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Trump must be held to account to restore America’s democratic luster
Former president Donald Trump. (Al Drago/Bloomberg News)
I’ve been critical of President Biden for not doing more for Ukraine, but the United States is sending more aid than any other country — by far. America’s total commitment to Ukraine — $44.3 billion — is nearly seven times greater than the No. 2 donor, Britain. Without U.S. help, Ukraine would likely have lost the war already.
This is a reminder that the United States remains, as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had called it, the “indispensable nation.” But how long can we continue defending democracy abroad while enduring a democratic crisis at home?
Biden was all too accurate in his blistering denunciation last week of “MAGA Republicans” who pose “a threat to our very democracy” and flirt with “semi-fascism.” The same conclusion has been reached by independent researchers who have found the GOP has more in common with authoritarian political parties in countries such as Hungary and Turkey than it does with center-right parties in Western Europe.
That’s a big problem because the GOP is not some fringe third party. As recently as 2018, it controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, and it is still on pace to take back control of the House in November, notwithstanding some encouraging political trends for Democrats.
And yet, no matter how much damaging information comes out about Donald Trump, the GOP remains a cult of personality for the disgraced former president. Even though the House Jan. 6 committee showed that the storming of the Capitol was part of an attempted coup d’etat by Trump, he is still viewed favorably by 80 percent of Republicans. It is the committee’s vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), who is the GOP pariah — not Trump.
Even Trump’s unauthorized removal of classified information — he kept more than 700 pages of classified material at Mar-a-Lago — has not dented his standing among Republicans. Just the opposite: The number of Republicans expressing a “very positive” view of Trump actually increased (from 45 percent to 57 percent) after a court-ordered FBI search of his property. The very same right-wingers who called for Hillary Clinton to be prosecuted for using a private email server for official emails are rushing to excuse Trump’s handling of mere “documents,” even if those documents have the potential to compromise highly sensitive intelligence-gathering methods or get human sources killed.
Just imagine how this looks when viewed from abroad. As Axios notes: “In at least 76 countries, leaders who left office since 2000 have been jailed or prosecuted — including in democracies like France, Israel and South Korea.” Yet the de facto Republican position appears to be that their supreme leader should be above the law — just like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping.
Trump has already gotten away with numerous offenses, including likely obstruction of justice in the probe of his campaign’s dealings with Russia, his attempted use of military aid to extort Ukraine into helping him politically, and of course his instigation of a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol. Now the GOP seems to think he should get away with the mishandling of classified information.
This simply adds to the perception that America is becoming a banana republic. We are the country, lest we forget, that had more confirmed covid-19 deaths — more than a million — than any other. The number of deaths per 100,000 population was nearly three times higher in the United States than in Canada.
Since the worst of the covid pandemic has passed, our international reputation has been rocked not only by the Jan. 6, 2021, uprising but also by our inability to deal with soaring gun violence. It is a tribute to American perversity that we are tightening our abortion laws while loosening our gun laws.
Little wonder that, although America’s international reputation has rebounded since Trump left office, few people in the world see our democracy as a model to emulate. In a Pew Research Center survey of 16 countries last year, 57 percent of respondents said that U.S. democracy used to be a good example but no longer. A more recent Pew poll finds that 66 percent of respondents across 19 countries say that China’s influence is getting stronger while just 32 percent say the same about the United States.
This brings us to the momentous decision that Attorney General Merrick Garland may soon have to make about whether to charge Trump with possible offenses such as obstruction of justice and violations of the Espionage Act.
Some suggest that Garland should lay off for fear of a Republican backlash that would only strengthen Trump. Those concerns are real; violence will likely erupt if Trump is arrested. But, if there is sufficient evidence to charge the former president with a crime and the Justice Department refuses to do so, that would send a dangerous message of impunity for high-level wrongdoing that will further undermine U.S. democracy at home and U.S. influence abroad.
The United States must champion the rule of law not only in Ukraine but also in Florida, come what may. The Justice Department cannot bow to political intimidation from American fascists. | 2022-08-29T11:32:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Garland must hold Trump to account for the sake of U.S. democracy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/trump-impunity-damage-us-democracy-home-abroad/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/trump-impunity-damage-us-democracy-home-abroad/ |
Feeling unwelcome in blue states, gun companies move to red ones
At least 20 manufacturers have shifted operations to states with friendlier attitudes toward firearms
By Todd C. Frankel
The U.S. firearms industry is increasingly rooted in the South and, to a lesser extent, the West, weakening ties to the Northeast that stretch back to the Revolutionary War. (Charles Krupa/AP)
Smith & Wesson CEO Mark Smith was fed up. He was running the largest firearms manufacturer in America, based in Springfield, Mass., where it had been making weapons since 1860, and yet state lawmakers were considering a bill to ban the manufacture of AR-15-style rifles for the civilian market. The proposed law would cripple Smith’s company. Sixty percent of Smith & Wesson’s revenue came from AR-15-style guns.
So after years of flirting with the idea, Smith announced last September that Smith & Wesson was pulling up stakes and moving its headquarters from Massachusetts to Tennessee.
Deciding to leave was “extremely difficult,” Smith told investors, but “we feel that we have been left with no other alternative.”
At least 20 firearms, ammunition and gun accessory companies — including some of the industry’s biggest names, such as Beretta and Remington Arms — have moved headquarters or shifted production from traditionally Democratic blue states to Republican red ones over the past decade, relocating thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment amid the nation’s sharpening divide over guns. The companies were enticed by tax breaks and the promise of cheaper labor. But the biggest factor often was the push for stricter gun laws in many of the Democratic-leaning states.
“This is where we part ways,” said Massachusetts state Rep. Bud Williams (D), whose district includes Smith & Wesson’s historic headquarters. “And I’ve been a big supporter of Smith & Wesson. But there’s too many mass shootings. I’m not going to be silent.”
The departures have come in waves, often prompted by legislative reactions to high-profile mass shootings — first the 2012 school shooting in Newtown Conn., and then the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla. Some states run by Democrats tightened gun laws. Republican states often moved in the opposite direction, sometimes loosening gun restrictions in the wake of mass shootings, studies show.
New gun laws led Beretta USA to move its manufacturing operations from Maryland for Tennessee in 2014. Mossberg shipped its shotgun production from Connecticut to Texas that same year. That’s also when Magpul Industries, among the country’s largest producers of ammunition magazines, left Colorado for Texas and Wyoming.
In 2019, Stag Arms trumpeted its departure of Connecticut for Wyoming.
Last November, two months after Smith & Wesson’s farewell, the owner of Remington Arms, the nation’s oldest gunmaker, revealed it was moving its headquarters from Ilion, N.Y. to LaGrange, Ga., pledging to invest $100 million and hire 856 people in its new home.
Companies made more than $1B selling powerful guns to civilians, report says
Republican lawmakers have encouraged gun companies to move and looked to lure them to their own states, viewing it as an opportunity to add jobs and burnish culture war credentials.
Last year, Oklahoma lawmakers launched a study of ways to attract gunmakers to the Sooner state. At the 2022 Shot Show, the firearms industry’s major annual trade show, governors from six states traveled to Las Vegas to sell their communities to the manufacturers of guns, ammunition and accessories. All of them were Republicans.
“These states are openly attracting the industry. Some of them have been very aggressive,” said Mark Oliva, spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group based — as it has been for decades — in Newtown, Conn.
These days, the firearms industry is growing rapidly, shaking off years of tepid sales during President Donald Trump’s term. (Gun sales tend to spike under Democratic presidents, when the potential for new gun laws seems greater.)
Americans bought an estimated 19.9 million firearms last year — the second most ever, right behind 2020′s pandemic-fueled record tally of nearly 23 million, according to Small Arms Analytics and Forecasting. Employment at firearms and ammunition companies jumped 28 percent from 2015 to 2021, totaling nearly 170,000 people nationwide, according to NSSF data.
The NSSF and the National Rifle Association have cheered on the gunmakers’ caravan of moving vans, attributing the trend to “anti-Second Amendment sentiment” and a search for friendlier states. An NRA journal called America’s First Freedom described the shift as, “Moving to Freer America.”
But most gunmakers are not abandoning blue states entirely.
Beretta USA, subsidiary of Italian gunmaker Beretta, moved 160 jobs from Prince George’s County’s Accokeek, Md., to Gallatin, Tenn., after Maryland lawmakers in 2014 banned dozens of assault-style weapons, including some made by Beretta.
“Why expand in a place where the people who built the gun couldn’t buy it?” Jeffrey Reh, general counsel for Beretta, said to The Washington Post while the state was debating the gun ban.
A city that makes guns confronts its role in the Parkland mass shooting
Last year, the father of a teen killed in that shooting designed a highway billboard that overlooked the firearms plant. It carried the message: “I can’t turn 21 and enjoy my first legal beer because a Florida teen was allowed to get his first legal AR-15.”
Smith & Wesson has responding by digging in and balking at the suggestion it shares responsibility for how its guns are used. This summer, Smith, the chief executive, refused to join executives from other weapons makers when they testified before a House Oversight Committee looking into the firearms industry. He then issued a statement blaming politicians for gun-related crimes and accused them of trying to shift culpability.
In 2000, a year after the school mass shooting in Columbine, Colo., President Bill Clinton’s White House and Smith & Wesson announced a legal settlement that included the gunmaker agreeing to install child-safe triggers and to ban sales to gun dealers with checkered pasts. Other gunmakers considered joining the deal. But facing intense pressure from the NRA and the gun industry, Smith & Wesson eventually backed away from the deal. Its chief executive resigned.
Sheehan, the city’s chief development officer, said he understood the difficult position that the company was in.
“But, in my mind,” he said, “you also need to weigh that with the economic impact.”
The bill didn’t pass.
“I just felt that with all these shootings,” Williams said, “at some point it’s time to put lives over profit.”
Smith & Wesson is expected to open its headquarters down South next year. | 2022-08-29T11:49:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Gun firms like Remington, Smith & Wesson leave blue states for red ones - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/29/gun-companies-move-south/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/29/gun-companies-move-south/ |
Duane Hansen celebrated his 60th birthday with a 38-mile trip down the Missouri River in an 846-pound gourd named ‘Berta’
Vegetable grower Duane Hansen hollowed out his 846-pound pumpkin and made a 38-mile journey down the Missouri River on Aug. 27. (Video: Reuters)
He’d been trying to grow a pumpkin that big for nearly a decade, but “Berta” wasn’t just for show. Hansen hollowed it out, plopped a cooler inside and hit the banks of the Missouri River.
The 60-year-old was on a quest to squash the Guinness World Record for “the longest journey by pumpkin boat.” Yes, it’s a thing — and Hansen’s not the first to use a giant gourd as a vessel.
Rick Swenson, who in 2016 completed a 25-mile trip inside a pumpkin when he paddled from Grand Forks, N.D., to Oslo, Minn., holds the title. But Hansen’s 38-mile float on Saturday would blow past that record. If verified by Guinness World Records, he could join those who have pushed the limits on what’s possible — whether growing eight-foot-long beards, spinning basketballs atop toothbrushes or stopping electric fans with their tongues.
Officials in Bellevue, Neb., announced Hansen’s record on Saturday, just hours after he’d completed the voyage to Nebraska City.
“Congratulations Duane for smashing the world record,” they wrote in a Facebook post. “We are proud that you started this record breaking 38 mile journey in Bellevue.”
Guinness World Records didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post. To validate a record, the organization requires evidence with its submissions, including photos, videos and witness statements. It appears Hansen has taken some steps to comply with the rules, after family members and officials documented his voyage.
Hansen spent about 11 hours floating in his pumpkin. People across the globe followed his progress, wishing Hansen Godspeed — or as one fan put it, “gourdspeed.”
They thought they unearthed the world’s largest potato. It turned out not to be a potato at all.
Hansen is known for growing large pumpkins and other produce. When he first approached Bellevue officials about sending his giant pumpkin down the river, they didn’t know he would be riding in it.
“Seems like a unique if not slightly crazy way to celebrate his 60th birthday,” Bellevue’s Facebook post states. Hansen’s birthday was on Aug. 26.
Before launching, Hansen had to carve the “boat.” With a circumference of around 146 inches, “Berta” was large enough for Hansen to fit inside once the pumpkin was hollowed out.
Hansen woke up early two days later to begin his attempt. The gourd, strapped over a mattress, was hauled on a trailer. Clad in denim shorts, a life jacket and a camouflage hat, Hansen took off around 7:30 a.m. as family, friends and city officials watched from the Bellevue public boat docks. “SS Berta” was written on the back of the pumpkin.
Photos posted by the city show Hansen using a bright yellow paddle to steer a partly submerged pumpkin along the “Big Muddy” — the same river from which Lewis and Clark launched their expedition over 200 years ago.
A car-sized pumpkin would have won the ‘Super Bowl’ of pumpkin growing. There was just one tiny thing wrong.
His journey was not without challenges, Hansen told News Channel Nebraska. He had “to be on top of it the whole time,” Hansen told the outlet. Waves from passing boats threatened to tip his pumpkin more than once.
“You’ve got to stop everything and just hold on and ride with those waves. That was bad,” he said.
By 2:52 p.m., Hansen had hit the 25.5-mile mark, the city of Bellevue wrote in an update. At that point, he’d broken the record set in 2016, officials said. Nearly four hours and 13 miles later, he arrived at the marina in Nebraska City, where a crowd of family, friends and fans were awaiting with loud cheers and happy tears.
“I’m so proud of my dad. … He has always said that you can do anything you want and how can you not believe somebody who goes out and does exactly what he wants?” Hansen’s daughter, Morgan Buchholz, told News Channel Nebraska. “I’m just so proud.”
On social media, pumpkin puns and congratulations for the new “Cinderfella” started pouring in from as far as Australia. A Twitter post about Hansen’s journey has gained nearly 125,000 likes since Saturday.
For Hansen, it’s go big or gourd home. | 2022-08-29T11:50:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Duane Hansen of Nebraska floated in a pumpkin to beat a world record - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/29/pumpkin-boat-world-record-nebraska/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/29/pumpkin-boat-world-record-nebraska/ |
Finally, a Sunday anchor puts his foot down on Espionagegate
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) makes his way off the Senate floor on Aug. 6 in Washington. (Anna Rose Layden/Getty Images)
Given my fervent criticism of mainstream media interviewers for going soft on Republicans carrying water for defeated former president Donald Trump, who is under investigation for possible violation of the Espionage Act, it’s only fair to point out appropriately tough, take-no-prisoners performances.
On Sunday, that came from ABC This Week’s George Stephanopoulos in an interview with retiring Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). His upcoming retirement is noteworthy since he should have zero reason to fear Trump’s wrath or prostrate himself in front of the MAGA crowd. And yet he did.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Was he right to take these documents to Mar-a-Lago?
One of the things I was concerned about when I heard about this so-called raid or seizing of these documents was, why hadn’t the Intelligence Committee that I’ve been on for my time in the Senate and time in the House, why hadn’t we heard anything about this, in fact, if the administration was concerned that there was a national security problem? ...
BLUNT: We need to be sure we don’t characterize them differently.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, it went on because the president didn’t turn over the documents, correct? He was asked several times. He didn’t turn them over. He was subpoenaed, he didn’t respond to the subpoena. . . .
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, he hasn’t said that. He said he did nothing wrong.
Several aspects of this deserve attention.
First, why in the world would a supposedly “mainstream” Republican such as Blunt humiliate himself by going to bat for someone caught with documents allegedly containing some of the nation’s top secrets? It’s incomprehensible enough that any elected official would engage in such behavior, but for someone months from retirement it’s virtually incomprehensible. At this stage Trump cannot “do” anything to Blunt, and yet the tribal loyalty, the refusal to level with the base and the contempt for voters’ intelligence remains. Servility becomes an unbreakable habit at some point.
Second, after Blunt’s interview, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) came on. Asked about Blunt’ response, Sanders pulled no punches. “Well, my take is there’s something a little bit absurd when it appears that we have a former president who was taking highly classified documents to his own residence,” he said. “I mean, it’s just incomprehensible to me. But then again, when we talk about President Trump, it’s — there’s a lot of incomprehensible things.” More Democrats should put pressure on Republicans to end their deceitful defense of Trump — and more hosts should ask them about it. Indeed, every lawmaker and every candidate on the ballot this November owes voters his or her candor on a topic that cuts to the heart of danger when cult figures operate with impunity.
Third, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, previously a Trump ally, also got asked. And here, Republicans, is your model answer: “It shouldn’t be a hard thing to say, you know, so I’ll say it, George, so you see that a Republican can say it. That’s wrong … for you to take top-secret, classified documents back to your house.” Christie added, “When I was U.S. attorney, it was wrong for me to do; when I was governor, it was wrong for me to do. And when you’re president, it’s wrong for you to do.” Any Republican who cannot say the same fails the fundamental test of fitness for office.
Fourth, given that so many are not willing to follow Christie’s example, the media has an obligation to question them as to their ability to live up to their oaths if elected. That in and of itself is a serious issue for November. If you’re not willing to declare that certain actions by former government officials are beyond the pale — such as illegally retaining national secrets, refusing to give them back, making misleading statements about keeping them, and stirring up a violent feeding frenzy that paints a target on the back of law enforcement officers — then you cannot sincerely uphold the oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
Frankly, the question of fitness for office should have been a major focus of coverage as soon as Republicans took Trump’s side in the “big lie” and refused to impeach or even investigate him. Now, they declare their determination to investigate the attorney general and the president’s son. No national party that contemplates such a betrayal of the country’s interests should escape scrutiny — and no respectable media outlet should treat the GOP as a normal party. | 2022-08-29T11:51:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Republicans like Roy Blunt won't say Trump's actions are wrong - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/roy-blunt-republicans-trump-wrongdoing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/roy-blunt-republicans-trump-wrongdoing/ |
What parents are getting wrong about teens and sexting
(The Washington Post/iStock)
Sexting – the digital sharing of sexually explicit texts and images – has become inextricably woven into the culture of adolescent life, growing ever more common and complex in recent years. Nevertheless, many parents take the simplistic approach of telling their teens, “Just say no.”
That’s a mistake, according to Carrie James and Emily Weinstein, Harvard researchers and co-authors of “Behind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing (and Adults Are Missing).” “Saying ‘Just don’t sext’ can be really a conversation ender,” James said. And when it comes to sending nudes there is plenty for teens and parents to talk about. In their research, she and Weinstein found that teens sext for many reasons, some of which might not have occurred to adults, and that girls are coming up with sophisticated strategies to discourage the leaking of nude images.
“One of the things that we found in our conversations with teens and in our research is that so many of the dilemmas around sexting are so thorny and complicated,” said Weinstein, who, along with James, is a researcher for Harvard’s Project Zero, which explores topics in education. “If we do not show up for these conversations with teens, we are not equipping them to navigate those situations and the pressures they’re facing.”
Here’s what parents need to know about sexting and how to approach their teens about it.
It’s fairly common
According to a 2018 meta-analysis of research done before June 2016, about 15 percent of teens had sent a sext, while 27 percent had received one and 12 percent had forwarded one without consent. A 2021 meta-analysis of studies between 2016 and early 2020 found that 19 percent of teens had sent a sext, 35 percent had received one and 15 percent had forwarded one without consent.
Both analyses, however, looked at studies done before the pandemic — and lockdowns reportedly sparked an increase in sexting between teens.
In fact, sexting among adolescents has become such a concern in some quarters, that experts have advocated including it in sex education curriculums, decriminalizing consensual sexting between teens, and teaching “safe sexting,” which would include advice such as deleting metadata, never including one’s face, identifiable body features such as birthmarks, or jewelry in a photo; and using a plain background.
Some of the girls Weinstein and James talked to in teen advisory groups had devised their own elaborate procedures to reduce the chances that nude photos of them would be leaked by recipients. For example, they would superimpose watermarks on the images with the name of the boy they were sending the photos. Or, instead of sending a nude, they might send a Google image, while also screenshotting the search result so they could forward it as proof that the body in the photo wasn’t theirs, if it was passed along.
“Carrie and I just kept thinking, why go to so much trouble? Why not just say, ‘I’m not going to send you a picture?’” Weinstein said. “And we came to see these as kind of like survival tactics, and a signal of how hard this landscape feels for them, regardless of what adults might think or feel is so obvious.”
Another thing that might not be obvious to parents is the definition of sexting today. “We tend to use one word like sexting and think of one kind of tiny sliver of a situation, probably a sliver where a girl is being asked by a boy for a nude and she makes a decision,” James said. But a 2018 meta-analysis found that research on sex differences in sending sexts is inconclusive. And the surveys and teen advisory groups that James and Weinstein conducted show that kids sext with a wide range of people for a wide variety of reasons, and can be quite willing participants.
For example, they may find it fun and exciting. They may want to show interest in someone. They may want to take their relationship to the next level and to express trust in their partner. In fact, in some cases, James and Weinstein said, older teens had had experiences sexting in close, consensual, trusting relationships with no negative consequences. These teens found adults’ dire warnings about sexting to be out-of-touch and condescending.
The researchers also pointed out that intimate digital communication might be an important option for LGBTQ kids who are exploring their sexuality and may not be ready or comfortable to do so in public.
But there are many scenarios in which kids are sexting under pressure. They include: Being threatened or coerced into sending a sext; not wanting to hurt someone’s feelings or shut down a relationship or potential relationship; thinking everyone else is doing it (research shows that high-schoolers who believe popular kids are sexting are more likely to follow suit); believing that having nude images gives them status (this is especially prevalent among boys); thinking it’s the only way to attract someone they are interested in; seeking affirmation about their body.
Some of the scenarios that James and Weinstein heard about surprised even them. For example, “It’s not just that teens are getting asked for nudes or seminude pictures from people they’re already in relationships with,” Weinstein said. “Sometimes those requests are coming from people who they actually see as friends.”
Shelley Rutledge, a psychologist for the Salem-Keizer school district in Oregon has seen the same behavior. “Particularly with our younger teens, we’re seeing transactional exchanging of images outside the context of romantic relationships that may be based in friendship or even just acquaintances,” she said.
Rutledge, who is a member of the school district’s Student Safety and Support Response team, recommends preparing kids to deal with requests for inappropriate images as soon as they begin using technology to communicate — whether that’s by phone, via social networks or on gaming platforms.
This isn’t a one-and-done situation, she said; as with all issues involving sexuality, parents should check in frequently and continue to have age-appropriate conversations and work on “refusal skills.”
Parents should also understand that consensual sharing of intimate images between adolescents, which was barely on the radar of psychologists 15 or so years ago, is no longer seen as developmentally inappropriate, said Rutledge. So your 13- to 18-year-old isn’t atypical if they are intrigued by sexting (although sending unwelcome photographs of themselves to others or pressuring others into sending images would be concerning). They are, however, impulsive teens who may not be able to understand the potential consequences of their actions or who believe in what psychologists call the personal fable – that their experiences are unique, and that bad things, won’t happen to them.
Talking to teens
So, how can a parent find out what is going on in their adolescent’s digital environment and talk to them about the risks?
Weinstein, James and Rutledge recommend asking open-ended questions, avoiding judgment and coming at it from a mind-set of curiosity. For example, a parent could ask how sexting is playing out in their child’s school, or whether their kids’ friends are talking about sexting, or what their teen thinks of the issue.
It’s also important to understand what function sexting would serve for your teen, Rutledge said — are they tempted to sext because they want to fit in, to save a friendship, to receive affirmation about their body? Then you can tailor the conversation around values. For example, if a friend asked your child for a nude image and won’t take no for an answer, you can talk about whether that person is really being a good friend.
But it’s not enough to teach adolescents how to defend themselves from inappropriate sexual overtures. Parents also need to tell teens why it’s not safe or appropriate to solicit photos, which is not a gender-dependent conversation. “All genders solicit, all genders consent, all genders can exploit, all genders can be exploited.” Rutledge said. “So we want to make sure that we’re having gender inclusive conversations about not just why it’s not safe to offer an image, but why it’s really, really unfair of you to ask for an image.”
Parents also need to talk about the core value of consent, she said. “True consent is enthusiastic consent. Like, ‘I am not just acquiescing to your request because I care about you. It’s that I believe this is in my best interest and it’s something that I actively want to do.’ ” Many kids, she added, don’t understand “that consent is not 10 no’s and a yes.”
Another important principle to impress upon teens is that sexts should never be shared without permission, said James, who termed it the “ultimate … violation of consent and respect in this space.” Rutledge also noted that adolescents should be encouraged to come forward if they see people sharing other people’s nude images that have been sent to them.
Finally, parents should assure their adolescents that they can reach out to them for help if sexting goes wrong. This is another reason, Rutledge points out, that it’s important to take a calm, nonjudgmental approach to the issue. While it’s difficult, she said, parents need to try to “set aside that visceral reaction to something that’s unsafe and scary for us. Because in the end, when your child makes a bad choice or if your child’s being exploited or harmed… we want them to come to us.” | 2022-08-29T11:51:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What parents are getting wrong about teens and sexting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2022/08/29/what-parents-are-getting-wrong-about-teens-sexting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2022/08/29/what-parents-are-getting-wrong-about-teens-sexting/ |
Live updates Artemis 1 launch is first of NASA’s plan to return to the moon
Working with liquid hydrogen is hard
Delay disrupts NASA’s plans for a celebratory broadcast
NASA engineers still trying to fix engine issue
Weather and a leak are likely to push the launch time back
Vice President Harris to attend Artemis I launch
What are the chances the SLS rocket will launch today?
NASA’s Space Launch System will attempt to launch the Artemis 1 rocket, the most powerful ever built, into space for 42 days on Aug. 29. (Video: The Washington Post)
NASA’s Space Launch System, which the space agency hopes will take American astronauts back to the moon, has been in development for more than a decade. But today will be the first time NASA attempts to launch the multibillion-dollar rocket, the most powerful NASA has ever built.
The development of the SLS has been controversial. Several inspector general reports have dinged the project for being over budget and criticized NASA for paying performance bonuses to the prime contractor, Boeing, even though the project is years behind schedule.
But despite those setbacks, Congress has continued to fund the program, which has cost $23 billion and counting — far more expensive than the rockets now being used by commercial space companies such as SpaceX. Critics often refer to the SLS as the “Senate Launch System.”
Weather or technical issues could force NASA to delay the launch to another day, but when the SLS flies, the space agency says it will mark a major milestone in its ambitious Artemis program to create a sustainable presence on and around the moon.
Launch originally was scheduled for 8:33 a.m. Eastern time, with a two-hour window. Given problems with weather and a technical issue, the launch may go later in the window. But NASA has not given a new launch time.
There are no astronauts on board. The launch will be the first test of the rocket and the first flight to the moon for the Orion crew capsule designed to one day carry people.
The Orion capsule is expected to spend 42 days in space before returning to Earth in October. It is scheduled to reach the moon in about six days and stay in lunar orbit before coming home.
The next Artemis mission, known as Artemis II, would send as many as four astronauts into lunar orbit, with a landing to follow with Artemis III by 2025 or 2026.
Liquid hydrogen, the fuel that powers the RS-25 engine, is a fickle propellant. It’s kept at minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that would be a shock to the system as its loaded into the tanks and then cycles through pumps to the engines.
To prepare the systems for the blast of super-chilled hydrogen, engineers condition the system ahead of time by bleeding liquid hydrogen through it. But in one of the three engines, a bleed line isn’t functioning properly, and so the engine is not dropping to the needed temperature.
Engineers are trying to figure out how to solve the problem, and the launch director has added a 10-minute hold to the countdown, so they can try to fix it.
NASA has big plans for its broadcast of the Artemis I launch, a show featuring astronauts and special guests who would talk about the space agency’s enthusiasm for its plans to return human beings to the moon.
It was to feature a series of celebrity appearances by Jack Black, Chris Evans, and Keke Palmer, as well as a special performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Josh Groban and Herbie Hancock. It also planned to feature a performance of “America the Beautiful” by the Philadelphia Orchestra and cellist Yo-Yo Ma, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
But all that has been put on hold while engineers attempt to get the huge Space Launch System rocket in a condition for launch.
Until the problems are resolved, NASA is providing a feed to its operational channel where it offers occasional updates on the progress of readying the rocket.
NASA engineers are troubleshooting a problem with one of the four RS-25 engines that power the rocket. They had attempted to run cryogenic propellant through the engine to get it to the right temperature for flight but were having problems with the line.
The liquid hydrogen is kept at minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit.
They have since open and closed the valves, and added pressure, but that doesn’t seem to be working to cool the engine. NASA ran into a similar problem during a fueling test in June and had hoped they had fixed the problem.
Additionally, engineers have noticed the build up of frost on the intertank, which connects the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen tanks. That could be the result of a crack, and engineers are assessing that as well.
NASA got a late start on fueling the rocket overnight when a thunderstorm came within five miles of the launchpad around midnight Eastern time. Once the storm passed, crews began fueling the rocket: First, the liquid oxygen, which was going well, and then the liquid hydrogen. That’s when sensors at the base of the rocket detected a leak. NASA stopped the fueling, then started and stopped again in a fitful effort to keep the launch on track.
The supercooled liquid hydrogen is extremely light and kept at minus-423 degrees Fahrenheit, which makes it a difficult propellant to control. It’s so cold that when the 130-foot-tall hydrogen tank in the main booster stage is fully fueled with 538,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen, it shrinks six inches, according to NASA.
A little before 5 a.m. Eastern time, NASA started filling the upper-stage tanks and, shortly thereafter, the main-stage tanks had been fully fueled without additional leaks.
“The team did fantastic job working through that problem and get us past it,” Jeremy Graeber, the Artemis I assistant launch director, said during NASA’s live broadcast.
In the meantime, NASA has been pressing ahead. The problems are likely to force NASA to move the launch time to later in the two-hour window. But the agency has not set a new launch time.
“We have a lot of work to get to that point,” Graeber said.
Later, NASA commentator Derrol Nail said NASA was investigating a crack on a part of the rocket that connects the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks, and serves as a connection point for the rocket’s solid rocket boosters.
“The intertank is built differently from the rest of the core stage,” according to NASA’s website. “It is bolted together, not welded, with ribs on the outside for strength.”
Engineers are also working a problem with one of the booster’s engines that is not at the correct temperature that would allow it to launch.
Vice President Harris is scheduled to visit NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and attend the Artemis I launch. She’s also scheduled to deliver a speech about the nation’s effort to return to the moon and tour the facilities where the hardware is being built for upcoming missions.
The Artemis program, which aims to send the first woman and person of color to the lunar surface, was an initiative started by the Trump administration. However, it has been embraced by the Biden White House as well, making it the first deep-space human spaceflight program to survive subsequent administrations since Apollo.
Earlier this month, Harris, who chairs the National Space Council, met with space leaders in the private sector. The next Space Council meeting is scheduled for Sept. 9.
The weather forecast for the beginning of the two-hour launch window, which opens at 8:33 a.m. Eastern time, looks good: an 80 percent chance of go. Later in the window, however, clouds and possible showers could move into the area near the Kennedy Space Center, lowering the probability of launch to 60 percent.
There are all sorts of other technical issues that could delay the mission, and since this is the first flight of the rocket, NASA is still learning how it operates, even after years of development. In the past, the space agency had trouble loading the vehicle with the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen that serve as its propellant. But it hopes that all of those issues have been resolved.
On Saturday, Mike Sarafin, NASA’s Artemis mission manager, was blunt in assessing the probability of launch, but he also said he was optimistic.
“We’re not going to promise that we’re going to get off on Monday,” he said. “We could have weather. We could have technical issues, or we could have a range and public safety hold and/or a combination of those. But we do feel good about our attempt on Monday in terms of our overall setup.” | 2022-08-29T11:51:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Artemis 1 to launch to the moon: Live updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/29/artemis-launch/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/29/artemis-launch/ |
Creator of online content Rayne Fisher-Quann at her home in Toronto on Aug. 18, 2022. (Hao Nguyen for The Washington Post)
Faced with explosive demand and few safeguards, creators of mental health content are defining their own ethics
Issey Moloney signed up for therapy through Britain’s National Health Service when she was just 12 years old. She was on a waiting list for four years.
In the meantime, social media helped her feel less alone, says the now 17-year-old who lives in London. She connected with people online as the pandemic isolated her from real-life friends. Eventually, she started making her own content. Now, she has 5.9 million TikTok followers — about 85 percent of them young women between the ages of 14 and 18 — and a collection of videos about friends, relationships and mental health.
Some of her clips are general, such as a short ode to the relationship between mentally ill people and pasta, while others address real diagnoses, such as “signs you might have BPD,” or borderline personality disorder. Sometimes, people ask her to address particular conditions. She tries to to research for at least a week, checking websites and message boards and interviewing by direct message people who have the particular diagnosis. She adds disclaimers: “Everyone deals with [panic attacks] differently and not all of them feel the same.”
The growing popularity of the subject means that creators of mental health content are filling a health-care gap. But social media apps are not designed to prioritize accurate, helpful information, critics say, just whatever content draws the biggest reaction. Young people could see their deepest struggles become fodder for advertisers and self-promoters. With no road map even for licensed professionals, mental health creators are defining their own ethics.
“I don’t want to give anyone the wrong advice,” Moloney says. “I’ve met some [followers] who’ve just started crying and saying ‘thank you’ and stuff like that. Even though it seems small, to someone else, it can have a really big impact.”
@isseypovs
♬ space song - favsoundds
As rates of depression and anxiety spiked during the pandemic and options for accessible care dwindled, creators shared an array of content including first-person accounts of life with mental illness and videos listing symptoms of bipolar disorder. In many cases, their follower counts ballooned.
For teens, navigating the mental health pitfalls of Instagram is part of everyday life
“It’s definitely strange seeing myself drawn into a commodifiable object for people to define ‘mental illness’ by, and to a certain extent for me to be eaten up by the algorithm that encourages people to go down this pipeline,” said Rayne Fisher-Quann, who openly talks about her struggles with mental illness with her 225,000 followers on TikTok. “There absolutely is a concerted effort to really capitalize on mental illness and particularly on young women’s mental illness. It’s a very marketable commodity right now.”
“Even if a therapist isn’t on social media, their clients are, and those clients are impacted by what they see on social media, and they’re bringing that directly into the session,” said Sadaf Siddiqi, an Instagram creator and licensed therapist.
Training is valuable. So is experience, creators say.
Many creators are not experts, and many say they’ve previously been failed by experts.
Fisher-Quann’s inbox is full of the types of questions you’d whisper to a best friend at midnight: Do these difficult feelings mean I have depression? Does having a queer sexual experience mean I’m gay?
If the question touches on something she’s experienced, she might respond. Other times, the messages go unanswered, said the 21-year-old writer and cultural critic. People occasionally message her to say they’re contemplating suicide, and she says she directs them toward professional resources. But it hurts to know they might not receive the real-world help they need, Fisher-Quann said.
“Because of that institutional failure, I don’t feel comfortable basically telling people to institutionalize themselves,” she said. “But I’m also very critical of capitalistic platforms where people present themselves as experts and offer advice that could ultimately be very myopic.”
Deciding who counts as an expert isn’t always straightforward. Klara Kernig, a creator with 159,000 followers on Instagram, describes herself in her biography as a “people-pleasing expert.” She earned that title through experience, she said.
After dropping out of her dream PhD program against her family’s wishes, she said, Kernig started learning about codependency, trauma and “people-pleasing” from books and the internet. Now she’s a lot healthier, she said, and makes her own mental health content, including “5 things we think are nice that are people-pleasing behaviors.”
“I don’t want to discredit therapists, but I also want to say there are other ways of educating people and of having that information,” she said. “Maybe I’ll even put something out there that’s wrong, and then I hope that my community and also the therapists there point that out to me in a loving way.”
“It’s funny because people will say, ‘You’re being passive-aggressive,’ ” Kanevsky said. “And I’m like, ‘No, I’m being aggressive-aggressive.’ If you posted nonsense, I’m going to tell you.”
Creators control content but not its interpretation
There’s an important difference between providing therapeutic advice and making relatable content, creators maintain. But those lines can blur quickly.
The posts lead to good conversations and deeper insights, Siddiqi said. But she worries about where the algorithm sends people afterward and whether audiences get enough time to reflect. It’s easy for people without real-life support to misinterpret mental health content or unfairly label themselves or others, she said.
The idea of people piecing together their own mental health journeys on a monetized, algorithm-influenced app can feel scary, but critics need to pump the brakes, said Dusty Chipura, who makes TikTok videos about attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and mental health. She isn’t too worried about self-diagnosis, because totally healthy people aren’t generally the ones scrolling for information about symptoms and treatments, she said. Furthermore, health-care professionals habitually discount people’s concerns, she said, so, many people with real disorders never get formal diagnoses.
“You don’t need a diagnosis of ADHD to benefit from the tips and tricks and strategies,” Chipura said.
Audiences know to consider the context and to not accept as truth every word uttered by a creator, said Nedra Glover Tawwab, a licensed therapist and Instagram creator with 1.5 million followers. As with any marketplace, the onus is on consumers to decide whether they’re buying what a particular creator is selling, she said.
Who’s responsible for evaluating mental health content?
In the world of online mental health guidance, there’s little accountability for platforms or creators if something goes wrong.
Instagram in June launched a pilot called the Well-being Creator Collective, which it says provides funding and education to about 50 U.S. creators to help them produce “responsible” content on emotional well-being and self-image. The program is guided by a committee of outside experts, the company says.
TikTok said it is “committed to fostering a supportive environment for people who choose to share their personal wellness journeys while also removing medical misinformation and other violations of our policies,” according to a spokeswoman.
“We encourage individuals to seek professional medical advice if they are in need of support,” she said in a statement.
“Young people need evidence-based sources of information outside the internet, from parents and schools,” Miller said.
Often, those resources are unavailable. So it’s up to creators to decide what mental health advice they put stock in, Fisher-Quann said. For her, condescending health-care providers and the warped incentives of social media platforms haven’t made that easy. But she thinks she can get better — and that her followers can, too.
“It all has to come from a place of self-awareness and desire to get better. Communities can be extremely helpful for that, but they can also be extremely harmful for that,” she said.
Linda Chong in San Francisco contributed to this report. | 2022-08-29T11:51:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mental-health content creators are defining their own ethics - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/29/mental-health-tiktok-instagram/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/29/mental-health-tiktok-instagram/ |
Monday briefing: NASA’s new moon rocket ready to launch; strikes near Ukraine nuclear plant; Brian Robinson Jr. shot; and more
NASA’s moon rocket is set to launch for the first time today.
The background: After years of delays, the Space Launch System is ready for takeoff. It’s the first step in NASA’s multibillion-dollar quest to return astronauts to the moon.
The mission: A test flight is set to send the Orion crew capsule around the moon without astronauts on board. It should reach the moon in a week and spend a total of 42 days in space.
The launch is scheduled for this morning, although storms and a fuel leak could delay it.
The National Archives has dealt with threats since the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search.
Why? The agency, which looks after government records, has been in a standoff with former president Donald Trump over classified documents taken when he left office.
The wave of threatening messages hit after the search of Trump’s Florida home this month, according to Post reporting.
What else to know: A judge could appoint an official this week to review the recently seized material.
More Russian strikes were reported around Europe’s biggest nuclear plant.
What happened? Ten people were injured yesterday in shelling near the Zaporizhzhia plant in southeastern Ukraine, officials said.
What’s next: Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency are headed to the plant as concern over a potential nuclear catastrophe grows.
An NFL running back was shot twice yesterday.
What we know: The injuries to Brian Robinson Jr., a rookie on the Washington Commanders, aren’t considered life-threatening, police said. He’s in stable condition.
The investigation: Officers said they’re looking at the shooting in D.C. as a possible attempted robbery or carjacking. They recovered a firearm near the scene.
Death Valley recorded the most extreme U.S. heat of the past decade.
How we know this: A new analysis of more than a decade of data shows the highest and lowest temperatures recorded at reliable weather stations in the U.S. each day.
The records: California’s Death Valley twice suffered a sweltering 130 degrees, in 2020 and again in 2021. The record low was minus-56 degrees in Cotton, Minn., in 2019.
A baseball card sold for a record $12.6 million.
What’s the card? It’s a mint-condition 1952 Topps featuring Hall of Fame slugger Mickey Mantle, who spent his 18-year career with the New York Yankees.
What we know: The rare card sold at auction yesterday, bringing a tidy profit for the man who bought it in 1991 for $50,000. The new owner hasn’t been revealed.
Drought keeps exposing hidden history.
Like what? Sunken Nazi ships were seen poking out from a dried-up river in Serbia. Buddhist statues, hundreds of years old, reappeared in China. Ancient dinosaur footprints showed up in Texas.
Why is this happening? Record-breaking drought — driven by climate change — has parched waterways around the world, briefly revealing what’s usually submerged.
And now … if you’re taking a flight soon: Here are the rules of acting like a decent human. And, if you’re weighing buying an electric vehicle: They soon could charge faster than your iPhone. | 2022-08-29T11:51:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The 7 things you need to know for Monday, August 29 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/08/29/what-to-know-for-august-29/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2022/08/29/what-to-know-for-august-29/ |
‘Strong over skinny’: Women powerlifters ditch stigma around bulking up
Sasha Stein’s exercise journey started a way many women can relate to: with an underused gym membership and a weight-loss goal. Now, the only number she focuses on is the amount she can powerlift.
Now more than ever, women are hitting the gym and heading straight to the weight racks. No longer fazed by the stigma that women can get too bulky from lifting weights, women powerlifters see the sport as a physical and mental salve. Those who have fallen in love with powerlifting — a slower version of weightlifting, often with heavier weights — say they feel stronger and more poised, regardless of their size.
Stein, 24, started exercising at Gainesville Health & Fitness in Florida, which was where her friend Lauren Wall, an online personal trainer, introduced her to the world of powerlifting. Wall loved to lift and explained to Stein how powerlifting could change her life, and how she’d lose fat and gain muscle through the activity. But she wouldn’t have to worry about having more muscle than desired, Wall reassured her, because bulking up happens intentionally. And she wouldn’t be alone: The support of a growing legion of powerlifting women would transform her mentally, too.
Your brain on barbells: Could strength training help improve your mood?
Wall showed Stein the proper form for the three fundamental powerlifts: squatting with a weight bar pressed behind the shoulders; bench-pressing the bar up from the chest while lying down; and dead-lifting from a sumo squat to pick up and hold the weight bar in front of the hips.
“That’s where I really started implementing more bodybuilding and using the gym as a kind of therapy,” said Stein, who started lifting around 45 to 65 pounds and is now at 155 to 250. She went “from regular going to the gym to: ‘Okay, I’m setting up a routine. I’m prioritizing my schedule to get it in.’ And it’s carried me ever since.”
Powerlifting is characterized by straight barbells, which are long rods that hold large, circular plates on each end. As opposed to the quick, jerky movements that Olympic weightlifters must perform to get their straight barbells and weights overhead, powerlifters typically have heavier weights that they lift slowly behind their back, above their chest or at hip level, depending on the type of lift.
The more Stein practiced the exercises Wall taught her, the more she began to see the gym as more than a place for weight loss and muscle gain. She said she now devotes four to five days each week to exercising, because it’s become her mood booster and her way to blow off steam after a tough day.
Wall, 24, got into powerlifting as a way to stay fit after undergoing knee surgeries from playing college basketball. Her clients have asked to try it for themselves after watching others squat and dead-lift at power racks, the cages used for powerlifting.
“It’s the best part of my day, every single day,” Wall said. “Going to different cities and states, … going to find a powerlifting gym and seeing all the other people who love to do it day in and day out, it’s the basis of everything that I do, and it’s so much fun. I couldn’t see myself living without it.”
Fitness enthusiasts practice progressive overload, gradually increasing the weight, repetitions or frequency of an exercise. As Stein improved in powerlifting, she said, she began taking a progressive-overload approach to life: If she pushed herself a little each day, she knew she would see results.
“I want to look muscular. I choose to look this way,” said Angelina Spizzieri, a 19-year-old powerlifter. “A huge misconception of females in strength sports is, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m going to look manly.’ You’re only going to look manly if you train to look that way. I trained to look a little bit more buff, because I prefer that. But I honestly never struggled with the pushback, because I was always so confident.”
Powerlifting is a male-dominated sport. This YouTuber is trying to change that.
Heidi Dehnel, 41, has seen women take up more spots in the powerlifting classes offered at Core Strength & Performance in Huntsville, Ala., the gym she co-owns with her husband. The small, private fitness center, which offers only strength-training and powerlifting classes, has a membership that’s about 80 percent women, with powerlifters as young as 23 and as old as 72, she said.
“It’s a lot more … women who have explored other avenues of training who are now seeing other women like them trying to powerlift and realizing that there is a possibility for that,” Dehnel said.
Some of the women whom Dehnel trains compete in events such as those hosted by the United States Powerlifting Association, the largest powerlifting federation. But many also lift for leisure and view powerlifting meets as a bucket-list item.
“If you would’ve asked somebody 10, 15 years ago what powerlifting was, you would think of huge, 300-pound-plus meatheads screaming in the gym, heavy metal all the time,” said Dehnel, who hosts the podcast “The Future Is Female Powerlifting.” “It’s definitely not what my gym is like. We’re much more inviting than the average old-school powerlifting gym.”
Seeing women who looked like her represented in the sport also encouraged Dehnel to join the fold. At the first meet she attended in 2011, she was inspired by Susan Salazar, a Navy veteran who’s Latina, like Dehnel. Latina and Black women are often marketed shapewear and fed the ideal of having a thin waist and a big butt, features that are often sexualized, Dehnel said, but powerlifting helped her see her body for what it could do rather than what it looked like.
Lanatria Ellis, 34, said powerlifting helped her overcome lifelong struggles with body dysmorphia, a common condition in which people agonize over their body’s real or perceived flaws. Ellis, who lives in Garland, N.C., said she used to obsess over her appearance, despite being petite.
“When I started weightlifting, that was the first time in my whole life I stopped thinking about the number on the scale, and I stopped thinking about the size of the clothes I was wearing,” she said. As a powerlifter, she is more focused, despite having attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, she said, and she has generally felt less anxious and more energetic.
Powerlifting is helping her beat her addiction: ‘I had to dig the fire and passion out.’
Sam Ong, 23, also felt self-conscious about her body after she stopped swimming and doing CrossFit. But with the help of her partner and powerlifting coach, the Union City, Calif., resident started to feel more in tune with her body and gain a Kardashian-like confidence as a powerlifter. She’s trying to increase her squat and dead-lift records from 315 to 400 pounds and her bench-press personal best of 167 pounds up to 200.
Her support system consists of those she has met in person, such as her partner’s clients, and online within the broader network of powerlifting women. Together, they’ve motivated her to crush her personal records and self-doubts.
“I feel like we’re all such a close-knit community,” Ong said. “Even if you have no clue who someone is, a stranger is totally willing to celebrate a PR with you, and it’s just so nice to see that … powerlifters come in all shapes and sizes.”
She made an Instagram account, @sam_dont_lift, to keep track of her progress, then other women powerlifters discovered her page and peppered her comments with words of encouragement. Ong said she has become close with her online fans, supporting and socializing with them regularly. She’s grateful to her powerlifting friends for helping her adopt a “strong over skinny” mind-set.
“No matter what I look like, I know that my body is healthy,” Ong said. “And if this is what my body looks like healthy, I am perfectly fine with that.” | 2022-08-29T12:29:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Women powerlifters are ditching the stigma around bulking up - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/29/powerlifting-women/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/29/powerlifting-women/ |
A beginner’s guide to fantasy football
Christian McCaffrey remains one of the most coveted players in fantasy football drafts. (Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images)
So you want to try your hand at fantasy football, eh? Well, as you’ve probably figured out, the first step is to draft a team. Whom to draft and when, however, takes a little more figuring out, and that’s where this oh-so-helpful primer comes in.
To get you going, we’ll play things relatively conservatively — the truly galaxy-brain strategies are best explored once you’ve joined the ranks of fantasy addicts — and rely on the most fundamental of draft-day concepts: average draft position.
More commonly referred to as ADP, it funnels the results of thousands of individual drafts into actionable intel. Essentially, you get a crowdsourced set of rankings that also have some predictive properties, given that ADP tends to inform the choices of those drafting with you as well.
For this exercise, we’ll assume a 12-team league and go with the default lineups used by behemoth fantasy sites ESPN and Yahoo: one quarterback, two running backs, two wide receivers, one tight end and one flex (RB/WR/TE), one defense/special teams and one kicker. We’ll use half-PPR (points per reception) scoring, a popular option that splits the difference nicely between full- and non-PPR formats, and we’ll draw our ADP from the aggregated rankings at Fantasy Pros.
Let’s start with a look at how many players ADP tells us you can reasonably expect to be drafted at each position from the first through 10th rounds. That’s enough to fill out your lineup (minus the defense/special teams and kicker positions, which really should wait for the later rounds) and add a few key backups.
RB: 7, 6, 4, 5, 3, 2, 4, 5, 3, 5
WR: 5, 3, 5, 5, 5, 8, 4, 3, 5, 3
QB: 0, 1, 2, 0, 3, 1, 3, 2, 2, 1
TE: 0, 2, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 2, 0, 2
Running backs fly off the shelves in the first two rounds, and then the eagerness for them cools. To avoid being left shorthanded, you’ll probably want to take at least one in the first two rounds.
Wide receivers take center stage in Rounds 3 through 6. This makes sense, because after the first 12 or so backs go off the board, running backs are historically outscored by wide receivers in what’s known as the “dead zone.”
In general, the fact that you need multiple running backs and wide receivers in most lineup structures means they start getting snapped up early and often.
By contrast, the “onesie” positions of quarterback and tight end don’t generally carry the same need to stockpile depth. As a consequence, they tend to be meted out sparingly over the course of drafts. In other words, if you want a quarterback or tight end and they start to get drafted just ahead of you, there’s no need to panic. You can — and probably should — wait a bit, and you’ll probably still come away with a top-12 option.
Making a pick
“This is all well and good,” you say, “but how does this help me figure out exactly who to draft?”
Well, that’s where ADP comes back into the picture.
Let’s say that you have the eighth overall pick and, having seen that there’s no great rush to pick a quarterback or tight end, you decide you want a running back or wide receiver. Going back to Fantasy Pros, their ADP suggests that the likes of RBs Jonathan Taylor, Austin Ekeler, Christian McCaffrey and Derrick Henry, plus WRs Cooper Kupp and Justin Jefferson, will be gone by the time you pick. However, if any one of them is still available, his ADP tells you that lots of folks would jump at the chance to snap him up.
It’s more likely that your crowd-vetted running back choices could come down to some combination of Dalvin Cook, Najee Harris and Joe Mixon. At wide receiver, Ja’Marr Chase has an ADP of 9, so he has a great chance of remaining on the board at 8.
This is where your own preferences and analyses come in. If you’re convinced that huge things are in the offing for Chase, who sat out the 2020 college football season before immediately lighting up the NFL as a rookie, maybe he’s the call there. If so, then you might be feeling some urgency to grab a running back in the second round, particularly because you know the popularity of that position tends to drop off sharply in the third.
A glance at ADP tells you that your likely running back options in the second include D’Andre Swift, Nick Chubb, Aaron Jones and Alvin Kamara. Does that sound good? If not, then try to game out what happens if you go with a running back in the first. According to their ADP, WRs Stefon Diggs and Davante Adams might not make it to you in the second, but it’s not out of the question. Even if they’re gone, at least one wide receiver from among CeeDee Lamb, Deebo Samuel and Tyreek Hill should be there. In addition, the consensus top tight end, Travis Kelce, might be yours for the plucking. A lot of fantasy analysts would also endorse an RB-RB start, and our overview tells you that if you go that route, there should be plenty of well-liked wide receiver options in the following rounds.
Okay, we delved into the first couple of rounds, but you should also use ADP to see who tends to be available in later rounds. For example, many analysts see a major drop-off after the first five tight ends (Kelce, Mark Andrews, Kyle Pitts, George Kittle and Darren Waller) and make a priority of getting one of them, which usually means using a pick in the first four rounds or so. However, if you like what you see in some of the lower-ranked options (e.g., Dallas Goedert, Zach Ertz and/or Dawson Knox), you might go into a draft prepared to use your early picks at other positions.
Hmmm, decisions, decisions. But that’s the fun of a draft, right? You get to play general manager, and see if your take on who’s available and when translates into a dominant squad.
Of further note
Remember that every draft is different, and picks can and will be made that veer sharply from ADP. Heck, maybe you’ll make one of those picks, particularly if you pay heed to my running back rankings, where I have Saquon Barkley fourth at his position (ADP: 13th at RB).
If and when unorthodox picks are made ahead of you, it gives you a chance to get great value on a player who fell to your spot, at least as suggested by his ADP. As such, regardless of the draft plan you began with, you should be prepared to pivot if unexpectedly fruitful opportunities arise. Maybe you wanted to start RB-RB, but Jefferson and Chase fell to your first two spots. Rather than look a gift horse in the mouth, go ahead and grab ’em, and use ADP to help you find a few solid running back prospects as things move along.
Not all ADPs are created equal, by the way, and the aggregated ranks at Fantasy Pros are just one option. You might choose instead to take guidance from the decisions made by drafters that we know have real money at stake, such as at the Underdog and FFPC platforms. Just be sure to bear in mind that those platforms have settings (e.g., best-ball, three-WR lineups, full PPR, etc.) informing their ADP that may not be the same as the ones your league employs.
Oh, and this is important: only draft players you feel good about. Don’t take someone you don’t want just because some “expert” says you should, or because he fell and now represents an ADP value. If, for whatever reason, you have a bad feeling about a player, trust your gut and pick someone else.
Once you have your squad and the season begins, you’ll want to use the waiver wire to replace drafted players who are underperforming with free agents who have either gotten off to hot starts or show signs of blossoming.
There’s more, so much more, to learn about fantasy football, but with any luck this exercise has left you ready to get started on good footing.
Now go forth and draft! | 2022-08-29T13:12:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A beginner’s guide to fantasy football - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/fantasy-football-guide/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/fantasy-football-guide/ |
MacKenzie Gore, pictured in June pitching for the Padres, remains on the injured list. (Morry Gash/AP)
When Cade Cavalli climbed the Nationals Park mound for the first time Friday, another piece of what the Washington Nationals hope will be their rotation of the future made a highly anticipated debut. Watching from the dugout were two more pitchers — Josiah Gray and MacKenzie Gore — the Nationals believe will join Cavalli in that group.
Gore has been on the 15-day injured list with left elbow inflammation since July 26 — a week before the San Diego Padres sent him to the Nationals in the Juan Soto trade. A day after Cavalli’s first start, Gore was at Nationals Park doing something he hadn’t done since joining the team — throwing off a mound during a bullpen session.
Gore has yet to make his Nationals debut but could find himself in the rotation before the end of the season if he continues to progress. He said everything felt great Saturday.
“We’re taking it day by day right now and trying not to get ahead of ourselves, so I’m not sure,” he said. “It’ll be some time, but definitely on the right track.”
The 23-year-old southpaw threw about 25 pitches with members of the Nationals’ staff watching, including Manager Dave Martinez. The next step will be to throw an extended bullpen session of 35 to 40 pitches.
Seeing Gore, like Cavalli, pitch in a game would be a welcome sign for the Nationals. As the No. 3 selection in the 2017 draft who quickly moved through the Padres’ farm system, Gore is accustomed to high expectations. And early on in his big league career, he more than lived up to the billing.
He made his major league debut in April and had a 1.50 ERA in his first nine appearances, eight of them starts. Then he struggled, posting an 11.05 ERA over seven trips to the mound, and his season mark ballooned to 4.50 before the injury. All of that is a reminder — just like Gray’s body of work this season and fellow 24-year-0ld Cavalli’s debut in a loss to Cincinnati — that it takes time for young pitchers to become the best version of themselves.
Cavalli has the next month to work through some kinks at the major league level. As an innings limit looms, Gray is almost finished with his first full year and has been making adjustments on the fly. Gore will, too, once he returns.
“We all have some work to do, a lot of work to do,” Gore said Saturday. “We just got to take advantage of these last 35 games or so to get better. If we can continue to take it day by day and get better, then we can make a jump next year.”
The Nationals built their contenders of the 2010s around the starting rotation. General Manager Mike Rizzo has shown his commitment to doing so through the draft and with monster signings such as Patrick Corbin’s free agent contract (six years, $140 million) and Stephen Strasburg’s deal (seven years, $245 million) after he was named 2019 World Series MVP — though neither move looks good in hindsight.
When Washington started its rebuild last season, Rizzo centered his trade of ace Max Scherzer and star shortstop Trea Turner to the Los Angeles Dodgers around catcher Keibert Ruiz and Gray. Gore came over in this summer’s blockbuster, as did 18-year-old fireballer Jarlin Susana, who is a ways away at Class A Fredericksburg.
One of the tough parts about the trade for Gore was his inability to contribute immediately. Washington was cautious with his rehab, striving to make sure he is fully himself when he returns. The organization has been careful with Gray and Cavalli, too, limiting their innings at times.
Gore said he put his injury in perspective by reminding himself that there are many worse than what he’s experiencing now. He used the extra time to get to know some of his teammates better, even though he already knew Gray and former Padres teammates CJ Abrams and Luke Voit.
Martinez knows Gore is eager to get out there. When Gore finally makes his Nationals debut, he knows expectations will be high as he and his fellow young pitchers mature.
“Yeah, there’s some talent,” he said of the young core. “Talent does not necessarily mean anything. We all have to play well and do what we need to do to go out there and give us a chance to win every day. But there’s some talented guys, which is a spark.” | 2022-08-29T13:12:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | MacKenzie Gore is eager to make Washington Nationals debut - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/mackenzie-gore-washington-nationals-injury/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/mackenzie-gore-washington-nationals-injury/ |
MIAMI, FLORIDA - AUGUST 15: A sign announcing monkeypox vaccination is setup in Tropical Park by Miami-Dade County and Nomi Health on August 15, 2022 in Miami, Florida. Miami-Dade continues to urge people to vaccinate as they work to get more vaccines now that the county has over 400 cases, which is the most in the state. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images North America (Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images North America)
Symptoms of monkeypox, a virus from the smallpox family, include fever, headaches, chills, a sore throat and a rash that can evolve into painful lesions inside the mouth and other sensitive areas. Although so far there have been no US fatalities, the virus can last for two to four weeks and is said to cause excruciating pain. The number of infections is rising, now standing at more than 17,000 nationwide. Even as early hot spots New York City and Los Angeles County see infection rates fall, new cases continue to increase across much of the rest of the US.
If the Covid-19 pandemic has shown anything, it’s that a public-health emergency of this kind requires two things: efficient distribution of resources to mitigate the outbreak, and clear communication with the public about the risks involved. When it comes to monkeypox, Biden’s administration fell short on both counts.
Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration dawdled for nearly two months before inspecting the same Danish company’s new pharmaceutical plant where an additional 1.1 million doses were stored awaiting distribution. Its inspectors didn’t arrive until July, by which time US cases had soared. It didn’t help matters that the US had previously allowed 20 million doses in its own national stockpile to expire, leaving just 2,400 available at the start of the outbreak.
• Moderna, Pfizer Covid Suit Is Just a Sideshow for mRNA: Lisa Jarvis
• Scientists Love Warnings. Here’s One for Them: Faye Flam | 2022-08-29T13:21:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden’s Monkeypox Missteps - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/bidens-monkeypox-missteps/2022/08/29/4dfa2478-279b-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/bidens-monkeypox-missteps/2022/08/29/4dfa2478-279b-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html |
A: There is an incredible project (sponsored by e-commerce company MercadoLibre) we helped start in the Atlantic forest of Brazil. It’s reforesting corridors for wildlife, connecting patches of forest, allowing endangered species to go from one part to the other, which will help some of these endangered species rebound. This is an area that used to be fully covered forest and starting in the ‘70s it was heavily deforested by agriculture. Now there’s an intention by many local people and international players as well to help reforest that area, because it’s a critical ecosystem that has enormous biodiversity and plays a critical climate role. Over a million trees have been planted and the project will continue to expand. | 2022-08-29T13:21:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pachama CEO talks holding carbon emitters accountable - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/pachama-ceo-talks-holding-carbon-emitters-accountable/2022/08/29/b23ecc20-2793-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/pachama-ceo-talks-holding-carbon-emitters-accountable/2022/08/29/b23ecc20-2793-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html |
This body-camera image released by the Salt Lake City Police Department on Aug. 26 shows officers trying to subdue Nykon Brandon on Aug. 14. (Salt Lake City Police Department/AP) (AP)
Brandon struggled with multiple officers for roughly five minutes until his labored breathing appeared to stop, according to video of the Aug. 14 incident. An officer tapped his shoulder and asked: “Can you hear me?” video shows.
“Is he alive?” another officer can be heard asking in the body-camera footage.
The Salt Lake City Police Department on Friday released body-camera footage of the fatal Aug. 14 incident, announcing that its internal affairs division and an outside agency, which it did not name, are investigating. The department did not immediately respond to questions from The Post early Monday.
A department spokesperson told the Associated Press the situation “rapidly unfolded.”
“It was a chaotic situation and our officers were required to make very fast decisions to get a situation under control that was very tense,” the spokesperson added.
Brandon appears to have been unarmed. The videos released by the department do not show Brandon holding a weapon. The department mentioned no weapon being recovered at the scene. However, officials did note that early in the encounter, Brandon appeared to grab at an officer’s belt. Footage shows him placing his hand near the officer’s gun before another took him to the ground.
A 911 caller noted that Brandon appeared to be a danger to himself and possibly others. The caller requested that “mental health resources” respond.
“We are committed to carefully reviewing the investigative findings in this case,” Salt Lake City Police Chief Mike Brown said in a statement. “As a forward-thinking department, we will use those findings to evaluate our policies, training, and procedures to continue ensuring we are making our city safer.”
Brandon’s death comes as police departments across the country grapple with how to confront people experiencing possible mental health crises. While The Washington Post does not track the number of non-shooting deaths by police nationwide, 21 percent of the more than 7,680 fatal police shootings since 2015 involved a person with mental illness, according to Post tracking.
In recent years, departments have implemented de-escalation policies and training to reduce instances in which police resort to using physical or deadly force. Such a policy was mandated in August 2020 by Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall (D). It requires officers to use de-escalation techniques like establishing rapport with a person and engaging in techniques that result in “voluntary compliance.”
About two years after those reforms, police were called to respond to the Fisher Brewing Company where a man wearing only underwear tried to steal beer before running into the street, the caller said. They added that the man was “definitely a danger to himself” and that he “more or less” attacked someone at the brewery’s entrance.
Minutes later, a police officer found a man later identified as Brandon running across the street, the department said. The officer said “stop,” approached Brandon and immediately tried to grab him, the officer’s body-camera footage shows.
Brandon then appeared to grab at the officer’s belt and gun, according to body-camera footage from another officer who arrived at the scene seconds later. That officer approached and pushed Brandon to the ground. Both officers tried to subdue the man.
“I’m going to Tase you,” one of the officers says, according to the footage. “You want to get Tased?”
After a third officer arrived and joined the effort to restrain Brandon, the man appeared to put his hand on an officer’s holstered gun, prompting one to announce, “He’s got a hand on your gun.” More officers arrived as the struggle continued, and the officers eventually forced Brandon’s hands behind his back and handcuffed him.
About four minutes into the encounter, four officers were holding Brandon facedown on the ground as he moaned and breathed heavily, according to the footage. Close to five minutes into the encounter, an officer said, “We can sit you up if you stop.”
It’s unclear if Brandon had drugs in his system. The city’s medical examiner has not publicly shared the results of his autopsy, and the office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post early Monday.
“Stealing a beer does not equate to the death penalty,” Lex Scott, the founder of Black Lives Matter-Utah, told the Associated Press. “I don’t care if this man robbed 10 banks in one day. He didn’t deserve to die. He deserved to make it to court.” | 2022-08-29T13:21:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man died after Salt Lake City police pinned him in struggle, video shows - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/29/nykon-brandon-utah-police-death/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/29/nykon-brandon-utah-police-death/ |
Post Politics Now Judge’s openness to special master for Mar-a-Lago documents raises new questions in criminal probe
This just in: White House plans conference next month on hunger and health
Noted: Mastriano holds fast to far-right views in Pa. gubernatorial bid
Noted: Bacterial infection takes Beto O’Rourke off Texas campaign trail
Former president Donald Trump leaves Trump Tower, Aug. 10, 2022, in New York, on his way to the New York attorney general’s office for a deposition in a civil investigation. (Julia Nikhinson/AP)
Today, a federal judge appointed by Donald Trump is signaling that she is prepared to appoint a special master to review materials seized from Mar-a-Lago by federal agents, raising fresh questions and injecting new uncertainties in the criminal investigation of the former president. U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon has also given federal officials until Tuesday to provide the court with a more detailed list of items the FBI removed from Trump’s Florida estate on Aug. 8.
President Biden returns to the White House on Monday ahead of a trip Tuesday to Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where the president will discuss his efforts to reduce gun violence. Biden’s native state looms large in the November midterms with competitive House races, a gubernatorial contest and a Senate race in which recent polling gives Democrats hope of winning a GOP Senate seat, with Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D) leading celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz (R).
9:55 a.m. Eastern. Biden returns to the White House.
1:30 p.m. Eastern. White House briefing by press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Watch live here.
Got a question about politics? Submit it here. After 3 p.m. weekdays, return to this space, and we’ll address what’s on the mind of readers.
By Amy Wang and Christian Davenport
News that NASA had scrubbed the launch of its Artemis I rocket because of engine problems Monday came after Vice President Harris and husband Douglas Emhoff had traveled to Florida to watch the launch.
Harris was also scheduled to tour Artemis II and Artemis III mission hardware at Kennedy Space Center, then give remarks at noon regarding the Artemis I launch. It is unclear what her plans are now that the launch has been canceled.
NASA’s development of the Space Launch System has been controversial. Several inspector general reports have dinged the project for being over budget and criticized NASA for paying performance bonuses to the prime contractor, Boeing, even though the project is years behind schedule.
But despite those setbacks, Congress has continued to fund the program, which has cost $23 billion and counting.
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R) says that there will be “riots in the streets” if former president Donald Trump is prosecuted for mishandling classified documents.
The comments by Graham, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and former Air Force lawyer, drew criticism from some fellow Republicans, who described the remarks as irresponsible coming from a member of Congress.
In an interview on Fox News’s “Sunday Night in America,” Graham said, “If they tried to prosecute President Trump for mishandling classified information after Hillary Clinton set up a server in her basement, there literally will be riots in the street. I worry about the country.”
Graham, once one of the fiercest critics of Trump in 2016, also said, “Most Republicans, including me, believes when it comes to Trump, there is no law. It’s all about getting him.”
Richard N. Haass, a former diplomat who served in the George W. Bush administration, wrote on Twitter that Graham’s prediction “that violence may follow any prosecution of the former Potus may not qualify legally as incitement but it is irresponsible all the same as it will be seen by some as a call for violence. Public officials are obligated to call for the rule of law.”
After Graham’s appearance, Trump posted the video clip on his Truth Social website.
Kevin Bishop, a spokesman for the senator, said Monday that Graham stands by his prediction.
A pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Trump insisted the election was rigged. The attack to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral college win resulted in five dead and injuries to 140 members of law enforcement.
The White House will hold the first conference in more than 50 years focused on hunger, nutrition and health.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement Monday that the conference will be held Sept. 28.
“Millions of Americans are afflicted with food insecurity and diet-related diseases — including heart disease, obesity, and type 2 diabetes — which are some of the leading causes of death and disability in the U.S.,” Jean-Pierre said. “Lack of access to healthy and affordable foods is one of many factors impacting hunger and diet-related diseases. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these challenges further.”
Attending the conference will be government leaders, academics, activists and other Americans focused on the goal of ending hunger and reducing diet-related diseases in the United States by 2030.
The event will give the Biden administration a chance to highlight the new climate, health-care and deficit-reducing law that passed Congress with only Democratic votes.
Since winning the Republican gubernatorial primary in May with 44 percent of the vote — after snagging a last-minute endorsement from former president Donald Trump and surviving a late scramble to consolidate the vote against him — Doug Mastriano has eschewed the typical path of reorienting his campaign toward the middle.
Instead, he has held fast to the same issues that drove his rise after attending the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, and openly embracing Christian nationalism.
But many Republicans say Mastriano’s focus on base voters has made it hard for him to raise money and broaden his appeal, hurting the party’s chances in November. Mastriano’s latest campaign finance report showed less than $400,000 as of June, and the campaign hasn’t bought any airtime on local TV. He grants interviews only to friendly outlets such as right-wing talk radio and the podcast hosted by former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon. The campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic candidate for Texas governor, postponed campaign events in his tour across the state after he was diagnosed with a bacterial infection, he said Sunday.
Our colleague Bryan Pietsch reports that O’Rourke said on Twitter: “After feeling ill on Friday, I went to Methodist Hospital in San Antonio where I was diagnosed with a bacterial infection.”
O’Rourke said he received IV antibiotics and would be resting at home in El Paso “in accordance with the doctors’ recommendations.”
He wrote, “I am sorry to have had to postpone events because of this, but promise to be back on the road with you as soon as I am able.”
O’Rourke is running against Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in the November election. He ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in 2018, finishing within a few percentage points of incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz (R). That race propelled O’Rourke to the national political stage and an unsuccessful campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. He previously represented El Paso in the U.S. House.
Read Bryan’s full story here. | 2022-08-29T13:22:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Judge’s openness to special master for Mar-a-Lago documents raises new questions in criminal probe - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/29/special-master-trump-biden-pennsylvania/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/29/special-master-trump-biden-pennsylvania/ |
FILE - Plain clothes security personnel stand on the road as people protest at the entrance to a branch of China’s central bank in Zhengzhou, Henan province on July 10, 2022. Provincial authorities announced on Monday, Aug. 29, 2022, the arrests of 234 people allegedly involved in a scam to bilk people out of their savings with the false promise of high interest rates. The scandal drew national attention after investors seeking information about their money were prevented from reaching Zhengzhou. (AP Photo/File) (Uncredited/Yang)
Artemis I launch scrubbed while Harris is in Florida | 2022-08-29T13:22:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | China announces 234 arrests in provincial banking scam - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/china-announces-234-arrests-in-provincial-banking-scam/2022/08/29/04ca0534-279b-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/china-announces-234-arrests-in-provincial-banking-scam/2022/08/29/04ca0534-279b-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html |
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) appears on “Sunday Night in America.” (Fox News)
It is generally understood that any indictment of former president Donald Trump would be rejected out-of-hand as corrupt by many of his most fervent supporters. There are further widespread worries that some of those supporters might engage in acts of violence in response.
This is not idle speculation. The revelation that Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort had been the target of an FBI search earlier this month led to a broad backlash against the bureau, with a spike in threats against agents and at least one attempt at violence. The political right’s view of the search began with it being an unwarranted overreach, a position that has been left largely unmodified as more details emerge.
There’s an obvious parallel here: Trump and his allies repeatedly insisted that the 2020 election was tainted and, on Jan. 6, 2021, his supporters violently pushed past law enforcement and overran the Capitol.
That this risk exists is unquestionably a complicating factor for the Justice Department as it picks its way forward in its investigation into Trump. Attorney General Merrick Garland reportedly spent weeks considering the Mar-a-Lago search before ultimately approving it, a consideration that certainly included the anticipated response.
But there is an important difference between understanding the existing threat and leveraging it.
In an interview on Fox News Sunday evening, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) rationalized why Trump supporters would be furious at an indictment.
“There’s a double standard when it comes to Trump,” Graham told host Trey Gowdy. He articulated this “double standard” in familiar ways, including disparaging the investigation into Russian interference. “I’ll say this," Graham continued, referring to Gowdy’s former role leading the House investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of an email server while secretary of state as part of the probe of the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, "if there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information after the Clinton debacle, which you presided over and did ... a good job, there’ll be riots in the streets.”
“If they try to prosecute President Trump for mishandling classified information after Hillary Clinton set up a server in her basement,” Graham said, "there literally will be riots in the street. I worry about our country.”
Gowdy agreed.
So did Trump. Soon after the segment aired, Trump shared a clip of it on Truth Social, without comment.
Now the question becomes: why? Why did Graham reiterate his point about “riots” twice? And why did Trump decide to share it with his followers on the social-media platform he runs?
Graham was stating that he understood the aftermath of an indictment would be likely violence — which, again, we knew. So we arrive in a grayer area, differentiating between the warning of action and the rationalization of it. Graham’s angry, pointed declaration of what would come was predicated on the idea that riots would in some way be justified, that a universe of Trump supporters who have come to understand investigations as unwarranted would understandably engage in violence.
Trump, eager to throw any roadblock in front of a criminal probe, readily amplified that suggestion. Where Graham was rationalizing possible violence, Trump appeared to be threatening it. And even recent history suggests that when Trump nods at violence or unrest, some part of his base takes him very seriously.
One effect of Graham’s comments on Sunday night is to give any acts of violence or outrage moral cover. We’ve seen this before. One response to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was that the left had engaged in a spate of violence the prior summer, compared to which the Capitol riot paled. It was an effort to minimize the violence itself. But the moral predicate for the riot — this false idea that the election was tainted — was well-established on the right. The response was seen as excessive, but understandable. Even as he appeared to break with Trump in the hours after the attack, Graham himself repeated false claims about the election results, as though there were valid questions about Biden’s win.
We must note that this attempt to rationalize potential violence in advance is based on a view of law enforcement’s actions that’s deeply rooted in false or exaggerated right-wing narratives. That the 2020 election results were suspect, that the Russia probe lacked a basis, that President Biden’s son Hunter faces no federal probe, as Graham suggested: all of these are articles of faith on Fox News and in the right-wing media universe but each is false or dubious. In other words, Graham’s explanation for why we might expect violence is rooted in false claims that he himself was elevating and validating.
It’s worth asking where this “rioting” might unfold. There are a lot of Trump supporters in blue states and in cities. (More people voted for Trump in Los Angeles County than voted for him in half of the states in the country.) It seems unlikely, though, that a Trump indictment would spur a demonstration in the heart of a major American city. Unless, of course, there’s a triggering action. Unless there’s a court hearing in D.C. or a warrant being served in Florida. What made the Capitol attack happen as a riot was a call by Trump and others to come to D.C. on that day. Otherwise, the possible violent response to a Trump indictment would be stochastic, to use a weirdly in-vogue descriptor: sporadic and relatively isolated. The sort of attack that the Department of Homeland Security warned about even while Trump was still president.
In response to a question from The Washington Post, Graham spokesman Kevin Bishop described the senator’s comments as “predicting/forecasting what he thinks will happen.” That’s certainly true. But this risk was understood before Graham articulated it on Fox News. So why articulate it there?
Again, he was obviously doing so as a warning: if the government takes this step, it is the government that is responsible for what follows. If Trump is indicted, we can expect violence and it’s the government’s fault for bringing the indictment.
An argument that Trump wanted to make sure that his millions of Truth Social followers heard. It wouldn’t be their fault. | 2022-08-29T14:04:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trumpworld walks a line between predicting violence and threatening it - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/29/trump-graham-violence/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/29/trump-graham-violence/ |
Their fruit forbidden in China, Taiwan’s pomelo growers feel squeeze
Pei-Lin Wu
Pomelos growing on the farm of Jhan Jun-hao, in Ruisui township, Taiwan, on Aug. 10. Growers in Taiwan face an economic hit as China has banned the import of the Taiwanese citrus fruit, as a response to Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. (An Rong Xu for The Washington Post)
RUISUI, Taiwan — In a sun-dappled orchid, Taiwanese pomelo farmer Jhan Jun-hao lays out a multipronged plan to prevent China’s import ban from decimating income from his 130-odd trees of the pear-shaped, fleshy-skinned citrus fruit.
Ideally, he would secure new deals to sell domestically to major supermarkets. If that fails, he will try his luck at predawn auctions in wholesale markets.
“Of course I’m not optimistic,” said the 33-year-old bespectacled farmer, who holds a master’s degree in forestry. “Taiwan grows more fruit than it can eat, so that’s why we need to sell abroad,” he said, adding that there really is no No. 2 export market for pomelos. China is the only place one can hope to sell at scale.
On Aug. 3, the day after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) touched down in the self-governing democracy of 23 million that Beijing claims as its own, Chinese orders for Taiwan’s pomelos were suddenly canceled, part of China’s package of military exercises and trade measures designed to punish Taipei.
Chinese fighter jets, missiles and warships encircled Taiwan to send a threatening message about the Chinese Communist Party’s readiness to invade if Taipei ever formalizes its independence. Even though the intensity of drills has dropped in recent days, analysts expect Beijing will continue with escalated economic coercion as part of an effort to punish the Taiwanese administration of President Tsai Ing-wen.
In recent years, China has often used its vast market to pressure other governments. When South Korea deployed a U.S. antimissile system with a radar able to monitor Chinese launch sites, its companies in China faced boycotts and sudden inspections. A diplomatic spat with Canberra led Beijing to ban Australian coal and slap high tariffs on its wine imports, among other goods.
That same playbook is used on Taiwan. Citing quality concerns, Chinese customs announced it was suspending imports of Taiwanese citrus fruits, two kinds of fish and hundreds of packaged foods like cookies and instant noodles.
Although agricultural exports represent under 1 percent of the overall trade relationship, the ban has an outsize impact on Taiwan’s fishing and farming communities. Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture estimated that just over $20 million in trade would be affected. The pressure is greatest on farmers like Jhan who are scrambling to protect their income.
Guaranteeing a good price for seasonal fruit like pomelos is never easy. But China’s ban means that supply has outstripped demand for bulk domestic sales, according to Liu Yuan-he, an auctioneer at the Taipei First Fruit and Vegetable Wholesale Market.
At 4 a.m. on a recent day, the 26-year veteran stood behind his electronic auctioning machine rattling through pomelo batches at a rapid clip. Compared with nearby stalls selling dragon fruit and lemons, the pomelo crowd was small and bidding subdued. Many lots went unsold.
“For Hualien, about 70 percent [of locally grown pomelos] would usually be sold overseas to mainland China. Now they don’t know what to do with that 70 percent, so most will be auctioned,” he said, referring to the Taiwanese county that includes Ruisui township. A bigger problem in the long run, according to Liu, is that young Taiwanese simply don’t eat as much pomelo as the older generations. “They don’t like having to cut them up,” he said. “Pomelos will probably gradually die out.”
China’s ban came at the worst time for pomelo farmers. When grown well with a smooth and unblemished skin, the fruit makes a popular gift for family and friends over the Mid-Autumn Festival on Sept. 10. Because the holiday, determined by the Lunar calendar, falls early this year and a hot, dry summer has delayed the harvest, there is only a short window between ripening and the holiday to sell.
“Taiwan’s fruit exports remain heavily reliant on China, and the import bans have caused losses for farmers,” said Christina Lai, an assistant professor at Academia Sinica, a state-founded research academy in Taiwan. “It is certainly quite difficult for the Taiwanese government and farmers to diversify tropical fruit exports immediately, which would incur significant costs from logistics and storage to identifying new business partners.”
Democratic nations have increasingly banded together to resist China’s global campaign of economic coercion. Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs announced a $6.7 million fund this month to help diversify trade and grow markets in Japan, Southeast Asia and the United States.
After repeated incidents of Chinese economic coercion, Taiwan’s producers “have gradually come to realize that the risks of the mainland market are relatively high,” Min-Hsien Yang, professor at the Department of International Business and Trade of Taiwan’s Feng Chia University, said in an interview.
“What I have never been able to understand is that even if current cross-strait relations are not good, [China] does not need to sacrifice products of farmers and fishermen,” Yang added. From a political perspective, it seems to him like a losing strategy. As a proportion of total trade, it’s tiny, but it affects a lot of people. China “wants more support, not more hatred, right?” Yang asked.
In 2021, China remained the largest destination for Taiwanese exports at 19 percent of the total. The bulk of trade is in electronics and other technology products, which remain unaffected by Beijing’s penalties.
Chinese imports from Taiwan have continued to rise since Tsai took office, despite Beijing’s economic measures to punish what it claims are pro-independence policies adopted by the president and the Democratic Progressive Party.
Early in her career, Tsai was often critical of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement with China, which she once called a “sugarcoated poison pill,” but she later softened her position on cross-strait trade. Her administration has sought to maintain communication, exchanges and trade with China but under the condition that the relationship must be mutually beneficial and should not be used as a tool to benefit China’s economy while undermining Taiwan’s.
Much of the action for resolving farmers’ concerns takes place in the headquarters of the Ruisui Township Farmers’ Association. In a building that once hosted a dinosaur museum, workers answer phone calls from frustrated farmers. In a move to find other ways to use up excess fruit, the association is branching out into pomelo soap, tea and salt.
Hhung Sheng-Huang, the group’s director, said he is hugely stressed by trying to find domestic markets for pomelos previously expected to sell to China.
But he added that government support is already opening new sales opportunities, and efforts to process pomelos and automate aspects of farming are making gradual progress. Earlier this month, they held an event to demonstrate the first Taiwan-developed automatic pomelo peeling machine.
China’s actions somewhat color how he views the country, but Hhung mostly thinks political disputes should stay out of the economy. “I just hope the other side of the strait can sympathize with the hard work of these farmers and not put political pressure on them,” he said. | 2022-08-29T14:30:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | China import ban on Taiwanese citrus fruits hurts pomelo farmers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/29/china-import-ban-taiwan-fruit-pomelo/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/29/china-import-ban-taiwan-fruit-pomelo/ |
That sum seems paltry given the scale of Noble’s collapse. Last month alone, the US Securities and Exchange Commission fined an insurer $50 million for not properly disclosing fees to annuity investors, while the UK Financial Conduct Authority would have imposed a £37.9 million ($44.5 million) penalty over misleading statements leading to the collapse of Carillion Plc, had the firm not already been in liquidation. Banks received about $9 billion in fines over the scandal about rigging the Libor interest-rate benchmark over the past decade, while BNP Paribas SA alone received a $9 billion penalty in 2015 for violating US sanctions. The modest sum levied against Noble is hardly likely to deter other companies on the same path, considering gross profits of more than a billion a year that it was cranking out in its pomp.
Issuing false statements has “no place in Singapore’s capital markets” and risks having “an adverse impact on the integrity of our capital markets,” regulators and law enforcement authorities led by the Monetary Authority of Singapore said in a statement announcing the penalty. A MAS spokesperson said after publication of this column that the civil penalty “is the largest MAS has imposed to date” with a purpose “to send a clear signal to listed issuers to ensure the accuracy of the information they release to the public.”
The official words strike the right note, but giving a light nudge to the stable door now, years after the horse has bolted, strikes a discordant tone. As early as February 2015, Iceberg Research, a short seller run by a former Noble credit analyst, was citing issues with the marketing agreements that formed the core of last week’s fine. Singapore’s investigation of the issue didn’t begin until November 2018, at a point when shares had already been suspended and 10 months after the company announced a debt restructuring that wiped out stockholders. The MAS spokesperson said that the investigations had “taken time” due to the number of potential offenses, accounting complexities, and outside consultations, among other things, and that the industry sector had “no bearing” on assessing the penalty amount. Noble still operates as separate industrial and trading businesses following the restructuring.
(Updates with MAS statement saying civil penalty is its largest ever imposed, 4th paragraph, and addressing the length and sector of the investigations, 5th paragraph. Adds link to Iceberg’s reaction, 5th paragraph.) | 2022-08-29T14:52:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Singapore Telling Noble They Were Naughty Sends What Message? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/singapore-telling-noble-they-werenaughty-sends-whatmessage/2022/08/29/996981aa-27a1-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/singapore-telling-noble-they-werenaughty-sends-whatmessage/2022/08/29/996981aa-27a1-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html |
Why Ukraine’s Big Nuclear Plant Raises Worries Again
Analysis by Patrick Donahue | Bloomberg
Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe’s biggest such facility, has become one of the most sensitive flashpoints of the war. Soon after Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February, they captured the plant in the first case of a nuclear station being taken as a spoil of war. Their assault sparked a fire at the complex, though the damage was limited. Since July, shelling aimed at the plant, which Russia and Ukraine blame on each other, has increased to become a near-daily occurrence. Both sides have an interest in stressing the dangers. Still, the United Nations’ atomic watchdog says the potential for a nuclear catastrophe is real.
1. What is Zaporizhzhia?
Construction on the plant began in 1981 -- five years before the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant about 500 kilometers (310 miles) away -- when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. A sixth reactor was added in 1995, after Ukraine gained its independence from Moscow. Located on the Kakhovka Reservoir on the Dnieper River, the plant has a total capacity of 5.7 gigawatts, enough to power more than 4 million homes. Owned by Energoatom, Ukraine’s national nuclear operator, it’s designed to provide a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity needs. It originally relied on Russia for the uranium that fuels its reactors, but today four of the six units use fuel from the US-based Westinghouse Electric Co. After Russian forces seized the site in early March, Moscow sent engineers from Rosatom, the state-owned nuclear power company, to supervise operations using the existing Ukrainian technicians.
2. What are Russia’s objectives?
A nuclear plant is valuable war booty. The complex would cost more than $40 billion to build today. Though power is still flowing to Ukrainian consumers, according to grid operator Ukrenergo, Russian engineers have been laying plans to connect the plant to Russia’s power grid and to charge the Ukraine government for whatever output would remain for Ukraine. In addition, European intelligence officials say that Russia is likely using the plant to shield troops and equipment, anticipating that the facility’s sensitivity protects it from major attacks. Russia has used the wider area to rest its forces at night and has launched long-range artillery attacks from adjacent regions, the officials said. Ukraine has circulated photographs showing Russian armored personnel carriers near Zaporizhzhia’s critical infrastructure.
3. How has fighting impacted the plant?
During two days of shelling around the plant in early August, shells landed near spent nuclear fuel that was in storage and wounded a Zaporizhzhia worker, according to Energoatom. Ukraine and Russia blamed each other for the shelling, which prompted Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to say there was a “very real risk of a nuclear disaster.”
4. What are the risks?
Suriya Jayanti, a former US State Department official who advised policy makers on Ukraine’s energy supply, says Zaporizhzhia “can take a decent amount of abuse.” Unlike the reactors at Chernobyl -- one of which exploded, contaminating some 150,000 square kilometers in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine with radioactive fallout -- those at Zaporizhzhia are surrounded by concrete and steel containment structures designed to stop the release of radiation. There are still dangers, however:
• Keeping the reactors cool requires a constant flow of electricity; a power cut could trigger a so-called meltdown, where, in the worse case, the reactor’s fuel gets so hot it breaches containment walls and is released to the outer environment. This is what happened at the Fukushima nuclear facility in Japan in 2011 after a tsunami damaged the plant’s backup generators.
• Another risk comes from spent fuel ponds, which Zaporizhzhia has in abundance. Were a storage tank to be hit with a bomb or shell, fuel exposed to the air could react and release radioactive particles -- with severity depending on the age of the fuel.
5. What interest do the two sides have in stressing the dangers?
The US-based Institute for the Study of War has said Moscow appears to be playing on fears of a nuclear disaster among allies of Ukraine in an effort to degrade their support for the country. For their part, Ukrainian authorities have been eager to leverage nuclear anxieties to press their demand that Russian troops leave. In an address warning of the threat to Zaporizhzhia, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, “The key thing is that international pressure is needed to force the occupiers to immediately withdraw.”
6. What can be done?
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres has called for establishment of a demilitarized zone around the plant; both sides would have to agree to the terms for it, and it’s unclear who would police it. Short of that, the IAEA has dispatched a mission led by agency chief Grossi himself to the plant. Even China, which has declined to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or join in sanctions punishing it, joined the US in pushing for the mission urgently at the UN Security Council. The IAEA mission includes security and safety experts capable of evaluating the damage caused by shelling. | 2022-08-29T14:52:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why Ukraine’s Big Nuclear Plant Raises Worries Again - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/why-ukraines-big-nuclear-plant-raises-worries-again/2022/08/29/707d6856-27a6-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/why-ukraines-big-nuclear-plant-raises-worries-again/2022/08/29/707d6856-27a6-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html |
Advice by Becky Krystal
(Video: Sean Dong for The Washington Post)
It’s a bug’s world, and we’re just living in it.
“I know it freaks people out when we see them,” says Zachary DeVries, assistant professor in the University of Kentucky’s department of entomology. “We plop our homes right in the middle of where these insects live.”
There may be no more distressing place to find bugs than in your pantry. If it happens, don’t panic. Follow these tips to get rid of them and prevent them from moving in the next time.
How to get rid of fruit flies — and stop them before they appear
How do they get there? While it’s possible that pests such as beetles or moths may already be in items we bring home from the store, DeVries says the majority show up after the food goes into your cabinets — “crimes of opportunity.”
Bugs that are attracted to your food may already be inside, or they may enter through open doors, crevices or cracked window screens.
Packages that are partially open, such as bags of flour or sleeves of cookies, are invitations to insects, as are thin cardboard boxes with narrow gaps, such as pasta or crackers. Anything that spills or leaks — looking at you, honey and sugar — can attract them, too.
What do they eat? Some pests can penetrate the seed coat of plants, which is why whole grains are particularly attractive to certain species, DeVries says. Others need the grain to be cracked open, as in many refined flours, pasta, cookies, cereal, crackers, etc. Dog and cat food and bird seed are also common sites of infestations.
“Inside buildings, household ants feed on sugar, syrup, honey, fruit juice, fats, and meat,” says the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
How should you get rid of them? Usually when you come across moths or beetles in the pantry, what you’re finding are the adults, DeVries says. Once you see a lot of them, 10 or 20, you probably have an infestation.
Much as eliminating the breeding site of fruit flies is the only sure way of eliminating those common pests, getting rid of the source is key to saying goodbye to beetles and moths. Systematically sort through all the food in your pantry and open the packages. Sift grains or flours to spot interlopers. Anything that appears to be heavily infested should be tossed. Often, the damage is limited to one or two items, according to DeVries. If you want to try to salvage items — or want to ensure that what appears to be free of pests in fact is — you can freeze them at 27 degrees or, ideally, colder for three to seven days; the longer, the better, says the Illinois Extension at the University of Illinois-Champaign. Or you can heat the food at 140 degrees in an oven for an hour, though keep in mind that most home ovens cannot be set that low.
Getting rid of the infested food can go a long way toward eliminating an infestation, but vacuuming and/or wiping down the shelves with warm, soapy water is never a bad idea.
Much of the same advice applies to ants. Once you find what is attracting the ants, says the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, remove it. Vacuum the ant trails and clean with warm, soapy water. This gets rid of the pheromones the insects would follow to get back to the food source, DeVries says. Then try to find and seal up the points where they’re coming in. If they persist, you can use ant bait, either in stations or other forms, such as gel, but try to save it for serious infestations. If you can, use bait outside near the entry points so that you don’t inadvertently attract more ants inside.
What don’t you need? Insecticides, DeVries says. Insecticides, especially sprays, near food and food prep surfaces pose a greater danger to you than pantry pests, which are a nuisance but not a general health concern. For beetles and moths you encounter, use a fly swatter or vacuum to eliminate them, or shoo them out the door.
How can you prevent them? DeVries suggests a three-pronged approach to prevention: turnover of food, stopping the intruders from coming in and hard-sided containers.
First, use the food in your pantry in a timely manner. Beetles and moths take awhile to settle in, so if you’re using your flours, pasta and snacks over the course of a few weeks or even months, you’re probably okay. It’s old items shoved in the back that remain untouched for a long time that are particularly problematic. Periodically sort through what you have to see what needs to be used or tossed (or composted).
Avoid leaving doors or windows without screens open. Patch broken screens and seal up gaps around your baseboards, doors and windows.
Keeping your food in hard-sided, airtight containers is “a very simple, very easy” step you can take, DeVries says. That deters pests, of course, with a side benefit of keeping your food fresher for longer. Containers or not, if you notice a spill, clean it up right away. | 2022-08-29T14:52:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How to prevent and eliminate pantry pests in your kitchen - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/08/29/pantry-pests-kitchen-tips/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/08/29/pantry-pests-kitchen-tips/ |
The fake hustle of self-righteous NFL critique
I don’t remember when I first heard Coach Mac, my head coach in college, critique me or one of my teammates for “fake hustle.” I do remember that even though it was the first time I’d heard that phrase, it was so vivid and contextual that I immediately knew what he meant. It’s the performance of effort in lieu of effort — a manipulative melodrama intended to convince people you care more and play harder than you actually do. In a basketball context, it’s slapping the floor with both palms to communicate good defense instead of just locking up.
If this is too esoteric, think a triflin’ boyfriend bending the knee and proposing to his girlfriend in a crowded mall food court. Or, better yet, a person talking and texting and tweeting and writing about how problematic the NFL is — and receiving all of the easy, low-hanging lauds of being critical of the Death Shield — and then watching the games.
Of course, the path for ethical consumption here, in America, is narrow. It exists, sure. But capitalism ensures it’s intentionally elusive. If you dig far enough, most occupations we hold and consumer choices we make are possible because of harms so far removed from the minutiae of our lives that they don’t feel significant enough to affect our behavior. Maybe you wouldn’t buy those sneakers if you lived next to the sweatshop they were threaded in. But you live in a suburb with zoning laws, so you don’t think twice about it. So, what distinguishes criticizing the NFL but still watching the games from critiquing, I don’t know, Apple’s labor practices but owning an iPhone? What makes the former “fake hustle” but not the latter? I have an answer. But first, I want to talk about the NFL’s new “helmets.” Have you seen the helmets? Let’s talk about the helmets because that explains everything else.
If you’ve watched any footage from training camp this year, you might have noticed that the players are wearing something that looks like someone gathered all the waffles from IHOP and stitched them together into a helmet-like substance. They’re called “Guardian Caps,” they’re intended to reduce head trauma, and the NFL has mandated that linemen, tight ends, and linebackers — the players who tend to be involved in the most helmet-on-helmet collisions — must wear them during training camp. Guardian Sports, the manufacturer of the waffle, claims it reduces impact up to 33 percent.
If this sounds like another example of fake hustle, you’re right, it is!
Football, America’s most popular sport (by far) and most lucrative TV property (by far), demands that many of the participants violently smash into each other each time the ball is snapped. Scientists and players have compared the collisions to car accidents. The average number of snaps per game is approximately 130. Multiply that by the number of games each season, and then multiply that by the number of years these men have played contact football, and then you have a … really big number. The NFL telling everyone they’re making football safer is like choking someone and calling it a neck massage. The only way to change this sport is to make a new sport, something no one is very interested in. The violence — and the broken brains and bodies caused by it — isn’t just an unfortunate inevitability, it’s the entire point. The tremendous feats of skill and athleticism that populate highlight packages are only meaningful because of the specter of terrible violence. And sometimes, the terrible violence is the highlight. Remove the violence, and you remove the interest. Remove the interest, and you remove the money.
When it is understood that the NFL’s primary function is to increase the value of the 32 teams, it makes sense that as long as franchise values continue to grow into the billions, the league (and, by default, we) doesn’t really care that much about the health of the players. Of course the NFL’s conduct policy will always be rickety and janky, because things created to construct a veneer of concern usually are. Of course the NFL used to receive millions of dollars a year from the Department of Defense, an act that paid for the injection of the performance of patriotism, and made each game feel like an episode of “NCIS.” Of course it would make a big stink every October, with the special pink gloves and cleats to recognize Breast Cancer Awareness Month. And of course it was revealed in 2013 that only eight percent of the proceeds went to breast cancer research. (The NFL now devotes October to raising awareness for all cancers.) Of course it would effectively blackball a player for kneeling during the anthem. And then, when the national consciousness about the value of Black lives shifted for that whisper of an hour in the summer of 2020, and protesting became a market-tested corporate strategy, of course the owners would find it in their hearts to be more tolerant of kneeling. The NFL has created America’s most effective symbiotic relationship between the monetization of harm and the performance of harm reduction.
The only way to change this sport is to make a new sport, something no one is very interested in.
So, back to you. Well, back to us, because I’m here too. Ever since watching Ryan Shazier almost die in 2017 during what looked like a routine tackle, I don’t watch as much football as I used to. I basically only watch the Pittsburgh Steelers. I’ve tried to rationalize this by saying I’m a Steelers fan, not an NFL fan, but that’s fake hustle too!
Anyway, what makes the fake hustle of NFL criticism so distinct is that football — the NFL specifically — is inessential. An iPhone, for instance, can be a necessity for communication, health care, public safety, food delivery and employment. But our consumption of the NFL is centered in pure and unadulterated desire. Which means that even while knowing that not watching is literally the only way we can give the league any incentive to sincerely attempt to change, we watch because it just feels good.
Is the point here that we should just say nothing? No! Keep the NFL on the hot seat. Just know that as long as you keep watching the games, it’s not fire under that chair. Just smoke. | 2022-08-29T14:53:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Damon Young: The fake hustle of self-righteous NFL critique - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/08/29/damon-young-fake-hustle-self-righteous-nfl-critique/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/08/29/damon-young-fake-hustle-self-righteous-nfl-critique/ |
The Lessons of Uzbekistan’s Lost Sea
One of history’s worst environmental disasters is now a tourist attraction. What can it teach us about the fate of humankind?
By Henry Wismayer
Guide Kutlimurat (Kolya) Maksetov on the salt pan of Barsa-Kelmes in Uzbekistan. (Marcus Westberg for The Washington Post)
Not for the first time, out on the salt pan, my mind had turned to death. It must have been 140 degrees on the crystalline surface of Barsa-Kelmes. The very air had a poisonous tang. How long could a person last out here? A week? A day? I wasn’t sure I’d endure an hour. I could barely reconcile this with my other observation, which was that the salt was beautiful, like a sea of gemstones stretching to the horizon.
A shape caught my eye amid the glitter: a small butterfly encased in the salt. It lay on its side, the mottled brown wings sealed together. Crystals had started to progress over its head and thorax. I could see that the creature had died with its proboscis fully extended, searching in vain for some sustenance as the salt had sucked the moisture from its exoskeleton.
I admit that there were points, amid the ferocious heat, the spine-jangling drives, the inescapable context of economic collapse, environmental decay and animal extinction, when I questioned what on earth had possessed me to come to the Aral Sea. The sea, which is actually classified as a lake, was more a memory than a body of water now.
It began, like so many tragedies, with hubris. From the 1920s onward, as part of a plan to collectivize agriculture, the Soviet Union determined that a vast swath of its Central Asian vassals would be given over to cotton. Inefficient irrigation canals, dug by hand, redirected water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya — two rivers that originated in the high glaciers of the Tien Shan Mountains — to feed the thirsty monoculture that soon covered millions of hectares of previously uncultivated land.
How Extreme Weather Has Created a Disaster for School Infrastructure
The American elm tree has all but died off in this country. In Castine, Maine, residents have found a way to keep their precious citizens thriving.
Since the start of the current Holocene epoch, approximately 11,700 years ago, the rivers had sustained the Aral’s delicate equilibrium. Covering 26,000 square miles, straddling the border of modern Kazakhstan and Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan’s autonomous western republic, the lake was a pearl in the arid steppeland, the fourth-largest inland body of water in the world. From the mid-1800s, fishing ports thrived on its bounty.
But in the 1960s, the diversion of yet more of the Amu Darya’s flow into the new Karakum Canal precipitated a tipping point. The Aral’s waterline started to recede. The water became brackish, then saline, then anoxic — inimical to fish life, which died away almost overnight.
During the Soviet era, when foreigners were prohibited from entering Karakalpakstan, news of the Aral’s plight was spilled by satellite, as images from above showed its shoreline shrinking from the edges, then splitting into pieces. For most of us, this was how the crisis was viewed — from the abstraction of space, a mutation of the map.
On the ground, a human disaster was unfolding. As the lake disappeared, so did its regulatory influence on the surrounding climate. Freezing winters gave way to searing summers. Winds mixed sodium chloride with freshly exposed carcinogenic particulates, which had leached into the land as a result of agricultural runoff and bioweapons testing, then carried the resulting noxious dust clouds into the atmosphere. By the 1980s, Karakalpakstan suffered from some of the worst cancer and infant mortality rates in the Soviet Union. Toxins from the Aral have been found in the bloodstream of Antarctic penguins.
In 2005, a dam built to contain the waters of the Syr Darya led to a partial recovery of Kazakhstan’s northern portion of the lake, while also sealing the south’s fate. In 2014, the lake’s eastern lobe vanished for the first time.
The Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest lake in the world. Watch it dry up.
Today, Karakalpakstan’s share of the water has evaporated down to a western sliver. The land revealed by its recession has become the Aralkum, an anthropogenic desert, a cautionary parable. It is often cited as the worst man-made ecological catastrophe in history.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a trickle of foreigners have found their way to Karakalpakstan, most of them drawn by the Igor Savitsky Museum, an unlikely trove of avant-garde Soviet art, in Nukus, the provincial capital. However, in recent years, more and more have continued north to see what’s left of the lake, and the land its diminution left behind.
What is the appeal of such a benighted destination? In “Notes From an Apocalypse,” the writer Mark O’Connell describes his journey to Pripyat, the scene of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, as an opportunity “to see the end of the world from the vantage point of its aftermath.” Like Chernobyl, the Aral region offers a chance to bear witness — in this case, to the kind of precipitous disaster that so many people fear now awaits more communities in the era of climate change. A similar scenario is currently playing out in Utah’s Great Salt Lake.
Dark tourism. Disaster tourism. Call it what you will. Karakalpakstan occupies a transitional space between a foreboding present and a potentially cataclysmic future. Which was why I wanted to go.
My first glimpse of what used to be the Aral Sea came at the top of a bluff, on the northern edge of Moynaq. In the Soviet era, Moynaq had been a fishing town of 30,000 souls, a settlement whose very existence depended on the lake. Most of the men worked in the boats. The women staffed the cannery, which never slept, producing 30 tons of product a day.
Below, at the leading edge of a vast wasteland, was its aftermath: a dozen boats, rusted umber, all that remained of the 100-strong fishing fleet, which had been dragged here from the spots where they were marooned as the sea ebbed away. Now they lay askew, propellers half-buried in sand.
Over the years, people had taken to scrawling chalk graffiti on the hulls and cabins. Messages of hope. Of thanks. Couples’ initials encircled by hearts. And so the ship graveyard, as it has come to be known, had become a palimpsest, new memories etched onto old. A handful of visitors circled the hulls, ran hands over the last flakes of paint, clambered onto the jagged decks to poke inside.
Ali Shadinov still had vivid memories of the years before the lake disappeared. It was, he said, a time of plenty: “There were so many fish, we used to throw the small ones away.”
In 1969, Shadinov was 18 years old, just starting out as a fisherman himself, when the older men began murmuring that something was wrong with the lake. It wasn’t the water level, not yet. It was the taste. The lake was getting saltier.
Now 70 years old, with an avuncular twinkle, Shadinov is one of the dwindling number of Moynaq residents who lived through this transformation. We met in Future Moynaq, a recently opened library-cum-learning-center. Its wallpaper showed a verdant forest scene, which felt simultaneously pleasant and cruelly ironic, given the desiccated environs of the town outside.
Within three years, the old hands’ prophecies had come to pass. As the lake withdrew from Moynaq’s waterfront, the townsfolk dug a channel so that the boats could still access the water. But before long, the deep-hulled vessels, named after Marxist heroes like Engels and Marx, were land-bound, useless in the sand. Ali and his father gave up pursuing the lake in 1977.
Another elder, Bibikhan Utambetova, took up the story. The worst crisis years were around the turn of the millennium, she told me. That was when Moynaq ran out of fresh water, which had to be trucked in from upriver. By now, the Kazakh and Russian friends she’d grown up with had headed back across their respective borders. Any delusions that the lake might return had given way to despair.
In 2002, she was appointed head of Moynaq’s women’s committee, where she agitated for government relief. Since then, Moynaq has undergone a slow reinvention. The administration in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, increased investment. Part of the canning factory cranked back to life to process artemia, a tiny brine shrimp that has proliferated in the Aral’s saline water, and which is coveted in China for use in medicine and cosmetics. The airport, closed for 30 years, was reinaugurated in 2020. “Moynaq has learned to hope again,” Utambetova said.
Back up on the bluff, this hope was manifesting in some unexpected ways. Our visit had coincided with the annual Moynaq Rally, and the drivers had gathered with their souped-up vehicles in the parking lot ahead of the following day’s race to rev engines and talk about gaskets or suspension or whatever.
Across the lot from the squat cylinder of the Aral Sea Museum, a black-and-white mural of fish skeletons and aquatic spirits wound around the old lighthouse, which now housed a cafe. In front of it was an archway of hammered metal that brought to mind the scrappy, dystopian aesthetic of Mad Max. A row of punched-out capitals read “HERE | NOW” and, in Cyrillic, the word “СТИХИЯ,” or “Sithia,” meaning “Force of Nature,” the name of a festival that was held here in May. Two thousand people had come to party, make art and listen to electronic dance music with the boats as a backdrop. Faced with a tableau of the apocalypse, one human response was to dance.
It was in a more sober mood that I found myself jouncing along the corrugated floor of the Aralkum in early June. I was traveling with my friend and photographer Marcus Westberg, and with Kutlimurat Maksetov, a young cultural anthropologist and local guide from Nukus who went by Kolya. Maqsud, an older man with limited English who seemed to know everyone from here to the Kazakh border, had the wheel. A talisman the shape of a camel dangled from his rearview mirror.
On every side: a wasteland so flat it felt as though you could see the curvature of the Earth. The only verticality was the gas fields, of which there were several, prompting a jarring realization that the climatic catastrophe of the Aral had unveiled an opportunity to take more carbon from the ground. Drilling scaffolds formed isosceles triangles on the horizon. Flare stacks trailed pennants of flame.
The former lake bed, when we got out to stretch our legs, had baked into a crust that crumbled underfoot. Closer inspection revealed that it was strewn with clamshells, bleached chalk-white, that once propped up the Aral’s obliterated food chain.
The most pressing concern, now that the water had retreated dozens of miles to the north, was the dust. As we drove, Kolya produced a tablet and showed me photos of the aftermath of a huge dust storm that had swept across Karakalpakstan in May 2018. A hundred miles south, in Nukus, the cars and buildings had been caked in a salty residue. “Everyone had to stay inside for three days,” Kolya said. “Most of the plants in the city died.”
The authorities were putting their faith in an unusual solution: saxaul, the shrub that we could see proliferating across the sand. The hope was that the fibrous bushes would stabilize the skin of the desert and “catch” the salt-laden dust particles before they could get airborne. In the wake of the 2018 storm, a thousand tractors were deployed to seed-drill saxaul across nearly 2 million acres of lake floor. Time would tell whether it would prove successful. Today, at least, the sky was crystal clear.
The remnants of the Aral appeared around half an hour after we climbed onto the Ustyurt Plateau, the vast rock shelf that formerly delineated its western edge. It materialized at first as a shock of color on the horizon, then later resolved into a disk of topaz blue. Having read so much about the lake’s ruin, its perfection, against the parched land, was startling. It would exert a mesmeric hold on us for as long as we were in its vicinity.
It was midafternoon by the time we arrived at the yurt camp where we would be staying for the next couple of days. Occupying a broad shelf, around halfway down the escarpment, it consisted of 16 comfortable yurts arranged around a communal space. Off to one side were toilets, showers and a simple bungalow, where the caretakers, Abat Awesbaev and Zoya Palimbetova, lived through the summer season with their three young children. The camp was clean and well kept, salubrious even. A pair of chaykhana tables, seating platforms often found in Uzbek teahouses, stood at the front of a sandy shelf overlooking the lakeshore.
Opened in 2017, the yurt camp — indeed, the very concept of Aral Sea tourism — was the brainchild of Tazabay Uteuliev. In 2005, he was working in a hotel in Nukus when the Italian ambassador approached to ask whether he could arrange a trip to see the lakeshore. Uteuliev rented an old Russian jeep and drove the ambassador and his family across the Aralkum.
Although Uteuliev’s parents lived in Moynaq, it was the first time he’d ever laid eyes on the Aral. “I thought we’d lost the lake forever,” he told me. “But then I saw the blue water, the beauty of the canyons. I realized this was a place that people would want to see.” For the first few years, his tours carried everything with them; guests stayed in tents and cooked evening meals on open fires. The yurt camp was built in 2017 to cope with the demand. Now his company, Aral Sea Discovery, had a fleet of 11 Toyota Land Cruisers and bookings were picking up to pre-pandemic levels.
Daily activity at the camp was dictated by the sun. In the early afternoon, when the heat was at its most ferocious, everyone retreated to slivers of shade to take a siesta or just sit very still. The only interruption was the incongruous chime of the satellite phone, which rang regularly, notifying Abat of comings and goings or how much plov (Uzbekistan’s national dish of rice and lamb) to cook for the evening meal.
Mornings and early evenings were for exploring the plateau. At the rim, where the gypsum shelved down toward the distant lake, areas of the cliff ruptured into canyon systems. In places, it had eroded into fins and pinnacles. In others, it had calved iceberg-like from the escarpment, splintering into house-size cubes. The sedimentary layers banding the rock were a reminder that the Aral’s retreat is a small-scale echo of a more titanic draining. This area, like much of Eurasia, was once submerged beneath the ancient Tethys Sea.
In the shelter of the cliffs were miniature ecosystems. Dappled butterflies danced around allium and artemisia, the latter of which filled the gullies with a scent like lemonade. I lingered here, keen to absorb these signs of vitality. So many of the other scenes we experienced up on the plateau had the opposite vibe.
The salt pan of Barsa-Kelmes, with its dead insects entombed by its sheet of crystal, wasn’t the only memento mori we discovered up here. Ancient cemeteries, final resting places of nomads who plied these edge lands during the heyday of the Silk Road, were a regular sight on the plain. The graves were marked by piles of rock and standing stones upon which were etched recurring symbols — a lollipop, a stylized twig — denoting the clan of the person buried therein. Exactly who or what each symbol signified Kolya didn’t know.
Elsewhere, the plateau was utterly barren. Five years ago, Kolya told me, a French group had opted to drive across the Ustyurt without a guide. They had GPS but nonetheless managed to get stranded up on the plateau. A search party found them a week later, deliriously eating lipstick and drinking perfume.
When we reached the derelict village of Urga, Jalgas Nurullaev was sitting outside a tin-roofed cabin, smoking the stub of a cigarette. He showed no surprise at our arrival, even though he was the only person for dozens of miles in any direction. Tourists sometimes came here, to the dead village, he said, and he always offered to take them for boat rides on Sudochie Lake, the small body of water separate from the Aral that we had seen as we rolled down the hill. He could take us too, if we liked.
Nurullaev — diminutive, with a weathered face and cropped hair — was here to prepare for a short fishing window. In a week or so, he and four friends would take to the lake in shallow skiffs to hunt for sazan and snakehead, which they would sell back home in Kungirot. Not that there were many fish. Not that there was much lake. The Sudochie was drying up, turning saline, Nurullaev said. Every year the seasonal haul diminished. All around the lake’s periphery, we could see that the reeds were turning brown.
It was no kind of shock to discover that water scarcity had spelled doom for Urga. It had once been home to 200 families, mostly Russians and Poles, but the community collapsed when a pipeline project to bring in potable water failed in the 1950s. The settlement they left behind had all the accidental poignancy of hasty abandonment. The centerpiece was the old smokehouse, a large, roofless block with a churchlike facade, its interior piled with detritus old and new. All that remained of the reed houses where Urga’s residents used to live were a few combs of stems projecting from the sand. Still more wretched was the graveyard we found at the top of the hill, a patch of coarse, anonymous wooden crosses, several of which had fallen over.
During my time in Karakalpakstan, I had been reading “Islands of Abandonment” by Cal Flyn. A bestseller in my native United Kingdom and a book of rare pathos, it described nature’s tendency to reclaim areas that humans had used, abused and left behind. Places rendered uninhabitable because of unexploded ordnance or chemical contamination — or even, as in the case of Chernobyl, radioactive fallout — were now running wild.
I’d hoped that this trip might offer some glimmers of that optimism, but the truth was that the Aral didn’t quite fit the mold. Here, the resilience of nature had failed to fill the gap. Conservationists were working to turn the Aralkum into a stronghold for saiga antelope. Flamingoes were flocking here to feast on the shrimp. But no amount of evolutionary ingenuity could replace the biomass of the Aral. Instead, this region was analogous to Flyn’s chilling coda, the Salton Sea in California: “An augury of the end of the world, the dawning of the age of dust.”
Perhaps it was the stories, the isolation, the otherworldly sensation of the friable ground. But I had read so much about the catastrophe of the lake’s withdrawal that it had become impossible to pass through the Aralkum without feeling haunted.
On the second afternoon, we went right down to the shore. Everything about the littoral seemed deceitful, untrustworthy. The beach, if you could call it that, had the jagged texture of dead coral. The water’s edge was frothed into a pink spume — evidence, Kolya speculated, that the artemia were spawning. Somehow the thought of sharing a swim with a billion larval crustaceans did little to alleviate my unease.
When I finally convinced myself to get in the water, the ground gave way, each footstep sinking several inches into a sucking, silken clay. The only solution was to crawl out on all fours and then, when you got around six inches clearance, flop bodily onto your back, trusting that the buoyancy of the tepid, salty water would keep you above the silt.
Even when I was adrift, I couldn’t take my mind off the quicksand below. All I kept thinking was: I wonder if there are areas of the lake floor that could swallow a person whole? And: What happened to the bodies of all the fish? It felt like dipping into a colossal grave. Later, I hung my swimming trunks over the door of our yurt, where they dried out in minutes, assuming the texture and rigidity of cardboard.
That evening the yurt camp was at capacity. As the temperature dropped, around two dozen guests, newly reanimated, convened at the promontory to watch the last interactions of water and sky.
Throughout the day I had been noting down the shifting moods of the lake. At dawn the sun rose directly over the dregs of the Aral, which blazed orange momentarily, then faded to a sheet of white gauze. By 11 a.m., the water had deepened into that complex shade of electric blue. In the midafternoon, there had been an hour when the breeze fell away to nothing. The surface of the lake went mirror-still, and it merged with the sky so that it became impossible to discern where water ended and atmosphere began. Now, we watched the water turn opalescent, then pick up the colors of the sunset to turn the hue and opacity of rose quartz.
It was a picture, certainly, but also irreducibly sad. Only by seeing what remained of the water was it possible to fully appreciate the tragedy of its absence — how awful its retreat must have felt to those habituated to waking up to it every morning.
The Aral Sea left you with the sense that, for all our genius, we enjoy a habitable planet by the grace of such fragile providence.
Was this why people came here? To marinate in the melancholy of loss? Among those watching the sunset, plenty seemed to have more anodyne reasons. A Danish photojournalist was researching a book about the water crisis of the Amu Darya. An Austrian man, jocular as Santa, had guided some tour groups through Uzbekistan in the 1990s, and this was the one place he didn’t see. A young Russian couple had come here since “we aren’t welcome anywhere in Europe because of the war.”
For my part, I suspected that these were cover stories, concealing voyeuristic impulses that were more ignoble. To some extent, I knew, disaster tourism was really about vainglory, a desire to feel, as O’Connell puts it, “the transgressive thrill of our own daring in coming here.”
But the more time I spent in this accursed landscape, the more certain I became that there were other, deeper emotions at play, too. Modern places of abandonment or catastrophe, it occurred to me that evening, were affecting primarily for their immediacy. The ambient entropy, which manifested here in the chaotic climate, the shriveling lake, the junk of human settlements laid waste, felt like the ultimate rebuke to our myopia.
That the Aral Sea represents an advanced stage on a continuum along which the whole planet is hurtling — hotter, water-deprived, despoiled — merely drove the point home. It left you with the sense that, for all our genius, we enjoy a habitable planet by the grace of such fragile providence. Actions, consequences. What more evidence do we need?
Against great odds, Karakalpakstan is trying to move on. A few months before our visit, the authorities in Moynaq had removed some of the last relics of the Soviet era, chipping off public mosaics that celebrated the town’s maritime past. The death knell that had sounded as the Aral began its long retreat was now fading away. In time, the Aralkum would evolve from a disaster zone to a memorial, and the sea itself would be all but gone. “I expect we can do this for the next 10, maybe 15 years,” Tazabay Uteuliev said. “After that, I guess we will find something else to do.” (Meanwhile, Karakalpakstan has more immediate concerns. Three weeks after I left the region, large protests in Nukus over government plans to dilute the province’s autonomy resulted in deadly clashes between protesters and police. At the time of writing, the situation is reported to have stabilized.)
The morning after we returned to Nukus, Maqsud drove us south to the ruins of ancient Khorezm, a kingdom that thrived for centuries along the once fertile oases of the Amu Darya delta. We were all alone at Chilpik Dakhma, a rotunda on a lonely outcrop, encircled by heavily eroded earthen walls. In its pre-Islamic period, when Khorezm was a cradle of Zoroastrianism, this was a place for “sky burial”; a boulder at its center marked the spot where people would lay down their dead to be picked clean by carrion birds. But one day in the early 13th century, the local population might have used it for another purpose — hiding here, in a state of terror, as a great dust cloud in the distance betrayed the approach of Genghis Khan’s ravening army.
Disaster can arrive in many guises, I thought, as the sun climbed over the dun lowlands. It was 9 a.m., the heat already an intolerable pulse. In the south, toward the Amu Darya basin, shocks of green marked the fields where the season’s early sprouts of cotton were unfurling. After days spent pondering the wreckage of the present, Chilpik’s forsaken clay seemed less like an artifact of distant events, more an echo. It felt like a warning.
Henry Wismayer is a writer in London and a regular contributor to The Post’s travel section. | 2022-08-29T14:53:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In Uzbekistan, the Aral Sea is one of history’s worst environmental disasters is now a tourist attraction. What can it teach us about the fate of humankind? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/08/29/uzbekistan-russia-climate-change-global-warming/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/08/29/uzbekistan-russia-climate-change-global-warming/ |
A “filter team” has “completed its review” of material possibly covered by attorney-client privilege, the court filing says.
A photo illustration shows from the government’s partially released F.B.I. search warrant affidavit for former president Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate. The affidavit was heavily redacted for the protection of witnesses and law enforcement and to ensure the "integrity of the ongoing investigation." (Photo Illustration by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
FBI agents have already finished their review of possibly privileged documents seized in an Aug. 8 search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, according to a Justice Department court filing Monday that could undercut the former president’s efforts to have a special master appointed to review the files.
The “filter team” used by the Justice Department to sort through the documents and weed out any material that should not be reviewed by criminal investigators has already “completed its review,” the brief filed by Justice Department prosecutors says. The filing came in response to a ruling Saturday by U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon to hold a hearing this week on Trump’s motion seeking the appointment of a special master.
Trump’s legal team filed the request two weeks after the Aug. 8 search, calling the court-approved law enforcement action a “shockingly aggressive,” politically motivated raid. The former president’s lawyers claimed that federal authorities seized records to which they had no legal right.
Although the judge, who was nominated to her position by Trump in 2020, said she was inclined to appoint a special master, she also said her order “should not be construed as a final determination on Plaintiff’s Motion.”
Federal authorities took about two dozen boxes of materials from Mar-a-Lago during the search, including 11 sets of classified documents, several of them categorized as top secret. Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, told congressional lawmakers Friday that U.S. intelligence analysts will conduct a review of the classified materials to determine the potential risk to national security if their contents were disclosed.
In the past, special masters have generally been appointed in cases of attorney-client privilege, not executive privilege.
According to a partially redacted affidavit unsealed on Friday, the agents who conducted the search of Mar-a-Lago were seeking all “physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation of three potential crimes,” including a part of the Espionage Act outlawing gathering, transmitting or losing national defense information. The warrant also cites the destruction of records and concealment or mutilation of government material. | 2022-08-29T14:53:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trump’s Mar-a-Lago documents already examined by FBI, Justice Dept. tells judge - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/29/trumpspecial-master-documents/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/29/trumpspecial-master-documents/ |
What Tim Ryan does better than any Democrat
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) drinks a beer with a United Steelworkers official in Logan, Ohio, on Jan. 15. Ryan is running for a seat in the U.S. Senate. (Maddie McGarvey/The Washington Post)
Granted, J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate nominee in Ohio, is a lousy candidate. His fundraising is anemic. The venture capital investor and millionaire book author once suggested women should stay in abusive relationships, analogized abortion to slavery, and opposed abortion bans with exceptions for rape or incest. A few years back he also suggested that if a 55-year-old blue-collar worker gets laid off, he might “not be able to find a good-paying job for the rest of his working life.” Yeah, he’s that bad a candidate.
However, not every Democrat has been able to capitalize on a radical Republican’s flubs. It’s especially hard in a red state such as Ohio. But Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) is not just any Democrat. Here’s how he responded to Vance’s fatalism about Ohio jobs:
.@JDVance1 wants to give up on Ohio. You know what I say to that? Screw you.
If that's what you learned in California, leave that there.pic.twitter.com/ATESJyFyyF
Ryan still has a tough slog ahead of him in a state few Democrats thought would be in play this cycle — and it is. However, he refuses to allow the Republicans or the media to define issues. And against a weak opponent, that’s half the battle.
On transitioning to clean energy, he focuses on Ohio’s chance to become the “arsenal of energy.” He’s not running from President Biden, who’s coming to the state to champion a new semiconductor manufacturing plant. “This is a huge opportunity. The CHIPS Act that we passed is all about reshoring high-end manufacturing jobs,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “Intel is going to invest, what they’re saying, up to $100 billion into Ohio to manufacture these chips that have helped — driven up inflation that we need for our cars and all the technology.”
Ryan added, “This is the biggest, most transformational economic development project in Ohio’s history ... I’m proud to have supported this and helped bring this investment to Ohio. And I will be there.” He summed up: “This is all about dominating these industries of the future. That’s what my campaign is about. The average wage there is going to be $135,000 a year. Those are the jobs we’re talking about.”
On abortion, he refuses to take the bait when asked about if he accepts any limits on abortion. (This, by the way, is a misnomer since only a handful of states have no limit on abortion; moreover, the number of third-trimester, let alone late third-trimester abortions, is minuscule.) Ryan explained that “of course, we don’t support abortion at the end of term, unless, of course, there is an extraordinary circumstance.” He emphasized how rarely they occur: “You have a room, you have bought toys, you have clothing for the baby, everyone’s excited, and then something tragic happens.”
Ryan instead brings the conversation back to the real issue. “But what we’re saying is, are we going to preserve the woman’s right to choose at the end to save her own life? I mean, come on. Like, should the government really be in there? That sounds very anti-American.”
As Ryan noted, “the extreme position” is Vance’s, meaning “if you’re raped, you are forced to have the rapist’s baby, where there’s no exceptions at all.” He reiterated that forcing young rape victims to travel to another state is “insanity.” He added, “That’s the extremism we’re talking about right now. And we are talking about 50 years of established law, the status quo. That’s what I’m for that seemed to work pretty well for the last 50 years.”
In short, Ryan refuses to let himself be made into a liberal caricature. Ryan supported the Biden-backed, job-creating bills that the vast majority of Republicans opposed. And when it comes to abortion, Ryan simple will not concede any moral equivalence between forced birth and pro-choice positions. “Extreme” amounts to empowering “J.D. Vance or Ted Cruz or anybody else,” he says, to make critical health and family decisions for women.
No wonder Ryan has been doing so well. The Democratic agenda (jobs, pro-choice) is popular. If Democrats are smart, they’ll also run on it and make sure voters understand who the actual radicals are. | 2022-08-29T14:53:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Tim Ryan knows how to define the race - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/tim-ryan-centrist-message-ohio/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/tim-ryan-centrist-message-ohio/ |
Barcelona striker and his wife assaulted in armed robbery in their home
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang was the victim of an apparent armed robbery. (Josep Lago/AFP/Getty Images)
Barcelona striker Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and his wife were reportedly assaulted early Monday morning when four hooded and armed men broke into his home, forcing him to open a safe to steal jewelry and other valuables.
Aubameyang and his wife, Alysha Behague, suffered minor injuries in the incident, according to Spain’s El Pais newspaper. The two were handcuffed and tied up during the robbery, which occurred at roughly 1 a.m. They were threatened with firearms and iron bars, El Pais said, and the men fled the scene in a white Audi A3.
Aubameyang’s home in suburban Castelldefels has been targeted by burglars twice in the past two months. He and his family were not at home when the first break-in occurred, police said. The men threatened and struck Aubameyang and his wife, according to reports, and demanded that they open the safe.
Last week, a watch valued at over $70,000 was stolen from the car of Barcelona’s Robert Lewandowski as he stopped for supporters while en route to training. He attempted to chase the thief, who later was apprehended.
Europe’s top-flight players have been targeted by criminals several times recently. In December, Manchester City defender João Cancelo was assaulted at his home in England and Benfica defender Nicolás Otamendi was attacked during a robbery at his home in Portugal. The Barcelona homes of Gerard Piqué, Ansu Fati, Jordi Alba, Samuel Umtiti and Coutinho have been broken into during games, police have said. Players in Madrid, Seville and Valencia have been targeted in similar incidents.
Lionel Messi and Luis Suárez, who also live in the Castelldefels seaside suburb, have hired private security firms to protect their homes. Thieves stole jewelry and cash worth thousands from Messi’s Paris hotel room last year.
Meanwhile, star midfielder Paul Pogba said that authorities in Italy and France are investigating what he said are extortion attempts and threats from an organized gang. Pogba, the French national who left Manchester United and rejoined Italian Serie A club Juventus in July, said in a statement that, “the competent bodies in Italy and France were informed a month ago and there will be no further comments in relation to the ongoing investigation.”
The French prosecutor’s office confirmed to Reuters that an investigation has begun. “I confirm that an investigation was opened on 3 August 2022 on the charge of attempted extortion by an organized criminal gang. The investigations have been entrusted to the OCLCO [The Central Bureau for Combatting Organized Crime],” the prosecutor’s office said. | 2022-08-29T14:53:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Barcelona striker Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang assaulted in armed robbery - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/pierre-emerick-aubameyang-armed-robbery/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/pierre-emerick-aubameyang-armed-robbery/ |
Suleiman Kangangi died after a crash Saturday during the Vermont Overland gravel road race. (Joseph Viger/AP)
“Sule is our captain, friend, brother. He is also a father, husband and son,” the team said in a statement. “Gaping holes are left when giants fall. Sule was a giant. Instead of leading us at the front of the pack, he will now lead us as our guiding pole star as we press forward in the realization of his dream.”
Amani’s John Kariuki won Saturday’s race, which includes nearly 7,000 feet of climbing, and Amani’s Jordan Schleck finished third. The newly formed team consists of riders from Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda. Team Amani describes itself as a nonprofit organization promoting inclusivity in cycling and creating opportunities for riders based in Africa.
“Vermont Overland is completely heartbroken,” race organizer Ansel Dickey said in a statement. “He was a kind friend and an inspiring and heroic athlete to his teammates and the gravel cycling community at large. We extend our deepest sympathies to his family, his friends, Team Amani, and the people of Kenya who are mourning his loss today.”
Kangangi raced for the pro continental team Bike Aid from 2016 until 2020, according to Velo News. He finished third overall in the 2017 Tour du Rwanda. He revived his cycling career with the Migration Gravel Race, a four-day event that debuted in Kenya in 2021. It featured international cyclists such as Ian Boswell and Laurens ten Dam alongside East Africa’s aspiring pros racing on gravel in the Maasai Mara of Kenya.
“My heartfelt condolences to his family, and the entire cycling community, that has lost a talented cyclist, a mentor and a friend,” Rachel Ruto, the wife of Kenya’s president-elect, William Ruto, tweeted. “We will all miss him as an individual. Kenya has lost a champion. Rest in peace Sule.” | 2022-08-29T14:53:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Kenyan cyclist Suleiman Kangangi dies during race in Vermont - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/suleiman-kangangi-kenyan-cyclist-killed/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/suleiman-kangangi-kenyan-cyclist-killed/ |
Anthony Davis has had back-to-back disappointing seasons after helping the Los Angeles Lakers win the 2020 NBA championship. (Tony Gutierrez/AP)
Three years ago, Anthony Davis occupied the same hot seat that Kevin Durant occupied this summer, thanks to a polarizing trade demand that made him a summer headliner and an easy target for critics.
Though Davis was clumsy in executing his exit strategy, especially at first, he got his wish: a high-wattage partnership with LeBron James on the Los Angeles Lakers. Together, James and Davis delivered the 2020 title thanks to a mutually beneficial relationship. James carried the heaviest load on offense, Davis organized the defense and their combined talent and athleticism overwhelmed the bubble competition.
For Durant, Davis’s life after controversy and extended bare-knuckle negotiations is a reminder that the hard feelings over his failed power play with the Brooklyn Nets should dissipate somewhat over time. Durant’s turn in the spotlight, meanwhile, underscores how Davis has become the NBA’s most forgotten superstar since departing Disney World with the Larry O’Brien trophy two years ago.
Davis has every credential needed to be one of the faces of basketball. He’s a former No. 1 pick who enjoyed a standout freshman campaign at Kentucky and won an Olympic gold medal as a teenager. He’s an eight-time all-star on the NBA’s highest-profile franchise, a silky scorer and versatile defender rolled into one. And he’s still just 29 years old, younger than Shaquille O’Neal was when he split with Kobe Bryant and younger than Kevin Garnett was when he joined the Boston Celtics.
Buckner: Kevin Durant’s messy trade request left other players twisting in the wind
The plan, it seemed, was for Davis to take the baton from James as the Lakers’ leading option and to battle peers like Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid for control of the league. Instead, Davis has played just 76 games combined over the last two seasons, succumbing to injuries that derailed the Lakers.
After peaking in the bubble playoffs by averaging 27.7 points, 9.7 rebounds and 3.5 assists per game and providing dependable All-World defense, Davis limped through a first-round exit against the Phoenix Suns in the 2021 postseason and appeared in only three games after the all-star break last season. There were consequences: Davis wasn’t selected as an all-star for the first time since his rookie year, and the Lakers tumbled from preseason conference favorites to an embarrassing 11th-place finish.
Persistent health concerns haven’t been the only issue dimming Davis’s shine. Los Angeles’s disastrous 2021 offseason robbed him of like-minded defensive contributors like Alex Caruso and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope while stranding him with Russell Westbrook, a ball-dominant guard who lacked Rajon Rondo’s setup skills.
As a result, a bulkier Davis found himself trying to cover up for too many weak links on defense and struggling to find a groove on offense, as his shooting percentages on three-point attempts and midrange jumpers fell off a cliff. Remarkably, the Lakers went just 17-23 with Davis on the court — a stunning reversal from their 2020 title campaign when they were 62-21 during the regular season and postseason when he played. Meanwhile, James, who recently signed a two-year max extension, has continued to dominate headlines and produce at an elite level, postponing Davis’s franchise takeover.
The Lakers’ 2022 offseason, to date, hasn’t done Davis many favors. A Westbrook trade has yet to develop and a deal for Patrick Beverley along with the incoming free agent class — highlighted by Lonnie Walker IV, Thomas Bryant and Juan Toscano-Anderson — hasn’t brought in proven difference-makers. Los Angeles did hire Darvin Ham to replace Frank Vogel as coach, and the former Milwaukee Bucks assistant quickly set to work talking up Davis and his importance to the Lakers.
“When he’s healthy like he was in 2020 in that bubble run, he’s top-five in the league easy, top-three,” Ham said on a Showtime podcast in July. “This is not going to work without AD. … He’s the centerpiece to that championship table that we’re trying to build.”
Even putting aside the overly ambitious title talk, Davis finds himself at a reputational crossroads. His Hall of Fame future is secure — Basketball-Reference.com gives him a 98.5 percent chance to earn induction — but he has lost his way on what once felt like a predestined journey to becoming an all-timer.
Tough questions will be unavoidable if Davis endures another injury-plagued or otherwise underwhelming season. Can Davis be the best player on a title team? How bad will his injury issues get in his 30s given that he has only played in 70-plus games twice in his 20s? With James approaching 40, how long can the Lakers afford to wait for Davis to regain his bubble form before exploring alternatives for their future?
The good news for Davis is that he can play the upcoming season free of contract concerns, as his current deal runs through the 2024-2025 season. Yet reasons for skepticism about the Lakers linger: Westbrook’s style of play and max contract are major impediments; James has dealt with his own recurring injury issues; and Davis still isn’t surrounded by enough plus defenders.
Much like Durant, Davis has shied from fame at times, generally preferring to let his game do the talking. That strategy works fine during winning seasons, but it creates a vacuum that is easily filled with criticism during tougher times. When disappointments accumulate, the public is apt to move on to more charismatic personalities.
While Davis survived his 2019 storm and won a ring, the true greats find ways to do it again and again. There’s still time for him to get things back on track, but none left to waste. | 2022-08-29T15:14:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Anthony Davis became the NBA’s forgotten superstar - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/anthony-davis-lakers-disappointing-seasons/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/anthony-davis-lakers-disappointing-seasons/ |
Summer of KidsPost: Readers enjoy their time near the water
Kids share their vacations photos from Delaware, North Carolina and Florida.
Readers traveled to vacation spots along the water in this edition of Summer of KidsPost. (The Washington Post collage/Family photos)
School is on the horizon (or maybe already started), but we’re still enjoying the sunny days and reading about how readers spent their summers. See how these four KidsPost-reading families enjoyed their waterside adventures.
This is the last call for Summer of KidsPost entries. You still have a few days to bring a KidsPost page to wherever you’re having fun and have a photo taken to share with other readers!
Tommy Garvey, 5, and Anna Garvey, 8, both from Alexandria, Virginia, enjoyed, on their trip to Lewes, Delaware, visiting the beach and seeing the Lightship Overfalls. This lightship was the last light vessel made for the United States Lighthouse Services before it became part of the United States Coast Guard.
Chloe Chenault, 12, of Sterling, Virginia, visited the Roanoke Marshes Lighthouse in Manteo, North Carolina, during a recent vacation in the Outer Banks. The lighthouse is a replica of the original, which was constructed in 1877 on the southern end of the Croatan Sound on Roanoke Island. The original lighthouse was crucial in helping sailors and fishermen travel safely through the waterways, but the replica is filled with historical exhibits and offers lovely views of the sound.
Danny Welton, 11, and Lizzie Welton, 7, of Herndon, Virginia, visited the Naples Pier in Naples, Florida. During their time on the Florida beaches, they made sand castles and road boogie boards. Their family took a boat tour of the Ten Thousand Islands in Everglades National Park, where they saw dolphins, manatees, bonnethead sharks, spotted eagle rays and pink spoonbill birds.
We’ll feature more readers’ photos in the printed KidsPost next Monday and until then on kidspost.com. Three randomly selected participants will receive a KidsPost prize package.
● Families can submit only one photo, and it must have been taken after May 27, 2022. Entries are due by Thursday. | 2022-08-29T15:57:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Summer of KidsPost: Readers enjoy their time near the water - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/08/29/summer-of-kidspost-water/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/08/29/summer-of-kidspost-water/ |
Flood victims in Pakistan carried belongings they could salvage from their submerged houses as they wade through a flooded area in Dera Allah Yar on Aug. 28. (Video: AP)
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Floodwaters ripping through Pakistan have killed more than 1,000 people since mid-June, affected millions of others and left entire villages inaccessible to relief workers.
Pakistani officials are calling the scale of the crisis “unprecedented” as they scramble to provide supplies, medical assistance and temporary shelter to those who have lost their homes.
The provinces of Sindh and Balochistan in the south of the country have suffered the most destruction. Some families tell The Washington Post they haven’t received any government assistance, forcing thousands to flee on foot in search of food and dry land.
“I have never in my life seen such rains and the floodwaters,” said Bashir Ahmed Mallah, a 62-year-old farmer in Sindh. When the waters began to rise in his village last week, he and his family crowded inside their home. “We thought these were our last hours before death,” he said.
The floods are the worst to hit Pakistan in over a decade. Initial government figures suggest they could be more devastating than the 2010 floods that killed hundreds and left millions homeless. Already battling a spiraling economic crisis and a power struggle with the country’s former leader, Imran Khan, the Pakistani government is appealing for outside help.
Officials say that they are struggling with limited supplies, and that relief teams are overwhelmed by the magnitude of the disaster.
Photos and videos: Flooding leaves more than 1,000 people dead in Pakistan
“The devastation caused by the floods is unprecedented,” Sindh Information Minister Sharjeel Inam Memon told The Post. In Sindh province, some 1,800 camps have been set up for those who lost their homes, and Memon said thousands more remain stranded.
“The government is doing its best,” he said, but called on “rich people and welfare organizations” to join the relief effort. “The destruction and losses are so huge, it’s something we have never seen before.”
Mallah, the farmer in Sindh, said his house is badly damaged, but more than a dozen homes in his area — most built from mud brick — have collapsed completely, and entire fields of crops are in ruins.
“There is nothing left, just dirt,” he said.
A government health center was set up in his village for a day last week, Mallah said, but it has since been dismantled, even though hundreds of people are without food and shelter. “We need immediate government assistance,” he pleaded.
The head of a local humanitarian group in Balochistan said damage to infrastructure has left some districts completely cut off.
Simultaneously, China suffers extreme flooding and unprecedented drought
Naseer Chan, who runs the National Humanitarian Network in the province, said his organization has prepared relief goods and food packages, but can’t access the worst-hit areas because roads and bridges have been washed away or are underwater.
Government relief efforts in Balochistan are heavily reliant on helicopters to reach those in need, according to Faisal Panizai, a spokesman for the province’s disaster management authority.
More than 61,000 houses in the province have been partially or completely damaged by the floods, according to the latest government assessment, Panizai said.
How water damages a flooded house — and what can be saved
Ali Raza’s neighborhood in Sindh is completely surrounded by floodwaters. To access food, medicine and clean water, he has to walk through three feet of water to the nearest dry land.
When the floodwaters hit last week, the noise was “deafening,” he said. All he remembers is the sound of his children screaming. Part of his house collapsed during the onslaught.
“We thought only God could save us now,” he remembered. His family survived without any physical injuries, but one of his sons is severely traumatized. He hasn’t spoken since and refuses to eat.
“The entire city was underwater for days and many areas are still flooded,” Raza said.
The 47-year-old day laborer works in the fields to support his family, but can’t make an income with most of the surrounding farmland underwater. He’s heard hundreds are seriously injured in his district and some have died, but with phone lines largely down and families scattered, it is impossible to know the true toll.
“Everybody is in shock,” he said.
Khan reported from Peshawar, Pakistan, and George from Kabul. | 2022-08-29T16:10:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pakistan flooding leaves more than 1,000 dead in 'unprecedented' event - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/29/pakistan-floods-monsoon-climate-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/29/pakistan-floods-monsoon-climate-change/ |
Washington Commanders running back Brian Robinson Jr. was shot during a robbery on Sunday evening. His injuries are not life-threatening. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
Washington Commanders running back Brian Robinson Jr. “was able to wrestle a firearm away” from one of the two men attempting to rob him Sunday before the other suspect shot him twice, D.C. police said Monday morning.
The men, who were both armed, approached Robinson after he left a storefront on the 1000 block of H Street NE shortly before 6 p.m. Robinson was taken to MedStar Washington Hospital Center for treatment of injuries that are not believed to be life-threatening.
Authorities have not identified the suspects, which D.C. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III said are likely between 15 and 17 years old. Police described the assailants as having shoulder-length dreadlocks with one wearing a black or brown shirt with yellow smiley faces on it. One firearm was recovered about a block south of the shooting, and police obtained the vehicle the two men used to flee the scene, which they believe was stolen in Prince George’s County on Friday.
According to the incident report, Robinson’s keys were stolen and he told police that he was shot in the leg.
Robinson published a photo on Instagram on Monday with a message acknowledging surgery “went well” and saying he was appreciative of everyone’s prayers.
The Commanders issued a statement Sunday night confirming that Robinson was stable and that his family and a contingent of team officials had joined him at the hospital. Coach Ron Rivera was among those who visited, along with team owners Daniel and Tanya Snyder, team president Jason Wright, general manager Martin Mayhew, running backs coach Randy Jordan, chief medical officer Anthony Casolaro and director of mental wellness and clinical services Barbara Roberts.
Rivera said Monday that Robinson is “doing well” and “it’ll be a matter of time before he’s back out here.” He declined to give a timeline or any more specifics about the extent of Robinson’s injuries or his recovery but noted that both Robinson and his doctors were “very positive.”
“I’ve gotten several phone calls as a head coach, unfortunately, but this one was one of the harder ones,” Rivera added. “… He really is more than just a football player. He is really a heck of a young man.”
The coach said he was watching film of Robinson when he got the call about the shooting. He immediately told Jordan, Washington’s running backs coach, and the two drove together to the hospital.
Rivera said that, in talking with others on the Commanders staff, he could “feel the anger swelling up” about Robinson’s situation and about gun violence in the United States.
Before practice Monday morning, Rivera brought his players together for a team meeting to talk about Robinson and the incident. Rivera asked players to “do the best they could” in practice that morning, and he came away pleased by their effort.
“You never want to see something like that happen,” defensive tackle Jonathan Allen said. “By the grace of God, he’s okay. Non-life-threatening [injuries], and he’s going to be okay. That’s the most important thing right now.”
Sporting a “Wear Orange” T-shirt to support the gun violence prevention movement, Rivera urged more discussion about gun safety and said it can’t be “a partisan issue.”
“What we saw in this case and others is just a wanton use of a firearm that hurts somebody,” D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said Monday.
The Commanders picked Robinson, 23, in the third round of this year’s draft out of Alabama. He finished his college career with 29 rushing touchdowns (10th in Crimson Tide history) and 2,704 rushing yards (11th). After impressing throughout the offseason with the Commanders, he is expected to play a key role in the team’s offense alongside fellow backs Antonio Gibson and J.D. McKissic.
The team is expected to get more details on Robinson’s health later Monday, and the coaching staff will decide on how to move forward. There has been discussion of placing Robinson on the non-football injury list.
Lauren Lumpkin contributed to this report. | 2022-08-29T16:24:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Commanders RB Brian Robinson Jr. struggled with suspects in shooting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/brian-robinson-commanders-robbery-shooting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/brian-robinson-commanders-robbery-shooting/ |
Elijah Green grew up in Florida, one of seven siblings. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
Even once Green had stopped playing football and focused on baseball, the sessions — organized by his dad, Eric — continued, with father and son making the 20-minute drive from their home in Windermere, Fla. The drills evolved. So did Green.
“Sometimes he hates [the hill] because it’s not easy,” Eric Green said. “And I always tell him, ‘If it was easy, everybody would be out here doing this. This is the special group that’s doing this type of stuff.’ And he bought into it.”
Nationals draft Elijah Green, a high school outfielder, with No. 5 pick
Eventually, Green developed into a top prospect, and by 18, was facing a mountain of expectations — a once-timid kid, finding ways to deal with intense pressure and increased attention. That attention grew considerably on a July day in California, when the Washington Nationals made the high school outfielder the No. 5 overall selection in the 2022 MLB draft.
‘Elite speed’
Eric Green played for four NFL teams over 10 seasons, including the Baltimore Ravens and Pittsburgh Steelers, where he made two Pro Bowl appearances. His career meant he could give his family a comfortable home, but he wanted to make sure his seven children didn’t trade their comfort for work ethic.
“I wanted them to see what life can be outside of these doors and outside of this gated community,” Eric said. “It worked out well for [Elijah] because he got tougher. He got to develop a competitiveness that was unmatched when he got to other places.”
Eric recalls how his son would play in a church basketball league as a boy. Kids kept stealing the ball from him. Green wasn’t bothered by it. But that bothered his dad.
So Eric got his son into football. Green eventually joined the Apopka Raptors, an AAU team on which he starred for six seasons and won four championships. But football wasn’t Green’s passion and — even though he was better at it — he quit the sport to focus on baseball.
Around the same time, Green began to work with A.J. Brooks, a former Boston College running back. Brooks, now a speed and conditioning coach, said that Green, still a reserved kid, was “a freak of nature” with “elite speed,” even when he met Green at 13.
Green’s speed was notable as a high school freshman. Brian Martinez, his head coach during his freshman and sophomore years at TNXL Academy, said “the ground shakes” when Green runs.
“If he focused on track, and that was something that he really wanted to take serious, I truly believe that he could be an Olympic track athlete for the USA,” Brooks said. “He possesses that kind of speed.”
‘He’s kind of a celebrity’
“We’d walk into places and little kids are asking him for his autographs when he’s 16 years old,” Martinez said. “He’s kind of a celebrity, like everybody talked about him since he was young. So I’ve never seen the hype that a person’s gotten like him.”
The attention wasn’t just in Florida. Videos of Green playing summer ball hit social media as his star grew. And after a strong sophomore summer, Green jumped to the top of the rankings for his draft class. He left for IMG Academy, an elite preparatory sports academy in Bradenton, Fla., ahead of his junior year.
Dan Simonds, director of baseball at IMG Academy, said traveling with Elijah was like traveling with “a member of the Beatles.” The program’s technical director, John Russell, remembers kids at a tournament in Alabama trying to convince their parents to wait around so they could watch Green and get a signature.
“Even in the minors, you really don’t have guys who come up to the plate and they have built such a reputation around themselves with how good they are that people get excited when they strike out,” said Diamyn Hall, a leadership coach at IMG. “So this is an 18-year-old who was experiencing this and he handled it like a professional.”
Simonds said Green’s teammates took to that work ethic and tried to follow in his footsteps. Green would often take swings in the cage after practices and, slowly, the coaches noticed how Green’s teammates would show up to work with him after-hours, too.
“Everything kind of gets amplified to a point where you know, there are 16-, 17- and 18-year-olds that have a brand out there on social media,” IMG national team head coach Dave Turgeon said. “But he was able to separate that from reality … he knew that he had work to do. He’s playing for a team and he’s playing for his teammates. And to be at that age and to be able to handle that is special.”
‘The best player out there’
Green has just started his professional baseball career, but the expectations and pressure are even greater than before. He’ll be continued to be evaluated by how quickly he makes adjustments.
Top pick Elijah Green flashes power at Nationals Park: ‘I can do everything’
Those around Green said it’s not a matter of if, but when, Green will put together all the pieces together. But no one is more confident in himself than Green. When he visited Nationals Park in late July, he said he could change the game with one swing. Then, he said he hoped to be in the majors in two to three years.
Green was pretty quiet for the rest of his visit. He didn’t say much, unless he was talking to his mom, Leslie; his sister, Emani; his agent, David Meter; or members of the Nationals organization. But when he was blasting balls out of the park with big leaguers watching nearby, he looked like he knew he belonged.
“He’s not boastful, he’s very modest,” said Brooks, the conditioning coach from Florida. “But every time he steps on the field, whether it’s training or some type of competition, he knows and his peers know — he’s the best player out there.” | 2022-08-29T16:24:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Elijah Green developed into a first-round pick - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/elijah-green-development-nationals-prospect/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/elijah-green-development-nationals-prospect/ |
Johnny Depp’s VMAs cameo is the latest stop on his redemption tour
Actor Johnny Depp made three surprise appearances at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards on Aug. 28. His face appeared digitally on the helmet of a moon person. (Video: Courtesy of MTV)
With NASA having scrapped Monday’s planned moon rocket launch over engine issues, it seems the only astronaut to capture the public’s attention early this week was … Johnny Depp?
The actor made a brief cameo at Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards as the Moonperson, the VMAs mascot generally present at the show in trophy form. This year, producers made the choice to bring the Moonperson to life. After Lizzo’s opening performance, a figure in a spacesuit appeared above the crowd, suspended from the ceiling. The visor opened to reveal a video recording of Depp’s face.
“Hey, you know what? I needed the work,” he said in one of a few appearances during the show.
The bizarre moment — perhaps on brand for this particular award ceremony — marked Depp’s first major public appearance since winning his defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard over a 2018 Washington Post op-ed in which she described herself as representative of domestic abuse. After a June verdict landing largely in Depp’s favor, awarding him $15 million in damages and Heard $2 million for a counterclaim, the 59-year-old actor said, “The jury gave me my life back.”
Depp has charted his career revival in realms beyond MTV as well. Less than a week after the verdict — around the time he created a TikTok account, which as of Monday boasts 16.5 million followers — Depp stood alongside British guitarist Jeff Beck as Beck announced at a concert that they would be releasing an album together. And though he joked about needing work, Depp has already booked multiple film gigs, including a biopic about the artist Modigliani that he will direct and co-produce with Al Pacino.
Dior, which has employed Depp as the celebrity face of its Sauvage cologne since 2015, stood by him throughout the high-profile trial and reportedly re-upped his contract earlier this month with a multiyear, seven-figure deal. The fashion house did not respond to The Washington Post’s request for confirmation, but its Instagram account hinted at a continued partnership the day before reports of the deal spread when it shared photos of Depp backstage at a musical performance.
“Fearless yet human, just like Sauvage,” the caption read.
Heard, 36, has maintained that she didn’t intend for Depp to lose work as a result of her publishing the op-ed, as she told “Today” show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie in a sit-down interview after the verdict’s delivery: “I have no bad feelings or ill will toward him at all,” Heard said. “I know that might be hard to understand, or it might be really easy to understand if you’ve ever loved anyone.”
Lawyers representing Heard in July filed notice to appeal the verdict, which attorney Elaine Bredehoft said in a separate “Today” appearance sent “a horrible message” to women who have survived domestic abuse. Depp’s team followed suit, filing their own notice to appeal the following day.
More on the Depp-Heard trial
Jury rules actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard defamed each other
Why Johnny Depp lost his libel case in the U.K. but won in the U.S.
The trial of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard was too much and not enough | 2022-08-29T17:55:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Johnny Depp’s VMAs cameo is the latest stop on his redemption tour - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/29/johnny-depp-vmas-trial-dior/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/08/29/johnny-depp-vmas-trial-dior/ |
We could well see Tropical Storm Danielle form but it’s unclear whether it will threaten land
The National Hurricane Center is monitoring four disturbances for possible development in the Atlantic. (National Hurricane Center)
After a sleepy start to hurricane season, the Atlantic is awakening. A tropical storm is likely to develop this week from a disturbance east of the Lesser Antilles, and has a small chance to eventually threaten the Bahamas and even creep onto U.S. weather maps.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami estimates that the nascent tropical disturbance has an 80 percent chance of eventual maturation into a tropical depression or named storm. Such a disturbance earns a name when maximum sustained winds reach 39 mph, and becomes a hurricane once those winds hit 74 mph. “Danielle” is the next name on the Hurricane Center’s list.
Late August into September is usually the buildup to peak hurricane season in the Atlantic, but thus far the basin has been largely dormant.
If August does draw to a close Wednesday without a single named storm forming, it will be the first empty August since 1997. As it stands, the Atlantic is only running at about 8 percent of average in terms of ACE, or accumulated cyclone energy — a measure of the total atmospheric energy released by tropical storms and hurricanes.
But the hurricane season is about to try to play catch-up. In addition to the developing system east of the Lesser Antilles that is likely to become Danielle, there are three other Atlantic disturbances scattered about that bear watching.
The disturbance most likely to become “Danielle”
As of 8 a.m. Monday, a ragged cluster of showers and thunderstorms was about a third of the way between the Lesser Antilles and the west coast of Africa.
Admittedly, the system was not much to look at on satellite, since robust thunderstorm activity is not overly widespread. The wave was exhibiting a broad swirl of circulation, though, and that is integral to eventual organization. The extent to which thunderstorms blossom and fill in within the diffuse region of low pressure remains to be seen.
The American (GFS) model projects the system to eventually become a hurricane. Before it can do that, however, the strip of low pressure must consolidate into a more symmetric vortex, which will entail the formation of a low pressure center and a subsequent wraparound of winds.
Where the system may head
It’s probable we will have a named storm on our hands by Friday. By then it will be due north of the Leeward Islands by a couple hundred miles, but should spare the archipelago. The system, which could be flirting with hurricane strength at that point, will probably be diverted more toward the north into early next week, at which point a close shave with Bermuda is possible.
However, there are caveats to that forecast. Until a center of circulation actually forms, it is not totally clear what steering currents might ultimately capture the storm, which makes predicting exactly where it will go a challenge.
Some model runs over the weekend had suggested that the storm could threaten the Bahamas and/or the U.S. East Coast, and such scenarios cannot be ruled out. The latest model simulations generally suggest that the storm will remain out to sea but that still could change.
There are three other systems to watch, the westernmost of which is the tropical wave that the American model had been projecting would become a powerhouse storm in the Gulf of Mexico. That’s highly unlikely to occur, and the model has recently backed off earlier forecasts. Instead, a ragged mass of showers and thunderstorms nestled within a subtle zone of low pressure east of the Yucatán Peninsula will drift northwestward in the coming days. Then it’ll enter the Bay of Campeche.
There might be some development with it eventually, but it’ll probably run out the clock in its limited window to strengthen as it inches toward the coastline of either Tamaulipas, Mexico, or southern Texas around Labor Day.
Otherwise, there’s a lonesome swirl about 500 miles east of Bermuda, but that’s unlikely to do much. The only other system to keep an eye on is rolling off the coasts of Senegal and Gambia. It’ll churn north of the Cabo Verde Islands and may slowly develop as it heads out to sea. | 2022-08-29T17:55:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A named storm will likely form in the Atlantic this week - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/29/atlantic-tropical-storm-disturbance-danielle/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/29/atlantic-tropical-storm-disturbance-danielle/ |
Briar Woods, 1-9 last year, shows progress by thumping Broad Run
High school football notes
Briar Woods senior running back Andrew Joyce breaks through the Broad Run defense in the team’s 42-13 win Friday. (Shaun Ross)
It took one drive for Briar Woods senior lineman Marcus Roser to know this year would be different. It wasn’t the method by which the Falcons played — they ran and ran and ran, as they did last year when they didn’t have a quarterback — but what they saw when they handed off the ball: a sweaty Broad Run defensive line getting more and more fatigued.
Broad Run advanced to the Class 4 state championship last season. So Briar Woods, coming off a 1-9 season, was plenty encouraged after it whipped the Spartans, 42-13, on Friday in Ashburn.
“Last year toward the end of the season, we were all just like, ‘This sucks.’ ” Roser said. “The morning after our final game last year, we were in the weight room.”
Briar Woods entered last season with five players who could bench 200 pounds, but by the middle of this summer, half the team could. On Friday the Falcons were well-equipped to bend the Spartans’ defense until senior Andrew Joyce’s first-drive, 20-yard touchdown run snapped it. The rout was quickly on.
“We can throw over the top now, too,” said Roser, who said he got goose bumps when sophomore quarterback Brady Carmical’s first completion landed in the hands of sophomore Colin Capistrant for a 78-yard touchdown. Carmical completed 9 of 10 passes.
Coach Michael Burnett’s program is stronger, closer and more disciplined now than when he took over in May 2021, a trend that is consistent with his résumé. In 2006, Burnett inherited a 1-9 Broad Run program and then helped it capture state titles in his third and fourth years. He left in 2010 for newly built Tuscarora, where he guided the team to championship games in 2014 and 2017. Then he left for a private school in California.
In his second season of his second go-round at Briar Woods, his Falcons appear for real.
“My wife says, you know, ‘Why don’t you ever take over a good program,’ ” Burnett said. “In my heart, I believe football is a game where any program can be successful if the kids buy in. When I see an opportunity to help and make that difference, you could say that’s what makes me kick.”
At Blake, new coach adjusts to top job
Friday will be Bryon Marshall’s seventh opening day game with Blake but the first in which he carries the title of head coach.
Marshall, who became well-known and liked within in the Montgomery County program as the JV coach and a varsity assistant, was hired to the top role in January. He is one of three new coaches in Montgomery County who will make their debuts this week.
“The strangest part is that, for the last couple of years, I’ve made suggestions. Now, I make decisions,” Marshall said. “And there’s plenty of behind-the-scenes things you’re not involved in until you’re the head coach.”
On the field, it took Marshall a few practices to find the right place to be.
“Honestly, when I first got the job, it felt a bit lonely, because normally I’m with a position group or in there working. Now I was overseeing things,” he said. “You can’t always take the time to work individually with certain people.”
The Bengals have a young roster, which presents pros and cons for Marshall. A lot of the players are intimately familiar with him and his preferences, considering he was recently their JV coach. But the team lacks varsity experience and features just eight seniors.
As Marshall sees it, those seniors have the chance to serve as the architects of a new era.
“When they come back to this school in 10 or 15 years and the program is where it’s at, I want them to be able to look back and say they set the foundation,” Marshall said. “I’m asking them to be that foundation for this year and the years beyond.”
Elliot Meine, RB, Lake Braddock: In his first game back from an ACL injury, the senior picked up 173 all-purpose yards and added three scores in the Bruins’ 57-10 win over Hayfield.
Andre Carter, QB, McKinley Tech: The senior’s five-touchdown performance propelled the Trainers to a 37-36 overtime victory over KIPP.
Aidan Conrath, QB, Gonzaga. The junior completed 22 of 26 passes for 316 yards and three touchdowns in the Eagles’ 37-14 win over Archbishop Carroll.
Northwest at Damascus, Friday, 6:30 p.m.
Riverbend (Fredericksburg) at Freedom (Woodbridge), Friday, 7 p.m.
Rock Creek Christian at DeMatha, Friday, 7 p.m.
Wise at North Point, Friday, 7 p.m.
Jones, Good Counsel run to season-opening win
After leading by 14 points earlier in the game, Good Counsel had allowed Saint Joseph Regional (N.J.) to tie the score at 21 late in the third quarter Friday night. Falcons running back Dilin Jones didn’t allow that score to last long.
Jones received a handoff on the 25-yard line and ran through the middle of the line. After juking a defender near midfield, nothing stood between Jones and the end zone as the junior scored from 74 yards out.
That play ignited Good Counsel’s offense, which scored twice more in the ensuing six minutes in its 42-21 season-opening win in Olney. Previously No. 2, Good Counsel moved up to the top spot in The Post’s rankings this week.
“When we play like that,” Jones said, “we can go undefeated.”
On nine carries, Jones rushed for 151 yards and three touchdowns. He began the game with a 52-yard touchdown run.
Jones said he was chubby as a child, so he played fullback. But as he grew up in middle school, Jones slimmed down and released his energy by shifting to running back.
This month, Jones, 6-feet and 175 pounds, has collected multiple Power Five scholarship offers, including one from Miami last week. Before turning his attention to recruiting, Jones is focused on winning a Washington Catholic Athletic Conference championship. The Falcons lost to St. John’s in last year’s title game.
“We talk about that [game] every day, every practice,” Jones said.
Ballou shows grit
As the game clock expired and his team sewed up a 19-18 home victory over Anacostia, Ballou Coach Kenny Brown did his best impersonation of Tiger Woods and fist-pumped as he let out a roar.
After experiencing the high of sprinting to a 13-0 lead, and the anxiety of being a dropped two-point conversion away from losing, the Knights were fired up to win Friday’s Southeast Cup.
“Winning this big rivalry game, the first game of the year is so big for my players and our school building as a whole,” Brown said. “This isn’t the same group from last year.”
The Knights went 3-7 last fall and had a tough time responding to adversity during Brown’s first year at the helm. This counted as a major step forward.
Three total touchdowns from quarterback Zyon Pierce paved the way for Ballou to extend its Southeast Cup winning streak to 10.
“Last season, we had a lot of young guys that were forced to play early,” Brown said. “This year those guys are smarter, bigger, stronger and have a better feel for the game. They want to win, and late in the game it showed.” | 2022-08-29T17:56:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Briar Woods, 1-9 last year, shows progress by thumping Broad Run - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/briar-woods-1-9-last-year-shows-progress-by-thumping-broad-run/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/briar-woods-1-9-last-year-shows-progress-by-thumping-broad-run/ |
‘NFL Blitz’ is back, depicting a gentler, less violent NFL
(Washington Post illustration; Arcade1Up)
Twenty-five years after the popular series launched, and 10 years after its last edition came out, “NFL Blitz” is returning in the arcade format that made it famous. Arcade1Up, a retro arcade company, announced that remastered versions of the series’ first three games will be released this fall, featuring retired star players including Jerry Rice, Deion Sanders, Dan Marino, Brett Favre and Jerome Bettis.
NFL Blitz Legends, the new arcade cabinet, will include “NFL Blitz,” “NFL Blitz ‘99” and “NFL Blitz 2000: Gold Edition.” The rerelease of these games, which were famous for playing up the sport’s physicality and violence, comes after years in which the NFL has made changes to its rules to increase player safety and improve perceptions surrounding the dangers of playing football. In a nod to these initiatives, Arcade1Up removed certain tackles and kept out animations that had been banned by the NFL dating back to the 90s, including after-the-whistle hits and other stunts that would earn a real life NFL player a disciplinary meeting with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
Discussing how the (real) game has changed since he retired after the 2004 season, Hall of Famer and three-time NFL Champion Jerry Rice said in an interview with The Washington Post that while he thinks recent rule changes have helped protect players, he liked playing in his era.
“I think the game is all about protecting players now. But back when I played it was a little bit different,” he said with a smirk. “You had to establish yourself on a football field, you knew that it was going to be a physical football game, and that you were going to get hit. … Back in the day it was brutal. You had to go out and you had to protect yourself. But I think it was something that the fans want to see.”
Acknowledging that players who target opponents should be kicked out of the game, Rice lamented the interruptions to gameplay due to the increased use of instant replay and what he sees as the greater amount of control given to officials in terms of deciding game outcomes.
“I understand it’s all about protecting players, but I played when you didn’t have all of those [officiating] decisions, where you just let the players go out and play the game,” he said.
Still, Rice lit up with excitement talking about the fluidity and pace of “NFL Blitz.” He highlighted the retro elements, including team logos and rosters, which hark back to a previous era of gridiron glory.
“It’s really the game of the ’90s,” Rice said.
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Taking these games, some of which were developed over 20 years ago, and making them run on modern hardware and graphics engines, was not an easy task, according to Davin Sufer, chief technology and product officer for Arcade1Up.
“You can do the ROM file, the original builds, [and] get your hardware to run it or you can dig up the source code and build the game from scratch,” Sufer said. “We did the latter.” It took two years for him and his team to complete the game.
The Arcade1Up version, in addition to increasing frame rate and responsiveness, also added an online multiplayer function and can be updated remotely by the developer. A 49-way joystick, present on the original arcade versions, has also been preserved. The “NFL Blitz” arcade cabinet features a 17-inch screen, stands about 5 feet high, and weighs 92 pounds. It has a 1280 x 1024 screen resolution and light up marquee.
“This is by far the most sophisticated game we’ve ever done,” said Scott Bachrach, CEO of Arcade1Up.
In addition to the technical challenges, Arcade1Up also had to deal with a complex legal landscape, which included negotiating new licenses with the NFL and the Football Greats Alliance, a group of retired NFL players. Working with the NFL, the Arcade1Up team agreed to remove and edit animations that showed players targeting one another by leading with the helmets during tackles. They were also able to get a license for 409 of the 448 players in the original games.
“To come out with this really is a small miracle in my mind,” said Mark Turmell, creator of the original “NFL Blitz.”
Academics want to preserve video games. Copyright laws make it complicated.
Turmell, who was involved with the remastering process, said he thinks the new editions stay true to his original versions.
“In terms of the hard hitting nature of NFL Blitz, that’s all still here,” Turmell said. “In terms of an arcade game, things move fast, things change on a dime, you can dive through the air, all of those arcade elements persist. That’s the code that’s running in this game. It really holds up.”
Asked about his own abilities, Turmell spoke like a true gamer, albeit one with a pretty big edge.
“I am pretty tough to beat,” he said. “I wrote the playbooks. So when I see a formation, this wide receiver goes out and makes a cut, I know the defender will go the wrong direction. In my head, I know all those movements.”
Rice, who also seems to know the movements of opponents ahead of time, said that even though he has been retired for years, this time of year — the start of the NFL season — is still special for him.
“It’s football season man! Even though it’s preseason, I get excited because preseason got me ready for the regular season,” he said.
For Rice, “NFL Blitz” and other sports games offer a taste of the reality he experienced on the field. That, he says, is why those kinds of titles are so popular.
“I think people get a chance to live that dream through these legends,” Rice said. | 2022-08-29T17:56:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NFL Blitz Legends brings back NFL Blitz without the illegal hits - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/29/nfl-blitz-legends-jerry-rice/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/29/nfl-blitz-legends-jerry-rice/ |
Tony Clark and the MLBPA have started the process of trying to unionize minor league players. (Richard Drew/AP Photo)
The process began late Sunday night, when Tony Clark, the union’s executive director, sent a virtual letter to all minor league players on domestic affiliated teams, informing them of the body’s intention to open its ranks.
Players also received authorization cards on which to affirm their willingness to let the MLBPA represent them. Those cards, which a person familiar with the union’s efforts say will remain confidential, will be used to gauge support for the effort and potentially prompt a vote among minor leaguers. The National Labor Relations Board requires at least 30 percent support on such cards to spur an election — in this case, a minor league player vote to unionize with MLBPA as its representative.
The move represents a swift and stunning departure from the union’s posture toward minor leaguers to date — a posture best described as supportive but hands off. Yet as groups like Advocates for Minor Leaguers pushed for housing, higher salaries and better facilities for players, and as the antitrust exemption that helps MLB dictate those conditions comes under more scrutiny, momentum for change to the long-standing system is reaching all-time highs. The union decided the time was right to take a big swing that never seemed inevitable, and still may not be.
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Clark and his staff will spend Monday answering questions for interested minor leaguers, according to people familiar with the plan. After that, MLBPA officials will await the return of those authorization cards in the hopes of a strong enough showing to proceed. If they get it — and multiple people familiar with the situation say they expect plenty of support — they can hold an election.
If a majority of minor leaguers vote to be represented by the MLBPA, the NLRB would require MLB to recognize the union. MLB could also choose to recognize the union voluntarily, though after taking over and consolidating the minor league system ahead of the 2021 season, the league office seems likely to fight for the cost-controlled status quo to which its owners are accustomed. If a union is recognized, the MLBPA could then collectively bargain with the owners on behalf of minor league players like it does for major leaguers.
Exactly what consequences unionization and that bargaining could bring for minor league players and their major league employers remains to be seen, though having the MLBPA represent both major and minor leaguers would not be uncomplicated. Even in the last round of big league collective bargaining level, which ended in March after a lengthy lockout, players found themselves split on several key issues. In the end, the MLBPA’s executive subcommittee voted against accepting the deal that rank-and-file membership decided to accept. Players at different stages of their careers, with different résumés and expectations, do not necessarily agree on what is best at the bargaining table at all times. Similarly, minor leaguers may find themselves with different priorities than the major leaguers — or even priorities that are in opposition to the goals of their major league colleagues.
But the MLBPA made clear Monday that it is willing to grapple with all possible complications as it pushes to add minor league players to the long list of workers in the industry — big league umpires, minor league umpires, and game day staffers — who have union representation. If it does, the professional baseball system could change quickly and dramatically. | 2022-08-29T18:43:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | MLBPA begins push to unionize the minors - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/mlbpa-unionize-minors/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/mlbpa-unionize-minors/ |
BYU dallied. The Bills waffled. Then public shame forced them to act.
Buffalo Bills punter Matt Araiza (19) before a preseason NFL football game against the Indianapolis Colts, Saturday, Aug. 13, 2022, in Orchard Park, N.Y. (AP Photo/Jeffrey T. Barnes)
The adults inside Brigham Young University’s athletics department believe in doing the right thing — when everyone’s watching them.
They will post a strongly worded statement against the racist taunts that were directed at Black volleyball players on the visiting Duke women’s team last Friday night. They will apologize, reiterate their Christian values and declare they hold a “zero-tolerance” policy against the very same ugly behavior they had spent the previous night tolerating.
Their athletic director will then take the floor before BYU’s volleyball next home game, with a microphone in his right hand and small piece of blue paper in his left. He will peek at his notes before reminding the fans in attendance for a second time that he’s the athletic director and therefore, accountability falls on him.
Then, he’ll point his finger at the crowd, strike the role of a fatherly figure and sternly warn the fans not to cross the line. The video posted on the team’s Twitter account, for all to see, ends there.
Similarly, the Buffalo Bills will place their culture over football — when everyone’s looking.
Their general manager will confirm this while addressing reporters following the release of Matt Araiza, the rookie punter who was allowed to compete for and win a roster spot in the weeks after the team learned that he had been accused of raping an underage girl.
The GM, too, will need to glance down at a sheet of paper before remembering to express sympathy for “the whole situation.” Then, without the benefit of prepared notes, his words will trickle out in a low and serious tone as he proclaims what’s important.
“Again, this is bigger than football,” Bills General Manager Brandon Beane said last Saturday, “our culture here is more important [to] us than winning football games.”
Only when their silos toppled and closed doors opened — and people started paying attention — did BYU and the Buffalo Bills act courageously.
When Duke sophomore Rachel Richardson prepared to serve Friday night, during a match played inside the relative anonymity of a fieldhouse that crowds 5,600 fans in Provo, Utah, the n-word was lobbed back at her.
Not one authority figure on the BYU coaching staff or one athletic official in attendance did anything to address the situation in the moment, Richardson noted in her own Twitter statement. And no one in the stands, a canvas of young White faces behind Richardson, showed the humanity to silence the harassment.
Without interruption or admonition, Richardson was allowed to be called everything but a child of God. Until her godmother shamed BYU in tweets that went viral, this private university sponsored by a religious organization remained in its bunker, ignoring racism in its midst.
Before the next game, BYU Athletic Director Tom Holmoe asked all fans representing the school to treat guests with respect “so that we can be disciples of Christ.” But he did so a day too late.
The Bills’ timing was even worse; they waited until Araiza’s gang rape allegation became public to distance themselves from their prized draft pick. We may never know the extent of Buffalo’s in-house investigation — the accuser’s attorney notified the team’s legal counsel on July 31 and according to Beane, the Bills used their law enforcement resources in an attempt to get to the facts.
However, it’s clear that when no one else knew about the gruesome details of the October 2021 night — when a 17-year-old girl claimed to have been gang raped by Araiza and his college teammates — the Bills went on making football decisions as usual.
For almost a month, they had knowledge of the accusations. They knew that a teenage girl in San Diego had hired a civil attorney. They were aware that the word “rape” was being attached to Araiza’s name. And they still played Araiza in their Aug. 13 preseason opener.
That day, Araiza boomed an 82-yard punt, building anticipation from the fan base and drawing praise from head coach Sean McDermott. And even on the day before the accuser filed a civil suit in San Diego against Araiza and two of his college teammates, McDermott appeared on a podcast and continued to hail Araiza’s punting abilities.
At that time few people outside Buffalo and San Diego knew about the allegations, so McDermott could still say with a straight face that Araiza was a “a great kid.”
Days later, after the allegations had surfaced, McDermott did not play Araiza in the team’s final preseason game. He struck a more somber tone.
“I understand there was a game just played but I want to talk about something that’s more important, which is what we have going on with one of our members of our team right now with Matt Araiza,” McDermott said. “It’s a situation that is extremely serious. Just hard to go through and it’s not a situation that I or we take lightly, whatsoever.”
Bills release rookie punter Matt Araiza amid gang rape allegation
In defending the team’s actions since late July, Beane said the Bills wanted to be exhaustive, even though they never interviewed the accuser, according to her attorney. They didn’t want to rush to judgment. They’re not the judge and jury. And they’re certainly not detectives, Beane said.
“We don’t have the means to put all the facts together … he’s a football coach. I’m a GM,” Beane said, as though this franchise valued at $3.4 billion didn’t have the means to employ trained investigators who could have interviewed the witnesses. “Like, we don’t have access to everything. And so that’s more important than playing football. We want Matt to focus on that.”
So, no, the Bills are not private eyes. They are just another NFL team with no clue how to handle assault allegations against women. Learning nothing from the Houston Texans’ and Cleveland Browns’ fumbling of the Deshaun Watson lawsuits, the Bills’ plan of action appeared to consist of waiting and wishing the situation away. It took the accuser’s lawsuit coming to light for the Bills to cut Araiza — and to suddenly remember their franchise culture.
Teams can brag about zero-tolerance policies and core values, but they mean nothing if they’re only used as shields against public outcry. Both BYU and the Bills waited in silence when no one was looking. Until embarrassing headlines left them no choice, at which point they spent the weekend attempting to nudge their way back to their supposed principles. They just waited too long for these acts of bravery to be trusted. | 2022-08-29T18:47:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | BYU and the Buffalo Bills needed public pressure to do the right thing - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/byu-racial-slur-buffalo-bills-punter/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/byu-racial-slur-buffalo-bills-punter/ |
D.C. Proud Boy member who led mob, menaced Schumer sentenced to 55 months
Joshua Pruitt also faced down police in the Crypt and Visitors Center, but did not assault officers.
An image from a police body-worn camera shows Joshua Pruitt, right foreground, outside the Capitol Jan. 6, 2021. ( and from documents filed with the US District Court of The District of Columbia/from documents filed with the US District Court of The District of Columbia)
In an encrypted chat during the weeks before the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, D.C. bartender Joshua Pruitt discussed how he wanted to become a full-fledged member of the Proud Boys, a white nationalist group that his text messages show was planning for full battle at the Capitol.
“I just want to do whatever needs to be done to be legit,” Pruitt said.
He discussed protective gear and lodging with other members. Shortly before the riot, the texts show, he was approved.
Pruitt, 40, showed up at three key points at the Capitol on Jan. 6, his tattooed arms bared, wearing a “Punisher” tank top, including in the Crypt, where he was photographed hurling a sign across the room and later went face-to-face with police. He was also photographed in the Capitol Visitors Center, where he threw a chair and confronted another group of rioters trying to access the Capitol tunnel system.
Then, in the halls of the Capitol, he began approaching Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) as the senator was being hustled out of the building. The team turned Schumer around and had him run in the opposite direction from Pruitt.
Pruitt never actually assaulted any officers or made physical contact with staff. But on Monday, a federal judge sentenced Pruitt to 55 months in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release. Pruitt pleaded guilty in June to obstructing an official proceeding, and federal sentencing guidelines suggested a range of 51 to 63 months in prison, in part because he has a lengthy criminal history, including assaulting police, cocaine possession and multiple drunken driving convictions.
D.C. Proud Boy and bartender pleads guilty to felony in Capitol riot
“You were acting somewhat in concert with others,” U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly told Pruitt, “engaged in planning to some degrees with others. … You did get into the building early, you did penetrate deeply into the building, you did damage property, you played a role in amping up the crowd, you did get very close to one of our national leaders.”
Pruitt, a father of a 9-year-old and an 11-year-old, said he had been blacklisted from working in the District restaurant business. “I’m not happy that January 6th happened at all,” he told the judge Monday. “To be completely honest, I wish I’d have been watching it from a restaurant rather than participating in it. … Yes I was wrong and I broke the laws and I do apologize for that.”
But Pruitt also said: “I did believe the election was stolen. I still do.”
A member of Schumer’s security team said he is haunted by the near-confrontation between the New York Democrat and Pruitt.
“I saw Mr. Pruitt approaching us with the intent to inflict harm to the Majority Leader of the United States Senate,” the special agent, identified by the initials M.L., wrote in a victim impact statement. “It was only due to our teams preplanning of alternate evacuations procedures and quick actions that this impending meeting did not result in blood shed or serious bodily injury.”
“I was within 30 feet of these nasty insurrectionists,” Schumer said at a hearing in January.
Pruitt worked as a bartender in D.C. until November 2020, when he was filmed being inducted into the Proud Boys by Chairman Enrique Tarrio after a pro-Trump rally. Pruitt later said members of the group had protected him during one of several violent clashes between supporters and opponents of the former president. He was not a full-fledged member though, and sought to become one after his first encounter with Tarrio, texts from his chats with other members show.
Defense attorney Robert L. Jenkins emphasized that Pruitt “did not physically attack any law enforcement officers … did not directly cause any bodily injury to any law enforcement officers,” and “did not possess or employ any weapons.”
In a conversation with other local Proud Boys on Jan. 5, Pruitt suggested that he could distract the police while others fought, according to the court record. “Strike when they come first,” he said. “And at that point we put in work.”
Prosecutors say he fulfilled that role. “Well over a year later, many officers remembered him as an instigator,” prosecutors said in their sentencing memo. His appearance was distinctive: A bodybuilder, Pruitt wore a tactical glove with padded knuckles and tank top emblazoned with the skull logo of a comic book vigilante. Inside the Capitol, he threw a sign and a chair.
One officer described Pruitt as “an agitator” who would get close to police and try to rattle them.
“The defendant did this repeatedly throughout my interaction to include telling me that, ‘You better stop eyeballing me,’ ” the officer recalled in his statement. “When the defendant found his efforts to be unsuccessful he would then retreat into the larger crowd of protesters looking for another target in uniform to provoke.”
In media interviews after the riot, Pruitt said he had no idea that the crowd would converge on the Capitol despite having been in conversations about those plans in a local Proud Boys group chat. He was also part of discussions in which Proud Boys were told not to wear their traditional colors of black and yellow so as to blend in better with the crowd.
The chat “included explicitly anti-Semitic and racist memes,” according to court records, with some anti-Jewish comment made by Pruitt himself. Jenkins said Pruitt did not make or see many of the anti-Semitic or racist posts.
Pruitt did write that he was “going for blood” and excited about violent confrontation.
“My chick (now ex) left me yesterday,” he wrote the Proud Boys group on Jan. 4. “Built up frustration ready to come out. Makes me even more dangerous.”
Pruitt was arrested in December 2020, accused of violating a protection order by threatening an ex-girlfriend; he was on probation and pretrial release at the time of the riot and wearing an ankle monitor. | 2022-08-29T19:09:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. Proud Boy accused of menacing Chuck Schumer on Jan. 6 sentenced to 55 months - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/29/dc-proud-boy-pruitt-schumer-sentenced/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/29/dc-proud-boy-pruitt-schumer-sentenced/ |
Most Trump voters see civil war as somewhat likely within a decade
Supporters of former president Donald Trump outside Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg)
It is Donald Trump’s fervent hope that, somehow, he should become president again. Maybe it’s in 2025, with his reelection by the American people. Or maybe, he seems to think, it could happen sooner. On Monday, he posited that some theorized bit of FBI nefariousness would warrant “declar[ing] the 2020 Election irreparably compromised” leading to a “new Election, immediately!”
Hopefully needless to say, this is both an unfounded demand and an unrealizable one. There is no mechanism for just throwing out a presidential election, even if it were warranted, which here it is not. But what’s important is that Trump believes or is pretending to believe that it could be. That the government of President Biden is illegitimate. This is the message he’s sending to his supporters: that the government should be upended in his favor.
This should be considered in the context of a disconcerting new poll finding released by YouGov: Four in 10 Americans think that a civil war may be likely within the next decade. Among those who say they voted for Trump in 2020, it’s more than 50 percent — a group that also expects political violence to increase “a lot” over the coming years.
We should stipulate that discussion of civil war is very different from any actual conflict. In fact, experts on civil conflict believe that a full-on armed conflict between political groups is unlikely for a variety of reasons, and that political violence might instead manifest as sporadic flare-ups. Not much consolation, certainly, but some. Of course, that’s assuming that tensions flare up at all. Relying on public opinion as an indicator of what’s likely to happen is understandably fraught.
That said, Americans generally see the danger of civil war — whatever that means in practice — as very real. In YouGov’s polling, conducted for the Economist, 14 percent of respondents said civil war was “very likely” within 10 years. An additional 29 percent said it was “somewhat likely.” Among Trump voters, though, those figures were 19 percent and 34 percent, respectively — or 53 percent in total. Among Biden voters, the total was just over a third.
Just because Americans see a civil war as looming doesn’t necessarily mean they will try to effect it, of course. But as explored elsewhere Monday, discussion of violence as potentially imminent can make it more likely to occur. What’s more, polling from The Washington Post and our partners at the University of Maryland this year found that 1 in 3 Americans think violence against the government can be justified — a sentiment more common on the right.
YouGov also asked respondents what they expected to happen more broadly in coming years. Most Americans think both political divisions and political violence will increase. But Republicans and those who say they voted for Trump are more likely to believe that both will increase than are Americans overall.
Among Trump voters, 47 percent think that the level of political violence will increase in coming years.
It’s clear, as the YouGov poll found, that political division has in fact increased. Even since 2021, poll respondents said that America had grown substantially more divided. This is measurable, as shown in analysis like that published by Pew Research Center this month. Americans feel as though political gulfs are widening, and researchers are measuring that expansion.
This is not the same as feeling as though the nation’s divides warrant or precede a violent conflict. Yet many Americans think such a conflict is looming. That a former president suggesting that a change of power is necessary doesn’t help.
Noted: Pa. GOP gubernatorial candidate thanked alleged Confederate statue defenders in 2020 | 2022-08-29T19:09:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Most Trump voters see civil war as likely within a decade - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/29/trump-voters-civil-war/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/29/trump-voters-civil-war/ |
Herman Rabbitt at the 1962 Montgomery County Fair, with Nona Brown, owner of the champion steer, Sir Tuffie. Rabbitt was known for his frugality and his success in raising beef cows. After his death in 1972, Rabbitt's estate was valued at more than $2 million. It included more than $500,000 in cash buried in milk cans and an oil drum. (Montgomery History) (Montgomery History)
When it comes to cows, Montgomery County is known more for dairy than for beef. That already made Charles Herman Rabbitt unique. A rancher in a land of dairymen, Rabbitt stood out for another reason: He buried a fortune on his land, only discovered after his death in 1972.
“He was definitely a well-known character, as they say,” said Sarah Hedlund, archivist/librarian at Montgomery History. “Everyone has a story about Herman Rabbitt and something eccentric he used to do. People remember him herding cattle down the road with a motorcycle.”
Hedlund recounted Rabbitt’s fascinating life last week during one of the historical society’s weekly History Conversations. You can view it through Sunday at montgomeryhistory.org.
Rabbitt was born in 1891. He owned various parcels of land in various parts of the county — hundreds of acres in all. He raised livestock on some of it and leased other land to tenants. He lived on a farm called Locust Grove near the intersection of Clopper and Longdraft roads in Gaithersburg.
Who knows what made Rabbitt suspicious of traditional financial institutions. Perhaps it was the Great Depression, when so many banks failed. Or perhaps the skepticism blossomed earlier, in 1925, when Maryland state’s attorney John A. Garrett was convicted of embezzling more than $50,000 from his private legal clients, including Rabbitt.
Whatever the reason, Rabbitt was untraditional in his finances.
“He never wanted to use banks,” Hedlund told me. “He would give people scraps of paper with his signature. That would be a check from Herman. He would keep his accounting written on his kitchen wall.”
Rabbitt jotted his accounts on the wall and tacked his receipts right onto it. At least he knew where everything was. Threatened with an audit, Rabbitt submitted a photo of the wall to the IRS, which grudgingly accepted it.
Rabbitt was exceptionally frugal. Acquaintances never saw him in anything but overalls. He preferred to do business in his barn, which was warmer than his house, which he chose not to heat.
“I’ll say one thing for him, though,” an acquaintance told The Post after his death. “He set up many a farmer around here. Back in the Depression times he’d loan money to farmers the banks wouldn’t loan to.”
After Rabbitt’s death, those who knew him were surprised to find out that his estate was valued at more than $2 million. Much of his savings was in banks — he hadn’t eschewed them totally — but his lawyers found something while going through his papers.
“It was basically a treasure map with directions to where to dig,” Hedlund said.
Sources disagree on where that was, whether in a farmyard or in the dirt-floored fruit cellar under Rabbitt’s house — the rabbit warren, so to speak. It took six men digging all day to unearth three milk cans and an oil drum. Inside them was more than $500,000 in currency and coins. “This Rabbitt’s hole lined with money,” was one inevitable headline.
It’s sometimes said that where there’s a will, there’s a family fighting over it. And Rabbitt’s will — or wills — offered room for interpretation.
“He had actually written a will in 1966 that left most everything to his housekeeper,” Hedlund said. Her name was Bessie Mills. “Then in 1968, he revised that will to leave everything to a cousin of his, who also helped him in later years, Robert Stiles.”
There were also small bequests to various nieces and nephews.
Mills contested the later will, claiming Rabbitt had promised her all the subterranean cash, which she said she had buried at his direction.
“Then people started coming out of the woodwork,” Hedlund said.
These included a man from New York State named Charles Herman Rau. Rau had already been left $1,000 in the will. He felt he deserved more. The reason? He said he was Rabbitt’s son. According to his birth certificate, he was.
Rabbitt’s five nieces and nephews also pressed for bigger shares.
The legal battle went on for almost three years. By the time a judge had considered all the competing claims, at least half of the nearly $3 million estate had evaporated: gone to the tax man and into the pockets of various lawyers.
In the end, the judge ruled that Robert Stiles, the cousin, would get the most, around $500,000. But he had died by then, so his widow got it. Mills, the housekeeper, got around $300,000. The nieces and nephews split $150,000. (One of them had died by then, too.) Rau, the son, got $150,000, too, but he’d had to declare bankruptcy, so it went to his creditors.
The Montgomery County fairgrounds sit on land Rabbitt owned. So does the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Old-timers still remember Herman Rabbitt. They remember something else, too: Though $500,000 was dug up, Bessie Mills, the housekeeper, claimed she buried $700,000. Make of that what you will. | 2022-08-29T19:13:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In Maryland, a map led to cash squirreled away by Herman Rabbitt - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/29/herman-rabbitt-buried-treasure/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/29/herman-rabbitt-buried-treasure/ |
A potentially extreme and prolonged heat wave later this week could fuel dangerous fire conditions into September
Forecast highs from the National Weather Service on Sunday show temperatures well into the 100s in California's Central Valley. (WeatherBell)
A quiet late summer for western wildfires may be about to come to an abrupt end.
Weather models are indicating that a potentially extreme and prolonged heat wave will build over western states this week and into the Labor Day weekend. The National Weather Service in Sacramento is warning of a “very dangerous heat risk” with high temperatures well above 100 degrees.
Although a supercharged monsoon brought a welcome reprieve from the smoke-filled summer skies and destructive wildfires of the last two years, not every region has seen soaking rain.
Much of California is entering autumn parched and flammable after a months-long dry season, as are parts of the Pacific Northwest into Nevada, Idaho and Montana. And the heat wave is arriving just as windy weather patterns begin to increase in the West.
“Because of the last two-plus years of drought, the fuel is ready to go and it’s just a matter of things lining up in terms of weather and ignitions,” said Alex Tardy, a warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service in San Diego, referring to Southern California.
The upcoming heat could not only cause an uptick in fire activity but also prime the landscape for autumn’s inevitable fierce winds.
“I would be surprised if we don’t get a relatively active fire season in September and October,” he said.
Farther north, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D) declared a state of emergency Sunday “due to the imminent threat of wildfire.”
A hot and potentially windy September
An intense and possibly record-breaking heat wave is on the horizon as a heat dome begins to build in the western U.S. this week. Excessive heat watches are already up for the southern half of California as far north as the San Joaquin Valley.
“We will very likely be in the midst of a full-fledged and potentially dangerous heat wave by midweek” wrote the National Weather Service in Los Angeles in a forecast discussion on Sunday.
Longer range forecasts indicate that much of the month will be warmer than normal.
Although the West hasn’t seen the repeated, headline-making heat waves that it did in 2020 and 2021, the last half of summer has still been unusually hot. Sacramento, for example, could break its record for the number of days in a year exceeding 100 degrees. Boise has already hit that milestone — topping 100 degrees 22 times this year — the most since the city’s records began in 1875. It’s forecast to add to that later this week when temperatures climb again.
🚨 With only 5 days left, #Boise #Idaho is on pace to see the warmest August ever since records began in 1875. It's likely Boise will finish the month with an average temperature over 80 degrees which has never been recorded in August before. #idwx pic.twitter.com/BIYsbePcyM
September — typically a transitional month into autumn weather — is likely to bring more wind as the jet stream begins to dip further south.
Dry cold fronts will push their way into the interior West and bring more organized westerly winds. Stronger “offshore” winds, which blow from the east, become more likely in California as fall progresses.
This past weekend, a passing cold front drove several thousand acres of growth on Oregon’s Rum Creek Fire, now over 10,000 acres. It also fanned the flames of the Cherry Gulch Fire in northern Nevada, which ballooned from zero to 15,000 acres in less than a day.
“These types of patterns tend to increase as we approach fall,” said Gina McGuire, a fire meteorologist with the Great Basin Coordination Center in Salt Lake City, who noted that dried grasses in northern Nevada into Idaho could fuel rapid fire spread during windy conditions.
There has also been abundant lightning in Idaho in the past few weeks, and holdover fires could still emerge.
“That’s a big concern especially in our higher elevation timber areas,” McGuire said. “That’s something that we’re definitely watching, not only with wind but also this week when we get higher temperatures.”
A quiet late summer, aided by monsoon moisture
In California, roughly 200,000 acres have burned so far this year — far less than the 1.5 million acres that had been scorched by this time last year and well under the 5-year average of 1.1 million acres, according to data from Cal Fire. The state has yet to record a 100,000-acre “megafire” this year, which have become almost routine in an era of drought and heat waves intensified by climate change.
“We haven’t had a lot of large active fires at the same time, so our resources are ready to go,” said Robert Foxworthy, public information officer for Cal Fire. “But that potential is there.”
In addition to monsoon rain in the mountains and deserts, Tardy said, high humidity from monsoon and ocean influences has helped to suppress wildfires in Southern California.
Those benefits could be erased by extreme or prolonged heat, as well as dry autumn winds. California could see its first offshore winds in September, which tend to intensify through the fall and have driven the state’s most destructive fires.
“We typically shouldn’t expect July and August to be the biggest part of the season in Southern California,” Tardy said. “Our time for the bigger fires is coming up.”
While California hasn’t seen a particularly bad fire season so far, the U.S. has still had an active fire year. The National Interagency Fire Center reports 47,918 fires have burned more than 6 million acres so far, which is “well above” the 10-year average. Notably, before the monsoon rains arrived, New Mexico saw its two largest fires on record in the late spring and early summer. | 2022-08-29T19:27:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ‘Very dangerous’ heat may reignite fire season in western U.S. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/29/western-california-heatwave-fires-forecast/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/29/western-california-heatwave-fires-forecast/ |
Former president Donald Trump with Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters at a rally in Arizona in July. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Do you want to know how frightened Republicans are by the sweeping turn abortion politics has taken since the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in late June? Just look at what their candidates in swing states and districts are doing.
It amounts to a collective assertion that, well, maybe they didn’t really mean what they said.
A number of Republicans in tough races seem to have hit upon the same strategy to put them on the right side of public opinion.
Here are the new rules: First, stop saying you’re “100 percent pro-life.” That might be what Republican primary voters once wanted to hear, but now it’s radioactive.
Next, make the absurd and unsupportable claim that nothing has really changed when it comes to abortion. Instead, say that the realization of a decades-long Republican goal is less a legal revolution than an opportunity for some heartfelt, respectful conversation.
Then, stress your deep commitment to the welfare of all women. Stop talking about any particular pieces of legislation or constitutional amendments to ban abortion that you used to support. And if you have to say anything at all about policies and particulars, talk about the exceptions to abortion bans you support — even if you didn’t used to support them.
Finally, say Democrats are the real extremists by pretending that they support babies being aborted literally during delivery, something that, by the way, never happens.
The award for fastest U-turn on abortion goes (so far) to Arizona Republican Senate nominee Blake Masters, who scrubbed his website of statements saying he’s “100 percent pro-life” and erased any sign of his advocacy of a fetal “personhood” amendment, which would effectively make all abortions at any stage of pregnancy an act of murder.
Under fetal personhood, there would be no exceptions for rape, incest or the health of the pregnant woman. And it isn’t entirely clear when an abortion could even be performed to save the life of the woman, because the life of the fetus would legally be of equal value to hers.
That and other specifics are now gone from Masters’s site. In an ad, he now says “I support a ban on very late-term and partial-birth abortion” — and says no more.
Masters isn’t the only one taking an eraser to his record. A Michigan Republican congressional candidate deleted his entire “Values” page, which used to contain information about his opposition to abortion.
And in Minnesota, GOP gubernatorial nominee Scott Jensen said in May that he would only support exceptions to an abortion ban in cases of rape and incest if the pregnant woman’s life was in danger. But now, Jensen has posted “A Plan to Support and Protect Women," which notes the “poignant conversations regarding abortion” Minnesotans are having and puts all its emphasis on helping women with things like contraception and counseling.
In the accompanying video, Jensen and his running mate claim that what they really want is “a system where abortion is not necessarily illegal, but it’s just not needed.”
As the Los Angeles Times reports, most Republicans in California’s congressional delegation, including three members in tough reelection races, are listed as co-sponsors of the Life at Conception Act, which would enshrine fetal “personhood” in law from “the moment of fertilization.”
But when asked about it now, the GOP incumbents are looking to hide: One says a nationwide abortion ban of the kind they support is “purely hypothetical at this point.” Another stresses that the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization “will not change access to abortions” for Californians. Two of the vulnerable members who answered the Times’s questions now say they support exceptions for rape, incest, and the health of the pregnant woman — none of which would be allowed under the legislation they co-sponsored.
Other candidates haven’t actually changed their positions or scrubbed their websites, but they are taking pains to strike a more modest pose than they had during the primaries. Tiffany Smiley, the GOP Senate candidate in Washington, said on a podcast that she was “100 percent pro-life,” a clip incumbent Sen. Patty Murray plays in her ads. But now Smiley says, “I’m pro-life, but I oppose a federal abortion ban.” In other words: I’m pro-life, but don’t worry, I won’t do much about it.
It took no great insight to predict that once the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade there would be a political backlash; there were probably more than a few Republicans who hoped it would happen after the election so the threat to abortion rights wouldn’t seem so urgent. But those candidates often insisted to primary voters that their opposition to abortion was fundamental to their values and beliefs.
Now that those rights are being dismantled, they have to confront the fact that most voters never wanted abortion to disappear. They’ve chosen to do so by evading, distractingand misleading. But one suspects that voters will take them at their word — or at least what used to be their word. | 2022-08-29T19:27:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The great Republican abortion backtrack has begun - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/republican-abortion-backtrack/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/republican-abortion-backtrack/ |
President Donald Trump at the White House on June 21, 2017. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
It might sound like an innocuous change to the structure of the federal workforce: creating a new category of employee, known as “Schedule F,” for positions related to “policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating.” Yet, this change threatens to politicize the underappreciated ranks of those who keep the country’s government running — the nation’s professional civil service.
President Donald Trump created the Schedule F designation by executive order near the end of his term, just ahead of the 2020 election. The order would have removed long-held protections from tens of thousands of career bureaucrats, making them easier to dismiss. That would give the president vast powers to reshape the federal government at will — and could politicize positions long treated as nonpartisan and merit-based.
The Trump administration attempted unsuccessfully to rush through the change before the end of its term, and, upon taking office, President Biden immediately rescinded the order. But, according to a troubling recent report from Axios’s Jonathan Swan, Mr. Trump and his associates plan to quickly reinstate Schedule F if he is elected in 2024, using it to fire career employees and replace them with loyalists. Other potential GOP presidential hopefuls have also indicated they would consider targeting the federal workforce.
The federal bureaucracy is a behemoth that includes approximately 2 million employees in myriad roles, working to keep the government operating. In 2020, the Trump administration justified its Schedule F executive order by suggesting that it would make it easier for supervisors to remove poor performers. No doubt there are ways to reform evaluation and dismissal processes so they are more nimble and responsive.
But much of our government’s expertise rests with civil servants. A system that sees more people enter and leave federal agencies with the political churn would be less knowledgeable and efficient. It would also eliminate one of the major appeals of federal jobs: the understanding that there will be some measure of stability even when there are changes in administrations. If potential employees feel like they could be fired with little cause or recourse, fewer capable people will seek out these positions. That would only harm the wide range of government services on which Americans rely.
Democrats have introduced legislation that would forestall such a possibility. The Preventing a Patronage System Act, sponsored by Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), would block positions from being classified outside the existing system unless Congress consents to it. Mr. Connolly subsequently sponsored this as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, and it passed the House last month. Six Democratic senators, led by Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.), have introduced companion legislation that would do the same thing. These measures would uphold protections for federal workers and reduce opportunities for patronage-based hiring in the future.
Populist politicians point to the “deep state” as the root of America’s ills. In fact, what they cast as a threat — a professional, merit-based, experienced civil service — is one of the country’s greatest assets. | 2022-08-29T19:27:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Trump's 'Schedule F' plan threatens to politicize civil service - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/schedule-f-trump-civil-service-politics/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/schedule-f-trump-civil-service-politics/ |
Attacks from N.Y. to California deepen concerns about Hinduphobia
By Richa Karmarkar
Hindus pray at BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Beltsville, Md., in honor of Diwali, the Hindu new year, in 2018. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post)
A tirade recorded at a California Taco Bell punctuated a string of discriminatory incidents this month aimed at Indian Americans and Hindu temples, deepening concerns that “Hinduphobia” is on the rise.
Krishnan Iyer had stopped into a Fremont, Calif., Taco Bell near his home on Aug. 21 to pick up an online order for his son, when a man in a black T-shirt and shorts and red sneakers began attacking his religion, according to eight minutes of video filmed and uploaded by Iyer. The man berated him unprompted, Iyer said, spewing slurs and chiding him for his vegetarianism while making much of ordering beef for himself. Many Hindus refrain from eating any part of cows.
The man insulted Iyer’s appearance, repeatedly calling him “dirty Hindu” and “ugly Hindu” and telling him he “bathes in cow urine” and eats “cow s---.” The man also spat in Iyer’s direction, Iyer said, but missed and hit the food service counter instead.
“It was very abundantly clear to me that he was trying to stir the pot and try to push his agenda,” said Iyer, who called the attack “disgusting.” “I didn’t have any reason to react to him. I do a lot of meditation and yoga, and that gave me a sense of perspective that his soul was in distress.”
Iyer said he had no idea what had spurred the man’s ire. After posting his video, he said, he learned from friends that an independence movement in the northern Indian state of Punjab has been stirring high feelings among Punjabis in North America. In Iyer’s video, the perpetrator can be heard speaking Punjabi and denouncing Indira Gandhi, the former Indian prime minister who was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, and displaying tattoos of a phrase from a Sikh prayer.
Two Fremont police officers responded to a call from another patron, and the perpetrator was forced to leave the establishment. Sgt. Kim Macdonald of the Fremont Police Department said an investigation is ongoing.
The incident in California was followed days later by a similar one in Plano, Tex., and both came just weeks after a Gandhi statue was vandalized and desecrated outside a Queens temple twice in less than a month. After the second statue toppling, New York Mayor Eric Adams (D) and several faith leaders from the surrounding Hindu, Jewish and Sikh communities gathered at the temple to denounce what the New York Police Department is investigating as a hate crime. In a statement from the Hindu American Foundation, Executive Director Suhag Shukla noted that surveillance videos recorded the attackers using phrases supportive of the same Punjabi separatist movement.
According to the FBI’s hate-crime data explorer, last updated in 2020, there were 11 hate offenses recorded that year as “anti-Hindu bias,” compared to 110 anti-Muslim and 89 anti-Sikh incidents.
But a study from Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Lab, published in July, found that anti-Hindu sentiments are on the rise. In a briefing Thursday, hosted by the Coalition of Hindus of North America, lead researcher Joel Finkelstein pointed to memes and online social cyber signals referring to perceived “dirty” and “scamming” qualities of Hindus, as well as depictions of Hindus being brutalized. Many of the memes, he said, were manufactured out of commonly used tropes against Jewish people, using tilaks, swastikas and bindis to signify Hindu culture.
“The internet has provided a fertile ground for the large-scale organization and weaponization of Hinduphobia by extremist communities, state actors and hateful players in the online space,” Finkelstein said.
Because the verbiage and tropes surrounding Hinduphobia are not yet recognized by social media platforms like Twitter, this kind of targeted hatred, which “reliably precedes real-world violence,” largely goes unchecked, he said.
“Unfortunately, these incidents are evidence of the untackled Hinduphobia that refuses to be given mainstream acknowledgment,” said Pushpita Prasad, of the Coalition of Hindus of North America. She said COHNA often battles with academics, activists and journalists to acknowledge the existence of anti-Hindu hate.
Iyer said both COHNA and the Hindu American Foundation contacted him, and the latter group contacted the FBI and the Fremont City Council. He says he is “truly grateful” for the outpouring of support he has received from people around the world.
“Being a Hindu means you are a universal human,” Iyer said. “At the end of the day, everyone has a soul, and every soul has a light. That’s the true spirit of Hinduism.” | 2022-08-29T19:28:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Anti-Hindu attacks grow, from Taco Bell tirade to Gandhi statue toppling - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/08/29/hindu-gandhi-taco-bell-punjab/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/08/29/hindu-gandhi-taco-bell-punjab/ |
Supporters of Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in Baghdad on Aug. 29. (Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images)
BAGHDAD — Followers of a prominent Shiite cleric stormed Iraq’s presidential palace Monday, in an outburst of anger following the cleric’s vow to quit politics that resulted in clashes with security forces and left at least eight people dead, health officials said.
The violence was the most serious during a summer of unrest in Iraq, which has been without a government for the better part of a year and captive to escalating feuds between political factions, including followers of the cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, and rival Shiite groups that are backed by Iran.
Sadr’s followers stormed the palace Monday after he announced his “final” retirement from politics — a threat he has made before, during years in the public eye, but one that could have more serious consequences in the charged political climate, and with the country ruled by a caretaker government.
Iraq’s political dysfunction — a feature of civic life since the U.S. invasion nearly two decades ago entrenched a sectarian, kleptocratic order — entered its latest phase in October, when Sadr won the largest number of seats in parliament but failed to form a government. After months of political paralysis, Sadr withdrew his lawmakers from the legislature in June and sent his followers to occupy the parliament.
A rival political bloc, comprising Shiite groups backed by Iran, has also held protests and sit-ins in the Green Zone, raising fears of a confrontation. In the background of the political infighting, Iraqis have suffered mightily, as state institutions, from schools to hospitals, deteriorate without government support.
Sadr, a populist who has opposed both U.S. and Iranian influence in Iraq, has called for early elections, as well as the barring of political figures who served after the U.S. invasion from working in government.
Fahim reported from Istanbul. | 2022-08-29T19:29:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Iraq protests turn deadly after prominent cleric quits politics - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/29/iraq-protests-sadr-presidential-palace/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/29/iraq-protests-sadr-presidential-palace/ |
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) at the Capitol on Aug. 5. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Because pursuing the investigation remains worthwhile, Mr. Graham’s comments are especially dangerous. His spokesman defended the interview to The Post as “predicting/forecasting what he thinks will happen.” But some predictions are also threats. And in this case, giving a forecast on national television might make it more likely that this vision of the future comes to pass. Mr. Trump promptly shared the clip on his platform Truth Social, which he has peppered with myriad ravings about the search of his property of late. Meanwhile, menacing messages from angry supporters are inundating the National Archives, and one man has attempted to attack an FBI facility. The Jan. 6 insurrection showed the country how readily some voters will interpret a leader’s words as a call to arms — and then action.
Mr. Graham, a former prosecutor who has chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, should understand how his comments could heighten the risk of unrest. He should know that the Justice Department does, too. By talking about the possibility of violence without condemning it, Mr. Trump’s sympathizers play a game of intimidation: daring Attorney General Merrick Garland to bring a case and face the consequences. As wary as Mr. Garland and his colleagues should be of overusing their power in tumultuous times, federal prosecutors must not allow themselves to be bullied out of doing their jobs. References to riots, civil war, banana republics or so much else we’ve heard in recent weeks make it more dangerous for the government to uphold the rule of law. “I worry about our country,” Mr. Graham said at the end of Sunday’sinterview. His reckless words and others like them are cause for the greatest concern. | 2022-08-29T19:29:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Lindsey Graham’s prediction of riots reads more like a threat - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/lindsey-graham-trump-riots-threat-reckless/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/lindsey-graham-trump-riots-threat-reckless/ |
Plants slowly overgrow the abandoned Radnor Center Elementary School in Bethesda in a photo taken Aug. 19. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)
In the middle of Kenwood Park, a tranquil Bethesda, Md., neighborhood notable mainly for its cherry blossom trees, sits the Radnor Elementary School. It’s been decaying for years now, its abandoned classrooms still stocked with dusty supplies, like some deserted gold rush town from the 1850s.
I live nearby, and for me what’s happened to Radnor poses the kind of basic civics question that seems to sow confusion — and distrust — in communities across the country. To whom does a neighborhood school really belong: the residents who pay taxes to maintain it or the bureaucracy that controls the land it sits on?
Radnor hasn’t been used continuously since the Montgomery County School Board voted to close it in 1981, as the local population of children started to plummet. By the time my wife and I moved to Kenwood Park with our two small kids in 2010, the building had been repurposed as a “holding school” — meaning that when the county refurbished other elementary schools in the area, Radnor was used as a temporary site.
For many years, neighbors had to endure an endless rumble of speeding school buses in the morning and side streets choked with cars in the afternoon — all for a school we couldn’t use ourselves. None of that bothered us very much, though, because we were among the families who benefited from the rebuilding program. Besides, Radnor remained the nexus of the neighborhood. Our kids climbed the jungle gym before dinner and learned to ride their bikes on the basketball court, just like in any other community. The neighborhood association held its annual picnics on the ball field.
One year, when county workers arrived to install a new fence around the perimeter, a neighbor of mine, the late Bradley Patterson, marched up to the school and insisted the workers install a gate behind his house, so that the neighborhood kids could cut through his yard to the playground. Patterson, who once worked in the Eisenhower White House, explained to me that his yard had been functioning as a shortcut for 50 years, since his own children were small, and he wasn’t about to let that change now.
When the pandemic hit in early 2020, the last students to occupy Radnor were hurriedly dismissed, never to return. By that time, the school system was finishing the last of its remodeling jobs, and it no longer had a use for the site. As a deserted school, Radnor instantly became the lowest priority for routine maintenance.
These days, kids moving into the neighborhood can’t use the playground at Radnor because it’s overrun with weeds and scattered with trash. The temporary classrooms, connected by labyrinthine gangplanks, are filthy and rotting. A few weeks ago, a retriever I see there most mornings wandered underneath the portables and severed an artery on what his veterinarian assumed was a shard of glass. The ball field has been overtaken by ivy. The pavement is cracked, the gates broken, the picnic tables mossy. Bolts from a bike rack stick up dangerously from the cement.
County crews recently installed a handicapped entrance ramp, in hopes of luring a private renter. Not surprisingly, no one jumped at the opportunity. The most useful purpose Radnor has served lately is to give police officers a place to train, presumably in case of a school shooting.
For years, the neighborhood association has been beseeching the school system to return the property to the community in some form — maybe as a green space under the care of the county Parks Department, or in partnership with a private sponsor. Local politicians — state Del. Marc A. Korman (D-Montgomery) (16) and County Council member Andrew Friedson — have convened meetings. A “working group” has recently been established.
School officials say they’re open to a plan that would put the grounds to better use. But they won’t cede the property permanently, because who knows — we might just need another elementary school sometime in the future, maybe when we all have jet packs.
To me, this entire conversation misses the politicians and school leaders are missing the larger philosophical point. A school system doesn’t really own schools. It’s not a real estate concern or a conglomerate.
It’s not like some entrepreneur in a fleece vest invented the idea of a neighborhood school, and from that innovation grew a company that goes around gobbling up school districts and paying lavish dividends to its shareholders.
Nor is the school district some kind of ruling junta, seizing whatever land it needs and holding it in perpetuity, maybe to build an armory or a small palace.
No, a school system is an amalgam of the residents who fund it, without whom the entire enterprise would disappear. We elect a board to administer our schools, and we pay for everyone who works in them. The bureaucracy we created shouldn’t get to hoard public spaces and then leave buildings to crumble in the middle of a neighborhood.
Look at it this way: Broadly speaking, you pay property taxes to cover four essential services — fire, police, schools and green spaces. For many years, we happily lent our school and green space to the county for the greater good. Now that there is no greater good to serve, we’re entitled to have it back.
Of course, times being what they are, I can hear someone saying: “Entitled indeed! You and your rich neighbors whine about your dilapidated school, when less fortunate communities have so much less.” Fair enough. I don’t think any of us objects to paying our taxes or to having them fairly redistributed.
But in this case, we’re not actually asking the government to give us more of something, but rather to do less. The cheapest thing you can do with a vacant building, as big cities have learned, is to tear it down and create green space in its place.
It occurs to me that what I’m seeing in my own neighborhood is really just a version of dozens of stories I’ve reported over the years. In New Jersey, where local taxes were unsustainably high, I wrote about what happened when 550 local bureaucracies refused to share the most basic services, driving up costs and demoralizing everyone.
In Rhode Island, I told the story of a fiscal crisis brought on when state officials decided they could gamble the public’s money on a risky tech startup, as though they were partners in a venture capital firm rather than the stewards of taxpayer wealth.
These states and many others became mired in dysfunction and discord over the past few decades because everyone — voters and politicians alike — seems to have lost their grasp on basic civics.
Sure, taxpayers sometimes forget that someone has to pay for all those services they demand. But local governments are just as apt to forget that those taxes aren’t meant to perpetuate fiefdoms and amass capital. They’re supposed to be pooled and reinvested in essential services. When governments honor that promise, taxpayers tend to be less resentful about paying the bill.
Radnor is a modest asset — a small plot of land in an unremarkable neighborhood, across the street from a couple of ugly water towers. Even so, that asset doesn’t really belong to the state, or the county, or the school board, or the district. It belongs to the community it was built to serve.
A school system shouldn’t lose sight of that. More to the point, neither should we. | 2022-08-29T20:45:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Who really owns this Bethesda neighborhood school? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/bethesda-neighborhood-school-land-sits-unused/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/bethesda-neighborhood-school-land-sits-unused/ |
Prince George’s man charged with murder in wife’s death, police say
Prince George’s County police detectives have obtained an arrest warrant for a Lewisdale man they say killed his wife over the weekend, officials said in a news release.
The man, 64-year-old Ernest Hayden, has been charged with murder in the death of his 60-year-old wife, Pauline Hayden.
Police were called to the couple’s home in the 2000 block of Amherst Road on Aug. 28 to conduct a welfare check, according to the news release. At about 11:30 a.m., officers found Pauline Hayden inside “suffering from trauma,” police said. She died at the house.
Detectives investigating the attack believe that Ernest Hayden killed his wife then fled their home, according to the news release. He is being held in the District and will be extradited to Prince George’s County, police said.
Clarence Williams and Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report. | 2022-08-29T20:45:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ernest Hayden, 64, accused of killing his wife in Maryland - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/29/prince-georges-man-charged-with-murder-wifes-death-police-say/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/29/prince-georges-man-charged-with-murder-wifes-death-police-say/ |
Teen charged with manslaughter in shooting of 17-year-old girl
Police are investigating the fatal shooting of a 17-year-old girl. (Prince George's County Police)
A 17-year-old girl was fatally shot at a Suitland apartment complex on Sunday afternoon and another teenager has been charged with manslaughter in her death.
Ter’Nijah Ryals, of Suitland, was shot in the 3300 block of Curtis Drive, Prince George’s County police said. Ryals was transported to a hospital where she died.
The other teenager, also 17 and from Suitland, has been charged as an adult. He is in the custody of the Department of Corrections, police said. Authorities did not name the male teen.
County police officers were called to Curtis Drive at about 1:50 p.m. on Sunday for the report of a shooting at the apartment complex.
In a news release, police offered little information about the circumstances, but said investigators believe the two teenagers were involved in an “on-going dispute.” Police said the 17-year-old shot Ryals during a “confrontation” Sunday.
Detectives are still investigating, police said. | 2022-08-29T20:59:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ter’Nijah Ryals, 17, killed in shooting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/29/ryals-teen-killed/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/29/ryals-teen-killed/ |
Maryland Zoo planning new exhibits, animals
The Maryland Zoo in Baltimore unveiled a master plan for its next decade, including plans to add new animals and exhibits and improve parking on Tuesday.
The most noticeable change for the zoo in the years ahead will be relocating more animal exhibits closer to its front entrance, said Kirby Fowler, the zoo’s president and chief executive.
“Today, you can arrive at the zoo, you walk in, and you’ll see prairie dogs and a snowy owl,” Fowler said. “But that’s all you see in a 15-minute walk from the front gate to the main part of the zoo. So it’s our job now to turn our attention to the front part of the zoo.”
While some improvements to parking are being funded by the state, the zoo still needs to raise funds for many of its other plans, including some of the new habitats and buildings, Fowler said.
The master plan did not include a price tag for all the proposed improvements. The vision includes developing a new Gateway Building near the front gate, likely to feature indoor and outdoor habitats for amphibians and reptiles, including possible new additions like a Gila monster and Asian water monitor, according to the master plan. The goal is to construct the building around 2029.
That building also could showcase the zoo’s work with the Panamanian golden frog, Fowler said. The zoo is a leading institution working to reintroduce the frogs to their native habitat.
Just across from the new building could be a new exhibit for gibbons, small apes known for using their long arms to swing from tree to tree. Such an exhibit could include four islands separated by water and connected by ropes overhead, which the gibbons could use to navigate between them. According to the master plan, the exhibit could be constructed in 2025.
“Some of these animals were zoo favorites a decade or two ago, like the gibbon — and we want to bring those back,” Fowler said. “Their call is, in my opinion, beautiful. It’s loud, but they’re fun primates to observe.”
The zoo plans to keep some of those old enclosures for historical purposes but also add new habitats to the area, including a raptor habitat highlighting the Steller’s sea eagle. The old elephant house, which hasn’t housed animals in more than 20 years, would be renovated as an event and education space.
The zoo also hopes to improve guests’ experiences in the coming years by adding experience features such as a ropes course or zip line, a project pegged for 2026.
Later this year the zoo plans to begin work to improve and expand its parking areas for guests, according to the master plan. The plan described the existing parking area as “undersized,” adding that “due to potholes and ruts, the surface has become challenging upon which to walk, drive, or push a stroller or wheelchair.”
The zoo has secured state funding to implement a new storm water management system in the parking area, starting in the spring of 2023, to better control water flowing off the lot and toward the Jones Falls, according to the master plan.
“It’s not as exciting as bringing new species and habitats to the zoo, but we’ve had a lot of complaints about our parking lot,” Fowler said.
The zoo also hopes to make sustainability improvements in the years ahead, including by adding a greenhouse to grow certain food items on-site, increasing composting and reducing the energy use of its buildings, Fowler said.
The zoo already instituted a “no idling” policy for vehicles driven by employees and started a relationship with the Compost Crew to compost some of its food waste, Fowler said. The zoo has a goal of becoming “zero waste” by 2025.
The zoo’s newly released master plan includes a number of initiatives focused on employees.
The zoo is searching for a director of diversity, equity, access and inclusivity, who would evaluate the zoo’s ability to attract diverse staff members and guests. It is also evaluating its employee compensation, Fowler said.
The master plan also includes the construction of new office space for staff, including a building near its African Journey area.
Some animals, such as the snowy owl and eagle, are poised to receive new habitats in the coming years, per the master plan. The zoo’s eagle, who previously suffered neurological injuries, doesn’t fly much, but she is “starting to glide,” Fowler said.
The zoo’s grizzly bears also could see their habitat expanded, according to the master plan. A trail would be added connecting them to additional open-air habitat space, the plan states. That could happen in 2026. | 2022-08-29T20:59:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Maryland Zoo planning new exhibits, animals - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/maryland-zoo-planning-new-exhibits-animals/2022/08/29/beb10f76-24f1-11ed-ae94-b5afe3c5886e_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/maryland-zoo-planning-new-exhibits-animals/2022/08/29/beb10f76-24f1-11ed-ae94-b5afe3c5886e_story.html |
Business founders of color and policymakers on entrepreneurial equity
September 13, 2022 at 9:00 a.m. EDT
In the past decade, there has been substantial economic growth among women and minority-owned businesses, but a number of challenges remain. Join Washington Post Live on Wednesday, Sept. 13 at 9:00 a.m. ET for a series of conversations with business owners and policymakers about the entrepreneurial landscape, equitable access to economic opportunity and the role of early investment in BIPOC enterprises.
Additional speakers to be announced.
Theresia Gouw
Co-Founding Managing Partner, Acrew Capital
Lee Mayer
Co-Founder, Havenly
Emily Motayed
Co-Founder, Nurture&
Expanding Women and Minority Entrepreneurs
Small businesses are the heart of the American economy. They drive economic growth and innovation, and create roughly two-thirds of new jobs in the United States. As the number of new business applications has grown in the U.S., women and minorities have continued to face barriers in starting and scaling businesses. In this segment presented by Wells Fargo, business leaders, policy experts, and advocates will discuss these challenges as well as the role of the private sector and government in supporting the creation, sustainment, and expansion of women- and diverse-owned small businesses.
President, Third Way
Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Salamander Hotels & Resorts
Co-Founder, Black Entertainment Television
President & Chief Executive Officer, National Urban League
Charlie Scharf
Chief Executive Officer & President, Wells Fargo & Company | 2022-08-29T21:01:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Business founders of color and policymakers on entrepreneurial equity - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/09/13/business-founders-color-policymakers-entrepreneurial-equity/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/09/13/business-founders-color-policymakers-entrepreneurial-equity/ |
People wade through a flooded area following heavy rains in Charsadda District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan, on Aug. 27. (Arshad Arbab/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
But even as Pakistan turns to donors around the world asking for aid, there is one thing that the country will almost certainly not receive: Compensation from the countries — including the United States — that are most responsible for planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
While the two issues may seem unconnected, for decades developing countries have asked richer ones to provide funding for the costs they face from heat waves, floods, droughts, sea-level rise and other climate-related disasters. They argue that the nations that became wealthy from burning fossil fuels such as the United States, Germany, United Kingdom and Japan also heated up the planet, causing “loss and damage” in poorer countries.
At U.N. summit, poor nations demand rich ones pay for climate damages
The issue has become a flash point in global climate negotiations. In the landmark 2015 Paris agreement on climate change, countries agreed to recognize and “address” the loss and damage caused by those dangerous climate impacts. Last year, at the major U.N. climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, negotiators from developing countries hoped that negotiators would finally create a formal institution to funnel cash to the countries most affected by climate disasters.
But the United States, despite being the largest historical emitter of carbon dioxide, has blocked such efforts at every turn. In Glasgow, the Biden administration joined a group of countries in resisting efforts to establish payments to developing countries that have been hit hard by climate change.
Preety Bhandari, a senior adviser for climate and finance at the World Resources Institute, points out that U.N. negotiators reached a side deal in 2015 that said addressing loss and damage did not provide any basis for legal liability. “I think there is possibly an overabundance of caution on the part of the U.S. and other developed countries,” she said.
But as the damage mount some are already going to court, as citizens and politicians from vulnerable countries seek compensation for the loss of their livelihoods, homes or farms. In Peru, a farmer is suing a German energy giant; the island nations, meanwhile, are trying to create a commission that would allow them to sue big countries for climate damage.
Kerry has also argued that there are existing channels to help provide relief to countries like Pakistan who are reeling from weather disasters. USAID, for example, is providing $100,000 in humanitarian relief in Pakistan. But such donations pale in comparison to climate change’s mounting toll in the developing world. A report released by the humanitarian group Oxfam in June found that over the past five years appeals for relief from extreme weather were only 54 percent funded on average, leaving a shortfall of tens of billions of dollars. Existing systems also require developing countries to rely on acts of charity, rather than a standardized system for who owes what.
The United States and other developed nations will be forced to reckon with this question at the next big U.N. climate meeting, known as COP27, which is scheduled for December in Egypt. But unless the Biden administration’s perspective changes, significant progress is unlikely.
“This particular issue could make or unmake COP27,” Bhandari said. | 2022-08-29T22:08:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pakistan floods underscore debate about who pays for climate damages - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/29/pakistan-floods-climate-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/29/pakistan-floods-climate-change/ |
Live updates Serena Williams faces Danka Kovinic in U.S. Open first round
Serena Williams will face Danka Kovinic in the first round of the U.S. Open. (Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)
Serena Williams begins what is probably her final U.S. Open with a first-round match against Danka Kovinic. Follow along for the latest updates.
When: After 7 p.m. Eastern
Serena Williams is a talisman for many Black women because the only lines she ever stayed within were on a tennis court. Even her presence there, at the time of her and her sister Venus’s debuts in the late 1990s, was radical, more than 40 years after Althea Gibson became the first Black player to win a Grand Slam title.
Live updates: Serena Williams faces Danka Kovinic in U.S. Open first round | 2022-08-29T22:12:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S. Open: Serena Williams vs. Danka Kovinic live updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/us-open-serena-williams/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/us-open-serena-williams/ |
NEW YORK — Stocks closed lower on Wall Street, adding to their recent losses as traders realized how determined the Federal Reserve is to keep interest rates high to fight inflation. The S&P 500 gave back almost 1% Monday. Technology companies were the biggest drag on the index. The Nasdaq and the Dow Jones Industrial Average also fell. This week investors will get more updates on the economy including the government’s monthly jobs report on Friday and a reading on consumer confidence Tuesday from the Conference Board. European markets were also lower and Asian markets closed lower overnight. Treasury yields were higher.
SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter at its best is a tool to get a message out quickly, efficiently and directly, whether you’re an activist or a local fire department. But it’s also a constant risk-and-reward calculation. A bombshell whistleblower report from Twitter’s former head of security alleges that the social media company has been negligently lax on cybersecurity and privacy protections for its users for years. The revelations could be especially concerning for those who use it to reach constituencies, get news out about emergencies as well as for political dissidents and activists in the crosshairs of hackers or other malicious actors.
WILMINGTON, Del. — Elon Musk’s legal team is demanding to hear from a whistleblowing former Twitter executive who could help bolster Musk’s case for backing out of a $44 billion deal to buy the social media company. Twitter’s former security chief Peiter Zatko — also known by his hacker handle “Mudge” — received a subpoena Saturday from Musk’s team, according to Zatko’s lawyer and court records. The billionaire Tesla CEO has spent months alleging that the company he agreed to acquire undercounted its fake and spam accounts — and that he shouldn’t have to consummate the deal as a result.
TOKYO — Major South Korean battery maker LG and Japanese automaker Honda are investing $4.4 billion in a joint venture to produce batteries for Honda electric vehicles in the North American market. They say the plant’s U.S. site is still undecided. Construction is to begin in early 2023, with mass production of advanced lithium-ion battery cells to start by the end of 2025. The closing of the deal is subject to regulatory approval. They say the plant will produce batteries exclusively for Honda vehicles assembled in North America, including the company’s Acura luxury brand.
WASHINGTON — Federal regulators have sued a data broker they accuse of selling sensitive geolocation data from millions of mobile devices. The data can be used to identify people and track their movements to and from sensitive locations, including reproductive health clinics, homeless shelters and places of worship. The Federal Trade Commission on Monday sued Idaho-based Kochava Inc. amid a charged debate over the privacy of individuals who may be seeking an abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in June ending the constitutional protections for abortion. The data-broker industry has come under amplified scrutiny from Congress and regulators.
BERLIN — The head of the European Union’s executive branch and Germany’s chancellor have pledged a reform of the continent’s electricity market to help bring down power prices that have been pushed higher by skyrocketing gas prices. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a speech in Bled, Slovenia on Monday that “skyrocketing electricity prices are now exposing the limitations of our current electricity market design.” She said it was developed for different circumstances, and “that is why we are now working on an emergency intervention and a structural reform of the electricity market.”
NEW YORK — Walmart has filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission that accuses the retailer of allowing its money-transfer services to be used by scam artists. It says the suit is an egregious instance of agency overreach. In its lawsuit filed in June, the FTC alleged that for years, Walmart failed to properly secure the money-transfer services offered at its stores. In a 41-page filing Monday, the nation’s largest retailer said the agency lacks constitutionally valid authority to sue for money or injunctive relief. Walmart also argues that the agency is trying to contort a regulation aimed at going after telemarketers and those who actively help them, of which Walmart is neither.
OMAHA, Neb. — Three of the 12 unions negotiating with the nation’s biggest freight railroads have reached a tentative deal providing 24% pay raises. That’s in line with what a special presidential panel of arbitrators recommended earlier this month to resolve the stalemate before a strike could happen. The tentative deal announced Monday covers more than 15,000 workers. But the two biggest rail unions that represent engineers and conductors say they still haven’t been able to reach a deal. The railroads have until mid-September to reach agreements with all their unions before federal law would allow them to go on strike. But if it gets to that point, Congress is expected to step in to keep the trains moving.
DETROIT — The National Labor Relations Board has found that Tesla can’t stop factory employees from wearing clothing with union insignias while on the job. In a 3-2 decision released Monday, the board overruled a 2019 NLRB decision involving Walmart and union clothing. The board wrote that a 1945 Supreme Court decision established the precedent for allowing the clothing. It ordered Tesla to stop enforcing what it called an overly broad uniform policy that effectively stops production workers from wearing black shirts with the United Auto Workers union logo. Messages were left Monday seeking comment from Tesla and the union. | 2022-08-29T22:29:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Business Highlights: Stocks' losses, Twitter's lapses - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-stocks-losses-twitters-lapses/2022/08/29/884bc57c-27e2-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-stocks-losses-twitters-lapses/2022/08/29/884bc57c-27e2-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html |
11 dead as police fire on attacking mob
Gen. Andry Rakotondrazaka, commander of the national gendarmerie, said many of those in the crowd carried large machetes and other weapons with blades and sticks.
More than a dozen kidnappings, assaults and murders of people with albinism have been reported in the past two years in various parts of Madagascar, according to figures published by UNICEF in March.
Passengers evacuated from burning ferry
Swedish and Finnish rescue services began evacuating families and elderly passengers from a fire-stricken Swedish ferry in the Baltic sea late Monday, but they said that the situation was calm and that no one had been injured.
About 70 of around 300 people onboard were scheduled to be evacuated by helicopter as the powerless vessel was drifting toward the island of Gotland and risked running aground later Monday.
The fire began in a container on the car deck aboard the Stena Scandica en route from Latvia to Sweden.
Governing party wins divisive election
Angola’s electoral commission on Monday declared the ruling MPLA, in power for nearly five decades since independence, the winner of last week’s national election, handing President João Lourenço a second term amid concerns of fraud.
The election commission gave the former Marxist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) a 51.2 percent majority after all votes were counted. Its longtime opponent, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) got 44 percent, its best result ever.
Fewer than half of Angola’s registered voters turned out for Wednesday’s election, which despite being the closest fought yet, extends the rule of MPLA that has ruled since independence from Portugal in 1975 and defeated UNITA in a long civil war.
Bodies of 7 migrants found off Spain's southeastern coast: Spanish police said Monday that they found the bodies of seven migrants they think might have drowned while trying to reach Spain in a boat. The bodies were found between Sunday and Monday in waters in three areas off southeastern Spain, the Civil Guard said in a statement. Police say they think the seven were of North African origin. They are investigating whether they had been in a boat that was found adrift Saturday with one migrant alive onboard.
Lion fatally mauls man in Ghana zoo: A lion at Ghana's Accra Zoo fatally mauled a man after he entered its enclosure over the weekend, the government said in a statement. At around noon local time Sunday, security guards on patrol noticed that the middle-aged victim had climbed over a tall mesh fence and entered the enclosure of a lion, a lioness and two cubs. His motivation has yet to be determined. "The intruder was attacked and injured by one of the lions," the state Forestry Commission said Sunday, adding that the man died of injuries he sustained in the attack. Authorities are investigating the incident.
Wage strike to bring Dutch trains to a halt Tuesday: Dutch railway workers will strike across the country Tuesday, bringing trains to a halt as a wage dispute between unions and state-owned NS Railways escalates. Only trains to and from Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, as well as Thalys and Eurostar international operators, will be running, NS Railways said in a statement Monday. It will be the first time the national service has been canceled, after three days of regional strikes last week. Unions are protesting the suspension of collective agreement talks with the management, during which they had asked for higher wages. The company had 38,600 employees as of 2020. | 2022-08-29T22:30:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | World Digest: Aug. 29, 2022 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug-29-2022/2022/08/29/ddbcf382-27a6-11ed-b16b-8271abe2ddc5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug-29-2022/2022/08/29/ddbcf382-27a6-11ed-b16b-8271abe2ddc5_story.html |
‘It’s frightening’: How the world’s young leaders see the U.S.
By Christine Emba
A makeshift gallows is erected outside the Capitol during the riot by supporters of President Donald Trump on Jan. 6. 2021. (Shay Horse/Getty Images)
HAMBURG — “It’s frightening, what’s happened to you,” a Bavarian civil society organizer shared with me over a stein of German pils. “America has become smaller.”
The theme of this year’s Bucerius Summer School on Global Governance, a Hamburg-based international conference consisting of dozens of young leaders from around the world, was “Facing New Realities: Global Governance Under Strain.” The reality this American observer had to face? That in the eyes of much of the world, the United States’ light has dimmed.
We are still watched intently and remain a major power. But it was clear that to many of the conference’s attendees — hailing from Germany to Mongolia, Ghana to Ukraine — the United States has become shorthand for democratic decline and disinformation, home to citizens who react to dissatisfaction by rejecting reality, and to institutions that are increasingly hollowed out.
“We don’t want the people who lose jobs during the climate transformation to end up as Trump voters or the equivalent,” a European foreign minister said during a discussion of economic retooling amid climate change. My fellow conference-goers looked my way apologetically, pity on their faces.
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“I thought about settling in the U.S.,” one attendee, an Ivy League- and Oxbridge-educated internationalist now working for the United Nations, told me. “But I couldn’t imagine living in a place where my children would have to practice” — here, she made mocking quotation marks with her fingers — “active shooter drills.”
The United States’ most famous exports used to be Coca-Cola, Levi’s and jazz — not to mention such ideals as freedom, civil rights and the rule of law. Now, we’re best known for rampant gun violence and gruesome school shootings.
Yet glimmers of respect for what we used to (and sometimes still) stand for do exist.
Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential run was brought up again and again as an example of the American political system’s openness to outsiders and capacity to surprise. The George Floyd protests of 2020 and the successes of the Black Lives Matter movement were commended as rare examples of truly free expression.
A Kenyan participant reminisced fondly about a year studying in the United States, including a summer spent interning in the local offices of a Republican congressman. He remembered his incredulity at realizing that a government official could campaign door to door without a driver or a bodyguard and would personally return his constituents’ phone calls; direct democracy, not as common in his home region, still seemed possible in the United States.
(Incidentally, that congressman, Fred Upton of Michigan, was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Upton announced his retirement this spring in the face of redistricting and a MAGA-backed primary challenge.)
The United States’ reputation has been deteriorating for at least two decades. During the Iraq War, as Bush-doctrine foreign policy was derided across the globe, the trope of American backpackers abroad pretending to be Canadian to avoid shame by association became something of a cliche.
Yet, the past six years have seen an unprecedented acceleration. Our geopolitical rivals have always had ammunition, but the old embarrassments pale in comparison to the new. The idea that credence is still given to arguments about whether the 2020 election was “stolen” — the settled view of the rest of the world is that this is obvious nonsense — is a source of alarm.
After the 2016 election, European leaders warned that the United States could no longer be relied on as a partner in defense and security. More recently, statements such as those from Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance — “I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other” — have made their way around the world, reconfirming the United States’ continued unseriousness and withdrawal from international engagement and moral leadership.
Our country is famously self-centered. It’s possible, or perhaps probable, that most Americans, only 20 percent of whom speak a second language — compared with 65 percent of the European Union’s population — don’t care what people in Europe or the rest of the world think.
But they should. As the United States fades, our competitors — a seemingly inexorable China, an unpredictable and aggressive Russia — wait hungrily in the wings.
In 2008, Fareed Zakaria wrote: “At the politico-military level, we remain in a single-superpower world. But in every other dimension — industrial, financial, educational, social, cultural — the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance.” In 2022, that vision of a “post-American world” has gone from theory to truth.
It might not be too late to effect a reversal. But if we want to preserve our stature, we should begin to act — holding our former president accountable to the rule of law would be a start — and realize that as we do so, the next generation of leaders is watching.
The world is taking our decline seriously. It’s time we did the same. | 2022-08-29T22:30:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | At a global leadership conference, America is viewed with pity - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/bucerius-global-leadership-america-democratic-decline/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/bucerius-global-leadership-america-democratic-decline/ |
Rioters break into the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. (John Minchillo/AP)
Richard M. Nixon famously deployed the madman theory of foreign policy, directing aides to suggest to his counterparts overseas that they might not be able to control a volatile and reckless president. Now, Donald Trump and his defenders are using a version of that gambit to deter the Justice Department from prosecuting the former president, arguing that going after Trump would dangerously incite his already angry followers.
Trump had his lawyer deliver this sinister message to Attorney General Merrick Garland — wrapped in a purported effort to calm the waters. “President Trump wants the Attorney General to know that he has been hearing from people all over the country about the raid. If there was one word to describe their mood, it is ‘angry,’ ” a Trump lawyer told a senior Justice Department official three days after the search at Mar-a-Lago. “The heat is building up. The pressure is building up. Whatever I can do to take the heat down, to bring the pressure down, just let us know.”
Then, on Sunday, Trump acolyte Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) didn’t bother with the disingenuous niceties. He went straight to the threat. “Most Republicans, including me, believe when it comes to Trump, there is no law. It’s all about getting him,” Graham said on Fox News, citing the decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for having classified information on her private email servers. “And I’ll say this: If there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information after the Clinton debacle … there’ll be riots in the streets.”
The Post's View: Lindsey Graham’s prediction of riots reads more like a threat
Lest you missed his point, Graham said the phrase twice — and then Trump reposted his comments on his social media platform. A retired Air Force lawyer and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Graham said nothing to convey dismay over the prospect of violence; to the contrary, his clear meaning was that outrage would be justified.
Let’s address that supposed “double standard” between Trump and Hillary Clinton: There isn’t one. Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state was, as I said at the time, sloppy and exasperating. She shouldn’t have used her private email address for official business, and she should have been more careful about classified information being on it. This is, as then-FBI Director James B. Comey concluded, a far cry from an indictable offense.
Think what you will about the wisdom of Comey’s July 2016 statement that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” Comey laid out a convincing distinction between what Clinton did and previous indictments for mishandling classified information, as in the cases of Gen. David H. Petraeus and former national security adviser Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger. Clinton and her aides, he suggested, were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
But, Comey said, “In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.”
How does Trump’s conduct fit into this rubric? With so much of the evidence under seal, we can’t tell for sure. But we know, based on the redacted affidavit, that there appear to be significant differences between the Clinton and Trump situations.
In Clinton’s case, Comey said, that “only a very small number of the emails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information”; Trump, by contrast, appears to have been fully on notice that he had classified materials whose return authorities were desperately seeking. Investigators found 113 Clinton emails containing information that was classified at the time; more than 300 documents with classified markings have been recovered from Trump. Finally, in Trump’s case, the government had “probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found” at Mar-a-Lago, according to the affidavit.
Greg Sargent: Lindsey Graham’s vile ‘riots’ threat gives away Trump’s game
Not that those distinctions, if they hold up, will convince anyone in Trump’s camp. Riots in the streets might well ensue if he is criminally charged. Garland shouldn’t let that prospect affect his judgment about the correct course of action. Prosecutors are supposed to be confident of winning conviction before bringing a case, but that doesn’t mean they should be deterred from taking steps that might be unpopular if they believe that prosecution serves the public interest.
The Justice Department’s Principles of Federal Prosecution lay out the considerations: “Where the law and the facts create a sound, prosecutable case,” prosecutors are told, “the likelihood of an acquittal due to unpopularity of some aspect of the prosecution or because of the overwhelming popularity of the defendant or his/her cause is not a factor prohibiting prosecution.”
A sound, prosecutable case. That’s the test — not intimations of mayhem from Trump and his allies only too happy to summon the mob, once again, to his defense. | 2022-08-29T22:31:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | His back to the wall, Trump again summons the mob - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/lindsey-graham-riots-trump-mob/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/lindsey-graham-riots-trump-mob/ |
A NASA helicopter flies past the agency's Space Launch System rocket Monday at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Joel Kowsky/NASA/AFP/Getty Images)
NASA’s decision to postpone Monday’s planned launch of the Artemis lunar probe is unfortunate. The program needs to get back on track as soon as possible — for the benefit of U.S. national security.
Most discussions of the Artemis program have focused on the scientific benefits or the sheer adventure of space exploration. It’s likely true that the national psyche gets a boost when we see Americans in outer space. Landing someone on the moon for the first time in decades would be a tangible sign for many that America’s can-do spirit is alive and well. The planned manned trip to Mars, which Artemis is intended to help prepare, would be even more exciting.
Those benefits pale, however, in comparison with the military challenges the United States could face if it does not remaster lunar travel promptly. China has announced an ambitious moon program that includes a system to detect and deflect asteroids from hitting Earth — a weapon that would potentially have terrestrial import as well.
Russia and China have also announced plans to establish a joint permanent lunar base by 2027. If successful, this means our most dangerous adversaries could be in a position to harm U.S. interests in space sooner than we had thought.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why this is threatening to U.S. national security. Control of the high ground in a conflict has been essential to warfare since ancient times. What once was simply holding a mountain or fighting from a castle wall has expanded as technology improves.
Command of the sky, and what lies beyond it, is now essential for any modern military. The U.S. military’s fearsome precision munitions depend on instantaneous satellite communications to hit their targets. Anything that threatens U.S. air or Earth-orbiting capabilities threatens national security.
China says its moon plans are entirely peaceful and scientific in nature. But no rational nation would place its trust in Chinese promises. A permanent Chinese or Sino-Russian moon presence could be militarized, perhaps without being easily detected unless the United States possesses similar lunar capability.
That’s why a successful Artemis program is so important. Artemis is not military in nature, but the processes developed for the program can be put to military use. NASA can also share information that its probes obtain with the U.S. Space Force, which can then work on its own to develop military applications.
There is plenty of historical romance about the 1960s-era race to the moon, but that should not obscure the fact that national security concerns fueled the U.S. space effort. The Soviet Union was ahead of the United States in space technology in the early 1960s. It had launched the first space capsule, the first satellite orbiting the Earth and put the first human being into Earth orbit.
The United States needed to catch up fast, and President John F. Kennedy knew that national security could not be ensured if a power bent on global domination beat the United States in space.
The challenge the United States faces from China is at least as serious as the one posed by the Soviets some 60 years ago. China’s economy is many times larger than the Soviet Union’s was, and it has developed more sophisticated technology than the U.S.S.R. ever did.
We should not exaggerate Chinese power, but neither should we look the other way as China closes the economic, military and technological gaps between it and the United States.
Meeting the Chinese challenge on Earth means outpacing it in space. And that means ensuring that both NASA and the Space Force have the resources they need to keep space open and the United States free. | 2022-08-29T22:31:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Why the Artemis moon launch delay is a national-security worry - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/nasa-moon-launch-national-security-problem/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/nasa-moon-launch-national-security-problem/ |
Too much and not enough
Student-loan debt activists rally outside the White House on Aug. 25. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
President Biden’s announcement on his student debt relief plan explained who is eligible and how it works. Megan McArdle’s Aug. 25 op-ed, “The student loan ‘fix’ will just make the problem worse,” explained why she thought it was a bad idea. One of the points that many Republicans have made is that this is unfair to those who have fully repaid these obligations (which includes my daughter). Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) described it as “a slap in the face.”
However, if we only took actions to be fair to the past experiences of people, we wouldn’t have freed the enslaved, given women the vote or allowed interracial or same-sex marriage. The whole idea of progress is to improve the lives of people so they have a better experience than their ancestors.
In the long run, a better solution might be to lower the cost of higher education in the first place. Perhaps some sort of pre-college counseling about the long-term effects of large loans would direct students toward making better decisions about their educational direction.
To me, the fact that it is being criticized by both sides means that Mr. Biden might have gotten it just right. Is it a case of “too little and never enough"?
Karoleen Schafer, Annapolis
Megan McArdle’s column on the “student loan ‘fix’ ” was correct in saying that this fix is a problem, but she failed to provide fundamental truths about the cause.
As an undergraduate at a state university from 1960 to 1964, my tuition and fees were $135 per semester. The cost of each school year (including room and board, books, spending money, transportation home, etc.) came to about $1,700. I was fortunate to find a job paying $2.50 an hour during the summer. Combining that money with what I earned working 12 to 15 hours a week at $1.25 an hour enabled me to fully fund my education.
Today, the states put much less money into education, and so does the federal government. Whereas there are other factors that also contribute to the cost increase, much of this problem is the lack of truth-telling and backbone of our politicians. Their constant (destructive) message is the need to reduce taxes, the ineffectiveness of government and the need to keep minimum wage below the standard of living.
Also, the cost of graduate degrees in the STEM fields and education was essentially zero. In STEM fields, students got research or teaching assistantships or fellowships. That was less common in education; however, my wife was a teacher who was a “teacher of student teachers.” She didn’t get paid directly for that activity, but the university gave her free tuition and fees for each semester she did it. The consequence: a master’s in education for her and a doctorate for me.
Kenneth Shere, Bethesda | 2022-08-29T22:31:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Too much and not enough - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/too-much-not-enough/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/29/too-much-not-enough/ |
FORT WORTH, Texas — Max Duggan has started 29 games as TCU’s quarterback and Chandler Morris had 531 yards of total offense in his only full game last fall. New Horned Frogs coach Sonny Dykes still hasn’t said which of them will take the first snap in the season opener Friday night at Colorado. | 2022-08-29T22:32:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | TCU could play 3 QBs, Dykes not saying who takes 1st snap - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/tcu-could-play-3-qbs-dykes-not-saying-who-takes-1st-snap/2022/08/29/f670be6e-27e6-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/tcu-could-play-3-qbs-dykes-not-saying-who-takes-1st-snap/2022/08/29/f670be6e-27e6-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html |
2 Suitland students arrested on first day of school with guns, police say
The teenagers are 16 and 18
Two Suitland High School students were arrested and accused of bringing loaded guns to class on Monday, the first day back to school for children in Prince George’s County.
Deputies with the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Office initially came to Suitland High School on Monday morning to execute an arrest warrant for a 16-year-old student. The teen, police said, was involved in a carjacking in District Heights on June 29.
When deputies and a school resource officer took the student into custody, they said they found a gun in his waistband, according to a police news release. The 16-year-old, who police did not name, is now charged as an adult with possession of a handgun on school property and other gun-related charges, in addition to the original carjacked charge.
Hours later, at about 2 p.m., a parent notified the school that an 18-year-old student, Christopher Harris, may have also brought a gun to school, county police said. The student resource officer and other school security personnel found the 18-year-old in a hallway and located a gun in his backpack, police said.
Harris will be charged with “multiple” gun-related offenses, including possession of a dangerous weapon on school property, police said.
Suitland High School Principal Ronald Hollis sent a letter notifying parents of the two arrests on Monday. No students or staff were harmed, he said.
“The safety of the Suitland High School community is our highest priority,” Hollis wrote to parents. “Any student found to be in possession of a weapon will face disciplinary action up to expulsion.”
Prince George’s County Public Schools CEO Monica Goldson said she appreciated “the swift response” from law enforcement. She asked parents to check their children’s backpacks and notify police of issues related to safety and “health and wellness.”
“I want to reiterate that weapons have no place in our schools,” Goldson said. “Families must assist us in protecting all students and staff from harm.” | 2022-08-29T23:26:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Suitland High School students arrested after they were found with guns - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/29/suitland-high-school-guns/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/29/suitland-high-school-guns/ |
Biden administration urges Supreme Court not to take citizenship case
Advocates disagree, saying case from American Samoa would give justices a chance to overturn precedents with racist and imperialist rhetoric
By Robert Barnes
Supreme Court Justices have criticized the early-1900s Insular Cases, which employed racist language and imperialist sentiment. (Patrick Semansky/AP)
The Biden administration told the Supreme Court Monday that it should not take up a case about citizenship rights for American Samoa even though advocates say it would give justices a chance to upend a series of century-old precedents that have been roundly denounced as racist.
Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar told the Supreme Court in a brief filed Monday that an appeals court had been right to find that Congress should make citizenship decisions about those born in territories, and the case in question, Fitisemanu v. U.S., would make a poor vehicle for reexamining a series of rulings called the Insular Cases.
Last term, justices at both ends of the court’s ideological spectrum — Neil M. Gorsuch on the right and Sonia Sotomayor on the left — criticized the rulings, which employed racist language and imperialist sentiment to find residents of some U.S. territories are not entitled to full constitutional protection, such as birthright citizenship.
“The Insular Cases have no foundation in the Constitution and rest instead on racial stereotypes,” Gorsuch wrote last April in a concurring opinion. He added that “the time has come to recognize that the Insular Cases rest on a rotten foundation. And I hope the day comes soon when the Court squarely overrules them.”
Supreme Court says Puerto Ricans can be excluded from aid program
Advocates were disappointed that Prelogar asked the high court not to take the case. “It is shocking that the Biden-Harris Administration and the Solicitor General continue to breathe life into the Insular Cases, which were grounded in a vision of white supremacy that has no place in our society, much less briefs filed by the U.S. Justice Department,” said Neil Weare, president and founder of Equally American, which advocates for equal rights in U.S. territories.
The group’s petition says that those born in American Samoa are labeled “second-class by the U.S. government.”
Those who move to the states, “despite being taxpayers who contribute to their communities, are unable to vote,” serve on juries or run for state and federal office, the petition says.
Despite a high percentage of residents serving in the military, it continues, “In effect, they are citizens of nowhere.”
Some of the territory’s approximately 50,000 residents, however, seem to like it that way.
Its political leadership and delegate to Congress filed a brief saying there is no consensus on citizenship, and any decision on the matter should not be imposed by courts but negotiated through the political process.
“For three thousand years, on an archipelago seven thousand miles from this Court, the American Samoan people have preserved fa’a Samoa — the traditional Samoan way of life, weaving together countless traditional cultural, historical, and religious practices into a vibrant pattern found nowhere else in the world,” their amicus brief to the court said. “The American Samoan people have kept fa’a Samoa alive in part by preserving their unique political status.”
As the three American Samoan challengers noted in their petition to the court, they are seeking to overturn rulings that began in 1901 with one justice saying there should be different rules for “alien races, differing from us,” and expressed concern over “savages” becoming “citizens of the United States.”
But the government’s brief filed Monday said the issue was how to interpret the Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantee that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
There is no split among appellate courts that overseas territories are not “in the United States,” the Biden administration said, and it is up to Congress to award birthright citizenship, as it has done in Puerto Rico, Guam and elsewhere.
“The government in no way relies on the indefensible and discredited aspects of the Insular Cases’ reasoning and rhetoric,” Prelogar wrote, so “this case would be an unsuitable vehicle for reexamining those cases.” | 2022-08-29T23:30:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Justice Dept. says Supreme Court shouldn't take Fitisemanu v. U.S. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/29/insular-cases-samoa-supreme-court/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/29/insular-cases-samoa-supreme-court/ |
The speech, one of Biden’s few in prime time, reaffirms his rhetorical shift to a greater stress on the threat to democratic values
President Biden, seen here during a speech in Philadelphia in March, is returning to the city for a prime-time address. (Patrick Semansky/AP)
Biden in recent days has adopted a message for the midterm elections that includes fiery denunciations of what he calls the authoritarian strains in the Republican Party, notably during a speech last Thursday saying many in the GOP had turned toward “semi-fascism.” He added that the “MAGA Republicans,” as he called them, “embrace political violence. They don’t believe in America.”
While Biden has touched on such themes before, the full-throated nature of the speech was a change from a message that had more often stressed his legislative accomplishments.
But now Biden appears to be seeking to meld the two messages — saying “MAGA Republicans” are trying to destroy democracy, and Democrats and traditional Republicans are getting things done.
Biden has delivered few prime-time addresses during his presidency, often preferring to make less formal remarks at less prominent times. In delivering Thursday’s speech at Independence park, where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were debated and signed, Biden is continuing his pattern of using symbolic backdrops when he seeks to make a broader statement.
During the campaign, for example, Biden spoke at Gettysburg, using the historic Civil War battlefield to deplore “the cost of division” and saying, “We must come together as a nation.” He also spoke at Warm Springs, Ga., whose therapeutic waters were a frequent destination for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. And last year, Biden visited Tulsa to commemorate the racial attacks that killed as many as 300 Black Americans a century earlier.
Biden, throughout his career, has also used speeches as a way to mark major moments, viewing them as a way to organize his own thoughts and galvanize supporters around a particular cause either from the Senate floor or, in this case, one of the nation’s most hallowed grounds dedicated to democracy.
Philadelphia has been a favorite location for Biden, not far from his childhood home in Scranton or his current home in Delaware. He announced his 2020 presidential bid in the city, noting the significance of standing in the birthplace of American democracy. His campaign was headquartered there, and he returned to Philadelphia shortly before the election.
Biden again visited the city last year to deliver remarks on the importance of protecting the right to vote.
Matt Viser contributed to this report. | 2022-08-29T23:30:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden to deliver prime-time address on democracy Thursday - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/29/biden-primetime-philadelphia-democracy-speech/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/29/biden-primetime-philadelphia-democracy-speech/ |
The mayor vowed to protect nightlife spots. Then a Commanders player was shot.
On the H Street corridor, where city officials have invested resources to combat violence, violent crime is up 89 percent compared with the same time last year
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) holds a news conference to highlight public safety preparations ahead of Independence Day weekend. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post/For The Washington Post)
Two months after D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser launched a program to disrupt “patterns of violence” at three city nightlife hubs, a Washington Commanders running back was shot and injured during an armed robbery on one of those thoroughfares.
Brian Robinson Jr., who was on track to earn a significant role in the upcoming season, was attacked in broad daylight Sunday in the heart of the H Street corridor, a one-and-a-half mile stretch in Northeast Washington full of popular restaurants and bars.
The shooting has drawn national attention to gun violence in D.C. and raised questions about whether the city is doing enough to keep its residents safe — including in the areas where officials have invested additional resources to curb crime.
Along the H Street corridor, violent crime is up 89 percent compared with the same time last year, according to data provided by the city. Robberies, including carjackings, are up more than 100 percent, from 13 at this time in 2021 to 28 so far this year. And there have been eight reported assaults with a dangerous weapon — an increase from five at this time in 2021.
“It just shows you it can happen anywhere and to anybody,” Commanders Coach Ron Rivera said Monday, wearing a “Wear Orange” T-shirt to support the gun violence prevention movement.
In June, not long after a 15-year-old was killed and three others wounded in a shooting at an event in the U Street area, Bowser (D) told residents that she had a plan to keep them safe in the busiest entertainment hubs. She vowed to station teams of police officers, transportation officials and other agency employees on H Street, Connecticut Avenue and the U Street corridor on weekend nights through Labor Day.
Two months later, the effectiveness of that strategy is unclear. The mayor’s nightlife teams, which are in service from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, were not active when Robinson was shot.
Robinson was one of three people shot at or stabbed this weekend along the H Street corridor, police said. One man was closing up his smoke shop in the wee early hours Sunday, when gunfire blasted through his storefront, according to a police report. That evening, Robinson was approached by two armed males trying to steal his car keys, as patrons at a wine tasting next door watched in fear, according to police and witnesses. Less than 12 hours later, a woman was stabbed three blocks away.
“There are going to be times when incidents do happen,” said Christopher Geldart, deputy mayor for public safety. “But I do believe the strategies we have in place and what we have been able to show in our U Street, H Street and Connecticut Avenue corridors have been a success.”
City officials said they are considering how to redeploy resources to address the spate of violence on H Street, including shifting more D.C. police officers and other uniformed employees from the Department of Transportation to the area. They also said they are planning to extend the program past Labor Day.
On Monday, business owners along the corridor said that they have come to expect occasional violence in their neighborhood and that the events of the weekend did not seem particularly unusual.
Carlos Mata has worked at the AT&T store at 10th and H streets NE for about a year, and said the store has been a target of criminal activity. One morning this winter, for example, he said he arrived at work to find shattered glass and multiple accessories stolen. But he said he has always felt relatively safe at work because the violence, in his experience, typically occurs at night when he is no longer on the clock.
The shooting of Robinson on Sunday felt slightly different, Mata said, because it unfolded in broad daylight. But he said a recent shooting near his house at the Prince George’s County mall had reminded him that gunfire can erupt at any time.
“I pretty much feel as safe as I did two days ago,” he said. “Anything can happen anywhere.”
Anwar Saleem, executive director of H Street Main Street, a business development group, said police and other anti-violence workers are doing all they can to address the uptick of violence in his neighborhood. The only way to stop the gunfire, he added, is to address the root causes of crime through programs such as job training.
“Who the heck in the daylight would think you need a bunch of police on H Street?” he said. “This is something that the police can’t handle alone.”
A man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation from those involved, said he was entering a nearby office building Sunday evening when he recognized Robinson standing in front of a pharmacy with two other men.
As the man and his adult son entered the office building, he said he saw two young males pull up in a car and walk toward the group of three. He didn’t think anything of it, he said, so he closed the door behind him. Seconds later, the man said he heard at least three gunshots. He and his adult son ducked for cover.
Police said Monday that two males had demanded Robinson’s wallet and keys, but the running back “was able to wrestle a firearm away” from one of the suspects. At that point, the other suspect shot him twice, striking him at least once in the leg, police said.
The man said he approached Robinson and saw police officers demanding that he “get down” to the ground. The man said he repeatedly told police, “He’s an athlete. He’s been shot.”
Police said at least one initial report of the incident claimed a man was in the area with a gun. Robinson, police said, had run a short distance with the firearm he took from the suspect.
“That is how they would respond to someone with a gun at a shooting site,” Geldart said.
D.C. police spokesman Dustin Sternbeck said his officers applied a tourniquet to Robinson’s gunshot wound.
Robinson wrote on Instagram Monday that he had undergone surgery and that it “went well.” Rivera said that “it’ll be a matter of time before he’s back out here.”
Nicki Jhabvala, Lauren Lumpkin and Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report. | 2022-08-29T23:43:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. mayor had vowed to protect area where Commanders player was shot - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/29/bowser-nightlife-brian-robinson-shot/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/29/bowser-nightlife-brian-robinson-shot/ |
Jimmy Garoppolo agreed to a revised contract to remain with the 49ers. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP)
The revised deal guarantees Garoppolo $6.5 million for this season, according to one of those people. It contains per-game roster bonuses and incentives based on playing time that could push its value to close to $16 million. Before the restructuring, Garoppolo was to have made $25.6 million on the final season of his contract.
It appeared throughout the offseason that Garoppolo, 30, would be headed to his third NFL team after stints with the New England Patriots and the 49ers. The Niners committed to making Lance their starter in his second NFL season, and they granted Garoppolo’s representatives permission to seek a trade.
49ers give quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo permission to seek trade
But Garoppolo’s recovery from offseason shoulder surgery, his previously cumbersome salary and the moves other teams had made by the time the quarterback was cleared to resume throwing in late June complicated those efforts. Most recently, there was speculation that the Cleveland Browns might make a deal for Garoppolo. Instead, they have resolved to use backup Jacoby Brissett as their starter while Deshaun Watson serves his 11-game suspension for violating the NFL’s personal conduct policy.
Garoppolo was in training camp with the 49ers but didn’t participate in practices or team meetings, instead working out on his own while he and the team waited for a trade that didn’t materialize. It remains possible that the Niners could send Garoppolo elsewhere by the Nov. 1 leaguewide trade deadline. But his contract contains a no-trade clause that would allow him to veto any proposed deal not to his liking.
Garoppolo retained the Niners’ starting job last season and kept Lance on the sideline as a rookie, waiting for his opportunity. But it was clear after the 49ers lost to the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC championship game that the team was very likely to turn to Lance as the starter for the 2022 season.
The 49ers traded up for the No. 3 selection in last year’s NFL draft and used it on Lance rather than on Mac Jones, who helped the Patriots to the playoffs last season as a rookie starter.
Garoppolo has spent 4 1/2 seasons with the 49ers after 3 1/2 seasons as the understudy to Tom Brady with the Patriots. The Patriots traded Garoppolo to the 49ers in October 2017. | 2022-08-29T23:43:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jimmy Garoppolo and 49ers agree to revised contract, avoiding trade - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/jimmy-garoppolo-49ers-revised-contract/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/jimmy-garoppolo-49ers-revised-contract/ |
25-year-old man fatally shot in Southwest D.C.
Brandon Smith, from Northeast D.C., has died. The Sunday incident remains under investigation.
A 25-year-old man was fatally shot early Sunday morning in Southwest Washington, police said.
An off-duty D.C. police officer found Brandon Smith with gunshot wounds in the 100 block of Xenia Street, SW, around 5:50 a.m.
Smith, from Northeast D.C., was pronounced dead on the scene.
Police have not identified suspects in the shooting, which remains under investigation. | 2022-08-29T23:48:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 25-year-old man fatally shot Sunday in Southwest D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/29/homicide-smith-southwest-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/29/homicide-smith-southwest-dc/ |
Honda, LG to team up on U.S. battery plant
Honda Motor and South Korean battery maker LG Energy Solution will spend $4.4 billion to build a new battery plant in the United States as the Japanese carmaker seeks to phase out fossil fuel vehicles completely by 2040.
The facility will have an annual capacity of about 40 gigawatt-hours with mass production slated to start at the end of 2025, Honda said Monday in a company filing. The duo will set up a joint venture this year in which Honda will hold a 49 percent stake by investing $1.7 billion. Construction is expected to start by early 2023.
The location of the plant is not decided. Bloomberg News reported in June that Ohio is a front-runner, and the Japanese firm already has carmaking plants there.
Carmakers around the world are scrambling to build electric vehicle (EV) battery plants in North America by partnering with Asian battery makers. Panasonic Holdings, which supplies electric car batteries to Tesla, is in talks to invest $4 billion in a battery plant in the United States, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. Korean battery makers also have a slew of plans for battery plants in the United States, constructing four for General Motors, two for Stellantis and three for Ford Motor.
Honda meanwhile plans to spend $36 billion on its push into EVs over the next decade by launching some 30 new models, one of the most aggressive expansions of electrification in Japan. The new plant will produce pouch-type cells for Honda and Acura’s EVs.
FTC sues data broker over geolocation sales
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has sued Kochava, a data broker it alleges sells consumers’ mobile geolocation data that could be used to track visits to abortion providers, addiction-recovery centers or other sensitive locations.
The suit comes in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade. In the weeks since, 12 states have criminalized abortion and six have put time limits on the procedure. Last week, new bans went into effect in Idaho and Tennessee, and in Texas abortion is now considered a felony punishable by life in prison.
Kochava describes itself as an Idaho-based mobile analytics company. The company preemptively sued the FTC this month, alleging the agency misunderstands its business and that consumers can opt out of geolocation data collection.
Western technology companies, including Ericsson and Nokia, announced plans for complete exits from Russia on Monday, following Dell last week, as the pace of withdrawals accelerates. Ericsson said it will gradually withdraw from Russia over the coming months, while its Finnish rival Nokia said it also plans to exit its Russian business by the end of the year. Switzerland-based Logitech International also said it will wind down its remaining activities in Russia, having suspended its operations in March. More Western companies are selling or withdrawing from their Russian businesses, having initially halted operations after Moscow sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24.
Dutch medical device maker Philips said Monday it has expanded an earlier recall of some respiratory machines to a total of 1,700 devices globally becuase of possible contamination of a plastic component with a non-compatible material. The company's subsidiary Philips Respironics has not received any reports of patient harm from the issue. The 1,700 devices include 386 in the United States, Philips said. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration first announced the recall Monday, saying that if the plastic is in the device motor of the bi-level positive airway pressure (BiPAP) machines, it may release certain chemicals of concern called volatile organic compounds. | 2022-08-30T00:01:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Honda, LG to team up on U.S. battery plant - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/honda-lg-to-team-up-on-us-battery-plant/2022/08/29/5b16ecc4-278a-11ed-806e-f01a46624ddb_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/honda-lg-to-team-up-on-us-battery-plant/2022/08/29/5b16ecc4-278a-11ed-806e-f01a46624ddb_story.html |
The Orange County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously last week to pay $480,000 to Sandra Quinones to settle a civil lawsuit over the delayed care. (iStock)
By the time jail staff responded to her calls for help, Sandra Quinones’s water had been broken for two hours. Employees at the Orange County, Calif., jail where the pregnant woman was incarcerated refused to call an ambulance, instead driving her to a hospital on a non-emergency basis.
The Starbucks trip, it said, amounted to “a blatant showing of indifference for Quinones and Baby Quinones.”
The Orange County Sheriff’s Office did not return an email seeking comment on Monday. A lawyer who represented the county in the case, Zachary Schwartz, also did not reply to an inquiry from The Washington Post.
Richard Herman, Quinones’s attorney, told the Los Angeles Times that his client has struggled with homelessness and mental health issues since losing her baby.
But, he said, “she understands that she was wronged.”
“Over two hours passed before anyone evaluated Quinones,” the complaint said.
Court records do not say how long the Starbucks trip lasted, but note that the jail employees decided to make the stop rather than taking Quinones directly to the hospital. It was not clear whether any employees were disciplined or how she lost the pregnancy. The lawsuit argued that Orange County does not properly train jail employees in handling female reproductive health issues or knowing when a hospital visit is necessary.
“She doggedly pursued this case, including all of its ups and downs,” Herman told the Los Angeles Times. “This was a long, hard fight.”
The lawsuit said Quinones has suffered post-traumatic stress disorder and depression stemming from the incident. She has been homeless and in and out of county custody, and struggles with substance abuse. For years, she could not process what happened, saying, “I can’t talk about it,” the suit said.
“Ms. Quinones will never forget how she was treated that day, and no amount of money will ever make her whole,” Nicholas Kohan, one of Quinones’s attorneys, told NBC News. “However, I am pleased with the result and that the county of Orange acknowledged its wrongdoing. Hopefully this will lead to better conditions and treatment for pregnant women in the Orange County jail.” | 2022-08-30T01:32:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pregnant inmate loses baby after jailers stop at Starbucks en route to hospital - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/29/pregnant-inmate-starbucks/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/29/pregnant-inmate-starbucks/ |
She knocks off the rust for a 6-3, 6-3, victory over Dana Kovinic
Serena Williams defeated Danka Kovinic in the first round of the U.S. Open. (Corey Sipkin/AFP/Getty Images)
NEW YORK — Fueled by an electric New York crowd and her fierce competitive fire, Serena Williams stepped onto Arthur Ashe Stadium on Monday night and defied time, rust and her own frustration to extend her remarkable career at least one more round.
After a pro career of unparalleled success that began when she was 14, Williams disclosed earlier this month that her retirement was at hand as she neared her 41st birthday. But Monday wasn’t going to be that night, she declared in gritty fashion, toppling 80th-ranked Dana Kovinic, 6-3, 6-3, to advance to the second round of the U.S. Open.
With the victory, Williams kept intact one of countless distinctions in her illustrious career. She has never lost a first-round match at the U.S. Open, bringing her mark since 1998 to 21-0. She also elevated her U.S. Open record to 107-14.
But Williams, who has won an Open era 23 Grand Slam singles titles, had played just four matches in the last 14 months, winning only one. Her most recent match, on Aug. 16, ended in a lopsided, error-strewn loss to 19-year-old Emma Raducanu that lasted just 65 minutes.
So every aspect of Williams’s game, apart from experience and sheer will, was in question when she took the court Monday against the hard-hitting Kovinic. Her next hurdle is apt to be considerably higher: a second-round match Wednesday against world No. 2 Anett Kontaveit, 26, of Estonia.
After a rocky start by both players, Williams broke into a broad smile upon clinching the victory over Kovinic. After extending a warm handshake at the net, Williams executed her customary victory twirl as she acknowledged all four sides of the towering grandstands and blew kisses. Then, amid a standing ovation, she remained on court for the U.S. Open’s video tribute narrated by Oprah Winfrey.
“I’ve always just got to do the best that I can,” Williams told the audience during her on-court interview with TV personality Gayle King. “I feel so comfortable on this court and in front of everyone here.
“When I step out on the court I just want to do the best that I can do on that particular day.
It was unclear in the immediate aftermath of Williams’s victory the precise ramifications of her statement, in a Vogue cover story earlier this month, that she was “evolving away from tennis.”
Will she retire at the conclusion of this U.S. Open? At the end of this season? Will she ever announce a firm retirement date or leave the door ajar, as many pros before her have done, in case she has a change of heart?
Asked during her post-match news conference if this U.S. Open would be her final tournament, she said “I’ve been pretty vague about it. I’m going to stay vague because you never know.”
Eager to witness what might be Serena Williams's final competitive match, thousands of fans poured into the Billie Jean King Tennis Center on Aug. 29. (Video: Reuters)
The capacity crowd of roughly 24,000 took no chances on missing the moment and seized the occasion to shower her with earsplitting cheers and shouts of love, appreciation and respect for a career’s worth of entertainment and achievement.
It was hardly smooth sailing for Williams, who has long been hailed as having the greatest serve in women’s tennis. From the opening game, she struggled mightily with her ball toss and plowed one serve after another into the net.
Her emotions — and her game — were all over the place in the early going.
After her fifth double-fault through the first four games, she appeared to tear up while serving at 2-2. With a subsequent error, she was broken and faced her first deficit of the night.
But once again, Williams proved her mettle, drawing on experience, savvy and grit to compensate for anything time and age have taken away.
The stadium cracked with the electricity of a Broadway opening when Williams’s name was announced. She strode out to a standing ovation — a shimmering star in a black cape over a black figure-skating-inspired dress with long sleeves and flouncy skirt. Every layer of her outfit, as well as her hair, was covered with crystals. On her feet were special edition, diamond-crusted Nikes with a diamond-laden swoosh along the heel.
The grandstands were packed, with nearly every fan snapping photos and selfies to preserve the moment as proof of being on hand for tennis history. Luminaries from sports, entertainment, politics — Mike Tyson, Gladys Knight and former president Bill Clinton among them — looked on. In Williams’s guest box, her daughter, Olympia, 4, looked on with her Aunt Isha Price in a matching outfit with white beads in her hair — a nod to the beads her mother wore in winning her first U.S. Open 23 years earlier. And on the plaza outside, fans without a ticket on Ashe stood shoulder to shoulder to watch on an oversized screen.
The crowd cheered Williams’s every point but fell silent as her serving woes grew.
“The crowd was crazy,” Williams said. “It really helped pull me through.”
Simply holding serve was a struggle in the first game; she committed five consecutive faults at one point.
But she went on to break Kovinic, who was competing against Williams and on the cavernous Ashe Stadium for the first time, in the next game, energizing the crowd by plucking a lob out of the sky for a winner to break for a 2-0 lead.
The play was patchy by both players.
Williams’s rust was evident. But as she has done so often in her career, she put her head down and turned her frustration into power.
She stormed back from the deficit to close the rocky opening set in 55 minutes.
As the second set unfolded, glimpses of the champion’s dominance came to the fore. Williams started moving better and, in turn, serving better. She ran down drop shots that seemed beyond her reach, cracked winning volleys and rarely erred on her timing.
With each ace, she grew stronger, which seemed to chip away at Kovinic’s belief.
Midway through the second set, Williams was in full control, and she raced to a 4-2 lead.
In a matter of minutes, it seemed, Williams had three match points as she readied for Kovinic’s serve. The rally proved short-lived, with Kovinic blasting one final forehand into the net.
Williams has given the sport her full range of emotions over her career — much of it on this exact stage, where she has roared with defiance, shrieked with joy, screamed tirades, glared at some rivals and consoled others, buried her tear-streaked face in her hands, and thrown back her head in triumph.
Monday night, after ensuring her singles career will last at least one more round by overpowering a competitor 13 years young, a smile of satisfaction was enough.
“I love this sport, and I feel like the sport has given me so much,” Williams said, asked if she envisioned a role in tennis after retirement. “I don’t see myself not a part of tennis. I don’t know how I’m going to be a part of tennis. We’ve come too far together to not have anything to do with it.” | 2022-08-30T02:55:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Serena Williams wins first-round U.S. Open match - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/serena-williams-us-open/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/29/serena-williams-us-open/ |
The debate over American fascism gets louder
Last week, President Biden dropped the f-word. He warned during a stump speech in Maryland that the country’s right-wing movement, which remains dominated by his predecessor, former president Donald Trump, has embraced “political violence” and no longer believes in democracy.
“What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy,” Biden said, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something — it’s like semi-fascism.”
Biden was gesturing to various ongoing Republican initiatives to restrict voting access as well as a slate of Republican midterm candidates who, to this day, deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election. There’s also the tacit support of some Republicans for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the violent rhetoric that has emerged among some corners of the right in the wake of a publicized FBI investigation into classified documents Trump kept in his private Florida golf club residence.
The simple invocation of “fascism” elicited howls of outrage from Republicans and triggered a weekend of political chatter. A spokesman for the Republican National Committee described the president’s remarks as “despicable.” Gov. Chris Sununu (R-N.H.) said on CNN that it was “horribly inappropriate” to brand a segment of the U.S. population as “semi-fascist” and called on Biden to apologize.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) tweeted that “communists have always called their enemies ‘fascists.’” One historian of Latin America responded to Cruz, noting that, while communists had other names for their opponents before the rise of fascist parties in the 1920s, fascists have always used anti-communist hysteria to “stir violence” and “augment their power.” (Never mind the relative absurdity of casting a figure with as centrist a record as Biden as a “communist.”)
Biden and his allies did not back down from the message. “You look at the definition of fascism and you think about what they’re doing in attacking our democracy, what they’re doing and taking away our freedoms, wanting to take away our rights, our voting rights ― I mean, that is what that is,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday. “It is very clear.”
There is no consensus in the U.S. political conversation on what “fascism” even is, let alone which set of political actors should earn its ignominious attribution. On the left, there’s a hardening belief that a Republican Party still captured by Trump is hostile to fair elections, bent on dismantling liberal democracy, and is taking its cues from more clear-cut would-be authoritarians like illiberal Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
On the right, there’s a parallel, if more histrionic, insistence that the Democrats and the liberal establishment comprise some sort of tyrannical front. That grievance has supercharged their long-running culture war and underlies recent moves by Republican state governments to ban certain books and censor what schools can teach about race, history and sexuality.
Scholars of fascism see Trump’s political ideology and style not as a redux of the past, but a brand of far-right, pseudo-authoritarian for the present. Regular readers of Today’s WorldView for the past half decade will know that we have not been shy about invoking “fascism” in the American context as we parsed the tumult of the Trump years, the ultranationalism and nativism animating his supporters and his own conspiratorial demagoguery.
Biden’s decision to deploy the term may reflect a more aggressive stance ahead of a bruising midterm election cycle. That could be a tactic to gin up Democratic voters. “They have thought they weren’t seeing the strong fighter, the person they elected, and they attributed it to age and to weakness,” Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic pollster, told my colleagues. “I hope we can anticipate more of this. People have been craving it.”
But the substantive claim Biden made is also important. The “semi-” in “semi-fascism” was doing a lot of rhetorical work for the U.S. president, who was not likening Trump and his movement to the genocidal monstrosity of the Third Reich. But his critics nevertheless seemed to suggest that was the subtext of his remarks, and dismissed the charge offhand.
So what may be a useful lens through which to see Biden’s invocation of fascism? Writer Jonathan Katz put forward a thorough analysis over the weekend, citing the work of Robert Paxton, a respected historian of Vichy France and author of the 2004 book, “The Anatomy of Fascism.”
Katz quoted Paxton at length: “Fascism in power is a compound, a powerful amalgam of different but marriageable conservative, national socialist, and radical right ingredients, bonded together by common enemies and common passions for a regenerated, energized and purified nation, whatever the cost to free institutions and the rule of law.”
“The danger is not that American fascism will necessarily or even probably turn out like Italian Fascism — or German, Syrian, Argentinian, or any other. We are not going to live a shot-for-shot remake of the Holocaust or the Second World War,” Katz wrote. Rather, he continued, “the danger would be in the triumph of an exclusionary, violent, anti-democratic cult of personality, which by definition will not be dislodged through elections, politics, or civil debate.” | 2022-08-30T04:13:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The debate over American fascism gets louder, as Biden invokes the term - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/30/fascism-biden-trump-american-history/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/30/fascism-biden-trump-american-history/ |
My husband is still working, and I am caring for an adult child with special needs. We are not getting any younger, and I don’t want to participate in this kind of dynamic.
Weary: To clarify: You aren’t asking to do less — or more — in terms of child care. You would like to be treated differently by the adults.
Exasperated: These “form” thank-you notes supply printed language and leave gaps for the grateful sender to fill in particulars: “Dear _______, Thank you so much for the ________. We ____ you so much. Sincerely/Love _____”
Or there are no blanks to fill in at all: just vaguely worded slips of greeting card gratitude, using fancy fonts to fill the space where actual gratitude should reside.
(I would rather be tagged in a group Instagram thank-you post than receive one of these.)
Disappointed: I take your point, but the two had met in a professional capacity; my idea to reach out warmly was to open the door — and give him the option to walk through it. | 2022-08-30T04:26:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: I feel like my daughter pits us against the other grandparents - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/30/ask-amy-grandkid-competition-in-laws/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/30/ask-amy-grandkid-competition-in-laws/ |
Dear Carolyn: I am increasingly concerned that no one likes my boyfriend.* I feel like after meeting someone’s significant other for the first time, it’s common to text or otherwise convey how much you like him or her (especially among female friends).** That keeps not happening. I don’t think he is doing anything off-putting or otherwise being weird, though, and I’m pretty hypersensitive to such things, so I don’t know what to make of the silence.
I certainly don’t need anyone’s approval — I’m a grown-up and the one dating him, after all — but the lack of commentary has me worried that he’s actually a huge [glass bowl] and I just can’t see it. Should I just stop worrying because this type of affirmative confirmation really isn’t a thing? Ask one person? Something else I can’t see?
*Except my mother. She can’t stop talking about how delightful he is. And, no, she isn’t desperate to see me shacked up.
**This is a thing I do, anyway, when meeting a friend’s SO. But it has been a long time since I’ve been in a place where a SO is meeting my people, so I don’t have a point of comparison here.
— Just Because You’re Paranoid …
Just Because You’re Paranoid …: The gravitational pull toward saying OMG YOU’RE THE ONE WHO DOESN’T LIKE HIM is strong with this one, from the neediness of it.
But I’ll resist! And say instead that if you’re interested in what your friends think of him, then absolutely you should ask them. Since we all have different comfort levels with saying difficult things, it makes sense also to spell out what you’re hoping to get from them. E.g., if you think friends are a good way to get a more complete view of someone and bypass your own blind spots, then say that.
Something like, “I’m not looking for approval” — I hope — “I just think friends can see things we/I can’t.”
I (female) think that in my 20s, I might have done such a thing as give unsolicited feedback on the guys my friends date. But now in my 30s, I never do that! It seems so weird, actually. Like, I trust these people to date people they like. They don’t need my approval. I might say something like, “It was so nice to meet Blake!” if it’s a really close friend, but among a group of friends, no, I wouldn’t. I think Carolyn’s advice is great. If you want to know their impression, ask, but don’t read much into the current state of commentary.
Back when, my friends and I had a pact. We would be allowed to weigh in on someone’s (let’s say Abby’s) new steady after three months of mustering. The group would give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and explain. We often saw emerging problems that Abby had been blinded to by limerence and/or great sex. Abby could then act on the advice or not, but we ALWAYS found that the group was right on point. Saved us all — women and men alike — a whole world of tsuris.
Gravitational pull is worth considering. If you are wondering why your friends don’t say anything about him, please consider why it’s an issue. If you are looking for reassurance outside how you feel about him, then it’s a good time to concentrate on only your feelings and really listen. I wish I had. | 2022-08-30T04:26:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Friends seem suspiciously quiet about new boyfriend - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/30/carolyn-hax-friends-boyfriend-quiet/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/30/carolyn-hax-friends-boyfriend-quiet/ |
In the 1980s and ’90s, his brainchild became a ubiquitous presence in school hallways across America
E. Bryant Crutchfield, who gave millions of students the Trapper Keeper, died Aug. 21 at 85. (Family photo)
E. Bryant Crutchfield, a paper-company executive whose signature product design became a touchstone of student life in the 1980s and ’90s, and an orderly object of nostalgia forever after, died Aug. 21 at a hospice center in Marietta, Ga. The creator of the Trapper Keeper was 85.
His wife, Virginia Crutchfield, confirmed his death and said the cause was cancer.
Mr. Crutchfield, known as “Crutch,” spent more than three decades with Mead, the paper company long headquartered in Dayton, Ohio. He held the title of director of new ventures in the 1970s, when he embarked on one such venture that would produce a sensationally and enduringly popular school supply.
The Trapper Keeper, essentially a three-ring binder to hold and organize folders, is a product immediately recognizable to the generations that grew up making cassette mixtapes, laughing at sitcoms such as “Full House” and “Family Matters,” and relishing the inimitable thwack of a slap bracelet. In its heyday, the Trapper Keeper was a ubiquitous presence in school hallways across the country, toted under the arm or stowed away in book bags and lockers until it headed home with its owner, a capsule containing all the day’s work done and yet to be done — and perhaps a passed note or two.
The history of the Trapper Keeper was detailed in an article published in 2017 in the online magazine Mental Floss, and the product’s origin story reflects all the careful planning and attention to detail to which any proud new owner of a Trapper Keeper might aspire.
Mr. Crutchfield began developing the product in the early 1970s. Market research had revealed that the coming school years would see more students per classroom, with less locker space for each student. Data also revealed a surge in popularity of portfolios, or folders.
“You can’t take six 150-page notebooks around with you, and you can’t interchange them,” Mr. Crutchfield told Mental Floss. “People were using more portfolios, so I wanted to make a notebook that would hold portfolios, and they could take that to six classes.”
Mr. Crutchfield set out on a process of market-testing and refinement that would last several years. Inspired by the Pee-Chee brand of portfolios that was popular at the time on the West Coast, he led the design of folders with pockets that were oriented vertically instead of horizontally to prevent papers from slipping out. Those folders became known as Trappers, following a suggestion from Mr. Crutchfield’s research and development manager, Jon Wyant, who went on to propose the name Trapper Keeper for the binder. “Bang!” Mr. Crutchfield told Mental Floss. “It made sense!”
Mr. Crutchfield assiduously collected feedback from students, who delighted in the stylish cover art of Trappers and Trapper Keepers. Over the years, the designs featured cats and hearts, cars and athletes, psychedelic geometric patterns and the rainbow-tastic creations of Lisa Frank. Mr. Crutchfield also consulted with teachers, who at first approved heartily of his organizational invention. He found especially useful assistants in his two children, including his son, a self-confessed ideal test case for the Trapper Keeper.
“My locker was a mess,” Ken Crutchfield recalled in an interview. “I was … never really very good at keeping things in a very organized way, even to this day.”
The Trapper Keeper made its test-market debut in Wichita in 1978 and began selling nationally three years later. Sales were boosted by a national prime-time television ad campaign in which a disorganized young man bumps into a pert young woman at the library, knocking her Trapper to the floor. In the flirty conversation that ensues, she extols the virtues of Mead’s product line.
“Boy, I’ve got to get a Trapper and get my act together,” the male student declares.
“If you do,” his new acquaintance replies, “I’ll let you carry my books.”
From the outset, the Trapper Keeper was a sensation.
“We rolled it out, and it was just like a rocket,” Mr. Crutchfield said. “It was the biggest thing we’d ever done. I saw kids fight over designs in retail.” According to Mental Floss, Mead began selling more than $100 million in folders and binders per year.
Ernest Bryant Crutchfield, an only child, was born in Greenville, Ala., southwest of Montgomery, on Feb. 5, 1937. Both of his parents worked in a cotton mill.
Mr. Crutchfield was the first person in his family to graduate from college, according to his wife. He received a bachelor’s degree in applied art from Auburn University in Alabama in 1960 and later served in the Air Force Reserve.
He began his career with Montag, a stationery and school supply company that later became part of Mead. At Mead, Mr. Crutchfield oversaw the development of products including the Valet stationery set, which came with a plastic envelope caddy and set a company sales record in the late 1960s.
After leaving Mead, Mr. Crutchfield worked for the Georgia-Pacific paper company for a decade before retiring.
Survivors include his wife of 61 years, the former Virginia K’Burg of Marietta; two children, Ken Crutchfield of Alexandria, Va., and Carol Iyer of St. Augustine, Fla.; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
By the end of the 1990s, Trapper Keepers had begun to decline in popularity — including among teachers, many of whom detested the noisy Velcro that replaced the binder’s original snap closure. Some schools banned Trapper Keepers, while others, still recognizing their organizational potential, required them. Sensing the potential for a comeback, Acco Brands, Mead’s modern-day parent company, relaunched the line last year. | 2022-08-30T04:27:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | E. Bryant Crutchfield, creator of the Trapper Keeper, dies at 85 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/29/trapper-keeper-e-bryant-crutchfield-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/08/29/trapper-keeper-e-bryant-crutchfield-dead/ |
NEW YORK — When Serena Williams won the 1999 U.S. Open for her first Grand Slam title at age 17, she wore white beads in her hair. On Monday night, when Williams won her first match of the 2022 U.S. Open at age 40, her daughter, Olympia, was courtside, sporting a hairstyle paying homage to Mom’s from all that time ago. | 2022-08-30T04:36:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Serena's daughter, Olympia, sports beads, like Mom years ago - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/tennis/serenas-daughter-olympia-sports-beads-like-mom-years-ago/2022/08/29/22bcd892-2817-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/tennis/serenas-daughter-olympia-sports-beads-like-mom-years-ago/2022/08/29/22bcd892-2817-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html |
Two decades ago, I spent more than two years sleeping a few decks above eight nuclear reactors onboard the Enterprise, the US Navy’s oldest nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. I was the rear admiral in command of the Enterprise’s strike group, and “broke my flag” and sailed to a long combat deployment in the Middle East to support the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.I didn’t lose much sleep thinking about those reactors, because I knew how professional and meticulous the Navy was about operating them: All US submarines and carriers use nuclear propulsion. I spent a fair amount of time with our engineers and learned a great deal about the advantages and dangers of atomic power.
Today, I am losing sleep about the situation in Ukraine, where Russian President Vladimir Putin’s troops are occupying Europe’s largest nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia. Putin is truly playing with fire, and much of Europe (and Russia as well) are at significant risk of a nuclear incident with terrible long-term consequences. What should the international community do?
Russians have captured the entire nuclear complex in southeast Ukraine, and are doggedly holding on to it for three principal reasons. First, Putin sees the strategically located site, near the focus of Ukraine’s long-awaited offensive operations centered on the Kherson region, as a kind of sanctuary from which his forces can stage attacks. He believes that the Ukrainians won’t bombard the site given the risks of a radiation release.
We don’t have to imagine what a radiation release could look like. We need only look back to Chernobyl, which was caused by structural and training failures. The effects were felt most directly in Ukraine, but significant radiation ended up in Belarus to the north and into Russia itself. Predicting deaths attributed to such a radiation event is difficult, but most sources believe thousands ended up dead or with severe health consequences, notably cancers. The costs of remediation approached $100 billion with over 330,000 evacuees.
More recently, in 2011, an earthquake and tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. The reactor failure and nuclear release was given the International Atomic Energy Agency’s most severe rating, level 7, equaling only Chernobyl. Despite massive civilian response and plenty of international assistance (including teams from the US Navy), thousands of people were affected, with over 150,000 evacuated.
Finally, artillery fire could hit the containers of spent uranium on the site, creating a more localized but still dangerous radiation release. While we are assured that a full nuclear detonation could not occur, the long-term risks to people and infrastructure are obvious. Zaporizhzhia is truly a ticking time bomb.
(Less urgently, this type of mission should be considered elsewhere — there are more than 440 nuclear power plants worldwide, some in regions that are politically unstable or vulnerable to natural disaster.)
The next step is complicated but critical: demilitarize the Zaporizhzhia plant and the surrounding area. Any nuclear operation in a combat zone must be regarded under international law similarly to a medical facility or religious center — a no-strike/no-occupy zone. Russia should be pressured to turn the plant over to an international mission led by the United Nations and staffed by the IAEA. Logistical support could be provided by a neutral country, perhaps India, which operates more than 20 reactors.
Convincing Russia to do this will be difficult, but additional pressure could be brought to bear by further condemnation in the UN General Assembly; by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization returning to the idea of a no-fly zone, at least one limited to the area around the nuclear plant; or by increased economic punishment, including global secondary sanctions on Russian energy sales.
Recent negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, organized by Turkey and the UN, restarted grain shipments out of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports to help ensure that food scarcity did not lead to global unrest. Avoiding the potential catastrophe of a massive nuclear radiation release is at least as important. | 2022-08-30T06:07:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Putin Can Be Pressured to Pull Troops From Ukraine Nuclear Plant - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/putin-can-be-pressured-to-pull-troops-from-ukraine-nuclear-plant/2022/08/30/6cba2a4e-2821-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/putin-can-be-pressured-to-pull-troops-from-ukraine-nuclear-plant/2022/08/30/6cba2a4e-2821-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html |
“The numbers speak for themselves: Nearly 90% of student loan debt relief will go to borrowers earning less than $75,000; 85% of the congressional Republicans’ tax cut went to taxpayers earning more than $75,000.”
— Tweet by the White House Twitter account, Aug. 28
In selling the president’s plan for student loan debt forgiveness, the White House has repeatedly claimed that the main beneficiaries would be people making less than $75,000 a year — even though the plan has much higher limits.
Households earning at least $250,000 a year — and individuals earning at least $125,000 — would be eligible to have up to $10,000 in student-loan debt canceled (up to $20,000 in the case of Pell Grants for low-income students). Parents who took out direct loans known as Plus would also be eligible, in addition to their children.
In this tweet, the White House contrasts its plan with the across-the-board tax cut passed by Republicans in 2017. The suggestion is that President Biden’s plan is targeted directly at the middle class, in contrast to a GOP tax plan that supposedly showered money on the wealthy.
There’s a reason $75,000 is so attractive to the White House. The Census Bureau says median household income is close to $70,000. But these numbers are measuring different things, and so they are not directly comparable.
White House student loan statistic
The White House has heavily emphasized its claim that much of the loan forgiveness would go to people making less than $75,000.
A chart appears in the White House fact sheet claiming 87 percent would go to people making less than $75,000, 13 percent would go to people making between $75,000 and $125,000, and zero percent would go to people making more than $125,000.
In his remarks announcing the plan, Biden said, “About 90 percent of the eligible beneficiaries make under $75,000 a family.”
Actually, Biden got that wrong. The chart says that the numbers reflect “individual income,” not family income. The official transcript has not been corrected, but perhaps Biden was confused, because usually such distribution tables are based on household (family) income. Instead, the White House rendered the statistics as individual income.
Imagine a family in which the husband and wife each make $75,000. That’s household income of $150,000. They likely would file a joint tax return. But under the White House scenario, each person is treated as an individual.
White House officials said they relied on an analysis done by the Education Department that studied individual income data from the Census Bureau and used what they claimed was more robust student loan data than provided by the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). The Education Department calculated the distribution based on the characteristics of people who have taken out student loans.
Thus far, a full distribution table or the methodology has not been released, only the White House chart — a fact that makes it hard to evaluate. Some analysts question how the distribution estimate captures rapidly changing incomes from 2020 and 2021 to 2022 — and the “lifecycle effects” of people as they age. Another issue is how the loan-forgiveness benefit is calculated from canceling a $10,000 income-driven repayment (IDR) loan — in which someone might only expect to pay less than half of that amount over the life of the loan. Under IDR loans, borrowers pay a monthly percentage of their income for a set period of time.
Meanwhile, the Penn-Wharton Budget Model, in evaluating the distributional impact of the student loan plan, used household income. White House officials confirmed there is no phaseout of the income limits, just a cutoff at $125,000 per individual or $250,000 per household. In doing the analyses, Penn-Wharton assumed there was no phaseout.
For student loans, the Penn-Wharton model relies on public Education Department data and uses the Fed’s data just for income distribution and thresholds, according to Kent Smetters of University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
The extra $10,000 for the Pell Grant is the main source of progressivity in the Biden plan, Smetters said, but that is mostly tied to parent’s income, complicating the analyses and possibly making the Biden plan appear more progressive than it really is. Penn-Wharton hopes to refine the analysis in the coming weeks once it receives permission to use confidential National Center for Education Statistics.
Remember how the White House says zero percent would make more than $125,000? The Penn-Wharton model found that about 1 percent of households with debts canceled would make between $212,209 and $321,699 in fiscal year 2022. About 5 percent would make between $141,096 and $212,209.
The Penn-Wharton model generally displays distribution results in quintiles. But at the Fact Checker’s request, Smetters ran the numbers so we could make a direct comparison to the White House figures. He said that 66.13 percent of households receiving loan forgiveness would have income below $75,000; for ages 25-35, 62.04 percent would have income below $75,000. Penn-Wharton said most of the debt forgiven would accrue to borrowers in this age range.
In other words, at least a third would make more than $75,000. That’s a different picture than what the White House presented.
White House officials argued that when using household data, a direct comparison should be at the $150,000 level — double the $75,000 in the chart. Smetters ran the numbers again. By that standard, about 95 percent of the loan cancellation benefits would go to households making less than $150,000, he said. For ages 25-35, he said, about 93 percent of benefits would go to households making less than $150,000.
GOP tax plan statistic
Meanwhile, the statistic about the GOP tax plan — “85% of the congressional Republicans’ tax cut went to taxpayers earning more than $75,000” — is based on household income, not individual income. The White House said this number comes from an Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (TPC) calculation from 2018, showing the share of the total federal tax change.
It’s worth noting that the Tax Policy Center uses a concept called expanded cash income, which includes as part of income such items as employer contributions for retirement plans, health insurance, and payroll taxes, as well as government cash transfers such as food stamps. These items could push some households into higher income categories. Penn-Wharton does not include such items, and neither does the Census Bureau. (The White House fact sheet linked to the Census Bureau when discussing the income limits.)
The TPC analysis shows that taxes were cut at every income level in the 2017 bill. The Congressional Budget Office, in a 2021 report, also found that “provisions included in the 2017 tax act reduced average federal tax rates among all quintiles in 2018.”
As we often note, since the wealthy pay most of the income taxes, they end up with most of the tax cuts in any across-the-board tax cut.
“Households in the highest income quintile, which received about 55 percent of all income, paid more than two-thirds of all federal taxes in 2018,” the CBO estimated. “In contrast, households in the lowest quintile, which received about 4 percent of all income, paid about 0.01 percent of federal taxes, on net, in that year.”
In any case, the White House distribution table for the student loan relief is based on individual income, while distribution claimed for the GOP tax cut is based on household income.
White House officials said that even when using household numbers, the student-loan plan compares favorably to the GOP tax cut. The bottom four income quintiles (under $141,000 in household income in the Penn-Wharton model) are projected to receive 94 percent of the student loan relief, one official noted. By contrast, the TPC analysis of the Republican tax law found the bottom four quintiles (under $149,000 in expanded cash income) received 36 percent of federal tax cuts.
Someone in the White House thought it would be clever to have a snappy comparison between the student loan plan and the GOP tax cut. But it’s not kosher to compare individual numbers with household numbers. That’s apples and oranges.
Broadly speaking, the student loan forgiveness is more progressive than the tax cut. But notice what happens when the analysis is apples to apples — household income of about $150,000: The student loan plan ends up benefiting about 95 percent of those under that income level — but the tax cut benefited more than 35 percent. That contrast works in the White House’s favor — but it’s not nearly as stark as before.
Two Pinocchios | 2022-08-30T07:38:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fact check: Biden's student loan relief vs. GOP tax cuts - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/30/white-houses-tricky-comparison-between-student-loan-relief-gop-tax-cuts/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/30/white-houses-tricky-comparison-between-student-loan-relief-gop-tax-cuts/ |
Ukrainian sniper Andriy attends a training outside of Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, Aug. 27, 2022. After moving to Western Europe to work an an engineer, Andriy scrambled back to Ukraine at the start of the war, and within weeks underwent a conversion from civilian life to a sniper being trained by the country’s special forces. (AP Photo/Andrew Kravchenko) | 2022-08-30T07:38:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Volunteer sniper embodies Ukraine’s versatile military - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/volunteer-sniper-embodies-ukraines-versatile-military/2022/08/30/65cb901a-282b-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/volunteer-sniper-embodies-ukraines-versatile-military/2022/08/30/65cb901a-282b-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html |
SAN DIEGO — San Diego State football coach Brady Hoke said he didn’t know star punter Matt Araiza had been accused of participating in the gang rape of a 17-year-old girl at an off-campus party in October until a civil lawsuit was filed last week.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The Jacksonville Jaguars traded wide receiver Laviska Shenault to the Carolina Panthers for an undisclosed draft pick in 2023.
ANAHEIM, Calif. —Aaron Judge hit his 50th home run of the season but Shohei Ohtani also went deep during their MVP showdown, and the Los Angeles Angels held off the slumping New York Yankees 4-3.
CINCINNATI — St. Louis Cardinals slugger Albert Pujols tagged his major league record 450th different pitcher for a home run, connecting off Cincinnati left-hander Ross Detwiler in a 13-4 rout of the Reds. | 2022-08-30T07:38:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Monday's Sports In Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mondays-sports-in-brief/2022/08/30/b11d7bb8-2831-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mondays-sports-in-brief/2022/08/30/b11d7bb8-2831-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html |
Pakistani officials said Aug. 28 that the historic flooding in the country has killed more than 1,000 people since mid-June and affected more than 30 million. (Video: Reuters)
A third of Pakistan is now underwater amid an unprecedented amount of rainfall since June, Pakistan’s Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman said Monday.
Flooding caused by eight consecutive weeks of rainfall has killed more than 1,100 people. “This is a huge humanitarian disaster, and I would call it quite apocalyptic,” Rehman said in an interview with Britain’s Sky News.
In one town in the southeastern province of Sindh, about 67 inches fell in one day, Rehman said on Twitter. “Unheard of, anywhere,” she said.
The growing number of extreme weather events around the world is due to the planet’s rising temperatures, weather experts say. Higher temperatures mean more water in the air: For every degree of warmer temperature, the air can hold about 4 percent more water.
The floods could cost Pakistan, which had already been battling an economic crisis, more than $10 billion, the country’s finance minister said, according to Bloomberg. Officials spent the past week appealing for international aid.
In a move aimed at alleviating Pakistan’s broader fiscal problems, the International Monetary Fund said this week it would release $1.1 billion to the country. Last week, the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund said it had allocated $3 million to U.N. agencies and partners in Pakistan for health, nutrition, food security, and water and sanitation services in flood-affected areas. The U.S. Agency for International Development said earlier this month that it is providing $100,000 in humanitarian assistance.
The floods have revived an old debate about whether developed, wealthier countries such as the United States — the largest historical emitter of carbon dioxide — should help cover the costs of climate change for poorer countries.
Rehman, who has urged Pakistan’s global partners to scale up their climate efforts, told Sky News: “We hardly contribute any emissions to the broader emission blanket that makes for greenhouse gases to turn our climate into a living hell.” | 2022-08-30T07:38:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pakistan floods leave third of country underwater, climate chief says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/30/pakistan-flooding-underwater-monsoon/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/30/pakistan-flooding-underwater-monsoon/ |
EPA Administrator Michael Regan speaks to reporters at a water treatment plant near Jackson, Miss., last year, addressing water problems that have plagued the capital city. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP)
The governor of Mississippi urged residents of Jackson, the state’s capital and largest city, not to drink the water there — if they still had access to it — warning that running water would soon be unavailable as the city’s long-struggling treatment plant failed.
Gov. Tate Reeves (R) said during an emergency briefing Monday night that the city would be without “reliable running water at scale” for the near future.
Exactly when the situation would be resolved was unclear, officials at the briefing said, but Reeves said the state was prepared to distribute alternative sources of water for “as long as we have to.” The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency had asked Reeves to mobilize the National Guard to help with distribution, said the agency’s executive director, Stephen C. McCraney.
Jackson Public Schools said that starting Tuesday, all of its schools would shift to virtual learning because of the water crisis.
There would not even be enough water to fight fires, Reeves said, adding that the state this weekend started gathering alternative sources of water, including for firefighting. Separate sources of drinking water and non-potable water for flushing toilets would be distributed, he said.
He appeared to blame, in part, Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba (D), saying that before Monday, the city had been unable to provide the state with a timeline of when the plant would be in “proper” operating condition. Lumumba, who was elected to a second term last year, was not at the briefing, and his office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Heavy rains caused Mississippi’s Pearl River to swell and crest at more than 35 feet on Aug. 29, just shy of the major flood stage. (Video: Reuters) | 2022-08-30T09:09:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jackson, Miss., in water crisis as treatment plant fails - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/30/jackson-mississippi-water-crisis-update/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/30/jackson-mississippi-water-crisis-update/ |
Russia wants to put Syria back in control of humanitarian aid
Abandoning the U.N.-established cross-border aid routes could put millions of Syrians at risk
Analysis by Jesse Marks
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, examines aid materials at the Bab al-Hawa border crossing between Turkey and Syria on June 3, 2021. (AP)
The U.N. Security Council approved a six-month extension of the remaining U.N. cross-border aid corridor into Syria last month, following extensive debate. Eight years ago, the Security Council unanimously voted to initiate this humanitarian aid mechanism under Resolution 2165, granting U.N.-led humanitarian groups the legal authority to bring aid into Syria through four designated border crossings with Turkey, Iraq and Jordan.
This resolution marked the first time the U.N. agreed on this approach — and the first time China and Russia voted to override Syrian authority because of human suffering in Syria. But both China and Russia now want to end this humanitarian aid access and centralize aid provision through Damascus. My research suggests this shift would limit aid access for millions in hard-to-reach areas of Syria.
Northern Syria depends on U.N. aid. That could end.
Russia and China want to preserve the Assad regime
The 2014 vote authorized cross-border humanitarian access, regardless of Syria’s consent. For Russia and China, this was a stark departure from their prior refusal to back any such resolutions in Syria.
A series of high-profile attacks in 2013 — including the Ghouta chemical attack — targeted Syrian civilians, fueling calls within the international community for military intervention in Syria. That upped international pressure on Russia and China to prioritize civilian protection.
For Russia, U.N. punitive actions in Syria risked undermining the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, Moscow’s leading strategic partner in the region, and threatened the Russian naval base at Tartous. China had its own reasons for vetoing U.N. proposals related to the Syria conflict, in part because Beijing had broad economic interests in the region. Beijing had also abstained on the 2011 U.N. authorization for humanitarian intervention in Libya — and Chinese policymakers believed the unrestrained NATO action, under UN authorization, prompted Libya’s collapse and subsequent civil war.
How the Ukraine crisis could make the Syrian civil war worse
After that abstention, China used its Security Council veto strategically to delegitimize regime change in Syria and lobby for non-intervention alternatives in the Syria conflict. The successive vetoes, particularly on the proposed referral of the Syria case to the International Criminal Court, left Beijing vulnerable to claims from the U.N. Human Rights Commission that China’s stance might fuel further atrocities in Syria. This soured relations with the Arab League, notably with Saudi Arabia, which resigned its Security Council seat in 2013 to protest the Chinese and Russian vetoes.
The U.N. had a rare moment of consensus
In 2014, Russia and China joined with Western members of the Security Council to unanimously pass Resolution 2139, which demanded the lifting of all sieges, along with immediate humanitarian access and delivery of aid. When Assad continued to resist U.N. demands, the Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 2165 in July 2014.
Why did China and Russia back the resolution? The compromise was that Western powers wouldn’t push to authorize the use of force, which Russia and China feared would give a pretext for military intervention and regime change. The trade-off, Security Council members believed, would expand U.N. authorization for humanitarian agencies to access hard-to-reach opposition-held areas.
Resolution 2165 enabled the U.N. to alleviate the worsening humanitarian situation without the Syrian government obstructing aid deliveries, but also reduced the likelihood of armed intervention and regime change. This trade-off, however, meant that China and Russia, strong proponents of Syrian sovereignty, also legitimized a major tenet of the U.N.’s Responsibility to Protect doctrine — that humanitarian concerns can trump a government’s presupposed right to sovereignty.
Pressure from Russia and China on the U.N.-led humanitarian system to centralize aid in Damascus under Syrian control is building, casting doubts about the longevity of the cross-border mechanism. China and Russia are instead promoting “crossline” aid from Damascus, to send aid across battle lines to opposition areas. Russia gradually undermined the current mechanism by closing the U.N.-approved crossings via Jordan and Iraq — only the aid access via Turkey remains. Russia and China also pushed to reduce the renewal timeline for this cross-border access from one year to six months, and added further requirements for the U.N. Secretary General to produce routine reports on the status of operations.
The U.S. and its partners argue that the cross-border mechanism remains critical for humanitarian aid to reach Syrians who live outside of government-controlled areas, and lack critical infrastructure, health services and food security. In a 2022 U.N. Refugee Agency survey, over 92 percent of Syrian refugees in the region see conditions in Syria as untenable for their return within the next year, due to the lack of security and basic services. And while the UAE is driving normalization of Arab relations with Syria, Western policymakers have little trust in the Syrian regime’s capacity and political will to oversee post-conflict reconstruction.
China and Russia have claimed that nongovernmental organizations, neighboring countries and Western nations are exploiting the aid routes to undermine Assad. Both countries believe that Assad would work to alleviate the nation’s suffering, if empowered to do so through international assistance rather than sanctions. Western aid groups, however, point to the disarray and rubble in areas like the southern city of Dara’a, where conditions have improved little since the city returned to government control four years ago.
Russia and China are still betting on Assad
Eight years after Russia and China acquiesced on Resolution 2165, the Assad regime has reclaimed control over much of the country, and wants to exert more control over outside humanitarian efforts. Assad is now driving the eventual restoration of state control to most geographic and normative areas of governance, including humanitarian efforts.
China has already greenlit deeper economic and political cooperation with Syria, welcoming it to the Belt and Road Initiative and Global Development Initiative and unlocking access to Chinese financing for reconstruction projects. Russia — preoccupied with its invasion of Ukraine — continues to support the Assad government militarily, but will likely look to China to assume a larger role in building Assad’s political, economic and bureaucratic capacities.
Jesse Marks (@JesCMarks) is a nonresident fellow at the Stimson Center, focusing on China-Middle East relations. | 2022-08-30T09:10:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russia and China are still betting on Assad. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/30/russia-assad-syria-un-china/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/30/russia-assad-syria-un-china/ |
Ukraine live briefing: IAEA inspectors arrive; Ukraine increases Kherson attacks
Oleksandr Shulga looks at his destroyed house following a missile strike in Mykolaiv on Aug. 29, 2022. (Afp Contributor#afp/AFP/Getty Images)
Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have arrived in Ukraine, and new attacks on Russian forces in the Kherson region are underway according to Ukrainian officials. Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
Kyiv said its forces broke through Russian positions in the Kherson region. Natalia Humeniuk, a spokeswoman for the Ukrainian military’s southern command, told the Russian-language outlet TV Rain that “offensive actions” had begun. The British Defense Ministry said Ukraine’s forces had increased their artillery fire at the front line in southern Ukraine, while “long-range precision strikes continue to disrupt Russian resupply,” although “it is not yet possible to confirm the extent of Ukrainian advances.”
There had been “an uptick” in fighting around Kherson “over the past few days, including artillery and rockets,” a senior U.S. military official, speaking anonymously under conditions set by the Pentagon, said Monday during a news briefing, adding that they could not confirm whether a counteroffensive had begun. A Ukrainian official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue, said that “counterattack” was too strong a phrase to describe what he said was “a normal operation.”
IAEA inspectors have arrived in Ukraine, a diplomat familiar with the situation told The Washington Post. The group is set to arrive at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant later this week to assess whether weeks of strikes — which Ukraine and Russia have blamed on the other — have dangerously damaged the facility
More attacks were reported near the plant. Oleksandr Starukh, regional governor of Zaporizhzhia, said Russian forces launched a missile strike on Zaporizhzhia overnight into Tuesday. Starukh said no one was injured and infrastructure was not seriously damaged, but that the situation was still being clarified.
The European Union is divided over whether to ban tourist visas for Russians as E.U. foreign ministers prepare to meet in Prague Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss this and other proposals to further sanction Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
Russia picked up its first shipment of combat drones from Iran 10 days ago, U.S. officials said, highlighting Moscow’s efforts to deepen ties with allies as Western nations continue to freeze it out in response to the war in Ukraine. But the weapons transfer has not gone smoothly, and the drones have experienced technical difficulties in test settings.
Russia will hold large-scale military drills with Chinese and other allied forces in the coming days, Russia’s Defense Ministry said Monday. The Vostok 2022 exercises will involve over 50,000 troops and 60 warships, the ministry said. It released a video purporting to show Chinese armed forces arriving with military equipment in the region of Primorsky, in Russia’s Far East, close to its border with China.
Ukrainian military strategy in action: Russian forces claiming to have destroyed advanced artillery systems in Ukraine may in some cases have been shooting at replicas made out of wood.
In this exclusive report, John Hudson reveals that “a fleet of decoys resembling advanced U.S. rocket systems has tricked Russian forces into wasting expensive long-range cruise missiles on dummy targets, according to interviews with senior U.S. and Ukrainian officials and photographs of the replicas reviewed by The Washington Post.”
The tactic is not new, and has been used in other conflicts, including World War II. But in Ukraine, it could account for the disconnect between the number of advanced rocket systems — including the U.S.-made HIMARS — Russian forces claim to have destroyed in Ukraine, and the denials from Kyiv and Washington, where officials say those systems are actually accounted for.
Karoun Demirjian, Reis Thebault, Mary Ilyushina and John Hudson contributed to this report. | 2022-08-30T09:10:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russia-Ukraine war latest updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/30/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/30/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/ |
The Indigenous man had lived alone for at least 26 years and repeatedly rejected attempts at communication
Brazil's “man of the hole” in the forest, in an image from a video released by Brazil’s national agency for the Indigenous in 2018. (FUNAI/AFP/Getty Images)
The last surviving member of an isolated Amazonian tribe died this month, Brazil’s national Indigenous agency, FUNAI, has announced.
Known in Brazil as the “man of the hole,” he had lived alone for nearly 30 years after the rest of his tribe was killed in attacks by ranchers and other tribes during the 1980s and ’90s. The Brazilian government had monitored him for 26 years and said he had repeatedly rejected attempts at communication.
Brazil’s Indigenous agency restricts access to the areas surrounding isolated tribes and follows their movements periodically to monitor their locations and prevent them from being contacted unnecessarily.
Other isolated tribes in Brazil are also threatened with extinction. The Piripkura tribe in central-western Brazil is down to three known members.
The Indigenous man’s body was found in western Brazil; he was lying on a hammock in a hut during a routine monitoring visit by the government. There were no signs of violence or struggle, the government said.
In a statement, Brazil’s Indigenous agency said it “deeply laments the loss of the Indigenous man and informs that, based on what we know, his death occurred from natural causes.”
The man, whose tribe and ethnicity are unknown, was called the man of the hole because of the nine-foot trenches he dug at the center of his homes. The reason for the holes is unknown, but some Indigenous experts say they may have served a religious purpose.
A rare video taken by the government’s Indigenous agency in 2018 shows the man semi-naked and chopping down a tree.
He was one of several dwindling, isolated tribes monitored by the Brazilian government and nongovernmental organizations and was considered a symbol of resistance against the development of the Amazon.
Brazil is home to 115 known isolated tribes, according to government figures, more than in any other country. As mining and logging projects eat into the Amazon, the number of tribes in isolation has doubled across South America, according to a 2019 report by Antenor Vaz, an expert on Indigenous cultures.
Brazil, once a champion of environmentalism, grapples with new role as climate antagonist
Under Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who pledged to open the rainforest for business, deforestation of the Amazon reached a 15-year high in 2021.
The consequences of this push for development shaped the life of the man in the hole. After evading the massacres that killed his tribe, he survived a 2009 attack by farmers protesting his presence on their lands, Brazil’s Indigenous agency said.
In 1998, a few years after experts confirmed his existence, documentary filmmaker Vincent Carelli tracked down the man of the hole. He was living in a shelter covered in dried palm leaves next to a lit fire. Carelli, who was working with members of Brazil’s Indigenous agency to locate him, said he was trying to document the man’s existence as a way to call for more protections in the area.
For six hours, Carelli and his camera crew wait for the man to try to coax him out, according to the documentary. “Come, come,” they say in the footage. “Come here, come out.”
The man peeks out from the hut, carefully points an arrow at the camera crew and then retreats.
“He only tried to shoot us only when he saw the camera,” Carelli says in the documentary. “The irony is that it was the camera that made him exist before the law.” | 2022-08-30T09:44:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Brazil’s ‘man of the hole’ dies, last member of Indigenous tribe - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/30/man-of-the-hole-indigenous-tribe-brazil/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/30/man-of-the-hole-indigenous-tribe-brazil/ |
A historic marker indicates Jackson Ward in Richmond. (Carlos Bernate for The Washington Post)
RICHMOND — It’s easy to think of ghosts on this forgotten plot of land, severed from the rest of the city by a highway and left to wither beside an ancient cemetery. Where hundreds of families once lived and worked, only a few structures remain, most empty, one collapsed and burned.
But Enjoli Moon sees something different. She walks to the corner of an overgrown lot, property lines marked by wooden stakes. Soon, if the money holds out, a memorial will rise here that reclaims an invisible history thousands pass by every day.
“What we see in this area today is not what this will look like in three years,” she says.
Moon and her sister, Sesha Joi Moon, are tired of hearing about the Confederate statues that have fallen in Richmond. They’re focused on what comes next, and their efforts have already shaken up what locals thought they knew about Black history in the former capital of the Confederacy.
Richmond tore down its Confederate statues — and revealed a new angle on history
Two years ago, they founded the JXN Project to focus attention on a part of their hometown known as Jackson Ward. Celebrated as “Black Wall Street,” Jackson Ward was where newly freed African Americans built prosperous lives in the years following the Civil War.
Jim Crow quickly stole their political and social status, and in the 1940s and ’50s, public housing projects and a highway tore apart the physical fabric of the community.
But research spearheaded by the Moon sisters, who are Black, is uncovering surprising new details that paint a much richer picture of that history. By the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026, The JXN Project hopes to turn its revelations into a museum and gathering place on what’s now one of the most isolated and forsaken properties in Richmond.
And it’s not ghosts that the sisters sense in their efforts.
“We go where the ancestors lead us,” Sesha Joi Moon said in an interview. “It’s just beautifully ordained.”
The Moon sisters are not professional historians. Enjoli, 42, is the assistant curator of a Richmond art museum, and Sesha Joi, 38, who lives in Fairfax County, was recently named by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as diversity chief for the U.S. House of Representatives.
Both grew up immersed in Richmond’s cultural and civic landscape. Their father, August, owned a recording studio and was a longtime local activist. Their mother, Michon, is an expert in court services for victims and witnesses.
Though they didn’t live in Jackson Ward, they knew it well as the heart of Black Richmond. This was the neighborhood of Maggie Lena Walker, the first Black woman to charter a bank in the United States, and newspaper publisher and early civil rights crusader John Mitchell Jr. Named to the National Register of Historic Places in the late 1970s, Jackson Ward’s glory years were roughly a century ago.
A few years ago, as Enjoli prepared for the annual Afrikana Film Festival that she founded, she decided to highlight the history of various neighborhoods in Richmond. Sesha got involved and started researching Jackson Ward.
Right off the bat, she stumbled over the question of how Jackson Ward got its name. Growing up, both Moon sisters had assumed the area was named for Giles B. Jackson, who had been born enslaved but became one of the first Black attorneys in Virginia, as well as a publisher and entrepreneur.
But that didn’t fit with what Sesha was learning.
Records showed that Jackson Ward was created in 1871, during Reconstruction, to keep the new voting power of Black men concentrated in one city district. It was gerrymandered across the city’s other voting districts, making it much bigger than what modern residents know.
All of the city’s other wards were named for Virginia-born political heroes — Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, John Marshall, James Monroe — and Sesha Moon’s research led her to conclude that the city’s premier Black neighborhood was most likely named for an icon of the Confederate Lost Cause: Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
Richmond's Stonewall Jackson statue is removed; city says others could come down soon
“It was just a big wake-up call,” Sesha Moon said. On the one hand, it stung to think that a name and place long associated with Black history had such racist roots. On the other, the revelation showed “just how much power Black Richmonders clearly had to be deemed a threat,” she said.
It got the sisters wondering — what were the roots of that power? How did a generation of Black achievers spring up so quickly after emancipation?
So they created the nonprofit JXN Project, the X representing the ambiguous roots of the name, and dove into the history.
They learned that as early Richmond began to industrialize, plantation owners would hire out their enslaved workers to city businesses and factories. Many of the workers lived in town, often alongside immigrants from Germany or Ireland as well as free Blacks, and were able to pick up money of their own through side businesses.
Shortly before the Civil War, more than one in eight free residents of Richmond was Black, according to the 1976 National Register application for Jackson Ward submitted by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.
“That is a very different narrative than I know is generally told,” Sesha Moon said. “Black people are not empowered, we’re enslaved. But the truth is, Black Richmonders, well before the Emancipation Proclamation …”
“Had autonomy,” Enjoli Moon finished the thought. “And were creating, you know, establishing themselves in a very real way.”
The more they pushed, the farther back the sisters were able to take the roots of the neighborhood — all the way to 1793.
In Richmond at that time, Thomas Jefferson’s state Capitol had been open for only five years. The local legal scene featured George Wythe — America’s first law professor — and John Marshall, future chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. “Light-horse” Harry Lee, a hero of the Revolution, was serving as governor but had not yet fathered son Robert, who would one day rebel against the Union.
Protesters transformed Richmond’s Robert E. Lee memorial. Now they mourn the loss of their most powerful icon of resistance.
And Abraham Peyton Skipwith built a gambrel-roofed cottage on Duval Street along the northern edge of town. According to the JXN Project’s research, he was the first free Black person to own property in what became Jackson Ward.
Skipwith had been enslaved in the Yorktown and Williamsburg area by Jacquelin Ambler, a wealthy merchant and adviser to Jefferson as governor, and later by Thomas Bentley, a controversial character who helped foster the Revolution in Illinois. Working with historians in Richmond and Williamsburg, Sesha Moon tracked down testimonials from prominent White Virginians — including Declaration of Independence signer Benjamin Harrison V — in petitions to secure Skipwith’s freedom around 1789.
Nicole Brown, a researcher for the College of William & Mary and Colonial Williamsburg, recently came across an unpublished manuscript written by the daughter of Ambler about life during the Revolution. At the beginning of a scene in which a group ponders the significance of the recent Boston Tea Party, the writer mentions “Abram” being late bringing in some tea. That, Brown realized, was Skipwith.
“It took me aback when I saw the first sentence. I thought, ‘Wait, is that what I’m looking at?’ ” Brown said. “It was an extraordinary find.”
That’s partly because there are so few records about individual enslaved people and their daily life. But also because — to borrow the line from the play “Hamilton” — it puts Skipwith “in the room where it happens,” privy to discussions about the founding of the nation, Brown said.
“I’m just blown away,” Sesha Moon said. Seeing Skipwith in that environment helps explain his success later in life. “Once he gets his freedom, he is putting everything to work that he picked up in those rooms,” she said.
In Richmond, Skipwith lived near a former mayor and became friends with the German owner of a popular beer garden. His last will and testament — among the first in Virginia executed for a Black man, Sesha Moon said — is a catalogue of prosperity. Along with gold, silver buckles and his home, Skipwith bequeathed a gun and a horse and carriage to his family.
Skipwith’s life is a strong counterpoint to the narrative of early African Americans as nothing but “downtrodden [and] powerless,” Sesha Moon said.
“It fortifies the spirit,” Enjoli said, “to be able to see historical reflections of yourself that are different from the oppressive ones that we’ve seen.”
Skipwith’s home stayed in his family until about 1905. It passed into the hands of another Black family that lived there for decades — until the 1950s, when the city condemned it along with hundreds of other structures in the path of the highway planned through the heart of Jackson Ward.
But the Moon sisters learned that Skipwith’s cottage survived, bought by White preservationists for $25 and relocated. With the help of Richmond Times-Dispatch Pulitzer-winning columnist Michael Paul Williams, they found the cottage in Goochland County. They visited the home early this year, only to find that it was on the grounds of a former plantation once owned by an official of the Confederate government.
“It’s a tragic irony,” Enjoli Moon said. “Here’s the thing that he built to pass on to his family in order to make sure they had freedom and it ends up on a former tobacco plantation, where the person who owned it …”
“ … fought for your continued enslavement,” Sesha finished.
The building has been so renovated that little original remains, they said. So the sisters decided that rather than try to reclaim it for Jackson Ward, they’d build a reconstruction. And around that same time, they got a site on which to do it.
In February, the Richmond Land Bank of the Maggie Walker Community Land Trust transferred 10 lots in North Jackson Ward to the JXN Project.
The bulk of Jackson Ward south of the highway has seen a resurgence, with restaurants, new apartment buildings and historical homes being renovated. The JXN Project is leading an effort to rename streets, many of which currently honor enslavers.
But the northern side of the neighborhood was in trouble even before the highway cut it off. In the 1940s, blocks of older homes and shops were replaced by a public-housing project — which today is one of Richmond’s most crime-ridden areas and is about to be completely redeveloped by the city.
The land trust, which builds affordable housing, had obtained the North Jackson Ward lots from the Historic Richmond Foundation four years ago but wasn’t sure what to do with them, said Erica Sims, CEO of the trust. “We can’t build a house there and have somebody live over there all by their lonesome,” Sims said. “Historic Richmond came to us and said, ‘I don’t think you know how historic this area is.’ ”
On one corner once stood the house where entertainer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was born in 1878. Nearby was the house where Charles Sidney Gilpin, one of the most celebrated Black actors of the 1920s, was born the same year. Maggie Walker had once owned rental properties there. All are gone.
Across the street from the site is Shockoe Hill Cemetery, where John Marshall is buried, and where a teenage Edgar Allan Poe would pine at the grave of a friend’s beautiful mother. Beyond that, the old Hebrew Cemetery. And on a hill to the east is an unmarked African burial ground, the extent of which is just now being rediscovered.
It was an “act of racial justice” to give the parcels to the JXN Project, Sims said. “It felt like we are doing something … about this neighborhood that has been treated really unjustly and giving it a chance to see some really amazing things happen,” she said.
Around the same time, the JXN Project won a $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, a big step toward the group’s goal of raising about $4.5 million to fund a new Skipwith cottage and museum on the North Jackson Ward site.
For Bill Martin, who runs the Valentine museum of Richmond history, the JXN Project has been a thrilling exercise in how a community can redefine itself through understanding its past. “The kind of research they’re doing is really groundbreaking, going into sources that were not looked at before,” he said.
Martin is working with the city’s Black History Museum to find new uses for Richmond’s toppled Confederate statues, but he sees special significance in the Moon sisters’ efforts. “Reframing this narrative about the power of Richmond’s Black community against really impossible odds is such a powerful story,” he said.
Nearly every day brings new discoveries. Enjoli Moon recently stopped by the North Jackson Ward site and noticed a grass-covered plaque on the ground by the curb. It proclaimed the spot as the former site of a 1790 cottage that “served as law office for Edgar Allen [sic] Poe’s foster father.”
Actually, according to historical documents, John Allan’s office was originally located several blocks away. It was moved to this spot in the later 1800s, where, for many years, it was home to a Black family.
That’s the kind of interwoven history — beyond Confederate monuments — that the JXN Project aims to bring back to life.
Friends from out of town “don’t understand why I love Richmond so much sometimes because … everybody just thinks of Richmond and those damn statues,” Sesha Moon said.
Despite the city’s status as the keeper of Lost Cause mythology, “it also is ground zero for Blackness in this country,” she said. “And it’s a very complicated history. And so maybe that’s why I’m so in love with it, because it has so much still to unpack.” | 2022-08-30T10:10:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Moon sisters uncover surprising Black history in a post-monument Richmond - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/30/richmond-black-history-statues-jackson-ward/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/30/richmond-black-history-statues-jackson-ward/ |
Joy Ryan, 92, had never seen a mountain. So her grandson decided to take her to every site that has “national park” in its name.
Brad Ryan with his grandmother, Joy Ryan, during a 2019 visit to Channel Islands National Park in California. (Cheryl Hutchison)
“Grandma Joy is a bit of a superhero,” said Brad, a D.C.-based veterinarian. “She is not your typical 92-year-old.”
Their trip last August to Gates of the Arctic National Park in Alaska was one of many journeys Ryan has embarked on with his paternal grandmother, Joy Ryan — whom he calls “Grandma Joy.” They are on a shared mission to visit 63 U.S. National Parks together. Since they started the effort in 2015, they’ve made it to 62.
“It’s beyond anything I could ever have imagined in my life,” said Joy, who lives in Duncan Falls, Ohio.
Together, they’ve marveled at the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, and slept beneath the stars at Joshua Tree National Park in California. They did the bridge walk at New River Gorge Park in Lansing, W.Va., rolled down a dune in Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, and watched brown bears catch salmon at Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park in Alaska.
“All of it has been magical,” said Brad, who moved to D.C. in 2018 and consults with various veterinary hospitals in D.C., Maryland and Virginia. “I’ve been able to see so much of the country and meet so many people with my grandma by my side.”
The national park project began spontaneously seven years ago. Brad was stunned when his grandmother — who he knew was deeply fond of nature — told him she’d never seen a mountain in person.
“I wanted to be able to offer an opportunity for my grandmother to see that first mountain,” Brad said.
So he asked Joy — then 85 — if she would be interested in a road trip to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles the border between North Carolina and Tennessee.
Her response: “What time are you picking me up?”
In October 2015, they packed up Brad’s Ford Escape Hybrid and hit the road, driving through the night. Once they arrived at the park, “she not only saw mountains, but she climbed mountains with me,” said Brad. “Even when the rain was pouring down, she was smiling.”
Before their first trip, Brad said he was struggling with his mental health, and his grandmother, he said, taught him to be resilient.
“I was trying to do something to help her, and she ended up saving me in the process,” he said. “From there, we just realized there was more that we wanted to see and do together.”
“Every time he wants to do something, I’ll go,” Joy said. “I’ve seen things that people have never seen in their whole life. It’s just been amazing.”
Growing up, Brad described his relationship with his grandmother as “idyllic.”
“We were very close throughout my childhood,” he recalled, saying he has vivid memories of catching frogs with her at their neighborhood park in Duncan Falls.
“My grandma was the one who was very adamant about me being out in nature, and I think my love of animals, in part, came from the exposure that I got to nature from her,” Brad said.
But their bond fractured when Brad was in college, amid his parents’ divorce. There was a 10-year period where he and his grandmother didn’t speak.
“Over time, I eventually reached out to her, and we had to really start our relationship from scratch,” Brad said.
Rebuilding their bond, he said, was accelerated as they began spending countless hours on the open road. Side by side, they’ve driven nearly 50,000 miles.
“What would be a typical grandson-grandparent relationship turned into the closest friendship I could ever imagine having with somebody,” Brad said. “I don’t think there’s any stone we’ve left unturned, in terms of sharing our life stories.”
“I wouldn’t trade him for anybody,” echoed his grandmother. “He is my best friend. That’s for sure.”
After the first trip, which Brad paid for, he started a GoFundMe page, as he knew they couldn’t afford to visit all 63 national parks on their list. They raised nearly $3,000 in one fundraising round, and close to $9,000 in another. The funds paid for a month-long road trip in the summer of 2017, during which they saw 21 national parks.
“We were being very conservative with our money and trying to see as much as we could,” said Brad, who also contributed some of his own savings.
Plus, “we’ve had a lot of private citizens that made donations, too,” he added, explaining that numerous strangers also offered to host them at their homes. “This whole thing has been fueled by generosity.”
Joy believes their story resonates with strangers because it showcases what’s possible.
“I think we just kind of wake people up,” she said.
On each trip, Joy — who worked at her local grocery store until she was in her early 80s — embraced challenges such as climbing mountains, sleeping in tents and white-water rafting.
“I’m always willing to try something different,” said Joy, a mother of three children, and a grandmother of four.
“He’s very considerate. He always holds my arm,” Joy said. “He is the sweetest boy. He just makes my heart sing. I wish more grandmas had grandsons like him.”
Although Brad has had to modify some of their adventures to suit his grandmother’s needs and abilities, “there are lessons to be learned by slowing down, too,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, when I ask if she wants to do something, she says, ‘we’ll give it a whirl!’ ”
That’s because, “I never think about how old I am, I just do it,” Joy said.
In between trips, “we try to see other noteworthy places,” said Brad, who took his grandmother to D.C. in March to see the cherry blossoms.
“It will be a glad day and a sad day,” Joy said. “We’ll start going to the state parks.”
“As a grandson, watching her life story unfold completely differently than it otherwise would have, it gives me peace,” Brad said. “She finally got to start living the life of adventure she had always been waiting for, and deserved.” | 2022-08-30T10:10:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Grandmother and grandson Joy and Brad Ryan visit 63 national parks - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/30/national-parks-grandmother-brad-ryan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/30/national-parks-grandmother-brad-ryan/ |
The red-hot labor market has helped boost unions
Two federal reports this week could indicate which way employment trends are heading
Workers rally on April 24, 2022, in support of unionization in front of an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, N.Y. (Calla Kessler/For The Washington Post)
“Unless the labor market cools off a lot, there’s going to continue to be a lot of workers demanding collective bargaining power,” said Guy Berger, principal economist at LinkedIn.
“Could labor activism be affected by a slowdown? Of course,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at Zip Recruiter. “When people become more nervous about the availability of alternatives, they become less likely to rock the boat. Do I think this moment has caused permanent shifts? Certainly. Some of this will last.”
Despite a 56 percent uptick in filings for union elections nationwide in the first three quarters of the 2022 fiscal year, labor experts say that many of these victories at major employers such as Amazon and Starbucks are mostly symbolic, covering a mere sliver of these companies’ enormous workforces. Meanwhile, although support for unions has been steadily increasing since the pandemic, union membership in the United States declined last year; only one in 10 workers is a union member. (Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Atulya Dora-Laskey, a 23-year-old crew member at a Chipotle in Lansing, Mich., that voted unionize last week, said members of his generation support unions because of how “dire” their working conditions have gotten.
“This felt like an impossible task at the beginning, and having gotten this far is quite incredible,” Dora-Laskey said. “We are up against a lot of opposing forces, and at the same time, we are realizing there are more workers than there are people who are exploiting us. That’s the ultimate advantage. Through unionizing, we’ve seen that power.”
But all of the major companies that employ workers trying to organize have come out against unionization, and some haven’t moved to bargain collectively with unions after victories have been declared.
In April, Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island voted to join an independent labor union, the first union victory at the nation’s second-largest employer. The victory occurred at a warehouse with roughly 5,000 employees. Still, Amazon has refused to recognize the union and appealed the election results, and the case could be held up in court for months.
Workers at Starbucks have won the most ground, successfully unionizing more than 230 locations and thousands of workers since late 2021, accounting for 31 percent of union election victories in the first half of 2022. But that’s still barely 2 percent of the coffee chain’s more than 10,000 locations in the United States.
But union membership continues to decline in the United States, despite victories that have attracted national publicity. It remains unclear whether the surge in union election petitions will undo that trend this year. And the Gallup poll that found record support for unions also found that most Americans who aren’t in a union say they are “not interested at all” in joining one. | 2022-08-30T10:41:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The red-hot labor market has helped boost unions - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/30/labor-market-july-job-quits/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/30/labor-market-july-job-quits/ |
Saving the American chestnut could restore a piece of history, resurrect a lost ecosystem and combat climate change. But critics say it would come at a cost.
Hana Wood, left, pollinates flowers on an American chestnut tree, while Linda McGuigan records data in July at State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry's research station in Syracuse, N.Y. Researchers hope to revive the trees, which once ruled the canopies of Appalachia. (Lauren Petracca for The Washington Post)
Clasping a branch of a two-story American chestnut, LoPiccolo pulled out a delicate, yellow-dusted glass slide and rubbed the thawed pollen onto some of the tree’s flowers. A few feet away and armed with another set of vials, a pair of colleagues at this field research station were aloft in a crane working on higher limbs.
“We open them up, and it’s like Christmas every time,” said LoPiccolo, a recent graduate of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY ESF).
Scientists in Syracuse, N.Y., say they’ve created a genetically modified version of the American chestnut that can withstand damage from an exotic fungus. (Video: Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)
These trees once ruled the canopies of much of Appalachia, with billions of mature American chestnut trees that towered in leafy forests from Maine to Mississippi. But around the beginning of the 20th century, an exotic fungus nearly drove the tree out of existence. Today, they still sprout in the wild but rarely reach maturity. Outside of growers’ orchards, scientists say, the tree is “functionally extinct.”
LoPiccolo and other researchers at SUNY ESF are growing American chestnut trees in the fields of Syracuse that can withstand that infection: Half of the nuts produced with the genetically engineered pollen will carry DNA meant to fight the blight. The researchers are now ready to sow the seeds in the wild, pushing to become the first in the United States to use gene editing to bring a forest tree back to its former glory.
But first, the project is seeking approval not only from three federal agencies but also from chestnut aficionados concerned about altering the genome of a beloved tree.
Scientists have wondered whether it’s possible to restore forests by raising better trees. Bringing back even a portion of the 2 billion tons of chestnut biomass lost to fungus would not only remake deciduous forests in the east but would also help combat climate change. Long-living and fast-growing, the American chestnut is a powerful sponge for greenhouse gas emissions.
“We’re making a path for saving other tree species, and it might even go beyond trees,” said Bill Powell, director of SUNY ESF’s American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project.
“I always say this is a century project. It’s going to take the general public wanting to plant these trees,” he said.
That’s not a given: Some chestnut lovers are leery of messing with what more than one writer has dubbed nature’s “perfect tree.” And regulators need to give the go-ahead.
“The big public policy question is: Should we bring back forests with genetically modified chestnut trees?” said Edward Messina, director of the Office of Pesticide Programs at the Environmental Protection Agency, one of the agencies weighing approval. “That’s a pretty heavy question.”
King of the canopy
The American chestnut showered sustenance onto the forest floor for jays, squirrels, bears and people for millennia. Native Americans fashioned the tree’s bark into wigwams. European colonists chopped its trunks into logs for cabins.
Its straight-grained timber was sought by furniture fabricators and musical instrument makers. Its rot-resistant wood was ideal for the railroad ties, telegraph poles and fence posts that helped connect and carve up the young nation. Its lumber cradled generations of Americans from cradle to coffin.
But by the time Nat King Cole sang of “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” the tree had nearly vanished.
The pathogen, called Cryphonectria parasitica, spread in all directions. The crisis prompted Congress to task the U.S. Department of Agriculture with inspecting and quarantining agricultural imports.
‘We got to try this out’
“We’ve come to this existential realization, we need an additional source of resistance so these trees can survive,” he said.
The setbacks prompted Herb Darling, co-founder of the foundation’s New York chapter, to approach Powell about turning to biotechnology to resurrect the species.
“I immediately called my colleague, Chuck Maynard, and said, ‘We got to try this out.’ ”
The results were dramatic: On the tree carrying the disease-resistant gene, a gray, dime-size sore swelled up at the site of the quarter-inch incision — an infection from which the tree would recover.
In the tree without the gene, a rust-orange depression spread halfway around the trunk. “It’s killing the tree,” Newhouse said. “Almost certainly it’s going to be girdled within another month. And everything above here will be dead.”
‘Truly a cautionary tale’
To distribute Darling 58 in the wild, the restoration team is awaiting a decision from three federal regulators — a process that began in 2020.
The EPA is reviewing how the transgenic tree’s enzyme will interact with people and the woodland environment. The Food and Drug Administration is evaluating the nuts’ nutritional safety. And the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is reviewing how the tree may affect insects and other plants.
“We were even told 10 years ago, before we started this process, that it probably wouldn’t be realistic for our little university research project to do this,” said Newhouse, who is responsible for guiding Darling 58 through the regulatory process.
The group has done its own testing on both regular and transgenic chestnuts, comparing effects on bumblebees pollinating their flowers, insects feasting on their fresh leaves and frog tadpoles gobbling up their decomposing litter.
“There was no difference,” Powell said.
But saving a species — especially with genetic engineering — is as much a public relations battle as it is a scientific quest. Critics say releasing the transgenic tree is akin to running a massive and irreversible experiment in the wild.
During the USDA’s public comment period, hundreds of people urged the agency not to approve Darling 58, arguing that not enough is known about the risks it poses. Chestnuts can live for centuries, they note, but the transgenic trees have only been tested for a few years.
Anne Petermann, executive director of Global Justice Ecology Project, which helped organize the campaign against Darling 58, is worried the project will lead to more commercial use of transgenic trees, to produce paper and lumber. She noted biotech firms hoping to make greater use of genetically modified organisms have helped fund SUNY ESF’s work.
“There are studies coming out weekly that show just how much we don’t know about forest ecosystems,” she said.
Some people cite past efforts to save the chestnut as a reason their concern is justified. In the 1910s, for instance, Pennsylvania foresters told landowners to chop down healthy trees in a vain effort to stop the spread of the fungus, a practice that may have inadvertently exterminated native chestnuts with blight tolerance.
“The story of the American chestnut is truly a cautionary tale,” said Donald Edward Davis, a founding member of the Georgia chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation and author of “The American Chestnut: An Environmental History.” “And because of that, I really think the public should be more careful about endorsing, just carte blanche, the transgenic approach.”
Davis left the foundation after it threw its support behind the SUNY ESF project in 2016. So did Lois Breault-Melican and Denis Melican, a wife and husband who served as board members of the Massachusetts and Rhode Island chapter.
Some growers, the couple said, have given up too soon on trying to pick out blight-resistant American chestnuts and breed them with their Asian counterparts.
“We don’t need genetic engineering to bring the chestnut back,” Melican said. “They are coming back. All that’s necessary is patience.”
But Powell countered that crossbreeding transfers far more genes between species. “Genetic engineering is actually a less-risky procedure than a lot of things that we’ve done in the past,” he said. “We are very precise. We’re only moving one, two — just a small number of genes into the tree.”
Powell hopes his work spurs similar efforts among geneticists.
“It’s going to spark a lot of other research on trees that people basically wanted to do but couldn’t do because they had that brick wall in front of them,” he said.
Already, Powell’s team is investigating ways to insert blight-resistant genes into chinkapins, a tree closely related to American chestnuts, and to engineer elms that can resist elm yellows, a bacterial disease with no known cure.
At Purdue University, researchers have attempted to tweak the genes of ash to survive the emerald ash borer, a beetle from Asia that has destroyed tens of millions of trees across 30 states since first identified in Michigan in 2002.
With advancements like CRISPR, a Nobel Prize-winning gene-editing tool that is faster, cheaper and more precise than its predecessors, more opportunities will only open up for genetic engineers.
For now, Darling 58 winds its ways through federal bureaucracy.
“This particular review has taken us a bit longer,” said USDA spokesman Rick Coker, noting the agency still needs to publish draft reviews, gather feedback and finalize documents. The researchers expect the three agencies to make a final decision by next summer.
Here in Syracuse, yards away from his tree experiment, Newhouse stepped into a field of knee-high saplings. The tiny oaks, hickories, pines and chestnuts here were not planted in neat rows, unlike in other parts of the research station. Instead, they were sown seemingly at random, a vision for how closed Appalachian coal mines might be reseeded in the future. Chestnuts can thrive in poor, rocky soil left in quarries.
If there’s any chance of returning the American chestnut to its former heights, thousands of acres need to be reclaimed. Many factors could complicate restoration. The fungus could evolve. Other diseases may take hold. Rising temperatures are poised to shift its range north.
“The scale of the former range of American chestnut is so huge, it’s intimidating to think about what that will look like,” Newhouse said. “And it won’t happen in our lifetimes.”
Ultimately, public input will be integral to whether restoration can go forward, said Messina, the EPA official. His team will weigh the benefits of the project, “which I can argue there are many, with any identified risks.”
“This case sits right at the intersection of cutting-edge science and public policy considerations,” Messina said in a video call. Still the question remains, he added: “Just because we can do something, should we?” | 2022-08-30T10:41:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How gene editing could fight chestnut tree blight and avert extinction - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/08/30/american-chestnut-blight-gene-editing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/08/30/american-chestnut-blight-gene-editing/ |
What borrowers think of Biden’s student-loan forgiveness plan
Keijana George, 18
Zach Hyatt, 42
Leandra Westbrook, 25
Levar Stoney, 41
Ava Stevens, 61
Student-loan borrowers have desperately awaited President Biden’s decision on debt cancellation since he took office. As days turned into months and months turned into more than a year of deliberations, some grew anxious or disillusioned. Others remained relentless in pressuring Biden to make good on a campaign promise.
Last week, he delivered a plan forgiving up to $20,000 of federal student debt held by Pell Grant recipients and up to $10,000 for other eligible borrowers. Only people earning under $125,000 a year — or less than $250,000 a year for couples — qualify. Because Pell Grants are given to lower- and middle-income students, the plan is designed to provide the greatest relief to people with the fewest financial resources.
The plan is not without its critics. People who never went to college, who never borrowed or who paid off their loans have called the policy unfair. Others, sometimes in those same groups, have defended it as a social good.
We wanted to know what borrowers — current and former — think about Biden’s cancellation policy.
Debt amount: $10,000
A rising sophomore at the University of Georgia, Keijana George, 18, has just about $10,000 in federal student loans. She still has two more years of college and designs on law school, which probably means more borrowing. Still, George is happy to have a clean slate, at least for now.
“I’m feeling pretty good,” said George, who is studying international affairs. “This is a great example of what we can accomplish when we hold our leaders accountable. But we have to push for more. Ten thousand is a lot of money, but college costs a whole lot more.”
Money is at the heart of nearly every decision George has made since applying to colleges. She traded in her dream school, Spelman College, a private historically Black institution where she was accepted with some financial aid, for much cheaper in-state tuition at UGA, where she could also take advantage of Georgia’s HOPE scholarship. Even if loan cancellation were available when she applied, George said, she would have chosen the same path.
“I have an older sister, a younger sister, and we’re three years apart. That’s a lot of tuition,” George said, noting that even $20,000 in forgiveness would not have wiped out the debt she would have acquired at Spelman. “Still, I have the privilege of being at an institution that helped a lot with paying for school. Not everyone has that. They need more help. We have to fight for more.”
News of Biden’s executive order delighted Zach Hyatt, an electrical department manager at a Cleveland Clinic center in Ohio. After years of struggling to repay his $31,000 in student loans, the father of two is eligible for $20,000 in relief as a former Pell Grant recipient.
“It’s great news,” Hyatt said. “This will cut my balance down to an amount where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Any working-class person who can get a $20,000 credit for any aspect of their life — it’s a big deal.”
Hyatt’s first daughter was born during his sophomore year at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Ind. He almost graduated with a business degree, but one semester shy of crossing the stage, Hyatt dropped out. Scholarships didn’t cover enough of the cost, his parents couldn’t help, and Hyatt didn’t want to borrow more money.
“I needed to be a dad and support my daughter, so I ended up working full-time,” he said.
Staying on top of his loan payments was difficult with low-wage jobs, rent, child support and attorneys’ fees as Hyatt fought for custody of his daughter. Things picked up after Hyatt completed an apprenticeship to become an electrician through the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. But after going through a divorce, he defaulted on his student debt. Hyatt has since brought the loans back into good standing and is trying to pay them off.
With $60,000 in education loans, Leandra Westbrook, a Pell Grant recipient, could see her balance drop by $20,000 under Biden’s plan. Yet Westbrook, 25, isn’t sure she’ll seek the benefit.
“I’m very against this policy,” she said. “It would be a huge relief, and I understand why people would apply. But I made a commitment to pay those loans back when I agreed to take them out. It’s no one else’s responsibility.”
Since graduating Kent State University in 2019, Westbrook has aggressively paid down the $80,000 in federal loans she and her parents took out for her education. She moved back home to save money, had an array of side hustles, sold items online and stuck to a strict budget.
“I’m living within my means, making sacrifices and cutting costs where I can, because this is my obligation,” said Westbrook, a fundraising specialist for Majority Strategies, a Republican political advertising firm. “We don’t need people to be so dependent on federal assistance.”
In hindsight, Westbrook said she regrets going to college and believes there is an overreliance on using degrees as a measure of ability. If anything, she said, the government should abolish the federal lending program, which she believes incentivizes colleges to keep prices artificially high. Perhaps then, colleges will be forced to lower their prices.
It took 15 years for Levar Stoney, 41, to repay the $25,000 in education loans he needed to attend James Madison University. When he graduated with a bachelor’s in public administration and political science, Stoney’s first job in politics paid about as much as he owed.
Still, he never missed a payment on his student debt or the Parent Plus loan his father took out on his behalf. Stoney lived a spartan life, even as he rose in politics, becoming Virginia’s secretary of the commonwealth and later Richmond’s youngest mayor. He kept his expenses at a minimum, he said. Years of hard work led to higher pay that helped whittle down the balance. And by 2019, he sent in his last payment.
Stoney was so elated that he took to Instagram to share his journey to becoming free of his student loans. And when he learned of Biden’s plan, a plan that would in no way benefit him, Stoney said he was “excited” for the recipients.
“I know how it feels to be burdened with college debt, and I believe that college should open up pathways to economic success,” Stoney said. “What’s unfair is to be burdened with debt for 10, sometimes 20 years, being unable to buy a house, build generational wealth.”
Student loans, Pell grants and scholarships put higher education within reach for Stoney, he said. The son of a custodian, Stoney said there was no doubt he could get into college, but paying for it was another thing.
“My problem was always: How can I remain in school and finish the job? Those loans, those programs allowed me to finish the job,” he said.
Debt amount: $200,000
As happy as Ava Stevens is for the millions of people who will benefit from the cancellation plan, she can’t help but think that for her it amounts to “a drop in the ocean.”
“While I think $10,000 is significant, it’s certainly not enough,” Stevens said. “When I look at the way our government bails out industries — they have lobbying power, borrowers don’t.”
With an MBA and a master’s degree in education, Stevens has amassed $200,000 in debt. Half of that, she explained, is the interest that has accrued on her student loans. Stevens deferred her payments to cover household expenses and medical bills that mounted as her husband battled, and eventually succumbed to, cancer.
Within two years of his death, Stevens lost her job in student financial services at Portland State University because of budget cuts. That led to low-wage adjunct teaching positions. Stevens said she was never able to make consistent payments.
“I’m not asking for a walk on my student loans because I certainly benefited from the education, but this interest is crazy,” Stevens said. “The interest rate on my car loan is a fraction of the rate on my student loans. I will never be able to retire.” | 2022-08-30T10:41:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Borrowers on student-loan forgiveness: Biden's plan in their own words - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/30/student-loan-cancellation-borrowers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/30/student-loan-cancellation-borrowers/ |
U.S. to clear another $1.5B in debt for Westwood College students
The move will grant full, automatic federal student loan forgiveness to 79,000 people
The Education Department is canceling the debts of 79,000 former Westwood College students. Above, flags decorate the space outside the office of the secretary of Education in Washington. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
The move covers 79,000 people who were enrolled at Westwood from Jan. 1, 2002, to Nov. 17, 2015, when it ceased enrolling new borrowers in advance of its 2016 closure. Former students are not required to submit an application and will receive a letter from the Education Department informing them of the pending discharge.
“Westwood College’s exploitation of students and abuse of federal financial aid place it in the same circle of infamy occupied by Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute,” said Undersecretary of Education James Kvaal. “Westwood operated on a culture of false promises, lies, and manipulation in order to profit off student debt that burdened borrowers long after Westwood closed.”
The Biden administration has been working through scores of petitions from former students of for-profit schools requesting the department cancel their debt under a statute known as “borrower defense to repayment.” Applications piled up at the department amid a series of college closures and the Trump administration’s efforts to delay and limit loan cancellation.
What started as a trickle of approvals in the early months of the Biden administration turned into a deluge this summer, with widespread cancellation of the debt held by former students of Corinthian Colleges and ITT Tech. With this latest announcement, the administration has now approved $14.5 billion in discharges for nearly 1.1 million borrowers who were defrauded by their colleges.
In the case of Westwood, the department said the institution routinely lied about graduates’ job prospects, promising prospective students employment in their field within six months after completion. Westwood inflated earnings outcomes in its marketing materials and falsely guaranteed students that it would pay their bills if they failed to find work.
According to the department, the college also misled students by saying that its criminal justice program in Illinois would lead to careers as police officers with the Chicago Police Department and Illinois State Police. But the school never had the accreditation needed to meet the state employment requirements for either force.
The findings are based on evidence provided by the attorneys general of Colorado and Illinois, including statements from former students and employees, admissions call recordings and Westwood’s internal records, according to the department.
The Illinois attorney general filed an application for group discharge on behalf of students who enrolled in Westwood’s criminal justice program. But the claim languished at the department for six years, leading borrowers to file a class-action lawsuit this year to force the department to make a decision.
In June, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) took to the Senate floor to call on the Education Department to erase the debts of Westwood students, just as it had done weeks earlier for Corinthian students. He shared the story of Victoria Vences, a party to the lawsuit who amassed $50,000 in student loans to become a probation officer.
“After three years juggling a full-time job and going to school full-time, Victoria was shocked to learn that a Westwood degree would not pay off at all,” Durbin said on the Senate floor. “She started applying for law enforcement jobs, showing them the certificate from Westwood. They told her, ‘That’s worthless.’”
Tuesday’s announcement could resolve the class-action lawsuit.
“It never should have taken this long — or litigation — for the Department of Education to do the right thing,” said Dan Zibel, chief counsel at National Student Legal Defense Network, which alongside the National Consumer Law Center and Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights is representing the Westwood students. “But we are thrilled that the department has finally discharged the loans of defrauded Westwood College students.” | 2022-08-30T10:42:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Westwood College students will have $1.5B in student debt erased - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/30/westwood-college-debt-cancellation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/30/westwood-college-debt-cancellation/ |
Free menstrual products are critical to dignity and empowerment
History shows that access to good menstrual management can be key to excelling in a modern world.
Perspective by Lara Freidenfelds
Lara Freidenfelds is author of “The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America” and "The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America," as well as a regular contributor to Nursing Clio.
Campaigners and activists rally outside the Scottish Parliament in support of the Scottish Governments Support for Period Products Bill on Feb. 25, 2020, in Edinburgh. (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
Scotland has staked a position at the forefront of an international menstrual equity movement. In mid-August, it became the first country in the world to require municipalities to provide menstrual products free to all who need them.
While such legislation might seem antithetical to the American commitment to free markets, history indicates that in a modern economy and society, access to menstrual products is critical to dignity, empowerment and upward mobility.
Before the 1920s, most women washed and reused cloth menstrual pads. If they were wealthy, they had soft cotton pads made from new fabric, and if not, they used whatever rags they could scrounge. The poorest women bled into their petticoats.
“Mary Hanson,” as I will call her (all names in this story are pseudonyms), who was born in the Boston area just after the turn of the 20th century, explained how cumbersome these pads were. “We didn’t have Kotex. We had diapers.” Menstrual care was infantilizing and frustrating. The pads bulged in front and back, and the pin that attached them to a belt stuck out. As Hanson reflected, “It was like putting a harness on you!”
Meanwhile, toward the end of the 19th century, some affluent women began to make their own disposable cotton wadding inserts for menstrual pads, and the Sears catalogue listed disposable Lister’s Towels for a few years beginning in 1896.
But it was in the 1920s, with the introduction of Kotex, that disposable pads really took off. It was an era of flappers wearing form-fitting, revealing dresses and working women moving to the city to find jobs behind department store counters and as office typists.
Progressive activists had promoted middle class values and aspirations to the many immigrants arriving in American cities in the preceding decades. With the vast majority of Americans aspiring to join the middle class, they sought out jobs that required the daintiness, poise, cleanliness and self-control ascribed to those of professional status.
Kotex and its more affordable imitators enabled women to manage their bodies and their periods, which empowered them to meet these expectations and achieve upward-mobility. Even amid resistance from retailers nervous about putting a sensitive product on their shelves, by 1927 several million women used disposable pads.
Yet this transformation was not without drama for many women, because they were bucking the traditions of their mothers. Ida Smithson, for example, was born in the late 1910s into a family of Black tobacco sharecroppers in the rural South. She had six older sisters, and yet nobody told her to expect her first period. “I remember being in school and I had this accident, I thought, and I came home crying, telling my mother. She didn’t put her arms around me; she didn’t do anything. She just said, ‘Well, go find a cloth, and pin it inside your pants.’ ”
Smithson learned more from “some wise children at school.” When her older brother, who looked after the family once their father died, gave her a small allowance, she used that money to buy herself a box of Kotex, which she described as a necessity. But she had to "keep it hid,” she remembered. She wasn’t sure how her mother would feel about her decision to start “being modern, using Kotex, all this kind of stuff.”
Smithson’s concern about her mother’s reaction was not uncommon as many American families still clung to traditional beliefs about menstruation that had been encouraged by folk medicine and elite medicine alike for centuries.
Many women had learned that bathing during menstruation was dangerous and that a chill at that time of the month could cause permanent debility. Smithson recalled, “I knew some girls in school, that, they didn’t change their towels and when they got up, you could smell them.” The girls had learned that washing themselves during menstruation posed health risks. According to Smithson, “Some people didn’t wash during the whole time.”
But modern young women like Smithson understood that these traditional practices were not compatible with growing middle class mores around bodily management, whether at school or at work, and stigma increasingly attached to them. “We would laugh about it, say, ‘Gosh, don’t let her get up!’ you know. So we were cruel.”
As Smithson and her friends made clear to their more traditional peers, institutions such as schools and offices that promoted upward mobility would not be welcoming places for those who would not bathe during their periods and use Kotex — or could not afford Kotex. Traditional menstrual folkways were more compatible with the meagerly compensated agricultural and domestic labor sectors to which Black Americans had long been relegated.
Modern menstrual care was by no means sufficient to create upward mobility, but it was necessary. The stains and smells associated with menstrual rags disqualified a person from a modern workplace.
Once women adopted modern menstrual practices for themselves, they were eager to pass them to their daughters. Smithson wanted to save her daughters the shock and distress she had faced at menarche, to teach them how to wash and use Kotex and to give them basic sex education. She explained that she wouldn’t want anyone “to go through what I went through being D-U-M-B dumb!”
Disposable menstrual products became the platform for the health and sex education that Smithson regarded as a bedrock for her family’s upward mobility. Like millions of modern American mothers in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, Smithson gave each of her daughters an educational pamphlet about the menstrual cycle published by Kimberly-Clark, the makers of Kotex, before they got their first periods.
Based on the trust she established with the gift of the pamphlet, Smithson continued to communicate openly with her daughters and monitor their cycles, to help them avoid teen pregnancy. In a community where it was common for girls to get pregnant, drop out of school and then earn a living by doing wash and other domestic chores for White families, Smithson had the satisfaction of seeing her children go to college and graduate.
The use of disposable pads continued to mark class differences well into the 1950s. Liza O’Malley, born in the 1930s in a White blue-collar Catholic family in the Boston suburbs, recalled that poor girls she went to school with “would wear cloth. And they used to call it ‘the rag,’ and that always made me very uncomfortable.” It made menstruation “feel dirty” to her. Dorothy Joyce, from a similar background, remembered the offensive smell of those used rags boiling on the stove at a friend’s house.
In the decades to come, older traditions around menstruation were almost entirely replaced. Educational pamphlets produced since the 1920s by pad and tampon makers became more popular as a way for mothers like Smithson to help their daughters have a smoother, happier, more empowered way to enter menarche.
“The Story of Menstruation,” a film created by Disney for Kimberly-Clark in 1946, quickly became a staple in fifth-grade classrooms, as menstrual education became a standard part of public schools’ sex education curriculums. The middle class health professionals who wrote these materials believed fervently that modern ways of handling menstruation could empower girls. Modern periods were the norm, embraced by mothers and daughters, educators and manufacturers eager to sell disposable products.
Today it is taken for granted that girls in schools and women in workplaces should be able to manage their periods in the modern way: with products that are comfortable and effective, that keep their users stain-free, odor-free and undistracted, supported by modern health knowledge and sex education. But the reality is that period poverty still sometimes keeps the least affluent out of schools and workplaces once a month. About 16.9 million Americans who menstruate live in poverty, and studies suggest that the majority of them struggle to purchase the menstrual products they need. Nearly a quarter of American teens worry every month about obtaining the supplies they need to attend class with their peers, even sacrificing meals to buy pads.
Modern periods were part of what empowered women like Ida Smithson and her daughters to make their way into the broad American middle class. History suggests that a free menstrual products program, especially if linked to robust health and sex education, might support that opportunity for more Americans today. | 2022-08-30T10:42:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Free menstrual products are critical to dignity and empowerment - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/30/free-menstrual-products-are-critical-dignity-empowerment/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/30/free-menstrual-products-are-critical-dignity-empowerment/ |
State-led mental health reform has failed before. But 2022 is different.
Now we appreciate that mental health is a core part of health, worth investing in.
Perspective by Phyllis Vine
Phyllis Vine is a historian and author of the forthcoming book "FIGHTING FOR RECOVERY: An Activists’ History of Mental Health Reform," which Beacon Press will release on Sept 27.
First lady Jill Biden speaks with youth mental health leaders Ayanna Kelly, Juan Acosta and actress Selena Gomez during the White House Conversation on Youth Mental Health on May 18, 2022 in Washington. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
The coronavirus pandemic revealed the many overlapping mental health crises that had simmered beneath the surface in America for years. Drug and alcohol use have skyrocketed since 2020 and suicide rates are up, especially among young people. Therapists have waiting lists and access to services is delayed. Even the rollout of the new national crisis line, 988, might be hobbled in several states because they simply don’t have the resources or trained staff available to handle all the calls.
President Biden has advocated for mental health reform, but historically, presidents have struggled to build political will to pass meaningful legislation.
And yet, this time the political will — despite all the volatility — seems more intent on meeting the challenge. It’s not just that conversations about mental health are breaking out of hushed silos. There also seems to be political support across party lines for funding local communities. Along with the robust engagement of activists with the lived experience of recovery, and families managing mental health challenges, there is a rising tide insisting that mental health is foundational, not adjacent, to overall health.
President John F. Kennedy was the first president to push for legislation to secure mental health treatment. In the early 1960s, addiction, depression, suicide and other mental health crises were not openly discussed. About 550,000 American adults and children lived in 279 state institutions, most of which were overcrowded fire and health hazards. Many of the patients had become “warehoused” and were presumed to be lifelong residents who could not get better.
The Kennedy family, for all its wealth and influence, was not removed from these challenges. Ever present in the president’s life was a quiet but pervasive sadness about his sister Rosemary, who had been placed in an institution after a lobotomy. His ambitions for people like her — and the lives they could lead if given the chance — led him to take this subject seriously. He made it his personal mission to change how people with a diagnosis were treated.
Under the influence of Robert Felix, a doctor and the former president of the American Psychiatric Association who led the National Institute of Mental Health, Kennedy addressed both houses of Congress in 1963 to urge action on mental health. He explained how state hospitals throughout the nation routinely left patients at the “mercy of custodial isolation” where they would “wither away.” It was a stain and a shame on the nation, he argued, and he considered the failure of institutionalization among the nation’s “most urgent problems.”
On Oct. 31, 1963, he signed the Community Mental Health Act (CMHA) which called for the construction of 1,600 community-based service centers across the United States. His assassination three weeks later, however, changed everything. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam starved the funding for all of his domestic policy priorities — including the CMHA system. Funding for the CMHA trickled and national priorities changed. Barely one-third of the called-for 1,600 community centers were built.
Jimmy Carter was the next president to make mental health reform a priority. He too had a family experience that inspired him to act. His cousin Tommy was in and out of the state hospital in Milledgeville, Ga., for years. But it was Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, whose interest and influence led this charge. Although nepotism laws prevented her from officially chairing the President’s Commission on Mental Health, she played a key role in guiding congressional hearings and mustering public and political influence to pass the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980.
The act called for a partnership between the federal government and the states to develop models for care and to minimize the need for involuntary institutional confinement. At a time when there seemed to be no accountability for the thousands of patients that state hospitals had already discharged with little attention to their aftercare, the new law offered a national plan for funding a system that could improve lives.
Although the MHSA had near unanimous support in both the House (277 to 15) and the Senate (97 to 3), the election of Ronald Reagan as president brought this singular opportunity to an abrupt end. As he had done when he was California’s governor, Reagan opposed using government funds to help people with disabilities, including mental illness. He extinguished the $500 million budgeted to implement the sweeping reforms of his predecessor and pulled the federal government out of direct spending for services. Instead, the 1981 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act provided block funds to the states, merging research and services for mental health and addictions with those for black lung disease, rodent control, blood pressure reduction programs and lead abatement — all but guaranteeing mental health would be overlooked.
But despite these budget cuts, things began to change over the next two decades as medical, psychological and political fields began to think differently about mental health and increasingly saw the essential, holistic relationship between our mental health and our whole health. This sea change was confirmed with the 1999 release of the Surgeon General’s report on mental health which showed that people diagnosed with mental health problems could recover and that such a diagnosis didn’t have to be a life sentence. That report coincided with the Supreme Court’s 1999 Olmstead v. L.C. decision, an affirmation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, which decreed that people with a diagnosis of “mental illness” or other disability should not remain institutionalized when they could live in the community.
President George W. Bush carried these accomplishments forward when he championed the implementation of the Olmstead decision. His commission, the President’s New Freedom Commission, wanted to lay the groundwork in 2002 to help people with disabilities live, work, learn and participate fully in their communities.
Bush’s ideals were ambitious but never fully realized. Despite the articulation of admirable goals and principles — for the first time by a Republican president who had openly acknowledged his own recovery from alcohol misuse — change happened incrementally. Obstacles had been built into a system that remained fragmented, marked by financial and racial disparities and unaccountable to recovery principles. These made the ultimate goal of a transformation difficult to achieve.
Now, 20 years later, the pandemic has revealed that essential services remain wanting. Yet, significantly, the public more openly discusses the imperative of mental health treatments. The issue is ubiquitous, for instance, as seen in advertising for new medicines aired during nightly television. Elements of previous plans for change have garnered a wider acceptance and generated the political will for funding the proposals in Biden’s 2021 stimulus package, the American Rescue Plan (ARP).
The ARP allotted $4 billion to improve mental health treatments and services, it expands access to care and it helps states plan community-based crisis services through their Medicaid offices. Funding packages underwrite the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency’s (SAMHSA) new suicide and behavioral health crisis line, 988. The Department of Veterans Affairs received ARP funding to expand its hugely successful network of peer service providers (people with a lived experience of behavioral health recovery) by adding 277 of these positions. And the ARP budgets $300 million for youth mental health services in schools, which is critical for identifying the earliest opportunity to help someone who is struggling.
No one can declare whether the measure has been a success yet, but implementation of the ARP, which is now underway in various agencies, would enact the goals and even some of the programs Kennedy, Carter and Bush had long envisioned. Unlike years ago, when mental health was considered adjacent to rather than essential for overall health, there is now an appreciation that mental health belongs in the mainstream of health care and that we can use the infrastructure to achieve an equitable, accessible and comprehensive approach without delay. | 2022-08-30T10:42:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | State-led mental health reform has failed before. But 2022 is different. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/30/state-led-mental-health-reform-has-failed-before-2022-is-different/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/30/state-led-mental-health-reform-has-failed-before-2022-is-different/ |
A frank conversation with Imran Khan
Former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan, center, leaves an antiterrorism court in Islamabad, Pakistan, on Aug. 25. (W.K. Yousafzai/AP)
Imran Khan, the former prime minister of Pakistan, is facing multiple threats of disqualification and arrest. On Aug. 21, the government charged him under the antiterrorism act; he was granted bail until Sept. 1. Meanwhile, he is also set to appear in a contempt of court case on Aug. 31.
He recently invited me over for a cup of tea at his Islamabad residence. I have known Khan for almost 30 years and I was curious to hear how he sees the next stage of his political career. Dressed in casual clothes, he looked fit and alert.
In the course of our conversation, he acknowledged that he had been unable to fulfill many of the promises he made after the 2018 election. He tried to explain the reasons for the failures, which he mainly ascribed to the limitations imposed on his power by members of parliament who weren’t under his control. He denied the fact that he was installed in office with the help of the military establishment. He claimed that the last elections were rigged against him. He said that intelligence agencies supported independent candidates who defeated his party’s candidates: “I formed the government with the help of the same independents who were controlled by the intelligence, and they betrayed me in the end.”
Khan confessed that his government was very weak and said that he relied on the intelligence agencies to get his budgets through parliament. He also said that he was too dependent on his former military intelligence chief, Gen. Faiz Hameed. When Faiz completed his tenure and was transferred to Peshawar, Khan tried to delay the general’s posting. “That was the beginning,” he told me, noting that from this point on his relations with the army were troubled.
He explained other reasons behind his differences with the military. “I wanted good relations with China and I took a hard line against the U.S. — but the military asked me to be polite to the U.S.” Surprisingly, he never blamed the United States for his downfall in the whole conversation. He is now trying to manage his ties with Washington, which means cutting back on talk of foreign conspiracies.
Another reason was his hard stance against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Khan said that the army leadership asked him not to hit Modi below the belt because it might jeopardize back-channel diplomacy. (When I asked the spokesperson of Pakistan Army, Maj. Gen. Babar Iftikhar, about Khan’s claim, he contradicted it, saying that the military had never stopped him from saying anything about Modi.)
During our conversation, Khan made interesting claims about his visit to Moscow in February, just as the invasion of Ukraine was getting under way. He said that he made the trip with the full consent of the military leadership. He had no idea, he said, that the Russians would launch an attack on Ukraine during his visit. He told me about his three-hour meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which included talks about a gas pipeline project. “There are misconceptions about Putin,” he said, “but his wife is Muslim.”
This statement raises a lot of questions. Putin divorced his first wife Lyudmila many years ago. Maybe Khan was talking about Alina Kabaeva, who was born into a half-Muslim family in Uzbekistan. She is widely rumored to be Putin’s girlfriend but there has never been any public indication that the two of them have ever married.
Khan thanked me for taking a stand against the torture of his close aide Shahbaz Gill. I told him that many journalists and activists faced the same kind of torture when he was prime minister. Khan denied this, saying he never ordered anyone to attack or censor journalists. I reminded him that, as prime minister, he was still responsible for the actions of his subordinates, whom he could, at the very least, punish if they committed crimes. Why, for example, was no action taken after the shooting of Absar Alam, one of his most outspoken critics in the press? To my surprise he claimed to be unaware of the incident.
In the end, he said the ultimate solution to the political crises in Pakistan is an early election. He was clearly feeling confident that things might change before November. He assured me that he is more powerful than Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who only rules Islamabad, the capital, while he, Khan, is ruling two big provinces, Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. He was aware that he might be disqualified in a dispute over campaign finance but told me that he still plans to use his control over those two provincial governments to cripple the federal government in the event that he is arrested. His loyalists are threatening to take over Islamabad.
Khan could indeed win. But he is playing with fire. Pakistan has already experienced the conviction and disqualification of a sitting prime minister and two federal ministers. My encounter with him showed clearly that Khan is taking his situation very lightly. I hope that he will reconsider — for the good of the country.
Pakistan is currently facing a national emergency in the form of floods that have already taken more than 1,000 lives. This is not a good time for political agitation. | 2022-08-30T10:42:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Imran Khan is planning a comeback. Here's what he told me. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/30/imran-khan-pakistan-political-comeback/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/30/imran-khan-pakistan-political-comeback/ |
Ukraine live briefing: IAEA inspectors arrive in Ukraine; Kherson attacks u...
A new survey reveals how people on the front lines process the tradeoffs of war
Analysis by Karina V. Korostelina
Gerard Toal
A youngster looks out the window of a train to Dnipro and Lviv during an evacuation effort from war-affected areas of eastern Ukraine, amid Russia's invasion of the country, in Pokrovsk, Donetsk region, on Aug. 19. (Ammar Awad/Reuters)
Six months later, the war in Ukraine has no apparent end in sight. President Vladimir Putin formalized new plans last week to expand Russia’s military. This comes on the heels of President Biden announcing the largest commitment of U.S. weapons and ammunition for Ukraine since the Russian invasion began in late February.
Speaking on Aug. 24, Ukraine’s Independence Day, President Volodymyr Zelensky remarked, “What is the end of the war for us? We used to say: peace. Now we say: victory.”
What do Ukrainians think? Public opinion polls suggest Ukrainians share Zelensky’s view, with one recent survey suggesting that 98 percent of Ukrainians believe that their country will win the war. Another survey found that 92 percent of Ukrainians believed in Ukraine’s victory.
Wartime rallying and optimism among ordinary Ukrainians is real. But research suggests wartime experience and location also matter. Our research in three front line Ukrainian cities reveals that people process the dilemmas of war in different ways. Ukrainians hold divergent views on how their country can best confront war’s painful trade-offs.
To understand the views of war-affected Ukrainians, we organized a face-to-face survey of over 1,800 Ukrainians, half of whom were local residents and half of whom were internally displaced people (IDPs). Participants were selected across three towns — Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia and Poltava — close to the regions involved in active fighting. The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology administered the survey in July, and talked to local residents using a random selection of electoral precincts. Displaced Ukrainians were interviewed at specialized IDP housing locations. Overall, locals far outnumber IDPs in these cities. The survey findings reveal important differences in thinking about key wartime dilemmas.
Ceasefire or victory?
The war in Ukraine is among the more deadly wars in the last 200 years, though precise casualty figures are hard to locate. The Pentagon estimates that Russia may have suffered upward of 80,000 killed and wounded. Ukrainian numbers are rarely discussed, but Zelensky acknowledged Ukraine was losing between 100 and 200 people a day in May and June.
We used this figure to pose the following dilemma to respondents: “Some believe that Ukraine should look for ways to cease fire, even through concessions, in order to save lives. Others believe that a cease-fire cannot be achieved through concessions, as this will be a betrayal of the dead. What do you think?”
We offered respondents three options: “yes, we need an immediate cease-fire no matter the territorial cost” (5.6 percent chose this response); “yes, we need a cease-fire but only under the right conditions” (15.4 percent); and “no we should only have a cease-fire when we have liberated all our lands” (70.5 percent).
These results suggest that a strong majority of front line Ukrainians support Zelensky’s views and the sentiments that Ukraine should fight until it achieves victory. For many Ukrainians, liberation takes priority over peace. Other results, however, suggest a more complex picture.
Do people in Donbas want to be ‘liberated’ by Russia?
Lives or territory?
In the first question, the cost we explicitly named related to territory. But what if lives and territory are directly opposed as costs? When respondents were presented with this dilemma, the variation in opinion significantly increased — as shown in the figure. We asked respondents “What do you consider more important? (1) Save the lives of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians or (2) continue the war to free all Ukrainian territories including Crimea and Donbas” — and asked them to indicate whether they felt option (1) or option (2) was very important or slightly important, or if they saw both options as equally important.
Is it more important to (1) save lives or (2) free all Ukrainian territories?
Close to 27 percent of our sample of front line Ukrainians believe that it’s more important to save the lives of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians rather than continue the war to free all Ukrainian territories including Crimea and Donbas. And 36 percent believe the opposite, prioritizing reclaiming all areas of the country currently under Russian control. Ukrainians overwhelmingly held strong views — both groups saw this topic as “very important.” In contrast, 34 percent saw both needs as equally important (“don’t know” and “refuse to answer” responses made up the rest).
Significantly, across all three cities, Ukrainians forcefully displaced because of the war tended to rank saving lives over territorial liberation more than local residents of these cities (40 percent vs. 26 percent in Poltava; 33 percent vs. 22 percent in Zaporizhzhia; and 35 percent vs. 27 percent in Dnipro).
Similarly, when we approached the issue indirectly by asking respondents their opinion on the extent to which most Ukrainians agree or disagree with some statements, 46 percent of respondents believe that for Ukrainians it is imperative to seek a cease-fire to stop Russians from killing Ukraine’s young men as the future of the nation. And 36 percent felt that Ukrainians should disagree with this position and avoid seeking the cease-fire.
Displaced respondents, who are personally impacted by the war, expressed a stronger belief than local residents that seeking a cease-fire to prevent the deaths of more young men is vital to Ukrainians (55 percent vs. 46 percent in Poltava; 59 percent vs. 44 percent in Zaporizhzhia; 61 percent vs. 45 percent in Dnipro).
What’s the bottom line? The front line Ukrainians in our study, especially those whose lives have been uprooted by the war, don’t necessarily think the same way — they respond to the tragic dilemma of seeking a cease-fire to save lives or fighting until victory differently. Those directly affected by violence are more likely to support saving lives.
Given straightforward questions with clear patriotic answers, Ukrainians overwhelmingly affirm their belief in victory. But given indirect and trade-off dilemma questions, important differences of emphasis emerge.
Ukrainians understandably want to defeat Russia’s aggression, to achieve victory and liberate their lands. They are also understandably torn when faced with the real life-or-death dilemmas of this war. Recognizing differences among Ukrainians is important for all those interested in how Ukraine survives this war, successfully negotiates its end, and builds a peaceful future beyond it.
Karina V. Korostelina is a professor and director of the Program on Prevention of Mass Violence and the Program on History, Memory, and Conflict at the Carter School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University.
Gerard Toal is a political geographer and professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech’s campus in Arlington, Va. His new book, “Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe”, will be published next year.
This research was supported by National Science Foundation award number 2226741. | 2022-08-30T10:42:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ukrainians believe they're going to win - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/30/ukraine-survey-ceasefire-war/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/30/ukraine-survey-ceasefire-war/ |
Iraqi cleric orders supporters to withdraw after clashes killed dozens
Moqtada al-Sadr's fighters fire their weapons during clashes with the Iraqi security forces near the Green Zone, in Baghdad, Iraq Aug. 30. (Thaier Al-Sudani/Reuters)
BAGHDAD — Moqtada al-Sadr, a populist Shiite cleric, called on his supporters Tuesday to immediately withdraw from a government district in Baghdad after a day of fierce fighting there killed dozens of people, deepening the political crisis in the country.
The bloodshed erupted Monday after Sadr announced his resignation from politics in a message posted on Twitter. His supporters reacted by storming the presidential palace in the government district known as the Green Zone, which houses ministries as well as foreign missions, including the United States Embassy.
“I apologize to the Iraqi people,” Sadr said in a televised speech early Tuesday afternoon. “I was hoping for a peaceful demonstration, not with mortars and weapons. I don’t want such revolution,” he said.
Minutes after his speech ended, groups of men, some carrying rocket-propelled grenades or other weapons, could be seen walking away from the Green Zone.
The violence was the most serious during a summer of unrest in Iraq, which has been without a government for the better part of a year and captive to escalating feuds between political factions, including Sadr’s followers, and rival Shiite groups that are backed by Iran. | 2022-08-30T10:43:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Moqtada al-Sadr calls on forces to leave Baghdad's Green Zone - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/30/iraq-violence-protest-sadr-baghdad/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/30/iraq-violence-protest-sadr-baghdad/ |
With quarterback Will Rogers, left, having plenty of experience in Coach Mike Leach's system, Mississippi State could be in store for a strong season. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP)
With college football season around the corner, here are a few futures bets to consider. This advice focuses on win totals for several less prominent programs rather than the national championship market, where Alabama is a +175 favorite, followed by Ohio State (+300) and Georgia (+400), all unappealing prices.
Odds taken Monday from DraftKings Sportsbook.
Syracuse over five wins (+125)
The Orange has won only 11 times since its 10-3 season in 2018, and Coach Dino Babers always seems to be on the thinnest of ice. But Syracuse has the best running back you’ve never heard of in Sean Tucker (1,751 total yards, 14 touchdowns as a freshman in 2021), loads of experience at linebacker and defensive back, and two new assistants (offensive coordinator Robert Anae and quarterbacks coach Jason Beck) who helped propel Virginia to new offensive heights last season. Wins over Connecticut and Wagner should get the Orange nearly halfway to five, and games against Virginia, Wake Forest and Boston College are winnable.
Louisiana-Lafayette under 8.5 wins (+100)
The Ragin’ Cajuns went 13-1 last year, losing only to Texas in their season opener and finishing No. 16 in the final Associated Press poll, but coach Billy Napier left for Florida after 40 wins in four seasons. Now Louisiana-Lafayette has a rookie coach and new starters at just about every key offensive position. There was a certain bit of luck in the Cajuns’ success last season: They went 7-0 in one-score games, recovered 68.4 percent of their opponents’ fumbles (tied for fifth nationally) and lost only 4 of 10 fumbles of their own (tied for 34th). Those types of things tend to even themselves out.
Mississippi State over 6.5 wins (-150)
It takes programs a few years to adjust to Mike Leach and his whimsical ways. His first two teams at Texas Tech went 14-11 before the Red Raiders went 9-5 in his third season and won a bowl game for the first time in seven years. His first three Washington State teams went 12-25 before he reached nine wins with his fourth. Leach has gone 11-13 in his first two seasons at Mississippi State, and the pattern should repeat itself this year. The Bulldogs return a lot of talent and likely will be favored in all four nonconference games (Memphis, at Arizona, Bowling Green, East Tennessee).
One more thing: Bulldogs quarterback Will Rogers is back for his third year as a starter under Leach. The previous three times we’ve seen that scenario — Kliff Kingsbury (2002) and Graham Harrell (2008) at Texas Tech and Luke Falk (2017) at Washington State — Leach’s teams won at least nine games.
Arkansas under 7.5 wins (-150)
This is a bit juicy for my tastes — bettors would need to wager $150 just to win $100 — but ESPN’s Bill Connelly is projecting 6.4 wins from the Razorbacks, and the difference between his estimate and the Vegas win total is hard to ignore. Nearly all of the defensive starters are gone from 2021′s nine-win team, as are three of the Hogs’ top four receivers (Treylon Burks, now with the Tennessee Titans, accounted for 39.7 percent of the Razorbacks’ receiving yardage). Nonconference games against 2021 CFP semifinalist Cincinnati, at BYU and Liberty loom on the schedule, as do the usual SEC West land mines, including Alabama and Texas A&M.
This is more of a “bad vibes and absurdly tough schedule” prediction than anything statistical. Coach Bryan Harsin seemed a peculiar fit for the Tigers when he was hired in December 2020, and he remains a peculiar fit now after a 6-7 record last season that resulted in a soap-opera offseason. Harsin already is on his third offensive coordinator and second defensive coordinator, and his absurdly large buyout reportedly was the only thing keeping him in place. This season, the Tigers host Penn State in early September and have to travel for their meat of their SEC schedule, with games at defending national champion Georgia, Mississippi, Mississippi State and Alabama.
The Yellow Jackets check a lot of boxes for a team that should struggle (again). Coach Geoff Collins is on the hot seat and brought in a busload of new assistants; their most exciting player from 2021 (running back Jahmyr Gibbs) transferred to Alabama; they have some of the lowest returning-production numbers in the nation; and they have a preposterously difficult schedule that might see them favored in only two games (at home vs. Duke and Western Carolina).
South Florida under 4.5 wins (-135)
The Bulls might be favored in exactly one game this year, at home against Howard in Week 2. Their other nonconference games are home against BYU and at Florida and Louisville, three almost certain losses for a program with three wins over its past two seasons.
Toledo to win the Mid-American Conference (+330)
Earlier this summer Central Michigan was the favorite to win the MAC, but the Rockets are the team to back because of a defense that will be better than that of many Power Five teams and is by far the conference’s best. Toledo travels to Ohio State in Week 3; it might not lose many other games apart from that one. | 2022-08-30T11:46:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Eight college football futures bets to consider - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/30/college-football-best-bets/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/08/30/college-football-best-bets/ |
Israel sentences Gaza aid worker convicted of funding Hamas to 12 years
Maher Hanna, lawyer for former Gaza World Vision chief Mohammed al-Halabi, speaks to reporters at a courthouse on Aug. 30. (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images)
TEL AVIV — An Israeli court sentenced a former Gaza aid chief from a major international organization to 12 years in prison on Tuesday after convicting him of siphoning millions of agency dollars to Hamas, the Islamist group that rules the enclave.
Israel says Gaza World Vision director diverted millions to Hamas’s military wing
Kevin Jenkins, president of World Vision International, said in a statement on the organization’s website that it was difficult to “reconcile” the allegations because the organization’s cumulative operating budget in Gaza for the past 10 years was only around $22.5 million.
In June 2016, Israeli security forces arrested Halabi at the Erez Crossing Point between Gaza and Israel, and he was indicted in August of that year. He has been in prison for the past six years while awaiting a resolution to the legal proceedings.
“The arrest, six-year trial, unjust verdict and this sentence are emblematic of actions that hinder humanitarian work in Gaza and the West Bank,” World Vision said Tuesday in a statement on its website. “It adds to the chilling impact on World Vision and other aid or development groups working to assist Palestinians.”
Lawyer Maher Hanna said that Halabi maintains his innocence and that he worked to keep the agency’s funds out of the hands of Hamas. He said they would appeal the verdict to the Supreme Court, where he expects the decision to be overturned, in the coming weeks.
Khalil al-Halabi, Mohammad’s father, said in a phone interview that Israel offered him the chance to sign a plea deal 12 times in return for his release, but that he declined so as not to confess to the “silly” charges that he categorically denied.
“They threatened him if he didn’t confess, he will be sentenced for years,” he said. “This is revenge for not confessing.”
Part of the prosecution’s case against Halabi relies on a confession they say he made to an Israeli informant he shared a cell with. His lawyer said the confession was made under duress.
Halabi was convicted of several charges, including membership in Hamas, financing terrorist activities, providing information to a terrorist group, taking part in military exercises, and the possession of a weapon.
Israel has kept much of the evidence for the trial confidential, from the public and from Halabi’s legal team, citing “security concerns.”
The Australian government, among the largest donors to World Vision, froze its funding to projects in the Gaza Strip following Halabi’s arrest in 2016. A subsequent Australian government probe found no evidence of embezzlement.
World Vision, a Christian charity founded in Portland, Ore., with the stated aim of helping children, is active in more than 90 countries. It is one of the largest nongovernmental groups working in Gaza, where it says its aid has benefited nearly 40,000 children.
The real purpose of the 12-year sentence, said Hanna, Halabi’s lawyer, is to “make life more difficult in Gaza.”
“Israel is putting pressure on the people, which puts pressure on Hamas, which compels them to commit to more and more cooperation with Israel,” he said. | 2022-08-30T11:51:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mohammed al-Halabi gets 12-year sentence from Israeli court for Hamas link - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/30/israel-gaza-halabi-world-vision/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/30/israel-gaza-halabi-world-vision/ |
At Pickles Pub, across the street from Oriole Park at Camden Yards, college friends (L-R) Ethan Robinson, Brian Tregoning, Mateo Brown, and Jason Tingue enjoy drinks before a recent game. (Doug Kapustin/For The Washington Post)
BALTIMORE -
Good things rarely happen to baseball teams down a run in the ninth with two outs, two strikes, no one on base and a rookie batting .167 at the plate. But in that position last week, Baltimore Orioles outfielder Kyle Stowers came through with a dramatic home run – his first ever - to tie the Chicago White Sox in a game the Orioles would go on to win.
It’s been that kind of year for the never-give-up O’s. The worst team in baseball last season entered 2022 with few expectations and even fewer good ones. They were young, scrappy and rebuilding, but they hadn’t been a contender in six years and a winning season still seemed a year or three away.
Apparently, someone forgot to tell the team. Not only are the Orioles winning in late summer, they’re in spitting distance of a playoff spot. This past weekend they took two out of three games from the Houston Astros, one of the best teams in baseball.
For a city where it can sometimes feel like so many things are going wrong, the surprising success of its baseball team is a reminder that hope is not easily vanquished. And Baltimore fans are finally allowing themselves to believe.
“They’re a young team and the boys are playing like teenagers. They’re having fun,” Richard Banks, 74, a retired Southwest Airlines employee, said as he waited to enter the stadium last week with his friend, Sharon Barnette, 68, a commuter bus driver.
The hard-nosed enthusiasm and late-inning heroics of a team of not-yet-famous ballplayers have been welcome here.
“The stadium is coming alive and people are noticing and it feels, it just feels really good,” said Katie Morris, 51, an artist and rabid Orioles fan who lives in Butchers Hill in Southeast Baltimore and often brings her teenage daughters to games with her. “I used to reserve my gear for games, but now I’m so proud of my hat I wear it around town.”
If the team can snatch up hope and stomp on dim expectations, some fans have surmised, so too can their beleaguered beautiful hometown. There is, all will admit, a lot to come back from. The chronic challenges residents tire of hearing outsiders tick off — or wield as political talking points — have worsened in recent years.
Violent crime continues to torment the city. The recent highly publicized shooting death by a 15-year-old squeegee worker of a motorist wielding a baseball bat just blocks from the stadium is one of Baltimore’s 236 homicides this year, according to police data. That’s more than last year at this time and on a pace to eclipse 2021′s total of 338. Law enforcement is also facing continued scrutiny. The city’s police department has been operating under oversight by the federal government since 2017 because of a Justice Department finding the force engaged in discriminatory and unconstitutional policing practices.
Baltimore’s public schools are foundering. The school district reported in 2021 that nearly two-thirds of high school students and half of elementary school students were failing at least one class. As the school year began Monday, officials citing high temperatures cut short the first and second days at more than a dozen schools without air conditioning.
Many downtown businesses and restaurants that shut down during the pandemic never reopened.
A winning baseball team won’t change any of that, but the Orioles’ rebound from five straight losing seasons “means a lot for the city,” said Banks, who still lives in the West Baltimore house he was born in. “Baltimore is going through a lot, but we’re going to pull through it. They’re redeveloping the harbor, businesses are coming back. We’re coming back.”
If the team’s winning is contagious, its never-give-up approach might be as well.
Dave Policastri, 48, grew up in the city’s Canton neighborhood and now works as the used vinyl records buyer at The Sound Garden in Fells Point where he was wearing his O’s hat behind the counter one day last week.
“Baltimore is always going to be the city that has “The Wire” attached to it and that is what it is,” Policastri said, referencing the hit HBO show that documented Baltimore’s murderous drug trade, police and political corruption and failing schools. “But there’s a lot of great stuff here too. There’s a lot of great people in Baltimore.”
A lifelong fan, Policastri said he’s surprised the Orioles have been as good as they’ve been this year, but he thinks the organization has made its farm system more productive and expanded its analytics department to find players others have overlooked. The team’s teardown and subsequent losing produced premium draft picks, with catcher Adley Rutschman, the No. 1 overall pick in 2019 -- now a top contender for AL rookie of the year.
And the team’s newfound success is coming despite having one of the lowest total payrolls in baseball. It’s a multi-faceted approach that makes Policastri optimistic for the club — and for Baltimore as a whole.
“I always have hope for for the city,” he said. “It’s just, it takes a lot of work for that. And again, just like with baseball, there needs to be a plan... You have to have hope in the future. Or else why are you doing it?"
Born and raised in Baltimore, Bill Cunningham, 73, is a passionate Orioles fan who served on the City Council during the 1980s and 90s, chaired the city’s planning commission and now is on the city’s zoning appeals board. Just before the pandemic began, Cunningham was violently mugged and left with a severe concussion that curtailed the biking and hiking he enjoyed before the attack. He’s still angry at the people who attacked him - they weren’t caught - but he hasn’t given up hope on his city - or his team
Baltimore, he said, never fully recovered from the closing of manufacturing plants and steel mills that once employed tens of thousands of workers. And it has also never fully recovered from the riots that decimated parts of the city following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and again in 2015 after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody.
But Cunningham, a Democrat, is optimistic about the city’s young mayor, Brandon Scott (D), and some of the approaches he is taking to address crime. He’s bullish on the expansion and development of the city’s colleges, universities and research institutions. And he’s hopeful that if Democrat Wes Moore wins the governor’s race in November, Baltimore will once again have a champion in Annapolis.
Many in Baltimore believe Gov. Larry Hogan (R) has done the city no favors, pointing to his cancelation of the $2.9 billion Red Line, a proposed light rail system that would have connected residents of some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods to downtown and, proponents say, furthered economic development. Hogan, who was reelected as Maryland’s governor in 2018 in a landslide but lost in Baltimore by a two-to-one margin, said the Red Line was not cost-effective.
“Hogan did everything he could to screw up this city,” Cunningham said. “Hopefully we’ll have a new governor who is city sympathetic, and I think he will be.”
Cunningham said he knows the recent Orioles success won’t stop the murders or solve the deep-rooted crises in Baltimore, but winning, he said, “has put a smile on the face of the city.”
“There has just been a great improvement in the mood of the city,” Cunningham said. “I can’t go anywhere without hearing people talking about the O’s.”
Last year the Orioles won just 52 games in their 162-game season. Fans were not impressed. Just 793,229 showed up all year to watch them play. With 20 home games still to play this year, the team has already drawn over a million fans to Orioles Park at Camden Yards, according to Baseball-Reference.com.
At Pickles Pub, a sprawling indoor and outdoor bar across the street from the stadium, the energy is night and day from last year, said manager Anthony Washington, 26, who remembers 2021′s dwindling crowds and and tepid support as the losses piled up.
Not so in 2022.
“More and more people come out when the Orioles win so it has been great for us,” Washington said. “There’s a hopefulness. There’s a different energy, a different vibe. My employees are very excited about the possibility of the playoffs.”
Playoffs? Playoffs?!
At the beginning of the season it was hard to find a prognosticator who thought the Orioles would have a winning season much less a chance to play late October baseball. But with their 67-60 record, the Os are just a game-and-a-half out of a wild card spot. A brutal final six-week stretch against some of their toughest opponents will fill the path to playoffs with landmines and roadblocks.
But what seemed impossible just months ago now has the slightest hint of destiny.
“These guys believe in themselves. They’re acting like a baseball team. They’ve got a future now,” said James McLamb, 76, a retired government worker and private contractor as he stood outside a supermarket in his Waverly neighborhood. “It’s a good time for the Orioles to take flight and give the city something to look forward to.”
Maybe hope will pay off. Maybe Orioles Magic will win out.
Baltimore could use it. | 2022-08-30T11:59:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A scrappy, unexpected Baltimore Orioles season is lifting the city - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/30/baltimore-orioles-fans-hope/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/08/30/baltimore-orioles-fans-hope/ |
Boutique condo building taps into D.C.’s U Street vibe
Aperture has 19 units on a quiet stretch of V Street NW near a vibrant commercial area.
Aperture is a boutique condo building near D.C.’s vibrant U Street corridor. Prices for market-rate condos in the new seven-story building range from $439,900 to $1,950,000. (Benjamin C Tankersley/For The Washington Post)
Aperture, a boutique condo building, offers luxury living on a quiet street just steps from D.C.’s vibrant U Street corridor. With U Street restaurants, entertainment and shopping a block away, “our location is amenity-rich,” said James LoBocchiaro, who handles sales for the seven-story, 19-unit building, which opened for sales in June.
The glass, steel and concrete infill building is “small in number of units,” LoBocchiaro said, “and there are no more than five units per floor.” The units, he added, “are quite spacious and comfortable.”
The building, at 933 V St. NW, has retail space on the ground floor, where a secure entry and lobby serve the condos, which are move-in ready and occupy the six floors above. The building has 17 market-rate units and two “affordable” units made available through D.C.'s Inclusionary Zoning Program.
The market-rate condos include a 538-square-foot efficiency, priced at $439,900; eight 658-square-foot units with one-bedroom and one bathroom, priced from $499,900 to $569,900; a 922-square-foot unit with two bedrooms and two bathrooms, priced at $774,900; a 941-square-foot unit with two bedrooms and a bathroom, at $799,900; and four 1,515-square-foot units with two bedrooms, two full bathrooms and a powder room (or half-bath), priced from $999,900 to $1,400,000.
Two penthouses — two-level units with two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a powder room — occupy most of the top two floors. One is 1,781 square feet and priced at $1,850,000; the other is 2,010 square feet and priced at $1,950,000. The penthouses have private rooftop terraces.
Most units at the front of the building have balconies. Four units have direct elevator access with a private foyer. Four covered parking spaces in the rear are available for purchase.
Aperture condos feature contemporary styling and luxury features. All have open floor plans and 10-foot-high ceilings. Units at the front have floor-to-ceiling windows, adding light, views and a sense of spaciousness.
The flooring is engineered wood in a nutmeg finish. The kitchens have J Suss white cabinets with soft-close hinges and black hardware; Lyskamm quartz countertops; full-height ceramic backsplashes in a herringbone pattern; and stainless-steel appliances, including a Blomberg refrigerator, Bosch wall oven, microwave, dishwasher and gas cooktop with outside vent.
Most units have a kitchen island with pendant lights overhead. Bathrooms have Lyskamm quartz countertops, dual vanities and backlit vanity mirrors. One-bathroom units have a frameless glass shower enclosure; in two-bathroom units, the second bathroom has a tub instead of a shower enclosure.
LoBocchiaro said the upscale building and the prime location — a block from the U Street Metro station and the U Street corridor and not far from downtown D.C. — may suit different types of buyers. For example, he said, larger units might attract people who are downsizing but still seeking a generous living space, though one with fewer maintenance demands. Smaller units, he said, might appeal to young professionals who work downtown, don’t have a car and want to be close to a lively restaurant and nightlife scene.
Schools: Cleveland Elementary, Shaw Middle, Cardozo Education Campus, middle and high
Transit: The U Street Metro station, on the Yellow and Green lines, is a block away. Georgia Avenue NW (Route 29) is less than a mile away; I-395 is about four miles away.
Nearby: Whole Foods on Florida Avenue NW is less than a mile away. U Street Corridor dining options include Ben’s Chili Bowl, among many restaurants, taverns and bars. Entertainment options include 9:30 Club, Lincoln Theatre and Howard Theatre. Also nearby are LeDroit Dog Park and Crispus Attucks Park. Howard University Hospital and Howard University are blocks away. The National Mall is 2.2 miles away.
933 V St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20001.
Prices for market-rate condos in the new seven-story building range from $439,900 to $1,950,000.
Builder: Urbaniak LLC
Features: The condos have open floor plans, 10-foot-high ceilings, engineered wood flooring, quartz kitchen and bathroom countertops, high-end stainless-steel kitchen appliances, frameless glass shower enclosures, dual vanities and full-size washers and dryers.
Bedrooms/bathrooms: 1 to 2 / 1 to 2.5. (One unit is an efficiency.)
Square-footage: 538 to 2,010
Homeowners association fee: $205 to $752 a month
View model: By appointment and during open-house hours some Saturdays and Sundays from 1 to 3 p.m.
Sales: James LoBocchiaro of McWilliams Ballard, 301-325-3995, jlobocchiaro@mcwb.com | 2022-08-30T12:12:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Boutique condo building taps into D.C.’s U Street vibe - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/30/boutique-condo-building-taps-into-dcs-u-street-vibe/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/30/boutique-condo-building-taps-into-dcs-u-street-vibe/ |
The housing market has been searching for balance ever since mortgage rates rose above 5% at the end of April. Demand has fallen, and in response, homebuilders have cut back on housing starts. The torrid price appreciation of the past two years has ground to a halt.
In his speech at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell presented an economic outlook that suggests interest rates will be elevated for a sustained period of time, dashing the hopes that a pivot in monetary policy could lead to lower mortgage rates in 2023. Instead, the path to more normalized levels of housing market activity will depend on gains in worker incomes.
The tricky part about assessing the reasons for the plunge in buyer activity since April is that it’s due to both reduced affordability — a function of home prices and mortgage rates — as well as skittish homebuyer sentiment. That skittishness was particularly acute in June, when fears of inflation and recession reached a fever pitch.
In their quarterly earnings conference call last week, the luxury homebuilder Toll Brothers spoke to the latter dynamic, noting that traffic to their website and communities plunged in June. But Toll decided not to meaningfully increase buyer incentives, feeling that buyers had decided to take a pause to assess the state of the economy and housing market, and modest incentives wouldn’t lead to increased sales. Traffic has improved in July and August, which has made them more willing to offer incentives since they think it’s now more likely to lead to an improvement in transactions.
In a chart of Las Vegas weekly sales per subdivision, Zonda chief economist Ali Wolf last week showed that the same summer pattern has occurred there, where there was a big plunge in activity through early July, with a modest improvement over the past several weeks as buyers tiptoe back to the market.
An improvement in buyer psychology is helpful, but what’s really needed is improved affordability, and the question is how we get that. Meaningfully lower mortgage rates don’t seem to be on the table right now given the Fed’s policy stance. And while home prices have declined in some markets, emerging trends in the data suggest that sellers would rather hold onto their homes for now than cut prices a lot from these levels, which has led to new listings declining after a meaningful rise this spring and early summer.
That leaves rising incomes as the best hope for the housing market right now. The July personal income data released last week showed that wages and salaries grew 0.8% in July, or 10% on a year-over-year basis, as job and wage growth both remain strong. Presumably this will slow in the months to come as rising interest rates cool the labor market along with the economy. But that will take some time, and the wage growth that will have occurred between the first half of 2022 and the first half of 2023 will allow buyers to better handle higher mortgage rates next year even if home prices don’t fall.
Consider the following: The monthly payment on a $400,000 house with a 20% down payment and a 5% mortgage rate is around $2,200. At a 5.5% mortgage rate it’s around $2,300 per month, or an increase of 4.5%. Wage growth for workers has been running at a pace somewhat above 5% for a while now, suggesting that if 5% mortgage rates were the “speed limit” for the housing market this spring, that speed limit could be 5.5% by next spring as higher incomes give workers the ability to handle higher mortgage rates. And that doesn’t account for the hundreds of thousands of jobs the US economy continues to add every month, with 1.3 million jobs added since April, when the housing market began to buckle under the weight of higher mortgage rates.
It’s possible the housing market could be in for even more negative surprises by the time we hit next year’s spring home-buying season — maybe we’re looking at 6% mortgage rates by then, or a deterioration in the labor market would negate the rising worker income story. But the environment we’ve experienced over the past few months — continued strong job and wage growth, with mortgage rates hovering in a range of 5.25% to 5.50% — if sustained, will allow the housing market to claw out of its hole. It won’t necessarily restore boom conditions, but it should make the housing market feel normal sooner rather than later.
No Dovish Pivot in the Home of Inflation Targets: Daniel Moss
Resist the Siren Song of 40-Year Mortgage Loans: Alexis Leondis
Will Housing Prices Just Flatten — or Collapse?: Jonathan Levin | 2022-08-30T12:12:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Don’t Sweat a Housing Crash as Long as Wages Are Rising - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/dont-sweat-a-housing-crash-as-long-as-wages-are-rising/2022/08/30/f021bb46-2857-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/dont-sweat-a-housing-crash-as-long-as-wages-are-rising/2022/08/30/f021bb46-2857-11ed-a90a-fce4015dfc8f_story.html |
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