerals and a pace of factory manufacturing that doesn’t currently exist. (Case in point: Ford has a three-year backlog for the Ford F-150 Lightning, thanks to sky-high demand.) The Biden administration has invested $5 billion into a network of car chargers across the country, but a recent study of chargers in the San Francisco Bay area found that over a quarter weren’t functioning.
For the moment, sales of EVs are mostly focused in higher-priced vehicles, rather than smaller, more affordable sedans, but automakers are trying to push the price point down. And in order for consumers to take advantage of the new $7,500 EV tax credit in the recently signed Inflation Reduction Act, more minerals and batteries will have to be produced within the United States. The combination of high upfront prices, the oft-mentioned “range anxiety,” and unfamiliarity with EVs may cause some Americans to resist going electric for years to come.
Still, the writing seems to be on the wall. Most EVs are now cheaper over the lifetime of the vehicle than comparable gas-powered cars. This year’s spiking gas prices drove many Americans — some of whom had never considered going electric before — to look into what it would be like to drive a car that pulls its energy from the grid.
“A couple of years ago, there was always a question about EVs — do people want them?” Cantor said. “Now that’s not even the question. It’s all about scale-up.” | 2022-08-25T17:55:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | California's electric vehicle transition: Is the era of gas-powered cars over? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/08/25/california-electric-vehicles-ev-gas-powered-cars/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/08/25/california-electric-vehicles-ev-gas-powered-cars/ |
Man struck, killed by driver on Dulles Toll Road, police say
The Dulles Access Road. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
A 26-year-old man was struck and killed by a driver on the Dulles Toll Road on Wednesday night, police said.
The crash occurred around 8 p.m. near the Fairfax County Parkway exit. A Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Police spokesman said the victim, 26-year-old Chris Baidoe, was transported to a hospital, where he died.
The driver remained on the scene, and no charges have been filed, police said. | 2022-08-25T17:56:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man struck, killed by driver on Dulles Toll Road, police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/25/dulles-toll-road-pedestrian-killed/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/25/dulles-toll-road-pedestrian-killed/ |
From left, Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, Rep. Mondaire Jones, Assemblywoman Jo Anne Simon, Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman and former federal prosecutor Daniel Goldman participate in New York's 10th Congressional District Democratic primary debate on Aug. 10. (Mary Altaffer/Pool/AP)
On Tuesday, former federal prosecutor Daniel Goldman was projected to be the winner of the Democratic nomination in New York’s newly redrawn 10th Congressional District, according to the Associated Press, defeating a crowded primary field that at one point included more than a dozen candidates, including a sitting congressman.
In any other year, the winner of the Democratic primary could safely be presumed the eventual winner of the general election in New York’s overwhelmingly Democratic 10th District. But this year’s race could remain competitive through the fall.
New York Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, who is projected to come in second in the Democratic primary — trailing Goldman by only about 1,300 votes — is weighing a general election run under the Working Families Party ballot line.
Niou has not conceded in the Democratic primary, and the race has not yet been certified. With 95 percent of the vote counted, Goldman has 25.8 percent of the vote to Niou’s 23.7 percent, with 1,306 votes separating the two. As of late Tuesday, 13,000 absentee ballots remained to be counted.
“I’m currently speaking with WFP and my community about how we can best represent the needs of this district,” Niou said in a statement to The Washington Post. “Because what we can do together is too important to give up this fight, we must count every vote. I’m so grateful for the outpouring of support and all of the people who showed up and turned out. Our people need and deserve a voice.”
In addition to Goldman and Niou, the field of Democratic primary candidates included Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), who moved to the newly redrawn district to run after Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, switched to running in Jones’s old district; New York City Council member Carlina Rivera; New York Assemblywoman Jo Anne Simon, and former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman. At one point, former New York mayor Bill de Blasio also was part of the field before he withdrew from the race in July.
Niou’s supporters have pointed out that Niou, Jones and Rivera — who are projected to come in second, third and fourth, respectively — split the progressive vote in the Democratic primary, giving the more moderate Goldman a path to victory.
A chaotic redistricting process in New York created the diverse new district, which covers much of Lower Manhattan — including Chinatown, Wall Street and the Lower East Side — and parts of Brooklyn. In her campaign, Niou, who is Taiwanese American, frequently emphasized that the new district included two Chinatowns, one in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn. She received endorsements from several progressive groups and state lawmakers, as well as from the Working Families Party.
The New York Times endorsed Goldman, who was the lead majority counsel in the first impeachment trial against President Donald Trump. One of his TV ads features a clip of him testifying before the House Judiciary Committee before declaring: “Dan Goldman proved the case against Trump.”
He has said protecting democracy would be among his top priorities if elected.
“Voters know what’s at stake,” Goldman tweeted Sunday. “We need to protect our democracy and our fundamental rights. Everything is on the line, and we need members of Congress who have been on the front lines standing up to authoritarianism on the radical right.”
Eugene Scott contributed to this report. | 2022-08-25T17:57:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Yuh-Line Niou weighs run against Daniel Goldman in New York’s 10th congressional district - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/25/ny10-niou-goldman-wfp/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/25/ny10-niou-goldman-wfp/ |
In this photo released by the Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, United States Senator Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. is greeted by Douglas Yu-Tien Hsu, Director-General, Taiwan’s dept. of North American Affairs, as she arrives on a plane in Taipei, Taiwan on Thursday, Aug. 25, 2022. The U.S. lawmaker arrived in Taiwan on Thursday, the second congressional delegation to visit the island after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did so earlier this month, sharply raising tensions with China. (Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs via AP) (Uncredited/Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs) | 2022-08-25T17:57:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | US senator visits Taiwan amid high tensions with China - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/us-senator-visits-taiwan-amid-high-tensions-with-china/2022/08/25/c44545a6-2497-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/us-senator-visits-taiwan-amid-high-tensions-with-china/2022/08/25/c44545a6-2497-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
Two plead guilty to theft of diary purportedly belonging to Biden’s daughter
President Biden walks with daughter Ashley Biden in Rehoboth Beach, Del., on June 20. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
Two Florida residents pleaded guilty in a case connected to a stolen diary that reportedly belonged to Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter, and that ended up in the hands of conservative group Project Veritas, which published portions of it in the weeks before the end of the 2020 presidential campaign.
Nearly two weeks before the 2020 election, Project Veritas published portions of the diary, which had gone missing earlier during the campaign. The group claimed that the diary purportedly belonged to then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s daughter and that it had been provided to them by a “whistleblower.”
While the conservative group claimed that the diary had been legally obtained, the FBI launched an investigation into how the diary ended up in the organization’s hands. Agents conducted two searches at the homes of people tied to the activist group in November 2021.
In its Thursday announcement, the Justice Department said Harris and Kurlander, around September 2020, “conspired to steal,” transport and sell “personal property that belonged to an individual” referred to as a “victim.”
Michael J. Driscoll, assistant director of the FBI, said in a statement that the two defendants “conspired to steal an individual’s personal property, which they subsequently sold to a third party and delivered across state lines.”
“As a consequence of their actions, they now face punishment in the federal criminal justice system for their crimes,” Driscoll said.
The two, the Justice Department said, knew the items belonged to an immediate family member of a political candidate. According to the department, Harris had been staying at a Delray Beach, Fla., property where the items had been stored by the victim. The objects included the diary, tax records, a storage card with private family photographs and a cellphone. Harris, the Justice Department alleges, stole these items and, along with Kurlander, contacted an organization based in Mamaroneck, N.Y.; Project Veritas is headquartered there. The organization, the Justice Department said, paid them $20,000 each for the stolen property and had them transport the objects to New York.
According to the Justice Department, the organization asked Harris and Kurlander to return to Florida and obtain more items from the property, which Harris still had access to.
A spokesman for Project Veritas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Harris and Kurlander pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit interstate transportation of stolen property, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. They also agreed to forfeit the $20,000 paid. Kurlander, as part of his plea deal, agreed to cooperate with the department’s investigation.
This marks the first time charges have been filed in connection to the theft of the diary.
According to the Justice Department’s investigation, the owner of the stolen property — which the department never identifies as Ashley Biden — was staying with a friend at the Florida residence around spring of 2020 and moved out of the property around June 2020, leaving behind the personal items with the friend’s permission. The same friend, days after Biden moved out, invited Harris to temporarily stay in her room, where she found the items. Nearly two months later, Harris asked Kurlander for help selling the property. Kurlander promised Harris he would help her make money selling the items.
By September 2020, the two had contacted a political campaign with the hopes of selling the items, but the campaign declined, according to the Justice Department. That campaign instead advised the two to turn in the items to the FBI.
In a text to Harris, Kurlander refused to do so, and said the sale of the items would have “to be done a different way.” That’s when they contacted the conservative organization. | 2022-08-25T18:43:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Two plead guilty in connection to stolen diary purportedly belonging to Biden’s daughter - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/25/ashley-biden-diary-project-veritas/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/25/ashley-biden-diary-project-veritas/ |
Despite predictions of an above-average season, the tropics have been silent
A satellite view of the tropical Atlantic shows little in the way of activity. (Tropical Tidbits)
Sometimes forecasts don’t pan out. Other times they do — but what was predicted is delayed. Regardless of which is true this year, Atlantic tropical storm and hurricane activity, thus far, has been strangely quiet — especially given forecasts for a busy season.
Observed activity is barely 15 percent of what’s normal up to this point.
With little activity of immediate concern on the weather maps (the National Hurricane Center is tracking two disturbances with small chances to develop), it’s tough not to wonder what’s up. So far, atmospheric ingredients simply haven’t gelled. But they still could, as we’re just now entering the peak of the season, which spans late August through early October. And, as Hurricane Andrew demonstrated 30 years ago, it takes only one storm for a quiet season to become a catastrophe.
This year’s silent spell comes five years to the day since the landfall of Category 4 Hurricane Harvey near Rockport, Tex., in 2017. The system then transitioned into a stagnant tropical rainstorm that delivered catastrophic flooding around Houston. Harvey was a prelude to a devastating September that brought Irma, Maria and a slew of other storms.
Five years ago we saw this incredible visual of Hurricane Harvey.
The GOES-R satellites changed the game and proved it immediately. pic.twitter.com/jYo3TIBv7M
— Dakota Smith (@weatherdak) August 25, 2022
How rare is the ongoing ‘tropical drought’?
A named storm hasn’t roamed the Atlantic since Colin dissipated on July 3, and even that storm was a marginal one. Since that storm grazed the Carolinas’ coasts, the Atlantic Ocean has been dormant.
The dearth of named storms is rare, but it’s not unprecedented.
According to Philip Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University, this marks the first time since 1982 that there hasn’t been a single named storm anywhere in the Atlantic between July 3 and the penultimate week of August. It’s happened five other times since 1950, making a quiet stretch this long leading up to peak season a roughly once a decade event.
During that 1982 season, only six storms formed, and the U.S. never experienced a hurricane landfall. The season tied with 2013 for having the record fewest named storms in the satellite era.
There’s a growing chance that August could draw to a close without any named storms. That hasn’t happened since 1997. Before that you’d have to go back to 1961 for a storm-free August. It also happened in 1941 and 1929.
Curiously, the 1929 season did later feature a Category 3 that made landfall in the Florida Keys in late September with a 150 mph wind gust in Key Largo.
In 1941, the first system didn’t form until Sept. 11, and only six wound up roaming the basin. A few did make landfall, including the Texas Hurricane of 1941, which swung ashore just east of Houston as a Category 3 with 125 mph on Sept. 23. A Category 2 also struck Florida in early October.
The 1961 season awoke suddenly in September, with three Category 4 storms and a pair of Category 5s forming through the end of October. Among them was Carla, which was a large and intense Category 3 when it made landfall near Port O’Connor, Tex., on Sept. 11. In addition to wind and rain, it unleashed a slew of tornadoes, including a devastating F4 that killed eight people in Galveston.
What’s causing the quiet?
What has been keeping August so quiet in the tropical Atlantic? hmmm... pic.twitter.com/6dqKLO3BVa
Atmospheric scientists have hunches, but it’s not obvious why the Atlantic is in a lengthy slumber. Ironically, the eastern Pacific Ocean, which was expected to be quieter than the Atlantic, has been active. It has already burned through the first ten names on the Hurricane Center’s naming list. Seven of the storms have reached hurricane status.
Usually when one basin is busy, the other is quiet. But Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, writes that the Pacific probably isn’t to blame.
“If there was a tremendous amount of intense hurricane action going on in the eastern Pacific, there could be,” he explained, as that might result in sinking air that could quell hurricane activity in the Atlantic. “But that’s not the case.”
He noted that the Pacific is only 13 percent ahead of where it should be in terms of ACE, or Accumulated Cyclone Energy — a measure of how much energy from warm waters tropical storms and hurricanes convert into expend on winds. The western Pacific, he explained, is 71 percent below average.
“Averaging across those three major tropical cyclone basins in the northern hemisphere, 2022′s ACE is roughly 55 percent of the average value,” he wrote in an email.
So what’s the deal? There are two main factors that are needed to brew a hurricane: light high-altitude winds, and instability, or the warm, humid air needed to fuel a storm.
Apropos to winds, while they haven’t been particularly favorable for storm formation, they also haven’t been abnormally hostile. In fact, all season, the amount of shear, or the change in wind speed and direction with altitude, has been pretty close to average. Shear can tear apart a fledgling storm and can even disrupt one that is mature.
In the chart below, the blue line represents this year’s shear and the black line shows the average.
As shown by the black line, there’s ordinarily a drop-off in shear during mid- to late summer. In many years that drop-off in shear encourages storm formation, but that hasn’t happened in 2022.
This year’s lack of storms may be tied to a lack of instability. There just hasn’t been much to support the growth of thunderstorm clusters across the Atlantic, which are the seeds of hurricanes.
That’s likely due to intrusions of warm Saharan air wafting over the Atlantic and drying things out at the mid-levels. That also caps the lower atmosphere and prevents parcels of air from rising.
It’s worth noting that the jury is still out on what the rest of the season will bring, but some models hint at an uptick in storminess come September.
The forecasts for a busy season could still be right. About 80 percent of storm activity typically occurs from late August onward. The oceans are heating up and are still primed for storminess. It probably won’t stay this quiet forever. | 2022-08-25T19:27:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | August may pass without a single named storm in the Atlantic - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/25/august-may-pass-without-single-named-tropical-storm-atlantic/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/25/august-may-pass-without-single-named-tropical-storm-atlantic/ |
The Post spoke to Emmitt Bailey, 8, on Aug. 23, two days after he was crowned winner of the 2022 Kid’s Mullet Championships. (Video: Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)
When Emmitt Bailey first announced he wanted a mullet, his mom wasn’t exactly on board.
“You think, ‘That guy over there, he’s been rocking a mullet for 20 or 30 years. Who is that guy?’” Begola said. “That’s one of those things you see in the wild and you’re like, ‘That takes commitment.’”
“He wouldn’t really care if someone said, like, ‘Why do you have your hair like that?’” she continued. “It’s what he likes and what he wants, making his own decisions. He doesn’t tend to let a lot bother him and get him down too much. I think that shows through in the mullet lifestyle.” | 2022-08-25T19:27:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 'Mullet Boy' Emmitt Bailey is the 2022 Kid’s Mullet Champion - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/25/mullett-kid-champion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/25/mullett-kid-champion/ |
Protesters voice their support for abortion rights during a rally in Boise on May 3. (Sarah A. Miller/Idaho Statesman/AP)
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, the Justice Department does not have many options for challenging state abortion bans. There aren’t many federal judicial circuits where right-wing judges don’t dominate the courts of appeal. So the department must take its opportunities when it spots them.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department racked up its first victory in a challenge to Idaho’s abortion ban, arguing that it conflicts with the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires hospitals receiving Medicare funding to provide emergency services that might include an abortion. The decision “ensures that women in the State of Idaho can obtain the emergency medical treatment to which they are entitled under federal law,” Attorney General Merrick Garland declared in a written statement.
These are two cases involving a limited aspect of abortion bans — potential denial of emergency care. (Think for a moment how barbaric it is for states to deny medical care to women at risk of serious adverse health consequences.) There are many other possible actions that can be brought, including federal claims based on unconstitutional vagueness, equal protection guarantees, free exercise of religion and free speech, as well as state-based claims rooted in state constitutions.
For example, in Texas, a group of abortion funds have sued for a declaratory judgment “barring Paxton and prosecutors from using [the state’s abortion ban] ... and other statutes to target those reproductive rights groups for activities the groups say conservative state leaders may politically oppose but are still legal,” the Texas Tribune reports. “The groups want the court to confirm that ‘the Trigger Ban cannot be enforced by any Defendant … in a manner that violates Plaintiffs’ rights to freely travel, freely associate, freely speak, and freely support members of their communities through financial assistance, as guaranteed by the United States Constitution and federal law,’ according to the suit.” | 2022-08-25T19:27:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | DOJ wins 1 of 2 abortion ban cases - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/abortion-ban-cases/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/abortion-ban-cases/ |
History teacher Eirik Nielsen speaks to students at K-Pop Club during lunchtime in his classroom at Burton High School in San Francisco in October 2021. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
The conservative campaign against education is many things. As a political matter, it’s about intensifying the culture war so moral panic drives Republican votes. As a policy matter, its long-term goals include dismantling public education. As a personal matter, it’s often motivated by fear that the American system of education is a threat to people’s children — that the wrong ideas, even ideas themselves, are impossibly dangerous.
On that last point, conservatives are absolutely right: Education is indeed a threat to many things they believe.
Consider some recent news from the front. In a Texas school district, police officers showed up to a high school library to “investigate” a graphic novel about a bullied gay teen. In Oklahoma, a teacher was investigated for responding to a draconian school censorship law by covering up her classroom library with a sign saying, “Books the state doesn’t want you to read”; she then resigned.
In another Texas district, a middle school deemed portions of a book by the man for whom the school was named — a grandson of former slaves who learned to read at age 98 — to be “inappropriate.” The reasons are unclear; perhaps his tribute to the importance of reading was too inflammatory.
It’s not just teachers. Librarians have come under attack, too. In a Michigan town, librarians were targeted with a torrent of abuse after residents learned that the library contained books on LGBTQ themes; the town then decided to defund its only library. Problem solved!
Meanwhile, Fox News has been on a tear, vilifying school teachers as lazy, stupid, anti-White Marxists trying to “groom” children for sexual abuse.
In some red states, teenagers have taken it upon themselves to organize sex-education classes. Conservatives who dominate in those places are terrified that if the teens learn how their bodies work and what sex is, they might develop ideas that undermine the “traditional” view of sex.
And once again, the conservatives are right. If you teach a girl that she has the right to make her own choices about sex, that having sex doesn’t turn her into chewed-up gum no one would want to touch, or that she ought to question why society labels men who have sex “players” but women who have sex “sluts,” she might begin to free herself from the shame and fear that perpetuates certain hierarchies of power. Who knows where that might take her?
Now, are school teachers more likely to be liberals, even in conservative areas? You bet they are. Think about the kind of person who goes into teaching. You have to be committed to the welfare of children, be skilled at providing care, and believe in the institution of schools (most of which are public). You have to care about equality, because it’s inherent in the practice. You have to love books and learning. And you have to be willing to work incredibly hard for low pay.
There are some conservatives who meet all those requirements, but most of the people who do — who are disproportionately women — are going to be liberals. That makes conservatives suspicious of the entire profession, regardless of what is actually being taught.
Then there are all the ways that, in Stephen Colbert’s immortal words, reality has a well-known liberal bias. If you’re going to teach science, you have to teach about evolution and climate change, even if some people would prefer to tell themselves both are sinister hoaxes.
And even if you train teachers to say the slaveholders who signed the Constitution actually hated slavery, or pass laws forbidding any mention of “gender fluidity,” what if your kids go on to college? Then they’ll be exposed to all manner of new ideas as they cultivate their capacity for critical thinking. They’ll probably meet people from different parts of the country and different backgrounds. They very well could decide that their parents are small-minded, and arrive at a set of beliefs that alienates them from the people who raised them.
These fears are intensified because we now live in an interconnected culture where shielding your children from ideas you don’t like has become almost impossible. If you’re 50 years old, you might have gone through school never meeting someone who was openly gay, or who wasn’t Christian, or who didn’t think the Civil War was about state’s rights. But if your kids have an internet connection, they have all kinds of exposure to different people and different ideas.
And the more conservative you are, the more likely it is that education will lead your kids toward experiences and beliefs that differ from yours — not because your kids are being victimized by propaganda, but just because of the nature of becoming educated.
If you’re an average consumer of Fox News and conservative media, you typically can’t do much about the things you’re told to be angry about every day; the rage is an end in itself. But in their war on education, conservatives have found a way to connect the national to the local, linking the things Tucker Carlson tells you are terribly threatening with what’s going on right down the street.
The threat is real. Conservatives can’t keep their kids from having their minds opened forever. And they know it. | 2022-08-25T19:27:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Conservatives think education is a threat. They're right. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/conservatives-education-college-threat-real/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/conservatives-education-college-threat-real/ |
A patient receives a booster at Mary's Center in Silver Spring in May. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
For all the amazing benefits of the mRNA coronavirus vaccines, there are limitations. The effectiveness wanes. New variants evolve faster than shots can be adjusted. Destructive disinformation about their safety lingers. Yet, the vaccines are critical to battling disease and death — and that also goes for the next generation of boosters coming soon. Critics might raise fresh concerns about these new shots, and there are some things the public should know. But the latest booster, as with all the previous shots, promises to be a life raft in dangerous seas.
Both Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have asked the government for emergency use authorization for a bivalent booster that would be based on the earlier vaccine as well as target the now-prevalent BA.4/5 variant. The Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are expected to give a green light in coming days. The Pfizer dose is for those 12 years and older; Moderna’s for 18 and older. In both cases, before the booster, a patient must have taken the two primary doses. But the new booster will be administered to anyone who has none, one or two of the previous booster shots.
The advantage of the bivalent booster is that it has a better chance of protecting against the virus that exists today. No one knows how much better, but experts say it could boost the levels of protection, as well as the duration and the breadth. Unfortunately, it is still a booster, and there may need to be more. Science is still chasing the goal of a pan-coronavirus vaccine that will last a long time.
What’s different this time is that this booster is being rolled out before human clinical trials are complete. (The trials are getting underway.) This is a bit of a gamble that past is prologue — that the experience with billions of doses of the earlier vaccines shows they are safe and effective. Also, tests in mice show that the boosters work, and this testing method has been used often in the past with the seasonal influenza vaccine. The new boosters are already in production and may show up for consumers in September.
Waiting for full clinical trial results might leave the booster well behind the curve if the virus mutates into a new variant. The trade-off — a booster that is currently relevant, with less clinical trial data — seems reasonable. Demanding both an effective vaccine and a full clinical trial “is simply a fantasy against this rapidly changing virus,” says epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina. Yet policymakers must be vigilant. They hold a fragile public trust in their hands. Already, booster uptake has been inexcusably low. The government must be totally transparent about this choice and do nothing to add to vaccine hesitancy and doubts.
The federal government has ordered 175 million doses of the bivalent booster, but this may be the last one that is free. Congress has unwisely balked at more pandemic funding. While many people have insurance that will eventually cover vaccine costs, those without insurance or means may give up on the vaccine life raft altogether. That would be an unnecessary and avoidable tragedy. | 2022-08-25T19:27:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | A new covid booster shot will be criticized. But it is worth getting. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/covid-booster-shot-fda-cdc-disinformation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/covid-booster-shot-fda-cdc-disinformation/ |
Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testifies during a House subcommittee hearing in Washington on May 11. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
His ignorance and lack of remorse are stunning. “Children fell far behind in school during the first year of the pandemic and have not caught up,” writes David Leonhardt of the New York Times. One study by Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research found that students who stayed home for most of 2020-2021 lost the equivalent of about 50 percent of a typical school year’s math learning. Black and Hispanic students, as well as students in schools with high poverty rates, were disproportionately damaged. A 2021 McKinsey & Company study found that schools with majority Black populations were six months behind in math and reading. A March Brookings study found that test-score gaps between students in low-poverty and high-poverty elementary schools grew approximately 20 percent in math and 15 percent in reading during the 2020-2021 school year. Curriculum Associates found that schools serving majority Black and Latino students reported “almost double the amount of unfinished learning” in third-grade reading and math than did schools schools where the majority of students were White.
No serious person disputes the irreparable damage from school closures — except Fauci. Lockdowns produced the “largest increase in educational inequity in a generation,” Thomas Kane, an author of the Harvard study, told the Times. “We haven’t seen this kind of academic achievement crisis in living memory,” says Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The American Academy of Pediatrics last October declared a pandemic-induced national state of emergency for children’s mental health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the number of emergency room visits for suspected suicide attempts by girls ages 12 to 17 rose 51 percent from early 2019 to the same period of 2021.
Fauci told Fox News he was “one of the people that said we have to do everything we can to get the children back in school.” But in 2020 he argued for nationwide school closures and criticized Republican governors such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis who resisted them, warning that if “you don’t have a real good control over an outbreak and you allow children together, they will likely get infected.” That summer, as students were supposed to be returning for the 2020-2021 school year, he urged that while the “default position” should be to open schools, this should apply to students in areas where transmission was low, while those in higher-risk zones should still be in hybrid or virtual learning. Yet according to Brown University economist Emily Oster, we had known for some time that schools were not superspreaders, even in high-risk areas. Fauci’s caveats gave an excuse for teachers unions to resist a return to in-person learning and ultimately kept millions of kids out of the classroom.
Moreover, school closures were rooted in the failure of the public health establishment — which Fauci helped lead — to recognize that kids were the least vulnerable to covid. Schools were shut down because children are usually the most vulnerable to a contagion. But we now know that covid is generally no more dangerous for kids than a typical flu. Indeed, Leonhardt says that “flu can be deadlier for children than Covid has been, even though most children receive a flu vaccine.” A 2021 German study found zero deaths from covid among healthy five- to 17-year-olds from March 2020 to May 2021. Zero. Far from being vectors of transmission, schools were among the safest places to be in some areas — because the covid case rate for students and staff in schools was lower than in the community.
School closures were just one element of Fauci’s disastrous pandemic leadership. From January to March 2020, Fauci incorrectly assured us the virus was not spreading in the United States when, in fact, it was spreading like wildfire. Then he told us not to weak masks because “people keep fiddling with the mask and touching their face,” which could make them sick. A few months later, he admitted that he said this because “masks were in very short supply” — and he wanted to save them for health-care workers. His tenure encompassed catastrophic failures of detection, testing and masking, and he championed lockdown policies that had little to no effect on covid-19 mortality but imposed enormous economic and social costs we are still paying to this day. | 2022-08-25T19:28:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | What Fauci got wrong is still costing America’s children - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/fauci-pandemic-errors-school-closures/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/fauci-pandemic-errors-school-closures/ |
Tel Aviv wants kids to see Israel’s actual border. That should not be controversial.
A section of Israel's separation barrier in the West Bank. (Nasser Nasser/AP)
When the schoolkids of Tel Aviv return from summer vacation, they are likely to find something utterly unfamiliar taped or tacked to a wall of their classrooms, something that reveals a secret that educators have long hidden from them: A map showing the Green Line, the border between Israel and the occupied territory.
The maps are the idea of Tel Aviv Deputy Mayor Chen Arieli, and were produced by the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality. The national Education Ministry — under right-wing Minister Yifat Shasha-Biton — issued an angry response when Haaretz reported the story. Only the government’s own map agency is authorized to produce maps, the ministry spokesperson said, and Tel Aviv’s maps are not approved for classroom use. Arieli persisted: The maps will go up, she tweeted.
The political and legal history of the Green Line could fill books. For practical purposes, it marked the area under Israeli sovereignty, rule and law until the June 1967 Six-Day War. After the war, Israel held its newly conquered territories under military occupation — except for East Jerusalem, which it quickly annexed, and the Golan Heights, which it annexed in 1981. Former president Donald Trump’s recognition of the Golan annexation is the exception that proves the rule: Internationally, the Green Line is Israel’s recognized border.
Tel Aviv’s new school maps also show the “border of sovereignty,” which takes in the Golan and East Jerusalem but otherwise matches the Green Line. Together the two lines are essential for understanding Israel’s political, security and foreign policy issues. Yet official maps and textbooks don’t show them.
Hence, Tel Aviv city hall’s move is revolutionary. It un-cancels the borders of the country.
The decision to erase the Green Line was made a few months after the 1967 war. A memo I found in the personal archive of Yigal Allon, then the minister of labor, informed the head of the Survey Department, which was part of Allon’s ministry and had a near-monopoly on mapmaking. Henceforth, Allon wrote, maps would show only the ceasefire lines from the end of the June war.
Presumably, it took time for old maps to crumble and old textbooks to be replaced. But by the 1980s, the only place in Israel where I could find a current map showing the Green Line was on the wall of a foreign diplomat’s office. The location of the line faded from popular consciousness as the generation that grew up before 1967 aged. In 2005, two geography professors published research in which they asked university students to sketch the Green Line on a map. At Hebrew University, the country’s top institution, only 36.4 percent could do so.
The internet put an end to map monopolies. Google Maps does show the pre-1967 line, but as a broken gray line, which I suspect one notices only if one is looking for it.
Just how fuzzy is memory of the line? Take this incident: In 2013, the European Union announced guidelines for joint projects with Israel, specifying that no E.U. funds could be used in occupied territory. At an urgent top-level Israeli meeting, then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other cabinet members heard that the rule would have prevented an E.U. loan to the Teva pharmaceutical firm because it has a plant in a well-known Jerusalem industrial park beyond the Green Line. No one present recalled that the park was in fact inside the pre-1967 Israel border.
Yet the line goes on shaping reality. On the Israeli side, the government is elected by the governed. On the West Bank side, the Palestinian population is subject to military occupation, now mixed with limited autonomy. Israeli settlers enjoy the rights of citizens, as if they lived inside Israel, under an “emergency” order that’s 55 years old. A tiff over renewing the order recently brought down the government and forced new elections.
How is an Israeli high school student supposed to understand this without an uncensored map? But the Green Line has become akin to sex in Victorian England: It’s the most important thing in adult life, but don’t talk about it — especially in front of the children.
The day after the story broke, the Education Ministry’s director general sent a letter to Tel Aviv city hall, demanding that the maps be taken down, claiming that they could “point to a particular political stand.” That’s nonsense.
Erasing the line is a political stance. Showing it makes it possible to analyze the spectrum of Israeli political views. The dispute over the map echoes the argument in other countries: Is education supposed to teach kids to think critically, or to think “correctly,” as one group or another defines “correct”?
It’s unclear whether the ministry has the authority or ability to make the city take the maps down. If they stay, some teachers will discuss them, others ignore them. And Tel Aviv is just one city, not the whole country.
Still, the effort offers a spark of hope. I’ll celebrate such sparks wherever I find them — especially if they illuminate the country’s most critical issue for the next generation. | 2022-08-25T19:28:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Tel Aviv wants kids to see Israel’s actual border. That should not be controversial. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/israel-map-green-line-border-school/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/israel-map-green-line-border-school/ |
Ted Leonsis has emerged as a potention buyer of the Washington Nationals. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
Because the current state of the local baseball team is both terrible and completely in flux, and because Cade Cavalli’s major-league debut is more a puzzle piece that could be a part of better days than a full-on solution for the worst-in-the-majors record, it’s worth thinking about what matters most. And what matters most about the Washington Nationals’ future is not who pitches Friday against Cincinnati but who owns the team for decades to come.
This is all speculative, of course, and Leonsis’s status as a potential bidder doesn’t mean he’ll be the next owner. But until this week — when The Post reported that Leonsis had taken the steps required by MLB to gain access to all the Nationals’ financial information — the names that had surfaced as potential bidders hadn’t piqued much interest or come with anything of a track record. Michael B. Kim is a South Korean American billionaire who hasn’t owned or run a sports franchise. Stanley Middleman is a Philadelphia-area mortgage tycoon who hasn’t done that either.
Leonsis has done it with multiple teams right in front of our eyes in Washington, and the decidedly mixed results he’s produced have begot the decidedly mixed reaction from fans — online, at least — about his potential stewardship of the Nats. His bid would seem to gain financial heft because David Rubenstein, the former Carlyle Group head and longtime Washington philanthropist, has joined as a partner. But Leonsis has the sports resume — and it’s worth looking at the past if we’re trying to predict the future.
About the Nats’ direction: If there is a prominent criticism of the Lerners’ tenure as owners — which includes soon-to-be three 100-loss seasons, five postseason appearances and the 2019 World Series title — it is that they have been unable to keep their best players. We’ve been over the particulars ad nauseam, and each case is different. But Friday night, the team behind Cavalli — the club’s top pitching prospect — won’t have Bryce Harper or Juan Soto in the outfield, Trea Turner at shortstop or Anthony Rendon at third base. Two left in free agency. Two were traded before they became free agents because the perception was they would leave when they did. The end result is they’re not here, and that hurts.
Whatever your assessment of him, Leonsis has kept his stars — and there’s a for-better-or-worse element to that, too. Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom, who were the Batman and Robin of transforming hockey in this town, each have signed multiple extensions here. Leonsis gave Wall a four-year, $170-million extension in 2017 — the maximum allowed — and this summer issued Bradley Beal a supermax deal worth a staggering $251 million over five years.
There are ramifications to all that. Backstrom is badly slowed by an ailing hip and may never again resemble the player he once was, crippling the Caps’ financial ability to build another contender. Wall eventually departed in trade, and there are questions about whether Beal is the kind of alpha megastar around whom a team can be built, even if he’s being paid like he is.
But that’s not where we are — at least not yet. What we have at the moment is a Nationals franchise looking for a new owner, a local figure familiar to the team’s fans as an interested suitor, and important questions about the direction of it all. Cade Cavalli might pitch well Friday, and he might pitch poorly. Don’t read too much into it either way. The more important issue is what Ted Leonsis — or anybody else — would do if he or she took control of the entire organization. | 2022-08-25T19:28:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ted Leonsis as Washington Nationals owner would offer synergy and complications - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/ted-leonsis-washington-nationals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/ted-leonsis-washington-nationals/ |
Serena Williams faces steep climb in what is likely her final U.S. Open
Serena Williams has stared down all manner of challenges in her tennis career, but she has never faced a major tournament quite like this one.
When the U.S. Open begins Monday in New York, it will probably mark the final stop on a farewell tour for one of the greatest athletes of all time. Williams will open her 21st appearance at Flushing Meadows against world No. 80 Danka Kovinic, a Montenegrin whom she’s never faced. The pair will play either Monday or Tuesday and probably in prime time, although the first-round schedule is not expected to be released until Sunday.
Kovinic has never advanced beyond the third round at a major, which she reached at the Australian Open and French Open this year.
Williams, whose retirement announcement earlier this month drove U.S. Open ticket sales sky high, is the jewel in an ever-dwindling collection of tennis giants at the year’s final major. Four-time U.S. Open champion Rafael Nadal is aiming for his third major championship of 2022 after withdrawing from Wimbledon ahead of his semifinal match due to an abdominal injury. Two-time U.S. Open champion Naomi Osaka will compete.
Both of the world’s top-ranked players, Iga Swiatek and Daniil Medvedev, will play. Medvedev, who beat Novak Djokovic in last year’s U.S. Open final for his first grand slam trophy, missed Wimbledon because of the All-England Club’s ban of Russian players.
But neither Djokovic nor Roger Federer will make an appearance in New York. Federer’s absence is no surprise, as the 41-year-old is recovering from knee surgery and has not competed in a major this year. He last played the U.S. Open in 2019.
Djokovic, who said after Wimbledon he would not get the coronavirus vaccine, announced Thursday he will miss the year’s final major. The United States requires proof of vaccination for nonimmigrant noncitizens to enter the country, meaning Djokovic’s major trophy tally will sit at 21 — compared to Nadal’s 22 and Federer’s 20 — until next year.
For Williams, Kovinic is merely one part of a grand challenge waiting for her in New York.
In addition to her own emotions in the moment and what will surely be an impassioned, sellout crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium when she plays, the 23-time major champion has struggled mightily on court recently.
Williams has not for some time resembled the woman who once ruled tennis with her mighty serve, and understandably so. She celebrates her 41st birthday next month and has turned her attention increasingly away from sports and toward her family and flourishing business career in recent years, playing just four singles matches since Wimbledon in 2021. She hasn’t won two consecutive matches since the 2021 French Open, where she advanced to the fourth round.
Her most recent match was a 65-minute loss against defending U.S. Open champion Emma Raducanu in Cincinnati last week. It was riddled with uncharacteristic errors, and her serve — the powerful, defining quality of her game that revolutionized modern women’s tennis — often failed her. She played the match with a strip of athletic tape on her leg, apparently to ease left knee pain that reportedly caused the match to be delayed by one day.
Should Williams defeat the 27-year-old Kovinic, world No. 2 Anett Kontaveit of Estonia probably awaits her in the second round.
Elsewhere in the draw, Osaka will face No. 19 seed Danielle Collins, the Virginia graduate who captured the tennis world’s attention as a surprise semifinalist at the Australian Open in 2019. She lost to Ashleigh Barty in the final in Melbourne this year. The pair sit in the same quarter as Raducanu and Venus Williams.
No. 12 seed Coco Gauff sits in No. 3 seed Maria Sakkari’s quarter along with two-time major champion, No. 7 seed Simona Halep.
In the men’s tournament, No. 2 seed Nadal will face Rinky Hijikata of Australia in the first round. Top-seeded Medvedev will face 24-year-old American Stefan Kozlov and 2020 U.S. Open champion Dominic Thiem faces a stiff matchup against No. 12 seed Pablo Carreno Busta. Three-time major champion Andy Murray will have a difficult test against No. 24 seed Francisco Cerundolo.
World No. 2 Alexander Zverev announced Monday he will not compete as he continues to recover from a brutal ankle injury suffered during his French Open semifinal against Nadal.
The most thrilling first-round men’s match may be No. 23 seed Nick Kyrgios against his countryman, doubles partner and good friend Thanasi Kokkinakis. | 2022-08-25T19:28:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S. Open draw pits Serena Williams against Danka Kovinic - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/us-open-draw-serena-williams/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/us-open-draw-serena-williams/ |
Two tourists on motorized surfboards were the latest to infuriate the decorum police
Gabe Hiatt
A parasol lies on the ground in Venice as a result of bad weather in August. (Andrea Pattaro/AFP/Getty Images)
One of the most popular tourist attractions in Europe — and the world — Venice sells an image of ancient wealth, singing gondoliers and Gothic architecture. The city would appreciate it if you wouldn’t mess that up.
Dating back to at least 1986, Venice has imposed decorum codes with the threat of fines. Some guidelines are intended to preserve its fragile lagoon environment, and others to preempt tourists’ antics. Recent actions have included banning cruise ships from approaching the city center and approving “day-tripper” fees for tourists that will go into effect in January.
The city promotes an #EnjoyRespectVenezia campaign, listing actions that are no longer allowed “to preserve urban cleanliness and landscape, and also for reasons of safety and public hygiene.” Some of the “forbidden” behavior includes sitting on the ground to eat and drink in spots such as monuments, bridges, steps or high-water walkways. Also on the list, people will be fined 350 euros ($349) if they litter or dump trash in public areas, and they’ll be fined between 25 and 500 euros if they feed pigeons. Forget about camping or biking.
Just last week, a pair of Australians drew the mayor’s ire for riding motorized surfboards in the Grand Canal, becoming the latest addition to the list of petty infractions the city won’t suffer.
When the two visitors from Australia made waves, Mayor Luigi Brugnaro wasn’t happy about it. He shared a video of the tourists surfing and tweeted about the incident in Italian. Translated to English, he said: “Here are two overbearing idiots who make a mockery of the City. I ask everyone to help us identify them to punish them.” He offered a free dinner to anyone who could help in identification. Within hours, according to local reports, the city had seized their motorized surfboards and slapped them each with a $1,500 fine.
In June, when Venice was reportedly seeing upward of 90,000 tourists a day, tourists were fined more than 4,000 euros for spreading out a tablecloth and setting up a picnic — equipped with wine and glasses — on top of a 300-year-old wellhead near the Campo Zaccaria.
In January, CNN reported a Czech woman was banned from Venice for 48 hours and fined $513 after she took a topless photo on a war memorial in the Italian city. A local was walking with his son when he saw the woman and two of her friends on the monument. She went for a dip in the lagoon, leaving some of her personal items on top of the monument before she took a moment to pose.
In 2019, two German tourists in their 30s were fined 950 euros and asked to leave the city after they were caught making coffee on the steps of the Rialto Bridge, the oldest on the Grand Canal. Since then, the town introduced a new law that touches on a series of public offenses, including setting up picnics at certain sites. “Venice must be respected,” Brugnaro said at the time, “and those impolite people who come here and do what they want must understand that. Thanks to the local police, they will be sanctioned and removed.” | 2022-08-25T19:29:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Venice loves to fine bad tourists - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/25/venice-fines-tourists/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/25/venice-fines-tourists/ |
Students on campus at Phoenix College wait to register to vote on National Voter Registration Day 2019 in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
Since the 2020 elections, more than 8 million people in the United States have turned 18, becoming eligible to work full time, join the military, buy a lottery ticket, file a lawsuit — and, if they’re citizens, cast a vote. But, as of June, youth voter registration rates have lagged those from the last midterm cycle four years ago in about half of the states. It does not have to be this way.
Many of those who follow politics have puzzled over why those in the 18-to-29 age range vote at lower rates. True, college student turnout more than doubled between the 2014 and 2018 midterm elections, going from 19 percent to 40 percent. Around half of young eligible voters cast ballots in the 2020 presidential election, “likely one of the highest rates of youth electoral participation since the voting age was lowered to 18,” according to a Tufts University report. Even so, youth voter participation remained the lowest of all age groups — in 2020, 15 percentage points lower than the national average and 25 points lower than turnout among Americans aged 65 to 74.
The first step is to stop doing things liable to make the problem worse. Since 2021, 18 states have passed more than 30 restrictive voting laws. They should be doing the opposite. Registering and voting can be tricky for those doing so for the first time. Measures that make it easier to vote, such as automatic voter registration, online registration and same-day registration, improve youth participation. Heading into the fall, colleges and college towns should sponsor voter registration drives, set up polling places on college campuses and provide transportation to off-campus polls.
But huge numbers of young adults do not go to college, and they should not be overlooked. Young voters are stereotyped as a solidly Democratic voting bloc, giving Republicans incentive to discourage their participation. But those without a college degree are more likely to vote Republican. They’re also more likely not to vote at all: Young people without college experience are more likely to lack transportation to polling places or the time to vote, according to the Tufts study. Measures Republicans often oppose, such as expanded access to mail-in ballots and early voting, would help these voters cast ballots.
Yet even if it were not in Republicans’ political interest to enable young people to engage with the country’s political system, they should still encourage youth participation. They have no principled reason to oppose efforts to drive up turnout. Both parties should seek to win by running candidates and proposing policies that appeal to more people, including those whom their decisions will affect for a very long time. Meanwhile, getting young people to the polls not only permits them to have their say in how the nation is governed, it also might get them more engaged in the nation’s democracy and civil society over the long haul, enhancing the system’s legitimacy and popular buy-in. Both parties should make this long-term investment in democracy. | 2022-08-25T19:35:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Both Republicans and Democrats should help young people vote - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/youth-vote-midterm-election-voting-laws/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/youth-vote-midterm-election-voting-laws/ |
California’s misguided plan to ban new gas-powered cars
Traffic backs up at the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge toll plaza on August 24. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
California is once again trying to use government mandates to force its residents to help fight climate change. The state’s latest installment in this long-running play, a new rule banning the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035, is likely to be as much a failure as its previous efforts were.
The proposal is a classic exercise of hubris. The thinking goes like this: The state wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and many of those come from cars and trucks. Therefore, if it bans the sale of new cars that emit those gasses, the people will follow along without much complaint. Cars become electric, greenhouse gas emissions go down and the problem is solved.
The problem comes from that little variable the state’s bureaucrats overlook: the people. The vast majority of people buy cars and trucks to get from one place to another, not to serve some lofty climate goal. They also balance the costs of transportation against other goods, like housing and food. If transportation costs rise, they look for ways to cut them to maintain consumption elsewhere. That’s basic economics.
People buy gas-powered cars today in large part because they are cheaper than electric ones. Prices for electric vehicles are substantially higher than for equivalent gas-powered models. The average EV is about $10,000 more expensive upfront, a massive amount for the average household and an insuperable one for low-income households. Even the new, more restrictive $7,500 per vehicle tax credit doesn’t fully eliminate the upfront price disadvantage that discourages EV purchase. Fuel and maintenance costs are usually lower for electric vehicles than for gas-powered cars, but it still takes years for owners to recoup the heavy upfront price premium.
Then there’s the battery life and depletion problem. Batteries of all types eventually lose their ability to store electricity, and vehicle batteries are no exception. The longer you own an EV, the more the battery will deplete and require frequent recharging. This happens more quickly in places with extreme heat or cold — which is to say, most places in the United States outside of California. That means an owner will either have to recharge their car more frequently, raising operating costs, or even replace their battery at substantial costs. Manufacturers typically warranty their battery for 10 years or 100,000 miles, but that’s little comfort for someone who expects to drive their vehicle beyond those points.
Then you get the problem of convenience. Gas-powered cars can run for hundreds of miles without needing refueling, and filling the tank takes only a few minutes. EVs are catching up on the ability to go long distances, but they can’t come close to matching the refueling advantage gas-powered cars have. Even with a Level 2 charger, which itself costs hundreds — or thousands — of dollars to purchase and install in one’s home, it takes hours to fully recharge a drained battery. That’s a matter of hard physical science, not economics, making EVs a problematic purchase for households that drive long distances frequently.
Getting around this by purchasing a plug-in hybrid, a combination electric- and gas-powered car that the new rule would permit, reduces the impact on climate change the rule-makers are trying to achieve. And the rule also includes a minimum electric range requirement — 50 miles — that new plug-in hybrids would have to meet to be sold in 2035. Almost no current models meet that Olympian standard.
Regulators surely expect their mandate to drive cost reductions and technology improvements that can mitigate over time these barriers to EV adoption. But the rule contains its own self-destructive clause by allowing the sale of used gas-powered vehicles. Used vehicles are already about 70 percent of all annual vehicles sales. Drivers who can’t afford new EVs will increasingly turn to the used market to get the gas-powered car they really want. That will in turn reduce the demand signals regulators hope to generate to force auto manufacturers to improve EV technology. It’s like they punched their own holes in a hose even as they plan to try to push more water through it.
California’s insistence on top-down mandates is all the more surprising given its own checkered experience with such measures. The state promulgated a Low Emission Vehicle mandate in 1990, intending to drive demand and technological change in gas-powered cars to lower conventional pollutant emissions. The rule flopped spectacularly as demand for the new cars remained low and manufacturers could not economically produce the desired technological improvements. The rule was watered down considerably, and an analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California found that most of the environmental improvements over time came from vehicle changes unrelated to the rule’s strictures.
This gap between hope and reality is endemic in climate change policy. People have minds of their own and balance climate goals against a host of other considerations. If achieving climate aspirations costs too much, most people will abandon them in favor of other, more personally important goals. That is a reality that can only be overcome by force, much as government can compel behavior during wartime by rationing and price controls. The fact that there’s no political will to impose those measures on recalcitrant Americans means that climate policies like California’s will inevitably fail to reach their goals.
California’s new electric car mandate is inspired by the best of intentions. But its ignorance of human nature and economics means it’s likely to be just another case of California dreamin’. | 2022-08-25T20:19:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Banning new gas cars won't be enough to get Californians to buy electric vehicles - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/ev-california-gas-car-ban/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/ev-california-gas-car-ban/ |
Reframing solo driving time as an opportunity for enrichment can make long trips not only bearable but also productive. ( iStock)
10 tips to get the most out of your data and devices while on a road trip
Tackle a difficult book. There are many apps for enjoying audiobooks. Rather than simply opting for one you know you’ll love, attempt a more challenging title. “You might be able to get through it as an audiobook,” says Finn Murphy, author of “The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road,” a memoir documenting more than three decades of working as a driver for moving companies, adding more than 1 million miles to his odometers. “It doesn’t have to be something highbrow, either. I couldn’t get through the Harry Potter books; they annoyed the hell out of me. But when I put on the audiobook, the reader was amazing and did all the voices, so I ended up listening to them all and enjoying them immensely.”
Write your own book. Do you have a novel or screenplay kicking around in your head? Maybe you want to write a memoir, either with dreams of publication or simply as a way to preserve family history. A supersize stretch on the road is a good place to start putting down your thoughts, sketching out scenes and even dictating the text. That’s how Murphy began writing what became “The Long Haul,” though he started so long ago that he used a microcassette recorder. These days, you can simply record voice memos on your phone or take it to the next level by using an app that will transcribe your spoken words into text, such as Dragon Anywhere, Rev or SpeechNotes Plus.
Compose a song. Nashville-based folk singer-songwriter Ira Wolf tours the country in her van and has racked up more than 100,000 miles while posting about her adventures on Instagram. She doesn’t see those hours behind the wheel as wasted time. Instead, they’re an opportunity for creativity. After an hour or so on the road, she switches off all distractions and focuses her attention inward. “If I can slow down enough and just let things spill out, it’s fascinating what my subconscious holds on to and seems to be processing,” she says. “I can be inspired by the landscape or some emotional process I’m going through.” If there’s a line or melody she can’t get out of her head, she makes note of it for later.
Level up your music knowledge. If you’re not a burgeoning songwriter, enjoy music in creative ways instead. Listen to an artist’s entire discography in chronological order. Use the opportunity to do a deep dive into a genre that’s new to you or one that you want to understand better. Enjoy a curated mood-focused playlist on your favorite streaming service. Or steep yourself in local vibes by playing artists born in the state you’re driving through.
Memorize a poem. Want to wow fellow guests at the next dinner or cocktail party you attend? Spend time behind the wheel learning a beloved poem. Murphy perfected “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. The memorization process had an added benefit. “You parse the poem into pieces, so you end up having a broader appreciation for the poem,” he says. “It takes on deeper meaning.”
Have a big conversation. Kashdan notes that not talking to people face-to-face can have huge benefits for the scope, depth and tone of conversations. If you have a hands-free device for your phone and the traffic doesn’t present any challenges, solo road trips may be a good time to call someone with whom you want to have a long, meaningful talk. “You don’t have the extra emotional pressure of them looking at your reaction and you looking at their reaction,” he says. But be sure to keep the discussion low-key; the last place you want to get wound up is in the driver’s seat.
Here’s what I learned as a Black woman on a solo road trip across America
Stop to enjoy yourself. Don’t whiz by the world without pausing occasionally to take it all in. Wolf considers her route in advance to see whether there are any good hikes along the way — a great way to get in some exercise while breaking up long trips — or whether there are any lakes where her dog, Winnie, might be able to take a quick dip. As she drives, she keeps an eye out for photo ops. “I love taking pictures on the road, so I watch for lighting I like or nice landscapes,” she says.
Become a better driver. We tend to think of driving as a means to an end rather than a skill. Readjust your mind-set, so you consider it a proficiency you can hone every time you get in your car. Murphy suggests thinking like truck drivers, because it takes them longer to turn, accelerate and stop. That means they’re watching what’s happening nearby, but also looking ahead, literally and figuratively. “Essentially, you’re looking into the future to see where the next risk factor is going to be,” he says. “Maybe there’s a merge coming up or there’s an accident ahead. This approach will make you the ultimate defensive driver and help you rack up accident-free miles.”
Indulge in good food. Rather than settling for fast-food drive-throughs or whatever happens to be at the next rest stop, be intentional about where you eat on the road. This will require some research, so you’re not distractedly asking Siri for the closest Mediterranean restaurant or trying to type “best cheeseburger” into Google while you drive. Good resources for discovering primo pit stops are “Roadfood” by Jane and Michael Stern and the “Great American Eating Experiences” guide published by National Geographic. Even though Wolf has a full kitchen in her van, she has a penchant for doughnut shops. “They will always trump cooking dinner,” she says.
Do nothing at all. Although there is a tendency to fill our time when we’re alone, there is a drastic alternative: Try doing nothing at all, Kashdan says. Let go of feeling obligated to do anything more than drive. Just watch the world go by. Even if you stop somewhere to enjoy a sit-down meal, resist the temptation to read, flick through your phone or put in your ear buds. “There’s something really cool about just sitting there and just taking in the chatter of the room,” he says. “It’s about enjoying the moment.” | 2022-08-25T20:19:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Things to do on long solo car trips - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/25/solo-car-travel-tips/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/08/25/solo-car-travel-tips/ |
14 Prince George’s officers indicted, accused of double-dipping
Prosecutors allege the officers were working as private security officers while on duty for their regular county shifts.
Prince George's County State's Attorney announces that 14 police officers were indicted in a secondary employment scheme. (TWP/Katie Mettler)
Fourteen Prince George’s County police officers were indicted by a grand jury Thursday in what prosecutors allege was an elaborate double-dipping scheme to make money as private security officers while on the clock for their regular department shifts.
The officers, 13 who remain on the force and one who is retired, had their police powers suspended in April 2021, Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Aisha Braveboy and Police Chief Malik Aziz announced in a news conference.
“Public safety cannot operate without integrity,” Braveboy said. “The badge has to mean something.”
The men are accused of exploiting a Prince George’s County Police Department program known as secondary employment, which allows officers to earn additional income working security in their personal time. Often, officers working secondary employment provide security at apartment complexes, concerts, liquor stores, nightclubs or sporting events. Under old department rules, officers could find this secondary work themselves or become an employee of a private security firm that brokers the jobs for them. All secondary work was supposed to be approved and tracked through the department.
But that didn’t occur in the case of the 14 officers indicted, prosecutors alleged. The officers were identified as: Cpl. Nick Agapov, Cpl. Jonathan Haskett, Cpl. Mathew Obordo, Cpl. Matthew Cotillo, Cpl. Joshua Hitchens, Cpl. Chris Hall, Cpl. Michael O’Connell, Cpl. Travis Popielarcheck, Cpl. Kyle Cook, Cpl. Anthony Brooke, Cpl. Brandon Farley, Pfc. Christopher Oliver, Pfc. John Mcintosh and retired Cpl. James Lubonski.
These officers, prosecutors say, concealed overlapping secondary employment shifts from the police department. They provided security at more than 20 apartment complexes in the county, police officials said. According to two people with knowledge of the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity, they all worked for a fellow officer, Edward “Scott” Finn, who recently pleaded guilty to one count of federal tax evasion related to his security company Edward Finn Inc.
Finn, a now-retired Prince George’s County police lieutenant, employed his colleagues for what was supposed to be off-duty security assignments, officials said. Prosecutors and officials allege that the officers who worked for Finn provided false information to the apartment complexes to justify their private security services.
“This is truly a disheartening day for the men and women who represent the very best of Prince George’s County Police Department,” Aziz said.
The case of the 14 officers indicted Thursday stemmed from the federal investigation into Finn’s finances, officials said. Information about the alleged secondary employment misconduct was brought to the internal affairs division in February 2021, police said. After an “extensive investigation” the case was sent to the State’s Attorney’s Office.
The alleged officer misconduct occurred between January 2019 and March 2021, officials said.
In his federal case, Finn admitted that he failed to disclose $1.1 million in taxable income from the business over a six-year span. Finn, who had been with the police department for 25 years at the time of his arrest, was initially indicted on five counts of tax evasion and one count of obstructing justice. Prosecutors accused him of deleting incriminating data from his cellphone when federal agents arrived at his home with a search warrant.
Finn is scheduled to be sentenced in U.S. District Court in Maryland on Oct. 7.
The 14 officers were indicted on various charges including misconduct in office and felony and misdemeanor theft scheme.
Chris Hall, reached by phone Thursday afternoon, declined to comment. The Washington Post left messages at phone numbers listed by a public records research service for Agapov, Haskett, Obordo, Cotillo, Hitchens, Cook, Farley, Mcintosh and Lubonski. The Post could not immediately find working numbers associated with O’Connell, Popielarcheck, Brooke or Oliver. | 2022-08-25T20:45:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 14 Prince George's officers indicted in theft scheme - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/25/prince-georges-police-officers-indicted/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/25/prince-georges-police-officers-indicted/ |
First-of-its-kind study finds Hurricane Harvey hit Latinos the hardest
Researchers have connected climate change to extreme weather in the past. Now they can assess who’s most impacted.
Addicks Reservoir flows into neighborhoods from floodwaters brought on by Tropical Storm Harvey in Houston. (David J. Phillip/AP)
Scientists have long known that warming temperatures supercharged the rainfall from Hurricane Harvey. But now, in a landmark new study about the 2017 hurricane, they’ve gone a step further. In the new research, released Thursday in the journal Nature Communications, scientists showed not only that climate change greatly increased Harvey’s flooding but also that the climate-boosted flooding hit low-income, Hispanic communities the hardest.
The finding shows that researchers can now do more than quantify how climate change led to additional homes being flooded. They can also assess how weather extremes, propelled by climate change, harm some groups more than others.
“There is now a clear line between how human beings have affected the environment to how that could impact a particular storm or event, and how that affects the most vulnerable communities,” said Daniel Gilford, a climate scientist at the nonprofit Climate Central who was not involved in the Harvey study. “And I think this paper does an excellent job of making that connection.”
Once upon a time — or around two decades ago — scientists often said that they could not connect any given hurricane or other weather extreme to climate change. The science didn’t exist yet.
Gradually, researchers began to use models for two separate climate systems: one with human-induced global warming, and one without. By comparing extreme weather events in the two different worlds, scientists can now say how climate change has influenced the likelihood or severity of particular heat waves, droughts, floods and hurricanes.
But it’s only recently that scientists have also begun to track climate change’s fingerprints on the impacts of given events: quantifying the number of homes flooded by climate change, for example, or billions of dollars in damages done. Last year, researchers estimated that global warming was responsible for at least $8 billion of Hurricane Sandy’s damages in New York City and the surrounding areas.
When Hurricane Harvey doused the city of Houston, it also filled Billy Guevara’s home in northeast Houston with 17 inches of floodwater. Guevara, who is blind, remembers his seeing-eye dog perched on a grooming table to stay out of the rising waters; he remembers being without power for four days as the water crept up his driveway; he remembers being crushed by the news that, a few miles away, several of his cousins and his aunt and uncle had been swept away in their van by the floods.
But he also remembers the smell. “Like a wet dog,” he said. “Just damp.”
Five years after Hurricane Harvey, Guevara, 48, has little doubt in his mind as to one of the main causes of the disaster he experienced. “I blame a lot of this on global warming,” he said. “There’s no doubt about it.”
For the new study on Hurricane Harvey, scientists built on research that quantified how much of the hurricane’s rainfall was due to temperature change from the burning of fossil fuels. (Warmer air holds more moisture, which can lead to more intense rainfall during hurricanes.)
On the low end, researchers estimated that global warming was responsible for about 20 percent of the precipitation that fell during Hurricane Harvey; on the high end, that figure could be as much as 38 percent. When the scientists plugged those numbers into a flood model, they found that climate change had increased the depth of the flooding between eight to 10 inches.
For somewhere between 32 percent to 50 percent of homes, those eight to 10 inches were the difference between the home flooding and the home coming out of the hurricane unscathed.
“The first big finding is that climate change can serve as the tipping point between flooding and not flooding,” said Kevin Smiley, a professor of sociology and Louisiana State University and the lead author of the paper. “That extra few inches could mean the difference between having a very soaked lawn and having a few inches of water in your home — which could mean thousands of dollars of damages.”
Researchers then analyzed how different groups were affected by the flooding. According to the study, neighborhoods with more Latino residents also seeing more flooding attributed to climate change. For example, Latino households only make up 36 percent of the properties in Houston that did not flood during the hurricane; but they accounted for 48 percent of the properties that flooded because of climate change and 50 percent of the properties that would have flooded anyway.
The researchers did not attempt to identify the precise causes of the disparity, but environmental justice advocates have long argued that poor drainage and outdated infrastructure can magnify flood damages in low-income neighborhoods.
According to Smiley, that’s a clear demonstration of how climate change is exacerbating existing inequalities. “The core question of the entire study was: ‘Who bears the brunt of climate change?’” Smiley said. “When you have these disproportionate impacts, it raises questions about the urban development processes that contributed to it.”
The study also showed that areas outside the Federal Emergency Management Agency 100-year flood plain also suffered greater climate change-induced flooding. The 100-year flood plain designates areas that FEMA believes have a 1 percent chance of flooding in any given year. Homeowners with federally backed loans in these areas are required to purchase flood insurance.
But because many of the damaged homes were outside the flood plain, Smiley worries that many homeowners did not have flood insurance. “Outside the flood plain you may not even be aware that you’re at risk,” he said. “You may not have even thought about purchasing flood insurance.”
Guevara’s home had flooded once before, during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, so he knew that there was some level of risk. But neither he nor his mother, who lived next door, had flood insurance by the time Harvey rolled around. “They said we weren’t in the flood plain, so it wasn’t necessary,” he said during a phone call. “We let our flood insurance lapse — we couldn’t afford it anymore.”
Smiley and one of his co-authors, Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., say that they mostly want the study to inform the public and also to spur places like Harris County to address underlying socioeconomic inequalities. But both also note that similar studies could be used for litigation — one of the original goals of attribution science. Now that scientists can trace specific damages to climate change, it may be possible to someday sue fossil fuel companies for helping to spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. So far, similar lawsuits haven’t made it far in the U.S. context. But, with the United Nations focusing more on the idea of “loss and damage” for climate-related disasters, such research could become increasingly useful.
“It’s not a decision for me to make, obviously,” said Wehner. “But this is a defensible way to establish losses and damages.”
The prospect of another flood is never far away. “It’s always in the back of our minds whenever a system comes into the Gulf,” Guevara said. “There’s always the fear.”
More on the Atlantic hurricane season
How tropical storms and hurricanes have hit U.S. shores with unparalleled frequency | 2022-08-25T20:58:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hurricane Harvey hit Latinos hardest, landmark study finds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/25/hurricane-harvey-climate-change-study/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/25/hurricane-harvey-climate-change-study/ |
Trigger laws tighten abortion bans in three states
Antiabortion activists protest outside of the carafem clinic in Mt. Juliet, Tenn., on July 28. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
Trigger laws tightened abortion restrictions in Tennessee, Idaho and Texas on Thursday, banning abortion from conception in Tennessee and Idaho and raising the penalty for abortion providers in Texas. Nearly 36 percent of U.S. women live in a state that bans most abortions, though some of those laws have been temporarily blocked by the courts, and more restrictions are on the horizon.
Antiabortion activists welcomed the new restrictions, which outlawed abortions that had previously been allowed under “heartbeat” bans in Idaho and Tennessee. Those states previously allowed the procedure before cardiac activity could be detected, which occurs around the sixth week of pregnancy — before many people know they are pregnant.
“Today we celebrate the strongest protections yet for thousands of unborn babies and their mothers across Idaho, Tennessee and Texas,” SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a statement Thursday. “Victories like these are made possible by the Dobbs decision that paved the way for all Americans and their elected representatives to protect life in our laws.”
Abortion was already tightly controlled in those three states before Thursday’s trigger laws took effect. For months, Texas has banned abortion from conception with a narrow exception in cases where the pregnant patient’s life is in danger. Abortion was mostly banned in Tennessee and Idaho, but a small number of people could terminate very early pregnancies.
On Thursday, a trigger law took effect in Texas and raised the civil and criminal penalties for doctors who perform an illegal abortion to include a $100,000 fine and up to life in prison. A new law in Idaho bars abortions from conception, with exceptions for victims of rape, incest or to save the life of the pregnant patient. Tennessee also tightened its ban to include nearly all abortions, with a narrow exception for cases where the pregnant person’s life is at risk.
Little changed in Texas on Thursday, where doctors had already been prohibited from providing most abortions since the state passed a six-week abortion ban known as S.B. 8 last year. The state’s ban expanded this year to outlaw the procedure beginning at conception.
“Since the [Supreme Court] decision came out, really, there’s been no meaningful access to abortion,” said Bhavik Kumar, medical director at Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast in Houston.
Abortion rights activists raised concerns that the tighter restrictions going into effect might jeopardize treatment for women facing pregnancy complications in those states, even though Texas, Tennessee and Idaho already had laws in place that banned most abortions.
“It’ll have a real chilling effect on physicians who provide for women in other settings," said Ashley Coffield, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and Northern Mississippi.
Doctors are left to decide, in the heat of the moment, whether a potentially life-threatening pregnancy complication like preeclampsia qualifies for an exception under the new law. “Whether it qualifies for a life emergency exception under this total ban would be a risk for providers to take because these are criminal penalties associated with this ban,” she added.
Additional restrictive abortion laws loom in the coming weeks.
Beginning Friday in North Dakota, abortion will likely be outlawed, except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the pregnant person. A judge temporarily put a hold on the state’s trigger law in late July, delaying its start date by about 30 days, but that temporary order expires Friday if it is not extended. Abortion has already all but ceased in the state, after the sole abortion clinic moved across state lines from Fargo to Moorhead, Minn., so that it could keep serving patients even if the trigger ban takes effect this week.
Oklahoma on Saturday increases penalties for doctors who perform illegal abortions, to include a $100,000 fine and up to 10 years in prison. The state bans nearly all abortion, with exceptions for instances of rape or incest that have been reported to police or if medically necessary to save the pregnant patient’s life.
On Sept. 15, Indiana will implement the first new abortion ban to be passed by a state legislature since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. Indiana lawmakers on Aug. 5 passed the ban from conception, with exceptions for rape, incest, lethal fetal anomalies and to save the life of the pregnant individual.
Lawmakers in South Carolina and West Virginia are also considering bills that would tighten restrictions on abortion in special legislative sessions that have spanned much of the summer.
West Virginia Republicans could not agree on whether to include exceptions for rape and incest in a proposed ban that the state Senate passed late last month. The state House rejected the Senate’s bill, and asked for a conference committee made up of members of both legislative chambers to meet and hash out the details of a ban that could get enough support to pass. The proposed ban has been stalled since then, though lawmakers could return to vote again.
The debate around exceptions also has been heated in South Carolina, where a bill that would not allow victims of rape or incest to terminate pregnancies is moving through the legislative process in the coming weeks. The state House will likely vote next week, and if the bill passes, it will move on to the state Senate. The state already has a six-week ban, but that law was blocked by the South Carolina Supreme Court last week. | 2022-08-25T20:59:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trigger laws tighten abortion bans in three states - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/25/abortion-trigger-bans/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/25/abortion-trigger-bans/ |
U.S. hits targets tied to Iran-backed militias
The U.S. military hit several targets in the Syrian city of Mayadin in parts of Deir al-Zour province under government control, in the third day of skirmishes with Iran-backed groups, local military sources said.
They said at least three members of an Iran-aligned militia were killed by a U.S. helicopter as they were about to prepare a rocket launcher in the town, which lies along the western bank of the Euphrates River. Iranian militias have a strong presence in the town and have long targeted the nearby Al Omar oil field on the eastern bank of the river, where the U.S. coalition has its biggest base in Syria.
The base, also known as Green Village, was targeted for a second consecutive day on Wednesday. At least one U.S. service member has been injured in the attacks and up to four militants killed, according to the U.S. military.
Islamic Jihad member faces terrorism charge
The Israeli military has filed terrorism charges against Bassam al-Saadi, a senior member of the Islamic Jihad militant group whose arrest earlier this month sparked three days of heavy fighting in Gaza.
The Iran-sponsored militant group has demanded the release of Saadi and another detained Palestinian who is on a prolonged hunger strike. The indictment signals that those demands will not be met.
The military said Saadi, 62, stands accused of “committing crimes of affiliation with and activity in an illegal association” and receiving funds from Islamic Jihad in Gaza, as well as “impersonation, incitement and aiding contact with enemy elements.” He has spent a total of 15 years over several stints in Israeli jails for being an Islamic Jihad member.
Islamic Jihad is opposed to Israel’s existence and has carried out scores of deadly attacks over the years.
Angola's long-ruling party appears on verge of victory: The People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola, the nation's ruling party since 1975, looked set to win a national election with a solid lead over the main opposition on Thursday. The election commission said that with about 86 percent of the votes counted from Wednesday's poll, the MPLA was ahead with a 52 percent majority, while its main opposition rival the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) had 42 percent. UNITA's vice-presidential candidate Abel Chivukuvuku told Portuguese radio station TSF that the party was considering contesting the results because they did not "correspond to reality," fueling fears of post-election violence.
Monkeypox cases on decline globally, WHO says: The number of monkeypox cases reported globally declined by 21 percent last week, after a month-long trend of rising infections, the World Health Organization said. The WHO declared the outbreak a global health emergency in July. So far, more than 41,000 cases of monkeypox and 12 deaths have been reported in 96 countries, with the majority of cases in the United States. The decrease in case numbers may potentially signal that the outbreak is declining in the European region, according to WHO's latest epidemiological report.
Vietnamese court upholds prison sentence for journalist: A Vietnamese court has upheld a nine-year prison term for a journalist and prominent dissident convicted of anti-state activities, her lawyers and state media said. The Hanoi People's High Court rejected the appeals by Pham Doan Trang, 44, at a tightly controlled trial in the capital city. Trang, who widely published material on human rights and alleged police brutality in Vietnam, was convicted in December of "conducting propaganda against the state."
Blackburn joins list of U.S. lawmakers visiting Taiwan: Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who sits on the Senate Commerce and Armed Services committees, arrived in Taiwan on the third visit by a U.S. dignitary this month, defying pressure from Beijing to halt the trips. Taiwan's Foreign Ministry said Blackburn was due to meet President Tsai Ing-wen on her trip, which ends Saturday, as well as top security and foreign affairs officials. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) visited in early August, sparking strong condemnation and aggressive military action by Beijing, which sees Taiwan, a self-ruling island, as its territory. | 2022-08-25T20:59:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Digest: Aug. 25, 2022 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug25-2022/2022/08/25/d2425860-2488-11ed-ba29-39afcd3965a2_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug25-2022/2022/08/25/d2425860-2488-11ed-ba29-39afcd3965a2_story.html |
Better climate models would build in political and personal decisions
Climate systems are social systems, too, and political scientists and the foreign policy community need to take that into account
Perspective by Daniel Baer
Noah J. Gordon
Drought in Europe has led to water levels in Spain's San Juan Reservoir decreasing 60 percent, causing farmers around Madrid to move up the harvest of their wine grapes. (Marcos Del Mazo/Getty Images)
Climate models are complicated things. They must consider a staggering number of mathematical and physical variables to predict, for instance, how emitting a given amount of carbon dioxide will change the flows of air, water and heat between the atmosphere and the oceans. More sophisticated projections go further, showing how temperature changes will affect rainfall in a certain region, which in turn will affect crop yields and, as a result, the carbon cycle.
Integrated assessment models widen the analysis yet further, including links between the climate system and the economy; for example, simulating how changes in population growth or fuel demand will affect the climate. It is also possible to add social and political variables: The models used in the latest report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rely on narratives of future development, or “shared socioeconomic pathways.” One narrative depicts the world developing in a way that respects planetary boundaries and reduces inequality along with emissions; another shows a world where resurgent nationalism and environmental degradation make mitigation and adaptation difficult. There are big unanswered questions here; for example, once they can afford to, will people in the global south consume as much meat as Westerners currently do? An integrated assessment model puts out different results based on which storyline it’s fed.
As useful as these models are, though, nearly all of them treat the human decisions that determine greenhouse gas emissions as external: Political choices are inputs, not outputs. Modelers generally don’t have a way of accounting for the complex interactions between the energy system and human decisions. For instance, extreme heat waves like the one that baked Europe in July tend to drive support for green parties, but the heat has also pushed sweaty British and French people to buy air conditioners, which can increase the cost of electricity, leading some politicians to blame carbon pricing for the high cost of living. The thousands of Britons pledging to boycott their energy bills this winter are unlikely to support any climate policies that cut emissions by raising the cost of their energy, and it’s very tricky for a typical climate model to capture these dynamics.
And yet these shifts — in which climate change generates political responses that, among other things, make climate action more or less likely — act as distortions that undermine the accuracy of models’ projections. This isn’t just an academic point. At a global level, political dynamics in one country affect the climate outcomes for others, some disproportionately so. At a local level, policymakers need a true sense of what kind of ecological and climate change is coming so they can make the right preparations — for example, to inform decisions on which neighborhoods are at risk of flooding and might need to be protected with a new sea wall.
Some scientists are trying to address these limitations — to show how social factors and biophysical changes influence each other. In a February article in Nature, a group of scholars described a new model they called the “coupled climate-social system.” It includes feedback processes involving policy, public opinion, emissions and the climate. One feedback process takes into account social conformity: the pressure to fit in, for example, by conserving energy when gasoline is expensive or installing solar panels to match the neighbors’. Another feedback process involves political interest; think of how America’s new Inflation Reduction Act promises to create millions of jobs installing green technologies such as solar panels, and how those workers might then support policies that boost clean energy even further. One of the most interesting mechanisms is the “expressive force of law” feedback loop, the idea that changes to laws can shape broader social norms, the way smoking bans in restaurants helped reduce smoking throughout society. For example, in the grip of a megadrought, Nevada is banning most lawns to save water. People from parts of the parched American West where lawns remain legal might visit Las Vegas and decide that rock gardens aren’t so bad, especially if saving water helps the state keep producing low-emissions hydropower from the Hoover Dam.
The Nature article’s authors argue that integrating these social phenomena into their perspective allows them to explain emissions trajectories as a product not only of the price of wind power or the rate of deforestation, but also of the social and political changes that will be shaped by (and themselves shape) humanity’s path to a lower-carbon future. Bringing sociopolitical dynamics into scientific models of climate change, they say, makes the models more robust.
The social-climate system article builds on other recent efforts to link climate models with social models, such as a 2021 Nature commentary calling for climate models to “get real about people.” As The Washington Post recently reported, in an article about the energy economics models used in calculating how the Inflation Reduction Act might benefit the climate, it’s clear that humans are not purely rational actors who make decisions solely by weighing costs and benefits. It’s time for modelers of climate change — which, after all, is a product of human behavior — to recognize that too.
Kids are living with climate catastrophe. That doesn’t mean they believe in it.
What these early attempts at an integrated model drive home is that neither physical scientists on the one hand, nor economists, political scientists and international relations scholars on the other, can responsibly assume that the other sphere will proceed in a straight or predictable line. If the world is to successfully address climate change, the path will proceed in steps, many of which will be driven by human decisions in response to climate impacts.
Admittedly, no model can be comprehensive. The social-climate model, for one, does not account for geopolitical shocks such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing restrictions on Russian fuel exports, nor how those shocks might be shaped or even caused by climate action or inaction. But the point isn’t that social-climate models have to keep expanding to include every possible feedback loop in all its complexity. That’s impossible.
The scientists behind the social-climate model have begun to do their part to consider how sociopolitical phenomena manifest as dependent variables. But are policymakers and political analysts doing enough to integrate climate science into their own models and theories, which are built on their understandings of social and political dynamics? Political scientists could build models and theoretical frames that take into account climate science, making their side of the feedback loop more robust. They can help clarify how geopolitical shifts could be shaped by and in turn shape climate action, focusing on the effects of climate change and the responses to it.
For example, if the richest, most polluting nations continue to fall short on their promises to share climate-related financial aid and technology with developing nations, and the U.N. Security Council remains unable to agree to address climate security risks, won’t the United Nations — if it still exists — be a less effective actor in 2040 than it is today? China plans to double its wind and solar capacity over the next five years, and electric vehicles already make up a quarter of the cars produced there. What, then, would be the geostrategic implications of China reducing its dependence on foreign oil imported through the Strait of Malacca? Or, to take another example, might those suffering from historic heat waves be radicalized and turn to violence, sabotaging oil and gas pipelines or committing violent attacks on the governments they perceive to have failed them? And how would any of this then affect decisions about climate policy? Here, too, there are feedback loops, between the climate impacts, the perceptions of those suffering from them, and the reactions of governments and international organizations.
To the extent that policymakers pay attention to the geopolitical implications of climate change, they mostly focus on how climate will modify constraints and opportunities in their existing worldviews — such as Arctic ice melting and opening up new sea routes — rather than re-evaluating theories of global security: The United States’ Interim National Security Strategic Guidance from 2021 repeats the term “climate crisis” without considering how it interacts with other threats. The Defense Department’s Climate Risk Analysis from 2021 goes deeper, with an encouraging focus on second-order effects of climate change, such as migration and civil unrest. Most forward-looking and holistic is the 2021 National Intelligence Estimate on climate security challenges, which warns that rich countries’ failure to uphold the Paris agreement could raise geopolitical tensions in ways that threaten the United States and the institutions it co-leads. But such thinking is not widespread enough. A climate-change-worsened hurricane in the Caribbean is a geopolitical event as well as a humanitarian crisis.
Now that the scientists have lobbed it over the net, the ball is in the court of the political, international relations and foreign policy community. Our task is to ensure that we treat climate change and environmental crises not as troubling developments that run parallel to human-driven international politics, but as threads that cannot be disentangled from them. | 2022-08-25T21:00:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Better climate models would build in political and personal decisions - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/25/climate-models-social-policymakers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/25/climate-models-social-policymakers/ |
Police identify man fatally shot in Lewisdale area
Prince George’s County police identified a 30-year-old man who was fatally shot in the Lewisdale area Wednesday night.
Police said the victim, Irvin Paredes, of the Langley Park area, was found about 9:15 p.m. in a parking lot in the 2300 block of University Boulevard. He died at the scene, police said. | 2022-08-25T21:55:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Police identify man fatally shot in Lewisdale area - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/25/man-fatally-shot-lewisdale/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/25/man-fatally-shot-lewisdale/ |
Finally, some justice for Breonna Taylor and me
By Kenneth Walker
People celebrate the FBI's arrest and charges against four police officers for their roles in the 2020 fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor, in Louisville, on August 4. (REUTERS/Amira Karaoud)
Kenneth Walker is a native of Louisville.
After nearly two and a half years, a person connected with the Louisville Metro Police Department has finally taken some responsibility for the death of my girlfriend, Breonna Taylor.
Since March 13, 2020, I have had to hear lie after lie about what happened that horrible night. Now the police have begun to tell the truth — that the cops knew that they did not have probable cause to search Bre’s apartment, that they lied to get the search warrant that resulted in officers unlawfully breaking down our door in the middle of the night, that they conspired to cover their tracks after gunning Bre down, and that they kept lying for years.
Moments after I held Bre as she died, the police arrested and charged me with attempted murder. Knowing all the problems that this failed raid would create, the Louisville police tried to use me as a scapegoat to deflect blame. It almost worked.
Justice has been a long time coming. For two months in 2020, I sat in custody thinking and believing I might die in prison — and for what? But, during that time, the police in Minneapolis choked the life out of George Floyd as he repeatedly told the police, “I can’t breathe.” Floyd’s murder led the world to look into the death of Breonna, the woman I loved. After Bre’s case started to receive attention, the case against me started to receive attention. Soon after, a judge dismissed it.
Following my release from jail, I sat by shell-shocked and waited for the Commonwealth of Kentucky to investigate the officers who caused the death of Bre and who wrongfully arrested, charged and blamed me for their mistakes. But instead of holding the officers responsible, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron told the world in September 2020 that it was my fault Bre died.
It was not my fault that the police refused to respond to Bre’s calls of “Who is it?” and returned more than 20 shots after I fired one shot to protect us in her apartment — a shot fired after the cops, holding a fraudulently obtained warrant, refused to identify themselves and knocked down our door in the middle of the night. Louisville police and local government officials made this about my (lawful) use of a firearm instead of their illegal conduct that led them to our doorstep.
This week, we got some accountability. Former police detective Kelly Goodlett pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy and admitted that the only information in the affidavit that might have justified a warrant was false. She admitted to knowing the warrant would be executed in the middle of the night and that it might risk injury or death to people in the home. She admitted that the warrant did not reflect up-to-date information. She also admitted that she and other members of the police department tried to cover up their lies.
The Justice Department’s investigation has begun to reveal the real story about what happened that night. There was no good reason for the cops to execute a search warrant at Bre’s apartment at any time, much less in the middle of the night. Federal charges are still pending against former officers Joshua Jaynes, Kyle Meany and Brett Hankison. All of these officers have been fired, although Meany did not lose his job until last week. The wheels of justice have turned very slowly, but I am grateful that the Justice Department has been faithful in its pursuit of the truth.
For me, Goodlett’s guilty plea is bittersweet. This case will follow me the rest of my life. I have to live as a witness to Bre’s horrific and tragic death. The memory of that door being forced open is with me constantly and makes it very hard to sleep. My mug shot has been shown all over the country. Even now, I am wrongly called a “thug” and a “drug dealer” by people I have never met. The Louisville police tried to have my civil suits against city and county officials dismissed, but they are proceeding.
I have to live with constant reminders of police falsely charging and mistreating me. While driving from Atlanta back to Kentucky last year, a Tennessee officer pulled me over for a traffic violation. When the officer ran my information, his system showed that charges of attempted murder of a police officer had been filed against me. Before I knew it, more police cars drove up. Luckily, the officers allowed me to explain that those charges had been dismissed. But, for a moment, I felt as helpless and afraid as I did on March 13, 2020.
This is my life. While I am grateful to have it, the nightmare continues. | 2022-08-25T22:30:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Kenneth Walker: Finally, justice for Breonna Taylor. It’s not enough. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/breonna-taylor-boyfriend-kenneth-walker-louisville-police/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/breonna-taylor-boyfriend-kenneth-walker-louisville-police/ |
A Taliban fighter stands guard outside a public meeting held at a private salon in Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Aug. 18. (Javed Tanveer/AFP via Getty Images)
So “duty still calls the U.S. in Afghanistan” [“A year after Kabul’s fall,” editorial, Aug. 21]? No. We have done our duty, and it is time to move on. Afghanistan had 20 years to develop some sort of stable, hopefully democratic, system. It failed. And it failed because most Afghans didn’t want what we offered the nation.
Let Iran, Pakistan, China and others who supported the Taliban now support the country. The Taliban is proving to be a disaster. But the Afghan people made their choice, and now they are stuck with it. And so are we.
Steve Baldwin, Springfield | 2022-08-25T22:31:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | We don’t owe Afghanistan more - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/we-dont-owe-afghanistan-more/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/we-dont-owe-afghanistan-more/ |
A demonstrator holds a sign outside the White House on Thursday. (Stefani Reynolds/AFP)
Millions of Americans rely on the federal government to cover the cost of college. Soaring tuition costs, higher enrollment and changes to the federal lending system have all contributed to the $1.6 trillion in outstanding federal student debt.
This week, President Biden announced a plan to cancel up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt for many borrowers, and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.
National higher education reporter Danielle Douglas-Gabriel walks us through who qualifies for the plan and the arguments for and against this massive debt forgiveness. | 2022-08-25T22:31:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How student debt relief works - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/how-student-debt-relief-works/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/how-student-debt-relief-works/ |
Decision clears the way for Maryland’s governor to secure a contract to widen the congested highways
Cars bake in 90-degree heat in the northbound lanes of I-270 last summer, in Clarksburg, Md. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
“This interstate project will address one of the worst traffic bottlenecks in the country, create more jobs and opportunities, and expand bike, transit and pedestrian infrastructure,” Hogan (R) said in a statement. “It is exactly the kind of bold and forward-thinking solution that Marylanders have been crying out for, for years if not decades.”
The highway project is one of Hogan’s signature transportation initiatives, and the term-limited governor has been racing to lock it in before he leaves office in January. Backers say adding two toll lanes in each direction on sections of the Beltway and 270 will alleviate traffic that makes commuting around the Washington region a misery for many drivers. But in the face of worsening climate change, transit advocates and some local officials have questioned funding a gigantic project to accommodate more cars.
The approval documents commitments the Maryland Department of Transportation has made to fund transit as part of the project. The contracting group the state intends to partner with would provide $300 million for transit in Montgomery County over the life of the project. The state transportation department would build a new facility and provide a fleet of buses, and allocate a further $60 million to design transit projects in the county.
Officials at the Federal Highway Administration had said earlier this month that they needed additional time to review the project’s environmental-impact studies. They missed an Aug. 5 target date for issuing their final sign-off, known as a record of decision.
The project faced a late challenge from advocates who alleged that there were signs of possible fraud in traffic modeling that officials had conducted as part of their final review. The highway administration asked the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Volpe Center, which provides technical assistance to officials, to review those claims. The center’s review “did not find scientific integrity fraud” in the traffic modeling, according an FHWA memo released along with the record of decision. | 2022-08-25T22:33:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Beltway, I-270 toll lanes win federal approval in boon for Larry Hogan - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/08/25/beltway-i270-toll-lanes-hogan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/08/25/beltway-i270-toll-lanes-hogan/ |
The $1.6 billion man
Leonard Leo, at Trump Tower in November 2016, left his position of executive vice president of the Federalist Society in 2020. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)
If, as the Supreme Court has decreed, money is speech, then $1.6 billion is one boatload of rhetoric.
That is the eye-popping sum — described as “the largest political advocacy donation in U.S. history” — that a little-known electronics magnate donated, tax-free, to a new nonprofit run by Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo.
There is so much wrong with this picture — even aside from how it supercharges the conservative Leo’s already-considerable influence on the country’s legal and political landscape. The gusher of cash in modern-day politics, much of it from undisclosed donors and not subject to ordinary contribution limits or reporting requirements, is a bipartisan scandal, one to which we have become dangerously inured.
When seven-, eight- and now 10-figure (10!) checks dominate the political discourse, when the public has little way of knowing who is funding messages and promoting candidates, the ordinary contest of ideas is skewed even more heavily in favor of the wealthy and powerful.
The mega-donation came from Barre Seid, a 90-year-old Chicago man who made his fortune in surge protectors and other computer equipment. First reported by the New York Times’s Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher, it took the form of shares in Seid’s company, Tripp Lite. The entire ownership of Tripp Lite was first transferred to a new entity controlled by Leo, the Marble Freedom Trust; then the company was sold last year to an Irish conglomerate.
The structure of the transaction, evidently legal, allowed Seid to avoid paying capital gains taxes on the increased value of the company; ProPublica and the Lever, which jointly reported on the donation, estimated the savings — and, therefore, the taxpayer-subsidized benefit to Leo — at $400 million.
And that’s just the galling tax wrinkle. The real story — the real problem — is that $1.6 billion, and to understand why requires a quick history of campaign finance regulation and the emergence of “dark money.”
A half-century ago, in the aftermath of Watergate, lawmakers of both parties — imagine that — got together to enact new limits designed to reduce the influence of money in politics and to ensure that the public knew where the money that was spent to help elect candidates was coming from. Thanks to a hostile Supreme Court, an intentionally ineffectual Federal Election Commission and a similarly feckless Internal Revenue Service, that effort can now be declared an abject failure.
The IRS comes into the picture because an enormous amount of political spending is now being conducted through the vehicle of nonprofit groups organized under section 501(c) (4) of the tax code. These are supposed to be “social welfare organizations” but they are now routinely used for political spending and influencing elections, including directly advocating for or against candidates.
So long as that is not deemed their “primary purpose,” these groups, and Leo’s new Marble Freedom Trust is one of them, are permitted to engage in political activities. They do not have to disclose their donors or report much about how the funds were used; hence the term “dark money.”
On its tax filing, Marble Freedom Trust offered this fuzzy description of its mission: “to maintain and expand human freedom consistent with the values and ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.” It acknowledged that the money came from the “sale of gifted company and subsidiaries” but said it was withholding identifying information “to protect donor confidentiality.” We know that Seid is the benefactor, but that’s thanks to diligent reporting, not any legal mandate.
This end-run around transparency and contribution limits has been adopted with bipartisan gusto. Indeed, in recent elections, Democrats, who once decried dark money, have excelled at collecting and deploying it to maximum political advantage. A New York Times analysis found that “15 of the most politically active nonprofit organizations that generally align with the Democratic Party spent more than $1.5 billion in 2020 — compared to roughly $900 million spent by a comparable sample of 15 of the most politically active groups aligned with the G.O.P.”
A “single, cryptically named entity that has served as a clearinghouse of undisclosed cash for the left, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, received mystery donations as large as $50 million and disseminated grants to more than 200 groups, while spending a total of $410 million in 2020 — more than the Democratic National Committee itself,” the Times reported.
Enter Seid and his mega-donation. “It’s high time for the conservative movement to be among the ranks of George Soros, Hansjörg Wyss, Arabella Advisors and other left-wing philanthropists, going toe-to-toe in the fight to defend our constitution and its ideals,” Leo told the newspaper, referring to some of the Democrats’ big donors and allied groups.
It’s more than a bit rich for Leo to portray himself as the poor cousin here. He sits astride a deliberately opaque and interconnected multimillion — now billion — dollar ideological and political empire. Leo’s original mission was installing conservative Supreme Court justices and federal judges, but in recent years he has stepped aside from his day-to-day role at the Federalist Society and broadened his focus to transforming state courts, pushing for tighter voting restrictions and other conservative causes.
The Marble Freedom Trust filing reports disbursing almost $230 million in the year beginning May 2020, including $153 million to another Leo group, the Rule of Law Trust and $41 million to Donors Trust, a vehicle for anonymous contributions to conservative groups.
Leo, by the way, paid himself $350,000. | 2022-08-25T22:47:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Leonard Leo’s $1.6 billion donation points to a bipartisan scandal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/dark-money-federalist-society-politics-distortion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/25/dark-money-federalist-society-politics-distortion/ |
The 11-3 vote to unionize at one of the chain’s locations in Michigan marks landmark victory for labor unions in fast food.
Employees prepare lunch orders at a Chipotle restaurant in New York. Photographer: Craig Warga/Bloomberg (Craig Warga/Bloomberg)
Workers at a Chipotle Mexican Grill in Lansing, Mich. voted to unionize on Thursday, establishing the only union at the fast food chain nationwide. The vote, which took place in the restaurant parking lot, was 11 to 3 with two contested ballots.
The election follows a string of first-time union victories led by Gen Z and millennial workers at high-profile companies such as Amazon, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, and Apple that have long evaded unionization. It also marks a milestone for the low-wage fast food industry, where unions have struggled for decades to gain a foothold because of the sheer number of locations, the franchising model, and high turnover.
“I am so excited we won. Being one of the first fast food restaurants to do this definitely proves a point to the entire country that we can do this,” said Samantha Smith, an 18-year-old crew member who voted Thursday. “This is a gigantic first step toward doing that and improving the lives of future generations.” Smith, who has worked at the Chipotle in Lansing for two years, makes $13.33 an hour.
Employers add 528,000 jobs in July, shattering expectations
“At Chipotle, our employees are our greatest asset, and we are committed to listening to their needs and continuing to improve upon their workplace experience,” said Laurie Schalow, chief corporate affairs officer at Chipotle. “We’re disappointed that the employees at our Lansing, MI restaurant chose to have a third party speak on their behalf because we continue to believe that working directly together is best for our employees.”
Workers at the Chipotle in Lansing cited wages and under-scheduling as the impetus for their campaign. They said some workers at their store make around $13 an hour and aren’t getting enough hours to afford basic necessities. Before filing for the union election, union organizers said some workers had been scheduled at times for one day a week. And during most shifts, some workers have had to take on additional jobs outside their normal responsibilities, such as running the cash register or drive-through while preparing food, they alleged.
Starbucks illegally withheld raises from union workers, labor board said
“It would be fine if you could bring up workplace issues and they were addressed but they’re not,” said Atulya Dora-Laskey, a 23-year-old crew member and union organizer at the Chipotle in Lansing. “They say ask us for things directly, but if you ask someone directly, they just ignore you. "That made it crystal clear that an individual relationship with the employer is unworkable.”
For years, unions have waged expensive pressure campaigns, such as SEIU’s Fight for $15, to unionize chains in the fast food industry such as McDonald’s and Burger King, and to push management to sit down at the bargaining table with workers. But these efforts have not resulted in election victories. Most gains unions have claimed have been in the form of minimum wage increases across a series of cities and states.
Last month, Chipotle shuttered a location in Augusta, Maine that had filed for a union election, hours before the union and management were scheduled for a National Labor Relations Board hearing about logistics for a potential election. The company said the closure was because of “staffing challenges,” but the union claimed that the closure was “union busting” intended to have a chilling effect on organizing at Chipotle.
Amazon workers in Albany, N.Y. file for a union election
The workers, who have been organizing since late 2021, and cited a wave of union victories at Starbucks, in Michigan and around the United States, as an inspiration for their campaign. More than 230 Starbucks locations have voted to unionize since last December.
“After seeing the victories at Starbucks, it was like ‘oh my god we can accomplish this,’” said Smith. “A lot of young people are in favor of unionizing but thought it would never happen here. That realism is that is keeping a lot of us down right now. Getting this far, shows us we do have to try because we can succeed.”
“The Teamsters Union is home to 1.2 million workers, and all of us are fighting for our brothers and sisters at Chipotle to get the union they deserve,” said International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Sean M. O’Brien in response to news that the Chipotle workers had voted to unionize with the Teamsters on Thursday. “Now is the time for working people in this country to take back what’s theirs.” | 2022-08-25T23:00:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Chipotle workers vote to unionize for first time - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/25/chipotle-union-victory-fastfood-michigan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/25/chipotle-union-victory-fastfood-michigan/ |
U.S. consumers go deeper in debt to buy new vehicles, Experian reports
Vehicle loan debt rises amid surging prices
The average monthly payment for a new-vehicle loan rose to $667 in the second quarter, up nearly 15 percent from a year earlier, Experian said in its latest report on the automotive finance market. The average amount borrowed rose 13.2 percent.
The length of the average new-vehicle loan stayed flat in the second quarter compared to a year ago at just over 69 months.
Used-car buyers also are borrowing more. The average used-vehicle loan jumped 18.7 percent to $28,534, with an average monthly payment of $515, up 17 percent.
Of vehicles financed in the second quarter, 60 percent were sport utility vehicles, Experian said.
Whole Foods joins chicken welfare push
Amazon’s Whole Foods and HelloFresh are among nine food businesses intensifying a push to improve the lives of chickens.
The companies will join the U.S. Working Group for Broiler Welfare, which helps businesses meet animal welfare commitments. It’s partnering with Perdue Farms, the fourth-largest chicken producer in the United States. The moves come as organizations are under increasing pressure to change the way they raise animals for food.
Other companies joining include Applegate, Pret a Manger, Sprouts and Natural Grocers. The new members join companies like Target, Shake Shack and Nestlé USA, bringing the group to 16 members.
Wall Street giant Citigroup said on Thursday it will wind down its consumer banking and local commercial banking operations in Russia and expects to incur about $170 million in charges over the next 18 months. Wall Street's biggest financial firms have shut or announced plans to close operations in Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, in line with sanctions imposed by Western countries. Citigroup has disclosed its Russia exposure was $8.4 billion, as of June 30. The U.S. lender has in recent years been cutting down its international footprint. | 2022-08-25T23:00:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S. consumers go deeper in debt to buy new vehicles, Experian reports - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/us-consumers-go-deeper-in-debt-to-buy-new-vehicles-experian-reports/2022/08/25/9e8a713a-2463-11ed-87c7-c807d6645a61_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/us-consumers-go-deeper-in-debt-to-buy-new-vehicles-experian-reports/2022/08/25/9e8a713a-2463-11ed-87c7-c807d6645a61_story.html |
Pr. George’s schools may combine classes amid 900 teacher vacancies
CEO Monica Goldson outlined school system challenges in letter to parents this week
Dr. Monica Goldson, CEO of Prince George’s County Public Schools and school board member Raaheela Ahmed talks to the press at Tulip Gove Elementary School before the first day of in-person class on April 8, 2021. (Robb Hill for The Washington Post)
Maryland’s second-largest school district is facing roughly 900 vacancies among its 10,000 employees, which may force it to combine classes in the upcoming school year.
Prince George’s County Public Schools CEO Monica Goldson wrote to the school system community in a back-to-school letter this week, detailing ongoing challenges in the school system, specifically staffing vacancies.
The district — which educates roughly 130,000 students — is one of many school systems scrambling to fill teacher positions, along with staff posts, including bus drivers. Across the state, the most critical shortages are in specific subjects, like math and English, at middle and high schools, and in special education, according to data presented at a recent Maryland State Board of Education meeting.
The vacancies follow high turnover during the past school year that saw resignations and retirements as educators across the country left the profession, citing exhaustion from the pandemic, a lack of respect in the classroom and consistently low pay. The Prince George’s County Educators’ Association teacher union was at an impasse with the district for months over such issues before reaching a tentative agreement last week.
Just over half of the school system’s anticipated teacher vacancies have been filled, Goldson said, with an average of about 4.5 openings at each of its 200 schools. A spokeswoman for the school system added that its top areas to fill are in special education, mathematics, science, elementary education and early-childhood programs. Overall, the school system is roughly 91 percent staffed.
“As a result, we are reviewing class size at all levels and combining classes where practical, particularly in under-enrolled classes,” Goldson said.
The school system plans to deploy substitute teachers to fill the gaps. Goldson said substitute-teacher pay was increased, in some cases up to $100 more per day than last year. The system has campaigns targeted at retired teachers and new substitutes, and plans extra compensation for teachers who cover additional classes.
Danielle LeClair, a mom of a rising eighth-grader in University Park, said when she saw the letter from Goldson, she wondered: “What is this going to mean for kids in special education or have disabilities, as well as mental health challenges?” LeClair said she was concerned that her daughter, who has an Individualized Education Program that lays out the special-education services a student is required to receive, won’t get the education she’s legally entitled too.
Goldson also warned families who use the bus system to expect delays during the first few weeks of school, as new bus drivers get acclimated to routes. The school system is also seeking roughly 165 bus drivers, as of Thursday, according to a district spokeswoman. Bell times have been adjusted at some schools to account for possible late bus arrival times.
Earlier this month, Prince George’s schools reinstated a mask requirement, as the county has a high covid transmission rate according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. But positivity rates are declining, Goldson said, and she anticipates easing the mandate “in the coming weeks.” | 2022-08-25T23:22:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Prince George's could face tough school opening next week, CEO says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/25/prince-georges-schools-staff-vacancies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/25/prince-georges-schools-staff-vacancies/ |
Students on school boards can vote, Maryland high court rules
Two parents sued the Howard County Board of Education, frustrated that a student board member voted against reopening schools
Glenelg High School in Glenelg, Md., on April 27, 2019. (Will Newton for The Washington Post)
In Howard County, the student member of the board of education plays more than just a symbolic role. The young person, who is elected by the county’s middle and high school students after a convention, decides on many of the matters before the board — including grading and attendance policies — just like their adult colleagues.
It was a position that did not necessarily draw that much attention until late 2020, when the student board member voted against reopening schools, leaving the board deadlocked at 4-4 and unable to move forward. Two parents, frustrated by the lack of action, sued the board, arguing that it was against the state’s constitution to allow a minor — selected by other minors — to serve on a school board.
This week, Maryland’s highest court ruled in favor of student school board members, saying the position did not violate the state’s constitution, which bars minors from voting or from serving in public office. The Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that those provisions applied only to elected positions created by the state constitution — which does not include school boards. And it also pointed to the fact that state lawmakers had passed provisions in the 1970s and 1980s creating and defining the student school board positions, affirming their constitutionality.
The law creating the Howard County school board member position passed the General Assembly in 2007. The student must be a Howard County resident and either a junior or senior in one of its public schools.
Traci Spiegel and Kimberly Ford, the two mothers who brought the lawsuit, were frustrated by the court’s decision, and said Marylanders would be stunned to learn that student school board members, elected by children as young as 11 years old, have some of the same voting powers that adult members have.
“We are extremely disappointed with today’s ruling permitting a 16-17 year old minor — elected by 11-17 year old minors — to cast binding votes on the Howard County BOE,” they wrote in a statement. “Our disappointment should be nothing, however, compared to Marylanders’ shock when they learn that the State Constitution does not apply whatsoever when it comes who serves on and who selects Members of local BOEs. And by whatsoever we literally mean anyone and anything including 5-year-olds, non-Marylanders, anyone. We ask community members that are paying taxes — where does this end?”
In an interview, Spiegel said she did not believe a teenager has the “life experience” to make decisions for the county’s 58,000 students, and worried that adult board members were using the youths as pawns to advance their own agendas. She was frustrated, she said, to see a student board member lead the effort to get police out of Howard County schools.
“It was mind-numbing that a 17-year-old could help decide that 58,000 children could not go to school,” said Spiegel, who works in marketing and had two children at Glenelg High School when the lawsuit started. One has since graduated.
“We just don’t think that a student who is 16 and 17 years old has the life experience to decide what happens to 58,000 students.”
Should 16-year-olds be able to vote? A majority of the D.C. Council thinks so
Abisola Ayoola, 16, a rising junior at Wilde Lake High who was just elected and sworn in to serve on Howard County’s board of education, said no one is better positioned to decide what students need than students themselves. Ayoola has been involved with the student board member elections since she was in sixth grade, when she first attended the convention to select the candidates.
“We are showing students that their voices are valuable and that we actually believe in what they have to say and what they want in their education,” Ayoola said. If students could not weigh in with a vote, “there’s no accountability.”
Maryland has been a vanguard on youth civic engagement in part because its constitution has made it easy for communities to pass measures to lower the voting age. Five communities — Takoma Park, Hyattsville, Greenbelt, Riverdale Park and Mount Rainer — permit 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in local elections. They are the only communities in the nation where the voting age has been lowered to 16.
More cities consider letting 16-year-olds vote in local elections
Berkeley and Oakland, Calif., both passed measures lowering the voting age for school board races, but the laws have yet to be implemented.
Student members of eight school boards across Maryland have voting rights, as does the student member of the state board of education. | 2022-08-25T23:22:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Students on school boards can vote, Maryland high court says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/25/student-voters-school-board-maryland/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/25/student-voters-school-board-maryland/ |
President’s move to cancel billions in student loans sets off an immediate fight, not always along party lines, on explosive issues of education and class.
Mark Guarino
Student loan debt activists rally outside the White House on Thursday, a day after President Biden announced a plan that would cancel $10,000 in student loan debt for those making less than $125,000 a year. (Craig Hudson/For the Washington Post)
The complex politics of student debt relief burst into full view Thursday following President Biden’s decision to forgive billions of dollars in student loans, adding a twist of uncertainty to an electoral landscape that has been shifting in the Democrats’ direction.
As current and former students nationwide began to digest what the plan might mean for them — some welcoming the relief, others criticizing it as unfair — politicians across the spectrum wrestled with the likely impact of a decision that had been vigorously debated within the White House.
The debate could be seen inside a small radius in Wisconsin. When David Bowen, a Wisconsin state lawmaker, saw that Biden was using his authority to ease student debt, he said he knew that it would be “a game changer” for many in his Milwaukee-based district who have struggled to make ends meet.
“With the cost of education being as high as it is right now, we have so many folks who have racked up debt, have strained their budgets to try to keep up with the costs of living, their plans for the families and futures,” said Bowen, a Democrat. “Overwhelmingly, this is a win perceived by working people and for working people.”
“Sure,” she wrote on Twitter, adding an eye-rolling emoji. “Sounds fair.”
Biden’s plan, which covers individuals making less than $125,000 a year, would forgive up to $10,000 in federal student loans, or $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.
Who qualifies for Biden's plan?
“It’s not going to please everybody. He understands the policy is not,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “But he wants to make sure we’re giving families a little breathing room.”
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) said she disagreed with Biden’s move, adding, “It doesn’t address the root problems that make college unaffordable.” Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) — like Cortez Masto, facing a tough reelection race — criticized Biden for sidestepping Congress and for adopting a plan that he said is not paid for and would add to the deficit.
“This decision by the president is out of touch with what the majority of the American people want from the White House, which is leadership to address the most immediate challenges the country is facing,” said Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine).
Rep. Tim Ryan, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Ohio, said Biden’s approach could alienate those struggling to make rent payments, much less attempting to go to college.
“While there’s no doubt that a college education should be about opening opportunities,” Ryan said, “waiving debt for those already on a trajectory to financial security sends the wrong message to the millions of Ohioans without a degree working just as hard to make ends meet.”
During the White House briefing on Thursday, Jean-Pierre was pressed a number of times on the cost of the program. She said it was done in a “fiscally responsible way” but that she had no cost estimate for the plan because it’s not clear how many will apply for relief. There is no revenue-raising element to it to offset the costs, although Jean-Pierre pointed to other unrelated Biden policies that have helped reduce the deficit.
Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration, wrote on Twitter that “pouring roughly half trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning is reckless.” White House officials respond that restarting student loan repayments, which have been on pause for more than two years, will offset any inflationary effect of forgiving other loan payments.
“If we could afford to cancel hundreds of billions in PPP loans to business owners in their time of need, please do not tell me we can’t afford to cancel all student debt for 45 million Americans,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote on Twitter.
The politicians’ debate reflected the way ordinary people are wrestling with the issue. When Tom Slusher graduated from Beloit College in Wisconsin in 2012, he faced $75,000 in federal and private loan payments and spent the next decade working to pay it down, taking jobs he wasn’t necessarily passionate about, for example in advertising and digital communications.
The 33-year-old’s loan debt is now down to roughly $15,000. But that progress came with a price, he said: “Taking on higher-paying jobs and positions with higher responsibilities and being afraid to leave jobs,” as opposed to “doing something more meaningful and with a more purpose-driven aspect to the work,” like working at a food bank.
Slusher said he does not resent those who will benefit from Biden’s plan. But he does blame the president, and other national politicians, for policies that have allowed college costs to skyrocket.
Charles said Biden’s plan is a lifesaver. “I can now see a future where I can put a down payment on a house, start a family and hopefully save for my future children’s education,” she said. “That was really hard to see before. I didn’t want to take my brain there because it felt so far from reality.”
“It’s virtually impossible today that you could have a part-time job to help pay for room and board and your tuition,” said Bowen, who is 35. “We have a generation before us that can’t fathom what it’s like to have tens of thousands of dollars in debt from student loans and still be strained to save to buy a house.”
He added, “They don’t know what it’s like. We have a difference in experience. They look at us and say, ‘You guys are soft. We had to go through it and had to take out loans to do it — why can’t you?’”
In January, an Economist/YouGov poll found that 49 percent of Americans supported canceling student loan debt from public colleges while 35 percent were opposed. Slightly more than half of Americans supported forgiving $10,000 per person, according to an NPR/Ipsos poll in June, but an overwhelming majority — 82 percent — said the top priority should be making college more affordable in the first place.
10 other ways to get your student debt forgiven
Republicans said Biden’s plan will essentially force hard-working blue-collar Americans to foot the bill for students getting degrees from elite institutions.
“You’re going to be having farmers, people that have their own small businesses, waitresses, they’re going to be on the hook to pay the student loan of somebody who got a PhD in gender studies?” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) told radio host Hugh Hewitt on Thursday. “I mean, give me a break.”
“I will never apologize for helping working-class Americans and the middle class, especially not to the same folks who voted for a $2 trillion tax cut that mainly benefited the wealthiest Americans and the biggest corporations,” the president said.
Felipe Diaz-Arango is among those who might have good reason to begrudge people benefiting from Biden’s plan, though he said he doesn’t: In April he wrote the final check for the $120,000 in loans it took to graduate from the University of Chicago in 2009. Diaz-Arango, 35, said he worked hard to pay back the loans in part to protect his mother, who had co-signed for them.
“The loans were my priority, because I didn’t want to mess up her life,” Diaz-Arango said. While $10,000 in debt relief “would have been nice,” he added, what he regrets more is what he considers the outrageous price of tuition and the predatory financial landscape that supports it.
He sees today’s younger people being open to more affordable options, such as studying abroad or attending a community college.
“That kind of conversation wasn’t happening when I was applying for schools,” Diaz-Arango said. “I thought, ‘If they’re giving me $120,000 in student loans, it must mean it’s fairly easy to pay off.” | 2022-08-25T23:30:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden student loan action ignites political battle - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/25/biden-student-loan-political-battle/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/25/biden-student-loan-political-battle/ |
First class of violence interrupters graduates from Peace Academy
Privately funded program is meant to train those who mediate conflicts on the streets of D.C.
Lashonia Thompson-El, executive director of Peace for DC, addresses the D.C. Peace Academy's graduating class. (Emily Davies/TWP)
Antoine Thomas did not know how to reach one of the young men he was supposed to steer away from violence. The teenager, he said, had told him not to bother offering any more city services. He was just not interested in being helped.
Then, Thomas, 47, remembered a training session about empathy and childhood trauma at the D.C. Peace Academy, a privately funded program for the people tasked with mediating street conflicts.
“I realized the boy was probably used to people giving up on him, so I decided not to go down that road,” said Thomas, an advocate with the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. “I showered my love on him instead.”
He said the boy eventually agreed to complete his high school education.
New academy will train workers who mediate conflict on D.C. streets
On Thursday, Thomas was one of 23 community violence intervention workers to graduate from the D.C. Peace Academy as part of its first cohort. The 13-week program had violence interrupters attend six-hour sessions every Tuesday and Thursday, where participants learned about everything from conflict resolution to cognitive behavioral therapy to how to treat bullet wounds. Academy leaders say they plan to train the roughly 250 violence intervention workers employed by various nonprofits and arms of the city government by the end of next year. The next cohort begins in September.
The graduation ceremony sought to offer hope for a city struggling with rising homicides. Violence intervention workers — community members hired by the city to engage one-on-one with those most at risk of committing crimes — can be an important tool for the government to keep people safe without relying too heavily on police. But experts say that those workers are only as effective as their training.
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), who attended the graduation ceremony Thursday, praised the academy and thanked the students for “doing a really tough job” on behalf of the city. But facing questions about a recent spate of shootings — including one in which a violence interrupter was wounded — the mayor said she had “limited information” about whether violence intervention was an effective strategy to reduce crime.
“I hesitate to say it’s 100 percent right,” she told reporters. In a separate statement, she said that areas with the most violence interrupters have seen violent crime drop by 16 percent.
The academy was funded by donations through Peace for DC, a nonprofit organization founded by local restaurant owner Roger Marmet after his 22-year-old son, Tom, was killed by a stray bullet in 2018.
Lashonia Thompson-El, executive director of Peace for DC, said one of the most important components of the academy was creating space for the students to heal from their own trauma. Some people hired to work in the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods have served time in prison themselves. Some have lost family or friends to gun violence. Each one is asked by the city to put themselves in harm’s way to protect others.
Andraè Brown, a psychologist and president of a consulting firm, provided life coaches and mental health sessions to the academy. He said there were multiple sessions where violence interrupters began to notice ways they were misdiagnosed as children by people who did not understand the environmental pressures they faced.
“Trauma can dull your cognitive abilities,” he said. “People want to be healed.”
Some violence interrupters said they had started meditating and using cognitive behavioral therapy exercises since enrolling in the academy.
Nneka Grimes, a former violence interrupter who recently launched a nonprofit organization to bring technological training to underserved youths, said she has used a “tragedy exercise” she learned in the academy with teenagers in her community.
“I have put in a lot of effort over these last three months,” she added. “I haven’t had this much information given to me since college.”
After each graduate walked across the stage, their classmates cheered and hollered inside jokes.
“Stan the Man!” one student shouted.
“That’s right, Stan!” another yelled.
Stanley Jones, a program coordinator with the Alliance of Concerned Men, walked across the stage. “Appreciate it,” he replied with a grin. | 2022-08-25T23:48:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | First class of violence interrupters graduates from ‘Peace Academy’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/25/dc-violence-interrupters-graduation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/25/dc-violence-interrupters-graduation/ |
The scene after a fatal shooting on O Street NW on Wednesday. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
Investigators believe gunmen who shot and wounded three men Wednesday night in Northeast Washington were retaliating for a shooting hours earlier in the Truxton Circle neighborhood in which two men were killed and three others injured, D.C. police chief Robert J. Contee III said Thursday.
The pair of related shootings and others across the city on Wednesday punctuated a violent 24-hour period that left a dozen people shot and three of them killed. City leaders have struggled with gun crime and a rising number of killings in 2022, and the latest round of shootings renewed questions about whether police and city officials are doing enough.
“It is a crisis,” said Joseph Johnson, a relative of four of the victims in the Truxton Circle shooting. “This is another pandemic in which every family, if we don’t get our hands around this, is going to continue to face loss.”
Two people were killed and three injured after a shooting in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 24. The video was captured by the front and side cameras of a parked car. (Video: Obtained by The Washington Post)
The shooting that police believe touched off the retaliatory violence occurred shortly before 1 p.m. Wednesday on O Street NW, just west of North Capitol Street NW, where police said two gunmen got out of an SUV and opened fire at a group on the sidewalk. Four of those struck were related, including cousins Rashad Johnson, 43, and James Johnson, 53, who were killed. Joseph Johnson said the fifth person wounded is a close family friend. No arrests have been made.
About 7:20 p.m., police said gunmen shot at people three blocks away on Quincy Place NE, just east of North Capitol Street NE. Two men in their 50s and another man in his 60s were struck and wounded. Police said they arrested three men in that shooting and seized five firearms, including two assault-style weapons.
“We certainly believe that this was retaliation for the shooting that occurred earlier,” Contee told reporters Thursday.
As police worked to investigate the crimes, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) attended a graduation ceremony for outreach workers, known as violence interrupters, trained through the privately funded Peace Academy to tamp down disputes before gunfire erupts. The city’s own violence interrupters are a key component of the Bowser administration’s $50 million investment in alternative justice programs.
Bowser told graduates the recent violence made for a “very tough day,” adding, “Despite our toughest and hardest work, there will be people who will be lost.”
Three people with knowledge of the incident said one of the surviving victims from the O Street shooting is a violence interrupter who works as part of the attorney general’s office’s Cure the Streets program. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a crime victim’s background in an ongoing investigation.
A top aide to Contee had said at a news conference Wednesday that the shooting on O Street “might be drug related” and described the area as an “open air drug market.” But Contee backed away from that description Thursday, telling reporters, “I would not say this is totally drug related.” Police said one of the injured men had gotten out of prison last week, and Contee said detectives are trying to determine if that had anything do with what happened.
“I don’t care what it’s related to. Whether it’s drugs or argument or rap music, it doesn’t matter to me,” the chief said. “I want to shut down whatever the issue is and get to the bottom of why these two people are dead.”
Two killed, three others injured in Truxton Circle area shooting
The triangular-shaped Truxton Circle area — lined by New York and Florida avenues and North Capitol Street in Northwest D.C. — has long been troubled by crime and drugs. Contee said if the shootings were fueled by drug trafficking, he would work to “shut it down,” while also noting efforts to get at the underlying causes of crime that are “not a law enforcement issue.”
Johnson, the relative of four of the O Street victims, including the cousins who died, said none of the men struck by gunfire were doing anything illicit, and they had merely gathered on a block where some had grown up or had friends. One of the victims who was shot and wounded lives on the block, according to a police report.
Johnson, who serves on a panel that acts as a liaison between residents and police who work out of the 7th District station, criticized police for too quickly citing drugs as a possible motive.
“A lot of things are being said and nobody had any evidence to back up anything,” said Johnson, who will be sworn in as an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Anacostia in January. “When you jump the gun with no evidence, it makes it worse. … We don’t know what caused this shooting.”
Johnson said “violence has no place in D.C.” and he questioned whether Bowser’s plan to fight crime is working.
Police said they are looking for a black 2020 Hyundai Santa Fe with a possible Virginia temporary license plate 956515X in the shootings on O Street. Police said they chased down the driver of a black Toyota Highlander after the later shooting on Quincy Place NE.
Police said officers pursued the Highlander to Evarts Street NE, where it crashed. Police said one man ran from the vehicle and carjacked a driver, but he was arrested before he could drive away. Police said two other men ran into an auto repair shop and were arrested.
Among the firearms and other weaponry police said they seized from the men and from the Highlander, according to a police report, was a black “auto-sear” switch that can turn a semiautomatic gun into a fully-automatic, allowing for a quick spray of bullets with one pull of the trigger.
Police said they charged Kharee Jackson, 24, of Northwest, Pernell Jackson, 36, of Northeast, and Charles Turner, 35, of Maryland, with assault with a dangerous weapon. Attorneys for Kharee Jackson and Turner did not respond to interview requests. A lawyer for Pernell Jackson declined to comment. | 2022-08-25T23:48:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Police say 3 shot in retaliation for fatal shooting in Truxton Circle - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/25/truxton-circle-retaliation-shooting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/25/truxton-circle-retaliation-shooting/ |
The effort follows a series of mistakes and would apply to a variety of sensitive military operations, officials say
This screenshot released by the Defense Department shows the aftermath of a U.S. drone strike in Kabul on Aug. 29, 2021, that killed 10 civilians. (AP)
The Pentagon on Thursday introduced a plan to reduce civilian casualties resulting from airstrikes and other sensitive military operations, as top U.S. defense officials face mounting pressure to break a pattern of deadly mistakes.
The plan envisions embedding risk-mitigation specialists in military operations centers throughout the world, establishing a “center of excellence” to promote best practices, and instituting oversight from the highest levels of the Defense Department. It also aims to improve data collection and analysis to better track and address the problem.
“It’s not that we haven’t taken civilian harm mitigation into account in the past,” said Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary. “It’s just trying to apply a consistent approach across the department so that this becomes a matter of how we do business.” Ryder called the effort “a direct reflection of U.S. values as well as a strategic and moral imperative.”
The Pentagon has taken fire for attacks that left innocent bystanders or unintended targets dead or wounded, incidents, critics argue, that could have been avoided. Such events include the Aug. 27, 2021, drone strike that killed 10 civilians, including seven children, in Kabul and accusations that the Pentagon tried to cover up civilian deaths during a strike on Islamic State adherents in Syria — claims the Pentagon rejected.
A year after U.S. drone strikes killed Afghan civilians, relatives on path to resettlement
The plan released Thursday does not address individual incidents. But according to a senior defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under terms set by the Pentagon, past episodes did inform the changes it outlines.
Special attention will be given to addressing cognitive bias — or erroneously interpreting evidence in a way that confirms one’s suspicions — and reducing the likelihood of target misidentification, the official said. The Pentagon also wants to ensure that, as part of its standard processes, attack plans posing undue risks to civilians are thoroughly gut-checked before they are unleashed.
The risk-mitigation plans will apply not only when firing a missile or dropping bombs, but also when conducting cyber strikes and other operations conducted outside of “the lethal space,” the official said.
The aim is to “help commanders and operators better understand the civilian environment before operations begin,” the official added.
The Pentagon expects to activate its center of excellence within the coming fiscal year, and begin implementing risk mitigation as part of regular military training using existing resources. To reach full capacity will involve additional congressional appropriations, the official said.
The Pentagon envisions the center of excellence will require a staff of about 30, and that the full program will require about 150 positions across the military. The official estimated that the budget required to execute the plans would be in the tens of millions of dollars — a small percentage of annual defense spending. | 2022-08-25T23:52:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pentagon plan aims to reduce civilian casualties caused by airstrikes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/25/pentagon-civilian-casualties/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/25/pentagon-civilian-casualties/ |
Texas requires ‘In God We Trust’ signs in schools. A man wants some in Arabic.
Longtime political activist Chaz Stevens is fundraising to send posters reading “In God We Trust” in Arabic to Texas schools. (Chaz Stevens)
As he rode his bike Sunday, longtime political prankster Chaz Stevens ruminated on a law that was irking him: A Texas statute requiring schools to post donated signs with the United States motto, “In God We Trust.”
Texas legislators, Stevens thought, were trolling people who don’t believe in a Judeo-Christian God.
Now, Stevens wants to troll them back.
The South Florida activist had raised more than $14,000 as of Thursday evening to distribute “In God We Trust” signs to public schools across Texas. The catch? The phrase is in Arabic.
“My focus,” Stevens said, “was how do I game the state of Texas with the rules?”
The Arabic text is meant to invoke Islam and some Christians’ discomfort with that faith, Stevens said. He’s hoping for even one school to hang up the poster — in his view, making a point about applying the controversial statute evenly to people of any religion or no religion.
But Stevens, a self-described “staunch atheist,” is also prepared to try to turn a loss into a win. If a school rejects his poster, he said, he plans to file a lawsuit and use the court case to challenge the statute itself.
Stevens’ stunt, previously reported in the Dallas Morning News, joins a history of challenges to the national motto that courts have consistently rejected. It also adds fuel to a political firestorm that in recent years has turned schools in Republican-led states into culture-war battlegrounds. Fights are erupting over book banning, how race and gender are taught, and religious practice on school grounds as politicians clash over what it means to be an American and who gets to decide.
Fla. law made school book bans easier. So one man challenged the Bible.
Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes (R), who sponsored the sign law, said Stevens’s Arabic posters do not meet the statute’s requirements and would not have to be posted in schools. He pointed to quotation marks around the phrase “In God We Trust” to suggest that a school only has to hang a donated sign with those words in English.
“That’s all they’re required to do,” Hughes said. “But they are free to post other signs in as many languages as they want to.”
The law, which took effect last year, mandates that public schools display “in a conspicuous place in each building of the school” a sign with the national motto if the poster was donated or purchased with private donations. The sign also must include the U.S. flag and the Texas flag, and it “may not depict” any other words or images. The law does not explicitly state that the national motto must be in English.
The statute, Hughes said, is “about coming together as Americans.”
“The Declaration of Independence said that our rights come from our creator,” he said. “And so the idea of the acknowledgment of God is nothing in new in American life.”
Several school districts in Texas have already hung donated signs with the national motto, local news outlets reported. The Yellow Rose of Texas Republican Women, a group that promotes conservative values, said this month that it had donated several posters to the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, about 25 miles northwest of Houston.
“Each visit was accompanied by staff smiles and ‘thank you’s,’” the organization wrote. “This has been such a blessing!”
“In God We Trust” officially became the nation’s motto in 1956, as declared by a resolution of Congress, but the phrase has been used since the country’s inception and has appeared on U.S. currency since the 1860s.
Many states allow or require public schools to post signs with it. At least nine states in addition to Texas require schools to display the motto, and at least eight other states allow it, according to the Education Commission of the States, which tracks education policy. Some states specify that their policy applies only to signs that are donated.
Courts have consistently ruled that the national motto’s reference to God is constitutional. In 1970, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the phrase did not violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause because it “has nothing whatsoever to do with the establishment of religion” and is instead about patriotism. Several other courts have since ruled similarly.
The direction of court opinions on this issue is unlikely to change now, after former president Donald Trump made the federal circuit courts more conservative, said Jennifer Clark, a political science professor at the University of Houston.
Texas legislators could amend the law to specify that the national motto must be in English, said Steven Collis, director of the Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center at the University of Texas at Austin. But he said that change could prompt litigation alleging that requiring the word “God” and not allowing “Allah” is discrimination against Islam.
“I don’t know if that would carry the day, but it seems like an argument that’s coming,” Collis said. “And we’ll see if any courts bite on it.”
The broader cultural issue, Collis said, is that the way people view signs with the national motto depends on whether they view public schools as neutral or hostile toward religion.
“Does having the national motto up take schools that have become way too secular and at least remind people that religion is out there and is important to a lot of people in our country?” he said. “Or is it taking it way too far and pushing religion on people?”
For Stevens, pranking conservatives is a part-time hobby. His primary job is running a company that connects people with mental illness with service dogs.
In between that work, Stevens plans to send 300 to 500 of the Arabic posters to Texas schools. He intends to start with the most liberal districts he can find — determined by coronavirus vaccination rates — in the hope that a school there will accept his sign.
“I see this as a teachable moment — a moment to teach inclusion,” he said. “And what better place than a middle school in Austin, Texas, or even better, a middle school in the deepest reddest part of Texas, to say, think about everyone else that’s not of your tribe, that they have rights allowed under law.”
Stevens is experienced at activism centering on the separation of church and state. Last spring, he petitioned dozens of Florida school districts to ban the Bible to call attention to increasing challenges of books in schools. Before that, he pushed to open city commission meetings with a satanic invocation and erected a Festivus pole at the Florida Capitol to protest a Nativity scene.
With his Arabic signs stunt, Stevens is readying for the likelihood of taking his fight to the courtroom.
“We’re going to wait for somebody to tell me ‘no,’” he said, “and then here it comes.” | 2022-08-26T00:01:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Activist plans to send Arabic ‘In God We Trust’ signs to Texas schools - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/25/texas-arabic-in-god-we-trust/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/25/texas-arabic-in-god-we-trust/ |
2 plead guilty to theft of diary purportedly belonging to Ashley Biden
2 plead guilty to theft
of purported diary
Two Florida residents pleaded guilty in a case connected to a stolen diary that reportedly belonged to Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter, and that ended up in the hands of conservative group Project Veritas, portions of which were made public in the weeks before the end of the 2020 presidential campaign.
While Project Veritas claimed that the diary had been legally obtained, the FBI launched an investigation into how the diary ended up in the conservative group’s hands.
In its announcement, the Justice Department said Harris and Kurlander, around September 2020, “conspired to steal,” transport and sell “personal property that belonged to an individual” referred to as a “victim.”
In a statement, Project Veritas said its “news gathering was ethical and legal.”
— Mariana Alfaro
Court blocks probe into AG's campaign ad
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit has temporarily blocked an investigation into North Carolina’s attorney general over a negative campaign ad, saying the state law he’s accused of violating is probably unconstitutional.
The debate turns on a 1931 law that criminalized the publication of a “derogatory” campaign ad, “knowing such report to be false or in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity.”
Stein maintained in court that the line “O’Neill left 1,500 rape kits on a shelf” was accurate because prosecutors can encourage and assist police in clearing their evidence backlogs. Even if the ad was false, Stein argued, it would be protected under the First Amendment.
The ruling is an injunction pending appeal; the judges are scheduled to hear arguments on the case in December.
— Rachel Weiner
Remains identified as 2002 missing swimmer
One of the five sets of human remains recovered this year in drought-stricken Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir by capacity, has been identified using DNA analysis as a swimmer who went missing two decades ago. Thomas P. Erndt, 42, drowned on Aug. 2, 2002, and his remains were found May 7, the National Park Service announced Thursday. “This corroborates a witness report to park rangers on the same date of a male seen swimming without a life jacket near Callville Bay who was struggling out in the water,” the park service said.
The first set of human remains, a shooting victim stuffed in a barrel in the 1970s or 1980s, was found on May 1.
FBI reports security breach at Chicago headquarters: A person jumped the fence and began throwing rocks at the FBI field office, said Rob Sperling, a spokesman for the Federal Protective Service. No injuries were reported following the security breach that occurred Thursday, officials said.
Ark. appeals court rejects ban on gender-affirming care: A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit on Thursday affirmed a judge's ruling temporarily blocking the state from enforcing its ban on transgender children receiving gender-affirming medical care. A trial on whether to permanently block the 2021 law is scheduled for October. | 2022-08-26T00:01:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 2 plead guilty to theft of diary purportedly belonging to Ashley Biden - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2022/08/25/65eacbe8-1470-11ed-aba1-f2b7689c0492_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2022/08/25/65eacbe8-1470-11ed-aba1-f2b7689c0492_story.html |
A helmet is swung during a scuffle at a joint practice between the Bengals and Rams. (Sam Greene/Cincinnati Enquirer/AP)
A brawl that broke out Thursday during a joint practice between the Los Angeles Rams and host Cincinnati Bengals included a player swinging a helmet at an opponent.
In a video of the melee taken from a distance, Rams star Aaron Donald was shown tumbling away from the scrum with a Bengals helmet in each hand. The all-pro defensive tackle reportedly had been scheduled to meet with the media after the practice but was not made available.
There were no reported injuries from the fight or from scuffles that unfolded earlier in the practice.
The ill will Thursday also included, per reports, Bengals offensive tackle La’el Collins throwing a Rams helmet at Los Angeles linebacker Leonard Floyd.
Both head coaches downplayed the incidents, which occurred on the second straight day the teams — who met in February’s Super Bowl, won in the final minutes by the Rams — worked out against one another.
Zac Taylor of the Bengals said he would not “get into what happened.”
“It’s over,” he told reporters. “We got two good days of work in, and everybody’s healthy.”
Rams Coach Sean McVay, who was described by reporters at the scene as appearing very unhappy while he waded into the brawl to break it up, said later he was not inclined to “look at pointing fingers.” The incident marked a premature end to the joint practice, though Taylor indicated the session was close to its scheduled conclusion anyway.
“I just see guys swinging and some guys have helmets on, some don’t, there’s a scrum, you just never know what can occur, and my biggest concern in just unnecessary injuries for people that we’re counting on,” McVay said, via the Los Angeles Times. “… God forbid anybody gets hit in the head with a helmet off.”
The scene involving Donald brought to mind a fight during a November 2019 regular season game between the Browns and Steelers in which Cleveland’s Myles Garrett swung at and hit the unprotected head of Pittsburgh’s Mason Rudolph with the latter’s helmet. A day after the contest, which was broadcast nationally on a Thursday night, the NFL suspended Garrett indefinitely. The standout defensive end missed the final six games of the season before being reinstated the following February.
Individual teams have jurisdiction over the conduct of their players during practices, including joint practices. It is not expected that the league will take action regarding Thursday’s events.
It is up to the Rams and Bengals to “handle” the situation as they deem appropriate, said a person familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The Rams declined to say Thursday evening through a spokesman whether Donald or any other player will be disciplined by the team for the incident.
“Emotions run high,” Taylor said of the several antagonistic incidents between his team and the Rams. “We’ve been working together for two days now, and that’s just some really competitive guys getting into it a little bit.
“You just want to make sure everybody’s healthy, and I think everybody’s healthy, so we’ll move on.” | 2022-08-26T00:02:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rams-Bengals joint practice devolves into helmet-swinging brawl fest - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/rams-bengals-brawl-aaron-donald/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/rams-bengals-brawl-aaron-donald/ |
D.C. vaccine mandate for government workers is ‘unlawful,’ judge says
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser speaks at a news conference on the coronavirus in 2020. (Patrick Semansky/AP)
A D.C. Superior Court judge on Thursday said the vaccination mandate Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) imposed on city government workers earlier this year was “unlawful” in response to opposition from the D.C. police union.
The order from Judge Maurice A. Ross comes in response to a lawsuit filed in February by the D.C. Police Union and other police groups that opposed the mandate, which was first imposed by Bowser last year. The August 2021 mayor’s order instructed D.C. government employees to submit proof that they had received the coronavirus vaccination, although workers could also apply for religious or medical exemptions or opt for weekly testing instead.
In November 2021, however, Bowser issued another mayor’s order that empowered the D.C. city administrator to remove the test-out option. In January, city officials said D.C. government employees who did not apply for a religious or medical exemption were required to get vaccinated by Feb. 15, including a booster shot, with enforcement set to begin the following month. The city implemented a tiered discipline system for those without exemptions, which could result in suspension or being fired.
A D.C. Superior Court judge in February denied the police groups’ efforts to block the mandate. But Ross said Thursday that Bowser lacked the legal authority to impose the mandate, arguing in part that she did not have the statutory power to do so, and that the D.C. Police Officers Standards and Training Board had the ability to establish its own health standards for the department.
Ross’s order says Bowser is “permanently enjoined from implementing, imposing and/or enforcing the covid-19 vaccine mandate ... against the plaintiffs,” and that all disciplinary actions related to the mandate “shall immediately cease and be dismissed with full reimbursement to be provided to all [Fraternal Order of Police] members for any loss of benefits, pay, or rights and all related disciplinary proceedings to be expunged from their records.”
Bowser’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.
As of March 28, 90 percent of the city’s employees were fully or partially vaccinated, according to city data provided to The Washington Post. More recent data related to discipline was not immediately available.
D.C. Police Union chairman Gregg Pemberton celebrated the judge’s ruling in a statement, calling it a “significant victory.”
“[The order] ensures that they will no longer be forced to receive the COVID-19 vaccine against their will and will no longer be subjected to discipline for deciding not to receive the vaccine,” Pemberton wrote. | 2022-08-26T01:19:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. coronavirus vaccine mandate for government workers is 'unlawful,' judge says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/25/dc-coronavirus-vaccine-mandate-workers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/25/dc-coronavirus-vaccine-mandate-workers/ |
New movies to stream this week: ‘Me Time’ and more
Updated August 25, 2022 at 9:00 p.m. EDT|Published August 25, 2022 at 10:00 a.m. EDT
Kevin Hart, left, and Mark Wahlberg in “Me Time.” (Saeed Adyani/Netflix)
The character Kevin Hart plays in the comedy “Me Time” is a variant of his role in “The Man From Toronto”: an average Joe in over his head. That’s not a subtle crack about the actor’s height. In these two movies — like so much of his résumé, serviceably amusing vehicles for his outsize talent — Hart makes for a towering comedic presence. In other words, he often stands head and shoulders above the material he’s given — in this case, a shaggy dog story by writer-director John Hamburg (“I Love You, Man”). Here, Hart plays Sonny Fisher, a stay-at-home dad who excels at caring for two cute kids (Che Tafari and Amentii Sledge); his high-powered architect wife, Maya (Regina Hall); and their pet tortoise. But when Sonny’s oldest friend, Huck (Mark Wahlberg), turns 44, Maya talks a reluctant Sonny into taking a break from dad duty to attend the Burning Man-like blowout Huck has planned in Death Valley, complete with matching tracksuits, a sweat lodge, yurts and a guest list of supercool 20-somethings. (Sonny does not feel worthy of Huck, whose wild lifestyle is everything Sonny’s is not.) The discursive story takes many twists and turns and features funny supporting performances from Jimmy O. Yang as a violent loan shark, Shira Gross as his Israeli enforcer and Ilia Isorelýs Paulino as an Uber driver who becomes Sonny and Huck’s accomplice in their ensuing misadventures. It’s a familiar odd-couple comedy. But true to its name, the focus of “Me Time” is all on Hart. R. Available on Netflix. Contains some sexual material, brief strong language and drug use. 104 minutes.
Jena Malone plays an adult woman who is irredeemably estranged from her biological mother and father and puts herself up for adoption by another couple in “Adopting Audrey.” The film was inspired by the true story of Jenna MacFarlane, who at the age of 43 solicited adoption by “mature parents.” Unrated. Available on demand. 92 minutes.
The documentary “Katrina Babies” looks at the legacy of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, as reflected in the lives of survivors who were children at the time of the storm. According to the Guardian, the film, which was directed by Edward Buckles Jr. — himself a Katrina survivor at 13 — “feels especially potent following the pandemic — which had a greater impact on the Black community — and the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor.” If unchecked, the Guardian writes, “how are today’s youth going to absorb these traumas?” Unrated. Available on HBO Max. 79 minutes.
After being dumped by her fiance, a woman (Nicky Whelan) decides to use her prepaid island honeymoon as an ill-advised vacation in “Maneater.” The shark-attack thriller also stars country singer Trace Adkins as a man — distraught after his daughter has been killed by a shark — who takes matters (and a shotgun) into his own hands when the authorities are slow to act. R. Available on demand. Contains strong language, some violence and gore. 86 minutes.
From writer-director Neil LaBute (“Your Friends and Neighbors”), “Out of the Blue” tells the story of Marilyn (Diane Kruger), a married woman whose affair with ex-con Connor (Ray Nicholson) takes a dark turn when the two start contemplating murdering Marilyn’s wealthy businessman husband. Hank Azaria also stars as Connor’s suspicious parole officer. R. Available on demand. Contains sex, strong language and some violence. 104 minutes.
In the romantic comedy “That’s Amor,” a woman (Riley Dandy) loses her job and relationship on the same day, only to meet a handsome Spanish chef (Isaac Gonzalez Rossi) who introduces some spice in her life. TV-14. Available on Netflix. 96 minutes.
The documentary “Untrapped: The Story of Lil Baby” follows the rising career of rapper Dominique Armani Jones, known as Lil Baby. R. Available on Amazon. Contains crude language and material related to drugs and sex. 90 minutes.
In the spirit of “Boys State,” the documentary “The Youth Governor” goes behind the scenes of an annual California civics program in which teenagers, over four months, campaign for the title of “youth governor” of America’s most populous state and run a simulated government. R. Available on Amazon and Apple TV Plus. 86 minutes. | 2022-08-26T01:32:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New movies to stream from home this week - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/08/25/august-26-new-streaming-movie-roundup/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/08/25/august-26-new-streaming-movie-roundup/ |
It was some of the strongest terms used by Biden, a politician long known — and at times criticized for — his willingness to work with members of the opposite party
President Biden participates in a rally for the Democratic National Committee at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Md., on Aug. 25. (Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images)
As if on cue, the rally was interrupted by a heckler yelling, “You stole the election!” The crowd booed as the man was escorted out, holding his two fingers up like President Richard M. Nixon and taking a brief bow.
After Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), speaking to conservative outlet Newsmax, said it was “completely unfair” for Biden to forgive some student debt, the White House reminded Greene on Twitter that she had $183,504 in Paycheck Protection Program loans forgiven.
It continued with a number of other lawmakers — including Reps. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.), Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) and Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) — with the White House noting the hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt the Republicans, who criticized the student loan forgiveness program, had forgiven through PPP.
Biden urged his party to turn out in large numbers, in part by trying to convince them of the unfinished business he wants to get done. In an indication of his struggles to deal with two Democratic senators who often thwart him — Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — he said: “If we elect two more senators, we keep the House … we’re going to get a lot of unfinished business done.”
“There are not many real Republicans anymore,” he said, adding that Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) “is a Republican you can deal with.” | 2022-08-26T01:50:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In fiery midterm speech, Biden says GOP’s turned toward ‘semi-fascism’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/25/fiery-midterm-speech-biden-says-gops-turned-toward-semi-fascism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/25/fiery-midterm-speech-biden-says-gops-turned-toward-semi-fascism/ |
SpaceX founder Elon Musk at a news conference with T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert on August 25. (Adrees Latif/Reuters)
The partnership would allow T-Mobile, the second largest carrier in the United States, to service customers in areas with no cell towers or wireless networks using Starlink satellites. The Bellevue, Wash.-based telco said that more than half a million square miles of the United States did not currently have cell coverage.
“An important thing … is that you will not need to get a new phone,” Musk said. “The phone you currently have will work.”
Chris Velazco in San Francisco contributed to this report. | 2022-08-26T02:42:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | T-Mobile to use SpaceX Starlink satellites to expand cell service - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/25/tmobile-spacex-starlink-cell-dead-zone/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/25/tmobile-spacex-starlink-cell-dead-zone/ |
The Bills said they “conducted a thorough examination” of the allegations against punter Matt Araiza. (Adrian Kraus/AP)
The incident allegedly happened during a party last October at Araiza’s off-campus residence during his redshirt junior season at SDSU. He won the Ray Guy award after the season as the nation’s best collegiate punter before declaring for the NFL draft, where he was selected by the Bills in the sixth round.
The San Diego County district attorney’s office is weighing evidence recently submitted by detectives to determine whether to file charges, according to the Los Angeles Times. No arrests have been made.
The university launched its own probe in July, according to a timeline posted on its website. SDSU said that while it was first informed of sexual assault allegations shortly after the party, campus officials held off on an investigation at the behest of the San Diego Police Department, which requested they not take “actions that might compromise its criminal investigation.”
According to the lawsuit, the complainant, then 17 and identified in a California Superior Court filing as Jane Doe, went out with friends that evening to find pre-Halloween parties. The address of the event in question had been posted on Snapchat, the filing says, and by the time Doe and her companions arrived she was “observably intoxicated.”
Araiza, then 21, handed Doe a drink that allegedly contained not just alcohol but “other intoxicating substances,” according to the lawsuit. After learning from Doe that she was a high school student and thus likely to have been a minor, per the lawsuit, he is accused of leading her to a secluded area to engage in sexual intercourse. Araiza then brought her to a room that already had three men in it, according to the filing, including the two other named defendants, Zavier Leonard and Nowlin “Pa’a” Ewaliko. Leonard is listed on the Aztecs’ roster as a redshirt freshman; Ewaliko was on last season’s roster as a freshman. The lawsuit says both were approximately 18 at the time of the party.
According to the lawsuit, Doe “went in and out of consciousness while she was being raped.” She remembered multiple men having sex with her and seeing “a light in her periphery as if someone was taking a video using a cell phone,” the lawsuit says. The ordeal continued for approximately 1½ hours, per the filing, until the party was “shut down.” Bleeding and distraught, Doe found her friends and told them she had been raped, the lawsuit says. Within two days, she reported the episode to police.
“We were recently made aware of a civil complaint involving Matt from October 2021,” the Bills said Thursday in a statement. “Due to the serious nature of the complaint, we conducted a thorough examination of this matter. As this is an ongoing civil case, we will have no other comment at this point.”
The NFL said it was “aware” of the matter but had no immediate comment. The league’s personal conduct policy would not apply because the alleged events occurred before Araiza was drafted. If he commits a new violation as an NFL player, he could be subject to enhanced discipline if it is determined he had a history of misconduct.
Kerry Armstrong, an attorney for Araiza, told the Los Angeles Times he hadn’t seen the complaint. He described the rape accusation as false, and said his investigator spoke to witnesses at the party who contradict the allegations.
The attorney who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the now-18-year-old Doe told ESPN that the alleged episode was “a horrific crime, the kind of which happens all too often.”
“What makes these crimes different is not only that they were committed by self-entitled athletes,” the attorney, Dan Gilleon, said in a statement. “Just as awful as the crimes, for months, multiple organizations — SDSU, the San Diego Police Department, the San Diego District Attorney, and now the Buffalo Bills — have acted the part of enablers looking the other way in denial that my client deserves justice even if the defendants are prized athletes.”
In July, Doe’s father criticized SDSU for waiting months to launch its investigation.
“To keep it silent … [while] the same people that are alleged to have done this have been allowed to roam free, graduate, continue to play in their sports,” he said then to the Los Angeles Times. “It drives me bonkers.”
The university said on its website that when it received anonymous submissions in October containing “third hand information about the alleged off-campus sexual assault,” it asked those making the submissions to meet with the school’s Title IX coordinator to provide more information, but that its requests were declined. Those providing anonymous information through December, the school said, were also asked to speak with San Diego police.
Describing the Title IX investigation it began last month as “an administrative procedure that determines only whether college or university policy has been violated,” SDSU said it has “trust in the more powerful criminal investigation process and continues to comply with SDPD.”
“Something like this sticks with you forever,” Doe told the L.A. Times last month. “And all I can really do now is just hope that I can get some sort of justice somehow and feel like people are facing consequences for their actions, because I feel like I’ve been facing the consequences for their actions.”
Araiza, nicknamed the “Punt God” for his booming kicks, won the Bills’ starting job in a training camp battle with incumbent veteran Matt Haack, who was released Monday. | 2022-08-26T03:34:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bills’ Matt Araiza, two SDSU teammates accused in gang-rape lawsuit - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/matt-araiza-bills-rape-lawsuit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/25/matt-araiza-bills-rape-lawsuit/ |
After almost 17 months of diplomatic wrangling, there could be glimmers of hope for a nuclear deal with Iran. On Wednesday, U.S. officials said they had sent back a response to Iranian comments on a E.U.-led draft agreement that would salvage the 2015 agreement over Tehran’s nuclear program. The trading of response documents could precede another round of talks in Vienna aimed at restoring the terms of the original deal, which placed hard curbs on Iran’s ability to enrich fissile material to weapons-grade levels in return for sanctions relief.
Those terms were unilaterally broken in 2018 by former president Donald Trump, who rejected the pact forged by the Obama administration and other international powers even as Iran was believed to be abiding by its restrictions. That move was opposed by the deal’s European, Chinese and Russian signatories, but cheered on by a clutch of regional powers united in their animus toward Iran — including Israel, then led by right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Arab monarchies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The Trump administration, at the time, claimed Iran wouldn’t dare restart its forbidden nuclear activity. But by 2019, shorn of incentives not to, Iran installed faster centrifuges in its facilities and commenced enrichment activities that violated the agreement’s strictures. Under the 2015 deal, the so-called “breakout” time for Iran to create enough for fuel for a potential nuclear bomb was measured in months, even close to a year. Now, it’s a matter of weeks, officials and analysts claim.
Biden came to office in 2021 vowing to return to the agreement and rein back Iran’s enrichment surge. But domestic politics intervened in both countries — an immediate deal with sanctions relief for Iran was a non-starter in Washington, while hard-liners in Tehran, who long opposed the original deal and doubted the worth of any diplomacy with the Americans, swept away the regime’s so-called “reformist-pragmatist” camp in elections. Polling of Iranian attitudes this summer found that fewer than half of the Iranians surveyed believe the deal will be restored, while more than two-thirds expressed doubt that the United States would abide by its commitments.
Robert Malley, Biden’s special envoy for Iran, warned late last year in an interview with the New Yorker that the Iranians were “emptying the deal of the nonproliferation benefits for which we bargained.” He acknowledged that at some future point diplomacy on this matter would “be tantamount to trying to revive a dead corpse.”
Scoop: U.S. toughened positions in Iran deal response, Israeli officials say. The talks the Israeli national security adviser had at the White House earlier this week reduced the anxiety in Jerusalem about more U.S. concessions. My story on @axioshttps://t.co/9Zjr51OsXx
Evidently, the Biden administration doesn’t believe we’ve reached that stage yet. But the prospect of the deal’s restoration has revived the angry debates surrounding its initial brokering. Republican lawmakers have expressed their outrage over any agreement that doesn’t have congressional oversight. David Barnea, chief of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, was quoted by Israeli media on Thursday warning that a looming deal would be “a strategic disaster.” A flurry of comments from Israel’s political elites, including Prime Minister Yair Lapid, urged the United States to back away from the negotiating table.
There’s no small irony to their current objections. Trump broke the accord in 2018 with Netanyahu’s goading even amid “a clear consensus within Israel’s security and defense establishment at the time that leaving the agreement was a giant error,” wrote Haaretz journalist Amir Tibon. Now, he added, it may be replaced by an agreement that “some experts warn … will be worse for Israel and create a more dangerous Middle East.”
“Israel, and opponents of a new deal in Congress, have said that the lifting of nuclear-related sanctions will provide Iran with hundreds of billions of dollars to finance terrorist activities, and the early expiration of some of its provisions will quickly allow Iran to revive plans to manufacture a nuclear weapon,” my colleague Karen DeYoung reported.
“Administration officials dispute the dollar calculations and say that the reinstatement of limits on the Iranian nuclear program, even with some expiration dates, will provide several years’ relief from an imminent nuclear threat and room for further negotiations,” she added.
The Trump administration and its fellow travelers who took a hammer to the agreement are reaping what they sowed. “Their actions not only almost prompted a war, but as a result of the Trump administration’s poor decision-making, Iran expanded its nuclear program in an unprecedented manner,” Holly Dagres, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told me. “Love or hate the JCPOA” — the acronym for the 2015 agreement between Iran and world powers — “it’s the best path forward at preventing Iran from potentially developing nuclear weapons.”
Had Trump not withdrawn from the deal, Dagres added, the inherent “confidence-building exercise” that the JCPOA entailed would have continued, perhaps leading to negotiations on other fronts. “Whether those discussions would’ve been constructive is unclear, but it’s safe to say that Iran would not be considered a nuclear threshold state as it is by some today,” she said.
Yet there’s a parallel sense that hawks in Washington got exactly what they wanted. “On its own terms, [the Trump administration’s decision to leave the deal] has been very successful,” argued John Ghazvinian, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Middle East Center.
It scrapped any prospect of rapprochement between Tehran and Washington, tightened cooperation between Israel and the U.S.’s Gulf allies and raised the likelihood of future covert Israeli or even American action against Iran. New tensions came to the fore and defined a fractious state of play — from Iran’s own violent plots abroad and the militancy of its Middle Eastern proxies to U.S. reprisals, including strikes this week on Iran-backed factions in northeastern Syria.
Iran is a malevolent actor. They support terrorism. They target Americans. This isn’t a argument against the nuclear deal. It’s an argument FOR the deal.
Why would we choose to pursue a policy that makes a nation as dangerous as Iran a nuclear weapons power?
Now, the Iranian regime and the Biden administration are simply “trying to secure their very basic and immediate needs,” Ghazvinian told me. The Biden administration wants to rein in Iran’s march toward being able to produce a nuclear weapon, while Iran would welcome loosened sanctions on its economy and oil exports.
Ghazvinian, author of “America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present,” noted that the world is in a different place from 2015 or 2009 — when the Obama administration entered a diplomatic process with European partners and Russia and China on Iran’s nuclear program. “We have become consumed with the details of the nuclear issue, lawyered this thing to death, and forgotten what the larger point was” — that is, he said, that the Obama administration believed the nuclear agreement could build a foundation for a wider strategic dialogue that would address concerns over Iran’s destabilizing activities.
That dialogue is nowhere in sight, while strategists in both countries have long since shifted their priorities — in Washington, away from the Middle East; in Tehran, toward greater accommodation with some of its neighbors and closer ties to China. It’s hard “to resolve an exceptionally complex technical issue in the context of an exceptionally dysfunctional political atmosphere,” Ghazvinian said, referring to the nuclear deal and the broader chasm between the United States and Iran. “We need to move beyond the JCPOA, we need to move past it.” | 2022-08-26T04:26:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Is the Iran nuclear deal worth salvaging? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/26/iran-nuclear-deal-salvage/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/26/iran-nuclear-deal-salvage/ |
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) shakes hands with Douglas Hsu, director general of the Department of North American Affairs at Taiwan's Foreign Ministry, after arriving in Taipei on Thursday night. (Taiwan Ministry Of Foreign Affai/Via Reuters)
BEIJING — Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) met Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen on Friday in Taipei, the latest U.S. lawmaker to visit the island at a time of tense relations with China.
Blackburn’s visit is the third by U.S. lawmakers this month. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip in early August plunged cross-strait relations to recent lows and prompted Beijing to launch large-scale military exercises in the waters around Taiwan.
Taiwan has been self-ruled for decades and is one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies. However, Beijing continues to claim the island as part of its territory and responds furiously whenever foreign officials or companies appear to treat Taiwan as a country. The United States and most other governments do not diplomatically recognize Taiwan, in order to maintain official relations with China.
In her visit on Friday, Blackburn called Taiwan a “country" in passing, while saying it was important to support Taiwan in “preserving its freedom.”
“I am looking forward to a wonderful visit. And yes indeed I do remember my visit fondly in 2008, and the opportunity to get to see some of your country firsthand,” Blackburn told Tsai, according to a video posted on Tsai’s official Facebook account.
Tsai called Blackburn an “important and close friend of Taiwan," and expressed her hopes that Taiwan would be more deeply integrated into U.S.-led initiatives in the region. Taiwan has been excluded from the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, a U.S.-led trade initiative, though Washington has launched separate trade negotiations with Taiwan.
“We look forward to working hand-in-hand with the United States and other like-minded democracies to safeguard peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region,” Tsai said.
Pelosi’s visit had sparked the largest Chinese military show of force since the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait crisis, and Chinese import bans on some Taiwan goods. The high-profile visit infuriated Beijing, which aired warnings to Washington publicly and privately ahead of the trip. Chinese leader Xi Jinping had personally asked President Biden to prevent Pelosi’s visit, a request turned down by Biden, The Washington Post has reported, according to a senior White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
A delegation of five members of Congress led by Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) visited Taiwan last week, prompting a fresh round of Chinese military drills in the waters around the island.
Alicia Chen in Taipei contributed to this report. | 2022-08-26T04:27:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sen. Marsha Blackburn meets Taiwan president amid China tensions - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/26/taiwan-marsha-blackburn-meeting-tsai-china/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/26/taiwan-marsha-blackburn-meeting-tsai-china/ |
She has always been insecure and has had a history of having too much wine and picking fights, reducing people to tears. We often took space after these moments, then brushed it under the rug and rebounded.
I felt a responsibility to be her best friend, because she had so few and couldn’t hold down a healthy relationship.
I decided that enough is enough, unless she wanted to take accountability for her actions. In the meantime, she has secured a healthy relationship (I’m assuming) with a man I actually set her up with three years ago.
Former Friend: If you are able to contact “Tracy” to acknowledge these events without getting sucked into her drama, then yes, it would be kind for you to do so.
Dear Readers: The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 800-273-8255, has recently changed its name and made it easier for people to make contact.
The Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is now a simple three-digit contact: 988. (The previous number can still be used indefinitely.) | 2022-08-26T04:35:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: Should I reconnect with my former best friend? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/26/ask-amy-reconnect-best-friend/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/26/ask-amy-reconnect-best-friend/ |
This combination of photos show Britney Spears at the 29th annual GLAAD Media Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., on April 12, 2018, left, and Elton John at the iHeartRadio Music Awards on Thursday, May 27, 2021, in Los Angeles. Spears and John have collaborated for the first time, creating the slinky, club-ready single “Hold Me Closer” that sees the pop icons take old sounds and fashion something new. (AP Photo) (Uncredited/AP) | 2022-08-26T04:35:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Elton John and Britney Spears unite on a new dance single - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/elton-john-and-britney-spears-unite-on-a-new-dance-single/2022/08/26/282f9ea2-24f4-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/elton-john-and-britney-spears-unite-on-a-new-dance-single/2022/08/26/282f9ea2-24f4-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
In this photo released on Aug. 26, 2022, by the New South Wales Police Force marble tiles are stored in a facility in Sydney, Australia. Authorities have found 1.8 metric tons (2 U.S. tons) of methamphetamine hidden in marble tiles shipped from the Middle East to Sydney in what police describe as the largest-ever seizure of the illicit drug in Australia. (New South Wales Police via AP) (HOGP/New South Wales Police Force) | 2022-08-26T04:37:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Australian police seize record 2 tons of methamphetamine - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/australian-police-seize-record-2-tons-of-methamphetamine/2022/08/25/0d5fe75e-24f3-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/australian-police-seize-record-2-tons-of-methamphetamine/2022/08/25/0d5fe75e-24f3-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
Dutch probe baby’s death amid ‘inhumane’ conditions at asylum centers
Hundreds of migrants seek shelter outside an overcrowded asylum seekers' center in Ter Apel, northern Netherlands, Thursday, Aug. 25. (Peter Dejong/AP)
Dutch authorities are investigating the death of a three-month-old infant at a makeshift shelter as the country struggles to accommodate an influx of asylum seekers. Hundreds have been left to sleep outside and in tents in conditions aid agencies described as “inhumane.”
The baby died Wednesday morning in Ter Apel, a northeastern village that serves as a port of entry to the Dutch asylum system. The infant was at a sports facility that was converted into an emergency shelter after the area’s main refugee center ran out of room.
State Secretary for Asylum and Migration Eric van der Burg said he was “deeply shocked” by the incident, the Associated Press reported, but authorities gave no further details about the circumstances of the child’s death.
The incident put a spotlight on the increasingly dire conditions for asylum seekers in the Netherlands, where a housing crunch, insufficient shelter space and reduced immigration staff have created dangerous bottlenecks at the country’s refugee centers. Thousands of refugees are now living in emergency shelters such as tents, gyms and event halls, according to rights advocates.
The situation is so critical, aid agencies say, that at least one refugee rights group has sued the Dutch government. The Red Cross also began providing assistance to asylum seekers in Ter Apel this month, and Doctors Without Borders began offering medical and psychological care on Thursday — the first time it has offered such assistance in the Netherlands.
“It is unprecedented that we are providing medical assistance in the Netherlands, but the conditions in which these people find themselves are inhumane,” Judith Sargentini, director of Doctors Without Borders for the Netherlands, said in a statement.
The AP reported Thursday that 700 people have been sleeping on the street in Ter Apel in recent days after the refugee center, which can house up to 2,000 people, ran out of space. Those who are living outside the center lack access to showers and clean toilets, and some asylum seekers with chronic illnesses have run out of medication, according to Doctors Without Borders.
The organization said that pregnant women and children were among the crowd of people stuck outside the center’s gates last week. “If this situation continues, it could lead to serious medical emergencies," Doctors Without Borders said in a news release Thursday.
Munasar Muhidin, a teenage asylum seeker who said he fled Somalia in 2020 after Islamist militants killed most of his family, told Reuters that upon arriving in Ter Apel, he was forced to camp on the side of the road, where clashes broke out and thunderstorms left his bedding soaked.
In the Netherlands, several thousand people apply for asylum each month. Most of the applicants are Syrian, according to government figures, but others come from countries such as Afghanistan, Eritrea, Turkey and Yemen.
Well before the evacuation, a generation of Afghans escaped to Europe. Their experience has been dire.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Dutch authorities set aside shelter beds for some 60,000 Ukrainian refugees, who bypassed the normal asylum application process.
The number of new asylum seekers has grown compared to recent years, said Karel Hendriks, a spokesman for Doctors Without Borders. But it remains significantly lower than it was at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe in 2015-2016.
Since that peak, Dutch authorities have scaled back staffing at the immigration service and closed asylum centers, reducing processing and shelter capacity, according to the Dutch Council for Refugees, a refugee rights group.
“The reception crisis was caused by political choices and could have been prevented,” said Nienke Toren, a spokeswoman for the group. She said that many Dutch municipalities have refused to participate in efforts to create more shelters.
The Dutch Council for Refugees sued the government to improve conditions for asylum seekers, with a court date set for Sept. 15.
Several government agencies, including the Health and Youth Care Inspectorate, have said they raised the alarm over deteriorating conditions months ago.
Leon Veldt, a spokesman for the government-run Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA), told Reuters this month that the country would need 51,000 beds for asylum seekers by the end of the year. It currently has 45,000.
“COA does everything it can to prioritize shelter for more vulnerable people, like children, individuals with medical conditions and women,” said Lennart Wegewijs, a spokesman for the agency, adding that the COA does its best to improve conditions outside of its facility “where possible.”
Some COA employees stopped work Tuesday to protest conditions at Ter Apel, the local daily newspaper, Dagblad van het Noorden, reported.
After the baby’s death on Wednesday, Wegewijs said residents and workers in Ter Apel felt “sadness and powerlessness.”
The crisis in general has raised tensions with local residents and police have struggled to maintain security. Fights have broken out as asylum seekers grow more desperate — and the Red Cross was forced to close its service point for several days, Iris van Deinse, a spokeswoman for the Netherlands branch, said.
The government has proposed some unusual solutions to alleviate the shelter shortage, including housing asylum seekers in hotels and on cruise ships. Authorities leased two cruise ships, one of which can accommodate 1,000 asylum seekers for a maximum period of six months, beginning in September.
The government "must make municipalities formally responsible for providing shelter and reception as soon as possible, just as happened with the Ukrainians that came here,” said Toren. | 2022-08-26T05:14:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Dutch probe baby’s death at Ter Apel asylum center - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/26/ter-apel-netherlands-asylum-center/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/26/ter-apel-netherlands-asylum-center/ |
Analysis by Ekow Dontoh | Bloomberg
Ghana, which is set to become Africa’s newest oil exporter at the end of this year, may pump as much as 240,000 barrels of oil from its offshore Jubilee field by 2014-15, the state-owned Ghana National Petroleum Corp. said yesterday.
The government abandoned fiscal discipline and opened the spending taps in anticipation of an oil windfall. But the revenue it earned was insufficient to cover a succession of expensive flagship programs and the budget deficit soared as borrowing rose to plug funding gaps. Overspending was particularly rife in election years. Akufo-Addo’s administration scrapped fees for all senior high school students and pays for their upkeep and accommodation. In 2021, the government spent $1 billion on refinancing loans taken out by indebted private power producers, a move that was intended to reduce its electricity bills. A plan to strengthen a banking industry that’s been weakened by bad loans has cost taxpayers more than 25 billion cedis ($2.5 billion), and an estimated 8 billion cedis more is needed to complete the process. Covid-19 dealt a further blow to the state’s already stretched finances. After selling Eurobonds for each of the previous nine years, it was shut out of international capital markets in 2022 as investors lost confidence in Ghana’s ability to service its debts. The government shunned an initiative that would have enabled it to suspend the servicing of its loans, and vowed not to tap further support from the IMF, before changing its tune in July 2022.
The country is on the verge of a fiscal crisis and may be forced to restructure a debt burden that equated to 78.3% of gross domestic product at the end of June, up from 62.5% five years earlier. When it could no longer tap international markets, the government resorted to taking out domestic loans, paying annual interest rates of almost 30%. The central bank stepped in to provide the government with funding after it risked defaulting on its local debt, but it plans to limit further support to stay within its legal lending threshold. In early August, S&P Global Ratings cut the nation’s credit rating by one notch to CCC+, seven levels below investment grade, citing the government’s elevated financing needs and limited access to external financing.
The Finance Ministry has vowed to return state finances to a sustainable path, cutting spending and reducing the projected budget deficit for 2022. The Bank of Ghana raised its key lending rate by 850 basis points between November 2021 and August 2022 to support the currency and help tame inflation. The central bank also increased the cash reserves that banks are required to hold and began buying dollars from mining and oil companies operating in the country -- moves that were aimed at bolstering the nation’s depleting foreign reserves. | 2022-08-26T06:07:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why Ghana Went From Hero to Zero for Investors - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/why-ghana-went-from-hero-to-zero-for-investors/2022/08/26/078fa54a-24fc-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/why-ghana-went-from-hero-to-zero-for-investors/2022/08/26/078fa54a-24fc-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 24: People protest in response to the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on June 24, 2022 in Washington, DC. The Court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health overturns the landmark 50-year-old Roe v Wade case and erases a federal right to an abortion. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images) (Photographer: Brandon Bell/Getty Images North America)
Bittner is a businessman and a dual citizen of the US and Romania. He used to live and work in Romania and, naturally, had to open financial accounts there. What he apparently didn’t know — many expats don’t — is that he had to declare all these accounts every year to the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, on a form colloquially known as the FBAR.
Americans abroad suffer a long list of indignities in trying to comply with US laws. Most of them don’t owe the IRS any actual tax (because they usually pay at higher rates to their host countries, and subtract those amounts from their American liabilities). But they must still fill out incomprehensible forms demanding information that’s often unavailable or ambiguous — at great cost of time, worry and money.
Some expats, for example, find themselves owning plain-vanilla mutual funds registered in their host country — employers sometimes put such investments into occupational retirement schemes by default. To the IRS, these are PFICs, or “passive foreign investment companies” — a synonym for toxic. The resulting paperwork is considered the most complex in the entire American tax code, and the taxation tantamount to confiscation.
US expats may also struggle to open — or keep open — financial accounts abroad. Foreign banks and brokers must report on “US persons” (citizens or Green Card holders) to the US. Rather than run the risk of American retaliation for errors and omissions, many financial institutions prefer to have no American customers at all. This particular problem is a consequence of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), notorious Obama-era legislation that has upended the lives of many US expats.
The unintended consequences are legion. One is to snare “accidental Americans” in the nets of the IRS and FinCEN. These are people who — usually because their parents happened to be in the US when they were born — have US citizenship but otherwise no connection to America. One day, they may receive a letter informing them of bureaucratic torment on a scale that would impress Franz Kafka.
This (largely coincidental) intertwining of citizenship law and tax law over the decades has made the US unique. All countries want to crack down on tax cheats who hide money in offshore accounts — that’s why ever more governments are agreeing to share financial information with one another. But only the US hits millions of expats who have modest assets and little clue every time it targets rich and sophisticated tax dodgers living stateside.
In a sign of growing desperation, a guerrilla insurgency of litigation is now forming from Canada to Israel to Europe. In the UK, a woman named Jenny Webster, American-born but British, has been taking the British authorities to court for sharing her financial information with the US, arguing that this amounts to violations of her data privacy.
In France, Fabien Lehagre, born in the US but French by upbringing, founded the Association of Accidental Americans. He’s got legal cases under way in several countries. With his input, France’s National Assembly recently passed a measure that would make its government stop sending people’s financial data to the US in accord with FATCA, unless the US reciprocates by sending information about French taxpayers in return. But the bill was nixed in the French Senate.
There are lots of reasons why people born in the US at some point find themselves living abroad. It shouldn’t be US government policy, even implicitly, to make such lives unnecessarily difficult. America must treat all its citizens equally, whether they live at home or overseas.
The nine robed justices now have an opportunity to send the first small sign that they got that message. Alexandru Bittner shouldn’t be financially ruined just because he made unintentional errors while he lived abroad. Nor should any other American — or indeed anybody at all.
• Golden Passports, Citizenship and Identity in a Time of War: Andreas Kluth | 2022-08-26T06:07:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Next, the Supreme Court Decides How to Punish US Expats - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/next-the-supreme-court-decides-how-to-punish-us-expats/2022/08/26/c33b3430-24fc-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/next-the-supreme-court-decides-how-to-punish-us-expats/2022/08/26/c33b3430-24fc-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
KYIV, Ukraine — In early April, after Russian forces took control of the southeastern city of Berdyansk, they made local police officer Yuri Mykytenko an offer: He could stay on the job — so long as he collaborated with them.
The 30-year-old asked for 10 minutes to think it over. Then he ran.
He was caught at a checkpoint on his way out of town, and became a prisoner of war.
Holding prisoners offers warring parties both an advantage and a burden, said David Silbey, a military historian at Cornell University. For centuries, POWs have been used as important bargaining chips. But they can also cause logistical hurdles during a conflict, when they must be fed and kept out of harm’s way.
In Ukraine, some missing people or suspected POWs’ whereabouts remain unknown. But others — like Mykytenko — have been swapped for Russian troops in dramatic exchanges near the front lines.
Returned POWs can often offer intelligence picked up during their time in custody. Details of their experience can also help military officials better train soldiers on how behave if they are taken prisoner.
Andriy Yusov, representative of Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, said in a statement that as of July, 573 Ukrainian “defenders” had been released from captivity. He declined to comment on how many POWs each side was holding.
The Ukrainian government, often with the assistance of the International Committee of the Red Cross, is “constantly in negotiations” regarding prisoner releases, Yusov said.
After his arrest, Mykytenko was held in several places. First, he said, soldiers he believed to be Chechen based on their accents beat him on his “back, hands, legs, everything except my face.” They then forced him and other prisoners to sing Russian hymns as an act of humiliation. There were no questions, he said, “just beating.”
After several days he was transferred to the southern city of Melitopol, where he said he was interrogated by agents of the FSB, the Russian security agency. He said agents showed him a photo of himself in his police uniform. “I am sure this information was given to the FSB by a collaborator from the police station,” he said.
While there, he said, troops he said he thought were Dagestani based on their accents beat him with electrical wires, leaving scars on his hands. One carried out a mock execution of Mykytenko, pointing his AK-47 at his head and then shooting the wall next to him, he recalled.
Soon he was moved again, this time to Crimea, where he said he was handed over to Russian police and held in a facility with around 120 others. At one point, he said, Russian TV crews came to film the prisoners and ask them questions about the controversial 2014 referendum conducted by Russia that Moscow has used to justify its annexation of the peninsula.
There he was again offered an opportunity to collaborate with Russian forces in Berdyansk, and he said he again refused. Then, at the end of April, he and six others were blindfolded and loaded onto a military vehicle.
When they finally stopped and their blindfolds were removed, they saw Ukrainian police vehicles sitting just 50 yards away and realized they were being exchanged. Their hands taped together, they walked straight past a group of smiling Russian troops heading toward them from the other side.
“We flipped them off behind our backs,” Mykytenko said.
Swaps can be risky for both sides, which are exposed to potential attacks, Silbey said. Among the most famous prisoner exchanges were those on Germany’s Glienicke Bridge — also known as the Bridge of Spies — during the Cold War.
“It’s a very sort of tense moment where it’s often easy for it to go very wrong,” Silbey said. “You look for places to make exchanges that are relatively geographically contained and also where it’s hard [for either side] to get an advantage.”
Around the time Mykytenko was detained, Anton Stovbur, 30, cleared his phone history and set off on a dangerous mission to try to rescue Ukrainian civilians living under Russian control in Berdyansk, Mykytenko’s hometown.
But at a Russian checkpoint, soldiers searched his phone and found one exchange he had forgotten to delete, which gave away his loyalty to Kyiv.
The Russian soldiers, Stovbur recounted in a phone interview, pulled him from his car to the side of the road. There, he said, they made him strip to check for military tattoos. A man the troops identified as their captain fired shots just above Stovbur’s head and near his legs, he said, before threatening to chop off his ear.
For several hours, he sat at the Russians’ roadside base. On the radio, the captain asked someone for guidance, he said, about “what he must do with me: Shoot me, let me go or wait until someone can take me?”
Ukrainian army psychologist Olena Sek said being taken prisoner is generally more traumatic for civilians than for soldiers, who are trained to handle that “professional risk.”
Soldiers often “compress” their emotions and thoughts “to the point that some don’t feel physical pain from torture.” She said her job was to “decompress” them after their release.
Stovbur said he was severely beaten by his Russian captors, often twice a day. “It was fun for them,” he said.
In late April, after several weeks in detention, he and six other civilian prisoners and more than two dozen military prisoners, some severely wounded, were loaded into military trucks. They were driven to a river and told to walk across on the rocks, carrying the wounded.
Ukrainian troops waited for them on the other side. They were being traded for Russian prisoners, but Stovbur didn’t look at them, he said, worried that something could go wrong right up until he knew he was safe.
“I didn’t care about them,” he said of the Russians. “I had an injured Ukrainian in my hands and I needed to get him to the checkpoint.”
When he finally made it back to his hometown of Zaporizhzhia, Stovbur went back to volunteering to help with the war effort, this time organizing a Telegram channel that helps residents find fuel.
Mykytenko, the police officer, volunteered to serve in a rotation on the front line. When reached by phone this summer, he said his position was under heavy artillery shelling and he was terrified of being captured again.
He said his captors had told him that if they detained him again, “we are definitely going to kill you.” | 2022-08-26T06:07:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In Ukraine, soldiers describe their experience as former Russian POWs - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/26/ukraine-pows-soldier-experience-russians/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/26/ukraine-pows-soldier-experience-russians/ |
In this photo released by the Taiwan Presidential Office, U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn meets with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen in Taipei, Taiwan on Friday, Aug. 26, 2022. Blackburn met with Tsai on Friday, in the second visit by members of Congress since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip earlier this month sharply raised tensions with China. (Taiwan Presidential Office via AP) (Uncredited/Taiwan Presidential Office)
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Taiwan’s leader on Friday said China and Russia are “disrupting and threatening the world order” through Beijing’s recent large-scale military exercises near the island and Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. | 2022-08-26T07:39:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Taiwan: China, Russia disrupting, threatening world order - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/taiwan-china-russia-disrupting-threatening-world-order/2022/08/26/47fa09f4-2506-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/taiwan-china-russia-disrupting-threatening-world-order/2022/08/26/47fa09f4-2506-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
ATLANTA — Masters champion Scottie Scheffler started the Tour Championship on Thursday with a two-shot lead as the No. 1 seed in the FedEx Cup. He led by as many as six shots on the front nine. Then his lead was down to two. And when he finished with three straight birdies for a 5-under 65, he was five strokes ahead of Xander Schauffele (66). | 2022-08-26T07:39:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Thursday Sports in Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/thursday-sports-in-brief/2022/08/26/c850df06-250b-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/thursday-sports-in-brief/2022/08/26/c850df06-250b-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
Myanmar arrest of ex-U.K. ambassador is ‘hostage diplomacy,’ activists say
Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, leader of the Myanmar military junta, seized power in a 2021 coup. (-/AFP/Getty Images)
The Myanmar military’s recent arrest of a former U.K. ambassador is an example of “hostage diplomacy,” activists and opposition politicians say. The detention of the ex-diplomat came as Britain moved to further isolate the Southeast Asian regime.
Vicky Bowman, who served as British ambassador to Myanmar from 2002 to 2006, was arrested Wednesday evening at her Yangon apartment along with her husband, Htein Lin, a renowned Burmese artist. They join the 15,000-plus people arrested by the military junta since it seized power in a coup last February, said the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a nonprofit that tracks people persecuted by the regime. The figures include at least three other foreigners.
Activists say the detention of Bowman, who is being charged for staying at a different address than the residence that she officially registered, reflects the growing impunity of the military. The junta has brutally crushed opposition over the past year and defied international appeals last month to execute four pro-democracy leaders. Many also see the arrest as an attempt to pressure foreign governments against undermining the regime, including with stronger sanctions.
Other foreigners known to be in detention include Sean Turnell, an Australian economist and longtime adviser to Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who was arrested days after the 2021 coup, and Toru Kubota, a documentary filmmaker from Japan, who was taken into custody earlier this month while covering a protest in Yangon.
Danny Fenster, an American journalist who worked in Myanmar, spent more than five months in jail last year before being released on a pardon. The U.S. Embassy in Yangon said last month that another American is being “wrongfully detained” in the country.
“They’re trying to create a hostage situation, a kind of hostage diplomacy,” said Moe Zaw Oo, deputy foreign minister for the National Unity Government (NUG) — an administration-in-exile that has significant popular support. He said the junta is borrowing from the playbook of other authoritarian regimes, including Russia, which continues to hold custody of Americans, including WNBA player Brittney Griner, that the U.S. State Department considers to be wrongfully detained.
“The ransom in this case is some sort of political benefit,” Moe Zaw Oo added about Bowman’s arrest.
Myanmar’s military, also known the Tatmadaw, has been brutal in its recent crackdown of opposition forces. It has employed strategies honed over decades of suppressing ethnic minorities, from the razing of villages to the use of human shields. Faced with multiple insurgencies and the threat of being further isolated from the international community, the junta is seeking out new methods of intimidation, observers say.
Military leaders are “in a fight for their survival,” said Mark Farmaner, director of pro-democracy group Burma Campaign UK. “They’re not playing the same international diplomatic games they used to play when they were in charge before.”
Zachary Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington who studies Southeast Asian security issues, said the arrests will probably prompt foreign governments to prioritize the safe release of their citizens. That could weaken — or delay — a more “principled response” to the junta, he said.
Australia has shied away from imposing severe sanctions on Myanmar since the coup, lagging behind other Western powers, he noted. Foreign Minister Penny Wong said in June that Australia is weighing new sanctions but emphasized that securing the release of Turnell is the country’s “first priority.”
Days before Bowman was arrested, Britain announced that it would be joining other countries in an International Court of Justice case alleging that the Myanmar military conducted genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority. London also said it would impose new sanctions, including against Sky One Construction Company, which has links with the son of the junta’s leader, Gen. Min Aung Hlaing.
There’s no immediate evidence that the arrest and the sanctions were related, but activists say the message sent to foreign governments is clear.
“It’s a challenge not only to the Burmese people but to the world,” said a Myanmar journalist in the United Kingdom, who is longtime friends with Bowman and Htein Lin. “The message is: No one is safe.”
The journalist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for security reasons, said that the arrest of Bowman, 56, and Htein Lin, 55, came as a surprise to their friends.
Brittney Griner may go to a Russian penal colony. Here’s what you need to know.
The couple was well-known in many circles — Bowman speaks fluent Burmese and has lived on and off in the country for more than 30 years; Htein Lin had been a student activist in the 1980s and 1990s — and their dramatic love story drew international attention.
But in recent years, they had led a relatively “low-profile” life, said the journalist. Bowman was most recently the director of the Myanmar Centre for Responsible Business, a Yangon-based initiative, and was not an outspoken critic of the junta.
In an interview with local news outlet Frontier Myanmar earlier this year, Bowman advised businesses against cozying up to the military. “Our advice is you need to continue to follow the law,” she said. “However, we do not encourage companies to stick their head up above the parapet and have a ceremonial, ribbon-cutting relationship with the government.”
While she was also not a supporter of the regime, Bowman had contacts within the military, said two of her friends. This gave her some confidence that she could live safely in the country with her husband and her 14-year-old daughter, even after the coup.
When the pandemic hit, Bowman and her family moved out of Yangon to a home that Htein Lin had in Kalaw, a hilltop town in central Myanmar. A junta spokesperson said Thursday that Bowman was being charged for living at an address that she hadn’t registered. Her husband, the official said, was charged “because he knew and encouraged his wife to move to his home address, contrary to the existing law.”
Tan reported from Singapore. Cabato reported from Manila. | 2022-08-26T08:39:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Myanmar arrest of Vicky Bowman is ‘hostage diplomacy’, activists say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/26/myanmar-arrest-vicky-bowman-hostage-diplomacy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/26/myanmar-arrest-vicky-bowman-hostage-diplomacy/ |
A Russian serviceman guards an area of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station in territory under Russian military control, southeastern Ukraine, May 1, 2022. (AP)
Electricity has been restored to Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, narrowly averting a “radiation accident,” says Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. The facility was cut off from Ukraine’s electricity grid on Thursday, causing a massive power outage before backup diesel generators kicked in. Zelensky warned that Europe remained “one step away from a radiation disaster” as long as Russian troops controlled the plant.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant remains cut off from Ukraine’s main electricity grid Friday morning, however it is running using power from a nearby line, the country’s energy company Energoatom said. Although now receiving power, it is not yet providing any power to the rest of the country. Russian troops have occupied Europe’s largest power plant since March.
The International Atomic Energy Agency chief says his team of experts will visit the site in the coming “days.” Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said: “Almost every day there is a new incident at or near the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant. We can’t afford to lose any more time.”
Russia is using 21 sites in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, to detain, interrogate and process prisoners of war and civilians in so-called “filtration camps,” a report by Yale University and the State Department has found. Its findings are based on data and commercial satellite imagery identifying with “high confidence” the separate locations, it said, one of which contains “potential graves.”
Russian claims of a military slowdown are “almost certainly deliberate misinformation,” Britain’s defense ministry said Friday in a daily update. Earlier this week, Russia’s defense minster Sergei Shoigu said an intentional slowdown in attacks was underway to avoid civilian casualties. However, Moscow’s offensive has in fact stalled because of “poor” military performance, the U.K. said.
“Extensive use” of cluster munitions by Russia have killed at least 689 people in Ukraine since the war began, the Cluster Munition Coalition, an international disarmament group, said in its annual report. They said use of the internationally banned munitions was having an “enormous impact on civilians” and “demonstrates a blatant disregard for human life, humanitarian principles, and legal norms.” Ukrainian forces have also used the weapon “several times” in the conflict, it added.
Kyiv has renamed 95 streets in a “de-Russification” effort. Kyiv’s mayor Vitali Klitschko announced the new street names, which were supported by a public vote, to “perpetuate the memory” of significant Ukrainian historical events, famous figures and heroes. Soviet era names would be replaced with those honoring Ukraine’s Azov battalion, Marine Corps and cities such as London, he said.
Ukrainians describe beatings and torture while held as Russian POWs: In early April, after Russian forces took control of the southeastern city of Berdyansk, they made local police officer Yuri Mykytenko an offer: He could stay on the job — so long as he collaborated with them.
The 30-year-old asked for 10 minutes to think it over. Then he ran. He was caught at a checkpoint on his way out of town, and became a prisoner of war. | 2022-08-26T08:39:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russia-Ukraine war latest updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/26/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/26/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/ |
Women protest outside the Justice Ministry in Madrid in 2019 after a court ruled that five men accused of raping a 14-year-old were guilty of the lesser crime of sexual abuse. (Paul White/AP)
Spain’s lower house of Parliament passed legislation Thursday that requires sexual consent to be explicit, rather than something that can be assumed to have been given through silence or by default — in a move that could classify nonconsensual sex as rape, according to Spanish media.
The bill, dubbed the “only yes means yes” law, was passed 205-141, with three abstentions. In a tweet celebrating its passage, Spain’s equality minister, Irene Montero, thanked the “feminist parliamentary majority that made it possible,” adding the hashtag #SoloSíesSí — or “only yes is yes.”
The legislation — which still needs to clear Spain’s upper house — was written after courts in the country ruled that two cases of sexual violence that occurred in 2016 were not rape, triggering widespread public anger.
In what is widely known as the “wolf pack” case, five men were accused of raping an 18-year-old woman during the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, a city in northeastern Spain.
The men had met the victim on a packed street during the festival, striking up a conversation and offering to walk her to her car. But instead, they led her into a building and took turns filming themselves sexually assaulting her.
Although the perpetrators were arrested the following day, they were initially convicted of the lesser crime of sexual abuse, prompting tens of thousands of people to hit the streets in protest. After another court upheld the verdict in December 2018, Spain’s Supreme Court found them guilty of rape in 2019.
A woman was sexually assaulted by 5 men. A Spanish court says it’s not rape.
In the other case, in Manresa, close to Spain’s second-most-populous city, Barcelona, five men were accused of taking turns raping a 14-year-old girl in an abandoned factory, while another watched and masturbated.
They were also convicted of sexual abuse because under Spanish law at the time, the perpetrator must have used violence or intimidated the victim for the act to qualify as rape. But because the victim was in an unconscious state and didn’t fight back, a Spanish court ruled otherwise.
Spain will join at least 13 other countries in Europe with laws that define rape based on the absence of consent, according to Amnesty International. Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom are countries with versions of a consent law.
About 1 in 20 women ages 15 or older in the European Union have been raped, or about 9 million women, the human rights organization said in 2018. One in 10 women ages 15 or older have experienced some form of sexual violence, it added.
Miriam Berger and Siobhán O’Grady contributed to this report. | 2022-08-26T09:09:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Spain's 'only yes is yes' law passes after anger over sex crimes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/26/spain-only-yes-law-sexual-consent/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/26/spain-only-yes-law-sexual-consent/ |
Two new books take different roads to understand South Africa
South Africa’s government changed after 1994. So did the social order.
Analysis by Carolyn E. Holmes
What happens when you live past a miracle? South Africa, in its transition from apartheid to multiracial democracy and societal integration, defied international expectations. But as with most end-of-history narratives, history didn’t end in South Africa, or anywhere, in 1994. What happens post-apartheid?
South Africa, in the words of Eve Fairbanks’s newly published volume, “The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Awakening,” is fixed “both liv[ing] after history and … still drowning in it.” But according to Evan Lieberman, we can’t just hang our hats on the ambiguity of this situation. As he notes in his new book, “Until We Have Won Our Liberty: South Africa after Apartheid,” whether South Africa is deemed “a case of success or failure has enormous implications for how we think about the promise of democracy more generally.”
These authors examine the trajectory of democratic South Africa through different approaches. While Lieberman primarily looks at issues pertaining to institutional changes, Fairbanks examines the social and moral orders of apartheid and democracy. This conception of what the transition was — a change of government, or a change in the social order — frames each of their books.
South Africa has achieved considerable successes
Lieberman begins with South Africa’s 2019 election. Vignettes of different polling stations, reflecting different demographic and economic profiles in a single municipality, come together to illustrate that across many very important divides, South Africans participated in a free, fair, legitimate and competitive election.
This general tone — that things are good, actually — comes as a bit of a surprise for political-science-reading audiences. Neither academic political science nor political news coverage are accustomed to telling good news about South Africa. In this sense, Lieberman’s book is almost countercultural.
But the sources of Lieberman’s convictions are data-driven. He presents his readers with evidence — from the increasingly competitive nature of South African elections and the expansion of basic infrastructure like water and electricity to the majority of the population, to the expansion of human rights and recognition of all citizens — to support his conclusions.
Lieberman’s optimism isn’t naive. He acknowledges the persistence and intensification of inequality, as well as the barriers to accessing health care and education. He also acknowledges that South Africans increasingly report dissatisfaction with their government — and notes that support for democracy is on the decline because of these and other issues.
But instead of focusing on these very real problems in terms of democracy, he turns the question around: Would a non-democracy have done better, given the same challenges? Lieberman argues, convincingly, that the answer is no. Rather, “South Africa is just muddling along, but that in itself is pretty remarkable in the wake of the legacies it inherited.” Lieberman’s analysis evaluates South Africa as a country, not as a miracle. Rather than being the bearer of the promise of democracy, the world can evaluate South Africa, Lieberman says, on its record of government performance, which has much to laud. In turn, then, South Africa becomes a new kind of model for democratic success in an era of democratic backsliding.
The transition from apartheid changed more than politics
But what of the people who live and work and love there? Fairbanks’s “The Inheritors” tells a very different story of the transition away from apartheid: not as a change in government, but as a change of the moral world of South Africans. Following the lives of four individuals — an Afrikaner army veteran, a farmworker turned farmer, and a mother and daughter from an urban township — Fairbanks weaves a story of the inheritances of apartheid and the ways the 1994 transition was both a break from and a continuation of their lives.
In each story, there are disappointments, big and small, personal and public. Elliot, a former farmworker, gets a government grant to buy his own poultry farm at the time when the removal of global apartheid-era sanctions and economically protectionist policies put South African farmers into an internationally competitive market, and a jump in costs made midsize agroindustry vastly less profitable. Dipuo, a former anti-apartheid organizer, gets a job in a glittering office building. What she had thought she fought for became an experience of feeling disregarded and demeaned by her White colleagues.
All these stories illustrate the same tension: between what people expected of social and political integration, and what actually happened. In some cases, the gap was vast. The civil war that Christo, the army recruit, was told to expect never came. In other cases, it was personal. The newly integrated university that Malaika, a young woman from Soweto, attends leaves her alienated from her childhood friends.
South Africa’s transition, then, was an invitation to live in a new, integrated social order. But ordinary South Africans also carried with them the experiences of the past: the hatreds and fears intentionally stoked by the apartheid regime, the seeming moral clarity of the cause for which they fought and the violence that was hidden behind the “miracle.”
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It is not that Fairbanks’s account of the New South Africa is pessimistic while Lieberman’s is optimistic. Rather, Fairbanks understands the transition away from apartheid as a continuation of, rather than merely a break from, the past. It’s messier, because people — their senses of self, of personal history and heredity, of right and wrong — are messy. And this is perhaps where the subtitles of each of these books can illuminate their difference. While Lieberman uses the subtitle “South Africa after Apartheid,” Fairbanks opts for “An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning.”
Ultimately, both books tell important stories about contemporary South Africa in its many contradictions. Rather than evaluating South Africa as a miracle, with the transition from apartheid as a period at the end of an era, these books let South Africa, and South Africans, continue to be, after and during their ongoing history.
Carolyn E. Holmes is an assistant professor of political science and public administration at Mississippi State University. She is the author of “The Black and White Rainbow: Reconciliation, Opposition, and Nation-Building in Democratic South Africa” (University of Michigan Press, 2020). | 2022-08-26T09:09:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How did the transition away from apartheid change South Africa? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/26/south-africa-post-apartheid/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/26/south-africa-post-apartheid/ |
Nebraska Coach Scott Frost will lead the Huskers against Northwestern in a Big Ten game in Dublin. (Ken Maguire/AP)
After another offseason of national chitchat about mergers, acquisitions, TV network bids and prospective mergers, acquisitions and TV network bids, they’ll start playing American college football again this weekend, on actual fields from Honolulu to the original Dublin. It’s a wonder they didn’t forget, given a sport that lately feels more like the business section than the sports section.
Eleven games involving Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) teams are on the schedule for Saturday, none involving Southern California or UCLA, which roiled the summer when announcing their eventual moves to the Big Ten in a reshaping — or disfiguring — of America’s most eccentric sport.
None of the 11 games involve any ranked teams, although it’s always wise to watch the excellence at Utah State, coming off an 11-3 run to the Mountain West title and a win no one can take away, the 24-13 pelting of Oregon State in the inaugural Jimmy Kimmel LA Bowl.
Whether anyone would try to take that away, other than Oregon State, would be up for discussion.
Utah State will welcome U-Conn., whose new coach has a long-familiar name, Jim L. Mora, who coached the Atlanta Falcons for three seasons (2004-06), the Seattle Seahawks for one (2009) and UCLA for six (2012-17) back when UCLA was a West Coast school. Mora lately told reporters in Connecticut that listening to the U-Conn. band had reminded him that, “I missed it. I’ve realized every day that I missed it.”
It’s a reminder that even in the dull haze of mergers and acquisitions and TV bids, bands still matter.
Saturday will bring back into view the programs that won the Jimmy Kimmel LA Bowl (Utah State) and the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl (Wyoming), as well as programs that finished runners-up in the Boca Raton Bowl (Western Kentucky), the Duke’s Mayo Bowl (North Carolina), the Frisco Football Classic (North Texas), the New Mexico Bowl (Texas-El Paso) and the Quick Lane Bowl (Nevada), as well as a runner-up from a first-round playoff in the FCS, or Football Championship Subdivision (Florida A&M). For a marker of an era, there’s even a team (Hawaii) which had its bowl (Hawaii Bowl) covid-cancelled.
Hawaii begins under new coach Timmy Chang, who treated it to an NCAA-record 17,072 passing yards as its quarterback from 2000 to 2004, and Hawaii welcomes Vanderbilt, which starts a second year under its former fullback Clark Lea, having gone 2-10 in the first.
As games try to lure attention from mergers, acquisitions and TV bids, five months of football begin in the fine air of Bowling Green, Ky., where Austin Peay visits and a noon Eastern kickoff starts the nation into its annual sedentariness merged with inadvisable food-and-drink products.
Half an hour after that, yet at 5:30 p.m. in the Dublin for which all the lesser Dublins are named, there’s the game figuring to draw the most attention. As America again takes its oddities abroad, and as non-Americans prime to gripe about what’s going on with so much down time between plays, Nebraska will play Northwestern in an early Big Ten determinant of which of the two might feel even more miserable.
Both went 3-9 last year even while proving how 3-9 can contain wildly divergent meanings. Northwestern’s 3-9 looked like a that’s-life hiccup after Big Ten West titles in 2018 and 2020, while Nebraska’s 3-9 looked like still-further concentric circles of red Hades. Northwestern has a fan base that knows a 3-9 comes around from time to time, even as the outstanding coach Pat Fitzgerald stands 109-90 across 16 seasons, while Nebraska has a fan base that once witnessed three losses total across five seasons (1993-97), even as the memory banks required for reminiscing about that keep getting older.
Of course, the past seven seasons have brought 48 losses, as opposed to the seven seasons preceding those, when the team lost four times each year and people found that insufficient. It’s sort of a parallel to the downward curve at Florida State, which will start trying to avoid a fifth straight losing season when it welcomes Duquesne from FCS while remembering that last year, Jacksonville State came from FCS to Tallahassee and left with a victory, albeit on one of the mad-crazy plays that give college football a slew of its lore. That was Damond Philyaw-Johnson’s 59-yard touchdown catch from Zerrick Cooper on the final play, which saw Philyaw-Johnson catch the ball 20 yards shy of the goal line yet find his way through two Florida State defenders.
Can Florida State matter again?
Can Nebraska?
Former Nebraska quarterback and current coach Scott Frost, a savior in summer 2018, finished last season at 15-29 and 0-0 in bowl games across four years, while saying, “I feel like a broken record a little bit with them,” as he tried his psychology with a team that lost its past six games of 2021 by 32-29, 30-23, 28-23, 26-17, 35-28 and 28-21. It knew precisely how to almost win.
Now it starts anew with quarterback Casey Thompson, who fulfilled another trend of the era by transferring. His past four seasons happened at Texas, which has gotten rich in exciting new quarterbacks. His 10 starts last season included a doozy in Dallas against Oklahoma, a 55-48 loss in which Thompson threw for 388 yards, five touchdowns and zero interceptions. He’s got robust charisma at 23, and told Nebraska reporters last Sunday that Frost’s decision to start him owed to his “decision-making at practice, my poise in the pocket and being able to take care of the ball.”
He noted only four or five interceptions in 18 practices with hundreds of attempts. He said he felt perfectly relaxed even in hubbub such as Texas-Oklahoma last season, and that, “You basically go into like a meditative state.”
He’s been around some.
So have so many others. This Week 0 alone, as it’s called, begins with Wyoming having a quarterback who transferred from Utah State, and Utah State having a quarterback who transferred from Wyoming just after winning the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl, a sequence that seldom has happened through time.
The Utah State-to-Wyoming quarterback, Andrew Peasley, may or may not start at Illinois in perhaps the most intriguing game of Week 0. Wyoming Coach Craig Bohl, the accomplished sort who helped send Josh Allen to the NFL, listed his starter as “TBA,” provided TBA doesn’t transfer before Saturday. | 2022-08-26T09:10:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | College football Week 0 includes games from Hawaii to Dublin - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/26/college-football-preview-week-zero/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/26/college-football-preview-week-zero/ |
Washington Commanders defensive line coach Jeff Zgonina sits at his home with his Neapolitan mastiff, Hank. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Jeff Zgonina played 17 years in the NFL as a defensive lineman, transitioned to coaching defensive linemen and still has the build of the Hulk, with arms so big that they flare out from his sides and legs that make slacks look more like spandex.
Now, more than a decade after he retired, Zgonina could still pass for a player, and he often does, working with the Washington Commanders’ defensive line through pass-rush drills and roaring from the sidelines as only a man his size can.
But in May 2016, Zgonina met his match: Squishy, a 175-pound Neapolitan mastiff the coach was tasked with leading around a ring at a dog show in Stillwater, Okla.
Squishy, owned by another handler in the show, made a “squishy” while prancing around, garnering the looks and laughs of those in the audience as Zgonina surrendered and stood in a yellow sport coat until Squishy finished his, uh, “squish.” Then Zgonina patted him on the stomach and praised him.
“Good job, Squishy,” he said. “Good job.”
Defying his size and the machismo of his first love, football, Zgonina, 52, has a second passion as a dog handler. Think “Best in Show” without the blow-drying or hair spray. Just a bit of shine for his mastiffs’ coats and an attention to detail that mirrored his playing career.
Zgonina is a standout of sorts on the dog show circuit, in part because of his massive 6-foot-2 frame but also his story. How many handlers have a Super Bowl ring? The hobby he discovered when his playing days ended has filled a competitive void and become a form of therapy for him as a member of a new team.
“He told me a couple years ago when I first met him,” defensive tackle Jonathan Allen said of Zgonina. “I wanted to go to one of his shows, but he didn’t tell us he was going that week, so we didn’t see it. But he talks about it all the time.”
When Zgonina retired in 2010 following a three-year stint in Houston, former coach Gary Kubiak encouraged him to stay in the game and coach. But Zgonina had always wanted to work in the family printing business his late father had started. He moved home to Chicago, only to realize the job wasn’t for him. “Not at all,” he emphasized.
So when the Texans played the Bears in November 2012, Zgonina went to the game and revisited the coaching conversation with Kubiak, who offered him a job on Houston’s staff. Zgonina’s gig as assistant defensive line coach lasted only one season; Kubiak was let go, and Zgonina wasn’t retained. He struggled for two years finding another job in coaching.
One day, after hearing his young kids beg constantly for a puppy, Zgonina saw they were watching “Dogs 101,” an Animal Planet show that goes in depth on various breeds and was featuring the Neapolitan mastiff.
“I said, ‘If I ever get a dog, it’ll be that one,’ ” Zgonina recalled. “I liked the way it looked. It was big. So I went online looking for dogs and found one in Ohio, not knowing anything about dogs. I bought the dog online, and a week later I went and picked it up.”
When Zgonina arrived to take home the pup, which he named Nook, the breeder asked whether he planned to keep him as a pet or make him a show dog. Zgonina, baffled, heard the words “you could compete” when the breeder explained what a show dog was. From there, Zgonina found his next mission: to figure out how to win titles, much like he did as a seventh-round draft pick out of Purdue in 1993.
Soon, Zgonina and Nook enrolled in classes back in Houston to learn how to show.
“The Houston show was the first show, and it actually was the [national show for Neapolitan mastiffs], too,” Zgonina recalled of his debut with Nook in 2014. “There were all these other Neapolitan mastiffs, and I got hooked because I just like competing in anything. I lost and was like, ‘Okay, I’ve got to figure this out because people are looking down on me because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.’ ”
Zgonina befriended other handlers, who shared tips and tricks of the trade. He showed their dogs in addition to his own for the extra reps, cleaned crates and helped out wherever he could — not so different from an NFL rookie aiming for one of those coveted spots on a 53-man roster.
At the beginning, Zgonina was just thrown in the ring and forced to figure things out on the fly. But the more he competed around other handlers, the more he shared stories from his playing days, winning everyone over.
“When they got shorthanded they were like, ‘Hey, can you show this dog for me?’ [I said:] ‘Yeah, sure. What do I do?’ ” Zgonina recalled. “And they’d kind of tell me that each breed shows a little different at times. So I just started doing that, and then they saw I was confident enough and I was doing a decent enough job, they just kept asking me. . . . I’ve been showing small dogs, big dogs. I would do anything because I just want to be in the ring.”
Two of the top handlers, Jill Bell and Brenda Combs, took Zgonina under their wings, and it wasn’t long before he bought a sprinter van and was touring the country, showing Nook, another mastiff named Lulu and Caz, his Staffordshire bull terrier.
Trumpet the bloodhound wins Best in Show at Westminster Dog Show
Combs, whom Zgonina described as a close friend, is a multiple best in show winner.
“She scares the s--- out of me,” Zgonina said. “I mean, she’s the sweetest person in the world, but she’s very good at what she does. It took me a couple of years to show a dog for her. We always talk, and we’re friends, but she’s intimidating. She intimidates me to this day.”
Zgonina learned a lot from his mentors, much like he did in football. He learned dogs sense their owners’ nerves and anxieties, so he could never get too pumped, like he does in pass-rush drills with the Commanders, or else the dog would feel it too and become “a complete wacko,” he said.
Yet Zgonina also had an advantage perhaps only a professional athlete could ever have: He can tune out the noise.
“I had a handler say to me one time they couldn’t believe how relaxed I was in the ring,” he said. “… I just said I don’t notice anybody, because when I played, I didn’t notice anybody. I go in and it’s me, the dog and the judge. And that’s it.”
Lulu, Zgonina’s female mastiff, seemed destined to show. But Zgonina quickly realized Nook, who at 170 pounds was a leaner Neapolitan mastiff, had neither the interest in showing nor the physical traits needed to consistently win. That turned every weekend into a challenge for his owner. Judges look for conformation of a dog to see if it fits the breed guidelines: Does it have a good “topline,” which is the profile line that extends from the base of a dog’s tail to the shoulders? Does it move like its breed should? Does it behave well?
Nook didn’t have a great topline. He didn’t move smoothly, either. And he would fight Zgonina in the ring, so much so that the former lineman often sweated through his sport coat.
“My biceps would cramp up for the couple of minutes I was in the ring,” Zgonina said. “[Nook would] stop, and I’d fall over sometimes. It was comedy to everybody, but I was determined.”
And Zgonina did figure it out. Over the past eight years, he estimates he has competed in some 80 shows with his dogs, collecting a number of wins and some close losses.
“We usually were the only [Neapolitan mastiff] that showed up, so, yeah, we won a lot,” Zgonina said with a laugh. “We’ve beat a few dogs, but I think it was more about me than it was the dog.”
Nook died in 2020, and Lulu lived for only 19 months, both because of heart issues. It wasn’t until March that Zgonina got another mastiff, Hank, who he purchased from a breeder in Argentina.
Hank flew on a plane to John F. Kennedy International Airport, where Zgonina met him. Nine months old and already 135 pounds, Hank already has been shown once, in Maryland during the NFL offseason. Never mind that no other mastiffs showed that day and the not-so-little Hank was guaranteed a ribbon. He’s undefeated, at 1-0.
The Commanders promoted Zgonina to defensive line coach this month, but he intends to maintain both of his passions. He hopes to find more classes for training Hank during the season, and he plans to compete in more dog shows during the offseason.
Football is his competitive fix and his therapeutic release, and so too are his pups.
“It’s a team sport. That’s what I thrive on,” Zgonina said. “I’m not a golfer. I’m not a tennis player. I’m a football player, and that’s a team sport. So it’s me and the dog working together.”
Why should fans care about the Commanders? Your questions, answered. | 2022-08-26T09:10:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In free time, this Commanders coach and his dog compete for best in show - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/26/commanders-jeff-zgonina-dog-shows/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/26/commanders-jeff-zgonina-dog-shows/ |
Analysis by Patrick Stevens
Contributing college basketball reporter
Lincoln Riley left Oklahoma to be the head coach at Southern California. It was one of several high-profile coaching changes during the offseason. (Mark J. Terrill/AP)
If the last year or so has reinforced anything about the college football landscape, it’s the reality of simmering instability. Some of the sport’s most storied programs — Oklahoma and Southern California, among them — have played a part in change coming at a rapid rate.
Conference realignment? No, though it is a big deal. Name, image and likeness? Nope, and it probably wouldn’t feel like it has added a wobbly element if there was some regulatory leadership from a central governing body rather than what amounts to abdication.
Instead, this is something more mundane, a convergence of a run-of-the-mill happening piled up at a rapid rate. College football had atypical head coaching turnover at its biggest brands, even by the sport’s impatient standards.
There are three sets of connected changes. Southern Cal lured Lincoln Riley away from Oklahoma, which hired Clemson defensive coordinator Brent Venables. LSU landed Notre Dame’s Brian Kelly — while his old team still had semi-plausible playoff hopes last year — and the Irish promoted defensive coordinator Marcus Freeman.
Then there was Miami’s latest attempt at restoring a long-since toppled college football dynasty. The Hurricanes brought Oregon’s Mario Cristobal back to Southern Florida, and the Ducks responded by giving Georgia defensive coordinator Dan Lanning his first head coaching gig.
Elsewhere, Florida replaced Dan Mullen with Louisiana coach Billy Napier, Virginia Tech tasked Penn State defensive coordinator Brent Pry to reinvigorate a program that had become lifeless under Justin Fuente, and Washington called on Fresno State’s Kalen DeBoer to take over for the fired Jimmy Lake.
Phew. That’s a lot of movement.
There are some caveats to this. Four of the changes came at schools without a playoff berth — Florida, Miami, Southern California and Virginia Tech — so it’s reasonable to quibble over whether they truly represent the sport’s elite. Still, USC finished in the top 10 nationally as recently as 2016 and Florida did in 2019, so those two have enjoyed some relevance of late.
And, of course, Nick Saban remains at Alabama (with a new $93.6 million extension, no less), Dabo Swinney is still coining Dabo-isms at Clemson and Kirby Smart is presiding over the defending national champion at Georgia. The world hasn’t turned completely upside down.
There was myopic chatter in 2019 about LSU fielding the most dominant team in college football history (1944-45 Army and 1956 Oklahoma, as well as a few recent entrants, might like to have a word). Two mediocre seasons later, Kelly gets to follow up five consecutive 10-win seasons in South Bend by trying to become the fourth coach this century to win a national title in Baton Rouge.
Then there’s Miami, now on its seventh full-time head coach since 2000 and chasing its past glory for nearly as long. Forget winning a national title for the first time since 2001. Cristobal’s first task is winning the program’s first ACC title; the Hurricanes are 0-for-18 on that front.
Other programs face equally pointed questions. Florida averaged eight victories over the past decade, which was enough to oust the last three coaches. Virginia Tech posted three losing records in the past four years. Washington seems far more than two seasons removed from the end of Chris Petersen’s 55-26 run that included a playoff berth in 2016.
And don’t look past the number of longtime assistant coaches who are getting their first shot at the big chair at a high-profile program. The 36-year-old Freeman gets all the scrutiny associated with Notre Dame, while Venables takes over at Oklahoma after having enjoyed considerable control of Clemson’s defense over the past decade. Lanning and Pry are also first-time head coaches.
The class of 2001 included three eventual national champions in Miami’s Larry Coker, Ohio State’s Jim Tressel and Southern Cal’s Pete Carroll, and it also marked the start of Mark Richt’s 15-year run at Georgia. Even Dennis Franchione went 17-8 at Alabama before bolting for Texas A&M.
Things didn’t go quite so well with the big-brand hires of 2018. Florida State’s Willie Taggart and Tennessee’s Jeremy Pruitt didn’t even make it to a fourth season. Mullen was nudged aside at Florida in November. Cristobal won a pair of Pac-12 titles at Oregon before departing. Only the embattled Scott Frost at Nebraska remains on the job.
Chances are, this year’s set of hires will have mixed results — leading some to memorable moments, and others to another round of flux in a sport where uncertainty is increasingly endemic. | 2022-08-26T10:10:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New coaches in college football at some of the biggest programs - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/26/college-football-new-coaches/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/26/college-football-new-coaches/ |
20-plus years of Serena Williams at the U.S. Open
By Ava Wallace | Aug 26, 2022
CAROL NEWSOM/AFP via Getty Images
Aug. 31, 1998, first round: Serena Williams makes her singles debut.
Gary M. Prior/Getty Images
With beads in her hair and braces, a 16-year-old Williams defeats Australia’s Nicole Pratt, 6-3, 3-6, 6-4. She loses in the third round.
Sept. 11, 1999, final: Williams wins her first major singles title.
Williams beats five-time major champion Martina Hingis in the final, 6-3, 7-6 (7-4), to become the first Black woman to win a major since Althea Gibson in 1958.
Williams, who ousted defending champion Lindsay Davenport in the semifinals, had never previously advanced past the fourth round at a major. She receives a congratulatory call from President Bill Clinton and his daughter, Chelsea, after the match.
Sept. 8, 2001, final: Venus and Serena Williams meet in a major final for the first time. Venus wins, 6-2, 6-4, to claim her second straight U.S. Open title. It is the first time two Black players meet in a major final.
The match is both intimate and grandiose. Venus and Serena sleep in the same hotel suite before the match and hit together to warm up in the morning, yet Diana Ross sings the national anthem and Billie Jean King does the coin toss. It’s also the first U.S. Open women’s final contested in prime time.
AMY SANCETTA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
With the win, Venus takes a 5-1 career edge over her little sister and secures her fourth major championship to Serena’s lone U.S. Open title. It is the beginning of an on-court rivalry that will span more than two decades —with Serena holding a 19-12 edge.
Sept. 7, 2004, quarterfinal: Jennifer Capriati beats Williams, 2-6, 6-4, 6-4, in a match marred by controversial line calls, all of which went in Capriati’s favor.
Four borderline calls go against Williams during the match. The most egregious is a backhand return from Williams that is clearly good but which chair umpire Mariana Alves overrules and calls out. A video replay — visible to television audiences at home but not used at the U.S. Open for two more years — shows Alves’s ruling to be incorrect.
Kathy Willens /AP
Williams receives an apology from a U.S. Tennis Association official the day after the match.
Sept. 12, 2009, semifinal: Belgian Kim Clijsters defeats Williams, 6-4, 7-5, in another match defined by controversy.
The most fiercely contested match of the women’s tournament enters disarray when, two points from a Clijsters’ victory with Williams serving at 5-6, 15-30, Williams is called for a foot fault on her second serve. It is a penalty that is rarely called, especially at a critical juncture in an important match, and is immediately questioned by commentators on the broadcast.
Williams launches into an expletive-laden rant, shouting at the lineswoman, “I’m … going to take this ball and shove it down your … throat.” She is assessed a point penalty, which gives Clijsters the victory. Williams, who is remorseless in her post-match news conference, later issues an apology. She receives a record $82,500 fine.
Sept. 9, 2012, final: Williams beats Victoria Azarenka to become the third woman in history to win the U.S. Open, the Olympics and Wimbledon in the same season.
It is the first three-set U.S. Open women’s final since 1995.
Sept. 7, 2014, final: Williams defeats Caroline Wozniacki, 6-3, 6-3, tying Chris Evert’s Open Era-record of six U.S. Open championships. It is her third title in a row in New York.
It is her 18th major championship overall, tying Evert’s and Martina Navratilova’s tallies.
Williams was undaunted by the history she was chasing, winning all seven matches in straight sets and never dropping more than three games in a set throughout the tournament.
Sept. 11, 2015, semifinal: Roberta Vinci, an unseeded veteran from Italy playing her first major semifinal, ends Williams’s quest for the Grand Slam with one of the biggest upsets in tennis history, winning 2-6, 6-4, 6-4.
Williams was two wins away from the Grand Slam — a calendar-year sweep of the majors — before Vinci pulled off the surprise win.
Only five players in history have achieved the feat, the most recent of which was Steffi Graf in 1988.
Sept. 8, 2018, final: Naomi Osaka defeats Williams, 6-2, 6-4, to claim her first major championship in an emotional, again controversial match that leaves both players in tears and reignites a conversation about sexism and racism in sports.
After blowing away Williams — and a packed, pro-Williams crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium — with her power and shot-making in the first set, 20-year-old Osaka is serving at the start of the second when Williams receives a code violation for coaching. Carlos Ramos, a famously strict chair umpire, saw Williams’s coach making a hand gesture that he interpreted as instruction.
From then on, Williams engages Ramos in discussion — at first civil, then increasingly heated as tensions rise and the crowd becomes engaged — over the penalty at various points. She receives a second code violation and a point penalty after destroying her racket later in the third set.
Ramos eventually issues a third code violation, resulting in a lost game for Williams, for “verbal abuse.” Williams calls the tournament referee on court to intervene, saying, “Do you know how many other men do things that are — that do much worse than that?”
When Osaka wins, defeating her idol and becoming the first Japanese player to capture a major title, she weeps as the crowd boos. Williams puts her arm around Osaka. In her post-match news conference, Williams reinforces her opinion that a man would not have been penalized so harshly.
Sept. 10, 2020, semifinal: Williams loses, 6-1, 3-6, 3-6, to Azarenka in a tournament that is both a testament to her longevity and a powerful showcase for the few working mothers on the WTA tour.
With a win in the first round, Williams passes Chris Evert’s record of 101 match wins in U.S. Open history.
She is one of three mothers to advance to the quarterfinals — a first for a Grand Slam tournament — along with Azarenka, a Belarusian, and Tsvetana Pironkova, a Bulgarian. Her semifinal against Azarenka is the first semifinal between two mothers in major history.
Perspective | Serena Williams became a champion again — for working moms
Perspective | Serena Williams, bigger than any label, is now something new: Relatable | 2022-08-26T10:10:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Serena Williams U.S. Open highlights - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/interactive/2022/serena-williams-us-open-highlights/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/interactive/2022/serena-williams-us-open-highlights/ |
Scientists say, yet again, that nuclear fusion is a few years away. Are they right this time?
A spool for creating a magnetic field stands outside Germany's Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, which contains the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator. The device is paving the way for operational nuclear fusion technology. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Using nuclear fusion energy to power the world has long been two things: the ideal form of alternative energy and a development that’s decades from becoming reality.
“We’re at a very exciting place,” said Dennis G. Whyte, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. “But we also have to be realistic in the sense that it’s still very hard.”
The quest for nuclear fusion technology started around the 1950s. Soviet scientists designed a machine called a tokamak — a doughnut-shaped device that uses magnetic fields to confine plasma and heat it to the outrageously high temperatures needed for hydrogen nuclei to smash together.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a company spun out of MIT, raised $1.8 billion in November. That came almost two months after it tested a magnet for its tokamak machine that will allow it to achieve “net energy,” meaning the machine will be able to make more fusion energy than it takes to sustain reactions.
Bob Mumgaard, the company’s chief executive, said that’s when government collaboration will really help. His company probably will need financial assistance from the Department of Energy’s loan program office to fund its power plant, Mumgaard says. The office got funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and has roughly $40 billion in loans available to help fund energy projects that are proven to work but might have a hard time raising money from banks.
“Once the technology is shown to work,” Mumgaard said, “it’s less risky, and the next buyer of that technology could get a commercial loan.”
“In both the U.S. and the U.K., there’s now kind of new government programs and support for trying to get to a [fusion] pilot,” he said. “It’s a good kind of risk-sharing between public and private [sectors].”
France’s global nuclear fusion device a puzzle of huge parts
The effects of climate change are increasingly irreversible, and the clock is ticking, he said, making fusion energy a crucial need. Companies will have to figure out how to deploy the technology widely. Doing it cheaply is most important, he said. “What I worry about is that we’ll get to a system where we can’t actually make it economically attractive fast enough,” he added.
“Can we get there?” Whyte asked. “I think we can if we get our act together in the right way. But there’s no guarantee of that.” | 2022-08-26T10:28:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nuclear fusion energy inches closer toward reality - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/26/nuclear-fusion-technology-climate-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/26/nuclear-fusion-technology-climate-change/ |
Ryan Zimmerman’s Great Falls, Va., house offered at $7.9 million
The Washington Nationals star, who has lived in the 13,200-square-foot home since 2012, has moved to McLean
The six-bedroom, 10-bathroom, 13,200-square-foot house was designed by McLean architect Mark Sullenberger of Custom Design Concepts and built by Galileo Group. (Peter Papoulakos Photography)
Retired Washington Nationals star Ryan Zimmerman has listed his Great Falls, Va., house for $7.9 million. Not to worry, the two-time all-star isn’t leaving the area. He bought a house in McLean, Va., not far from former teammate Stephen Strasburg, Realtor.com reported.
Zimmerman put the house on the market in April for $8.5 million, removed it in June and then relisted it this month.
“House move week. Last car packed and about to pull out,” Zimmerman posted on Instagram in July. “For all those asking, moving closer in to DC! Don’t worry. Can’t get rid of me yet!”
Ryan Zimmerman house | Retired Washington Nationals star Ryan Zimmerman has listed his Great Falls, Va., house for $7.9 million. (Blue Skye Media)
Zimmerman, who was the Nationals’ first draft pick, spent his entire 17-year major league career with the team. He helped Washington win the World Series in 2019. Following his retirement in 2021, the Nationals retired his number, 11.
The six-bedroom, 10-bathroom, 13,200-square-foot house was designed by McLean architect Mark Sullenberger of Custom Design Concepts and built by Galileo Group. The original owner sold it to Zimmerman in 2012, less than a year after its completion.
Zimmerman and his wife, Heather, “really liked the look of the home and also loved the location,” he told Home & Design magazine, which featured the house in 2016. “It’s tucked away at the end of the street and very quiet.”
Located in the Innsbruck neighborhood of Great Falls, the five-acre estate has a gated entrance with stone pillars. A circular driveway leads to a limestone parking pad. The stone-and-shingled house has an attached three-car garage.
Arched entry doors open to a formal living room with a gas fireplace. Three sets of French doors face the terrace, water fountain and gardens. The formal dining room has an adjacent butler’s pantry. Both the cerused-oak-paneled library and study overlook the front yard.
The kitchen has a large marble-topped island and a breakfast area. The family room and sunroom have gas fireplaces and views of the gardens. A main level owner’s suite has a gas fireplace, two dressing rooms, a patio and a bathroom with a separate shower and soaking tub.
Four bedrooms are on the second level, each with an en suite bathroom. The upper-level family room has built-in cabinetry and sliding barn doors.
Not long after they purchase the house, the Zimmermans hired Alice Busch of Great Falls Distinctive Interiors and Matt Trunnell of Distinctive Building Group to work on it.
The wine cellar “was an unfinished closet when we bought the house,” Heather told MLB.com, which featured the house in a “Coldwell Banker Home Field Advantage” video. The exercise room “is another room we completed once we bought the house. It was an unfinished storage room.”
Besides workout equipment, the exercise room has a steam room, hot-and-cold plunge pools and a bathroom. The lower level also has a wet bar, a media room, a game room and a bedroom with en suite bathroom.
Charles Owen of Fine Landscapes transformed the backyard into a retreat where the Zimmermans have hosted many get-togethers for family, friends and teammates. The cabana has a large seating area with a fireplace, an outdoor kitchen with bar seating for 12, and a dining area. The pool house has two bathrooms, an outdoor shower and laundry facilities. There is a saltwater infinity pool, a hot tub and a koi pond with a waterwheel.
Ryan told MLB.com that the “goal was to make it look like the pool house had been here for a long time and someone built a new house next to [it].”
Tucked into the woods is a two-story playhouse that was featured on TLC’s “Charmed Playhouses” television show.
“This whole house works as a great escape for us since we don’t get to travel for pleasure too much during the year,” Heather told MLB.com.
524 Innsbruck Ave., Great Falls, Va.
Bedrooms/bathrooms: 6/10
Approximate square-footage: 13,200
Features: The house was designed by McLean architect Mark Sullenberger of Custom Design Concepts and built by Galileo Group. Alice Busch of Great Falls Distinctive Interiors and Matt Trunnell of Distinctive Building Group were hired by the current owners to work on the house. Charles Owen of Fine Landscapes transformed the outdoor spaces.
Listing agent: Wetherly Barker Hemeon and Karen Barker, TTR Sotheby’s International Realty | 2022-08-26T10:28:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ryan Zimmerman’s Great Falls, Va., house offered at $7.9 million - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/26/ryan-zimmerman-house-for-sale/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/26/ryan-zimmerman-house-for-sale/ |
The cost of energy is jumping for UK households, with regulator Ofgem raising the limit on how much it allows suppliers to charge. That’s as wholesale natural gas prices have surged following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In early August, Ofgem warned a challenging winter lay ahead, a reflection of record gas and power prices. The government is facing strong calls from lawmakers, campaigners and the industry to review the system of how homes are charged.
The system, introduced in January 2019 by Ofgem during Theresa May’s administration, was designed to save money for consumers as it sets out how much suppliers could charge homes per unit for the power and gas they use. It covers most households, about 24 million in the UK, on a so-called standard variable tariff, and caps the level of profits an energy supplier can make at 1.9%. It has offered protection for those who haven’t been able to shop around and switch suppliers regularly. More savvy consumers have traditionally saved many hundreds of pounds per year by switching supplier.
A common misconception is that the measure limits how high a household’s bill will be. But it doesn’t, since the total will in most cases still depend on how much energy that household actually consumes. The cap set by Ofgem is expressed in terms of average energy bills, not an absolute ceiling. That cap was raised on Aug. 26 to a record £3,549 ($4,188), effective Oct. 1. That was up from £1,971 pounds in force since April.
The level is nowhere near where it’s expected to get to next year. With no end in sight to Russia’s war in Ukraine and wholesale gas prices jumping more than 60% so far in August alone, analyst forecasts for future cap levels are constantly getting revised. Cornwall Insight has been predicting that the price cap will soar further to peak above £5,300 in the second quarter of 2023 and remain above £4,700 throughout 2023. The government is putting in place an overall £400 discount on energy bills for households, payable in monthly installments between October 2022 and March 2023, to ease the cost. | 2022-08-26T10:41:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What’s the UK Energy Price Cap and Why Is It Rising? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/whats-the-uk-energy-price-cap-and-why-is-it-rising/2022/08/26/6e0bb8f6-2522-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/whats-the-uk-energy-price-cap-and-why-is-it-rising/2022/08/26/6e0bb8f6-2522-11ed-a72f-1e7149072fbc_story.html |
People receive coronavirus shots at a back-to-school pediatric clinic in Hyattsville. (Joy Asico/AP)
“These infections are rare but they can be particularly devastating,” said Hasson, medical director of the pediatric ICU at Randall Children’s Hospital, remembering that the child sustained permanent brain and kidney damage, and lifelong disabilities. “It’s a tragedy because the patient was a completely normal, healthy child previously,” she said. Parents are often racked by regret, she said.
Health officials worry about scenarios like that one as students across the nation, now returning to school, have fallen behind on routine school immunizations during the pandemic. Families missed doctor visits and yearly physicals. and some never caught up on shots for diseases such as polio, measles, whooping cough and diphtheria.
The toll of the pandemic is hard to dispute. In Virginia, statewide rates for school-required vaccinations among kindergartners and adolescents fell by 10 percentage points from fall 2019 to fall 2021 — to around 86 percent, state data shows. Officials attributed the drop to fewer well-child visits, months of virtual learning, fluctuations in kindergarten enrollment and other factors.
Arkansas saw vaccinations for children and adolescents drop more than 12 percent from 2019 to 2021. And in D.C., more than 30 percent of students had not met requirements as of mid-August, though city officials think the number is far lower because of complexities in record-keeping. City health officials said they did not have comparative pre-pandemic data “due to changes in reporting methods.”
“We’re cautiously optimistic but we also know there’s work to do to make sure that children do get caught up on vaccines, or in some cases they haven’t been vaccinated and that they get vaccinated,” said Georgina Peacock, director of the Immunization Services Division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Orders for the federal program for families in need — Vaccines For Children — fell 14 percent in fiscal 2020, compared to a year earlier, officials said. There was a partial rebound in fiscal 2021, but it was still 6 percent less than the pre-pandemic level. For this year, through May, orders are 4 percent lower than in 2019.
More measles cases in five months than in any time since 1992
Coronavirus vaccination is not mandated in most schools — though D.C. requires it for students 12 and older.
National data show 60 percent of those ages 12 to 17 are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, as are 30 percent of children ages 5 to 11. Shots for those younger than 5 were first offered this summer.
The peril of being unvaccinated against significant diseases was clear recently in Rockland County, N.Y., where a 20-year-old man contracted polio, setting off a wave of public health concern about the highly contagious, life-threatening disease that causes permanent paralysis in about 1 of every 200 infections.
Before that, measles outbreaks in 2019 caused similar alarm. More than 85 percent of cases for the first nine months of that year were associated with pockets of under-immunized people, including Orthodox Jewish communities in New York, according to a CDC report. City officials blamed anti-vaccine groups for spreading misinformation.
Pandemic led to fewer adolescents vaccinated against HPV, CDC says
Vaccinations for adolescents have taken a big hit, said Judy Klein, president of the nonprofit Unity Consortium, which advocates on the issue. Vaccinations for HPV — recommended but not required in most states — have declined by 11 percent in fiscal 2022, after drops in 2020 and 2021, she said. “HPV is basically a cancer-fighting vaccine,” she said. “It’s not something that’s going to show up tomorrow; it’s going to show up years from now.”
In Maryland’s largest school system, in Montgomery County, the vaccination noncompliance rate had hit 23 percent last September. After a wave of catch-up efforts, the rate fell to 14 percent in December, then 11 percent in spring, said Mark Hodge, senior administrator for school health services in Montgomery. With the start of school a few days away, an update was still being finalized. | 2022-08-26T10:41:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Student vaccinations is down. Can schools catch them up? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/26/student-vaccination-measles-polio-school/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/26/student-vaccination-measles-polio-school/ |
In 1921, Coleman became the first Black woman to earn a pilot’s license
On Aug. 8, American Airlines operated a flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to Phoenix, with an all-Black female crew. The flight was in honor of Bessie Coleman, who became the first Black woman to earn a pilot’s license in 1921. (American Airlines)
It’s been more than a century since Bessie Coleman made history, becoming the first Black woman in the world to earn a pilot’s license. Recently, an all-Black female flight crew made history in her honor.
On Aug. 8, an American Airlines flight from Dallas-Fort Worth — near where Coleman grew up — to Phoenix was operated by the airline’s first-ever all-Black female crew.
The 36 staff members had roles ranging from captain to customer service coordinator. The crew, including flight attendants, cargo team and aviation maintenance technicians, worked on the flight as a gesture of respect and admiration toward Coleman, who had a short but storied career.
Coleman, the daughter of sharecroppers, received her pilot’s license in 1921. She learned to fly in France, as there were no opportunities for Black Americans, Native Americans or women in the United States. Coleman, who was all three, died at age 34 when a test flight she was a passenger on crashed in 1926.
As a pioneering pilot, Coleman — often referred to as “Brave Bessie” and “Queen Bess” — broke racial and gender barriers in the exclusive aviation industry. Throughout her career, she fought against racism, and was known for saying: “I refuse to take no for an answer.” She wouldn’t let her gender or race stand in the way of her pursuits.
But still today, the aviation industry remains mostly homogenous. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 93 percent of America’s pilots and flight engineers identify as White, and just over 10 percent as Black, Hispanic or Asian. Only 5.3 percent of pilots and flight engineers are women, and of them, less than 1 percent are Black.
Coleman’s family hopes to honor her legacy by encouraging future generations of Black women to follow in her footsteps, they said, and the all-Black female flight crew is part of that mission.
The flight’s destination was Phoenix because it was one of the many places Coleman performed in an air show during her career.
Beth Powell, an American Airlines employee of 22 years, was the flight captain. Like Coleman, Powell had dreams of flying an airplane from the time she was a child.
During her pilot training in Vero Beach, Fla., “I was the only Black girl there,” she recalled. “It did feel lonely. There were times where you questioned yourself, because you didn’t see anyone that looked like you.”
“It was very important to me, from a young age, to go back to the community and tell them what they can do,” Powell, 45, said. “That’s where I find the most pride and joy, in speaking to the next generation, and telling them what they can become.”
Throughout her career, she has been involved with organizations that seek to diversify the flight deck, including Sisters of the Skies and the Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals (OBAP). When Bessie Coleman Aviation All-Stars — a nonprofit started by Coleman’s family — launched a tour to mark the 100-year anniversary of Coleman’s pilot license, the foundation asked Powell and American Airlines to host a flight in her honor.
Before takeoff, as Powell and the crew walked through the airport, she said she felt as though Coleman was with them.
“When I looked to my left and I looked to my right, we were no longer the only ones,” Powell said. “We all made it in our own right. We are all here as Black women. We are channeling Bessie’s dream.”
Gigi Coleman, Coleman’s great-niece, took part in the flight as a passenger, and said “it would have meant the world,” to her great-aunt — whose accomplishments were not celebrated during her lifetime due to discrimination and racism, she said.
“We’ve come a long way since Bessie Coleman,” said Gigi Coleman, 64, who is the president of Bessie Coleman Aviation All-Stars. “I think my great-aunt would have been so proud of these beautiful, talented, courageous women of color. They were soaring through the blue skies, just like she did, and telling the world that we can accomplish anything in life by working together.”
As the crew touched down in Phoenix, “we were in tears,” Powell said. “We did it. We honored Bessie. And now we have shown others, too, what they can become.”
American Airlines offers financial support and mentorship to prospective pilots through its Cadet Academy, which works to bring more diversity in the field. The airline also announced a $1.5 million donation to OBAP, which will be set aside to train pilots with diverse backgrounds.
Powell said representation is critical to inspire young people of color to enter the aerospace workforce.
“People can see themselves in us,” she said.
Following the flight, several members of the crew met with high school students at the Academies at South Mountain in Phoenix, to discuss careers in aviation — and demonstrate what’s possible.
“It’s really empowering to go back and talk to the kids,” Powell said. “This is my why and my purpose.”
Gigi Coleman believes it was her great-aunt’s purpose, too.
“The main goal of the Bessie Coleman Aviation All-Stars is to expose young people to aviation careers,” said Gigi Coleman, who shared Bessie Coleman’s story with students at the school. “The doors are wide open for them now. The sky is not the limit.” | 2022-08-26T10:41:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | All-Black female flight crew makes history honoring Bessie Coleman - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/26/bessie-coleman-pilot-american-airlines/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/26/bessie-coleman-pilot-american-airlines/ |
Beagles are in the news after decades as key players in medical research
The long history of beagles helping to produce scientific breakthroughs — for dogs and humans
Perspective by Brad Bolman
Brad Bolman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago. His first book, "The Dog Years: A History of Beagle Science," is set to be published by the University of Chicago Press.
Bonnie Schuenke fosters five beagle puppies at her home in Dousman, Wis. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
Beagles are in the news. Last fall, Republican politicians, including Rep. Madison Cawthorn (N.C.), attacked Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, by seeking to tie him to supposedly torturous experiments involving the breed. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) posted a photo on Twitter of former president Donald Trump holding a beagle with the disconcerting caption, “Beagle Lives Matter.” Then, more recently, 4,000 beagle dogs were released from the facilities of contract research company Envigo after investigations found violations of federal animal welfare regulations. There is probably one available now at your local animal rescue, which will surely receive more attention now that Prince Harry and Meghan adopted one of them.
Much of the recent attention has been driven by activist organizations seeking to make the cute little hounds into icons of animal experimentation, to undermine public support for federal spending on animal research. But, the beagle news also raises the question: Why are beagles used for experimentation?
Humans and dogs, as any pet owner will tell you, are extremely alike. Many of our basic biological systems are similar: Dogs get cancers like ours and respond to some pharmaceuticals like we do. Beagles, a medium-sized and friendly breed, are easy to work with and cheap to feed, making them useful laboratory animals. But the full answer requires a longer historical view.
In the first decades of the 20th century, scientists began to worry about the reliability of their laboratory animals. Dogs had long been used for experiments, especially in cardiology and physiology, because their circulatory systems are parallel to ours. But the dogs that researchers had access to were neither consistent nor even always healthy. Strays were often picked up in fields or purchased from city pounds, and scientists rarely knew exactly what they were getting. What was needed, they argued, was a “standard” or “normal” dog.
There were a number of candidates. Researchers at Columbia University proposed the Irish terrier in the 1930s, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration briefly bred the dogs for toxicity testing. But terriers didn’t stick — their small beards required tiresome maintenance, and advocates failed to assemble funding for a centralized terrier colony. Others proposed airedales or beagles, yet there were few decisive arguments favoring one above the rest. Scientists typically recommended breeds they knew best, generating a stew of competing personal preferences.
Outside of the walls of the laboratory, however, American dog culture was changing and altering the fates of many breeds. Beagles were always common dogs, ever since their importation from England in the late 19th century, but they experienced a steady climb in popularity as dog ownership exploded in the 1930s and ’40s. In 1950, Americans fell in love with Snoopy, a new beagle character in the Peanuts comic. Four years later, the American Kennel Club listed it as the most popular breed in the country.
Such popularity extended into science as well. In 1950, the Atomic Energy Commission launched the most expansive beagle study ever conducted in a multi-sited investigation into radiation and longevity, occasioned by the U.S. detonation of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Short-term radiation effects were clear and horrific, but long-term consequences from lower doses were less obvious. Because rats tended to die of pneumonia before they developed cancers, a bigger and longer-living test animal was needed.
America’s nuclear scientists settled on the dog and chose beagles, which were bred in most states and thus easy to purchase. From 1950 until the early 1980s, large-scale beagle radiobiology studies were conducted across the country: at the University of California at Davis, the University of Utah, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Rochester and more. The foundations of much of what we know about the health effects of radiation lie in this work.
But so does much of what we know about beagles and dogs more broadly. As it turned out, little basic data about canine health even existed in 1950. American veterinarians were only just starting to focus on domestic pets, rather than agricultural animals. The majority of privately owned dogs died young — hit by cars or felled by undiagnosed health issues.
So along with studying radiation, researchers such as Allen C. Andersen, at Davis, set out to answer key questions, such as: How long can a beagle live? (More than 17 years.) How many dogs should live together in cages? (Two seemed to be the sweet spot.) What were their nutritional requirements? Their psychological needs? Supported by the new Research Laboratory for the Diseases of Dogs at Cornell University, these researchers generated huge quantities of information about beagles, culminating in the publication of Andersen’s “The Beagle as an Experimental Dog” in 1970.
But radiobiologists weren’t alone. Pharmaceutical researchers and the FDA also began prominently favoring beagles. The FDA’s toxicity testing guidelines from 1955 noted that the agency used beagles for internal appraisals — but stopped short of formally endorsing the breed. That changed in the early 1960s after researchers realized that thalidomide, a popular morning sickness medication used by pregnant women, could cause serious birth defects in their children. These revelations convinced legislators and regulators of the need for stronger drug testing standards. The result was the 1962 Kefauver-Harris Amendment to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which required demonstrations of drug efficacy and established the framework for today’s “gold standard” of random clinical trials. It also forced the FDA to explicitly advise companies on how to test drugs, including using dogs (or monkeys) as the step between rodent tests and human trials. Arnold Lehman, director of the FDA’s Division of Pharmacology, clarified in 1963 that when the FDA said “dog,” it basically meant “beagle.”
Because the large American market was increasingly key to the success of drugs anywhere, regulators around the world mirrored the FDA’s beagle recommendation, and pharmaceutical companies from Germany to Japan established their own colonies of charming little black and tan hounds. Today, there are for-profit scientific beagle breeders in the United States, England, Japan, China and more.
This history reminds us how much we owe to these dogs, countless thousands who have lived, howled and often suffered for science. Their sacrifices helped unveil secrets of the atom, demonstrate that cigarettes cause cancer, reveal new techniques for periodontal surgery and much more. We also know more about dogs and how to care for them. Many vaccines, including for rabies, parvo and canine hepatitis, relied on beagle research. So too did modern canine nutritional guidelines and medications such as Anipryl, which treats Alzheimer’s-like conditions in dogs. Our understanding of how dogs live was fundamentally transformed thanks to beagles.
But today, a science without beagles appears increasingly likely. Many I spoke with during the course of my research for a book on the history of the use of beagles in scientific research, especially within activist communities, predict an end to their use within one or two decades. Whether they are correct remains to be seen, but understanding our debt to beagles and their role in over a century of scientific discovery is as vital as ever. | 2022-08-26T10:41:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Beagles are in the news after decades as key players in medical research - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/26/beagles-are-news-after-decades-key-players-medical-research/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/26/beagles-are-news-after-decades-key-players-medical-research/ |
Mike Pence is wrong about vice presidents testifying before Congress
Dating back to George Washington, there is a history of presidents and vice presidents testifying
Perspective by Laura Ellyn Smith
Laura Ellyn Smith teaches at Oxford University while undertaking a second doctorate in U.S. history. She is also an adjunct assistant professor at Richmond the American International University.
Former vice president Mike Pence signs a poster for Brooklyn Hoffman on Aug. 20 in Waverly, Iowa. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
When asked recently about whether he would testify before the Jan. 6 committee, Mike Pence’s response raised more questions than it gave answers: The former vice president stated, “It would be unprecedented in history for the vice president to be summoned to testify on Capitol Hill.”
This is misleading. Not only have past vice presidents testified before Congress, but there is also a long and healthy history of presidents themselves volunteering to testify — dating back to George Washington. This precedent, demonstrating the executive branch’s traditional respect for Congress’s oversight prerogative, has been consistent in times of regular operations and even during crises that have tested the nation and its government — regardless of time period or party politics.
As with so many things regarding the presidency, Washington set the template for presidents and vice presidents appearing before Congress. In his first year as president, Washington spoke to the Senate regarding Native American treaties. The willingness to testify reflected the first president’s respect for the checks and balances instituted by the Constitution. This was something Washington understood well, as he served as president of the Constitutional Convention. In Federalist 51, James Madison explained the Founders’ attitude toward the relationship between the executive branch and Congress: because of “human nature” such oversight was necessary “to control the abuses of government.”
Once Washington left office, his successors — regardless of party — maintained and protected this tradition at critical points in the nation’s history.
Maybe most notably, amid the Civil War, arguably America’s greatest crisis, Abraham Lincoln testified before the House Judiciary Committee concerning the case of a journalist leaking his December 1861 message to Congress. Lincoln clarified that members of his family, specifically first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, were acquainted with the journalist, but they had no involvement with the leak. The committee had detained the journalist while it waited to hear from Lincoln, and he recognized both that Congress was entitled to his testimony, and how much weight it would have with congressional investigators.
The practice of presidents testifying continued into the 20th century, regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans held the White House.
Nothing made this clearer than the behavior of the three men who ran against each other in the 1912 presidential election. A month before the election, when he was running for president as the Bull Moose Party candidate, former president Theodore Roosevelt testified before Congress for the second time. This time his testimony concerned campaign expenditures, and he appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections. President William Howard Taft, Roosevelt’s successor and a man who disagreed with him on many things, testified more than any other president after his tenure because of his position as co-chair of the World War I National War Labor Board and later as chief justice of the United States.. And Woodrow Wilson, the candidate who bested both Roosevelt and Taft in 1912, resurrected Washington’s practice of going before Congress over foreign policy matters, when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1919 to make his case in support of the United States joining the League of Nations.
Each of these presidents or former presidents volunteered to testify, recognizing the value of their testimony to Congress’ oversight function and its ability to make good policy.
Vice presidents have also testified and cooperated with congressional investigations. During the scandal-ridden years of Ulysses S. Grant’s administration, for example, Schuyler Colfax, his first-term vice president, testified voluntarily before the House Select Committee examining the Credit Mobilier scandal in 1873. Notably Spiro Agnew, Richard M. Nixon’s first vice president, avoided being “summoned,” to use Pence’s term, by admitting to tax evasion and resigning in 1973. Nevertheless, Congress compelled this action, because Agnew understood that otherwise he would face congressional inquisitors and the possibility of impeachment.
Maybe the most well-remembered testimony offered by a president or vice president was also connected with Nixon’s scandal-tarred administration. In 1974, President Gerald Ford — a former House minority leader — voluntarily returned to the House to testify on his decision to pardon Nixon. Ford saw the pardon as the only way to end the national crisis of Watergate that threatened the stability of American government. But he also understood that many Americans wondered if he had cut some sort of deal with Nixon. Therefore, Ford understood that testifying on the record was the best way to clear the air. While he recognized the uniqueness of the crisis and the moment, Ford was also relying on long-standing precedent.
And while Pence chose to elide this history, many still remember it. When asked about Pence’s comments, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) — the vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee and the daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, who had been Ford’s chief of staff — clarified that “there is actually precedent when you have a national crisis for presidents, vice presidents to testify,” citing her father’s former boss.
This history makes clear that while it hasn’t happened in recent years, there is a long history of both current and former presidents and vice presidents appearing before congressional committees to testify on important matters. It happened in moments of crisis, during fierce policy debates and even when Congress was investigating executive branch malfeasance.
If Pence refuses to testify, it won’t be because he’s adhering to historical precedent. It will instead reflect political calculations about an investigation that his party loathes. Pence was lauded on Jan. 6, 2021, for adhering to constitutional and legal traditions by resisting enormous pressure and certifying Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election. But history is clear: For Pence to continue to adhere to these traditions, he will need to testify about the events of that day. | 2022-08-26T10:42:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mike Pence is wrong about vice presidents testifying before Congress - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/26/mike-pence-is-wrong-about-vice-presidents-testifying-before-congress/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/26/mike-pence-is-wrong-about-vice-presidents-testifying-before-congress/ |
Pianist Orrin Evans is the artist-in-residence for the DC Jazz Festival. (Christopher Kayfield)
Pianist Orrin Evans has only one appearance on the DC Jazz Festival’s 2022 programming calendar — but it’s a big one. On Sept. 2, his Captain Black Big Band performs at Arena Stage in Southwest with revered jazz vocalist Dianne Reeves.
“It’s a dream come true,” Evans, 47, says of the summit. He’s been tailoring new arrangements especially for Reeves and the ensemble.
But if it’s his only spot on the bandstand during the festival (which runs Aug. 31 to Sept. 4 at venues throughout the District), it’s nonetheless the tip of the iceberg for Evans’s involvement. The Philadelphia pianist and composer is serving as the festival’s artist-in-residence, a two-year commitment that runs through the end of 2023.
“The idea of the artist-in-residence was not necessarily that Orrin would have a dominant presence during the festival itself,” DC Jazz Festival Artistic Director Willard Jenkins says. “It was that we would have this engagement that spreads out throughout the year.”
Indeed, Evans’s work reaches well beyond the extended Labor Day weekend. He generates and executes ideas to connect not just with audiences, but with students, fellow artists, the city at large and beyond.
“In that sense, I’m representing the festival,” he says. But he’s also its beneficiary. “It’s also giving the artist a chance to speak that you don’t get in just a gig. I’m learning: not just musical things, but the inner workings, how a festival like this works.”
“We’re learning a lot, and he’s learning a lot,” agrees Sunny Sumter, the festival’s executive director. “That was very much the point: We wanted the artist residency to be a learning experience for the artist as well.”
Evans is not the festival’s first artist-in-residence; bassist Ben Williams had the position in 2018 and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington in 2019. But as the festival evolves, so does the role, and Evans represents a new phase. His is the first residency to be a multiyear position.
“We decided to do it this way so that there could really be a relationship that’s built over time,” Sumter says. “It allows Orrin and us to grow together.”
Evans’s work with the DC Jazz Festival has additional support from South Arts, a nonprofit organization with a mission to support artists’ development and increase access to arts and culture. Evans received a $40,000 grant from South Arts’ Jazz Road Creative Residencies program for work with the Captain Black Big Band, which features musicians from New York and Philadelphia.
A proud, even outspoken Philadelphian, Evans envisions the big band’s festival presence as a means to build connections between his city and the District. “Some of these artists that play with the Captain Black Big Band may not be well known,” he says. “So this is an opportunity to introduce [D.C. to] musicians that they haven’t heard of.”
Evans has also arranged for some of these musicians — all of them signed to his label, Imani Records — to serve as the house band for an evening jam session Sept. 3 at the Wharf’s Union Stage. These players include bassist Jonathan Michel, piano player Luke Carlos O’Reilly and saxophonist Caleb Wheeler Curtis.
But the bridge he wants to build has two sides, and Evans has channeled some of his energy into work with local musicians. Earlier this year, he performed a dual piano concert with D.C.’s Allyn Johnson at the University of the District of Columbia. He also conducted a program with the Howard University Jazz Ensemble and this summer took some of its students to play a gig in West Virginia.
“That’s part of Orrin’s ideas about engaging musicians of different generations together, and that’s going to continue to evolve as Orrin’s ideas evolve,” Jenkins says.
Even with all this work, the festival proper remains an important part of the residency program. The five-day 2022 edition is truncated from the DC Jazz Festival’s usual 10-day schedule; the festival is still replenishing the revenue it lost during the covid-19 lockdown. The goal is to return to the larger schedule in 2023, which will make room for more of Evans’s projects.
His ensembles range from trios to small bands like Terreno Comun (his Brazilian quintet, which performed at the 2021 festival) and the free-form collective Tarbaby (with bassist Eric Revis and drummer Nasheet Waits) to Captain Black.
As artist-in-residence, Evans also contributes ideas to the programming beyond his own projects. In addition to his dream-come-true concert with Reeves and the big band, he is excited about other performances.
“I’m like a kid in a candy store, to be honest,” he says.
Asked for some recommendations, though, he has an immediate answer. “You can’t go wrong with two of the greatest bassists on the whole planet,” Evans says. “You’ve got Ron Carter and Christian McBride [who lead bands as part of the outdoor JazzFest at the Wharf component lineups on Sept. 3 and 4, respectively]. And then Dianne Reeves — I dare not say that’s the top three, Reeves, McBride and Carter, but that’s a great place to start.”
The D.C. Jazz Festival takes place Aug. 31-Sept. 4 at locations throughout D.C. Go to dcjazzfest.org for a full schedule. Orrin Evans’ Captain Black Big Band and Dianne Reeves: Sept. 2 at 7:30 p.m. at Arena Stage; sold out. DC JazzFest at the Wharf: Sept. 3 at 2 p.m. and Sept. 4 at 1 p.m. at District Pier; general admission free, seated tickets $89. Orrin Evans Jam: Sept. 3 at 9 p.m. at Union Stage; $20-$40. | 2022-08-26T10:42:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Orrin Evans is building bridges with the DC Jazz Festival - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/08/26/orrin-evans-dc-jazz-festival/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/08/26/orrin-evans-dc-jazz-festival/ |
The ‘good criminals’ who help treat opioid addicts
Review by Nancy D. Campbell
A drug user in Olympia, Wash., holds a bottle of buprenorphine, a medicine that prevents withdrawal sickness in people trying to stop using opioids. Though “bupe,” as it's known, has been shown to prevent opioid deaths, many in law enforcement dismiss its use as substituting one drug for another. (Ted S. Warren/AP)
In her 2018 bestseller, “Dopesick,” Beth Macy presented a staggering picture of the opioid catastrophe that continues to upend lives and communities across America. In “Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis,” she is back with a portrait of the compassionate and practical people who have stepped in to help stem the tens of thousands of drug deaths that still destroy families every year.
Macy uses a biblical story to capture the work of the volunteers and outreach workers who are dedicated to aiding addicted people. She draws on the tale of Lazarus, who had died of an illness and was entombed for four days until Jesus him brought back to life. Before Jesus acted, he asked his followers to roll away a stone that lay across the tomb’s entrance. In “Raising Lazarus,” Macy calls the workers she writes about “stone-rollers.”
It’s an image she borrowed from the Rev. Michelle Mathis, co-founder of the Olive Branch Ministry of western North Carolina, one of the groups in the book. As overdose deaths escalated in the United States — more than 1 million since 1996, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — these groups stepped in to attempt “what officials have failed for decades to do: keep people alive,” Macy writes.
Macy’s stone-rollers regard the people they treat as equals of moral weight, respect and worth. They do not stigmatize, judge or shun these drug users. Their work is called “harm reduction,” and it sometimes ventures into illegal activity.
“In the richest country in the world, treatment of the sickest, neediest people fell to volunteers risking arrest,” Macy writes. Out of their own pockets, they purchase clean needles, naloxone and fentanyl test strips. They test for hepatitis C, then treat it. All kinds of weather finds them trooping out to homeless encampments and drug “trap houses” to deliver food, water, blankets and other first-aid supplies. They provide safe places to shoot up. They deliver “unconditional positive regard” — something Macy stresses is essential for people struggling to get through each day. Their work is funded by bake sales, T-shirt sales and GoFundMe drives. Often working underground, they are what Macy calls “good criminals.”
Such strategies have hardly been embraced by a nation where total abstinence, “tough love” or submission to a higher power is regarded as “treatment.” The high costs of not doing harm reduction recur throughout the book. Macy cites numerous “state and local politicians who wrongly blame suffering people for their own demise.” The lack of humanity was exemplified when a Kiwanis Club leader commented at a community meeting that when people relapse, “we should let ’em die and take their organs.”
The book covers every aspect of the crisis — the science of addiction, the history of the problem, the justice system that, while acknowledging addiction as an illness, treats addicted people merely as criminals. These are interspersed with accounts of the legal battles to hold the Sackler family (owners of opioid-maker Purdue Pharma) accountable for what Macy calls the “taproot of the opioid crisis.”
Shoe-leather reporting took Macy to cemeteries, committee meetings, hearings, court proceedings and protests. Death by drugs, she emphasizes, results from a devastating convergence: Decline of meaningful work. High levels of occupational injury. Failed War on Drugs policies. Lack of access to health care. Profound disengagement by the recovery community from evidence-based, medication-assisted treatment. The drug buprenorphine (bupe), for instance, has been shown in multiple studies to prevent opioid deaths, but many in law enforcement dismiss its use as just swapping one drug for another.
In Mount Airy, N.C., the hometown of actor Andy Griffith, which bills itself as the fictional and idyllic Mayberry of the 1960s “Andy Griffith Show,” we meet Wendy Odum. “My husband and I are now raising our four grandchildren and so are all the grandparents we know,” she says. “All our kids are dead.” Addiction has been taking lives there for three generations: Odum was addicted herself after being prescribed opioids after a fall. Her mother, too, died from an overdose.
What, then, is the solution? The “real magic wand is to give up on the rigid notion that a single fix exists,” Macy writes. Her book is a call to “radically rethink addiction care, to do more than give lip service to the throwaway line — addiction is a disease — and to treat it like one.” That means adopting the stone-rollers’ tactics: needle exchanges, HIV and hepatitis C testing, safe places for people to take drugs when they must, supportive assistance when they are ready to try treatment — which should be “free and easily accessible.” She calls for a Cabinet-level drug czar and a nationwide system of clinics that provide mental health care along with addiction care. Treatment should not be left to the “whims of local boards who subscribe to abstinence-only anti-medication models.”
Macy sees glimmers of hope — the Tennessee judge who, after educating himself about the benefits of bupe, now allows it along with recovery housing for his addicted defendants. The Fairfax County, Va., jail that refers addicted inmates to a bupe program and provides counseling. But these are lonely outposts of progress.
If the addiction crisis is to end, we must create an infrastructure that works. It must be at least as compelling and accessible as the opioid production and distribution network. Those who die of drug overdose in the United States typically come close to dying nine times before the boulder irrevocably closes them off in their tombs. There are many opportunities to roll that stone away.
In July, Teva and Allergan joined the list of pharmaceutical companies agreeing to billion-dollar settlements for their roles in the overdose crisis. As opioid abatement and remediation funds trickle down to the states, this is the task that “Raising Lazarus” sets us. Who will join in rolling those rocks away?
Nancy D. Campbell is the author of “OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose.” She is a professor of science and technology studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.
Hope, Justice and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis
Little, Brown. 400 pp. $30. | 2022-08-26T10:42:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of "Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis” by Beth Macy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/26/good-criminals-who-help-treat-opioid-addicts/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/26/good-criminals-who-help-treat-opioid-addicts/ |
In post-apartheid South Africa, dashed hopes and moral struggles
Review by Paul C. Taylor
Artwork of Nelson Mandela and other South African freedom icons is displayed in Johannesburg's Soweto township in 2013. Eve Fairbanks tells the stories of ordinary South Africans to paint a picture of the country after apartheid. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
The most dynamic storyteller at the most interesting cocktail party could scarcely achieve more than Eve Fairbanks has achieved in “The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning.” How this achievement lands with readers will depend on whether they want more than storytelling from a book on this topic.
“The Inheritors” uses the stories of ordinary South Africans to examine the challenges of post-apartheid life. The topic of raising a democratic republic from the ashes of a white-supremacist state appeals to the American-born Fairbanks and will presumably appeal to many readers, both because of the intrinsic human interest of the stories and because of obvious parallels to the United States. Both countries explicitly, brutally and systematically organized themselves to benefit White people while oppressing everyone else. (We gave this names like Jim Crow and “Indian removal.” They gave it names like “apartheid” and “homelands.”) Both countries tried to reestablish their national projects on less-worrisome foundations, only to find that they had built much better than some of their faithful critics knew. Both found, as a result, that truly achieving what we called “Reconstruction” and what they called a “new dispensation” is harder than most people can readily accept. Now both countries struggle with what to do in the aftermath of this unhappy realization.
The general question of life after apartheid is really many smaller questions, all united by the pain of dashed hopes and the perils of contemporary conditions. Poverty, labor unrest, shaky infrastructure and many other ills remain prominent features of life for too many South Africans, long after the end of White-minority rule. These are policy problems with psychological overtones, rooted in the disappointment of finding the promised land as far off as ever.
Fairbanks explains that she was prepared to explore these issues during her youth in 1990s Virginia, when she found herself fascinated by Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson. Her interest centered not on his odious political commitments but on the existential questions he would have faced had he survived the Civil War. Every sincere Confederate faced these questions in some form, as the Northern victory signaled the official repudiation of the values on which they’d staked their lives. But Jackson’s famous commitment to personal rectitude gave them special resonance for Fairbanks. What does someone who cares passionately about right action and good citizenship do when the meaning of the right and the good changes overnight? How can this person contribute to the society that rejects the values that define his very being?
Of course, the United States never pressed these questions as seriously as it should have. White supremacy reorganized and reasserted itself, bought itself another century of open domination, and after that laid the groundwork for whatever it is that Donald Trump has laid bare. These halting attempts at racial reconstruction prompted Fairbanks to look to South Africa, whose people “never had the luxury of dawdling at the psychological precipice of great change. In the blink of an eye, in the tallying of a vote, they were in it.”
One might wonder if “dawdling” is the word for violent campaigns of racist terror and systematic programs of oppressive state policies, but Fairbanks is surely on to something. More than 50 years separated Martin Luther King Jr.’s rise in Montgomery and Barack Obama’s ascension to the Oval Office. By contrast, South Africa’s Nelson Mandela went from political imprisonment to the presidency in three years (albeit after nearly three decades behind bars). The United States is just beginning to grapple with the prospect of its White population no longer constituting a demographic majority. South Africa’s White people were in the minority all along. Looking southward, then, is supposed to give Fairbanks’s readers a glimpse of where the United States is headed.
The book’s through line comes from the stories of its three main characters: Dipuo, an activist from Soweto; Dipuo’s daughter Malaika; and a former special forces officer named Christo. We follow all three from childhood to the present, from Dipuo’s life in the township and Christo’s life in Afrikaner farming country, through their work in the struggles for and against apartheid, and into the upended, post-apartheid world that confronts them with the fraught consequences of their earlier choices. Here we begin to follow Malaika as well, from her conception a few months after Mandela’s release from prison, through university, into her own forms of activism, and into the good graces of a successful Black businessman and father figure.
As these lives unspool languorously across the book’s 34 chapters, the post-apartheid world comes vividly into focus. The main characters’ stories branch into stories about other people, and from there into wonderfully accessible summaries of South African history, politics and policy. Readers who already know something about the country will find helpful reminders and moving examples. Less-knowledgeable readers will find concise and engaging points of entry.
Fairbanks also shows considerable insight into the challenges of post-apartheid moral psychology. Her subjects grapple with racially freighted emotions like shame and guilt, pity and penitence, and she draws useful lessons from their efforts. A closer relationship to the vast scholarly literature on these issues wouldn’t hurt, but one happily exempts writers from scholarly specialization when their work provides other compensations.
Unfortunately, Fairbanks blocks the path to those compensations by clogging the book with secondary characters. Some of these people have names, some do not. Some are poor or working class, while others are middle class or even more comfortable. Their stories are richly drawn and often moving. But the book collects them haphazardly, and scatters them across chapters that are uniformly (with one exception) and uninformatively named for one of the three main characters. One comes away wishing for more authorial guidance about how to thematize these narrative riches.
The problem may be that guides have to start by figuring out their own location. For a writer, especially on a project like “The Inheritors,” this means examining one’s relationship to the subject matter. It means refusing the fantasy that one can move through the text without friction or remainder, like a ghost or a god.
It’s not that Fairbanks withdraws from the text altogether. In addition to reporting her youthful preoccupation with Stonewall Jackson, she confesses to trading the “gauzy, forced confidence” of her childhood for a growing sense of “frustration” and “dread” at the United States’ continued dawdling. She compares personal experiences, like arguments with old boyfriends, to South Africa’s civic fissures, optimistically assuming that the merits of these analogies will offset their faulty sense of proportion. She also routinely appears in her stories, talking to her characters and visiting hospitals and farms and schools with them.
This is presumably the intimacy promised in the book’s subtitle, but it is oddly one-sided. Fairbanks watches her friends and acquaintances struggle with the world they’ve inherited, and she listens as they question their choices and commitments. But she seems to have little interest in following their lead. One lesson of the book is that people reared in places saturated with complicated racial meanings ought to treat their convictions about race with diffidence and perhaps with suspicion. But it never seems to occur to Fairbanks that this lesson might apply to a White American writer who started her study of South Africa by puzzling over a Confederate general.
A more equitable intimacy might have led Fairbanks to say more about why she went to South Africa and how she met her characters. (We never find out, on either score.) Or to make better use of her Jewish mother, whose identity seems to have no bearing on the author’s racial politics. Or to set aside the old American obsession with Black and White, a habit of mind that allows her to avoid nearly all mention of South Africa’s large and important Indian and mixed-race populations.
I may be asking for a book more like Wendell Berry’s “The Hidden Wound,” which finds its White American author pondering whether he ever really knew the Black people whose stories he tries to tell. I wonder if this is an inappropriate request. After all, Fairbanks never set herself the tasks of a literary essayist. But then I think of Wesley Lowery’s book, “They Can’t Kill Us All.” Lowery, like Fairbanks, is a journalist. He approaches Ferguson, Mo., after the police killing of Michael Brown much as she approaches South Africa after apartheid, which is to say, by telling stories about the fascinating people he encountered. But he also quite explicitly asks what the politics of the Black Lives Matter moment mean to him, and what they require of him as a reporter, a Black man and a citizen. Fairbanks mostly sidesteps this kind of personal investigation, even though one could argue that her subject requires it.
Which brings me back to my opening thought about cocktail parties. Sometimes deeper investigation is simply out of place. Sometimes it is enough to entertain and provide some light edification, especially when the person holding forth draws from a wealth of material that they have gathered with great effort and are sharing with great skill. One might wonder what else the speaker might do with this material — write a novel, say, or a reflective essay. But that is ultimately their business, and for now they’ve chosen to share some of their hard-won wealth with you.
Paul C. Taylor is the W. Alton Jones professor of philosophy and a professor of African American and diaspora studies at Vanderbilt University.
An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning
By Eve Fairbanks
Simon & Schuster. 399 pp. $27.99 | 2022-08-26T10:42:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning by Eve Fairbanks - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/26/post-apartheid-south-africa-dashed-hopes-moral-struggles/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/26/post-apartheid-south-africa-dashed-hopes-moral-struggles/ |
An ‘underclass’ made vulnerable to disease, then blamed for outbreaks
Review by Sarah Carr
Anthony P., second from left, who did want his full name used, meets with health educators at a needle exchange run by Camden Area Health Education Center in Camden, N.J., in February. Steven W. Thrasher writes that such protective measures are often not available to vulnerable people. (Matt Rourke/AP)
When Michael Johnson went on trial in Missouri in 2015, accused of having “recklessly” exposed several other men to HIV, he embodied what journalist Steven W. Thrasher describes as the “viral underclass.”
The young man had only one ally — his public defender — writes Thrasher in an important new book, “The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide.” That lone supporter was an overwhelmed, underprepared lawyer who erroneously referred to Johnson in remarks to potential jurors as “guilty” of charges that could send the 23-year-old to prison for life.
The prosecutor, for his part, aggressively portrayed Johnson, one of few Black students at the suburban St. Louis university he and some of his accusers attended, as a public health menace. The jury found Johnson guilty under a 1988 state law stating that people with HIV who fail to disclose their status to sexual partners could face felony charges. And the judge ultimately sentenced the young man to 30 years in prison — longer than the state’s average sentence for second-degree murder.
As a journalist for outlets including BuzzFeed, Thrasher delved into Johnson’s case over several years. In “The Viral Underclass,” the story provides the narrative through line for Thrasher’s argument: that the “isms” that define so much of life in America — racism, ableism, capitalism — have not only caused some to suffer disproportionately, and unnecessarily, but have also led society to blame individual “bad actors” for viruses’ devastating toll. In other words, members of the viral underclass are not only most likely to contract diseases such as HIV and covid-19, they are also disproportionately punished for it, a process that largely absolves the country’s classist and racist policies and institutions.
Thrasher borrows the term “viral underclass” from a 2011 statement by Sean Strub, a longtime activist for LGBTQ equality, who coined it as a way of acknowledging the discriminatory effects of legal sanctions and other policies around HIV. Such practices resulted “in the creation of a viral underclass of persons with rights inferior to others, especially in regard to their sexual expression,” Strub wrote.
In broadening the scope of this concept, Thrasher shows that such logic can be self-reinforcing. Instead of fighting for a more affordable and equitable health-care system that would expand access to HIV drugs and dramatically lower the risk of transmission, for instance, we lock up lone men like Johnson who have faced various challenges, including, in his case, dyslexia and economic hardship. In Thrasher’s telling, Johnson serves as a convenient scapegoat for society’s sins.
The stories of a few brave, virus-afflicted people living — and sometimes dying — at the margins of society are central to Thrasher’s book. Those also include Lorena Borjas, a leader in Queens’s transgender immigrant community who helped countless others, most of them transgender people, cope with police harassment, sexual violence, homelessness, HIV infection and other health concerns. Struck by covid early in the pandemic, Borjas resisted medical care from a system that she knew posed distinct humiliations and risks for trans people and Spanish speakers like herself. Ultimately, she grew so ill, she had no choice but to seek medical help. Her story tragically shows how the cruelties and inequities of our society can work to compound individual vulnerability to illness over time — as we concentrate all the diverse forms of prophylaxis, or protection, in the hands of some, leaving others almost entirely bereft.
Thrasher, who holds a journalism professorship at Northwestern University focused on LGBTQ research, notes that the American response to the pandemic has been defined by uneven access to some of the most well-known forms of protection: masks, drugs and vaccines. Yet he points out that other forms are far more diffuse and entrenched — and can be more powerful. Those include quality health care, stable housing, jobs with the flexibility to work from home, literacy and computer savvy. “Prophylaxis is often kept from people in the United States if they are already considered disposable,” he says. “Then, when they become infected by a virus, their diagnosis makes them even more marginalized, if not untouchable.” There are, for example, stunningly higher rates of AIDS in the Black population. Two decades after effective drugs became available, in 2015, there was a higher per capita rate of AIDS among Black people than there ever had been for White people, Thrasher notes. This is a direct consequence not just of unequal access to treatments but also of all the other factors, great and small, that prevent people from needing those treatments in the first place.
Thrasher structures most chapters around a theme — the disastrous implications when White people believe they are immune from disease, for example, or unequal access to protection — accompanied by an anecdote or personal story. At times, the book feels like it’s suspended between memoir and public health tome. Nevertheless, the sometimes sprawling nature of the storytelling, and Thrasher’s liberal acknowledgment and incorporation of many of his friends and colleagues (as well as his past journalism and relationships), ultimately work in the service of one of his main points: that we are all more interconnected and reliant on one another than we always realize.
Yet I still wanted more depth in some places, and shorter detours in others to keep the focus on what is freshest and most revelatory. I could, for instance, have done without a lengthy recounting of the plot of the 2019 South Korean film “Parasite,” which takes up much of his chapter on capitalism.
Ultimately, this book is at its most searing when Thrasher shows, by the numbers and by the people, how various public health crises have compounded in America to create the viral underclass — and then, too often, to blame them for their own suffering. To that end, Thrasher’s recounting of Johnson’s and Borjas’s stories is particularly powerful. So are his examples of how various inequities and public health concerns have so often overlapped during covid — with devastating results. He points, for instance, to a report finding that 80 percent of the people who died of covid in Texas correctional facilities as of November 2020 were in pretrial detention and had not been convicted of the crimes for which they were being held. I craved a bit more original reporting and analysis of this kind.
Michael Johnson was released from prison in 2019 after an appeals court deemed his initial trial unfair. True victories on behalf of the viral underclass are rare, however. And Thrasher hints at how rapidly — how virally, in fact — the underclass can expand, especially as climate change heightens the likelihood of new (or old) viruses finding a home in the human species. We are all more vulnerable and intertwined than we realize, he writes in an eloquent epilogue — with the line between the exposed underclass and those who consider themselves “immune” unsteady as the shifting sand.
The Viral Underclass
The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide
By Steven W. Thrasher
Celadon Books.
352 pp. $29.99 | 2022-08-26T10:42:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Book review of "The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide" by Steven W. Thrasher - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/26/viral-underclass-review-steven-thrasher/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/26/viral-underclass-review-steven-thrasher/ |
Vibrant, intimate photos of everyday life in Greenland
From “Keepers of the Ocean,” published by Disco Bay. (Inuuteq Storch)
When I was in graduate school at the University of Missouri, a student who was almost finished with his master’s degree went to Greenland to do his capstone project. I was very new to photographic storytelling and was curious to see his work. I remember being struck by the verdant scenes he captured. That was also, I believe, the first time I had ever seen any documentation of Greenland.
Fast-forward a couple of decades and I can say with confidence that I still have not seen a lot of work on Greenland. At least for me, it remains a pretty mysterious place. The only work that comes to mind is Danish photographer Jacob Aue Sobol’s “Sabine.” And that happens to be a book far too expensive for me to get, so I’ve seen only snippets of it online.
But not too long ago, I was tagged by the artist and writer Brad Feurhelm on Instagram about a book he had received and thought I might be interested in. Turns out, the samples he shared on his account looked very compelling to me. It was a book by Greenlandic photographer Inuuteq Storch called “Keepers of the Ocean,” published by the Copenhagen-based Disko Bay.
The fact that this is a book about Greenland by someone actually from there and not just parachuting in makes it even more compelling for me. For a variety of reasons — some avoidable, some not; some even reprehensible — the White male perspective is more readily at hand than those of people native to a country, telling their own stories. We all need to do a better job of finding and highlighting that kind of work, including me.
Having said that, I find Storch’s book compelling on its own merits. It is a very personal and intimate account of life in Greenland. The photographs themselves are striking and diarylike. Looking at them is like being granted access to Storch’s private thoughts and world.
The photos eschew tidy compositions in favor of a more stream-of-conscious approach that allows us to enter into the everyday life of the people and places in Storch’s orbit.
At times, Storch’s photos are reminiscent of the aforementioned Sobol’s, but they also recall Richard Billingham’s searing personal portrait of his own family in his cult book “Ray’s a Laugh.” And they are earnest in a way that reminds me of the work of Danish photographer Jacob Holdt. What they all have in common is an approach that can feel less reined in from a technical standpoint but rewards you in spades with a personal point of view.
“Keepers of the Ocean” is first and foremost a love letter to life in Greenland, particularly life in Storch’s hometown of Sisimiut, surrounded and imbued with snow, the ocean and the elements. The photographs, made over three years, are described this way in the book’s introduction:
“Everyday images of friends, family, food and interiors form part of the subject matter combined with Storch’s own intervention and experimentation. Unstaged yet absorbing, intimate and vulnerable. His intuitive narrative style draws the viewer into the image, giving us the feeling of being present ourselves. A rare sight when it comes to portrayals of Greenland — exceptional, meaty and sorely needed.”
It cannot be overstated how unique this book is in its portrayal of a place we don’t often get to see. That is reason enough to get a copy. But the vibrancy and execution of the photos makes the book even more compelling.
You can find out more about Storch and his work on his website, here. And you can buy the book from Disko Bay here. | 2022-08-26T10:42:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Photos of Greenland - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/08/26/vibrant-intimate-photos-everyday-life-greenland/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/08/26/vibrant-intimate-photos-everyday-life-greenland/ |
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