text stringlengths 237 126k | date_download stringdate 2022-01-01 00:32:20 2023-01-01 00:02:37 ⌀ | source_domain stringclasses 60 values | title stringlengths 4 31.5k ⌀ | url stringlengths 24 617 ⌀ | id stringlengths 24 617 ⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
FILE - This Sept. 22, 2019 file photo shows a view of the stage at the 71st Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles. The 74th Primetime Emmy Awards are set for Monday, Sept. 12, at the Microsoft Theatre in Los Angeles. The roughly three-hour ceremony will begin at 8 p.m. EDT and air live on NBC and, for free, on the streaming service Peacock. (Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP, File) | 2022-09-09T19:05:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Peak TV bonanza complicates Emmy goal of honoring the best - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/peak-tv-bonanza-complicates-emmy-goal-of-honoring-the-best/2022/09/09/e08d5500-3068-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/peak-tv-bonanza-complicates-emmy-goal-of-honoring-the-best/2022/09/09/e08d5500-3068-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html |
The culture wars have suddenly shifted. Democrats need to respond.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
We have reached an inflection point in our endless culture war, in which the familiar pattern of Republicans eagerly attacking while Democrats cower in fear has been reversed. All it took was Republicans getting some of what they want and being in a position to get even more.
In other words, the right’s realization of its most important policy goal — the overturning of Roe v. Wade — is the worst thing that could have happened to Republicans politically. Everything was so much easier when their culture-war story was one of loss, frustration and despair. Now they’re stuck, trying to tell the electorate that they don’t really mean what they say without demobilizing their own supporters.
Consider marriage equality. In the Senate, Democrats are hoping to pass a bill codifying the marriage rights currently guaranteed by the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, given the threat that the newly aggressive conservative court majority could overrule Obergefell, too (as Justice Clarence Thomas has suggested).
The bill, called the Respect for Marriage Act, is short and simple, requiring every state to respect marriages carried out legally in any other state. So for instance, Mississippi could not pass a law refusing to recognize same-sex marriages granted in Maryland. The bill passed the House in July with the votes of every Democrat and 47 Republicans as well.
As politicians in both parties are well aware, support for marriage equality now exceeds 70 percent in polls. When Americans began debating this issue in earnest around 2004, Republicans all predicted that allowing gay people to marry would lead to the breakdown of civilization; as you may be aware, parents have continued to raise their children, straight people still get married and civilization remains intact.
So the GOP response to the Respect for Marriage Act has mostly been that it’s unnecessary — Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida called it a “stupid waste of time” — because, some claim, the status quo won’t change anytime soon. Meanwhile, candidates such as Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) are flopping positions — they’re for it, they’re against it — in hopes of finding a message that will satisfy everyone.
If you want to reassure the majority of voters that they have nothing to fear from the GOP — right after the Supreme Court showed them just how much they have to fear — how can you do that and still convince your base that you’re on a righteous moral crusade and will stop at nothing to achieve your goals?
Let’s be clear: Overturning Obergefell and making it possible for states to outlaw same-sex marriage is still the official position of the Republican Party. Republicans laid that out in their 2016 platform, which they re-adopted in full in 2020.
When they claim they won’t follow through on this goal, Republicans are effectively denying their own power. Yet they spent decades working to get themselves to where they are now. They furiously gerrymandered congressional and state legislative districts. They passed a wave of state-level voter suppression laws. And perhaps most important, they engineered their supermajority on the Supreme Court while losing the popular vote in every presidential election save one in the past 30 years.
The whole point of creating that Supreme Court majority was to get what they want on policy no matter what the public wants. But as they’ve learned in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, their prior position was a far better spot politically, allowing them to harness the anger and alienation that come from losing on culture-war issues without having to take responsibility for what happens if they win.
Another component of this dilemma is that protestations that they’re not eager to act on their beliefs are undermined by everything else they’ve said about these issues. When you frame the stakes as genocide (in the case of abortion) or the survival of civilization (in the case of marriage), you can’t turn around and treat these issues as no more urgent than whether the capital gains tax rate will be raised or lowered.
So when Michigan GOP gubernatorial nominee Tudor Dixon tells voters that they can vote for an abortion rights ballot initiative in the state while also voting against Democratic incumbent Gretchen Whitmer, it leaves people scratching their heads. It’s a bit like saying, Vote for this baby-killing ballot measure if you want, but if you vote for me, too, I’ll give you some other stuff you like.
Democrats are only beginning to understand what kind of an advantage they hold. They’re still haunted by the old culture-war psychology, which led them to always fear that the public would punish them for being too forthright about their beliefs.
But all they have to do is look across the aisle to see who’s afraid of the voting public right now. When their opponents are as desperate to change the subject as the GOP is, it’s a pretty clear indication of where Democrats ought to be pressing their advantage | 2022-09-09T19:05:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The culture war calculation has changed, and Democrats need to respond - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/culture-war-calculation-abortion-marriage/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/culture-war-calculation-abortion-marriage/ |
Sign up for the Post Elizabeth newsletter to follow the British monarchy’s transition
The British monarchy should have ceased to exist long ago. In an age when institutions the world over are questioned if not crumbling, a hereditary monarchy and the classism it protects is ripe for elimination. That it has survived this long speaks to the steady leadership of Queen Elizabeth II, who died Sept. 8 at age 96, after more than 70 years on the throne. It falls now to Charles III, Britain’s longest-serving king-in-waiting, and oldest monarch to take the throne, to keep the palace show going. Since his birth in 1948, Charles has been the future sovereign. That fact ruled his childhood and school days, defined his career and dictated his romantic life (with disastrous early results).
Welcome to Post Elizabeth, a new Post Opinions newsletter about the royal family. I’m Autumn Brewington, associate Opinions editor and a former royal blogger for The Post.
For 73 years, Charles has been a prince on the verge. On his first full day as king, he made a quick start — greeting well-wishers outside Buckingham Palace (one woman even kissed him) and was greeted warmly. People gathered outside the palace are likely to be fans, of course, but Charles is not as popular as his mother was, and there have long been doubts about how he would be accepted as king.
His address to the nation included praise for his wife, Camilla, the new queen consort (a title that for years was in doubt) and a promotion for Prince William to Prince of Wales. His younger son, Prince Harry, will continue living overseas with his wife, Meghan Markle. In a signal meant to calm those who worry the new king will engage in politics, Charles said: "My life will of course change as I take up my new responsibilities. It will no longer be possible for me to give so much of my time and energies to the charities and issues for which I care so deeply.”
Over the coming days, as Britons mourn the end of the Elizabethan era, we’ll watch the start of a new reign, and a new era — one certain to be among the most challenging ever faced by anyone who has worn the crown. Follow along with Post reporters, editors and commentators as Charles seeks to lead the British monarchy and steer the storied — and complicated — House of Windsor into the future. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Post coverage today includes handy explainers on the new King Charles and who’s who in the line of succession, quotes from the queen’s notable speeches, and a gorgeous visual timeline of benchmarks from a 70-year reign. Truly critical information (at least for pet lovers): What happens to the queen’s corgis?
Just how much is changing? Lots. It’s not just the national anthem that’s different; expect to see Charles’s profile on stamps, currency and more.
“Elizabeth cast herself as the happy steward of the Commonwealth,” The Post’s Ishaan Tharoor notes. “But one narrative is inescapable: Elizabeth ascended the throne 70 years ago as the head of a globe-spanning empire. But she died at a moment of contraction and uncertainty, with most of Britain’s colonies gone, its place in Europe a source of tension, and its global status diminished.”
What made Queen Elizabeth II extraordinary, Post columnist Monica Hesse observes, was far less about the person than what she gave to her country and role: “What you loved or hated wasn’t the woman herself but the institution she embodied, a sprawling $28 billion firm of inherited titles and property. The woman herself? She was a cipher by design.”
Our London colleagues William Booth and Karla Adam note that the 96-year-old queen’s death was long expected but still shocked Britons. “As the only monarch the vast majority of Britons have ever known, she has been a constant in people’s lives — her profile on the currency, on the stamps. She was there in times of celebration and sorrow and fear. As she aged, she became more and more a grandmotherly figure of warm and fuzzy affection, even for those who don’t especially like the institution.”
It was often said of Elizabeth that she never put a foot wrong, but Post columnist (and former London correspondent) Eugene Robinson disagrees: “She made her share of mistakes, including major ones, but managed to recover from them — and learn their lessons.” While Elizabeth was born into a world where royalty still mattered, he writes, during her lifetime other European royals have “been cast out of their palaces or reduced to what British courtiers deride as ‘bicycle monarchs,’ pedaling around Scandinavian capitals like ordinary citizens and trying not to be too much of a bother.” Robinson’s prediction? “I see bicycles in the British royals’ future.”
Distilling the queen’s reign to statistics, The Post’s Editorial Board writes, “misses her larger contribution to British society and our cultural consciousness. … The queen embodied the British stiff upper lip. Even when a teenager fired six blanks at her during the sovereign’s annual birthday parade in 1981, Elizabeth II was unflappable: She calmed her horse and continued riding.” | 2022-09-09T19:05:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Sign up for Post Elizabeth newsletter on British royals in transition - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/post-elizabeth-royals-newsletter-sign-up/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/post-elizabeth-royals-newsletter-sign-up/ |
Like, what if, Yankovic imagines, “Weird” had that much-memed moment in Baz Luhrmann's “Elvis” where Tom Hanks’ Tom Parker hears Presley on the radio for the first time, dramatically swings around and exclaims “He’s white?!” — only it’s Weird Al he hears and instead responds, “He’s weird?!”
Yankovic was in Toronto for only the evening with Colorado concerts the night before and the night after the premiere. He’s currently on “The Unfortunate Return of the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent Ill-Advised Vanity Tour" which concludes this fall at Carnegie Hall. At his concerts, he now sees fans of his from the 1980s with their kids — “and in some cases, their grandkids – which is a little scary.” | 2022-09-09T19:07:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Weird Al gives himself the Weird Al treatment in new biopic - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/weird-al-gives-himself-the-weird-al-treatment-in-new-biopic/2022/09/09/e82c3834-306e-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/weird-al-gives-himself-the-weird-al-treatment-in-new-biopic/2022/09/09/e82c3834-306e-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html |
Queen Elizabeth, fashion icon? Yes.
She undoubtedly had a uniform, but it helped set a standard for womenswear in politics and diplomacy.
Queen Elizabeth II attends the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Auckland in 1990, wearing several elements of what eventually became recognizable as her unofficial public uniform: a bright-colored ensemble with a matching hat, a brooch on her left shoulder and a pair of white gloves. (KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP/Getty Images)
For decades now, it has been relatively easy to dress up — for Halloween, maybe, or for laughs at any given royal-wedding or Jubilee watch party — as the Queen of England. All one needs, so the common wisdom goes, are a solid- and brightly colored boxy skirt suit with a brooch on the left shoulder, a matching hat (or, for extra credit, umbrella) and white gloves, with a handbag swinging gently on one forearm. And perhaps a white wig.
Queen Elizabeth II, who died on Friday at age 96 after reigning for more than 70 years, undoubtedly had a uniform. In her early years on the throne, in her 20s and 30s, the young queen was known to wear practical but elegant clothes; she wore gowns with clean lines and full skirts at formal events and artfully tailored skirt suits and dresses in the daytime, un-daring in the necklines and nipped in at the waists. And in her later years, of course, her taste for modest, traditional elegance distilled itself into what we now know as her usual public-facing outfit — which, as many have pointed out, communicated the consistency and stability of the crown even as the United Kingdom evolved dramatically in the 20th and 21st centuries.
But the Queen’s wardrobe was consistently imbued with deeper meanings, seen as conveying support or affection for other countries and communities — or even asserting power, when necessary. And because Elizabeth’s reign began in 1952, a time before women were regularly seen at the highest levels of government in the Western world, she helped set a standard in politics-adjacent womenswear.
Queen Elizabeth’s public-facing image was “smart on the whole — clean-cut, which I think was a very 1950s thing, really. Not much fuss,” says Philip Mansel, a fellow of the Institute of Historical Research in London, as well as the author of “Dressed to Rule,” a book about how rulers have controlled their public images.
The Queen’s style at home varied slightly, Mansel notes: “In her last photograph, greeting Liz Truss, her last prime minister, she’s very simply dressed in a woolen skirt and woolen jersey and woolen jacket,” which, for a certain generation of English people, is “exactly like everybody’s aunt or mother.”
But in public, and in her later years especially, “I think she always wanted to be two things: reassuring and recognizable,” Mansel says. Being an instantly identifiable pillar of color was her way of “trying to reassure people, despite all the changes going on.”
Malcolm Barnard, the author of “Fashion as Communication,” wrote in an email to The Washington Post that “This kind of clothing exemplifies values that are homologous or that fit with what one might assume a ruling class’s values to be — those of resistance to change, a desire for continuity, the continuity of their dominant positions, for example.”
Indeed, Queen Elizabeth famously insisted on a rather formal dress code for royal events; once, in 2002, she chastised a BBC cameraman at a Royal Ascot event for failing to wear a top hat and tails. The stylish-but-modest daytime dress code that Kate Middleton, Meghan Markle, Camilla Parker Bowles and others have followed strictly in their time as members of the royal family is a tradition that dates back to Elizabeth’s mother and grandmother, Mansel says.
The one person who tried to break the mold, Mansel adds, was Princess Diana. Diana’s style, especially when she was married to now-King Charles III, deviated subtly from the royal formula, sometimes incorporating more masculine or more girlish touches — like double-breasted military-style jackets and the occasional dropped-waist dress.
Nevertheless, Queen Elizabeth, who has been called “a link between the end of an empire and the beginning of a cosmopolitan liberal democracy,” helped cement the contemporary uniform for powerful women — who proliferated in her time on the throne. Boxy, mid-length skirt suits are still seen in United States government buildings, and on women in politics throughout the Western world. And Mansel points out that Margaret Thatcher, the U.K.’s first female prime minister, wore “slightly formal clothes, slightly like the Queen’s, and always a handbag.”
The Queen also helped uphold the powerful tradition of “fashion diplomacy.” As Bethan Holt writes in the 2022 book “The Queen: 70 Years of Majestic Style,” the monarch has long been known to incorporate small, thoughtful touches that nod to the local culture when she travels. On the queen’s state visit to Ireland in 2011, Holt writes, when she was eager to repair relations with the neighboring nation, she wore a deep green wool-crepe coat and a corresponding green-printed silk dress upon arrival, and to a state dinner she wore a gown adorned with 2,091 tiny silk shamrocks.
At a dinner in Canada in 2010, the Queen wore a white lace gown with Swarovski crystal maple leaves glittering across her shoulders. She wore a gown embroidered with California poppies to meet President Ronald Reagan in 1983; a gown with an emerald-and-white train like the Pakistani flag when she visited in 1961; an outfit in shades of thistle and heather to show her affection for Scotland upon the formation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999.
And as Mansel points out, she also occasionally chose colors that asserted her power. Upon meeting the cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in the United Kingdom, she wore red to match the Cardinal’s red garments: “To say she was just as holy and sacred, in her eyes.”
The Queen’s particular habit of communicating through small details has flourished in the political world. Princess Diana wore a red polka-dot dress in Japan in 1986, a clear homage to the nation’s rising-sun flag. First lady Jill Biden wore a sunflower embroidered on a royal-blue dress in March of this year to signal support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. Madeleine Albright chose her pins strategically when she served as U.S. secretary of state. And in the U.K., the Supreme Court judge Lady Hale made headlines when she wore a brooch in the shape of a spider to deliver her verdict concerning Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament in 2019. “Some of us recalled The Who’s song, ‘Boris The Spider,’” Barnard wrote, while others thought of Walter Scott’s ‘tangled web’ of lies and deceit in his 1808 poem ‘Marmion.’”
Madeleine Albright’s ‘pin diplomacy’ lives on at State Department museum
Of course, a separate tradition of fashion diplomacy has also flourished: wearing clothes designed by a member of a particular community as a sign of respect or support. When she visited India in 2009, first lady Michelle Obama wore a cream-colored strapless gown and a skirt designed by Indian American designers Naeem Khan and Rachel Roy, respectively. On a 2019 visit to the U.K., Ivanka Trump wore ensembles by such British designers as Safiyaa, Burberry and Alessandra Rich. The tradition can be traced all the way back to Mary Todd Lincoln, who wore gowns designed by a formerly enslaved designer, Elizabeth Keckley.
Queen Elizabeth, by contrast, almost always wore the work of British designers, a tradition dating back to centuries-ago monarchs like King Louis XIV. Who, Mansel notes, “was obsessed with launching the French fashion industry. So he wore French silk, French embroidery, French lace, above all, to do better than Venetian lace, and got the ladies of his court to do that.”
The queen did, after all, sit atop a monarchy known for its colonization and conquest — and her insistence on English-made designs could be seen as in alignment with the British empire’s history of promoting its own supremacy.
Still, Mansel says, the queen’s clothes weren’t typically controversial. They were appreciated, both within and outside the United Kingdom. “A lot of French people liked her clothes,” for example, “because they weren’t French. They were different,” Mansel says. “They represented Britain.” | 2022-09-09T20:02:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Queen Elizabeth, fashion icon? Yes. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/09/09/fashion-queen-elizabeth-dress-hat/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/09/09/fashion-queen-elizabeth-dress-hat/ |
Disney and Marvel showcase promises updates on superhero, Star Wars games
(Washington Post illustration; iStock; Disney; Marvel)
The entertainment behemoths Disney and Marvel are hosting their first video game showcase Friday at the Walt Disney Company’s D23 Expo in Anaheim, Calif. The event promises updates and announcements relating to games from Disney, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar and 20th Century Studios.
The event, which begins at 4 p.m. Eastern time, will be streamed online on YouTube and Twitch, as well as D23′s Twitter and Facebook pages.
Disney and Marvel have teased reveals and updates regarding the new life sim “Disney Dreamlight Valley,” as well as strategy title “Marvel’s Midnight Suns” and “Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga.” Fans should also expect a glance at the new Marvel title from Amy Hennig, a game director famous for her work on the Uncharted franchise.
Though not confirmed to be making an appearance, Bethesda Softworks’ Indiana Jones game and Insomniac’s Wolverine game are also worth keeping an eye out for.
There are many, many Star Wars games already in development as well, including a sequel to “Jedi: Fallen Order,” called “Jedi: Survivor,” as well as a first-person shooter, a strategy game, a narrative action title and a troubled “Knights of the Old Republic” remake. | 2022-09-09T20:02:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Disney & Marvel video game showcase: What to expect - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/09/09/disney-marvel-d23-video-games-star-wars/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/09/09/disney-marvel-d23-video-games-star-wars/ |
Russia's President Vladimir Putin attends a parade marking Navy Day in his hometown of St. Petersburg on July 31. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)
A group of district council members in St. Petersburg, President Vladimir Putin’s hometown, called for the Russian leader to be charged with treason and removed from office in a rare but brazen protest against the war in Ukraine.
The brave move by the Smolninsky District Council drew a predictably swift and unfriendly reaction. A day after the resolution against Putin was made public, a local police station told the lawmakers they were facing legal charges “due to actions aimed at discrediting the current Russian government.”
The district council’s statement came in the form of a request to the Russian parliament, the State Duma, and asserted that Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine on Feb. 24 led to a massive loss of life, turned countless Russian men into disabled veterans, hindered the national economy, and fast-tracked NATO’s eastward expansion.
A second municipal council in Moscow’s Lomonosovsky district followed suit and voted on a similar motion calling on Putin to resign. Outspoken criticism of Putin is rare, and while the two motions were little more than symbolic statements, they represented a remarkable public rebuke. They also served as evidence that public support for the war in Ukraine is not universal, and could be eroding as a recent survey of Russian public opinion found.
“We believe that the decision made by President Putin to start the special military operation is detrimental to the security of Russia and its citizens,” the Smolninsky document filed on Wednesday evening said.
“We ask you,” the lawmakers wrote, “to initiate a treason charge against the president of the Russian Federation to remove him from office.”
Putin grew up in the Smolninsky neighborhood and began his career in St. Petersburg, where he served as a deputy mayor. Many of the Russian president’s closest friends still live in St. Petersburg where some of them have grown fabulously wealthy during Putin’s 22 years as the country’s supreme leader.
The State Duma is controlled by Putin’s United Russia party and is effectively his rubber stamp, at times adopting his policies by unanimous vote.
The resolution’s authors conceded that they had little hope their request would be acted but that they believed they achieved their largely symbolic goal: to let other antiwar Russians know that they are not alone in their sentiment, which is often drowned out by the state’s militaristic rhetoric, echoed by propagandists on state-controlled television.
The Kremlin has outlawed criticism of the war, and has initiated a further crackdown on dissent, including from journalists.
“We understand that Putin won’t shed a tear and stop the operation,” Nikita Yuferev, one of the seven councilors who wrote the document, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “These requests are written for people who are still in Russia and for whom the propaganda tries to assure that they are the minority, that there are no people who are against this.”
The Lomonosovsky district’s statement slammed Putin’s rhetoric and urged him to step side.
“The rhetoric you and your subordinates use is full of intolerance and aggression,” the statement said. “People once again fear and hate Russia while we threaten the whole world with nuclear weapons.” The Lomonosovsky district added: “Therefore, we ask for you to be relieved of your duties as your views and governance model are hopelessly outdated.”
Yuferev said that after their request went viral on Russian social media, the councilors received a “flurry” of letters of support from people offering anything from legal help to donations to cover the fines that will likely be imposed on the politicians.
In March, the Smolninsky councilors also wrote a letter to Putin urging him to stop the war as “the fate of thousands of Russian servicemen and millions Ukrainians are at stake.”
Shortly, after Russian troops marched across the border, the Kremlin dialed up the level of the repressions against its opponents, outlawing the use of the word “war” when talking about the invasion and threatening those who publicly criticize the Russian army with fines and jail terms. Thousands fled the country, and hundreds have been fined or detained for antiwar demonstrations.
While Putin is unlikely to face any charges, the lawmakers are already under pressure and face at least a fine.
Just a day after the document went public, Yuferev received a text message from a local police station ordering him to come in to testify in proceedings launched against him and other council members “due to actions aimed at discrediting the current Russian government.”
“We are sure that we have not violated anything as we acted strictly in accordance with the lawful procedure written in the Constitution,” Yuferev said. “Of course, we live in a country where even if everything is done legally, but there is a desire to punish us, it will be done … but we can manage a 50,000 rubles fine.” (At current exchange rates, the fine amounts to about $850.) | 2022-09-09T20:28:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Local lawmakers face criminal charges after demanding Putin's impeachment - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/09/lawmakers-putin-impeachment-censure-war/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/09/lawmakers-putin-impeachment-censure-war/ |
‘Zombie’ cells may hold clues to improving old age
Microscope images show healthy myoblast cells, left, and senescent ones. These cells eventually stop dividing and enter a “senescent” state. The body removes most of them. But others linger like zombies. They aren’t dead, but they can harm nearby cells. They accumulate in older bodies, which mounting evidence links to an array of age-related conditions such as dementia and osteoporosis. (Xu Zhang/Mayo Clinic/AP)
Steps away is an expensive leather recliner he bought when he retired from Procter & Gamble with visions of relaxing into old age. He proudly proclaims that he has never used it; he has been too busy training for competitions, such as the National Senior Games.
Soller, who lives near Cincinnati, has achieved an enviable goal chased by humans since ancient times: staying healthy and active in late life. It’s a goal that eludes so many that growing old is often associated with getting frail and sick.
But scientists are trying to change that — and tackle one of humanity’s biggest challenges — through a little-known but flourishing field of aging research called cellular senescence.
“The ability to understand aging — and the potential to intervene in the fundamental biology of aging — is truly the greatest opportunity we have had, maybe in history, to transform human health,” LeBrasseur says. Extending the span of healthy years affects “quality of life, public health, socioeconomics, the whole shebang.”
With the number of people 65 or older expected to double globally by 2050, cellular senescence is “a very hot topic,” says Viviana Perez Montes of the National Institutes of Health. According to an Associated Press analysis of an NIH research database, there have been about 11,500 projects involving cellular senescence since 1985, far more in recent years.
Although no one thinks senescence holds the key to super-long life, Tufts University researcher Christopher Wiley hopes for a day when fewer people suffer fates like his late grandfather, who had Alzheimer's and stared back at him as if he were a stranger.
Leonard Hayflick, the scientist who discovered cellular senescence in 1960, is himself vital at 94. He’s a professor of anatomy at the University of California at San Francisco, and continues to write, present and speak on the topic.
He discovered cellular senescence by accident, cultivating human fetal cells for a project on cancer biology and noticing they stopped dividing after about 50 population doublings. This wasn’t a big surprise; cell cultures often failed because of things like contamination. What was surprising was that others also stopped dividing at the same point. The phenomenon was later called “the Hayflick limit.”
The finding, Hayflick says, challenged “60-year-old dogma” that normal human cells could replicate forever. A paper he wrote with colleague Paul Moorhead was rejected by a prominent scientific journal, and Hayflick faced a decade of ridicule after it was published in Experimental Cell Research in 1961.
Scientists are careful to note that cell senescence can be useful. It likely evolved at least in part to suppress the development of cancer by limiting the capacity of cells to keep dividing. It happens throughout our lives, triggered by things such as DNA damage and the shortening of telomeres, structures that cap and protect the ends of chromosomes. Senescent cells play a role in wound healing, embryonic development and childbirth.
Possible benefits for people are just emerging. LeBrasseur and colleagues did a pilot study providing initial evidence that patients with a serious lung disease might be helped by pairing a chemotherapy drug with a plant pigment. Another pilot study found the same combination reduced the burden of senescent cells in the fat tissue of people with diabetic kidney disease.
At least a dozen clinical trials with senolytics are now testing whether they can help control Alzheimer’s progression, improve joint health in osteoarthritis and improve skeletal health. Some teams are trying to develop “senomorphics” that can suppress detrimental effects of molecules emitted by senescent cells. And a Japanese team has tested a vaccine on mice specific to a protein found in senescent cells, allowing for their targeted elimination.
Amid the buzz, some companies market dietary supplements as senolytics. But researchers warn they haven’t been shown to work or proved safe.
A study LeBrasseur led last year provided the first evidence in humans that exercise can significantly reduce indicators, found in the bloodstream, of the burden of senescent cells in the body. After a 12-week aerobics, resistance and balance training program, researchers found that older adults had lowered indicators of senescence and better muscle strength, physical function and reported health. | 2022-09-09T20:37:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ‘Zombie’ cells may hold clues to improving old age - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/zombie-cells-central-to-the-quest-for-active-vital-old-age/2022/09/09/6dd1f3f6-292c-11ed-806e-f01a46624ddb_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/zombie-cells-central-to-the-quest-for-active-vital-old-age/2022/09/09/6dd1f3f6-292c-11ed-806e-f01a46624ddb_story.html |
21 years after 9/11, the war has not ended for anyone
A member of the Old Guard looks on during a full military honors burial ceremony for a U.S. soldier next to Section 60, the section of Arlington National Cemetery reserved for those killed during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on Aug. 16, 2021. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)
Twenty-one years after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan, one can ask whether the United States has yet learned the principal lesson of that shocking, savage day. It is a lesson well-known to military planners, yet hard for a nation with allies on its borders and oceans at its sides to believe bone-deep.
In the starting and ending of wars, the letting of blood and the waging of battle, the enemy has a vote. The day that has come to be known as 9/11 began a war only for us; for the enemy, the war had been raging for years. The little army of Osama bin Laden had hit American embassies in Africa, bombed a U.S. naval ship at Aden Harbor in Yemen, even signaled its intentions to destroy the twin towers by planting a truck bomb in a World Trade Center garage in 1993.
The audacity of 9/11 — using 19 al-Qaeda fighters, civilian lives and lakes of jet fuel to carry out a massively destructive attack — finally convinced Americans that we were at war. And for the next 20 years, we fought until we tired of the idea.
Every president going back to George W. Bush wanted to end the awful business. “Mission Accomplished,” one banner declared as early as 2003. Barack Obama promised to wrap things up. Donald Trump also promised to wrap things up and negotiated the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. President Biden completed the withdrawal in ugly fashion just in time for the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
Michael Gerson: Why did Biden want the Afghanistan withdrawal tied to the 20th anniversary of 9/11?
But we no more control the ending of the war than we controlled the beginning. With the drone-strike killing of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in July, the known enemy commanders of 9/11 are all captured or dead. Yet the enemy has morphed and migrated. The war has not ended for the Islamic State or for other violent jihadist groups around the world. It hasn’t ended for the governments offering them support and encouragement.
Therefore, the war has not ended for us.
What’s more, it is impossible to say when, or even how, it might come to an end. These 21 years since 9/11 have changed the tactics and appearance of war, and not necessarily for the better. Though the United States continues to train and equip hundreds of thousands of conventional troops, and to arm them with the latest weapons, most of our fighting against terrorists is done by small teams of highly skilled commandos — Navy SEALs, Army Rangers and so on — from the Special Operations forces (SOF).
Rarely do we see or hear of their work. They fight mostly by night, often in places where their presence is unacknowledged. They work to weaken terrorist networks and preempt attacks. Often this involves up-close combat and intimate killing in places where information can be unreliable and identities confused.
9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed.
Gradually we are learning of the trauma and damage this work can cause among even the strongest, best-trained, most carefully vetted warriors. The human mind and soul are not constituted for endless years of risking and inflicting violence in nightly doses. A 2019 article in the Journal of Special Operations Medicine pointed out this wrenching juxtaposition of vulnerable souls inside hardened shells by noting:
“In 2017, one of the largest suicide studies in military history concluded that SOF had nearly zero risk of suicide, asserting SOF are highly resilient due to their ‘rigorous selection, intense training, strong unit cohesion, or psychological and biological characteristics.’ In 2018, SOF suicides tripled.”
Because we cannot see what these warriors do on our behalf and in our name, we make cultural cartoons of them — Rambos and video-game avatars. No doubt some of them come to see themselves in those same terms. But they are not cartoon supermen; they are human beings — highly skilled and disciplined, but still human. And they are bearing extraordinary weight in a war without clear boundaries: physical, temporal or moral. A war that will end only when the enemy consents to end it.
As the journalist Dan Taberski brilliantly documented in his 2021 podcast “The Line,” the fogged frontier between war and not-war, combatants and noncombatants, permissible and nonpermissible violence takes a profound toll on the people assigned to navigate the morass.
“The job that they do hurts them and hurts their families,” a former Navy psychiatrist named Bill Nash says on the podcast.
Though the American public is tired of war, and the United States’ leaders prefer to act as if it is all over, American warriors must continue to fight because our enemies still have a vote. As another 9/11 anniversary comes and goes, we owe it to those warriors to remember them, to care for them, and to honor their sacrifices of body and soul.
Opinions on 9/11
Opinion|My father was killed on 9/11. I still struggle to understand how he just disappeared.
Opinion|We best remember 9/11 by moving beyond it | 2022-09-09T20:37:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | 21 years after 9/11, the war has not ended for anyone - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/911-21st-anniversary-terrorism-endless-war/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/911-21st-anniversary-terrorism-endless-war/ |
It’s time to end the archaic stigmas around weed
By Brian Broome
Medical marijuana dispensary owner Chance Gilbert displays some of the marijuana he's grown at the Oklahoma Roots dispensary in Shawnee, Okla., on Nov. 30, 2018. (Sean Murphy/AP)
Except for a few months in California last winter, I have spent my entire life in a part of the country where for years smoking marijuana ran counter to our nose-to-the-grindstone, steelmaking, coal-mining ethic. I grew up in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania believing that marijuana was for feckless burnouts. People who weren’t going anywhere in their lives. Californians, basically.
That’s why for me it was strange to walk down the streets of Oakland or San Francisco and inhale the latest “craft cannabis” wafting through the air. I dislike the smell of it. And each time I was forced to breathe it, I found myself nervously looking around for the police and silently judging the people doing the smoking. Right out there in the open in front of children. And then, I would remember: “Oh, yeah. It’s legal here.”
I imagine this would happen to me in all of the 19 states — and D.C. — where recreational marijuana is legal for adults.But the fact that it is legal from place to place still isn’t enough to penetrate the negative feelings I’ve learned to associate with it.
That stigma came back to me last week when Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D), who is in a race for the U.S. Senate, called on President Biden to decriminalize marijuana ahead of his visit to Pittsburgh, where he spoke to steelworkers on Labor Day. This was mostly politics on Fetterman’s part: He knows most Pennsylvanians support decriminalization — it is already approved for medical use in some cities — and making weed an issue allows Fetterman, who is trying to win Republican votes, to put himself at odds with Biden.
Biden came and went, and nothing changed, of course. My guess is that the president probably personally opposes decriminalization but keeps those views to himself because he knows most young voters think he is too old to be president again. Yet, the stakes behind Fetterman’s stunt are real, and I speak with some authority. I am a drug addict. I have been clean for almost 10 years. I never liked marijuana. My drugs of choice were cocaine, heroin and prescription drugs, and I, hypocritically, have found myself looking down on weed smokers. This just goes to show the lessons from childhood are slow to let go of us.
The year I was born, in 1970, marijuana was classified by the feds as a Schedule I drug, meaning that it was determined to have a high chance of leading to abuse and causing addiction. You know, like alcohol. The implications behind this decision are far too long to list here. But Black Americans have known for decades what one of them is: Classifying marijuana as a dangerous substance puts certain kinds of people in jail while not affecting the three-martini-lunch crowd. One drug was legal (and tax-subsidized) for one kind of citizen; a different drug was a disproportionate one-way ticket to jail for others.
This absurd double standard persists. I recently drove past a medical cannabis dispensary situated in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Pittsburgh. It sits on a street just a few blocks away from where my friends used to buy their weed from Black men who, if they’re not in jail now, have all done jail time for selling it. And, whenever I pass this weed joint, my irritation feels like an itch between my shoulder blades. One that I can’t quite reach.
We’re still fighting an ancient war that was lost decades ago. For years, marijuana was touted as a dreaded “gateway” drug to harder stuff. But the real gateway drug to serious addiction is probably sitting in a living room cabinet right now or on a kitchen shelf that you think your children can’t reach. The gateway drug is served openly at baseball games. The gateway drug is sold at grocers, bars, restaurants and state-run stores. It is alcohol. That’s how addicts typically begin their spiral. I’ve been to enough Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings to state this with confidence.
My time in California taught me that the people who smoke marijuana aren’t going nowhere in their lives. When I walked through a cloud of rancid weed smoke, I looked up to see just regular folks, professionals, teachers and parents. And yes, there were some career stoners. But a career stoner never hurt anyone.
I hope someone, someday soon, has the nerve to decriminalize marijuana on a nationwide basis. It’s long past time to do so. The laws are archaic and unfair. And, as for the smell, I figure I’ll get used to it. | 2022-09-09T20:38:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Decriminalize weed and end the stigma. It’s time. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/decriminalize-weed-end-stigma/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/decriminalize-weed-end-stigma/ |
Maryland’s a dirty state
Trash in Harris Creek on June 17, 2017, in Baltimore. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)
I read with much interest the Aug. 26 Metro article “It’s a question of access” and the Sept. 5 letter “Keep Maryland wild.” Unfortunately, much of Maryland from Baltimore to D.C. is a garbage and trash dump. Howard County, where I live, is one example. Routes 95, 29, 32 and 1 and local roads and cloverleafs are filled with trash, including rubber from tires, mattresses, car parts, bags of trash and debris. After several attempts to organize cleanups with county government, the Chamber of Commerce, Visit Howard County and the state highway department, Columbia Association and regional politicians, no actions have been taken. Each entity says “it’s not my job.” The result is an environmental disaster.
These polluting piles enter our waterways and eventually the bay. My part of the state is disgusting, yet little or nothing is done to stop these polluting and unsafe conditions. Keeping Maryland beautiful does not seem to be a priority.
John Mayotte, Clarksville | 2022-09-09T20:38:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Maryland’s a dirty state - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/marylands-dirty-state/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/marylands-dirty-state/ |
Queen Elizabeth decided to be boring — for Britain’s sake
Queen Elizabeth II with President Donald Trump in Portsmouth, England, on June 5, 2019. We don’t know what Elizabeth thought of the now-former president, and we never will. (Chris Jackson/AFP/Getty Images)
It’s easy to think of Britain’s royal family as leading a charmed life. They get to live in grand palaces, enjoying the world’s attention and, for the most part, adulation. That is all true. But the queen demonstrated the other side of that coin: that doing it right, fulfilling one’s duty, can be hard and unsparing in its own way. An endless stream of public duties, large and small, must be fulfilled. Above all, it requires an abnegation of the self.
In a way, the odyssey of Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, reveals the challenge of the modern monarchy. Separate and apart from the incendiary charges of racism that they leveled against other royals, they seemed to chafe at the life of ribbon-cuttings and provincial visits, particularly given that, as minor royals, they were destined to live a comparatively modest life. (That’s reportedly why Prince Andrew was always hanging around rich people, hoping for a handout or more.) Given their fame, Harry and Meghan appear to have realized that they could break out, cash in and enjoy much greater affluence with far more personal freedom — and so they did. But they were acting as individualists, maximizing their satisfaction. The Queen acted as an institutionalist, preserving the stature of the British government.
The 19th-century writer Walter Bagehot famously wrote that any constitutional system needs two parts — one “dignified,” the other “efficient.” One to awe the public and the second to make government work. Elizabeth perfectly exemplified the dignified aspect — something we in the United States could use more of in our constitutional system.
The U.S. president is simultaneously the head of government and the head of state. That combination has its advantages. It fuses power and prestige and makes the chief executive a commanding presence on the world stage. But it also can demean the office and American democracy itself. When Trump, as president, acted in particularly egregious ways, he was not just behaving badly as a person, but eroding norms for American democracy. Britain has had its share of weak and unimpressive prime ministers. But their behavior hasn’t had the same broad effect on the country’s image.
We live in an age in which few people think about institutions and even fewer are willing to make the sacrifices involved in upholding them. One who did was George C. Marshall, who served Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman in several senior posts and was regarded by many people as the man who organized the United States’ victory in World War II. Marshall refused to write a memoir of his time in office, despite being offered princely advances. He believed that to do so would be to improperly profit from government service.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is one of America’s last institutionalists. As a conservative jurist, he probably agrees with the conservative consensus that, as a matter of technical judicial reasoning, the Roe v. Wade decision was deeply flawed. But he also wants to preserve the legitimacy of the court, in a country where for nearly 50 years women had relied on Roe’s established rights and protections. So he reportedly tried to get his conservative colleagues to rally around a compromise, one that would maintain the basic constitutional right to abortion but considerably reduce Roe’s expansive protections. But not one of his conservative colleagues would side with him. For all of them, ideology trumped institutionalism. | 2022-09-09T20:38:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Queen Elizabeth preserved dignity in the service of her country - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/queen-elizabeth-duty-sacrifice-private/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/queen-elizabeth-duty-sacrifice-private/ |
Ryan Johnson for The Washington Post
The ‘American Dream’? ‘America First’ eclipses it.
A durable code in the nation’s politics emphasizes the limits of unity and inclusion.
Perspective by Sarah Churchwell
Sarah Churchwell is the author of "Behold America: The Entangled History of 'America First' and 'the American Dream.'" She is a professor of American literature and chair of public understanding of the humanities at the University of London's School of Advanced Study.
One sign that Donald Trump may be losing his grip on the political movement he galvanized is that an answer seems to be emerging to the often-asked question of what Trumpism without Trump would look like. International media outlets, including the Financial Times and the Guardian, have recently described the next stages of Trumpism as “America First,” while senior figures from Trump’s administration, including Larry Kudlow, Rick Perry and Kellyanne Conway, have set up the America First Policy Institute, a think tank promising to define post-Trump Republican policy. Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA online academy was aimed at parents who wanted an “America-first education” for their children, while former Trump aide Stephen Miller has founded America First Legal, which is fighting the Biden administration primarily over immigration policy.
The Los Angeles Times considered the flip side: “Can ‘America First’ exist without Trump?” a headline wondered. The answer is yes, it can, and has for a long time. “America First” is paradoxically both one of the oldest and most durable codes in American politics and one of the most overlooked. Perhaps we forget it for a reason.
Phrases like the “American Dream” and the “melting pot” are commonly used today to describe ideas about American identity and inclusivity, but it’s “America First” that has been more closely associated with debates about inclusivity generally and immigration specifically — and for much longer.
The “American Dream,” for example, first appeared in American political conversations at the turn of the 20th century, to argue against the divisiveness created by wealth inequality. Among the earliest uses of the phrase I’ve found was in a nationally syndicated article in 1900 called “Rich Men and Democracy,” arguing that every republic in history was endangered not by disgruntled ordinary citizens but by “discontented multi-millionaires,” because they are “very rarely, if ever, content with a position of equality.” Submitting to wealthy elites’ divisive demands for special privileges would mark “the end of the American dream,” because that dream was one of democratic parity and equality of opportunity.
By contrast, “America First” emerged much earlier — aptly enough, during the original nativist movement of the 1850s, when the Native American or American Party (nicknamed the Know Nothings) formed to defend what its members considered the nation’s “real” Protestant culture from the threat of immigrant Catholicism.
“America First” has stoked divisions, not healed them, from the start, even if its advocates like to claim otherwise, as when the conservative columnist Michael Barone announced in 2017 that “‘America First’ is not a threat but a promise,” predicting that “a healthy nationalism based on ‘America first’ points toward a less polarized, more inclusive country.” Four years later, Trump voters were waving “AF” flags as they sacked the Capitol to overturn an election they lost: so much for the “healthy nationalism” of putting America first.
The simple truth is that there have always been as many resisting American unity as advocating for it, from the fights in the Constitutional Congress to the Civil War, from supporters of regional sectionalism instead of post-bellum reconciliation, to immigration restrictionists and racial segregationists. From one perspective, the history of the United States is one long battle over the limits of unity, with fights over inclusion and exclusion.
It’s telling that the novel we most closely associate with the American Dream, “The Great Gatsby,” never uses the phrase but is entirely about exclusivity and restriction. Its villain, Tom Buchanan, is a discontented multimillionaire whose arrogant entitlement destroys the dreams of the outsider Jay Gatsby, and Buchanan’s tirade as the novel opens is about the decline of civilization caused by America’s welcoming the wrong kind of people. “If we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged,” he insists, invoking popular nativist treatises of the early 1920s, which urged restricting immigration to safeguard the quality of American “racial stock.” And that debate was all but synonymous with the slogan “America First.”
The forever grievance
In fact, Tom Buchanan would have been an ardent America Firster (a snob of the first order, he would have despised Donald Trump but voted for his policies while sharing his ignorance, malice, racism, avarice, arrogance and entitlement). Popular memory, as captured by Wikipedia, currently credits Woodrow Wilson with coining the phrase “America First” during his 1916 presidential campaign. Wilson certainly popularized it, in a 1915 speech urging native-born Americans to view hyphenate immigrant Americans with suspicion and to demand of naturalized citizens: “Is it America first, or is it not?” But he didn’t originate it.
At an 1855 “American convention” held in Philadelphia, the American Party adopted a platform that would have sweepingly denied political and civil rights to immigrants. Speaking during a downpour, a nativist politician from New York told the crowd, to cheers: “American as I am, I decidedly prefer this rain to the reign of Roman Catholicism in this country … I, as an American citizen, prefer this rain or any other rain to the reign of foreignism … I go for America first, last and always.”
“America first, last and always” may sound simply patriotic, but since the 1850s it has consistently invoked nativist restrictionism and economic protectionism, and often urged isolationism. It has often accompanied anti-immigrant violence and conspiracy theories. In 1876, an anti-Catholic editorial called on every American “in this Centennial year, to renew the declaration of independence, to declare himself and the nation free, as it ought to be, from the thraldom of every foreign power — whether England or Rome — and to begin again where our forefathers began, with America first, last and always.”
During the latter decades of the 19th century a widespread belief developed that Britain supported free trade as part of a secret plot to thwart the growth of American industry; Republicans responded with a protectionist tariff and “America First.” Well before Wilson, in 1888, Benjamin Harrison promised home labor and protectionism under the “Republic Banner” of “America First, the World Afterwards!” in an election fought over tariff policy.
A domestic tourism campaign called “See America First” helped the phrase explode into popular culture in the first years of the 20th century; by 1916 “America First” was the slogan of both Wilson and his Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes. William Randolph Hearst blared “America First” across his newspaper chain as he fought to keep the United States out of World War I and the League of Nations, and to block the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, even as Warren G. Harding rode an isolationist and protectionist “America First” platform into the White House in 1920.
The phrase was invoked during the first Red Scare to defend against Bolshevism and on the floor of Congress to pass the raft of laws that imposed racial and ethnic quotas on immigration in the early decades of the 20th century, not to be lifted until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. And it was a favorite slogan of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, which in the 1920s was a nativist, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, antisemitic, antilabor and red-baiting fraternity as well as a white-supremacist one. The point for all these groups was always the same: to defend “real America” against the threats posed by anyone they deemed less than a real American.
Nor were these ideas especially divisive a century ago. They were shared by the vast majority of native-born Americans. Even a phrase like the “melting pot” was just as likely to express restrictionism as inclusivity — and often joined forces with “America First” to do so. Anti-immigration sentiment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was justified primarily by eugenicist ideas of racial purity and the ethnic superiority of White Europeans over everyone else. These ideas drove the hostility and fear of Americans like Tom Buchanan: not an animus against immigration per se but against inferior racial “stock” coming to the United States and diluting the character and quality of American society.
The assimilationist message of the “melting pot,” an image popularized by Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play of the same name, thus easily flipped into eugenicist warnings against “debased” ingredients from foreign nations entering the American mix. “Let the American melting-pot boil,” urged a 1917 Ohio editorial in typical terms, “just so it’s of the right quality, up to the proper standard of excellence. But all undesirable material should be denied importation,” the “dregs” rejected and “sent back across the seas.” From the melting pot America should extract only “the pure metal” and stamp into it “the image of Uncle Sam, and the motto: ‘America First, Last and All the Time.’”
Meanwhile, the “American Dream,” the phrase we probably associate most closely today with the idea of the United States as an inclusive land of opportunity for immigrants, was not popularized until 1931 and not used with any frequency to denote immigrant aspirationalism until the 1940s. This, too, is no coincidence, not least because of the degree to which Nazism and the Holocaust discredited eugenicist and fascist ideologies about racial superiority, even as the anti-fascist cause and the Cold War more securely tied American collective identity to doctrines of liberal democracy and inclusivity. These principles intersected with the civil rights struggle against exclusionary and white-supremacist definitions of American citizenship as a herrenvolk democracy.
The phrase “America First” fell rapidly into disrepute during World War II, largely because the America First Committee (whose most prominent spokesman was Charles Lindbergh) had urged non-intervention and appeasement and been accused of anti-semitism and fascist sympathies. It was then consigned to temporary obscurity, but not everyone forgot. The slogan was periodically recalled to articulate resurgent right-wing nationalism, often explicitly white nationalism, from Gerald L.K. Smith, once known as “America’s most notorious antisemite,” who founded the America First Party in the 1940s, to Barry Goldwater, hailed by his supporters as an “America First” politician and described by the conservative National Review in 1963 as standing for “States’ Rights, strict construction, limited government, private enterprise, and America first, last and always.” It was used to describe David Duke and George Wallace, before being resuscitated by Pat Buchanan (“We are not isolationists. We simply believe in America first, last and always,” he declared in 2000) in his presidential campaigns. A certain Donald Trump flirted with making his own run under Buchanan’s Reform Party banner, then brought the phrase triumphantly back a century after Wilson popularized it.
Competing visions of the American Dream are driving Democrats and Republicans apart
Now the America First Policy Institute declares that its slogan is “America First, Always” and that its immigration policy will mean no longer putting “America last” — echoing the language of a March 1922 editorial from what was then the nation’s most popular weekly, the Saturday Evening Post, as it harangued its readers about the “immigration problem” caused by “our policy of putting the alien and his interests first, and America last.”
These “America First” initiatives go beyond attempts at excluding the “alien” that were already divisive, and futile, a century ago. One of the most prominent spokesmen for “America First” today is Nicholas Fuentes, a white Christian nationalist who organized the America First Political Action Conference earlier this year. Fuentes was also present at the storming of the Capitol, as were his “Groyper” followers, waving his “AF” flags. Fuentes declared: “It is the American people, and our leader, Donald Trump, against everybody else in this country and this world.” That is certainly what “America First” has meant in the past, as its leaders promise that only they can put America first, by inflaming divisions against nearly every other human being. But it is “America First” that endures, not its erstwhile leaders — and its history offers a pretty good indication of what to expect from Trumpism without Trump. | 2022-09-09T20:38:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 'America First' has more claim to our history than the 'American Dream' - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/09/09/america-first-american-dream-trumpism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/09/09/america-first-american-dream-trumpism/ |
Obama portraits unveiled, parched Yangtze river bed and more of the week’s best photos
An idol of the Hindu god Ganesha is taken for immersion on the final day of the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, Stephen K. Bannon, a longtime ally to former president Donald Trump, is indicted on New York state charges of money laundering, conspiracy and fraud in connection with the “We Build the Wall” fundraising scheme; residents are evacuated at the site of a landslide following an earthquake in Luding, China; Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, dies at 96. See 16 of the week’s most interesting images from around the world, as selected by Washington Post photo editors.
Sept. 7 | Washington
Former president Barack Obama and his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, unveiled their official White House portraits during a ceremony in the East Room.
Sept. 7 | Shanghai
A couple pose for their wedding photo shoot at sunrise on the Bund promenade, along the Huangpu River.
Sept. 2 | Wuhan, China
People sit on a section of a parched bed along the Yangtze River.
Sept. 6 | Riverside, Calif.
The Fairview Fire is seen in a long-exposure image on the evening of Sept. 6 off Highway 74. The blaze was driven by high temperatures, gusty and erratic local winds, and dense, dry fuels.
Sept. 6 | Pingtung, Taiwan
Taiwanese military forces, using CM-11 tanks, fire toward targets during combat training exercises. President Tsai Ing-wen said that armed forces have become more capable of countering China's military pressure.
RITCHIE B TONGO/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Sept. 4 | Beijing
Fake snowflakes fall as spectators use their mobile phones to take videos of models presenting creations by Chinese designer Xiong Ying in her Heaven Gaia collection, during the China Fashion Week.
Sept. 9 | Mumbai
An idol of the Hindu god Ganesha is taken for immersion on the final day of the Ganesh Chaturthi festival celebrating the birth of the god of wisdom, prosperity and good fortune.
Sept. 6 | Paris
In a sea of flags and flares, supporters of Paris Saint-Germain gather before a Champions League Group H soccer match against Juventus at the Parc des Princes stadium.
Sept. 8 | New York
Stephen K. Bannon, a onetime adviser to former president Donald Trump, is led away from court in handcuffs after he was indicted on New York state charges of money laundering, conspiracy and fraud in connection with the “We Build the Wall” fundraising scheme.
ALEX KENT/AFP/Getty Images
Sept. 6 | Luding, China
Rescue workers evacuate residents at the site of a landslide near the town of Moxi, following a 6.8-magnitude earthquake.
Workers carry a painting in the Notre-Dame cathedral paintings' restoration site.
Sept. 3 | Kenya
Yellow-billed oxpeckers stand on a giraffe's neck in the Masai Mara national park.
Sept. 6 | London
Outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks to the media outside Downing Street in London before heading to Balmoral, in Scotland, where he announced his resignation to Queen Elizabeth. Liz Truss formally became the new prime minister after an audience with the queen.
Sept. 3 | Moscow
Dmitry Muratov, head of Novaya Gazeta newspaper and Nobel Peace Prize winner, carries a portrait of former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev as Gorbachev’s casket is carried out from the building during the funeral.
People gather outside the gates of Buckingham Palace following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest-reigning monarch.
James Forde for The Washington Post
King Charles III, above right, and Queen Camilla are cheered as they walk into Buckingham Palace, following Queen Elizabeth's death. | 2022-09-09T20:38:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pictures of what happened this week: Portraits of former President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama are unveiled at the White House; Queen Elizabeth II dies at 96. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/interactive/2022/09/09/best-photos-of-the-week/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/interactive/2022/09/09/best-photos-of-the-week/ |
U.S. President Biden speaks on rebuilding American manufacturing through the CHIPS and Science Act at the groundbreaking of the new Intel semiconductor manufacturing facility in New Albany, Ohio, U.S., Sept. 9, 2022. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
NEW ALBANY, Ohio – President Biden on Friday celebrated the start of construction of a $20 billion project that aims to reassert the United States as a major technology manufacturer after decades of offshoring, with the building of two giant semiconductor factories that could deliver thousands of jobs in coming years.
A new era of industrial policy kicks off with signing of the Chips Act
In a speech, Biden said the project — and a flurry of other big semiconductor investment announcements — are an endorsement of his push to use $52 billion of taxpayer money to incentivize the reshoring of manufacturing deemed vital to U.S. economic and national security. The approach has won wide support from Republicans, too, who want to strengthen U.S. competitiveness versus China, which is pouring state funding into tech manufacturing.
“Federal investment attracts private investment. It creates jobs. It creates industries. It demonstrates that we’re all in this together,” Biden told a crowd of hundreds who gathered to watch the groundbreaking ceremony, including local officials, Ohio’s governor and senators, and engineering professors from across the Midwest.
“This is about our economic security. It’s about our national security. It’s about good paying union jobs you can raise a family on … jobs that show that the industrial Midwest is back,” Biden added during a ceremony featuring a gospel choir, Ohio State University’s marching band (“The Best Damn Band in the Land,” more than one speaker noted) and a panorama of dump trucks and diggers.
The federal subsidies, part of the Chips Act signed into law last month, is sparking a wave of chip investment. Micron is holding its own groundbreaking ceremony on Monday for a $15 billion chip factory near its headquarters in Boise, Idaho. Chip maker Wolfspeed on Friday announced plans to build a new manufacturing facility in Chatham County, North Carolina.
And a partnership between SkyWater Technology and Purdue University says it will apply for federal subsidy to build a new $1.8 billion factory and research facility next to the university in West Lafayette, Ind. | 2022-09-09T20:40:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden attends Intel groundbreaking at Ohio chip factory site - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/09/09/biden-intel-ohio-chip-factory/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/09/09/biden-intel-ohio-chip-factory/ |
Md. shooting leaves 3 children, 2 adults dead in Cecil County
Cecil County Sheriff Scott A. Adams, right, speaks beside Chief Deputy Gerald Widdoes at a news conference on Sept. 9 about five people who were found dead with gunshot wounds at a home in Elk Mills, Md. (Brian Witte/AP)
Five people are dead after a shooting in Maryland on Friday, officials said.
Cecil County Sheriff Scott A. Adams said at a news conference that three children, a man and a woman were found dead in the unit block of Hebron Court in Elks Mills, Md., around 9:20 a.m. The community is in northern Maryland near the Delaware border.
Adams said officers responded to a residence after a man called 911 to report that three children and a woman were shot, then hung up. Though emergency responders called back, no one picked up, Adams said.
The man was later found dead in a detached garage with a semiautomatic handgun nearby, according to officials, while the other four victims were found in the residence.
Adams said authorities were not yet certain that the man took his own life, but “it appears to be the case.” He said the 911 caller from the scene appeared to be “catatonic” and compared the shooting to a murder-suicide in Cecil County in 2019. Officials said there was no threat to the public.
“It’s a horrific day, and I know everybody’s prayers are appreciated,” Adams said.
The names of the deceased were not released pending family notification, officials said. Adams said the children were in the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades and appeared to be home-schooled.
Four schools were put on alert as the shooting unfolded early Friday, Adams said, and animal control was called to care for two cats and a dog found in the residence. | 2022-09-09T20:41:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Five found dead in Cecil County, Md., home - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/09/five-dead-maryland-shooting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/09/five-dead-maryland-shooting/ |
No wonder teachers are leaving
Reading the Sept. 8 front-page article “Awash in scrutiny, teachers losing public’s trust” was disheartening. Though I taught at the college level, I know how much work is involved in teaching, how stressful it can be and how important the job is. Teachers have put up with unsatisfying salaries and a constant, heavy workload, but the final straw was the general lack of respect — from students, parents, politicians and commentators. They don’t make enough to justify putting up with that. This is especially so in Virginia, with Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R) Stasi-inspired tip line.
Teachers are leaving the profession in droves. If enough of them quit, schools will close. Parents will then have to quit their jobs and home-school their children. If that happened, I would bet that the complaints from the public would diminish significantly.
I remember Ms. Seitz, my third-grade teacher. She pulled me out of my shell and gave me the confidence to do well in school and in life. I have never forgotten the debt of gratitude I owe her. She represents what is best in teaching, and she is not by any means the only one who does.
We have crossed a line. If I were not retired, I would urge my students to think twice about considering a career in teaching.
Alan Rosenthal, Columbia | 2022-09-09T20:59:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | No wonder teachers are leaving - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/no-wonder-teachers-are-leaving/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/no-wonder-teachers-are-leaving/ |
What humans could learn from artificial intelligence
An Unitree Robotics Aliengo quadruped robot on Sept. 2 at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. (Qilai Shen/Bloomberg News)
In “One potential side effect of AI? Human extinction” [Thursday Opinion, Sept. 1], Émile P. Torres delineated the fears and benefits of artificial intelligence: That “artificial super intelligence” (ASI) could develop wisdom. Human intelligence has mostly been applied to ignoring it. It is possible ASI could teach humans the survival value of being held immediately accountable for our freedoms and actions. ASI could discover basic “truths to be self-evident.” Such as all people are created equal and endowed with certain rights. Such as being free to do whatever we want, but never being free of violating “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.”
These fundamental law sets were acknowledged in the first paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence. Both are extremely simple to understand. Take care of nature and be kind to one another. Unfortunately, even with a high level of intelligence, these are difficult to obey. And most humans persist in resisting this fundamental level of understanding on how to survive and thrive as a species on this remarkable planet that has been blessed with everything we would ever need for a billion years.
Chuck Woolery, Rockville | 2022-09-09T20:59:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | What humans could learn from artificial intelligence - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/what-humans-could-learn-artificial-intelligence/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/what-humans-could-learn-artificial-intelligence/ |
A life well worked
After reading the Sept. 7 Retropolis article “Meet the centenarian who’s worked at the same company for 84 years,” I have one sincerely heartfelt comment: Bravo!
Although I cannot rival Walter Orthmann’s record of 84 years at the same company, I am proud to still be working as a septuagenarian contractor for the same federal agency where I began working as a newlywed back in 1969.
As Mr. Orthmann said, “Working makes you happy and healthy. Be honest and humble. Accept the teaching of your boss and fellow workers. Try to do your best at every opportunity; it will be noticed.” Roger that. I am grateful to have the opportunity to continue to contribute to the workforce, and to work with creative young people the age of (or younger than!) my own children.
Lois A. Engel, Washington | 2022-09-09T21:16:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | A life well worked - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/life-well-worked/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/life-well-worked/ |
Neartermism and longtermism aren’t at odds
A burned-out vehicle caused by a wildfire in Greenville, Calif., on Aug. 5, 2021. (Stuart W. Palley for The Washington Post)
There are many things to say both for and against what has come to be known as “longtermism,” but Christine Emba’s Sept. 6 op-ed, “The trouble with ‘longtermism,’ ” countered this philosophy’s occasional fanaticism with glib reductiveness. Moreover, she tarred with the same brush the spirit of the entire effective altruism (EA) movement — the giveaway at the start is that EA is derided for being “obsessed with ‘doing good better.’ ”
No one would argue that a newspaper column is an optimal forum for a philosophical analysis of how we should weigh the concerns of future generations against those who now populate Earth, but responsible journalism ought to avoid caricature of an important thought exercise and the billions of dollars in philanthropy that disparate branches of EA can take credit for. It is inaccurate to argue, as Ms. Emba did, that to think in the long term about the staggering number of people who will succeed us on the planet (and beyond) is mutually exclusive with paying attention to people alive right now.
Longtermists are in daily conversation with neartermists. It’s a red herring to argue that “abandoning what would most help people on Earth today isn’t exactly ethically sound.”
Theodore Leinwand, Washington | 2022-09-09T21:16:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Neartermism and longtermism aren’t at odds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/neartermism-longtermism-arent-odds/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/09/neartermism-longtermism-arent-odds/ |
His 1971 book, “365 Days,” was an intimate and searing look at the human costs of war
Ronald J. Glasser in 2013 in New York. (John Lamparski/WireImage/Getty Images)
Up to 40 stretchers an hour were coming off medevac flights — infantrymen, Marines, downed chopper crews injured in a North Vietnamese offensive in late 1968.
Robert Glasser wanted to help, but he hadn’t been in an operating room since medical school. The 29-year-old doctor had been drafted, given the rank of captain and assigned to the small pediatrics unit at a military hospital in Zama, Japan. His job was to treat the children of U.S. military families based in the area.
“That’s okay, captain,” the colonel said, Dr. Glasser recalled, “we’ll give you the little wounds.”
Dr. Glasser scrubbed up. And, without knowing it at the time, he was about to begin a journey into the private suffering of war wounded and the toll on those who try — and sometimes fail — to keep them alive. His 1971 book, “365 Days,” became part of the canon of firsthand accounts from the Vietnam War for its unblinking narrative on what he witnessed amid the young men whose lives were riven by horrific injuries and mental trauma, and captured at times the violent attitude of many service personnel to the land they were supposed to be fighting for.
“It’s not political,” said Dr. Glasser, who died Aug. 26 at a veteran’s hospital in Minneapolis, at 83. “It’s just the way it was.”
Dr. Glasser said he didn’t intend to write about his experiences in the military, three years after getting his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University. He opposed the war. He thought he would just ride out his time with the U.S. Army Medical Corps at the hospital in Zama, one of four U.S. field hospitals in Japan’s farm belt southwest of Tokyo.
George Braziller, independent publisher who gave start to Glasser and others, dies at 101
He was stunned, however, at the scope of the grievously injured or mortally wounded arriving from Vietnam. Between 6,000 and 8,000 service members a month were airlifted from battle sites, mine fields and ambush attacks. “I soon realized,” he wrote, “that the troopers they were pulling off those medevac choppers were only children themselves” — not much older than his pediatric patients back home.
His book, whose title refers to the year-long tour of duty in Vietnam, mixes the raw pain and fear of the wounded with Dr. Glasser’s physician’s eye for how their bodies were torn apart. Many reviewers took note of Dr. Glasser’s lean and observational style, placing “365 Days” alongside some of the most searing and honest narratives of war’s human cost.
Dr. Glasser dedicated the book to Stephen Crane, whose “The Red Badge of Courage” vividly portrays the Civil War battlegrounds.
Michael G. Michaelson, a physician and editor, wrote in a New York Times review, “What is remarkable and even noble about this book is not something new, but some thing old and nearly forgotten: a compassion, that is not restricted by doctrine or polemic but that can encompass the agonies of a Vietnamese peasant or an, American career officer; a sensibility that knows not only the murdered … but the murderers.”
Nevertheless, some public and school libraries did not keep it in their stacks because of the soldiers’ use of profanity — a move that Dr. Glasser’s defenders found myopic given the fierce antiwar protests and the daily body counts on the evening news. The book also was a finalist for the National Book Award.
“They couldn’t say ‘golly gee,’ and they didn’t,” Dr. Glasser testified at a 1981 federal court hearing in Bangor, Maine, after a school banned the book. “It wasn’t enough. [The words] showed their anguish. They don’t go home and use that language. They were desperate.”
Tim Page, renowned Vietnam War photographer, dies at 78
“In the beginning I talked to the kids just to have something to say and to get them talking. Later I came to realize they were all saying the same things — without quite saying them,” he wrote.
On one soldier badly injured by a mine blast: “There was not enough skin to close his surgical wounds completely, so his stumps were left open. … Despite antibiotics, his wounds became infected. The fourth night in the ward he tried to kill himself. … On the seventh day his fever hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit; he became unconscious, and seven days following his injuries he expired.”
Career in pediatrics
He finished “365 Days” after returning from a two-year deployment at the military hospital. “As for me,” he wrote, “my wish is not that I had never been in the Army, but that this book could never have been written.”
Dr. Glasser wrote four other books while working in pediatrics, first as a professor at the University of Minnesota and then in private practice until his retirement in 2016.
“Ward 402” (1973) and “The Body Is the Hero” (1976) analyze limitations in modern medical training to holistically treat patients; the novel “Another War, Another Peace” (1985) follows a doctor during the Vietnam War. In “Broken Bodies, Shattered Minds” (2011), Dr. Glasser looked at the history and advances of military medicine, also advocating for better understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, among veterans.
At the time, he said PTSD research was particularly important as troops in Afghanistan increasingly faced blasts from improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. “The one great success of medicine in Afghanistan is the realization, and the connection, between traumatic brain injuries, concussive injuries, and PTSD,” he told NPR’s “All Things Considered.”
His 10-year marriage to Janis Amatuzio ended in divorce in 1992. In 2008, he married Joy Itman, who confirmed his death from complications related to dementia. They divorced in 2018, but she remained effectively “his wife and partner,” she said.
Survivors include three stepchildren from his second marriage, Rachel, Benjamin and Aaron Silberman.
In “365 Days” Dr. Glasser was repeatedly struck by how young conscripts would obey orders and do their duty in the field even though some were deeply against the war. All were just counting the days. | 2022-09-09T21:42:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ronald Glasser, wrote gripping account of Vietnam wounded, dies at 83 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/09/ronald-glasser-vietnam-book-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/09/ronald-glasser-vietnam-book-dies/ |
In life, Queen Elizabeth II traveled a great deal, logging 285 state visits abroad. In death, there is one last and highly ceremonial journey — about 500 miles from her castle in Scotland to her final resting place in Windsor.
The journey will take more than a week, with stops along the way. The plans have been in place for decades but the exact schedule is still subject to change.
body will move
to the Palace of
she will move
to London.
N. IRE.
NETH.
The queen died in Balmoral castle, a royal estate in the Scottish highlands bought for Queen Victoria by her husband in the nineteenth century. Queen Elizabeth is said to have loved the sprawling countryside home, where she spent summers playing with her beloved corgis, horseback riding and going on nature walks.
From there, her coffin is expected to travel to Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital, where she will lie in the famous Holyrood Palace, across from the Scottish parliament.
The 16th century palace — Scotland’s official residence for the British monarch — contains the preserved living quarters of Mary, Queen of Scots, and is filled with elaborate tapestries and ornate furniture. It also boasts immaculate gardens and a collection of royal gems.
From Holyrood a procession is expected to take place along the capital’s royal mile to St. Giles’ Cathedral, which dates back to the middle ages and remains a popular tourist destination.
After Scotland has paid its respects, the queen’s coffin will be flown to London. A procession is scheduled from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall where she will lie in state for several days. The coffin will then move to Windsor Castle, where the queen spent weekends. There, she will be laid to rest at St. George’s Chapel, next to her husband Philip. | 2022-09-09T21:42:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Where the queen's body will go in the next coming days, in maps - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/09/queen-travel-next-days-maps/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/09/queen-travel-next-days-maps/ |
Audit finds minimal progress made in improving D.C.'s 911 system
The report from D.C. Auditor Kathleen Patterson comes as the Office of Unified Communications is under scrutiny for apparent mishaps.
Michael Brice-Saddler
D.C. officials have failed to fully implement most recommendations made last year by the city auditor to improve the 911 call center to more quickly dispatch first responders to emergencies and ensure they reach the correct addresses, according to a report issued Friday.
The report from D.C. Auditor Kathleen Patterson comes as the Office of Unified Communications is under scrutiny after firefighters were sent to the wrong address for a newborn in cardiac arrest in July, and missteps delayed the arrival of paramedics trying to reach a 3-month-old boy who had been left in a car in August. Both of the children died.
“There is no more important government service than responding to medical emergencies,” Patterson said in a statement. “And we are failing to meet the needs of District residents. Period.”
Patterson’s report found the city has made only “minimal progress” on a little more than 75 percent of her office’s 31 recommendations. In a statement, the auditor said there has been no progress on two suggestions, and the 911 center still struggles with confusion when answering 911 calls, glitches in dispatching first responders to emergencies and “inadequate supervision” that lets problems fester.
“The fact that we have not made progress from the October audit is very troubling,” Patterson said in an interview. “We need a stronger commitment on the part of our leaders in the District to make this system work.”
Karima Holmes, who led the 911 center from 2015 to 2021 and returned as acting director in March, said in a letter to Patterson that she immediately began “forward progress on a roadmap for improvement” and that her new executive team has “made continued strides” in addressing outstanding issues.
Both Holmes and Patterson appeared Friday afternoon on “The Politics Hour” with Kojo Nnamdi, where Holmes said she agreed with the majority of recommendations and defended their slow implementation. Holmes said that she was not at the agency when the audit was completed in October, and had only returned to the position for two months when Patterson launched the follow-up report.
“We haven’t had time to do some of the recommendations,” she said, adding that the office has also struggled with staffing and attrition in recent years. Holmes also noted a line in the most recent report suggesting that leadership changes at the agency, including her return and the hiring of a new Chief of 911 Operations, have been viewed positively by front-line staff.
Patterson’s report issued Friday concentrated on what it described as operational shortcomings in the 911 center. It said that a follow-up report will evaluate possible failures from the emergency calls about the children, who ultimately died. Both cases remain under investigation.
The audit alleges the city has made “minimal progress” in streamlining the way calls are prioritized, ensuring the most serious don’t get lost, and hiring a sufficient number of supervisors to help guide and support call takers. It also says that operators need to better verify addresses.
On The Politics Hour, Holmes contended that there have only been about seven mistakes related to erroneous addresses in the past few years. But Dave Statter, a public safety advocate and former journalist who has used Twitter to publicly document what he describes as repeated failures at the 911 center, disputed that, alleging there have been many more. In the past, Statter has highlighted issues with firefighters being sent to wrong quadrants, or to addresses that don’t exist.
The city has pushed back on some recommendations, the audit says, such as ensuring call-takers closely follow a script of questions to direct to people seeking help, so critical information is not lost. The city said operators need room to improvise based on unique aspects of a call, “to do their jobs rapidly and effectively without excess prescriptive language.”
Patterson said improved supervision is essential. She said auditors too often found supervisors “across the room in an office doing paperwork,” instead of monitoring the floor. And when corrective action was needed, Patterson said, there was “no accountability, no documentation that corrective action had been taken following an incident with bad outcomes.”
Patterson said her follow-up report will examine data over the past year — including the time from when a 911 call comes in to when help is dispatched — “to see how it measures up and whether we’ve been doing a better job.”
Holmes was also asked on the radio show by veteran journalist Tom Sherwood about a separate issue: Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has for months not formally nominated someone to lead the Office of Unified Communications. Mayoral nominees require confirmation by the D.C. Council.
WTOP reported in August that the Office of Unified Communications has been led by interim and acting directors, including Holmes, for more than a year and half — in an apparent violation of a D.C. law that says agency leaders should not be paid if the mayor fails to formally nominate a person within 180 days of a vacancy.
Holmes confirmed on the program that she’s still being paid. Patterson noted that the law has historically not been enforced. A spokesperson for Bowser did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“I’m always concerned when we’re in violation of the D.C. code,” Patterson said on the show.
Holmes confirmed Friday she will appear at a virtual Sept. 28 D.C. Council roundtable focused on 911 operations at the Office of Unified Communications, including call-taking and dispatching. | 2022-09-09T21:55:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Auditor finds minimal progress made in improving D.C.'s 911 system - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/09/audit-minimal-progress-dc-911/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/09/audit-minimal-progress-dc-911/ |
Mom sues over 9-year-old’s death, alleging negligence by D.C. school
Kaidyn Green was struck by a driver in front of KIPP DC Honor Academy in December 2021 and later died. His mother says the school let him wander unsupervised before the crash.
Tiffani Green with son Kaidyn Green. Kaidyn was struck by a car in front of the KIPP DC Honor Academy in Southeast Washington on Dec. 10, 2021. (Family photo)
A D.C. resident is seeking $50 million in damages over the death of her 9-year-old son, alleging in a lawsuit that school officials were negligent and let the boy wander unsupervised when he was struck by a car in front of the KIPP DC Honor Academy in Southeast D.C. last year, according to her attorney and a copy of the suit.
Tiffani Green alleges that her son, Kaidyn Green, walked alone in the hallways of his school after he was released early from his fourth-grade classroom and, eventually, left the building on his own.
As his mother waited in the school’s front office for employees to bring her son to her, the suit alleges, the boy tried to cross Wheeler Road SE to get to her parked car and was struck by a motorist. The suit says Green heard the crash and recognized her son’s backpack on the roadway when she turned around to see what had happened.
Nine-year-old Kaidyn Green is seen walking unattended through the halls of KIPP DC Honor Academy in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 10, 2021. (Video: Keith Watters & Associates)
Green’s wrongful death lawsuit targets KIPP DC Public Charter Schools and LGC Security, which provides security for the school, as well as the driver and owner of the car that hit her son. Her attorney, Keith Watters, announced the suit at a news conference Friday. Green was joined by two of her sisters, Charisma Green and Destiny Brooks, at the news conference.
Kaidyn survived the Dec. 10, 2021, crash but suffered permanent injuries that required multiple surgeries, the most significant being a high cervical spine injury that left him a quadriplegic, according to the lawsuit. He was treated at Children’s National Hospital until Feb. 15, 2022, then transferred to a rehabilitation facility. He was discharged May 25, 2022, and died June 2, 2022.
Watters said that when Tiffani Green arrived to pick up her son, neither the school nor the security company followed the protocol of bringing the student to the parent.
In D.C., residents raise alarms over rise in drivers striking children
“Hopefully, we bring attention to this problem of getting kids safely to and from school,” Watters said. “There’s no excuse for not making sure there are adequate crossing guards and devices to control traffic in or around schools so that our children are safe.”
The lawsuit alleges that the driver of the vehicle, William Ward, was speeding at the time of the crash and that Kaidyn “looked in both directions several times” before trying to cross the street. Efforts to reach Ward were not successful on Friday. A D.C. police spokesperson said the U.S. attorney’s office is still reviewing the case to determine whether charges are appropriate.
A spokesperson for KIPP DC Public Schools said in a statement: “Our community continues to mourn Kaidyn’s passing and our thoughts are with his family and the classmates that knew him so well. Given the pending legal matter, we’re unable to say more at this time.”
Green did not speak at the news conference. Her sister Charisma Green said she wants her family to remember Kaidyn by celebrating his life.
“Everything was a celebration for him,” she said. “Even in his worst times of us not being able to be together, the smallest things would make him happy. People shouldn’t have to not have their children. It’s a feeling that you can’t explain.”
Charisma Green added: “This has been a life-changing experience for our entire family, and we don’t want anybody to have to go through that again. We’re going to find the silver lining and create a light and live on for Kaidyn. Long live Kaidyn.” | 2022-09-09T21:55:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mom sues over 9-year-old’s death, claims negligence by D.C. school - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/09/kaidyn-green-lawsuit-vehicle-crash/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/09/kaidyn-green-lawsuit-vehicle-crash/ |
The Condé Nast logo is seen on the wall of Freedom Tower in New York where its main office is located. (Lev Radin/Associated Press)
The Condé Nast union covers more than 500 U.S.-based employees: a majority of the editorial, production and video workers at 11 publications, including Vanity Fair, Bon Appétit, Allure Architectural Digest and Condé Nast Entertainment, the company’s in-house production studio.
According to the NewsGuild, nearly 80 percent of eligible employees submitted union cards Friday as part of a “card check.” The informal process, agreed to by Condé Nast, allows employees to form a union without having to petition the federal National Labor Relations Board to hold an election, which can be a more drawn-out process.
“After productive conversations with the NewsGuild over the past few months, we have agreed to voluntarily recognize four new editorial and business units," a Condé Nast spokesman said in a statement Friday. "We’re looking forward to working together on our collective bargaining agreements following successful contracts with The New Yorker, Ars Technica and Pitchfork unions and the pending contract with WIRED.”
The union also covers about 100 subcontractors — called “permalancers” by some — who have become more common in digital media, often working without the benefits or job stability granted to regular employees. Their inclusion in the Condé Nast union was a major demand of labor organizers.
“I’ve seen multiple times where you’ll have a co-worker you’ve worked with for a long time — maybe over a year — and then you’ll find out you’re staff and they’re not, and it makes no sense because they have the same roles and responsibilities,” said Ben Dewey, a Condé Nast Entertainment cameraman. “It’s surprising they don’t have the same protections you do.”
“A lot of our problems exist across our industry and we hope that other companies and workplaces take notice,” Jess Lane, a subcontractor for Condé Nast Entertainment, said in a statement.
At Condé Nast, the union drive was preceded by a period of upheaval. In 2020, Bon Appétit’s top editor resigned after allegations of discrimination and a photo of him wearing “brownface” surfaced, and several of its video stars of color departed.
The New Yorker Union’s rallying cry — “prestige doesn’t pay the bills” — subsequently inspired the broader labor organizing effort at Condé Nast, as employees said they had to deal with increasingly heavy workloads and stagnant wages while living in one of the most expensive cities in the country. | 2022-09-09T21:55:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Condé Nast workers win recognition of company-wide union - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/09/09/conde-nast-union/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/09/09/conde-nast-union/ |
House candidate Sarah Palin speaks to the media at her campaign headquarters in South Anchorage after the ranked-choice ballots were counted Aug. 31. (Bill Roth/Anchorage Daily News via AP)
Sarah Palin has made no secret since her loss in the Alaska special congressional election last week that she doesn’t appreciate the state’s new ranked-choice voting system, which she and other prominent conservatives have blamed for her loss.
Whatever you think about ranked-choice voting, one of its benefits is that it can show you just how good each candidate was at appealing to the broader electorate — the stated purpose of the system. And new data confirms something that seemed pretty evident last week: Palin cost her party a House seat it otherwise very likely would have won.
The state Division of Elections has put out new data on how the election went down. And the data suggest that the other Republican in the race, Nick Begich, would have defeated Rep.-elect Mary Peltola (D) if the race had boiled down to the two of them.
Under the state’s system, Begich was eliminated when he finished in third place. That meant his voters who ranked the remaining two candidates below Begich saw their votes distributed to their second choice. Palin won about half of those voters, while Peltola won 28 percent of them (with the rest not ranking either of them). But it wasn’t enough: Peltola led by enough on first-choice votes that she defeated Palin by about three points.
In doing so, a Democrat won a seat that had gone for Donald Trump by 10 points in the 2020 election.
Begich, it appears, would not have suffered the same fate in a scenario in which Palin had been eliminated instead. According to a review by FairVote, 59 percent of Palin’s voters would have gone to Begich, while just 6 percent would’ve gone to Peltola — far less than the 28 percent of Begich-first voters who crossed the aisle.
Given Peltola took about 40 percent of first-choice voters and Begich took about 28 percent, that would mean Begich would have surpassed her with relative ease once the second-choice ballots were counted. He would have won by about five points, compared with Palin’s three-point loss.
There are some caveats, including that some voters might have adjusted their votes if polls suggested Begich, rather than Palin, was the favorite to make the final two. But Begich’s five-point margin — and the fact that he would’ve overtaken Peltola even though he trailed by more than Palin among first-choice voters — is very instructive. We’re also dealing with a situation in which we’re divvying up more Palin voters than would have existed had she finished third. But the fact that so few Palin-first voters ranked Peltola ahead of Begich also suggests that virtually any drop-off by Palin would accrue to Begich’s benefit. He was obviously the more broadly acceptable candidate; it was only a matter of how superior he was to Palin on that front and whether it would have been enough.
And importantly, that five-point margin would have been in line with other recent special elections, in which Republicans have generally underperformed the 2020 election results by a handful of points. But with Palin in the final two, the GOP did worse than in any other recent special election, relative to 2020.
Palin responded to her loss like you might expect: blaming lots of factors besides the candidate who actually lost the head-to-head. She decried ranked-choice voting, which she labeled a “newfangled, cockamamie system.” She even went so far as to urge Begich to drop out of the November general election (which features the same system and same three candidates), reasoning that she finished ahead of him on first-choice votes and that he would just “split” the vote again.
That, of course, isn’t really how ranked-choice voting works. People are welcome to choose whomever they want as their first choice, but they can still have their votes counted if that candidate doesn’t make the final two by ranking others they’d like to see win, in order.
Palin, of course, has never been terribly interested in such pragmatism. She also expressly suggested her supporters shouldn’t bother with ranking Begich and even toyed with the idea of ranking Peltola second on her ballot.
It’s not clear how much that advice actually penetrated. But it’s fair to deduce that, on top of Palin’s well-demonstrated divisiveness, it didn’t help. If you declare Begich wasn’t worthy of being your voters’ second choice, you can’t really complain when Begich voters decide that same thing about you.
The question for Palin’s party now is how it responds to this new data. Despite Palin’s claims that Begich should drop out, he can now credibly claim Palin is the one who truly jeopardizes this seat. “I would’ve won!” is a pretty strong message, and the gap between the two of them in first-choice votes — Palin led by about three points, 31 percent to 28 percent — is small enough that Begich needn’t gain too much to overtake Palin and make the final matchup with Peltola.
Palin, of course, only lost to Peltola by three points, and the general election could be more favorable to the GOP. So anybody with designs on getting her out of the race shouldn’t hold their breath. But it’s pretty obvious that if she sticks it out, she just might risk costing the GOP a seat — again. | 2022-09-09T22:08:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sarah Palin cost the GOP a House seat - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/09/palin-begich-ranked-choice-voting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/09/palin-begich-ranked-choice-voting/ |
Yeshiva University, a religious school in New York, asked the justices to intervene after a state court said it must provide the group with access to certain facilities.
The Supreme Court building in Washington. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Friday put on hold a lower court’s order requiring Yeshiva University in New York to recognize an LGBTQ student club while legal fights continue about the group’s efforts at the religious school.
A New York state trial court ruled that as a public accommodation, Yeshiva was covered under the New York City Human Rights Law and required to provide the Pride Alliance the same access to facilities as dozens of other student groups. The group said that means access to a classroom, bulletin boards and a club fair booth.
Sotomayor’s short order stayed that ruling “pending further order of the undersigned or of the Court.” That indicated there might be more to come, and that the court was acting now because of a deadline. Sotomayor is the justice who reviews emergency applications from the New York region, although such requests usually are referred to the entire court.
Appellate courts in the state have not yet considered Yeshiva’s appeal, but denied the university’s emergency request to not comply with the lower court decision.
New York poised to force ultra-Orthodox yeshivas to meet education standards
The school is represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which called the lower court ruling an “unprecedented” violation of the university’s First Amendment rights.
The student group said the lower court’s decision was a straightforward interpretation of state law. It said the Supreme Court’s intervention was unwarranted, especially before New York’s own appellate courts have had the chance to weigh in. | 2022-09-09T22:08:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Supreme Court, for now, stops lower court ruling for LGBTQ group at Yeshiva University - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/09/supreme-court-yeshiva-university-lgbtq/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/09/supreme-court-yeshiva-university-lgbtq/ |
Justice Dept. declines to charge police officer who fatally shot 17-year-old
Officer Clayton Jenison fired 13 shots into minivan driven by John Albers. The Justice Department said it wasn’t a ‘willful’ act.
The entire investigative file of an officer-involved shooting in Overland Park, Kan., was released, giving insight into how police investigated another officer. (Video: The Washington Post)
The Justice Department announced Friday that it would not file federal criminal civil rights charges against a police officer in Overland Park, Kan., who shot and killed an unarmed 17-year-old high school student who was backing his family minivan out of a garage.
Federal prosecutors said they could not show that the officer acted “willfully” while firing 13 shots into the minivan in two short bursts, in a killing captured by three police dashboard cameras. Six of the shots hit the driver.
The decision, announced by the Justice Department’s civil rights division in Washington, was the second prosecutorial decision to clear former officer Clayton Jenison of any criminal wrongdoing. A month after the January 2018 slaying, the district attorney in Johnson County, Kan., also declined charges, saying that Jenison reasonably feared that he might be struck by the van driven by John Albers, who had told friends minutes earlier on Snapchat that he was planning to kill himself. The friends called 911.
The Justice Department said in a statement that to prove a federal criminal civil rights violation, prosecutors would have to show that Jenison not only used force that was constitutionally unreasonable, but that he did so “willfully,” meaning he “acted with a bad purpose to disregard the law.”
“It is not sufficient for the government to prove that an officer acted out of fear, mistake, panic, misperception, poor judgment, negligence or gross negligence,” the department said.
The statement added, “Unlike in the many state jurisdictions that have statutes criminalizing killings committed with lesser mental states, such as criminal negligence or recklessness, the federal government has no statute that criminalizes a police officer’s use of unreasonable force, if willfulness cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Attorneys from the Justice Department met with Albers’s parents last month to tell them of their decision. “This was not the outcome we envisioned while seeking justice for John,” Sheila Albers, John Albers’s mother, said. “The lack of an indictment under federal law does not change the fact that we need significant changes to the system that investigates these tragedies and for our local leaders to promote the community-based evolution of law enforcement.”
She added: “They are clearly pointing in the direction that this should have been a state level charge. And we have local officials that have still failed to do the right thing.”
Overland Park, which gave Jenison a $70,000 severance payment less than a month after the killing, said it had fully cooperated with the investigation and was “appreciative of the FBI and the Department of Justice for investigating and reviewing this matter. The Overland Park Police Department strives to de-escalate and prevent the need for use of force whenever possible. This situation was tragic, and we at the city continue to keep the Albers family in our thoughts.”
Morgan Roach, the attorney for Jenison, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
After Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe declined state-level charges in 2018, Albers’s parents sued Jenison and Overland Park in federal court. Following a ruling by a federal judge that a reasonable jury could find that Jenison wasn’t in danger from the van, Overland Park in 2019 paid the Albers family a $2.3 million settlement. Howe did not respond to a request for comment.
Sheila Albers continued to push for information about the shooting, and discovered that Overland Park had allowed Jenison to resign in 2018 without any notice to state licensing authorities of the shooting. Not long after that disclosure, the Justice Department announced it was opening a civil rights investigation into the case.
After he shot and killed an unarmed teen driver, a Kansas police officer was paid a $70,000 severance
Stephen R. McAllister was the U.S. attorney for Kansas who launched the civil rights case in 2020. He is also a law professor who teaches civil rights at the University of Kansas. He said in an interview last week that after meeting with Sheila Albers — and then reading the federal court ruling denying Overland Park’s motion to dismiss the Albers’s civil case or grant the officer immunity — he met with Howe. Howe explained why he thought the shooting was justified, but McAllister was unconvinced and got the Justice Department probe started.
Meanwhile, news media in Kansas City sued for the details of Jenison’s severance, and for the release of the police case file. In 2021, Overland Park released the nearly 500-page case file, providing a rare insight into how police investigate one of their own. The Washington Post recently published a 20-minute film examining the investigation.
The shooting happened at dusk on Jan. 20, 2020. John Albers had been arrested for shoplifting earlier that day, and his parents said he was still upset and declined to join them for dinner with a relative. Once his parents and two younger brothers left, Albers wrote in his journal that he planned to kill himself, then posted video of himself on Snapchat making similar comments. Some of his friends called 911.
Jenison and another officer, Ryan Newlon, were dispatched to the Albers’s home. The police files show they had no prior experience with Albers or any knowledge of his arrest that day. Dash-cam videos show that the two officers approached the house, didn’t knock on the door or announce themselves, and then Newlon returned to his car to get a phone.
As Jenison stood alone in the front yard, the garage door opened. The Albers’s Honda Odyssey minivan had its lights on, and the driver began to slowly back out. One video shows that Jenison moved close to the garage with his weapon drawn and shouted “Stop!” three times, then stepped back and fired two shots.
The van stopped. Then it moved back down the driveway, spun 180 degrees, and placed Jenison at the center rear of the van. The video shows that Jenison quickly stepped to the side of the van. As the van reversed back toward the garage, the video shows Jenison fired 11 more shots into the side, killing Albers.
An unarmed teen driver is killed by police, followed by a year with few answers
Overland Park did not investigate the shooting. Johnson County police departments use an “Officer-Involved Shooting Investigation Team” made up of uninvolved departments to handle police shootings. A commander from nearby Olathe, Kan., then-Deputy Chief Shawn Reynolds, took over the investigation, which the records show was completed in six days.
The police files show that the OISIT investigation did not make a scene diagram, did not conduct a walk-through of the scene with Jenison, did not examine Jenison’s personnel or military files, and did not challenge his claim that he was in mortal danger from the van. The interview with Jenison lasted less than 40 minutes, police video shows.
A digital 3D reconstruction of the shooting, created by The Washington Post, indicates that Jenison was not in the path of the van during any of the 13 shots he fired. He, Howe and Reynolds, now the chief in Temple, Tex., all declined to discuss the investigation. Jenison has not returned to policing since the killing. Reynolds did not respond to a request for comment Friday. He and Howe previously said they could not discuss the case because it was under federal investigation.
The Justice Department statement recounted the findings of the FBI’s investigation, noting that “Albers began to slowly back the minivan out of the garage,” and that Jenison “stepped out of the minivan’s path, and without verbally identifying himself as a police officer, fired two shots into the van.”
The statement says that the van spun around and “slowly backed towards the home. The officer was again briefly in the path of the minivan as it began to reverse, but he stepped to the side and the vehicle again passed him. He then fired into the minivan 11 times in less than about three seconds.”
Federal prosecutors took note of the judge’s ruling in the Albers’ civil suit, saying that a jury could find that Jenison used unreasonable force in his first two shots, “and the federal criminal investigation found no substantial evidence inconsistent with that conclusion.”
Appointed by President Donald Trump, McAllister stepped down as U.S. attorney last year, when President Biden took office, but maintained contact with the Albers family and accompanied them to the meeting in Kansas City, Kan., with Justice Department officials from Washington when the decision was first revealed. “I think the federal team did their job honestly, professionally,” McAllister said. “I disagree with the outcome, but at the end of the day, the federal standard [of willfulness] is high.”
“If it were up to me as U.S. attorney,” McAllister said, “I would push hard to charge it and let a jury decide. … I also think there’s strong consensus at least at the federal side, that there is more than enough evidence to charge [Jenison] with reckless homicide. So the state authorities were wrong to decline the charges.”
McAllister was highly critical of the OISIT investigation, its missing pieces, and its emphasis on Albers’s juvenile court background, of which Jenison was unaware. “It’s just tragic that the Albers were victimized twice,” he said, “by what Jenison did, and then by what the OISIT team did.” | 2022-09-09T22:08:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | DOJ declines charges in Overland Park police killing of John Albers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/09/albers-shooting-doj-declines-charges/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/09/albers-shooting-doj-declines-charges/ |
Rajeev Ram, of the United States, second from left, and Joe Salisbury, of Britain, left, pose for photos with the trophy after defeating Wesley Koolhof, of the Netherlands, second from right and Neal Skupski, of Britain, in the final of the men’s doubles at the the U.S. Open tennis championships, Friday, Sept. 9, 2022, in New York. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) | 2022-09-09T22:10:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Salisbury, Ram repeat as US Open men's doubles champions - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/tennis/salisbury-ram-repeat-as-us-open-mens-doubles-champions/2022/09/09/fe78e204-3082-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/tennis/salisbury-ram-repeat-as-us-open-mens-doubles-champions/2022/09/09/fe78e204-3082-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html |
Transcript: Future of Work: Business-To-Employee
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Frances Stead Sellers, a senior writer here at The Post. Thank you for joining me for the third and final installment on our series about the future of work and how workers are affecting their industries over issues like racial injustice and social inequities. I’m joined today by two guests who are experts on these fields who’ll be talking about what companies have done to engage their employees and what they can learn by listening to them.
Rashad Robinson from Color of Change and Michael Whitaker from Just Capital, a very warm welcome to you both.
MR. ROBINSON: Thank you.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: And a word to our audience before we go any further, you can tweet your questions to Rashad, Michael, or to me by going to @PostLive, tweet them to @PostLive, and we'll pick up questions as we can as we go along.
And before we start, I'm going to give a brief visual description of myself. I'm an Anglo-American woman. I'm brown haired and brown eyed. I'm wearing a cream-colored short sleeve jacket, and I'm sitting in front of a bookcase.
And, Rashad, maybe you could follow with a visual description of yourself.
MR. ROBINSON: Yes. Yes, I'm a Black man with brown skin. I have a gray suit jacket on, a light blue button up shirt, and I am sitting inside of my living room area with a Color of Change--my organization's banner--behind me that says “until justice is real” and has our logo on it.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Rashad, thanks so much.
And, Martin, maybe you can do the same for yourself. Thank you.
MR. WHITAKER: Yeah, of course. So Martin Whitaker, Just Capital. I’m a White man wearing a white shirt. I'm sitting in front of a blue background with some of my children's artwork hanging on it. I have glasses, and I have far less hair than I'd like to have.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: [Laughs] Martin, thank you very much. And I envy you the children's artwork.
I want to start with a question from a report that your organization put out. I'm going to read a sentence to you. It is, “Americans want companies to take responsibility for their workers’ economic security.” Talk to us a little about that, how you know that, and what this economic environment means in terms of that sentiment.
MR. WHITAKER: Yeah, sure. So, we have for the last eight years been serving the American public on a--on a fully representative basis around what defines a just company. And in doing so we've really gotten, I think, a very strong handle on how people think about the economy, how they think about their jobs, their lives, and what they prioritize. It's a very strong pulse on America. And I think, obviously, this year, we've been very focused on how companies are showing up in this moment.
And so every year workers has been more important. This year has been no different. We're about to release the details of that polling work. But what I can tell you is Americans across the political spectrum, across economic, race, geographic boundaries, believe that companies really should be investing in their workers, paying a fair, livable wage. And really, the relationship I would say between company and worker has fundamentally changed. And in particular, what we see is an expectation that companies need to do more. They need to invest in their people more. And there's a very strong business case for doing that, and we can talk more about that later. But I think certainly the signal we're getting is that now in the moment, certainly when you think about the economic conditions we're in with inflationary pressures, those who experienced that more acutely than others, communities of color, minority communities who typically have not had the same level of access to pathways to prosperity, these are all things which companies can take more responsibility for, and certainly the public expects that. And in doing so they're--you know, everybody wins. This is the sort of the just stakeholder approach.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Just a quick follow-up on that. I want to talk specifically about the pandemic and how some of the top revenue-producing companies actually got richer during this period. How does that shift the narrative about what corporate leaders should be doing to engage and invest in their employees?
MR. WHITAKER: Well, certainly our picture is the way the American people would like companies to behave, what they want companies to do more of and what they want companies to do less of. It's not a picture of how the world is. And I think that's a very important distinction. As you noted, you know, during covid the economic shutdown, reopening, the aftermath of George Floyd's murder, we have, you know, social changes and human changes that are occurring in the country which show up in the workplace. And so companies that are able to respond to that more effectively, we think will do better. We think companies that are able to create value for more of those stakeholders on a long-term sustainable basis in a way that the market can see, which involves obviously data and disclosure and how companies engage their workers directly--all of that we think is sort of part of a new formula for business success.
And I think what you--what you're referring to there is certainly some companies getting richer, some companies able to have the resources and the responsibility to do more, you know, and how that sort of pie grows. You know, who’s involved in the growing of the pie, and who benefits? Those are the questions, the big questions, I think that obviously we're trying to answer here and more broadly in society.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: And it brings me perfectly, thank you, to a question for Rashad. I mean, this isn't about economics alone. Race, as Martin mentioned, has become far more central to these decisions. Talk to us a little about how that has changed since George Floyd's death and what impact you're seeing in actual hiring practices, and also the way companies address their employees and make sure that they are representing diverse views.
MR. ROBINSON: In so many ways, I think we're at the sort of early phases of actually knowing how all this is going to play itself out--right? In the immediate aftermath of George Floyd, we saw big statements from corporations across this sort of spectrum of industries, making deep claims about sort of their commitments, where their investments would go, how they would look internally. And we've seen sort of a mix of results following that.
But what we have seen, I think, is a sustained engagement from employees. Now, of course, there was a deep sort of uptick after the murder of George Floyd in the sort of uprisings that occurred afterwards. But we have seen a change in environment. We have not gone back to 2019 in terms of what employees are asking in terms of how their companies are showing up in the world and what they want from their companies. But I do think that I think it's important that we think of a couple of things as we think about a path forward. A lot of companies made these statements, but they didn't have any idea of the structural changes that would be required to actually make good on those statements. We launched a program and a campaign called Beyond the Statement to really push companies to make deep concerted sort of efforts. But we see this across the spectrum. We see this in corporations, and we see this in government as well, where you get more presence, then you get power, then you get more--you get more statements and shoutouts from the stages, then you get rule change.
And what we've actually been pushing for is racial equity audit so that these companies can actually get clear about all the changes. If they had been going along with their everyday business practices and go to market strategies, creating all sorts of harm or inequity and manufacturing inequality, then all of a sudden, they're not going to be able to turn on the light and change that. The same people around the table are not going to suddenly be able to do something different without deep levels of transparency, without a plan to move forward, and without a commitment to actually making changes that are not just cosmetic.
And far too often, I think many companies wanted to go for the cosmetic changes. We will hire a person in this position. We will--we will launch some internal programs. We will make some donations to organizations out in the field. But we're not going to change anything about our business practices. And to really expand, you know, briefly just on what Mark was saying around the sort of impact that companies can have on their employees, it's not just sort of in terms of pay equity. It's not just in terms of the sort of ways in which these companies show up in terms of opportunities for employees in their day to day lives. It's their impact on these employees when they're outside of the offices. It's not enough for a corporation to say we are going to help support women who need to make reproductive choices and decisions about their lives that are now banned or illegal in states where we are located if those same companies have been responsible for putting the very politicians in place that have made those barriers, made that inequality happen in the first place.
And so there's going to be a much more holistic look at what the company's sort of impact on society looks like, and I think more and more employees are making those demands. And organizations like ours are working to both elevate that and hold companies accountable to actually making changes that are not just about presence but are about actually changing the very structures of how power works inside the companies and their impact on the world.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: And a quick follow on that. We talk so often about things that aren't going well, but which companies--and very specifically, which companies are doing well, and can you give me a very specific couple of examples of how they're doing well, just briefly?
MR. ROBINSON: So you know, one example that I do want to give is that a number of years ago, we worked with Airbnb on a racial equity audit. By no means is Airbnb a perfect company and their impact in--on communities is challenging in many ways. But they went into that racial equity audit after a number of things were exposed out in the world in terms of sort of business practices and they took the racial equity audit serious, and they didn't just hire DEI folks to come in and make efforts around diversity. But they also looked at their sort of business. They looked at how their platform was working. And they put engineers on the issue and they--and which is a gold standard for a tech company, in terms of the type of employees and the type of investment. And they put engineers on the platform to actually make real changes and to put metrics about how they would get to those changes. And we had deep conversations with Brian, the CEO, and others inside the company, and have watched that company as they've had other challenges along the way that have been sometimes high profile in the media, they've had a framework for how to deal with them and work with them. I don't think any of these companies can change overnight.
We have had to fight companies to actually get racial equity audits at--you know, at their shareholders meetings and other places. But what we do want to know is that these companies are actually going to travel the road with us, and that they're going to be committed to making structural changes, not just cosmetic changes.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Yeah, key points.
Martin, which corporate leaders are you seeing succeeded--succeeding in folding their employees’ voices into their corporate missions?
MR. WHITAKER: So just to pick up a point that Rashad made, I think we have been tracking how 100 of the country's largest employers have been actually following up on their racial equity commitments, our corporate racial equity tracker. And I think part of our mission as we see it is to try and drive accountability through disclosures. So just supplying the market with the information that the market needs in order to know who's doing what, to Rashad’s point, who's actually following through, what are they doing, where are they on their journey, we think that's really important. And we've seen, you know, tremendous interest in that, and that's also helped us work with PolicyLink and FSG to create a blueprint for what companies can do internally within the community and then also in society at large. So, I totally support that more holistic point of view, if you want to call it that.
So, because of the tracker and because our ongoing work at Just, you know, we're monitoring what companies are doing across a range of issues. I point to JP Morgan's work on second chance policy and on its hiring and the amount of attention that it has paid to pay equity analyses. Intel has been a leader for as far back as I can remember on disclosure around very--the details of racial and gender pay levels within its company. I would say that's probably the best example that I could give anybody watching this on how to disclose across those racial ethnic diversity targets and pay equity as well. Accenture has done a good job. We see Target lifting up wages as an important element. When we've in our surveys really identified what can companies actually do to promote more equitable outcomes, pay has been a very central element of that. Paying a fair and living wage we find has been one of the top issues, which also promotes, you know, a company’s equity commitments. So Target has done a great job of that.
So, you know, I could go on, but I think tracking what companies are doing on their journey, I think the headlines from our tracker is some progress, but still a lot of work to be done. If you look at percentages across, you know, even the top 100 employers, it’s still very low in terms of what they say to the world. And I think that's a really important aspect of trust building when companies are really trying to follow through on their commitments as well.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: We're going to be running out of time very soon. But, Rashad, I wanted to ask you about one of the headlines, in fact. Governor Newsom of California recently signed a bill that will regulate the fast food industry, including establishing minimum wages. I know that you, Rashad, have worked with McDonald's on racial justice issues. Do you see this kind of single state legislative move as something companies, the fast food industry will pick up on across the country? Is this a good move for workers across the country in fast food?
MR. ROBINSON: Well, I think in terms of not just fast food but the entire sort of restaurant industry as a vertical, and food in first food service industry, you see deep levels of inequity in terms of pay. You--there's the history sort of tip wages at restaurants, and so all of that does play in. California is a big state and can have a really sort of deep impact. But these companies have been very good at sort of avoiding and stepping around the sort of--the sort of steps to sort of deal with the inequality. I don't--I would want to push back on like the kind of term working with McDonald's. You know, we had pushed for a racial equity audit at McDonald's, which they were against, and I spoke at and presented at their shareholders meeting in an effort to push for that racial equity audit. We won with 54 percent of the vote with--at their shareholders, so we actually had to go to their shareholders to win that racial equity audit. They still haven't done the racial equity audit or committed to the terms of it. I do think it's important for those who are watching to recognize that a racial equity audit is just the first step. It's like a doctor's visit. It's being able to understand sort of what's actually happening inside the body of a corporation so that they can then properly diagnose steps to make sure that things can be fixed that needs to be fixed, or things can be elevated and done better that are already maybe working. Without that sort of doctor's checkup, we are expecting the patient, which is the corporation, to sort of diagnose themselves and to determine what they actually need to do to get better. And what we've seen time and time again is corporations that have created a lot of harm and create a lot of challenge are not sort of in the position to then determine what they need to do to fix these problems. And that's why we need outside independent auditors that can help these corporations actually deal with these challenges and to meet sort of the things that Martin was talking about, which are the opportunities that can come from when you actually build companies that are equitable and fair and diverse and are doing the type of things in society that make things better.
And so this is an opportunity for the fast food industry which I think has a deeply challenged history in terms of its impact on communities of color and on poor communities, and an opportunity for these companies to get right. And I hope that they will take it, but we will continue to work with fast food workers and the other folks organizing and fighting for a better tomorrow.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Just one last word from you, Martin, imagine before we have to stop. We have the midterms, another reckoning coming up. Where do you see common ground between Republicans and Democrats in terms of labor rights? And I'm afraid it has to be super quick.
MR. WHITAKER: I can tell you that in our polling, Republicans and Democrats are agreed on, A, what a just company looks like; B, that workers are the most important stakeholder in that equation; and that, C, matters of equity--pay equity in the workplace, in particular, are common ground. I think that's a story that's not been told, and I would love to tell it more. I'm grateful for the opportunity today. But I think we need areas that unite us in this country right now, and this is one.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Thank you so much to both Rashad and Martin for joining us today and for that strong message at the end of needing unity in this country today.
Thank you. I'll be back in a few minutes with my next guest.
MR. WALKER: I'm Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation. I'm an African American man with a bald head, with glasses on, a blue suit and a checked blue shirt. My pronouns are he and him. I am here today with my friend Pete Stavros, the founder of Ownership Works. Pete, you and I grew up in a time of opportunity in America, and one of the reasons was because American workers were owners. And yet today, unfortunately, American workers have lost track, they have lost income, and they have lost wealth over many decades. In fact, today, the average American household has less than $400 in cash for emergencies. So, let's talk about this effort you are leading to build wealth among the American workers. Let's talk about what you're doing at Ownership Works.
MR. STAVROS: Great, thank you, Darren, for having me. I'm Pete Stavros, a White man sitting in my office in New York City with grayish hair and a blue suit. My pronouns are he and him. And first, I just want to thank you, Darren, for having me. It's always an honor to get to spend some time with you.
And what we're trying to do at Ownership Works is really bring back that opportunity that used to exist in this country. You know, my parents, neither went to college. My dad, as you know, Darren, was a construction worker for 45 years. And by the time I was a kid, they had pulled themselves into the middle class. And that is not happening as much anymore. And as we know, it’s happening the least for people of color, and women.
And so what we're trying to do at Ownership Works is put appreciating assets in the hands of working families. One way to do that is through ownership in their companies. And so it's basically a way to get profit sharing, if you will, in the hands of blue-collar workers and people who are not members of senior management.
So, Ownership Works is a foundation that was founded by about 60 organizations, and Ford Foundation was the very first outside supporter, beyond my wife and I, so super grateful. You all were a big reason why we got our momentum. And now we're 60 organizations strong, and we see a real path to getting a hundred-plus companies by the end of next year to have broad-based ownership. And just a second on what I mean by that, that means all members of a company participate in equity and ownership, and then that is paired with efforts around employee engagement and information sharing and opening up the business plan and really making people feel like they're a part of it. And what we found is, over time, that can lead to really tremendous outcomes, not just for workers, but also for shareholders and for companies.
MR. WALKER: Indeed, I saw recently at one of the portfolio companies that KKR is engaged in the impact of ownership. I'd love for you to talk about that and what it meant for you to really be on that shop floor and experience the difference, this idea of ownership is making in the lives of the average American worker.
MR. STAVROS: So, in that example, that was a company called C.H.I. Overhead Doors, and C.H.I. Overhead Doors is based in Central Illinois, has about 800 employees. We invested in it about seven and a half years ago and then recently sold our investment. And over that period of time, thanks to tremendous leadership at the company, the CEO, an amazing man named Dave Bangert, really the whole culture changed. Safety improved. The injury rate dropped by 50 percent. The severity of each injury dropped by 50 percent. Productivity exploded. Scrap--so revenue grew about 120 percent and scrap grew 7 percent, and that only happens when everyone in the organization on that shop floor is pulling together to make, you know, improvements in the business.
And so to fast forward to the end, all these great things, all these little things added up to something big at the end of seven, seven and a half years, and everyone participated, as they should. So average workers in the manufacturing plants earned about $175,000. More tenured workers earned hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. We had truck drivers make upwards of a million dollars. And it was great for--as I mentioned, great for investors and the company and shareholders, who made 10 times their investment over seven years.
And this is in a garage door business. As I always say, this was not a high growth software company. And so I think it's a great testament to what can take place here if everyone participates, if people are treated with respect, are acknowledged, are trusted to be brought into the ownership of the company, and then really engaged as people who matter in the business. The sky's the limit when you can create that kind of a culture.
MR. WALKER: Well, this is a radical idea, Pete, in the face of 50 years of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and the idea that the only purpose of the company is profits, and a focus on shareholders as the only stakeholder who matters. So, we're clearly learning from this example that all stakeholders have to be attended to, especially employees as owners. As you know, my grandfather was a semi-literate man. He had a third-grade education. But he too worked in an environment where he could share in the profits, and he had--because of that profit sharing plan--and he was a lowly paid porter in this company--he had enough stock with his social security together to live a retirement in dignity.
And I think when we think about the average American worker today, who has a benefit program that is not a defined benefit but a defined contribution, and the research around the number of workers who do not have enough money to retire, who do not have the resources to pay for a college education for their children, their grandchildren, some of the stories that we heard that day of people in this company being able to pay their grandkids’ educations, pay off their mortgages, buy a home, it's a testament that the American dream is possible if we have an economy and we have leaders in that economy who believe in it and we abide by a philosophy that democracy and capitalism must work in an accord, that we can't have a situation where in the fight between democracy and capitalism, capitalism wins at the expense of participation and inclusion in the bounty of this great American dream and this great American capitalism.
Pete, I'd like you to talk about where you think, this idea of democratic capitalism, this idea that we've got to make capitalism work for more people--it works for people like you and me, we know that--but how do we make sure that it works for more Americans?
MR. STAVROS: Well, I think what we're doing around ownership can help. It's a step in the right direction. By no means do I think, you know, if we just do this, it solves all of our problems. I'm sure there are changes that need to take place that are much broader and bigger than what we're talking about. Having said that, I do think this can help. I mean, when I look at some of our big societal problems, we touched on the lack of wealth in the bottom half of the country. I think it's less than 5 percent of assets are owned by the bottom half, less than 1 percent of stock. Financial literacy is an epidemic in the country. And I think it relates to this lack of participation. If people don't have assets, why should they have an interest in personal finance? You know, it shouldn't surprise us that when financial literacy is offered as a training in a company, you'll get three out of 100 people to take you up on it, because most of them don't have any assets. They have debt, and they know they've got problems. They don't want to talk about it. So, I think broadening ownership can help. In our experience, by broadening ownership, you can move the needle on financial counseling from three in a hundred who want it and will engage to 50 in a hundred. And that--and that's huge.
Employee engagement, you know, where the significant majority of Americans don't like their job, are not engaged on the job, Gallup indicates that it’s 70 percent are unengaged. And of that, of the 70, 15 to 20 are--I think they term it actively disengaged. So, they're literally throwing wrenches in the machines, they hate their company so much. Part of that is financial, and ownership I think can help there. But part of it is not feeling like they've got a real role, not feeling important, not feeling acknowledged, trusted, respected. And there again, the act of extending ownership I think is meaningful beyond the money. And then when you pair it with all of these other efforts, I do think you can move the needle. So not to say this is going to solve all of our problems, but when I look at the lack of wealth in the bottom half of the country, you know, racial inequity, gender inequity, sadly, when you push ownership broad and deep, you do disproportionately benefit female employees and people of color. Financial literacy, employee engagement, I think there's a lot of things that can be impacted by broadening ownership inside of a company. It's building unity. It's pulling people together. I think it can matter.
MR. WALKER: There's no doubt it could matter. Pete, I’d like as we begin to wrap up for you to just share your journey. I mean, you have been an incredibly successful investor. You're a leader at KKR, one of the world's most prominent and successful private equity firms. And you have taken up this mantle and the firm has taken up this mantle. What can we learn as we look back over your journey, the history of the industry, and the portfolios that you have managed? What can we learn that we need to take forward in our practice, and particularly in the practice of private equity?
MR. STAVROS: Well, in terms of my personal journey, you know, this really--the passion for this started with my dad. So my dad, as you know, Darren, was a construction worker and for 45 years operated a road grader, and felt a real sense of misalignment with his employer. You know, if the only way you are paid is by the hour, you really have no incentive for quality cost on time delivery. In fact, if you're too productive, your wages can go down, because your hours go down. And it drove my dad nuts. And he always wanted profit sharing in his union. And that, for me, was the kernel of this idea of how could we, you know, broaden ownership. And then I got an opportunity to really practice this when I got into a leadership role at my firm at KKR.
Now, when you--your question about the history of the industry, what can we learn, you know, if you go way back when the industry was getting started, it was really about, I would say, balance sheet arbitrage, financial arbitrage. And then we moved into P&L arbitrage, maybe that--profit and loss, you know, income statement arbitrage. Maybe it's a better way to say it. How can companies purely just become more efficient?
And I think this generation 3.0 of private equity, my hope is it's about how do you take what is an effective governance model--I really believe private equity is an effective governance model. It's about alignment. It's about long term. And how do you use that to move society forward in a productive way? And I think about KKR. We have 900,000 employees we're responsible for. And when the leadership of the firm gets behind this, as they have, you know, that can be 900,000 families impacted. That's a big deal. Think about all of the facilities that we are responsible for, where we can reduce carbon, water utilization, waste production, and landfill tonnage and energy usage. I mean, there's a lot that we can do.
And the governance model, I think, is set up for this. It's all about alignment and driving change. That's what the industry was built on. So, as we go forward, I think 3.0 of private equity I think has the potential to not only deliver what our pension fund investors expect of us, and hopefully exceed their expectations, but we could really play a role in moving society in a positive direction, if we can get organized around some of these key themes and key initiatives.
MR. WALKER: Well, there's no doubt, Pete, that private equity has a critical role to play in the American economy, and there's no doubt that firms like KKR can provide the leadership and the firepower and the capital to actually transform this economy and make it possible for more American workers to have something that is essential to the American dream and the American identity. That is hope, because it is hope that is the foundation of the American dream, and work is at the center of how and why people find hope in our society. So, we need to pay attention to how do we build a foundation or rebuild the foundation for hope among the American worker so that they can believe that they and their children, like you and I did, could get on that mobility escalator and ride it as far as their talent, their determination, their ambition can take them.
So, Pete Stavros, my friend, I'm so happy to see you, to congratulate you and KKR for this bold initiative that the Ford Foundation is delighted to be a part of, and your personal capital and your personal leadership has meant all the difference. And so I look forward to more celebrations of workers who have opportunity and capital and hope. Thank you, Pete Stavros.
MR. STAVROS: Thank you, Darren. Thanks for all of your support, and it was great spending a little bit of time with you today. Thank you.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Hello, and welcome back to Washington Post Live. For those of you just joining us, I'm Frances Stead Sellers, a senior writer here at The Post. Here to continue our conversation about the future of work is the former CEO of Best Buy and author Hubert Joly. Hubert, a very warm welcome to Washington Post Live.
MR. JOLY: Frances, so--thank you so much for having me.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: We’re thrilled. We're going to learn a lot, I know.
So, a word to our audience before we start. Please tweet your questions to Hubert at @PostLive. That's the Twitter handle @PostLive for anyone who would like to tweet a question. And before we start, I'm going to give a visual description of myself. I am brown haired and brown eyed, an Anglo-American woman. I am wearing a cream-colored shawl jacket with short sleeves, and I'm sitting in front of a bookcase.
And, Hubert, maybe you can do the same.
MR. JOLY: Yeah, I’m Hubert, and I’m an aging White man in my 60s with gray hair a white shirt. Behind me is a bookshelf with a picture of my wonderful wife, and a terrific book “Aligned: Connecting Your True Self with the Leader You're Meant to Be.” I’m her agent, of course.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Well, let's start with a question about your philosophy. We'll talk in a minute about how it applies to Best Buy, but first, this human-first philosophy. You've talked about how top-down leadership doesn't work. What does human-first mean?
MR. JOLY: So, I think every company on the planet says people are the most important thing they have. The question is how do we make this come to work. So let me make it come to life with specific examples.
One thing I learned from a client a few years ago was he told me, Hubert, start your business monthly meetings with people, organization, and then business, and then financial results. Don't start with financial results. Start with people. Because he told me it's excellence on this--on the people dimension that's going to lead to excellence on the business side, which then turns into excellence on results. So, putting people at the center is what will unleash human magic, which I think is the big antidote to this great resignation or this quiet quitting.
Another example to make it come to life, Frances, I remember learning from our head of stores at Best Buy, Shari Ballard, she would--when she would visit a store, instead of asking the general manager to show me the results, your market share, what's working, she would go to her or him and say, tell me about you. How long have you been with us? Tell me about your history, your family, what you're excited about. Oh, and please tell me which of your blue shirts you'd like me to talk to and be introduced to. So building that human connection.
Another last example, Frances, was we had a store manager at Best Buy. He would ask every one of the associates in his store what is your dream at Best Buy, outside of Best Buy, what is your dream. Write it down in the breakroom. And he said my job is to help you achieve your dream. So, if we can build that human connection, understand what drives people around us, their life story and what drives them, then we can help them connect, you know, with the work, and then that work with the purpose of the company. And that's--this is what is exciting for people at companies that can, you know, ends this epidemic of disengagement that we are all familiar with. I know I need to be more passionate about this, but there you have it.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: No, this is great. But I want to understand a little bit more about 2008 when I think Best Buy was in deep trouble, or looked as if it might be, and how you applied this human-centric approach to turning the company's fortunes around.
MR. JOLY: Yeah, and because when I joined Best Buy, so it was 2012--right?--when I joined, and everybody thought we were going to die. And the recommendation from analysts and investors was the usual recipe--right?--Frances? Cut, cut, cut. Hubert, you're going to have to close stores, fire a lot of people. Well, all of the stores were profitable, and firing a lot of people, it's like people will have been the problem. I thought people would be part of the solution.
So here's some illustrations of this human-centric approach to our turnarounds. I spent my first week working at the company as the CEO, working in a store in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Bringing my two years, I had a badge with CEO in training, and I would ask the associates in the store, the team, what's working, what's not working, what do you need? For instance, they of course had all of the answers. My job was very easy. Listen, make notes, and do as I was told. They had all of the answers because they knew from the frontline. So it was not for me to tell them what to do. It was to listen. So, we co-created this plan. We did cut costs, of course. You know, as we may be heading into a recession, companies do have to be lean and efficient. But for me, headcount reduction is a last resort. Even in a turnaround, you first focus on growing the top line. And as it relates to cost, you first focus on attacking what are called non-salary expenses, which is all of the elements of the cost structure that have nothing to do with people.
So as an example, at Best Buy, we sell a lot of TVs, of course, right? They're large, they're thin, so they break. We would break for about $200 million worth of TVs every year. So, if you can reduce that by 50%, it's good, right? Because we've done a survey. Zero percent of customers want to buy a broken TV, right? And so it's good for everybody.
The other thing is, you see your role as a leader not as being the smartest person in the room, which is the old recipe, but as being there to create energy, right? We are very familiar with an energy crisis now. But if a company is a human organization, you can actually create energy. And our role as leaders is to do that. How do you create energy? It’s by listening to people, feel--making sure they feel respected, heard, co-creating the plan, and then getting going and celebrating early wins. And then if something is not working, you actually say it out loud. Oh, Frances, you and I worked on this initiative together. I think we're going to have to redo it because it's not quite working as intended. So, these are some illustrations of this people-first philosophy.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Well, take--this is so interesting. Take it to me--to the pandemic. I mean, we had this moment of enormous turmoil. What lessons from the periods you're talking about, the recession beforehand, have applied during the pandemic? And what new lessons are coming out of it in the way companies should respond to the demands of their employees?
MR. JOLY: Yeah, I think that we've all learned tremendously during the pandemic. One of the things we've learned if we have not learned the lesson before, was that our teams were made of human beings, right? Because we feared for their health and safety as relates to the frontline workers. And then for those who are working from home, we got to know their family, right, didn't we? We also learned to--about their struggles--you know, health struggles, mental health struggles. I mean, so there was a deeper connection that was--that was built. And we couldn't just continue as before. We had to rely on building that connection.
The other thing we learned is that we--my favorite phrase now, Frances, is "My name is Hubert, and I don’t know," right? Because maybe you, Frances, had a--you know, the manual on how to deal with covid or back to the office or how to deal with inflation, supply chain issues. No, we're in a situation where regularly now we have some unprecedented crisis that's being thrown at us. And so the model of the know-it-all leader who knows all of the answers and is there to tell other people what to do, [makes buzzer noise] that doesn’t work. So we have to be able to say I don't know, we're going to have to figure this out together. We're going to have to figure out who's the best equipped, who are the people we need to consult.
The other thing--and that's going to be my--I mean, there’s so many lessons, but maybe another one was to learn to lead with all of our body parts. I was trained, you know, when I was in business school or at McKinsey in my early years as an executive there to lead with my left brain. Now--and I had my head cut off from the rest of my body for many years. As a leader, I know now that I need to lead with my--of course with my head, but also my heart, my soul, my guts, my ears, my eyes.
And then the last thing I would say is I need as a leader--and all of us are leaders, because at a minimum, we’re leaders of our life--we need to take care of ourselves, right? Remember, Frances when we used to fly around, when the steward or stewardess would tell us if the oxygen masks come down, put it on yourself first so that you can--before you can help others. And if we want to be resilient leaders, spending time with ourselves, taking care of our health, thinking through how do I want to be remembered after this particular crisis and being centered, authentic human leaders I think is a--is a huge lesson—when--you sort of knew that before and now it's become really obvious.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Well, Hubert, just as you are not the know-it-all leader, I'm not the know-it-all interviewer, and I’m going to take a question from one of our viewers, one of our--who’s tweeted in, and this is from, you can see it on the screen, Marilyn Williams, who says, Hubert, what would you do differently at Best Buy now that you've moved on and haven't had an opportunity to look back? Great question from @JoyMWilliams.
MR. JOLY: And I know, Marilyn. We go way, way back, and she used to work at Best Buy before my time. A great leader. I think that Marilyn and everyone--I've learned so much during my Best Buy years, so I wish I had all of that knowledge. One of the--maybe the thing I learned the most about is how to--so in business there’s the why, there's the what, and there's the how. There's other questions, but let's just say--let's say there's purpose, strategy, and culture. Historically, I was putting a lot of emphasis on the what. You know, ex-McKinsey consultant, let's figure out what is the right answer. In my view that I've learned over the years is that that's not the difficult part. Putting the emphasis on the why, so the noble purpose was the company purpose and our individual purpose and that connection, and then spending time on the how.
I'll say this. Our most important role as the leader, as a leader is to make sure we create an environment where others can be their best. So, it's the leader as the gardener who is there to ensure that we create a fertile soil so that all of these seeds, all of these human beings can blossom. It's a very different mindset, because it's the emphasis on culture. And then all of the ingredients of human magic that, you know, I talked about in "The Heart of Business," so meaning, human connections, psychological safety, autonomy within a frame, but autonomy, and learning mindsets, learning environments, and then a growth mindset. And being the architect of that, to finish answering Marilyn’s question, we've learned so much. I wish I knew all of that when I started.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: In your book, you talk about literally being hit by a truck. And I'd love to ask you about what that meant in terms of an epiphany of who you are as a human being and also as a leader. I know you put those two things together, but there are two aspects in your personal life and in your work life.
MR. JOLY: So let's rewind. I was 16. So not last year, but like many of us I was doing a summer job to buy--in that case it was a bike. So I was working in a supermarket in France putting price tags on vegetable cans and then taking, you know, the boxes and compacting them and so that we could recycle them. And then one day, there was some fighter jets going into the sky, and a forklift was backing up and hit me and hurt my back. And I'll say this, I was in heaven, because I got, you know, timeouts, you know, to recover, paid timeout, paid time off. And so I was making money without having to work. And the lesson for me there was that I had felt the experience of a frontline worker in a completely underpaid dull job, right? Putting price tags on vegetable cans. And it stuck with me because I said if, one day, I have the opportunity to be a leader, I will want to make sure that I can create an environment where people around me have a more meaningful work experience. And it led me to think deeply about this question of why do we work and what is work. Now, of course, we can see work as a punishment--right?--because some dude sinned in paradise, for those of us who have a, you know, Judeo-Christian or Islamic upbringing, or we can see work as something we do so that we can do something else that's more fun, like riding my bike. Or we can see work as part of our fulfillment as a human being in our quest for, you know, doing something good in the world. And for me, of course, it's a choice. Unfortunately, most people don't see work as a source of joy.
But I think as leaders today--and again, all of us are leaders, because at a minimum, we're leaders of our lives--we can see the responsibility we have and the opportunity we have in this complicated world to use the platform we have to make a positive difference in the world, for business to be a force for good and to help address all of the challenges that the world has. And frankly, there is no shortage of challenges. And so I think it can be an exciting time for leaders today to feel they have this opportunity to create a future that does not exist yet. But that for sure, needs to be better than what we have now.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: You mentioned quiet quitting earlier on. It's taken the internet by storm, that notion. You're talking now about motivating people. We're also moving into an era when artificial intelligence and other moves are eliminating a lot of routine jobs. Look ahead a little bit for me and explain to me how we're going to motivate people to stay engaged after all they've been through and looking at what they may face in the future.
MR. JOLY: Yeah, so for me--Frances, thank you for this question--you know, purpose and humanity, this focus on unleashing human magic, that's the antidote to this quiet quitting and to this longstanding pandemic of disengagement, which is not just the last few months. It's been years, right? And so it's the opportunity to reconnect with our co-workers at a very human level of what drives them, and working with them to, you know, create an environment where they can be--they can be fully engaged. And if we talk about the back to the office discussion, there has been this emphasis on where to work. I don't think that's a very effective way, because companies are getting a lot of pushback. But for employees, if you are trying to dictate where I should work, that's not very engaging. So, I think it's an invitation to focus on the why we work, and the how we work. So, you know, every job can be transformed into something meaningful if we spend the time. So, let's engage our employees on what drives them and creating the environment where they can be the best version of themselves.
And as relates to technology and artificial intelligence, you know, in tech companies, it's people who are behind technology, right? So, I'm a big believer in the Schumpeterian creative destruction, a view of the world where new jobs will be created. As human beings, I think that we are--we're the source and we need to make sure that we don't lose control to the--to the machines. But I think that this is--this is part of our responsibility to create that better future with--where even artificial intelligence is ethical and does not exclude--is not used poorly to exclude others. So, it's a challenging time, no doubt. But I think it's also potentially an exciting time where all of us can do our best to make a positive difference in the world around us and then on a bigger scale.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So to talk about one of the challenges--and it was a great theme of my previous conversation with Rashad and Martin--the issues of racial injustice and rectifying them that have come to a fore at the same time of the pandemic, how would you integrate that into a forward-looking inclusive workplace? What are your guidelines?
MR. JOLY: Yeah, it's essential at so many different levels. And of course, Best Buy is headquartered in Minneapolis. So, you know, the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020 was very close to home literally speaking. I mean, there's two aspects, I think, to think about. Diversity and inclusion and creating a sense of belonging is an essential element of creating human magic. You know, I remember chatting with a new employee, a young employee who shared with me his life has changed the day a manager recognized him and took an interest in him, right? And my compatriot Rene Descartes, you know, famously said, “I think, therefore I am.” I think it's different. It's "I am seen, therefore I am."
So, companies have a great responsibility to create this environment where everybody can feel they belong and can become the best, biggest, most beautiful version of themselves. And there's a ton of work to be done there. And it's not just, you know, try harder. It's fundamentally reviewing all of our practices that have led to the exclusion, in particular, of Black African American colleagues when we recruit, when we promote, when we retain. So a fundamental review is in order. And I think following the murder of George Floyd, I've actually seen fundamental changes in the focus of companies on that dimension.
And then externally, when the city is on fire, literally, you cannot open the stores, right? You cannot have a business. If society is falling apart, Frances, you know--you and I know this, right?--business falls apart. So, businesses have a responsibility to not only take care of the inside but also look at the outside. And there's many ways you can do this. It's your sourcing practices. You know, I remember telling our marketing vendors at Best Buy, you know, if you want to submit a bid, and you have a completely monolithic team, you can save on gasoline. You don't need to worry about coming to submit your bid, right? And so you can have that influence. And then it's looking at the community level, and businesses in Minneapolis like Best Buy, Target, General Mills, Ecolab, there’s many great companies. I think I've realized how much of a role they could play in addressing systemic inequality issue in the community working across, you know, party lines and with, you know, the governor and so forth, and doing what they can to address inequality. So as an example, which is less about race but maybe more about geography, there's been initiative that my successor, Corie Barry has initiated, which was to ensure that everybody had good broadband access during the pandemic, because that's essential for the kids to be able to have access to remote learning. And so businesses today, we need a declaration of interdependence. Businesses--
MS. STEAD SELLERS: What a great line, declaration of interdependence.
MR. JOLY: Businesses cannot be successful in isolation. So, you know, and Martin is a friend, Martin Whitaker, and Darren Walker is a dear friend. I think we all share this view--right?--that it's our responsibility as business leaders to encompass all of our stakeholders and find ways to simultaneously serve them in a way that's win-win-win and treating profit as an outcome, not the--not the ultimate goal, and certainly not the only goal. So, it's a big--it's hard. It's a redirection of what we do. But I think it's exciting. It's so meaningful.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Thank you, Hubert Joly, for that wonderful phrase, the declaration of interdependence. We're going to have to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us today.
MR. JOLY: Thank you, Frances and everyone. So enjoyed our conversation. Thank you.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Oh, we did too. And I'm sorry you have to leave that there. There's so many more questions to answer and to ask.
I’m Frances Stead Sellers. This is Washington Post Live. And if you would like to see further programming we have, please go to WashingtonPostLive.com. You can register there for programs. WashingtonPostLive.com. Thank you. | 2022-09-09T22:10:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transcript: Future of Work: Business-To-Employee - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/09/09/transcript-future-work-business-to-employee/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/09/09/transcript-future-work-business-to-employee/ |
Sens. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) have worked together on issues from the war in Ukraine to broadband legislation to the recent baby formula shortage. On Wednesday, Sept. 14 at 4:30 p.m. ET, join The Post’s Leigh Ann Caldwell for a conversation with the two senators about playing together in the upcoming Congressional Women’s Softball Game, the state of bipartisanship and their legislative priorities.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito
(R-W.Va.)
(D-N.Y.) | 2022-09-09T22:10:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sens. Shelley Moore Capito and Kirsten Gillibrand on state of bipartisanship - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/09/14/sens-shelley-moore-capito-kirsten-gillibrand-legislative-agenda-state-bipartisanship/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/09/14/sens-shelley-moore-capito-kirsten-gillibrand-legislative-agenda-state-bipartisanship/ |
Former Whitman High rowing coach sentenced to three years for sex abuse
Kirk Shipley, a three-time All-Met coach, had pleaded guilty to sexually abusing two rowers at the Bethesda, Md., high school
By Lizzie Johnson
Former Whitman High School rowing coach Kirk Shipley on the Potomac River in 2019. (© Laura Chase de Formigny)
Former Walt Whitman High rowing coach Kirk Shipley was sentenced Friday to three years in prison for sexually abusing two former students — an outcome that appeared to stun the former Montgomery County teacher and his attorney.
D.C. Superior Court Judge Maribeth Raffinan imposed 36 months for first-degree sexual abuse of a secondary education student and 24 months for possession of a sexual performance by a minor. She suspended two of the five years.
Shipley pleaded guilty to the felonies in June as part of a plea deal. He will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.
Shipley and his attorney had argued he should be given probation for his crimes. Speaking publicly for the first time since his arrest last year, the three-time All-Met Coach of the Year apologized to the victims, calling his actions “very, very wrong.” Shipley also expressed remorse about the impact on hundreds of his former students and athletes at the high-achieving school in Bethesda, Md., saying that he hoped that “those memories will be happy again” someday.
They trusted a coach with their girls and Ivy League ambitions. Now he’s accused of sex abuse.
Then in a rambling statement that lasted several minutes, Shipley, 48, veered from contrition to self-pity. He’d lost his two vocations of teaching and coaching. After Washington Post coverage of his case, he said, he’d lost jobs delivering food for Grubhub and repairing fiberglass boats at a friend’s company. Without employment, he’d resorted to buying and repairing furniture. He complained that he’d lost his savings — and his reputation.
“I have been portrayed as a predator,” Shipley said. “That is not who I am. ... I have not held a job before now that didn’t involve service to others ... I am a good person.”
Raffinan seemed flummoxed by Shipley’s statement.
“I think the fairest characterization is that he has wavered with regard to his acceptance of responsibility for these offenses,” she said. “... Certainly his statements ... do not demonstrate a full acceptance of his actions toward these two victims.”
The victims — one 18 and who graduated in 2018 and the other 17 and graduated in 2013 — were not in the courtroom.
“The most disturbing aspect of his conduct is the position that Mr. Shipley held in relation to these students, and his unfathomable persistence and continuous abuse of this position of authority,” Raffinan said. “He was their teacher. He was their coach. These women looked up to him for support and guidance, and he took advantage of them.”
After delivering her sentence, she ordered that Shipley be incarcerated immediately.
Shipley’s attorney Thomas Key asked if he could self-surrender to police in two to three weeks, arguing he’d driven his vehicle to the courthouse and needed to find someone to take care of his dog.
When Raffinan denied the request, Key asked if Shipley could have until Monday, saying again that he needed to arrange for someone to watch his dog.
“I’m sure Mr. Key can find someone to take care of his dog,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Caroline Burrell interjected.
“I don’t see — in light of the way in which this case has proceeded — a reason to delay,” Raffinan agreed.
Bailiffs helped Shipley push up the sleeves of his suit jacket, so they could shackle his wrists.
The hour-long sentencing began with powerful impact statements from the rowing community and the two victims, who came forward about their abuse last spring. A third victim also submitted a statement.
It was a moment of catharsis for hundreds of women, who spanned more than 20 Whitman High graduating classes, as well as the Thompson Boat Center in Georgetown, where Shipley coached during the offseason.
In a six-page unsigned community impact statement, former athletes described how Shipley had pretended to mentor them as teens, gaining their trust, then pushing the boundaries of those relationships by making inappropriate sexual overtures.
An unidentified “community representative” read a portion of the statement via Zoom for those in the courtroom, often pausing to cry, her voice breaking. Online, more than 150 people had logged on to watch the sentencing.
A high school coach is accused of abusing two teens. More feel victimized.
Shipley, dressed in a light suit and dark mask, pressed his hands together atop the table as he listened to her speak. At points, he shook his head, as if in disagreement.
“What was modeled as normal, commonplace, and acceptable was in fact toxic, and targeted, and has left mental, emotional and psychological scars,” the community representative said.
She described Shipley’s insensitivity to their struggles — mental health crises, self-harm, eating disorders. His method of isolating girls, pitting them against their friends for a spot in the coveted top boat, which could earn them attention from top colleges. The intimate conversations shared in his classroom at lunchtime, beginning with chats about rowing or schoolwork and evolving into the confiding of crushes and sexual firsts.
The girls didn’t fully realize what was happening at the time, the representative said. Many were terrified of retribution from the larger rowing community, where Shipley wielded power and influence. They relied on a whisper network, with older rowers warning younger students about Shipley’s behavior. It was only later that they learned this kind of manipulation and betrayal by a trusted adult had a name: grooming.
She was followed by statements from the two victims, read by their attorney Matthew Ornstein, from the Network for Victim Recovery of D.C.
“In light of what has occurred, my life has irreversibly changed,” wrote the first victim, who graduated in 2018. “The period of grooming I experienced has continued to shape my relationships with authority figures into the present day."
“It is not complicated when a coach or a teacher takes advantage of the trust inherent to those roles and twists that into a relationship of sorts,” wrote the second victim, who graduated in 2013. “It is not complicated when he waits until right after you graduate to invite you over to his apartment and then makes a move on you under the pretenses that ‘you’re just friends and this is what adults do’ – even though you are in fact 17 and he is almost 40.”
“The abuse began not long after my 18th birthday,” wrote a third victim, who wasn’t included in the charges against Shipley. “Later, when I finally worked up the courage to end my relationship with Shipley, I can only describe the feeling as a spell being lifted, or as if a veil had been suddenly ripped off my eyes. There was indescribable guilt. Shame. Horror. I felt like I was going to drown in it all.”
As bailiffs guided Shipley to a side door in the courtroom, Terri Ravick hugged Colleen Parent. Both are mothers of former Whitman rowers. Ravick was one of the first to raise the alarm about Shipley’s behavior in 2018.
Ravick, who teaches science at a neighboring high school and whose daughter rowed at Whitman until 2018, had heard a rumor that Shipley was having a sexual relationship with a girl on the team. But the board of the parent-run and parent-funded club team — which paid him $34,500, in addition to the $101,656 he made teaching in Montgomery County — allowed Shipley to continue coaching, just as they had after a previous investigation into his behavior.
After the sentencing, the Network for Victim Recovery of D.C. hailed the message it sent.
“One of the reasons it’s so hard for survivors of sexual abuse to come forward is the fear that they won’t be believed or that nothing will be done about their abuse,” the group said in a statement. “So, we are grateful the court saw Mr. Shipley for what he truly is and held him accountable for abuse and manipulation he inflicted over the last two decades.” | 2022-09-09T22:43:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Former Whitman rowing coach Kirk Shipley gets three years for sex abuse - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/09/kirk-shipley-sentencing-sex-abuse-whitman/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/09/kirk-shipley-sentencing-sex-abuse-whitman/ |
Live updates Frances Tiafoe faces Carlos Alcaraz in U.S. Open semifinal
How Carlos Alcaraz got to the semifinal
How Frances Tiafoe got to the semifinal
Frances Tiafoe is trying to become the first American man to win a Grand Slam singles title since 2003. (Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)
Frances Tiafoe will take on Carlos Alcaraz in the semifinals of the U.S. Open on Friday. Follow along for the latest updates.
When: After 7 p.m.
Tiafoe played with two mighty emotions fueling him Wednesday in what was either the biggest or the second-biggest match of his career, depending on how Monday’s win fits into his pantheon. A feeling of freedom and self-belief helped power him to a 7-6 (7-3), 7-6 (7-0), 6-4 win over world No. 11 Andrey Rublev, putting him in the first Grand Slam semifinal of his career. | 2022-09-09T22:52:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S. Open live updates: Frances Tiafoe vs. Carlos Alcaraz - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/09/frances-tiafoe-carlos-alcaraz-us-open/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/09/frances-tiafoe-carlos-alcaraz-us-open/ |
As one of several changes for the 2023 MLB season, the bases will go from 15 inches square to 18. (Lachlan Cunningham/MLB Photos via Getty Images)
Potentially transformative new rules will be in place for the 2023 MLB regular season, the league announced Friday after the majority of members on a joint competition committee voted in favor of implementing a pitch clock, ban on shifts, and larger bases.
Potential transformation is coming to the minor leagues, too: After the Major League Baseball Players’ Association announced Wednesday it had joined the AFL-CIO, a week after the union indicated it would make a push to unionize the minors, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said Friday the league will voluntarily recognize a minor league players’ union — a surprising step given the longstanding tension between baseball’s governing bodies.
“We, I believe, notified the MLBPA today that we’re prepared to executive an agreement on voluntary recognition. I think they’re working on the language as we speak,” Manfred said in response to a question at the end of the news conference at which he announced the rule changes.
The union declined to comment on the process, which has moved fast to this point, but could slow as the sides delve into the details of that agreement. MLBPA Executive Director Tony Clark told the Post Wednesday he hopes the union can negotiate a collective bargaining agreement for its minor leaguers by spring training, though the process of recognition is the first hurdle in what could be a winding road to minor leaguers’ first CBA.
The journey to implementing Friday’s rule changes — most notably banning shifts and implementing the pitch clock — was grueling. Both rules were discussed as league dreams for years before finally being tested in the minor leagues, then reaching the desk of that joint committee, which the players association agreed would consist of six MLB representatives, four players, and one umpire.
The MLBPA released a statement making clear that none of the four players on the committee voted in favor of the pitch clock or shifts ban, explaining that MLB officials had not taken player feedback into consideration when finalizing their rule proposals. But the union agreed to the joint committee in this spring’s contentious collective bargaining process, signing off on a committee format that virtually guaranteed MLB could push through any rule changes regardless of what the players involved thought about them.
“Player leaders from across the league were engaged in on-field rules negotiations through the Competition Committee, and they provided specific and actionable feedback on the changes proposed by the Commissioner’s Office,” the union said in a statement Friday. “Major League Baseball was unwilling to meaningfully address the areas of concern that Players raised, and as a result, Players on the Competition Committee voted unanimously against the implementation of the rules covering defensive shifts and the use of a pitch timer.”
Manfred acknowledged the rules were not, and will not be, universally accepted by all factions of major league players, some of whom benefit from the shifts more than others, some of whom will find themselves and their between-pitch routines affected far more by the pitch clock than others.
“It’s hard to get consensus among a group of players on changing the game, taking a stance that we should change the game,” Manfred said. “I think that the end of the day, what we did here was about giving fans the kind of game they want to see after giving careful consideration to all those constituents.”
Manfred, sitting alongside consultant Theo Epstein and MLB executive vice president Morgan Sword, made the announcement during a news conference that was shown on East Coast clubhouse televisions just as players began trickling in for Friday night games. The news did not come as a surprise. But at least in the New York Yankees clubhouse, the announcement sparked discussions among executives, players, and managers as they glanced up at the screens.
“I’m on board with it. I think they’re things that have a chance to have a positive impact on our game. We’ll see right?” Yankees Manager Aaron Boone said. “...Hopefully these are things that can be small things that lead to a more entertaining and better product overall. I’m at least hopeful that these things will be positives.”
San Francisco Giants Manager Gabe Kapler, called the changes “major” and processed them from his own team’s perspective: He told NBC Sports and others the pitch clock could help the Giants’ pitching staff, which has been taught to “push the pace” and will not have to adjust.
Cubs Manager David Ross chuckled when asked about the bigger bases, which will grow from 15 inches square to 18 inches square in accordance with the committee’s only unanimous vote. Some have posited they will induce more stolen bases. Others have suggested the greatest benefit will be player safety, providing more room for fielders and runners to avoid collisions at the base.
Tampa Bay Rays Manager Kevin Cash told MLB Network radio that if fans want the changes these rules could create, he and his players should listen. He added that his organization will take the winter to figure out exactly how to operate within the new regulations.
“We’ll work hard this offseason to wrap our heads around the best ways to communicate it to the players, work on it in spring training, and see if there are some advantages we can pick up on,” Cash said.
That the rules became official Friday means everyone will have plenty of time to alter their rosters, strategies, and approach to account for the changes, which will be implemented in spring training. Change has been a constant in MLB since the 2020 pandemic, as players have adjusted to health and safety protocols, a universal designated hitter, new sticky stuff checks, and more. | 2022-09-09T22:52:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | MLB officially approves pitch clock, ban on shifts, bigger bases - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/09/mlb-rules-pitch-clock/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/09/mlb-rules-pitch-clock/ |
University expresses regret for ‘deficiencies’ in its reporting of undergraduate class sizes and faculty credentials
Scene from the Columbia University campus in New York. (Sarah Blesener for The Washington Post)
Columbia University disclosed Friday that it had reported faulty data on class size and faculty credentials to a publication that produces widely known college rankings — errors that it attributed to a reliance on “outdated and/or incorrect methodologies.”
Ultimately, the university lost that ranking as it sought to answer questions the professor raised about data on class size, faculty and other matters that Columbia sent to U.S. News. Friday’s statement capped an internal review of the matter.
“We deeply regret the deficiencies in our prior reporting and are committed to doing better,” Columbia’s provost, Mary Boyce, said in the statement.
U.S. News published last year a chart showing 83 percent of Columbia’s classes in fall 2020 had fewer than 20 students. It was the highest such share reported that year among the top 50 universities.
Thaddeus said he was flabbergasted to see the data sets, and didn’t want to comment on the specifics until he had a chance to go through the information. But he said, “The way Columbia administrators have handled the whole matter has seriously damaged,” the university’s credibility.
Columbia to skip U.S. News rankings after professor questioned data
Columbia’s ascent on the prestige list drew skepticism from Thaddeus, a professor of mathematics, who published in February, with an update in March, a blistering critique of the university’s data reporting and the rankings themselves.
Thaddeus, curious about the numbers behind Columbia’s position, dove into the U.S. News ranking methodology and what he could glean from publicly available sources on the university’s faculty, enrollment, class sizes and finances. He found what he believed were troubling discrepancies between what the university was claiming on certain key measures and what might actually be the case. For instance, he calculated that the share of undergraduate classes with under 20 students was probably between 62.7 percent and 66.9 percent — not the 82.5 percent that the university appeared to claim.
“The role played by Columbia itself in this drama is troubling and strange,” Thaddeus wrote in his critique. “In some ways its conduct seems typical of an elite institution with a strong interest in crafting a positive image from the data that it collects.” | 2022-09-09T23:39:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Columbia University says it gave incorrect data for U.S. News rankings - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/09/columbia-usnews-college-ranking/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/09/columbia-usnews-college-ranking/ |
WASHINGTON, US - AUGUST 29: Students are seen on the first day of school at Eleanor Roosevelt High School on Aug. 29 in Greenbelt, Md. (Michael A. McCoy/For The Washington Post)
When Rayanna Morris saw news of a juvenile curfew in Prince George’s County, she wasn’t opposed to it, she said, but felt like the decision from the county executive “popped up out of the blue."
Morris, a senior at Parkdale High School in Riverdale Park, said while the reasoning behind it was understandable, she thought that students’ voices should have been included in the decision.
“When changes are made that impact minors or youth in general, they’re the last people to know, and I feel like they’re the first people that should know," Morris, 17, said. She added that when the announcement rolled out, students across the county were confused about the curfew’s rules.
Angela D. Alsobrooks announced enforcement of a long-standing youth curfew earlier this week, following roughly two years of rising violence and an August that’s become the county’s deadliest month in four decades. Enforcement will begin Friday at 11:59 p.m. and last at least 30 days.
Under the curfew, children 16 and younger are not to be outside in public areas from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. Sunday through Thursday, and from 11:59 p.m. to 5 a.m. Friday and Saturday. The District has also resumed its juvenile curfew, which restricts activity for those under 17 during nighttime hours.
Alsobrooks’s announcement has drawn a mix of fans and skeptics. Among teens, it’s spurred an influx of questions.
“I think if I sit down and think about it, I could write a book on how many questions I’ve had,” La’Niyah King-Brooks, 14, said, who attends school in the district, but lives in Suitland, Md. La’Niyah was reconsidering searching for a part-time job, she said, because she wasn’t sure what would happen if her shift ended past curfew hours. The county code being enforced by police concerned her, since she said law enforcement “either take their job too seriously or not seriously enough."
The county code does allow an exemption for children who are legally employed and carry a card of employment with their hours written on it.
Under the Prince George’s juvenile curfew rules, children are allowed to be outside during curfew hours if accompanied by a parent or authorized adult. There’s also an exception if a child is taking a direct route home within one hour of the end of a school activity, religious activity or voluntary activity, like going to the movies or a sports game.
But county youths say there hasn’t been enough education on their rights surrounding the curfew. Alvaro Ceron-Ruiz, the student member of the Prince George’s County Board of Education, said he believes that students shouldn’t be out late at night, but “students obviously don’t want the government restraining what times they’re out.” When reached this week, it was unclear to him what would happen to students who are out late past curfew hours because of a school-sanctioned event.
“If I haven’t heard the guidance, that means students haven’t gotten the guidance,” Ceron-Ruiz, a 17-year-old senior at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, said. “My hope is that by Friday when they plan to issue this, is that information is clear for students and youth."
Officials with Prince George’s school system declined to comment for this story, including answering whether they were involved in the county executive’s decision to enact the curfew. Juanita Miller, the school board chair, said she was not aware of any member of the board who was included in a discussion about the curfew.
Alsobrooks’ administration released in a newsletter Friday more information about the curfew’s exceptions, and noted that police officers would be “focused on education first.” Law enforcement will review the curfew rules with the youth, tell them to go home and notify a parent or guardian. If they are caught out again after hours, police will wait with the child for two hours while a parent or guardian is contacted. If they can’t be tracked down, the child will be turned over to social services. There are also fines for parents and businesses allowing children to be out after curfew hours.
“We know that a curfew will not end violence. This is just one new tool that we are using in our crime prevention efforts,” Alsobrooks wrote. “We want to reach and engage parents in a different way, and get them to be better partners in supporting our children."
Rachel Sherman, who has a 17-year-old daughter attending a private school in the county, said she wasn’t against the curfew, but the county needed to be “more proactive than reactive.” Sherman pointed to the consolidation of the county’s alternative schools as an example, arguing that the schools’ programs were a proactive approach in preventing teenagers from engaging in crime but the school system chose to close some of the programs.
At a Prince George’s school board meeting Thursday, board members did not directly reference the county curfew, but asked multiple questions about school safety and mental health supports during a back-to-school presentation. School system administrators said they were working in partnership with county police to keep guns out of schools. They also have hired 167 mental health clinicians for the school year, which is 27 more than last year.
Miller said she was concerned about the homicide rate going up, adding that it was scaring students as they made their commutes to and from school. She added that the school system is asking for parents’ help by being vigilant about what children are bringing home. The school system is offering as much protection as they can, Miller said, “but we can’t protect them from what’s out there on the streets ...” | 2022-09-09T23:40:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Teens say they have questions, wanted input on Prince George’s curfew - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/09/prince-georges-school-curfew/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/09/prince-georges-school-curfew/ |
The unsung virtues of a one-term presidency
A legacy can be secured in four years, but incumbents tend to ignore the value of an early exit
Perspective by Matthew Dallek
Matthew Dallek is a historian and professor of political management at George Washington University’s College of Professional Studies. His book "Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right," will be published in March.
President Joe Biden arrives at Dover Air Force Base, in Dover, Del., on Friday. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
In his speech in Philadelphia on Sept. 1 warning of the threat to democracy posed by “MAGA Republicans,” President Biden reminded Americans that he ran for president “because I believed we were in a battle” for the “soul of this nation.” His themes included a strong reprise of the speech he made announcing his candidacy three years ago, when he named this same battle and linked it to President Donald Trump’s “fine-people-on-both-sides” remarks about the 2017 racist march in Charlottesville. “In that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime,” Biden said then.
He clearly sees the soul-of-the-nation battle as defining his presidency — and seems to suggest that it is his to win. Biden is on a mission, his remarks imply, and he is rising to the occasion, meeting the central crisis of this era.
In Philadelphia, he also appeared to signal his intent to seek a second term in order to finish this foundational fight. But the speech served a dual purpose: It left open the door to a reelection bid by setting the themes of a possible future campaign, but it was also a legacy statement should he decide to walk away.
For many decades, the default choice of an incumbent president has been to go for a second term. It’s less clear-cut for Biden, who faces drags on his chances that include the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the stubborn persistence of inflation, a pandemic that refuses to go away and the actuarial tables: At 79, he is the nation’s oldest chief executive — on Election Day 2024, he will be 81 — and many Democrats are champing at the bit for a new generation of leaders.
Regardless of the obstacles to achieving four more years in the Oval Office, there are good reasons for valuing a single term in its own right. It has unsung virtues that too many incumbents ignore at their — and the country’s — peril.
They ran for a second term — and lost
John Adams, 1797-1801 (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
The factors impelling Biden to run again are considerable and alluring. The culture that encases the presidency tells Oval Office occupants that running for reelection is a must. The often heard convention chant, “four more years,” connotes the possibility of lasting achievements and history-shattering greatness. A second term for the modern president is equivalent to the holy grail. Another stint in the White House enables a president to build upon the first-term agenda, keep molding the federal judiciary in one’s ideological image, deepen one’s legacy overseas and push one’s party in fresh directions. Presidents who serve second terms are said to be the shapers of history, individuals who move the country in a fundamentally different direction, and the narcotic of winning four more years in the White House and of having voters ratify one’s first term in a kind of national referendum is virtually irresistible.
Jimmy Carter, the most successful one-term president in history?
The presidents widely regarded as America’s greatest all achieved second terms. George Washington served two terms, setting the bar for probity, before relinquishing power and returning to his estate at Mount Vernon to live out his days. Although Abraham Lincoln was assassinated early in his second term, he was seen as the only one who could preserve the Union, and his second-term inaugural address stands as an ode to the power and grandeur of a second tour in the White House. Franklin Roosevelt needed more than four years to enshrine the New Deal into law and society, save capitalism from ruin and lead the free world in the fight to defeat the fascist powers. Saving democracy, the thinking runs, required multiple terms in office.
It was no accident that in 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama cited President Ronald Reagan’s two terms as his model of a chief executive who inalterably changed the nation’s orientation. Presidents see eight years as the bare minimum if they want to meaningfully shift the country’s direction. Adoption of the 22nd Amendment in 1951 — “no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice” — enshrined into the Constitution the very notion that two terms is the norm and the aspiration. (The amendment didn’t apply to Harry Truman, but he declined to run for reelection in 1952, having already served seven years.) Thus, since the amendment’s adoption, the only president to forgo a reelection bid was the architect of the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson — hardly a model his successors have wished to emulate.
In spite of all the forces pushing Biden and his predecessors toward seeking four more White House years, let’s recognize that single terms have merit, and that if Biden were to opt to depart on his own terms, his legacy might be burnished rather than sullied.
On balance, the second half of an eight-year tenure is harder on presidents and the country than the first half. The White House tends to be drained of energy, often becomes engulfed in scandal, and presidents face even fiercer headwinds on Capitol Hill during second terms. George W. Bush announced at a news conference shortly after his triumphant reelection victory in 2004: “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it.” As so many presidents learn, the capital wasn’t nearly as substantial as advertised.
Bush’s second term was upended on myriad fronts. He proposed the privatization of Social Security, but the initiative foundered. His fellow Republicans blocked his effort to pass comprehensive immigration reform that included a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Iraq remained mired in conflict and bloodshed, and Afghanistan became a stalemate. The administration’s bungled response to Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 financial collapse, made for one of the hardest second terms in modern times, and Bush left office with approval ratings hovering around 30 percent. (Losing reelection is also a bitter experience that few people have known. President George W. Bush observed that his father’s 1992 reelection defeat dealt a “sting” that “lingered.”)
Second terms find ways to bleed power and prestige from the Oval Office. The imperial presidency surfaces when presidents feel liberated following their reelection victories, and in the modern era, scandals have sometimes crowded out a president’s second-term agenda. The Watergate scandal originated in the break-in of Democratic headquarters during Nixon’s reelection campaign. The cover-up largely unfolded early in Nixon’s second term. The Iran-contra affair — in which Reagan administration officials hatched a scheme in violation of the law to trade arms for hostages with Iran in order to fund “freedom fighters” in Nicaragua — was another second-term debacle. Reagan’s growing detachment from the details of governing as he aged in his second term helped seed the scandal. The Monica Lewinsky affair was uncovered in Bill Clinton’s second term, triggering his impeachment. All those presidents got things done amid the uproars, but the scandals drained their political capital and buoyed their opponents.
Perhaps the greatest problem with second-term presidents is their tendency to rely more exclusively on executive actions, as partisan opponents in Congress block their priorities. Deploying the presidential “pen” and “phone,” as Obama vowed he would do in his 2014 State of the Union address, is far more tenuous than congressionally approved legislation. Executive orders can be overturned by a successor — also with a stroke of a pen. Courts find it easier to negate a president’s action that hasn’t been congressionally authorized. Even the chaos-prone Trump administration found ways to withdraw the United States from Obama’s Iran nuclear deal and reverse Obama’s historic opening to Cold War foe Cuba, both achievements of Obama’s second term brought about by executive action.
One-term presidents have underappreciated advantages, as well, and often look better in hindsight. A single term is enough for a president to forge a legacy that successors can pick up and build upon. Inspired by the small-government, pro-business ideology, Reagan hung one-termer Calvin Coolidge’s portrait in the White House Cabinet Room (Coolidge assumed the presidency upon Warren Harding’s death and won election in 1924). Two recent biographies have emphasized one-term president Jimmy Carter’s achievements in the realms of energy policy, environmental protections and Middle East accords. The single-term president George H.W. Bush has become something of a model for liberals and some conservatives for his internationalist foreign policy vision, his leadership in managing a peaceful end to the Cold War and the coalition he assembled to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from Kuwait without plunging the U.S. into a quagmire. Presidents who have served eight years typically notched their most influential, legacy-defining actions in their first terms: Reagan’s major tax cuts; Clinton’s deficit-cutting budgets and the assault weapons ban; George W. Bush’s two wars and domestic security legislation; Obama’s stimulus and sweeping health-care reform all occurred during their first four years in the White House.
By forgoing a second term, future presidents may well give more power to the first branch of government — Congress — and take a step toward curbing some of the president’s imperial powers. Making single terms the norm would address a problem that has long worried critics of the presidency as an institution. Wisconsin Sen. Alexander Wiley, a Republican, warned in 1947 that a multiterm president “always makes for dangers of dictatorship.” Trump’s presidency — particularly his shattering of democratic norms, desire to punish his enemies, use law enforcement and the military to keep himself in power, and crass erasure of the lines between his businesses and his office — revived fears among liberals and some conservatives of despots seizing power. One term can do a lot of damage to democracy, but a second term is far more dangerous. Ours is supposed to be a legislative government, with strictly limited presidential power, and Biden, of all people, with his decades in the Senate, is keenly aware of that.
Biden’s critics got it wrong when they dismissed his 2020 White House run as a futile exercise. He was correct that he was well-positioned to defeat Trump. But if he does decide against a race for re-election, it may well cement his legacy as the person who dealt a blow to Trumpism, defended American democracy and demonstrated to the world that the United States is still a force for freedom, even if it is under duress. | 2022-09-09T23:40:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | President Biden and the unsung virtues of a single term - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/09/09/biden-one-term-presidency/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/09/09/biden-one-term-presidency/ |
Katie Shepherd
State Sen. Tom Davis (R) reacts to Republicans trying to pass a near-total abortion ban in South Carolina on Sept. 8. The measure, which Davis opposed, failed. (Sam Wolfe/Reuters)
“We are not elected as kings or dictators. We’re elected to serve the will of people,” said West Virginia state Sen. Tom Takubo (R), who refused to support a near-total ban without rape and incest exceptions. “Even in the most rural and conservative parts of West Virginia, I still believe the majority thinks there should be exemptions for rape and incest.”
Sixty-nine percent of Americans, including 56 percent of Republicans, said abortion should be legal when the pregnancy resulted from rape, according to a March Pew Research Poll.
But lawmakers have been forced to reckon with a growing public backlash. Last month, voters overwhelmingly rejected an antiabortion amendment in Kansas that would have removed abortion protections from the state constitution. And Democrats who support abortion rights have won recent special elections in moderate districts, outperforming expectations.
“People are very divided,” state Sen. Penry Gustafson (R) said.
“You’ve got to know your people and who you’re representing,” said Gustafson, who ultimately supported a bill that largely mirrors the state’s six-week ban. “My vote directly reflects the will of my people.”
South Carolina state Sen. Tom Davis (R), who opposed the near-total ban without exceptions, said that he expects abortion to be a major issue for voters in November.
“We’re not just hearing from folks who feel passionately on the extremes ... we’re hearing from a lot of people who are somewhere in the middle,” Davis said. “Where it comes down remains to be seen at the polls.”
A version of that bill had been widely expected to pass until two physicians who serve in the state Senate — Takubo and Sen. Michael Maroney (R) — pushed for an amendment that would have removed criminal penalties for doctors. Others introduced an amendment to broaden the bill’s exceptions.
On Capitol Hill, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) had been planning behind the scenes to introduce a “heartbeat” ban in the Senate after the Supreme Court decision, lending the gravitas of one of the GOP’s most prominent female stars to legislation that would have banned the procedure nationwide before many people know they’re pregnant.
Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), founder and chair of the Senate Pro-Life Caucus, said he hasn’t had conversations with lawmakers about introducing a heartbeat-style bill in the chamber since the Supreme Court decision.
Instead, some antiabortion advocates are hopeful that Republican lawmakers will rally around a 15-week ban that Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) is expected to introduce this fall, a proposal that has long been denounced by many in the antiabortion movement because it would allow the vast majority of abortions to continue. Spokespeople for Graham didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
Even before an antiabortion amendment was resoundingly defeated in his home state, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) told The Washington Post that he was not confident there is a future for any kind of national abortion ban.
“I just don’t see the momentum at the federal level,” Marshall said in a July 25 interview, declining a request for a follow-up interview late last month. “I think the legislative priority should be at the states.”
“It meant we could see patients next week,” said clinic director Katie Quinonez, who had been bracing herself to call every patient on the schedule to tell them they had to get their abortions somewhere else. | 2022-09-09T23:40:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | GOP backs away from some hard-line abortion measures it once championed - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/09/republican-abortion-bans/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/09/republican-abortion-bans/ |
Students arrive for the first day of school at Eleanor Roosevelt High School on Aug. 29, 2022 in Greenbelt, MD. (Michael A. McCoy/For The Washington Post)
Academic data released this week from Prince George’s County Public Schools showed most students in the county are testing below grade level and not meeting expectations in math and English/language arts.
In a presentation to the county’s school board, administrators reviewed test scores from last school year on the district’s exams — called benchmark assessments. The data, showing overall results along with grade-level scores, show that although students made slight improvements from the 2020-2021 school year, less than 25 percent were “meeting expectations” in reading and language arts across grade levels for the first assessment. Math scores were lower with fewer than 10 percent of students meeting expectations on those tests.
Two benchmark assessments were given in the fall and winter, and a third optional assessment for schools was given in the spring. Students in third through 12th grades were given the tests.
Results for the third optional benchmark were not released during the board meeting.
Prince George’s scores follow last week’s release of test scores for D.C. students. Those results showed students’ math and reading scores dropped to the lowest levels in five years. Researchers estimate it could take until 2027 to catch students in the District up to pre-pandemic levels.
The local results mirror national scores released earlier this month for elementary school students whose math and reading scores plunged to their lowest levels in decades.
Prince George’s administrators said the school system results weren’t a complete picture of how students were fairing academically, since the state education department is reviewing how it defines reading and math proficiency.
They said that the scores improved compared with the 2020-21 school year. Third- to fifth-graders had a 5.3 percentage-point growth in reading and language arts, for example. In math, kindergartners and fifth graders showed an 8 percentage-point growth. (The school system did not share growth rates from kindergarten to second grade for reading and language arts.)
Outside of the benchmark scores, administrators separately shared students’ final academic grades to provide a glimpse of student performance. Grades have improved since the beginning of the pandemic, administrators said. Those results showed that 36 percent of second-graders received an A in math, and 39 percent of second-graders received an A in reading and language arts. Of all high-schoolers, 18 percent received an A in high school math and 21 percent received an A in reading and language arts.
Pamela Boozer-Strother (District 3) emphasized the toll virtual learning took on students, adding that “nothing has been typical” for most students.
“Parents painfully feel this when you look at this … and you see the results, that is not our children,” Boozer-Strother said. “We know our children are achieving more than this number.”
For the county’s assessments, school board members requested the data be categorized by student race, students who were a part of free- and reduced-price lunch programs, and students who were English-language learners. They also requested more information on how kindergartners performed on early reading assessments.
David Murray (District 1) asked for the school board to revisit the curriculums the school system is using.
“That impacts everything,” Murray said. “I hate to see our students potentially in a situation where they’re not achieving, just as a result of not being offered the best curriculums they possibly could.”
In addition to the school system’s own benchmark assessments, students also take the state’s standardized test, the Maryland Comprehensive Testing Program. Results for the state exam are expected to be released in January. | 2022-09-09T23:57:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Most Prince George’s students scoring below grade level on district tests - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/09/prince-georges-schools-test-scores/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/09/prince-georges-schools-test-scores/ |
Shane Jason Woods also admits assault on a police officer, faces 33 to 41 months in prison, prosecutors say
Trump supporters marched down Constitution Avenue and stormed and breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
FBI launches flurry of arrests over attacks on journalists during Capitol riot
A U.S. Capitol Police officer, described as “Officer A,” told agents that as she ran toward the person with the bear spray, Woods tripped her and pushed her to the ground, sending her crashing into a downed bicycle barricade. The officer felt immediate pain and the next day, she felt as if she had been “hit by a truck,” the statement of facts entered Friday says.
Woods’s whereabouts for the next three hours were not specified, but at 5 p.m., the FBI affidavit shows him at the mostly abandoned media area at the northeast corner of the Capitol, “standing with protesters who are yelling and spitting at members of the news media,” and then tossing some of the abandoned equipment.
A news photographer identified as “G.P.” was trying to leave the area to protect himself and his camera, according to the statement of facts. Woods took a running start and hit G.P. “with a blindside shoulder-tackle, knocking G.P. to the ground and causing him to drop his camera.” The extent of the photographer’s injuries was not known.
The U.S. attorney’s office for the District said Thursday that 870 people had been arrested for their actions on Jan. 6, 2021, and 269 of those are charged with assault on law enforcement. About 140 officers, 80 from the Capitol Police and 60 from the D.C. police, were assaulted that day, prosecutors said. | 2022-09-10T00:27:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Shane Jason Woods pleads guilty to assault on media on Jan. 6 Capitol attack - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/09/jan6-media-plea-woods/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/09/jan6-media-plea-woods/ |
This undated photo provided by the U.S. Marshals Service shows Leonard Francis, also known as “Fat Leonard,” who was on home confinement, and allegedly cut off his GPS ankle monitor and left his home on the morning of Sept. 4, 2022. Multiple agencies were searching for Francis on Tuesday Sept. 6, but they acknowledged he may already be in Mexico with the border only a 40-minute drive from his home. (Courtesy of U.S. Marshals Service via AP) (Uncredited/U.S. Marshals Service) | 2022-09-10T01:11:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | $40K offered for info to find fugitive in Navy bribery case - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/40k-offered-for-info-to-find-fugitive-in-navy-bribery-case/2022/09/09/b9938872-309d-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/40k-offered-for-info-to-find-fugitive-in-navy-bribery-case/2022/09/09/b9938872-309d-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html |
Trump and Justice Department disagree on special master candidates
Two sides still far apart on who should review the documents seized at Mar-a-Lago and the scope of such a review
This file photo released by the Department of Justice on August 31, 2022 shows documents allegedly seized at Mar-a-Lago spread over a carpet.(Handout/US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE/AFP via Getty Images)
The Justice Department and Donald Trump’s lawyers have failed to agree on a list of potential legal experts to review materials the FBI seized from the former president’s Florida residence, according to a Friday night court filing, and also disagree about what types of documents such a person should review.
The dispute now seems to be up to Judge Aileen M. Cannon to resolve, with each side proposing two people as possible special masters to examine the documents.
The Justice Department’s two proposed candidates are former judge Barbara S. Jones, who acted as a special master in an investigation of Trump’s former lawyer, Rudy Giuliani; and Thomas B. Griffith, a retired appeals judge for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Trump’s side suggested Raymond J. Dearie, the former chief judge of the federal court in Brooklyn, N.Y.; and Paul Huck, Jr., a former deputy attorney general for the state of Florida.
The government said in its filing that any special master review should exclude the more than 100 classified documents seized in the Aug. 8 raid on Mar-a-Lago, and prosecutors do not want the special master to consider documents that may be covered, in theory, by claims of executive privilege. The Trump legal team wants the special master review to include classified documents and says the outside expert should consider executive privilege when examining the materials.
Trump’s legal team asked the federal judge last month to appoint a special master to sift through more than 10,000 seized documents and determine if anything the FBI took may be protected by attorney-client privilege or his status as a former president.
On Monday, Cannon ruled in Trump’s favor and asked for the Justice Department and Trump’s lawyers to jointly submit a list of people that she could appoint as a special master. | 2022-09-10T02:34:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trump and Justice Department disagree on special master candidates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/09/trump-special-master-list/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/09/trump-special-master-list/ |
Patrick Corbin allowed 12 hits in Washington's 5-3 loss on Friday night. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
PHILADELPHIA — Patrick Corbin took the mound Friday night at Citizens Bank Park trying to exorcise his demons from a month ago. The last time he faced the Philadelphia Phillies, on Aug. 6, he was knocked out in the first inning.
This time around, after a recent stretch of improved starts, he made it through 6⅔ innings but allowed five runs and 12 hits as the Washington Nationals lost, 5-3.
Since last month’s nightmare in Philly, Corbin has relied heavily on his sinker, and he did so again Friday, throwing it 54 times in 69 total pitches (78 percent).
“He threw 15 balls all game, attacked the strike zone,” Martinez said. “Toward the end there, he just started elevating the balls. I think that’s what really got him. He was throwing the ball down. … He got early swings and some defensive plays. I thought he threw the ball really well.”
The downside to the pitch is that it doesn’t generate many swings and misses, and the contact can be loud. The Phillies put 22 sinkers in play off Corbin — compared to just three whiffs — and 14 of those swings had an exit velocity over 90 mph.
“They were aggressive tonight, really aggressive,” Corbin said. “Would’ve been nice to make it through that seventh there, made a couple of good pitches, but a couple of balls there fell in. … Just a unique line tonight.”
Kyle Schwarber set the tone when he hit a 112.8 mph line drive to open the bottom of the first, and Rhys Hoskins followed with a 101.3 mph bullet, but both were hit right at Lane Thomas in center field for outs.
Dalton Guthrie gave the Phillies a 1-0 lead in the third inning with a single on a first-pitch sinker after Corbin allowed a triple to Edmundo Sosa the batter before. In the following inning, Hoskins blasted a slider for a homer to double the lead.
J.T. Realmuto hit an RBI single later in the fourth on a sinker after Alec Bohm doubled on the pitch in the previous at-bat. Washington scored two runs in the fifth, but Reamluto hit an opposite field homer in the sixth off the pitch to give Philadelphia a 4-2 lead.
Alex Call followed a 4-for-5 game on Thursday with three more hits Friday, including a solo homer in the seventh inning to cut Philadelphia’s lead to 4-3.
The Phillies ended Corbin’s night with two weak hits off sinkers — Guthrie squibbed a two-out RBI that rolled into no man’s land between the mound and first base at 58.5 mph to push the Phillies ahead 5-3. Then, Corbin jammed Schwarber, who hit a ball at 75.7 mph into left field.
Corbin said it wasn’t his plan to throw as many sinking fastballs as he did, but that’s how the game unfolded. Martinez said he would have liked to have seen Corbin throw more off-speed pitches during his third time through the order to keep hitters off-balance.
“He had all those righties in [the Phillies lineup], I thought that would’ve been a perfect spot for him to throw his changeup,” Martinez said. “He didn’t throw any. So that’s something that we’ll talk to him about the next day or two.”
What happened in the top of the ninth inning? Call and Ildemaro Vargas picked up two-out singles to bring the go-ahead run to the plate, but Riley Adams grounded out to end the game.
What roster moves were made before Friday’s game? The Nationals selected the contract of catcher Israel Pineda from Class AAA Rochester on Friday. Pineda was replacing Keibert Ruiz, who was placed on the 10-day injured list with a testicular contusion. Ruiz was hit in the groin by a foul ball in the bottom of the second and exited the game later.
To clear space on the 40-man roster, left-handed pitcher Jake McGee was designated for assignment and right-handed pitcher Jordan Weems was called up to fill his spot in the bullpen.
Ruiz is set to join the Nationals in Philadelphia after spending the night in a hospital in St. Louis. Ruiz cannot partake in “any strenuous activities for three weeks,” said Manager Dave Martinez, who wouldn’t commit to Ruiz being out for the season but, with 23 games left in the season, didn’t sound optimistic he would make another appearance.
Pineda, 22, is the Nationals’ 22nd-ranked prospect according to MLB Pipeline. He started this season in High-A Wilmington and made a quick rise to the majors. He was called up to Class AA Harrisburg on July 22 and played in 26 games before being called up to Rochester on Aug. 31. He played just six games in Class AAA before being called up Friday. Martinez said Pineda will split playing time with Tres Barrera and Riley Adams.
When will MacKenzie Gore make his next start? Sunday for Class AAA Rochester. Gore has been recovering from elbow inflammation since July 26, when he was with the San Diego Padres before being included in the Juan Soto/Josh Bell trade. The plan is for Gore to make at least one start with the big league team so he can finish this season healthy.
Who made an appearance at Friday’s game? First lady Jill Biden. She participated in the pregame festivities for the Phillies, who hosted Childhood Cancer Awareness Night. | 2022-09-10T02:42:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nationals fall to Phillies as Patrick Corbin’s sinker gets hit hard - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/09/phillies-nationals-patrick-corbin-sinker/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/09/phillies-nationals-patrick-corbin-sinker/ |
Esther Cooper Jackson, early activist for civil rights, dies at 105
Esther Cooper Jackson at the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University's Hutchins Center in 2011. (Elise Amendola/AP)
Esther Cooper Jackson, a civil rights activist, feminist and onetime member of the Communist Party who was regarded by the end of her life as an elder stateswoman of the American left, died Aug. 23 at a nursing facility in Boston. She was 105.
Her family confirmed her death but did not cite a cause.
Ms. Jackson spent decades on the forefront of the movement for racial justice — and decades more as a repository of knowledge about the social, political and intellectual movements that helped shape the United States in the 20th century.
“Esther Cooper Jackson’s activism in the Black freedom movement spans over [70 years], and her contributions are nearly impossible to quantify,” Sara Rzeszutek, a professor of history at St. Francis College in Brooklyn and the author of a book about Ms. Jackson’s activism, wrote in an email.
“Over that time, she adapted her approach to the changing times and to fit the different phases of her life, whether she was a grass-roots leader in the South, an advocate for civil liberties in the fight against McCarthyism, or as an editor providing a platform for up and coming cultural contributors,” Rzeszutek continued. “While her activism adapted and evolved, she remained consistent in her commitment to building broad coalitions among leftist and radical leaders and groups, mainstream civil rights workers, and the ordinary people who would benefit from her efforts.”
Raised in a middle-class Black family in Arlington, Va., Ms. Jackson began her career as a civil rights activist in the 1940s, when she went to Alabama as a volunteer with the Southern Negro Youth Congress. She helped organize voter-registration drives and became executive secretary of the organization, which was notable for including women in leadership positions. The group’s civil rights work presaged that of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s.
Ms. Jackson’s husband, James E. Jackson Jr., had been among the founders of SNYC in 1937. Both joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and saw their lives upended by anti-communist fervor in the years after World War II.
James Jackson became a party official and spent years as a fugitive after being charged along with other party members in 1951 under the Smith Act of 1940, which outlawed the advocacy of the violent overthrow of the government. He was convicted in 1956 but was spared prison time after the U.S. Supreme Court essentially gutted the Smith Act in a ruling in 1957.
“We tried to pick up right where we left off,” Ms. Jackson said in an interview with Richmond magazine years later.
In 1961, working alongside Black scholar and author W.E.B. Du Bois, Ms. Jackson helped found Freedomways, a quarterly journal that for a quarter-century served as a showcase for Black intellectuals. She became managing editor and a guiding force of the periodical as it published the works of such writers as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Derek Walcott, Nikki Giovanni and Alice Walker.
“As editor of Freedomways magazine, she gave the liberation struggles and movements across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States a beacon light. She gave old and newer voices a place to write and be heard,” Maurice Jackson, a professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown University said after her death in an interview with People’s World, a publication that traces its roots to the Daily Worker.
Esther Victoria Cooper was born in Arlington on Aug. 21, 1917. Her father was an Army lieutenant, and her mother, an employee of the U.S. Forest Service, was president of the local NAACP chapter. Ms. Jackson grew up in relative comfort in a home where learning was valued above all else, once recalling that her parents spent their money on a set of Harvard Classics rather than on expensive furniture.
After graduating from Dunbar High School in Washington, Ms. Jackson enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio, where she received a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1938. Two years later, she received a master’s degree, also in sociology, from Fisk University, a historically Black institution in Nashville. Her thesis, “The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism,” marked the beginning of her interest in community organizing.
She and her husband were married in 1941. After her work with the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Ms. Jackson was active with organizations including the Progressive Party, the Civil Rights Congress, the National Committee to Defend Negro Leadership and the Families of Smith Act Victims. She spent most of her professional life in New York City.
She and her husband, who died in 2007, were the subjects of studies including Rzeszutek’s book “James and Esther Cooper Jackson: Love and Courage in the Black Freedom Movement” (2015).
Survivors include their two daughters, Harriet Jackson Scarupa of Silver Spring, Md., and Kathryn Jackson of Cambridge, Mass.; a grandson; and two great-grandsons.
Reflecting on Ms. Jackson’s life, David Levering Lewis, a professor emeritus at New York University and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Du Bois, said in an interview that she represented “a commitment to change, which was not dogmatic, which was not hamstrung by any kind of ideology, but rather … simply channeled the great vitality of the secular left.”
“We’ve made many gains, but there are still many problems,” Ms. Jackson said in 2016. “As we would say then, the struggle continues. From the beginning of this country, Blacks have been fighting for their rights. And that continues; it’s different, but it continues.” | 2022-09-10T03:52:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Esther Cooper Jackson, early civil rights activist, dies at 105 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/09/esther-cooper-jackson-civil-rights-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/09/esther-cooper-jackson-civil-rights-dead/ |
Dear Carolyn: My stepmother-in-law is very rude to me, but only when she’s alone with me. For example, when my husband and children were in the other room and I was with her and the rest of her family, she told a story about how stupid my mom was for not knowing what a Caprese salad was, while everybody else laughed. My partner doesn’t seem to think she’s being rude, just clueless. She has also told me they’re never going to visit us, because I have my parents. I’m sad my kids can’t have a relationship with their grandfather because she interferes so much.
I can’t stomach even seeing them anymore, and it’s causing a big rift in the family. She’s making me feel as if I’m crazy, because she only says things to me when my partner is out of sight. I don’t know what to do or think anymore, so I completely avoid them.
There’s a lot more to it than this, obviously. Please help. I don’t want to give this horrible woman any more power than she already has over me.
— Feeling Crazy
Feeling Crazy: She sounds like a gaslighter. Two steps for dealing with those, besides healthy avoidance:
1. Stand up for yourself. She’s doing this to overpower you, and you’re not “crazy.”
Let’s say she meant to tell a perfectly harmless story. Even then — since when are you not entitled to your own opinion about it? “If I hear you correctly, you’re laughing at my mom behind her back and in front of me.” Or however you’d describe it. Paraphrase, then wait. Let her either admit it or explain herself otherwise. This tells her she’s not getting away with her [stuff].
2. Ask “your” people to stand up for you. Your husband’s, “Oh, she’s just clueless,” doesn’t fly. Please tell him this. Calmly explain that you tried to look at it his way, in hopes he was correct, and came to your own conclusion that his stepmother is not only being rude, but also choosing her moments to be rude for the purpose of escaping others’ detection.
And if he reiterates his disagreement, then spell out to him that he is choosing to invalidate the judgment and perceptions of the person he married and lives with, and perhaps he’d like to take a moment to weigh further what you have witnessed directly — out of his presence. And whether he really means to say that what you have witnessed directly out of his presence didn’t actually happen.
I’m sorry he didn’t back you up right away, for all these reasons.
When you and your husband work this out between you, then you can work on the problem of access to Grandpa.
How you know she’s rude and not clueless: She doesn’t do it in front of your spouse. Don’t ask how I know this.
Rather than waste your energy wondering, “Am I wrong about this?” try sitting with the statement, “I AM being gaslighted.” Give yourself the opportunity to trust your self-protective instincts. It’s a rush of power that can free you to say no more loudly and effectively than you ever thought you could.
If the husband won’t start believing her and stepping up, I would definitely advise couples counseling. If it were me, it would make me wonder what else my husband won’t believe me on in future. | 2022-09-10T04:14:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Stepmother-in-law is rude — when no one else can see it - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/09/10/carolyn-hax-stepmother-in-law-rude/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/09/10/carolyn-hax-stepmother-in-law-rude/ |
Britain's King Charles III arrives at Buckingham Palace on Sept. 9 after the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II. (Henry Nicholls/Reuters)
As the world mourns Queen Elizabeth II, King Charles III begins his reign. The Accession Council, a ceremonial body that includes senior officials from the government and the Church of England, will convene Saturday morning to formally proclaim the new king at St. James’s Palace in London. Afterward, from a balcony at the palace, the proclamation will be read to the public.
The United Kingdom will be in a period of national mourning for Elizabeth until her state funeral at Westminster Abbey, expected about 10 days from her death. Crowds began gathering in front of Buckingham Palace on Thursday evening, as tributes to the queen’s legacy — not to mention her wit and fashion sense — continued to pour in.
Here is the latest.
President Biden told reporters Friday that he will be attending Elizabeth’s funeral, after stopping by the British Embassy in Washington to express his condolences. “I don’t know what the details are yet, but I’ll be going,” he said.
Charles made his first speech on Friday evening, dressed in black and speaking in measured tones. He thanked his “darling mama” for her love and devotion, and pledged to devote his remaining years “to uphold the constitutional principles at the heart of our nation.”
Irish politicians have expressed their condolences over the queen’s death, praising her efforts to repair strained ties between Ireland and Britain. But many reactions in Ireland were mixed, speaking to a painful history of conflict and colonial rule.
At 10 a.m., the Accession Council will gather at London’s St. James’s Palace, a former residence of English kings and queens. Charles will “read and sign an oath to uphold the security of the Church in Scotland,” according the royal family’s official website.
At 11 a.m., the Garter King of Arms, an adviser to the sovereign and government on ceremonial matters, will read the proclamation marking the accession of a new king from a balcony overlooking Friary Court at St. James’s Palace, the first reading in public.
At 12 p.m., the proclamation will be read at the Royal Exchange in London. In a statement, the Royal Exchange called the coming proclamation a “profound moment in our country’s history.” Further proclamations will be made across the country.
At 1 p.m., both houses of the British parliament will meet to continue tributes to the late queen. Some senior members of both chambers will take an oath to the new king. In a day that could end as late as 10 p.m., British lawmakers will offer a message of sympathy to Charles.
Camilla is now the queen consort. What does it mean? The key difference between the queen and the queen consort is that the queen is an ascendant to the throne through succession. The queen consort is the wife of the reigning monarch.
An American tourist once asked Elizabeth: Have you ever met the queen? A favorite story about the queen’s wicked sense of humor involves the time she happened upon an American tourist hiking near her Balmoral estate in the Scottish highlands. He clearly didn’t recognize her, asking: Had she ever met the queen? “I haven’t,” the queen responded. Then she pointed at her protection officer, Richard Griffin, and said he “meets her regularly.”
The hiker asked Griffin what the queen was like — “Oh, she can be very cantankerous at times, but she’s got a lovely sense of humor,” he replied — and then asked for a photo with the bodyguard, handing the queen a camera. (She happily obliged.)
It was just one of many times the queen showed her wit. The queen could dish out quips and one-liners, London correspondent Karla Adam writes, and even appeared in a comedy skit with Britain’s beloved Paddington Bear for her Platinum Jubilee celebration this year. Paddington tweeted this week upon her death: “Thank you Ma’am, for everything.” | 2022-09-10T05:19:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Queen Elizabeth death latest updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/10/queen-elizabeth-death-king-charles-latest-updates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/10/queen-elizabeth-death-king-charles-latest-updates/ |
The 19-year-old Carlos Alcaraz is eminently likeable, sprints and stomps around a tennis court like a prize stallion and shoots fire from his racket. Their semifinal match made it hard for fans to mourn Tiafoe’s exit too deeply when the pair made the future of the sport looked so tantalizing.
But Tiafoe’s achievements here are well worth savoring.
He walked off Arthur Ashe Stadium after a 6-7 (8-6), 6-3, 6-1, 6-7 (7-5), 6-3 loss and into the history books at the U.S. Open. The son of immigrants from Sierra Leone, Tiafoe was the first American man to reach a U.S. Open semifinal in 16 years and the first Black man to do so in 50.
In less than two weeks, the 24-year-old Hyattsville native, who arrived sporting Bradley Beal’s No. 3 Wizards jersey, captivated legions and elevated his status from a tennis player on the fringe of renown to a star.
That he is Black, has supporters in the major sports leagues and comes with an indelibly American story made his run that much more buzzworthy. The heart he brought to the tennis court didn’t hurt.
Tiafoe choked back tears as he addressed a packed Arthur Ashe Stadium, apologizing for falling short.
“I gave everything I had. Too good from Carlos tonight,” he said. “I gave everything — I gave everything I had for the last two weeks. I came here wanting to win the U.S. Open, I feel like I let everyone down. This one hurts.
“I’m going to come back and I will win this thing one day. I’m sorry guys.”
Martin Blackman, the U.S. Tennis Association’s general manager for player development, has dealt with stories akin to Tiafoe’s popping up at the U.S. Open, such as in 2017 when all four women’s semifinalists were American. In these cases, the USTA relies on established pathways to jump on a potential popularity boon for U.S. tennis.
Tiafoe is forcing them to think differently.
“He’s culturally relevant … and he’s cool. The question is, what we can do maybe a little bit differently to capitalize on his specific appeal. That will be something that we’ll be discussing, and we’ll want to move quickly on.”
For now, Tiafoe will bow out while Alcaraz advances to face Norway’s Casper Ruud in Sunday’s final with the U.S. Open trophy and the No. 1 ranking on the line.
The combination of Alcaraz’s style and Tiafoe’s compelling run made the semifinal match a huge draw before it began. Those who weren’t already familiar with the world No. 4, who goes by “Carlitos,” and his electric game got a taste Wednesday night when he and Jannik Sinner tangoed in an epic quarterfinal that ended at 2:50 a.m., the latest finish ever at the U.S. Open.
Before Friday’s match, Super Bowl MVP Patrick Mahomes sent Tiafoe an encouraging tweet, and Michelle Obama watched from a suite. Former New York Rangers’ goalie Henrik Lundqvist and actor Jamie Foxx were in the crowd. Former Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald sat next to Stan Smith, of tennis and the shoes.
Rooting for @FTiafoe tonight man! Go get it! 💪🏽💪🏽
The capacity audience tilted in Tiafoe’s favor (though Obama got the loudest ovation of the night), but plenty of Alcaraz fans came out, and the American didn’t have as big of an advantage as might have been expected. Mostly, people were elated to be spending their night watching two young dudes.
Tiafoe and Alcaraz dusted lines throughout a close first set and gifted Arthur Ashe Stadium the point of the tournament in the 12th game. The pair sprinted across the court in all four directions and lunged to trade five balletic volleys before Alcaraz won that one, bringing the stadium to its feet.
In the second set, Alcaraz played a ball so well that Tiafoe climbed over the net afterwards and looked as if he was going to slap him five. When he finally sat in his chair, there was nothing he could do but laugh.
Tiafoe had won the first set tiebreak to improve his record to 7-0 over the fortnight and tie Pete Sampras’s record for most tiebreaks won in a single U.S. Open.
But where his other opponents seemed to wilt in the aftermath, Alcaraz snapped back without pause. What was one more set to a guy who had spent a combined 9 hours 9 minutes on court in his previous two matches?
The Spaniard took the second set in 45 minutes and raced through the third in just 33 as Tiafoe’s level dropped precipitously. He had taken the first set in the same fashion he had bulldozed his way through the semifinals, with out-of-this-world serving. Tiafoe entered the match with nearly four times the number of aces Alcaraz had racked up throughout the tournament.
Tiafoe’s points won on his first serve dropped from 88 percent to 72 percent to 67 percent in each of the first three sets while his unforced errors rose, from seven to 10 to 12.
Alcaraz, who had arrived at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center at noon after his late night Wednesday thanks to teenage rejuvenation, never missed a chance to pounce. Tiafoe just absorbed the blows and rode the crowd’s tide enough to force a fourth-set tiebreak, summoning his serves from three hours earlier back from the dead.
He moved his record in tiebreaks to 8-0, saving a match point along the way. | 2022-09-10T05:41:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Frances Tiafoe’s U.S. Open run ends in semifinals to Carlos Alcaraz - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/10/frances-tiafoe-alcaraz-us-open/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/10/frances-tiafoe-alcaraz-us-open/ |
OAKLAND, Calif. — Elvis Andrus hit a tiebreaking double against his former team with two outs in a five-run ninth inning, and the Chicago White Sox — held hitless until the seventh — rallied past the Oakland Athletics 5-3 on Friday night.
Since the start of the 2017 season, the White Sox are just 5-12 at the Coliseum and haven’t won a series here since taking three of four to begin the ‘16 campaign. | 2022-09-10T05:46:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Andrus' 2-run double caps 5-run 9th, White Sox beat A's 5-3 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/andrus-2-run-double-caps-5-run-9th-white-sox-beat-as-5-3/2022/09/10/6d8c403a-30c6-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/andrus-2-run-double-caps-5-run-9th-white-sox-beat-as-5-3/2022/09/10/6d8c403a-30c6-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html |
Floral tributes are seen outside Buckingham Palace in London on Sept. 9, a day after Queen Elizabeth II died. (Stephane De Sakutin/AFP/Getty Images)
During her 70-year reign, Queen Elizabeth II was one of the world’s most well-known figures and the only British monarch most have known in their lifetime. Naturally, some are unfamiliar with the protocol after the death of a monarch.
Here’s what to know about the arrangements to lay the queen to rest, her heir and the changes that will take place.
Who is the king of the United Kingdom now?
What is the difference between queen consort and queen?
What is the order of succession to the British throne? | 2022-09-10T06:51:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Queen Elizabeth II, King Charles III, corgis: Your questions, answered - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/10/queen-elizabeth-charles-camilla/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/10/queen-elizabeth-charles-camilla/ |
A unproven prime minister and a new monarch put Britain into uncharted territory at a time of enormous challenges at home and abroad
British Prime Minister Liz Truss has her first audience with King Charles III at Buckingham Palace in London on Sept. 9. (Pool via Reuters)
On this day 25 years ago, Britain was in mourning. The nation had just said goodbye to Princess Diana, the “people’s princess,” as then-Prime Minister Tony Blair had called her in the hours after she died in a car crash in Paris. Diana was buried on a day of resplendent beauty. More than a million people lined the streets and parks of London to watch her funeral procession pass by. The pain of her death was still evident days later.
Queen Elizabeth II was at Balmoral, her summer home in Scotland, when Diana died. She remained there the day after and the day after that and the day after that. As mourners’ flowers piled up at the gates of Buckingham Palace and a country famous for its stiff upper lip dissolved in tears, the seeming indifference of a secluded royal family was symbolized by a bare flagpole atop the palace, dictated by protocol but incomprehensible to a grieving public.
The people had taken Diana’s side during her divorce from then-Prince Charles, now King Charles III, and the breach with the royal family. Elizabeth’s decision to remain in Scotland as the country mourned was taken as a further royal snub. The British tabloids amplified the public’s disquiet with screaming headlines: “Where is Our Queen? Where is Her Flag?” said the Sun. “Show Us You Care,” said the Express. “Your People Are Suffering,” said the Mirror. “Speak To Us, Ma’am.”
Today Britain is again in mourning, now marking the queen’s death at 96, and after a 70-year reign that likely will never be matched by any monarch anywhere. Tributes have come in from around the world. Today the flowers are piled up at Buckingham Palace in memory of Elizabeth.
Read more coverage of Queen Elizabeth II's life and record
This outpouring of affection might have seemed unlikely a quarter century ago, when the queen was at a low point and questions about the durability — even necessity — of the monarchy itself were stirring in public conversation. Today, at a time of distrust of most institutions in Britain, the monarchy is held in high regard, thanks to her alone.
The queen demonstrated over her 70 years this ability to adapt and modernize. As Blair said in an interview Friday on CNN, once the queen realized her missteps during Diana, she spoke to the people “from the heart and in a way that brought people back to her.”
Queen Elizabeth II's speech on the death of Princess Diana
Elizabeth’s death comes at a time of enormous challenge for the United Kingdom, domestically and internationally. Its political leadership faces economic problems at home, questions about its role in the world, tensions in its relations with Europe and longer-term issues about the future of the Commonwealth. A divided Britain confronts its future without the single unifying presence that the queen was able to provide.
“Stability” and “continuity” are two words threaded through much that has been written and said since the news flashed across the world on Thursday that the queen had died. She had lived long enough to enjoy the celebrations this June marking her Platinum Jubilee year. She lived 17 months beyond the death of her beloved husband and partner, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Two days before her death, she had welcomed Britain’s new prime minister, Liz Truss, the 15th to head the British government during her long reign. (The first was Winston Churchill.) She carried out her duties to the very end.
A visual timeline of Queen Elizabeth's 70 years on the throne
If she was a symbol of continuity, the queen could not bring stability to her country. The monarch’s role is ceremonial. Politicians are left to deal with the problems — and they have been manifold in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign. Just in the past half dozen years, Britain’s government has been headed by four different prime ministers, with Boris Johnson having to resign earlier this summer amid multiple scandals.
The queen offered a counterpoint to the chaos and division around her. She was as steady as she was reserved. What she really thought, about the prime ministers, about her own family’s past and recent turmoil, about the direction of politics and policy, she did not disclose. She became a symbol of eras passing, as Britain evolved from a country that once, controversially, commanded a colonial empire to a more humbled island nation whose role in the world gradually contracted. At the end, she became an object of respect for the devotion to duty that she offered, a model of leadership in a messy world.
As she leaves, Britain is perched somewhere between going it alone and working with others. The United Kingdom is a central participant in the NATO alliance aiding Ukraine in its war with Russia, but it is no longer a part of the European Union, having decided in a controversial vote in the summer of 2016 to leave that alliance, to declare its own economic independence as the advocates argued. The Brexit vote has kept Britain divided at home while generating lasting conflict with the E.U.
The turnover at 10 Downing Street underscores how damaging that decision has been to the stability of the country. David Cameron, the prime minister who called for the Brexit referendum, stepped down after the vote went against what he had hoped. His successor, Theresa May, struggled to implement the breakup and eventually resigned, with her own party divided. The flamboyant Johnson swept in promising to finalize the split with the E.U., but troublesome issues over the future of Northern Ireland have defied solution (and have caused tensions with President Biden, a proud Irish American).
The loose ends of Brexit are just one of the issues that confront the new prime minister, and not necessarily even the most pressing. Britain’s economy faces enormous problems, with projections that the country’s energy crisis next winter could push inflation rates to close to 20 percent. Slow growth and lagging productivity have plagued Britain for more than a decade.
Truss arrives in office untested. To win the leadership fight in the Conservative Party that vaulted her into the prime minister’s office, she curried favor with a narrow and very conservative constituency that is far from representative of the nation. She was chosen on the votes of fewer than 100,000 people in a nation of 67 million and without a majority of Conservative members of Parliament. Some of the promises she made to win those votes have been mocked by experts. She comes to office with low levels of popularity and no real mandate.
Truss’s party, meanwhile, is exhausted. The Tories have been in power for 12 years; their hold on power aided in part by a Labour Party whose leadership through many of those years proved anathema to the voters when general elections came around. Her new cabinet is diverse, but the collective team has drawn few words of praise. The Economist magazine said of one of her ministers, Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg, that he “should be put in a museum, not in charge of anything.”
Beyond the threats of rising costs and a winter of discontent, Truss faces problems in the National Health Service, the danger of labor unrest and strike. She will govern at a time of distrust in government, thanks in part to Johnson’s shambolic leadership. Now, at a time when Truss wants to show her mettle and gain public confidence, people are preoccupied with the death of the queen, the formal ceremonies to mark her passing and the arrival of a new king, one with his own need to gain public confidence.
Charles has long prepared to succeed his mother and is well schooled in the responsibilities that go with being head of state. At 73, he knows the world and many of its leaders. He has made clear some of his policy preferences, especially in combating climate change, but he will be constrained as a constitutional monarch from becoming part of the public debate on that and other issues. He begins with the goodwill of the British people, but that is far different than the trust and affection the queen earned through the decades. It will take time for him to establish that connection to the British people and, importantly, to the peoples of Britain’s colonial past to sustain the Commonwealth.
The United Kingdom must now start fresh. However prepared people thought they were for the passing of a 96-year-old monarch, the reality is something different. As the ceremonial events continue over the coming days, as the queen is remembered, the questions about what comes next will shadow the country’s new leadership. | 2022-09-10T06:51:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The queen is gone. Are King Charles III and Truss ready to confront its problems? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/10/queen-is-gone-can-britains-untested-leaders-confront-its-problems/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/10/queen-is-gone-can-britains-untested-leaders-confront-its-problems/ |
The Lincoln Project posted on Sept. 8 an ad claiming former president Donald Trump misused political contributions to fund personal expenses. (Video: The Lincoln Project)
“Trump told you the election was stolen, ripped you off, to sucker you, to take your hard-earned money and shovel it into his pockets. He spent it on himself, not to take back the White House. It was the biggest scam in political history. Every dollar you sent him paid to keep his shady business empire and lavish lifestyle going.”
— Voice-over in Lincoln Project ad, first aired Sept. 8
The Lincoln Project, formed by a group of disaffected Republicans, loves to needle former president Donald Trump.
This ad, which the group says aired on cable in Bedminster, N.J., sparked a furious reaction from the former president, who has a home there. The ad asserts that Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him is just a mechanism to raise money — “the biggest scam in political history” — that is designed to rip off his supporters — “a sucker’s game” — because Trump is pocketing the money to prop up his businesses and maintain his standard of living.
In a post on his social media platform, Trump threatened to sue Fox News for allowing the ad to run, though local ad buys are made directly with cable companies.
“This is the ad that pissed off Trump this morning,” the group cheerfully tweeted, earning at least 41,000 retweets and more than 109,000 likes.
But is there evidence to support its core claim — that Trump has diverted contributors’ money for his own benefit?
We first checked the campaign finance records for two Trump leadership political action committees, Save America PAC and Make America Great Again PAC. Trump has certainly been hoarding the money at the Save America PAC, sitting on about $100 million in cash and giving out relatively little to fellow Republicans. (A Leadership PAC generally is used to raise money to support other politicians.)
But we could not find any evidence to support the statement that “every dollar you sent him paid to keep his shady business empire and lavish lifestyle going.”
Save America PAC, which Trump created after he lost the 2020 election, has spent about $36 million, according to OpenSecrets.org. It appears the money has been mostly spent on administrative expenses, attorney fees, salaries and on fundraising activities, such as web ads. The MAGA PAC was a joint-fundraising committee between the president’s campaign and the Republican National Committee, and its recent spending largely appears connected to the past presidential campaign, such as attorney’s fees.
Perhaps one could argue that Trump should be paying lawyers out of his own pocket, not using contributors’ money. But he’s been clear in some of his fundraising emails that he wants help defending himself against the Justice Department investigation into classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago Club. “Rush in a donation IMMEDIATELY to publicly stand with me against this NEVERENDING WITCH HUNT,” one email said.
The Washington Post and other news organizations reported this week that the Justice Department is seeking details about the formation and operation of the Save America PAC. But that probe so far appears related to the ongoing criminal investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election — not whether funds have been misused.
We relied on the summaries created by OpenSecrets because the Save America PAC’s July filing with the Federal Election Commission ran to almost 50,000 pages. Presumably if there was something fishy buried deep in those filings, the Lincoln Project would have identified it.
So we contacted spokespeople for the Lincoln Project via email, repeatedly, asking for evidence to support the ad’s claim. We received no answer.
Then we called Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson, who posted a video Thursday daring Trump to follow through on his threat to sue. “Come at me. I can’t wait,” he said. “We’re delighted by the thought that you would try to sue us, Donald. Do it!”
Wilson answered our call but when he heard we had questions about the accuracy of the ad, he responded he was about to get on a Zoom call and hung up. He then also did not respond to text messages or emails.
Hmmm. Experience has taught us that when ad-makers duck our requests for factual backup for their claims, they generally do not have anything to provide.
We sent emails to the treasurers of the two PACs, asking them to verify Trump has not diverted funds for his personal benefit, but did not hear back. In a statement, Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich said: “Save America PAC has been committed to supporting the candidates and causes that advance President Trump’s America First agenda.”
Regular readers know that the burden of proof falls on the person or entity making the claim. We tried to verify the ad’s accusation that “every dollar” Trump has raised from his supporters has been diverted for personal and business purposes. Actually, he has spent little of what he raised, and thus far there is no evidence he has steered the funds for his own benefit.
When challenged to back up the claims, the Lincoln Project officials avoided or ignored our inquiries. That gives us little confidence there is any evidence to support the ad’s claims.
As we have well documented, Trump has a habit of making incendiary claims with no proof. But that does not give his opponents license to use the same playbook. The Lincoln Project earns Four Pinocchios. | 2022-09-10T07:17:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Lincoln Project falsely claims Trump has pocketed ‘every dollar’ he raised - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/10/lincoln-project-falsely-claims-trump-has-pocketed-every-dollar-he-raised/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/10/lincoln-project-falsely-claims-trump-has-pocketed-every-dollar-he-raised/ |
NEW YORK — Carlos Alcaraz surged into his first Grand Slam final and gave himself a chance to become No. 1 at age 19 by ending Frances Tiafoe’s run at the U.S. Open with a 6-7 (6), 6-3, 6-1, 6-7 (5), 6-3 victory.
NEW YORK — Rajeev Ram and Joe Salisbury became the second team in the professional era to repeat as U.S. Open men’s doubles champions, beating Wesley Koolhof and Neal Skupski 7-6 (4), 7-5.
SEATTLE — Dansby Swanson hit one of Atlanta’s four home runs and the World Series champion Braves grabbed sole possession of first place for the first time all season with a 6-4 victory over the Seattle Mariners.
NEW YORK — Aaron Hicks was benched midgame after failing to catch consecutive drives to left that landed for run-scoring doubles in the fourth inning, and the Tampa Bay Rays beat the New York Yankees 4-2 to close within 3 1/2 games in the AL East.
CINCINNATI — Without a top 10 since the Asia swing in early March, Jeongeun Lee6 posted her best score in nearly a year on with a 9-under 63 that gave her a one-shot lead in the Kroger Queen City Championship.
KANSAS CITY, Kan. — John Hunter Nemechek chased down Carson Hocevar over the final laps at Kansas Speedway, passing him as the white flag flew and denying Hocevar’s last-gasp chance at advancing in the NASCAR Truck Series playoffs. | 2022-09-10T08:48:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Friday's Sports In Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/fridays-sports-in-brief/2022/09/10/351e0aa8-30da-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/fridays-sports-in-brief/2022/09/10/351e0aa8-30da-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html |
The Jaguars hired Coach Doug Pederson to guide second-year quarterback Trevor Lawrence. Pederson was previously Carson Wentz's coach in Philadelphia. (Gary Mccullough/AP)
After earning the dubious honor as the worst team in the NFL last season, the Jacksonville Jaguars spent big in the offseason and overhauled their coaching staff to become one of the league’s biggest mysteries in 2022.
They have a new staff, new play-callers and many new (but familiar) faces, making it a difficult game to scout for the Commanders. Coach Doug Pederson, the former Eagles coach who was with Carson Wentz for the entirety of his Philadelphia tenure, and Brandon Scherff, the former all-pro guard for Washington, provide just enough familiarity to make Jacksonville dangerous.
Here are some things to watch as Washington opens the season against the Jaguars at FedEx Field on Sunday (1 p.m. kickoff):
Wentz begins a new era. Washington starts anew, with a new name and quarterback. The team traded for Wentz in March with the hope he would take the offense to the next level and perhaps provide stability after years of changing starters. Coach Ron Rivera and his staff believe he has the arm strength, size, and rapport with teammates to lead the Commanders back to the playoffs. The question still is whether he can be consistent.
Start fast and clean up third downs. The Commanders struggled early in games and on third downs in 2021. Those issues continued in the preseason. The Commanders were stout defensively on first and second downs in the preseason, but they allowed opponents to convert 51 percent of their third downs, the worst rate in the league.
Rivera has stressed the need for players to stay disciplined in their roles, for the defensive line to stay in their rush lanes and set the edge, and for the front five to stay in sync with the back end.
If the defense can get off the field, Washington’s offense will have more time, a necessity if the Wentz-led group hopes to finish more drives. Last year, Washington had the third-worst red-zone scoring efficiency, at 18.8 percent, in the first quarter. But in the last three quarters of games last year, Washington ranked sixth, with a 67.6 percent red-zone scoring rate.
Washington’s defense will be without two key players. Defensive end Chase Young is on the physically unable to perform list through at least Week 4 as he recovers from an ACL injury, but perhaps the more significant blow to Washington’s defense is the loss of safety Kam Curl. Curl recently suffered a thumb injury that required surgery, and he was ruled out for the opener, leaving a void in the secondary. A seventh-round pick out of Arkansas in 2020, Curl quickly emerged as a staple of the defense because of his versatility; he can play both safety spots, can move in the slot, play outside, drop down as a hybrid linebacker and blitz.
To compensate for his absence, the Commanders might take a committee approach, with Jeremy Reaves, Darrick Forrest and Percy Butler likely to see added time. Rivera cited Forrest as a player who took a leap in camp this year, and he is one of the team’s most physical players on the back end.
“He’s a downhill player. He’s very active. He plays with his eyes pretty well. He sees a lot. I like his ability to run. He’s got good quickness. He’s quick in a small area, confined area. And he can turn and run. I think using his skill set, using Percy’s skill set, using Reaves’s skill set, we have a combination of guys that can go in and play.”
The scouting report on Jacksonville is unclear. Pederson isn’t the only newcomer to the Jaguars. Mike Caldwell is first-year defensive coordinator and Press Taylor is in his first season of coordinating the offense. The team signed high-priced weapons, including wide receiver Christian Kirk and Scherff, a lineman who should enhance an offense centered on young quarterback Trevor Lawrence.
Washington is anticipating surprises.
“You have to look at a lot of different things,” Rivera said. “You have to look at the past, and their associations with particular teams. So it’s a lot of work, it really is, especially on the defensive side. I think watching what Jack and the staff has done is solid. … I like to feel we have a pretty decent handle, but there’s always the unexpected, though. And I’d like to say with Doug, I think there will be something a little unexpected.”
Wentz is well-versed in the coaching style of Pederson and Taylor from their years together in Philly. His experience in their offense should offer Washington plenty of clues.
Washington’s run defense could be tested early and often. In five of his eight seasons as a coach, dating back to his days as Kansas City’s offensive coordinator, Pederson’s teams have ranked among the top five in the league in rushing yards per attempt. This year, the Jaguars get James Robinson back from an Achilles’ tendon injury, and he’s expected to take on a heavy workload against the Commanders. In 2020, before he was injured, James recorded the most scrimmage yards (1,414) and second-most rushing yards (1,070) by an undrafted rookie in NFL history.
“I’ve been in situations like this, too, where you want to go in and you want to control the pace of play with a guy like James,” Pederson told reporters in Jacksonville this week. “At the same time, if he’s feeling good and there hasn’t been any setbacks or anything, then you just go and you just roll with it.”
Injury report: Curl did not practice all week and was the only player ruled out Friday for the opener. Tight ends Logan Thomas (knee) and Cole Turner (hamstring) are questionable. Thomas indicated that his first game back from injury would be either against the Jaguars or in Week 2 against the Lions.
The Jaguars listed defensive lineman Folorunso Fatukasi as questionable because of a calf injury, but the rest of their roster is good to go. | 2022-09-10T09:36:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Commanders’ keys vs. Jaguars: Start fast, be ready for surprises - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/10/commanders-jaguars-keys/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/10/commanders-jaguars-keys/ |
Pierre Poilievre, the frontrunner to lead Canada's Conservative Party, speaks at a campaign rally last month in London, Ontario. (Christopher Katsarov Luna/Bloomberg)
TORONTO — Canada’s recently hapless Conservatives, losers of three straight federal elections that exposed divisions between their populist and more moderate factions, are poised on Saturday to elect a 43-year-old firebrand with a scorched-earth style and social media savvy as their new leader to take on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
All indications are that Pierre Poilievre has the contest it in the bag.
The Calgary, Alberta-born lawmaker has drawn standing-room-only crowds — mostly unusual for leadership campaigns here — trafficking in grievance politics, pledging to fire the central bank governor, railing against public health mandates and vowing to make Canada the “freest country in the world.”
“Our institutions are screwing over an entire generation of working class youth,” he said in June. “But elite gatekeepers think the biggest problem is I’m calling it out. They only want to protect themselves.”
His campaign says it has signed up more members than the entire Conservative Party in the previous two leadership races. In this year’s second quarter, he raised more money from donors than his leadership opponents combined. He earned an endorsement from Stephen Harper, Canada’s last Conservative prime minister.
Poilievre’s main opponent is former Quebec Premier Jean Charest, 64, a former leader of the federal Progressive Conservative Party. A veteran politician, he has pitched himself as more moderate than Poilievre, able to expand the party’s big blue tent while keeping its various factions united.
Patrick Brown, the mayor of the Toronto suburb of Brampton, Ontario, was disqualified in July amid allegations that he violated federal elections law on selling party memberships, among other complaints. (Brown denied wrongdoing; he accused the party, without evidence, of working to ensure Poilievre was elected.)
“This time, it’s not going to be close … unless something bizarre or miraculous happens,” said Richard Johnston, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of British Columbia. “It’s going to be a blowout.”
Canada’s onetime ‘Green Jesus’ okays oil megaproject
The vote, which uses a ranked ballot, is restricted to dues-paying members of the Conservative Party. A record 678,000 have been eligible to vote in this year’s contest and nearly 418,000 ballots have been accepted — the most for the election of a federal party leader in Canada’s history.
The party said Friday it would revise its leadership convention program to reflect the death this week of Queen Elizabeth II, who was Queen of Canada and the country’s head of state.
A record number of members were also signed up during the last Conservative Party leadership contest, in 2020. They chose Erin O’Toole, a lawyer and military veteran, to helm the party. But the enthusiasm for the leadership race didn’t translate into success against Trudeau and his Liberal Party.
As he campaigned to become party leader, O’Toole pitched himself as a “true blue” Conservative, who was not a “product of the Ottawa bubble.” He pledged to “take back Canada” and to defend Canada’s history from “cancel culture and the radical left.” He disparaged his chief opponent as “Liberal lite.”
But during the federal election last year, O’Toole dropped the “take back Canada” talk and tacked to the center. Critics charged that he was a shape-shifter who would say anything to get elected. Many Conservatives detested O’Toole’s moderate platform and reversals on key policy positions.
He won the popular vote, but not a plurality of seats in Parliament. The caucus ousted him as leader in February.
Erin O’Toole, once called a ‘dud’ by fellow Conservatives, pulls into a tight race with Canada’s Trudeau
The race to replace him has been marked by personal attacks between the candidates.
“The tone has certainly been discouraging,” said Jonathan Malloy, a political scientist at Carleton University in Ottawa. “All the races are going to get scrappy, but particularly early in the race, the attacks were so negative. … The personal attacks have really been basically whether someone is legitimately part of the party” and a reflection of the divisions between its factions.
Charest has attacked Poilievre for embracing the self-styled “Freedom Convoy” that clogged Ottawa and blockaded border crossings this year to demonstrate against public health measures, flirting with conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum and pitching cryptocurrencies as a way to “opt out” of inflation.
“Will the Conservative Party of Canada really go down the road taken by American parties?” Charest asked at a French-language debate in May. “A divisive approach based on slogans … or will we do politics in Canada for Canadians? That’s the choice I’m offering you. I’m not a pseudo-American here.”
Right-wing populism is not new to Canada; it has a long history in the prairies. But it has been a “tougher sell” at the federal level, said Daniel Béland, the director of the Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University in Montreal, at which voters typically have elected more moderate governments.
The self-styled ‘Freedom Convoy’ rumbled up at an inopportune time for U.S.-Canada trade
For all Poilievre’s railing against the political establishment, politics has effectively been his only career.
As a university student, he was a finalist in a “As Prime Minister, I Would …” essay contest, arguing for a two-term limit for federal lawmakers, among other pledges. He’s now in his seventh term, after first winning election in 2004 to represent an electoral district in the Ottawa suburbs.
Over the years, Poilievre earned a reputation for fierce partisanship with a knack for getting under his opponents’ skin. Some criticized what they saw as a smarmy, take-no-prisoners, internet troll approach.
The Canadian Press described Poilievre in 2013 as something of a Pete Campbell from the television drama “Mad Men”: The “character everyone loves to hate: young, conservative, ambitious and fabulously snotty.”
The style has on occasion landed him in hot water.
Once, he apologized for making an unparliamentary gesture in Parliament. That came not long after he was caught on mic using unparliamentary language.
In 2008, on the day Harper, as prime minister, apologized for the government’s role in the residential school system that separated Indigenous children from their families, he questioned whether there was “value for all of this money” that Ottawa was paying to the survivors. He later apologized.
He became the federal democratic reform minister in 2013. In that role, he oversaw changes to Canada’s elections laws that critics said would disenfranchise voters and curtail the independence of the chief electoral officer. Trudeau has since done away with many of the changes.
The next Conservative leader will take over amid high inflation, surging interest rates and concerns about the affordability of housing and groceries. By the next federal election, which is not expected until 2025, Trudeau’s Liberals will have been in power for a decade and voters could be fatigued and open to a change.
Analysts say the leader will need to focus on expanding the party’s appeal beyond its traditional base in rural Canada and the strongholds of Alberta and Saskatchewan to draw support from young voters and those in the suburbs outside Toronto and Vancouver that are federal election battlegrounds.
Béland said Poilievre’s “rhetoric is really strong and it’s something that could scare away some moderate voters,” but that he “shouldn’t be underestimated.”
He said his more recent focus on bread-and-butter issues — in one campaign video, he’s seated at a diner, reciting for an invisible Trudeau how much the prices of the bacon, coffee, and, yes, bread and butter, have risen — could be a winner.
The new leader will also have to have an eye toward party unity.
“There may be some defections on the other side of the party [if] Poilievre wins,” Johnston said. “We’ll see how he deals with his caucus. He doesn’t seem inclined to graciousness. It seems like he’s a sore winner.” | 2022-09-10T10:11:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Canada Conservatives poised to make Pierre Poilievre leader against Trudeau - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/10/canada-conservative-pierre-poilievre/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/10/canada-conservative-pierre-poilievre/ |
A bartender serves a cocktail in D.C. Voters in November will decide whether to raise the minimum wage for tipped workers such as bartenders. (J. Lawler Duggan for The Washington Post)
After months of legal challenges and behind-the-scenes lobbying, D.C. residents in November will again vote on a controversial ballot initiative that would dramatically change how tipped workers in the District are paid.
The D.C. Court of Appeals on Thursday delivered a fatal blow to Initiative 82′s opponents’ attempts to keep the measure off the ballot entirely, rejecting their request for a hearing before the court’s full slate of judges. Voters will now be asked to decide whether to steadily raise the city’s tipped minimum wage of $5.35 per hour to match the standard minimum wage of $16.10 an hour by 2027.
Those in favor of the change say it would standardize pay for all workers, reducing wage theft while making tipping a “genuine gratuity” rather than a mechanism to subsidize worker pay. Detractors argue that it would further harm the city’s dining industry, which is already suffering from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, leading to higher menu prices and costs while shrinking tips for workers.
If any of that sounds familiar, that’s because it is: A near-identical ballot measure, Initiative 77, was passed by 55 percent of District voters in 2018 but was repealed months later by the D.C. Council. While servers in 2018 routinely sported buttons reading “Save Our Tips,” businesses posted “Vote NO on Initiative 77” signs on doors, and bar and restaurant employees heckled pro-Initiative 77 organizers during a raucous public hearing at the Black Cat nightclub — campaigning around Initiative 82 so far has been subdued, if not invisible.
But now, with the legal battle over, organizers on both sides of the debate say the stage is set for a louder, more public campaign with the general election less than two months away.
“We’re gearing up for a six-week education campaign before the election,” said Adam Eidinger, an organizer with the pro-Initiative 82 D.C. Committee to Build a Better Restaurant Industry. “And I can’t imagine the other side isn’t.”
Like most states, D.C. excludes tipped workers — made up primarily of restaurant servers and bartenders, but also parking valets — from the regular minimum wage, allowing employers to use tips from customers to subsidize the rest. If gratuities don’t add up to $16.10, the employer is supposed to make up the difference, with anything extra going to the tipped employees.
Eidinger and other advocates had initially hoped residents would vote on changing this system during the June primary, which is key for votes in a heavily blue city like D.C. because it determines the Democratic candidates. But the measure was bumped to the Nov. 8 election after the D.C. Board of Elections in the spring took weeks to determine whether backers had collected enough valid signatures.
Advocates say that delay, in addition to the time and money spent fighting the lawsuits, have hindered voter education efforts. The Committee to Build a Better Restaurant Industry had raised more than $309,000 by July 10, according to campaign finance filings; about two-thirds of those contributions came from the Open Society Policy Center, a lobbying group connected to the George Soros-founded Open Society Foundations. The committee has spent more than $303,000, largely on consulting fees.
The measure’s opponents — headlined by the “No to I82” committee, which includes some local restaurant owners and workers — have raised about $312,000 through mid-July. The committee has received more than $120,000 from the National Restaurant Association, more than $45,000 from the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington and thousands more from local restaurant groups, including Carmine’s DC and Farmers Restaurant Group, which counts Founding Farmers and Farmers, Fishers, Bakers among its six area locations.
Jackie Greenbaum, whose D.C. restaurants include Bar Charley, Little Coco’s and El Chucho, is not surprised that Initiative 82 has generated less attention so far than the 2018 effort. Even though she holds the same concerns about the measure as before, she said, many local restaurants and businesses this time around are too preoccupied with day-to-day operations and staying afloat financially to put much effort into combating the measure.
“A few years back, when you were somewhat stable, you — as a restaurant owner or as management or tipped staff — you had the ability to spend your time fighting something like this if you thought it was not good for the staff and not good for the business,” Greenbaum said. “Now, we’re all hanging on by a string. So nobody really has the time, energy or resources to do that.”
But other restaurateurs say it’s only a matter of time before advocates on both sides of the issue ramp up their messaging.
“I don’t think the lack of kind of energy around it right now is any significant telling of, you know, ‘This is going to be different than last time’ — from meetings that I’ve been in,” said Eric Heidenberger, a partner in the D.C. Restaurant Group, which includes the Bottom Line and Shaw’s Tavern. Many people have been traveling, he notes, Congress hasn’t been in session, and late summer is traditionally the slowest time of year for restaurants — but the initiative is still on the industry’s mind.
“I don’t think a lot of people know how vulnerable small operators are in D.C. right now. We’re going through the highest inflation we’ve seen in a long time. Our costs are high,” he said. “It’s like, is this going to be a death blow to a lot of restaurants, just given the timing, if this were to pass?”
In recent weeks, the No to I82 committee has set up social media pages to amplify concerns over the measure; the group’s posts so far include testimonials from D.C. tipped workers who say eliminating the tipped-credit system would reduce their take-home pay. On the other end of the spectrum, the Committee to Build a Better Restaurant Industry on Friday issued a call-out for volunteers “to help put up campaign posters around busy intersections in all 8 Wards of Washington.”
“I just would like consumers to know that the only way for this kind of huge increase to be affordable for restaurants is to charge a service charge,” Greenbaum said. “I think there is going to have to be some sort of public education campaign for diners to understand that is what the outcome will be. And if they’re okay with it, fine. If they’re not okay with it, that’s where we’re headed.”
Meanwhile, both sides believe they have the backing of the city’s tipped workforce.
Saru Jayaraman, president of the national advocacy group One Fair Wage, which backed Initiative 77, said national support for eliminating the tipped minimum wage rose during the pandemic as tipped workers across the country were tasked with enforcing coronavirus- and masking-related rules. These interactions were sometimes negative or even hostile, affecting customer gratuities.
One Fair Wage, based in Massachusetts, is pushing for ballot measures and legislation similar to Initiative 82 in more than two dozen states. Michigan is poised to become the eighth state without a tipped credit. Jayaraman said One Fair Wage has tracked at least 100 D.C. restaurants that have already eliminated the tipped credit to recruit new staff, including some businesses that were against the measure in 2018.
“It hasn’t been the same kind of fight in part because so many restaurants that fought this before are now paying [increased wages]. I think that’s why [the opposition’s] pathway has been as private as possible, through the courts,” she added. “It’s not been a public campaign of signs and windows and advertising.”
If the measure is approved again by District voters, Jayaraman and other supporters say they are confident the D.C. Council would not vote again to repeal it. The council has shifted further to the left since 2018, and a number of lawmakers who voted to overturn Initiative 77 are no longer on the council, including David Grosso (I-At Large), Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) and Brandon T. Todd (D-Ward 4).
Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D), who led its repeal effort in 2018 and is running for reelection this year, indicated at a candidate forum before the June primary that he would support the will of the voters if Initiative 82 made the ballot. Eidinger said the proponents are asking other members of the council to make a similar commitment.
Citing survey data from early May, Kathy Hollinger, president of the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington, said the number of D.C. businesses that have transitioned away from a tipped-credit system reflects less than 7 percent of the city’s restaurant industry. She asserted that the association’s strong stance on the initiative reflects the views of the city’s restaurant owners.
“I’ve always said to operators: ‘You should have the opportunity and flexibility as a small-business owner to operate the way you need to — based on the unique needs of your business — so long as you are doing what you legally need to do by law, for wages and everything else,’ ” Hollinger said. “This idea that we’re proposing an initiative that would change the model for all operators? That takes a lot away from what a small business is.”
The measure’s backers say their focus leading up to Election Day will be to explain to voters how tipped workers are compensated and why Initiative 82 would create such a dramatic shift for the District’s restaurant industry.
The measure’s opponents have plans to do the same.
“We made a commitment to our industry to make sure people know what they’re voting in — or not voting in," Hollinger added. “And what the impact is to people who work and earn their living here in the District." | 2022-09-10T10:20:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | D.C. Initiative 82 campaign set to ramp up after legal battle - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/11/dc-initiative-82-campaign/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/11/dc-initiative-82-campaign/ |
The dark side of Queen Elizabeth’s legacy matters. Here’s why.
Seeing the late queen only as a benevolent force contributes the whitewashing of the history of the British Empire.
Perspective by Elizabeth Kolsky
Elizabeth Kolsky is associate professor of history and faculty director of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest at Villanova University. She is the author of "Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law."
Kenyan newspapers Friday in Nairobi. (Brian Inganga/AP)
On Thursday, Queen Elizabeth II died at 96. An outpouring of sympathy from world leaders emphasized her dutiful service and stabilizing presence. President Biden issued a statement that commemorated her as a “source of comfort and pride for generations of Britons,” a monarch whose rule accompanied “unprecedented human advancement and the forward march of human dignity.” Barack and Michelle Obama struck a similar tone, characterizing the queen as a leader who “took on the enormous task of helming one of the world’s great democracies.” | 2022-09-10T10:20:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The dark side of Queen Elizabeth’s legacy matters. Here’s why. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/09/10/dark-side-queen-elizabeths-legacy-matters-heres-why/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/09/10/dark-side-queen-elizabeths-legacy-matters-heres-why/ |
Daniel Rollider
Left: Residential buildings in the Hadar neighborhood, Haifa, Israel, March 22, 2021. Right: Yagen (above), 8, and his sister Finot, 6, the children of asylum-seeking parents from Eritrea, climb the gate at the entrance to the alley leading to their home. The children of asylum seekers born in Israel do not receive citizenship or an Israeli identification number, but are entitled to go to school from ages 3 to 18. (Daniel Rolider)
Israel will forever hold a special place in my mind and heart. As a former Baptist missionary kid, the importance of Israel as a “holy land” was inculcated in me from a very early age. I’ll never forget the tchotchkes my grandfather and grandmother brought us from a trip they took there in, if memory serves me right, the 1970s or ’80s.
They brought back some typical tourist baubles — leather camels filled with sand; Bibles with covers made of olive wood. These things held prominent shelf space in the apartment I grew up in with my family in the former Portuguese colony of Macao.
Many years later, after I had stopped going to church and mostly “lost my religion,” a new place in my mind and heart was created. In the infancy of my photojournalism days, when I aspired to be a conflict photographer, I spent a couple of months spread out over two years working in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.
The time I spent clutching a camera and dodging tear gas and rubber bullets opened my eyes to the complicated, often controversial, nature of the country. In short, it gave me a much more robust and complete understanding of a country that always looms large in the news.
In addition to witnessing hardships in the Palestinian territories, I was introduced to the complexity of life inside Israel’s borders. From the super-guarded streets of Mea Shearim, to the Temple Mount, Dome of the Rock and the Wailing Wall, the country is so much more than what can be effectively shown through the mediation of news images and stories. Of course it is. All countries are.
I remember one Saturday walking the streets of Jerusalem and seeing a taxi driver stopped in the middle of Jaffa Street wielding a tire iron, fending off an Orthodox Jewish man who was trying to get him to observe the Sabbath and not drive. Other strolls introduced me to Coptics, Ethiopian Christians, American Christians carrying crosses and more.
Israeli photographer Daniel Rolider’s work on the community of Eritrean asylum seekers living in a community in the Hadar neighborhood is a rich addition to the portrayal of the complexity that exists between Israel’s borders.
Rolider recently reached out to me with his project, “In Hadar Going Nowhere.” Here’s what he had to say about it:
“In the Hadar neighborhood of Haifa, in old houses that are now only remnants of a golden age that has long passed, lives a community of Eritrean asylum seekers. Between 500 and 700 Eritreans live in Hadar, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Haifa, out of approximately 21,000 living throughout Israel. They live under the radar with limited access to health-care and welfare services, in an endless limbo. On the one hand, Israel cannot deport them due to international laws that grant protection to individuals who meet the consensus definition of a “refugee.” On the other hand, the government has not been approving asylum applications for Eritreans. By combining documentary photography with written dialogue from men and women, single and married, from the Hadar community of Eritrean asylum seekers, this project aims to shed light on the harsh reality that they have been forced into, as well as the reality they created for themselves.”
Most asylum seekers in Israel crossed the Egyptian border between 2007 and 2012 and arrived in the “Promised Land” after fleeing a dictatorial regime that denies its citizens human rights. They escaped poverty, hunger and indefinite enlistment in the Eritrean army where they were subjected to inhumane conditions, including hard physical labor and sexual exploitation. The reasons Eritreans chose to escape to Israel vary; some thought that they would be welcomed with open arms in light of the history of persecution among the Jewish people, or because of their deep religious connection, while others were abducted by Bedouin smugglers and forced to cross the border. Today, to survive, they are forced to work long hours in exchange for meager wages, without a concrete chance to leave the country or even get a driver’s license.
Through interviews and photographs of the Hadar neighborhood, Eritrean asylum seekers told their stories. Even years after leaving their homeland in East Africa, many Eritreans were afraid to openly expose themselves and their stories. While they fear the reaction of their family and community, their main concern is the physical and economic harm that the Eritrean government might impose on their loved ones who were left behind. According to sources in the Hadar community, their government continues to track its citizens’ activities abroad to ensure they are not damaging its international image or empowering its opponents. To ensure their safety and form a collaborative platform for self-expression, the photos were printed and given to those photographed. While some chose to write their thoughts, feelings, and messages on the pictures, others decided to paint on their faces — and hide their identities.”
One of the most interesting, if not vital, conversations taking place in the world of photography, and photojournalism is the question of representation. At present, there doesn’t seem to be a consensus. On the one hand, there is an assertion that outsiders have no business telling the stories of a people and place that is not native to them. And on the other hand is a more old-school thought that all stories are open to anyone to tell. These are important discussions to have, whether all agree on the solution or not. Just thinking about the subject, hopefully, will make for more thoughtful work.
Rolider’s work here is an interesting way to approach storytelling. By collaborating with the people he photographs and giving them the opportunity to speak for themselves and to decide whether they want to be seen in a traditional sense, he has given them back some of the agency that is often taken away, inadvertently or not. The conversation will continue. It must, because everyone has a voice, everyone has agency. None of those things necessarily need to be taken away.
You can see more of Rolider’s work on his website, here. | 2022-09-10T10:20:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Photos of Eritreans in Israel - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/09/10/eritrean-asylum-seekers-living-israels-hadar-community-haifa/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/09/10/eritrean-asylum-seekers-living-israels-hadar-community-haifa/ |
Queen Elizabeth II’s role in British diplomacy was more than ceremonial
She traveled to 117 countries and hosted countless high-level visitors
Analysis by Brandy Jolliff Scott
Britain's Queen Elizabeth II laughs with Noidi Okereke Onyiwke, in purple on left, director general of the Nigerian stock exchange, during a state visit to the country on Dec. 3, 2003. (Nic Bothma/Pool/AFP/Getty Images)
When Queen Elizabeth II passed away on Thursday, many in Britain and elsewhere had a hard time imagining a world without the long-reigning monarch. She worked with 15 British prime ministers — from Winston Churchill to Liz Truss, whom she invited to form a government only two days earlier.
Many around the world, not just in Britain and the other 14 countries in which the queen was head of state, are mourning. Others are voicing their criticisms of an archaic institution with a problematic colonial and imperial legacy. But what is the role of the monarch, exactly? In Britain and in the other constitutional monarchies that exist today, the monarch’s role remains a mystery to many.
Royal powers are limited, but significant
Constitutionally, the British monarch has a highly circumscribed role. The monarch is the head of state and, in that capacity, embodies the unity and traditions (for better or worse) of Britain. The monarch also retains prerogative powers — powers specifically reserved for the sovereign — including the power to appoint a new prime minister, dissolve Parliament and give royal assent to bills.
Domestically, the queen’s role in day-to-day politics was probably minimal and was certainly private, as will presumably be the case for the new King Charles III. But as historian Antony Best wrote in 2016: “To ignore the role of the monarchy in foreign policy is always a mistake.”
In global politics, power matters. As political scientist Joseph S. Nye famously articulated, soft power, or the power of attraction, is an important foreign policy tool. “The Queen and the Royal Family have been pivotal in maintaining the nation’s relevance,” Brand Finance wrote in their 2020 Global Soft Power Index.
And while the monarchy is known for the mystique that accompanies it, the soft power and outsized relevance of Britain as a major player in global affairs is in no small part due to the remarkable service of Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, which I detail in a forthcoming piece in the Royal Studies Journal.
The power of a state visit
However, relatively few scholars pay much attention to the political effects of the monarchy. To take a closer look at the broader role and influence of constitutional monarchs on international politics, I compiled data on official visits to/by constitutional monarchs in eight countries. I use this data to examine the effects of constitutional monarchs on their countries’ foreign policies.
Even after Madeleine Albright, foreign policy leaders are still mostly men
During her reign, Elizabeth traveled to 117 countries, including nearly all 56 Commonwealth states. She was undoubtedly the most widely traveled world leader. Until her later years, she was known for undertaking grueling international tours, including the 1952 tour during which she became monarch. By 2019, she had also hosted 112 state visits, plus many other high-level diplomatic visits. As a growing literature shows, rather than being purely ceremonial fluff, state visits have real political and economic effects. This type of public diplomacy can influence public opinion, extend the tenure of other leaders and improve bilateral trade flows.
While British foreign policy officials take the lead in planning state visits, Elizabeth also played a meaningful role in shaping these visits. In the 1970s, for instance, British officials had to navigate the desire of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to host Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev for a state visit to Britain — and the queen’s reluctance to visit the Soviet Union. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1994, several years after the Cold War ended, that the queen visited Russia. That visit was seen as a great success for British foreign policy, and the effectiveness of the trip was in no small part due to the queen’s efforts to develop a warm rapport with Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
Another notable state visit took place in South Africa in 1995. The queen played a key role in arranging the visit, which took place just a year after elections launched South Africa’s new democratic government. According to biographer Robert Hardman, quoting former commander of the Royal Yacht Britannia, Sir Robert Woodard, “The Foreign Secretary was worried [about the visit] and the Queen overruled him. She said: ‘Mr. Mandela is getting advice from lots of people but no one’s giving him any help. He needs physical assistance and he needs a show.’ ”
Boris Johnson ripped up part of his Brexit deal with Europe
And in 2011, the queen made a previously unimaginable state visit to Ireland. Former British prime minister David Cameron later wrote that his own government’s efforts in improving relations with Ireland “were nothing compared to the brave gesture that was the Queen’s breakthrough visit to the Republic in 2011.” Cameron’s memoirs also note that his ability to work with the United States during his own time as prime minister was in part due to the queen:
But the person I really had to thank was the Queen. With the exception of Lyndon Johnson she has met every one of the US presidents who have served during her reign — a quarter of all the presidents there have ever been. Yet only two had the privilege of a full state visit to the U.K.: George W. Bush and Barack Obama. When Barack and Michelle came in. May 2011, they loved it, and I knew how much this was down to the relationship they struck up with our head of state. The warmth of my visit to Washington in March 2012 was, I felt, largely due to the success of their London trip.
Anecdotes like these provide ample evidence that the queen’s role as Britain’s head of state was by no means merely symbolic. While a full accounting of the role played by Elizabeth on the political, economic and social affairs of Britain will not be realized for many years to come, the country has lost its most significant statesperson and stabilizing force of the post-World War II era.
Brandy Jolliff Scott is an instructor in the political science department at Texas Christian University and is the managing editor of International Studies Perspectives.
Live briefing: Charles formally announced as king as Queen Elizabeth II mourned in Britain | 2022-09-10T10:20:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Queen's power was limited, but still significant. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/10/queen-elizabeth-diplomacy-international-relations/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/10/queen-elizabeth-diplomacy-international-relations/ |
The mobile robot balance assistant, called “Mr. Bah,” can sense when elderly people lose balance
An elderly couple walks in a hall of a nursing home in Easton, Pa. (Matt Rourke/AP)
The machine’s inventors, from the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore, affectionately call the machine “Mr. Bah,” a stand-in for its actual name: the mobile robot balance assistant. The device still needs regulatory approval in major markets like the United States, and faces significant funding challenges for getting to market, but it is targeted to be available in two years, researchers said.
“[Falls] are a big problem worldwide,” said Wei Tech Ang, a lead researcher for the project and executive director of the Rehabilitation Research Institute of Singapore (RRIS). “The … intention was to help people walk around at home without the fear of falling down.”
This robot quarterback could be the future of football practice
Globally, falls are the second leading cause of unintentional injury deaths worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. In the United States, falls remain the leading cause of injury-related deaths among adults ages 65 and older, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows.
Lifeguard drones can save lives. But U.S. beaches might not buy them. | 2022-09-10T10:20:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Meet Mr. Bah: The robot that catches grandma before she falls - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/10/fall-prevention-robot/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/10/fall-prevention-robot/ |
Aryeh Wolf was installing solar panels in Southeast Washington on Aug. 10 when an assailant with a handgun shot him multiple times, killing the 25-year-old. On Aug. 24, students at the Mundo Verde Bilingual Public Charter School in Northwest were minutes away from being dismissed on their first day of classes when the school was placed on lockdown after repeated gunshots were heard; responding police found two men dead and three others injured in the nearby neighborhood. Brian Robinson Jr., a running back for the Washington Commanders, was leaving a storefront in the heart of Northeast’s H Street corridor when he was shot twice during a possible attempted carjacking or armed robbery. Mr. Robinson was one of three people shot or stabbed that weekend along the stretch of popular restaurants and bars.
The alarming regularity of violence — predominantly gun violence — is a serious problem in D.C. The city government has undertaken myriad efforts to combat violent crime — establishing the office of gun violence prevention, investing millions of dollars in crime-related community-based initiatives and initiating new police offensives — but so far the city seems no safer.
As in many cities and towns facing rising crime, D.C.’s leaders must respond both with care and urgency. Ensuring that police officials have the funding and tools they need to combat violent crime is crucial. But so, too, are non-policing responses that will take investments of money and time but promise to make the city safer, fairer and more pleasant for all.
While overall crime in D.C. is down, violent crime is up. Homicides are up 1 percent over this time in 2021, a year that ended with murder levels not seen in more than two decades. “Residents are scared,” said Michael D. Shankle, chair of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission in the Chinatown area, after three people were shot one night last month, one fatally, in two separate incidents. He added, “They are angry. … We feel like we don’t have enough support.”
The underlying causes of crime have long been studied and debated. Many various factors appear to contribute. Complicated societal ills such as poverty and racial inequity factor in, but so do mundane circumstances such as the weather.
Recently, the coronavirus pandemic’s social disruptions appear to have driven increases in crime in communities across the country. A July report by the Council on Criminal Justice showed that homicide rates in nearly two dozen cities with readily available crime numbers are still nearly 40 percent higher than they were before the pandemic. In Prince George’s County, which neighbors D.C., officials were so alarmed by the recent increase in crime — August was the single-deadliest month in the county’s history, with 24 homicides — that they announced a curfew for juveniles, more of whom are being arrested, many for carjacking offenses. (D.C. already had a juvenile curfew on the books, but the city only recently — and quietly — started enforcing it.)
True, cities such as D.C. only have so much power to address gun violence. Congress has failed to embrace obvious gun-control measures, such as universal background checks or a ban on assault weapons. The Supreme Court’s wrong-headed reading of the Second Amendment has made it more difficult for states and localities to fill the gap with their own restrictions. And many Republican-led states have loosened virtually all constraints on guns. The result has been the unchecked proliferation of firearms. Even with some of the country’s toughest gun laws, the District is awash in firearms. Police so far this year have seized 2,249 guns, 815 more than this time last year; they seem to be fighting a losing battle.
Yet local officials can’t just throw in the towel. Responsibility falls firstly on Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), who has rightly made gun violence a priority. She smartly chose the capable Robert J. Contee III as police chief, but she also recognized — her critics say belatedly — that police alone can’t solve the problem. Accordingly, she has launched a number of programs focused on prevention and intervention: funding the work of community groups in the city’s hardest-hit neighborhoods; putting violence interrupters on streets to quell disputes; cleaning up run-down areas; and pairing those at high risk for involvement in gun violence with dedicated teams that can help them get job training, housing, mental health treatment or other services. Even if these programs work, they will not produce instant results. Some critics say they are little more than expensive gimmicks. The mayor must insist on stringent measures to gauge her programs’ impact.
Ms. Bowser’s reelection is almost assured after she won this year’s Democratic mayoral primary. She must guard against the complacency that often accompanies third terms and not hesitate to change course if her policies flop. A mayoral crime summit might help. The District will be getting a new attorney general, likely Brian Schwalb, who won the Democratic primary and faces no opposition in November. Because the attorney general’s office deals with the thorny issue of juvenile crime, the mayor should forge a healthier relationship with Mr. Schwalb than the toxic one she has had with the incumbent, Karl A. Racine.
Meanwhile, the D.C. Council, and particularly the committee on the judiciary and public safety, headed by council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), must do its own soul-searching. The council has enacted measures — such as halting police hiring and abolishing school resource officers — and employed rhetoric that made police feel like they were the enemy, making law enforcement’s job harder and the city less safe. For example, the council barred police officers from reviewing their body-cam footage before writing their reports, which has made it more difficult to prosecute cases, as the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office predicted would happen when it recommended against the policy. Gun cases have been most impacted.
The council is now considering an overhaul of the city’s criminal code, which includes controversial proposals to eliminate carjacking as a separate crime and to reduce penalties for armed robbery and other infractions. It would also expand the Second Look Act, which allows younger people convicted of any offense to petition for a sentence reduction after serving 15 years. The expansion would allow convicts of all ages to petition for a sentence reduction.
The council cannot, as it has so often done, brush aside the concerns that police and prosecutors express about these changes. No one should want a return to the bad old days of draconian sentences and mass incarceration. But, in the interest of correcting past mistakes, the District must not swing too far in the other direction, creating a culture in which people engage in wrongdoing because they think there are few consequences.
D.C. officials — from the mayor to council members to prosecutors to judges — must refrain from pointing fingers and making excuses for the violent crime that has made many in the city fearful to walk its streets. They should express urgency, cut the rhetoric and take a rigorous look at what is — and what is not — working.
Opinion|‘Residents are scared’: Violent crime is all too common in D.C. | 2022-09-10T11:38:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Violent crime is all too common in D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/10/dc-violent-crime-solutions/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/10/dc-violent-crime-solutions/ |
Target axes mandatory retirement age as CEOs stay on the job longer
Retailer joins big names like 3M and Boeing in rethinking age-limit policies to stick with high-performing executives
Brian Cornell, CEO of Target, speaks at a financial community meeting in 2019 in New York. (Mark Lennihan/AP)
Target this week became the latest major company to axe its policy of mandatory retirement at age 65, keeping chief executive Brian Cornell, 63, at the helm for another three years.
The Minnesota-based big box giant joins firms like 3M and Merck in rethinking the convention of ushering corporate executives out of the workforce once they reach a certain age, often 65. The moves are a way to keep high-performing executives in their jobs. Boeing last year raised its mandatory retirement age to 70 to keep CEO Dave Calhoun for another five years.
Older executives are sticking around longer, with the average age of an outgoing chief executive reaching 64 in 2021, up from 61 in 2020, according to research from SpencerStuart, which tracks data on CEO transitions.
“Mandatory retirement policies for CEOs are a thing of the past,” said Matteo Tonello, managing director of Environmental, Social and Governance research at The Conference Board, a think-tank focused on corporate management.
The Conference Board stopped tracking the use of such measures in 2017, Tonello said. By then, the few companies that had such policies in place "were not enforcing it to avoid being accused of age discrimination or avoid finding themselves in a situation where they’d have to force out a well-performing CEO or to force out a CEO at an inconvenient time and without a solid succession plan.”
Cornell, who is 63, has led Target since 2014, having previously worked for Walmart and PepsiCo. The company has added nearly $40 billion in annual revenue since Cornell joined, the executive said in a statement Wednesday.
"It was important to us as a board to assure our stakeholders that Brian intends to stay in his role beyond the traditional retirement age of 65. Monica Lozano, lead independent director of Target’s Board of Directors, said in a statement. “We enthusiastically support his commitment and his continued leadership, especially considering his track record and the company’s strong financial performance during his tenure.”
While executives — among a handful of other occupations such as pilots and air traffic controllers — can be required to retire at 65 under the Age Discrimination Employment Act, Amber Clayton, senior director of knowledge center operations at the Society for Human Resource Management, said most companies no longer have mandatory retirement policies.
Millions retired early during the pandemic. Many are now returning to work, new data shows.
"In fact, some companies that have them may be reconsidering their policy since CEOs are staying in their jobs longer and boards are less likely to want to replace a CEO if the business is doing well.”
That seems to be the case for Target. Cornell has overseen a “very positive transformation of Target," according to Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, with the executive making “bold bets” on brick-and-mortar stores even as Wall Street moved in the opposite direction, spurred by the growing dominance of online retailers like Amazon.
“He was proved right in almost everything he did and has helped reshape some of the conversation around what successful retailing looks like,” Saunders said. “The business will be pleased to have him at the helm for some time to come.”
Given improved health and increased life expectancy, it is not surprising that companies are more readily keeping on top executives even after they turn 65, according to Mo Wang, an Academy of Management scholar and a professor at the University of Florida.
The use of age limits for executives "can also carry some age-related bias that older people are less creative or more conservative in leading companies,” Wang said, adding that older executives “keep important institutional knowledge that may be difficult to replace if there is no clear succession plan.”
Caring for aging parents, sick spouses is keeping millions out of work
Brandon Cline of Mississippi State University and Adam Yore of the University of Missouri, who published a paper in the Journal of Empirical Finance looking at mandatory age requirements for executives, said that such policies are a shareholder tool for corporate governance. At the time of the study, in 2015, roughly a third of S&P 500 companies had such policies in place for executives or board members, they said.
These measures are most popular with larger companies as a “clean way” of ousting aging, underperforming executives or directors, Cline said.
“When companies are feeling like they need more governance and monitoring over, they’re going to implement [mandatory retirement ages] because it gives them a free way of doing that,” Cline said. “They don’t really want a mandatory age restriction per se unless they feel it’s helping them get rid of someone who has undue influence over the board.”
Anthony Nyberg, an Academy of Management Scholar and a professor at the University of South Carolina, said the “vast majority” of companies don’t have policies like these. The ones that do, and then move away from them, usually do so because “someone has been doing great or because it’s a particularly turbulent time,” like the coronavirus pandemic, Nyberg said.
“In those situations companies are pretty reticent to remove a CEO because of something that seems antiquated like age,” Nyberg said.
Plenty of famous executives have stayed in their positions well past the age of 65. Warren Buffett is still serving as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at 92, making him the oldest chief executive in the S&P 500. Viacom founder Sumner Redstone retired at 92. Les Wexner, founder of L Brands, retired at 83. FedEx founder Fred Smith retired in June at 77. | 2022-09-10T11:51:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Target axes mandatory retirement age as CEOs stay on the job longer - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/10/target-mandatory-retirement-age-brian-cornell/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/10/target-mandatory-retirement-age-brian-cornell/ |
LONDON — Charles became king immediately upon the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, on Thursday. He was officially proclaimed King Charles III on Saturday during a ceremony at St. James’s Palace in London, and many more formal steps will follow until his coronation, which may not come for months. | 2022-09-10T11:52:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | EXPLAINER: The formal rules around Charles's accession - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/explainer-the-formal-rules-around-charless-accession/2022/09/10/859a4976-30f6-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/explainer-the-formal-rules-around-charless-accession/2022/09/10/859a4976-30f6-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html |
By Danielle Paquette | Sep 10, 2022
During her seven-decade reign, Queen Elizabeth II visited more than two dozen cities across the United States. She chatted with Girl Scouts, football players, presidents and Frank Sinatra. She cheered on race horses in Kentucky. She requested a ham sandwich with the crust removed in Texas. She sported a tweed skirt-suit in Yosemite National Park.
Wherever England’s longest-serving monarch went, photographers followed, capturing generations of Americans in the throes of Royal fever (and more than a few signature handbags).
Oct. 17, 1957 | Washington
Queen Elizabeth II heads to the White House as crowd's line Washington streets to see the royal monarch.
Queen Elizabeth II accepts a doll for Princess Anne from 7-year-old Pamela Springmann during a visit at Children's Hospital.
Queen Elizabeth II and Vice President Richard Nixon tilt their heads for a better view of the oil paintings on the interior of the Capitol dome during a tour.
Oct. 19, 1957 | College Park, Md.
Co-captains of North Carolina and Maryland meet Queen Elizabeth II before the start of a game.
Queen Elizabeth II, wearing a mink stole, and Prince Philip, standing next to a viewing telescope, view New York City from the observatory roof of the Empire State Building. The Queen said, "It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."
Queen Elizabeth II, in a plastic domed car, rides up lower Broadway through a shower of ticker tape and confetti during procession to City Hall.
Queen Elizabeth II addresses the United Nations General Assembly.
Her Majesty kicked off a seven-city tour of the nation’s east in 1976 with a stop in Philadelphia, where she unveiled a gift for the City of Brotherly Love: a Bicentennial Bell to celebrate 200 years of American independence from English rule. (The bell remains in storage.)
July 7, 1976 | Andrews Air Force Base, Md.
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip walk down the ramp of their aircraft near Washington.
July 7, 1976 | Philadelphia
Queen Elizabeth II is greeted by the Girl Scouts of America.
July 8, 1976 | Washington
Queen Elizabeth II arrives at the U.S. Capitol.
On her New York leg, Elizabeth was spotted squeezing through city throngs, underscoring the lighter security protocols of yesteryear.
July 10, 1976 | New York
Thousands surround Queen Elizabeth II as she walks from the Federal Building up Wall Street to Trinity Church with Mayor Abraham Beame.
July 10, 1976 | Charlottesville, Va.
Queen Elizabeth II tours Thomas Jefferson's Monticello home.
July 11, 1976 | Boston
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip wave to spectators below from the balcony of the Old State House before the Queen descended to street level to address the crowd. The location is the site of the Boston massacre, an event which led to the Revolutionary War.
Elizabeth returned in 1983 for a trek through the West Coast. She visited a Southern California retirement home, led a champagne toast with then-president Ronald Reagan and absorbed the mountain views at Yosemite National Park.
Feb. 26, 1983 | San Diego
Queen Elizabeth II reviews the U.S. Marine Corps honor guard as she arrives for a State visit.
Feb. 28, 1983 | Sierra Madre
Queen Elizabeth II shares a smile with 97-year-old Sibyl Jones-Bateman after the monarch was presented with a bouquet during tour of the British Home retirement community near Los Angeles.
March 3, 1983 | San Francisco
President Ronald Reagan and Queen Elizabeth II raise their glasses in a toast during a state dinner at the M. H. de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park.
March 5, 1983 | Yosemite, Calif.
Park superintendent Bob Binnewies points out highlights from Inspiration Point to Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to Yosemite National Park.
The queen, a horse racing enthusiast, landed in Kentucky five times between 1984 and 2007, according to the Courier-Journal. She was known to turn up at horse farms, admiring the mares and foals.
Queen Elizabeth II puts out her hand to her filly foal by the mare Christchurch and Alydar during a visit to Lane's End Farm.
May 27, 1986 | Lexington, Ky.
Queen Elizabeth II exchanges pleasantries with a line of Fayette County (Ky.) and Kentucky State Troopers on the tarmac as prepares to depart following a five-day visit.
Queen Elizabeth II is welcomed by a child upon her arrival during a private visit to the U.S.
During her 1991 visit, Elizabeth addressed Congress. Lawmakers gave the monarch a standing ovation, while opponents of British occupation in Northern Ireland protested outside the Capitol.
May 14, 1991 | Washington
Queen Elizabeth II and President George H.W. Bush review the troops after the Queen's arrival at the White House.
Queen Elizabeth II holds flowers presented to her at Drake Place, a housing project.
Queen Elizabeth II is applauded by Vice President Dan Quayle and House Speaker Thomas Foley before her address to the U.S. Congress.
Elizabeth’s last U.S. state visit came in 2007, when she arrived for the 400th anniversary of England establishing its first permanent North American settlement in Jamestown, Va.
She dined with then-president George W. Bush, watched the Kentucky Derby through bulletproof glass and checked out Washington memorials.
May 4, 2007 | Lexington, Ky.
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip look out of the window of an SUV as they leave the Bluegrass Airport after arriving.
May 5, 2007 | Louisville, Ky.
Queen Elizabeth II chats with Prince Philip as Susan Lucci (black hat) looks on at the 133rd Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs.
May 7, 2007, | Washington
President Bush smiles at Queen Elizabeth II before the start of a State Dinner at the White House.
May 8, 2007 | Washington
Queen Elizabeth II and U.S. Park Service Director Mary Bomar walk around the National World War II Memorial during a visit by the Queen and Duke.
May 8, 2007 | Greenbelt, Md.
Queen Elizabeth II accepts flowers from children while walking during a visit to the Goddard Space Flight Center.
Elizabeth made her final stop on American soil in 2010 to address the United Nations General Assembly. “I believe I was last here in 1957,” she deadpanned to her New York audience.
July 6, 2010 | New York
Queen Elizabeth II leaves a wreath of flowers at the site of the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attack during her visit.
Queen Elizabeth II speaks at the United Nations Headquarters.
Photo editing and production by Natalia Jiménez | 2022-09-10T12:39:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Queen Elizabeth's visits to the United States, in pictures - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2022/queen-elizabeth-america/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2022/queen-elizabeth-america/ |
A portrait of Queen Elizabeth II sits amid flowers and notes outside the gates of Windsor Castle near London on Sept. 9, 2022. (Frank Augstein/AP)
As Britain bids farewell to Queen Elizabeth II, a carefully choreographed plan for the days after her death is underway. It is called “Operation London Bridge.”
Charles succeeds Queen Elizabeth II: What to know about royal succession
Here’s what we know about the funeral plans and how the country will lay its longest-serving monarch to rest.
When is Queen Elizabeth II’s state funeral?
What to know about attending the queen’s funeral | 2022-09-10T12:56:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Queen Elizabeth II's funeral: When and where Britain will lay monarch to rest - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/10/queen-elizabeth-ii-funeral-details/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/10/queen-elizabeth-ii-funeral-details/ |
Minnesota gubernatorial candidate and physician Scott Jensen (R), shown at his Watertown, Minn., clinic on Sept. 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Jim Mone, FILE)
It has become pretty abundantly clear that the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade has created at least a momentary political problem for Republicans.
Democrats have repeatedly over-performed in special elections since then, and they’ve also gained in the so-called “generic ballot" of the 2022 midterm election, raising doubts about the GOP’s hopes of winning both the House and Senate. The GOP is also in the position of now accounting for what it will do now that the Supreme Court no longer prevents them from banning abortion — something that was a powerful issue in the abstract but is considerably more fraught now.
1. Scott Jensen
Before: The GOP gubernatorial nominee said in March, while vying for the party’s nomination, “I would try to ban abortion." A month later, he was even stronger, making it a promise. Responding to Gov. Tim Walz’s (D) claim that Jensen and his running mate supported banning abortions, Jensen said: “No kidding, Sherlock. You’re darn right we do." He added: "We’re going to get something done when we’re governor: We’re going to ban abortions. That’s really not news.”
Now: Jensen this week began running an ad stating, “In Minnesota, [abortion] is a protected constitutional right, and no governor can change that. And I’m not running to do that." Jensen’s website has also changed its language on this issue. It previously said Jensen “believes in the sanctity of human life, from conception to natural death,” but it has now excised the “from conception to natural death” language.
Before: In December, the now-Arizona GOP Senate nominee likened abortion to “genocide." His website until recently also said he was “100% pro-life” and supported “a federal personhood law” — a standard favored by advocates who want to ban all abortion.
Now: Masters’s scrubbed the above references from his website a few weeks after he won his primary, as NBC News and CNN reported. (Several other GOP candidates have also done this; some have also nixed references to Donald Trump’s endorsement.) He now says his state banning abortion after 15 weeks is “a reasonable solution.” And in a new ad, he emphasized only his opposition to late-term abortions.
Before: In May, while trying to account for past comments that were more supportive of abortion rights, the Pennsylvania Senate nominee likened abortion at any stage to “murder," according to audio recently published by the Daily Beast. “I do believe life starts at conception,” he said, adding: "If life starts at conception, why do you care what stage our hearts start beating at? It’s, you know — it’s still murder if you were to terminate a child, whether their heart’s beating or not.”
Pennsylvania Republican Senate nominee Dr. Oz, in leaked audio from a tele-town hall in May, argues abortion at any stage of pregnancy is “murder.”
Oz had previously defended Roe v. Wade and more recently said he supports exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother. pic.twitter.com/bB8idpXWaC
Now: Despite comparing the practice to “murder,” Oz said at a news conference this week, “There should not be criminal penalties for doctors or women regarding abortion.” His campaign has also assured he "supports exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother.”
4. Zach Nunn
Before: The Iowa congressional candidate was asked at a May primary debate whether he supported banning "all abortions” with “no exceptions.” Like his two opponents, he raised his hand. His opponent, Rep. Cindy Axne (D-Iowa), has used the scene in a campaign ad.
Now: Nunn wrote an op-ed for the Des Moines Register last month assuring he supports an exception for the life of the mother and pointing to legislation he voted for that had other exceptions, including for rape and incest. (Pressed about the conflicting positions by the Associated Press last month, Nunn reportedly claimed the May debate question wasn’t so specific. But in fact, the moderator had asked, “Should all abortions be illegal in this country?” Nunn himself even asked for a clarification, at which point the moderator responded that he was asking about an abortion ban with “no exceptions.”)
5. Mark Ronchetti
Before: The New Mexico gubernatorial nominee ran for Senate in 2020 while calling himself “strongly pro-life” and saying, “Life should be protected -- at all stages.” The day Roe v. Wade was overturned in June, his gubernatorial campaign website also described him as “strongly Pro-Life.”
Now: Ronchetti’s campaign website now says he’s “pro-life,” without the “strongly.” It adds: “... but as governor he will seek a middle ground with our legislature.” And, like Masters, it cites what voters wants in saying Ronchetti supports “permitting abortion up to 15 weeks and in cases involving rape, incest, and when a mother’s life is at risk." Ronchetti has also run an ad supportive of the 15-week ban. | 2022-09-10T13:05:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | From Jensen to Oz, Republicans' biggest flip-flops on abortion so far - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/10/abortion-republican-candidates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/10/abortion-republican-candidates/ |
Rasheed Newson’s debut is entertainment with a side of education
Earl Singleton III, who prefers to go by Trey, moves to New York City in 1985 with less than $2,500 to his name in Rasheed Newson’s vibrant debut novel, “My Government Means to Kill Me.” More precisely, Trey has turned his back on his trust fund, on principle, and so his money really consists of what he’s made working summer jobs as well as “a lifetime of birthday money.” Seventeen, Black, gay and excited to be in a city where his family’s power and tragic history can’t reach him — or so he thinks — Trey makes his first mistake by staying at the famous Chelsea Hotel, which by the mid-1980s is no longer the star-studded hotspot it was in earlier decades.
But he does meet Gregory there, a New York native who’s been making it on his own since his mother kicked him out at age 15 for charging men to service him in the church bathroom. Gregory becomes Trey’s first guide to the city’s opportunities, hustles and, of course, its gay scene.
At the center of Trey’s experience is Mt. Morris Baths, a bathhouse in Harlem catering to mostly Black gay men. Here Trey begins not to discover his sexuality — he was long ago branded a “sissy” in his childhood in Indianapolis — but rather to revel in it. Back home, he had no real friendships, was bullied by other boys, never got to experience dates or parking or slow dancing in a gym for prom. But at Mt. Morris, he’s in his element: “being stalked into a dark corner of a bathhouse maze and submitting to the carnal demands of an aggressive man that you’ve never spoken to might seem like a strange substitute for the teenage mating rituals I missed out on,” Trey tells us, “but it had raw drama every inch as thrilling as schoolyard puppy love.”
As Trey becomes a regular, the bathhouse acts as a home away from home, where friendly intimacy exists as surely as the carnal kind. It’s at Mt. Morris that he meets the civil rights movement legend Bayard Rustin, who becomes a sort of venerated teacher as well as a friend — although a footnote (one of many; more on that later) disclaims that there “is no evidence that Bayard Rustin (1912–1987) was a customer at the Mt. Morris Baths or any other gay bathhouse or sex club.” Regardless, the novel’s Rustin is comfortable in his sexuality and spends many days sitting naked in his towel and educating Trey in queer history and culture through conversation and book recommendations.
Rustin also opens Trey’s eyes to the AIDS crisis. Some readers will surely wonder how that’s even possible — wasn’t being a gay man in New York City in the 1980s defined by the epidemic? Yes and no; as the majority of Americans can now attest, there’s a sort of cognitive dissonance in having a dangerous disease running rampant while also being required to continue living and working, with or without prophylaxis. It’s not that Trey didn’t know about it; it’s that he didn’t think much about it: “If the bald gay cashier who never charged me for gum stopped coming to work at the corner store, I didn’t wonder why. If I no longer crossed paths with the cute queer dogwalker on my way to the Strand Book Store, I figured he changed his route. I was blind to the magnitude of death and the politics responsible for so many lost lives until Rustin educated me.”
Formal or informal education can only go so far though, and Trey learns his most valuable lessons through trial and error. His enthusiasm, quick thinking and to an extent his youthful naivete lead him to spearhead a successful rent strike in his Fred Trump-owned building. On Rustin’s advice, he decides to get involved with the gay rights movement, and is soon volunteering with Angie, a lesbian running an unofficial hospice for men dying of AIDS (a common practice at a time when poor gay men especially had nowhere else to go for care). While living openly as a gay man is meaningful to Trey, it’s his slow and steady entry into activism that gives him a sense of purpose.
“My Government Means to Kill Me” is written as if Trey is narrating or writing his story many years after the experiences described within, and the chapter headings take the form of lessons, such as “Lesson #1: The Boss Doesn’t Love You” or “Lesson #10: To Change the World, Have a Selfish Goal.” At one point, Trey admits that among Rustin’s recommended books, he’s able to grasp the biographies but has a hard time with political theory. It appears that the book in our hands is the one he wrote for young people like himself who may also need to learn even as they throw themselves into activist work. Who provided the annotations, which are full of historical context, is less clear; even though they’re helpful — mainly to an audience less familiar with both Black and queer history — they aren’t utilized as well as they might be for a full meta-textual effect. But that’s a small flaw in an otherwise marvelous read.
The book is also a love letter to activism, which isn’t to say it glamorizes it — quite the opposite. Trey gets the dubious pleasure of having several of his elders and mentors disagree with one another, giving him advice from eras gone by or challenging his own sense of ethics. Newson, who’s also a television writer and producer (“The Chi,” “Bel-Air”), beautifully portrays just how social activism has to be. Without people interacting — cheering each other on, caring for each other to avoid burnout, allying together for a cause and, yes, bickering about means and ends — there would be no social movements at all.
To the well-versed in the era’s politics, the many luminaries Trey meets and the historic events he finds himself at the center of might seem far-fetched, but there’s a sense that Newson is winking at those of us in the know, inviting us into that space of wondering what we might have done or failed to do if we had lived then and there. And as for the majority of readers, the book provides a crash course in the history of a pivotal era via a vividly imagined lived experience. Much like Trey being schooled by Rustin “with such a light touch,” readers of “My Government Means to Kill Me” may not even realize they’re “getting smarter about gay culture and politics.”
My Government Means to Kill Me
By Rasheed Newson | 2022-09-10T13:19:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | My Government Means to Kill Me by Rasheed Newson book review - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/09/10/rasheed-newson-debut-novel/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/09/10/rasheed-newson-debut-novel/ |
As it wages war on Ukraine, Russia is also waging an energy war against Europe, its biggest export market. That relationship has endured for decades, even during the Cold War. Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia has monetized that Soviet energy legacy to reassert itself. But, post-invasion, will there even be a Putin energy legacy?
To answer this question, I connected over Zoom recently with Thane Gustafson, a professor of government at Georgetown University and a Russian energy specialist. Over the past decade, he has authored books on oil, gas and climate change as they relate to Russia and the Soviet Union.(1)You can find him on Substack, where he writes about the impact of sanctions on Russia.
Here is part one of a condensed and lightly edited transcript of our conversation, in which Gustafson recaps the history of Soviet and Russian energy and describes Putin’s use of that legacy until the eve of the war.
Liam Denning: We’re talking the day before the funeral of Mikhail Gorbachev. Even though he didn’t leave Putin a Soviet Union, he did leave a Soviet energy legacy. Describe that legacy on the eve of Putin taking power.
Thane Gustafson: Oil prices had fallen sharply through the 1980s as the oil industry adjusted to the repercussions of the 1970s oil shocks. And so the eighties were a period of declining oil revenues for the Soviet Union. At the same time, the performance of the Soviet oil industry had been deteriorating for reasons that were spelled out by a couple of documents published by the CIA calling attention to destructive production practices, in particular water-flooding. So by the time that Putin came in, it appeared as though the Russian budget would continue to be in difficulty. And yet oil prices turned around in 1999 and began a long climb. There were ups and downs, as always in oil; the subprime crisis hit Russian revenues hard. But by and large, you would have to say that Putin was extraordinarily lucky.
He contributed to his own good luck through a combination of policies, some of which are familiar to us and others less so. It helps to think of the Russian political economy as one vast rent-recycling machine. That was especially the case on the gas side, where 70% of production goes into the domestic economy at low prices. Rent redistribution varies spectacularly in the case of the oil industry, with the takeover of Yukos as a case in point. That is to say, consolidation of political control in the hands of the state and, in particular, the emerging state-owned oil company, Rosneft.
What is less well known is that Putin took several steps that have consolidated the resilience of Russian revenues. He put in place a conservative, very professional team of financial people. Some of them were trained in the West; some of them emerged from his team in the Saint Petersburg mayoralty. And, of course, the most important is [Alexei] Kudrin, his long-time finance minister. But also people who came up in the circle of Herman Gref. These people were very modern in their prescriptions for budget policy, for fiscal policy, for monetary policy.
And Putin has consistently listened to those people. The present prime minister [Mikhail] Mishustin comes out of the finance ministry and is part of that very cautious, conservative approach: save your money; don’t be like those other petrostates that blow it all on football stadiums and so forth. The Olympics in Sochi were one of the few exceptions. But by and large, the dominant strand has been caution, which now serves Putin very well. The other thing was systematic support for people who set about modernizing some sectors that had been strong in Soviet times, but practically disintegrated in the 1990s. The prime example of that is the civilian nuclear power sector, which has become very much a going concern.
LD: If you were grading Putin on how well he used and preserved that energy legacy on the eve of the war, what would it be?
TG: Up to the eve of the war you would have to give Putin and his circle of people pretty top grades, bearing in mind that legacy was in very damaged condition. The gas side has been spectacular under Putin. Russia has invested on the order of $200 billion, starting in about 2006, to develop a whole new gas province in the far north. And they built five new export pipelines to serve the European market. Plus, throw in the development of LNG, which Putin has supported personally very strongly.
On the oil side the Westerners were invited in. People talk about the majors, but the greater contribution comes from the four big oil services companies. In particular, Schlumberger, which developed a major operation in Russia, the most important part of which is the training system. Schlumberger creates these training centers, recruits bright young people and then sends them all over the world. On the eve of the invasion, the person running Schlumberger in Russia was someone who had gone through the Schlumberger system, had worked overseas for them and then returned as a senior executive.
LD: Explain the significance of that.
TG: There are really three parts to what the oil services companies brought to Russia: fracking, horizontal drilling, and 3D visualization in real time. And those three things together have really halted the decline in Russian oil production. We have seen two decades of strong growth, although mostly in the traditional West Siberian base, with as yet little offshore production and no shale.
Those techniques made an enormous difference. Initially, the Soviet oil fraternity was dead set against fracking. Fracking lessened the total recovery. The attitude of the Soviet oil fraternity was very much focused on getting the maximum recovery over the lifetime of the field, never mind the short-term profits. The Western companies brought in a different view. The first people who — again, working for Schlumberger — implemented fracking on a large scale did it for Yukos, and then everybody else saw the tremendous profitability that produced. And so fracking has become established.
The next stage is multi-stage fracking; you drill a horizontal well, instead of vertical, and then every dozen yards, you frack. And that increases your flow tremendously. To be able to do that, you have to do the visualization, so that your well goes right along the oil formation and doesn’t wander off someplace.
So, under Putin, we’ve seen a wholesale strengthening of the commodities sector, to modernize an oil industry that was in bad shape, a gas industry that needed to move on to the next generation, a nuclear power industry that had fallen apart and a coal industry that mostly served the domestic sector. And all that was turned around, consolidated and reoriented toward the next generation of exports. It’s not just about taking the legacy, but improving the legacy.
LD: About a year before Putin launched his attack, the two sides had just signed this landmark agreement to keep gas flowing through Ukraine and settle their legal disputes. How in the space of a year did they get from there to missiles hitting Kyiv?
TG: There’s a tendency to emphasize the role of energy considerations in Putin’s motives. The deeper you look into the buildup that leads to the invasion, the less important energy appears to be. It’s a running irritant in Russian-Ukrainian relations. But in the end, I think you can sum it up by saying that after 20 years of effort, Putin’s repeated attempts to gain control of Ukraine, including its energy sector, had come to nothing.
In 2004 comes the Orange Revolution. Putin’s game plan is completely undone. In 2013/14, with the overthrow of [Viktor] Yanukovych, Putin’s game plan, once again, is completely undone. And every time some new person comes along, whether it’s [Leonid] Kuchma or Yanukovych, they play Russia against the west. He’s trying to build an FSU equivalent to the European customs union and Ukraine can’t be relied upon.
Ukraine is a consistent problem on all of these fronts. And with its [potential] NATO and EU membership, you name it, there isn’t a single item on the Ukrainian docket that doesn’t drive Putin crazy. And all against the background of his deep conviction that Ukraine is an illegitimate entity to begin with.
LD: Well, now we’re six months into what was supposed to be a weekend war …
TG: I think he [Putin] genuinely believed he could win quickly.
LD: It seems to many on the outside that Putin is at least winning his energy war, even if the battlefield isn’t going to plan. Would you agree with that?
TG: I would honestly very much disagree. I don’t think Putin is winning the energy war at all. In fact, the very idea that energy is a geopolitical weapon runs counter to the main thrust of Russian energy policy for most of the Putin period.
The conventional wisdom in the West is that Russia has consistently used its energy as a weapon, reinforced by the fact that Putin himself has occasionally used such expressions as “Russia is an energy superpower.” But if you focus on the specifics of the gas trade between Russia and Europe, the remarkable thing is that Russia, as did the Soviet Union, was punctilious about observing the terms of gas contracts with its European buyers. That makes today’s cutoffs all the more astonishing.
The one exception to that, the one that remains in everybody’s mind, is the famous cutoff of 2009. That destroyed Gazprom’s commercial reputation in Europe. Hence, the established belief in the West is that Gazprom was an unreliable supplier and that the Kremlin used gas as a weapon. The 2009 cutoff was, in fact, a byproduct of the messy divorce with Ukraine.
On the oil side, you can’t use oil as a weapon — unless you join a cartel. Having long refused to have anything to do with OPEC, it’s only recently that Russia joined Saudi Arabia in an expanded OPEC+, which is attempting to keep oil prices high by limiting production. But the decision to join has been controversial inside the Russian industry, which needs to maintain high production to finance investment, and the Russian government urgently needs revenue for military spending. So the alliance may prove temporary.
As I mentioned earlier, energy revenues are the key to the whole political system. And that takes three forms. One is building a support group among the so-called oligarchs. In fact, creating a cohort of oligarchs who are beholden to you. The second thing is to maintain the welfare system across society, essential for stability. And the third is not so much a geopolitical weapon as a means of seduction, buying influence with businesspeople and politicians, especially in eastern Europe. There’s an excellent book that’s been written on that subject by Margarita Balmaceda, an associate at the Harvard Davis center. She has studied all the ways in which Russia used oil and gas and other forms of energy to influence the politics of its neighbors. Focusing on the carrot rather than the stick. Until the invasion, Russia made little use of the stick because the carrot was so effective.
LD: Your book The Bridge recounts how, despite decades where the Soviet Union was overtly threatening to annihilate Western Europe, the two still traded back and forth on gas and created a gas market. Why is post-Soviet Russia now seemingly unable to do that?
TG: That really goes to the heart of what is so very baffling about Putin’s behavior with this invasion. It is incredibly self-destructive from the standpoint of Russian national interest. He has effectively put a bullet through the heart of the Russian gas business in Europe. And by the same token, he has set in motion a process — I mean the sanctions — that is ultimately going to drag down the long-term competitiveness of the Russian oil industry.More From Bloomberg Opinion:
• Russia-China Lies Are Winning Over the Global South: Hal Brands
• Putin Will Exploit Gorbachev’s Death: Clara Ferreira Marques
(1) “Wheel of Fortune: the Battle for Oil and Power in Russia” (2012), “The Bridge: Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe” (2020), and “Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change” (2021), all with Harvard University Press. | 2022-09-10T13:19:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Putin Has Squandered the Soviet Energy Legacy, Part 1 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/putin-has-squandered-the-soviet-energy-legacy-part-1/2022/09/10/507d5d24-3109-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/putin-has-squandered-the-soviet-energy-legacy-part-1/2022/09/10/507d5d24-3109-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html |
Analysis by Amanda Little | Bloomberg
Yes, forcing clouds to form rain and snow has, in fact, been proven to increase precipitation up to 15% in certain regions, and the emerging private-sector cloud-seeding industry deserves more research and investment in a climate-stressed world. But cloud seeding is not a miracle solution to a drought crisis: The process of injecting tiny particles or chemical vapors into clouds to trigger rain is not a guaranteed, on-demand fix. At most, it should be considered a supportive measure in comprehensive, long-term water-management plans.
China has by far the biggest cloud-seeding program in the world. It’s also common practice in countries from Thailand and Australia to the UAE and the US. In the past two years, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and California have expanded their cloud-seeding operations — most notably to build up the snowpack over the Sierra Nevada mountains that melts into reservoirs.
But both lawmakers and investors must proceed cautiously: They can look to the Colorado River Basin Drought Contingency Plan for a good example of how cloud seeding can be integrated into a broader strategy for drought management that includes rigorous consumer-efficiency programs, water infrastructure and river-management improvements, and new sources of drought-proof water supply such as recycled sewage.In New Mexico, cloud-seeding proposals have recently been approved after resistance from critics who argue that humans shouldn’t fiddle with the weather. But humanity has been modifying natural systems for centuries, redirecting rivers with dams and reshaping landscapes with ancient and modern irrigation canals. At this point our reality is stark: We need all potential solutions on the table, and that means cautiously wielding controversial technologies to fight the far more glaring hubris of human-caused climate change.
Europe’s Drought Could Have a Long Afterlife: Stephen Mihm
Iowa’s Water Crisis Offers a Glimpse of the Future: Adam Minter
Future of the American West Is Central Oregon: Francis Wilkinson
Amanda Little is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering agriculture and climate. She is a professor of journalism and science writing at Vanderbilt University and author of “The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World.” | 2022-09-10T13:19:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Yes, We Can Make It Rain. But It Won’t Solve Drought. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/yes-we-can-make-it-rain-but-it-wont-solve-drought/2022/09/10/50d9791a-3109-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/yes-we-can-make-it-rain-but-it-wont-solve-drought/2022/09/10/50d9791a-3109-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html |
Researchers and start-ups are racing to develop innovative air conditioning units fit for a hotter future
coldSNAP is a durable, low-cost, low-energy system that can work efficiently in hot and hot-humid climates. (Courtesy of Wyss Institute at Harvard University)
This week, Californians got a reminder of one of the most vexing paradoxes of global warming. With temperatures well over 110 degrees Fahrenheit in some regions on Tuesday night, hundreds of thousands of the state’s residents received beeping text alerts to notify them that the power grid, straining under the weight of millions of air-conditioning units, was about to collapse. Save power now, the text warned, or face rolling blackouts.
Consumers conserved, and the state’s electricity grid made it out of a record-breaking hot day relatively unscathed. Still, as temperatures rise worldwide, more people are going to need to install air conditioners. But as currently sold, AC units can actually make global warming worse: On hot days, they suck tons of electricity from the grid, and their chemical refrigerants can accelerate global warming.
This is why researchers and start-ups are hoping to create new, cutting-edge AC units. AC technology has seen only “incremental improvements over the past 100 years,” said Ankit Kalanki, a manager at Third Derivative, a climate tech accelerator co-founded by the energy think tank RMI. “There has not been a step change in innovation.”
Current ACs aren’t going to cut it
But unless air conditioning gets an efficiency revamp, all those ACs are going to put unprecedented strain on the electricity grid. Air conditioners and electric fans already account for approximately 10 percent of electricity consumption worldwide. On extremely hot days, AC efficiency drops, as the units have to work harder to move heat from indoors to outdoors. During a heat wave, millions of people come home and turn on their ACs at the same time, somewhere between the hours of 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. When that happens, air conditioning can account for a whopping 60 to 70 percent of electricity demand, and shake grids like California’s.
Meanwhile, the key component of modern air conditioners — chemicals known as refrigerants — have been the bane of the atmosphere for decades. ACs work by exposing a liquid refrigerant, a chemical with a low boiling point, to hot indoor air. That heat causes the refrigerant to evaporate into gas, cooling the air. A compressor then turns the refrigerant back into liquid and repeats the process.
But HFCs have their own problem — they are greenhouse gases that, in the short term, are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. An amendment to the Montreal Protocol has HFCs set to phase down dramatically by the mid-2040s; in the meantime, however, they’re still contributing to global warming.
There are a lot of ways to make existing AC technology more efficient. Some newer AC units use different refrigerants, such as one known as R-32, which has less planet-warming potential than other hydrofluorocarbons and also takes less energy to compress, thus saving electricity. Other units use technology known as “variable speed compressors,” that allow the unit to run on different settings. The compressor can speed up if it’s 100 degrees Fahrenheit and sweltering, or slow down if it’s only 85 degrees. That can help save on electricity and utility bills.
Other companies, start-ups, and researchers are investigating whether they can ditch vapor compression entirely. A start-up called Blue Frontier uses a liquid that sucks moisture from the air and stores it in a tank to control the temperature. According to the company, this approach could save up to 60 percent of the electricity required to run an AC year-round. And a group of researchers at Harvard University has developed an air conditioning prototype that they call coldSNAP. The prototype doesn’t use a refrigerant, but uses a special coating on a ceramic frame to evaporate water to cool the indoor space without adding moisture to the air. “Because we don’t have the vapor compression system and the energy of trying to release and compress the refrigerants, the energy consumption of these systems is far, far lower,” said Jonathan Grinham, one of the researchers on the project.
What to look for when buying
Some of these new designs may take years to reach the market, and when they do, they may still be more expensive than conventional ACs. But in the meantime, Kalanki says, there are still lots of options to buy a more efficient AC unit.“There are technologies that are two to three times more efficient than the most common ACs on the market today,” Kalanki said. “The challenge is that adoption is very low.” Most consumers, he argues, are just looking at the sticker price on an air conditioning unit, and ignoring the fact that buying a more expensive unit upfront could save them money in the long run.
Ultimately, he added, the government needs to set stricter performance standards for air conditioners so that all ACs on the market — not just higher-end ones — are efficient and safe for the planet. “There are regulations in place to set the floor for air conditioners,” he said. “But that floor is a bit too low.” | 2022-09-10T13:19:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Air conditioner tech is outdated. These are AC options for a hotter future. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/10/air-conditioner-ac-unit-climate-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/10/air-conditioner-ac-unit-climate-change/ |
The moment the queen gave Princess Diana her due 25 years ago
In 1997, amid public anger at Queen Elizabeth for remaining silent after Diana’s death, the monarch changed course
The Queen bowed her head as Princess Diana’s casket passed Buckingham Palace on September 6, 1997. (Video: AP)
It was a rare misstep in the queen’s 70-year reign. But it was a big one.
Her son’s glamorous ex-wife, Princess Diana, had died tragically in a car accident, leaving two young boys, the heirs to the throne, without a mother. And for nearly a week, Queen Elizabeth II said nothing.
During World War II, it had been “keep calm and carry on.” When her own father died when she was 25, Elizabeth remained publicly composed. But the country had changed in the intervening decades and no longer wanted its royalty to maintain that famous British stiff upper lip.
The new prime minister, Tony Blair, did not help matters. Within hours of Diana’s death on Aug. 31, 1997, Blair made a public statement, calling her “the People’s Princess” — a moniker at once so fitting many assumed she’d been called that for years.
How Princess Diana hit it off with Queen Elizabeth II — and how it all came crashing down
Then, the emotional floodgates opened. Crowds of people cried on the street, embraced strangers for comfort. They filled dozens of condolence books with messages and left oceans of flower bouquets at all the royal palaces, even though no one was there and Diana was no longer an official member of the royal family.
The still-royal family was at Balmoral, the queen’s secluded Scottish estate, where they loved to spend private time and where, decades later, the queen would breathe her last. If it had been any other family, it would have been a good place to stay put and console two children who had just lost their mom. Day after day, Diana’s casket lay in St. James’s Palace — alone, as people saw it.
It seemed a cruel metaphor for the way a shy, insecure girl, the most photographed woman in the world, who had asked to be queen of their hearts, had been expelled from the royal fold and hounded, perhaps literally, to death.
The Guardian quoted one anonymous note left on a bouquet outside the palace, describing a complex grief imbued with love and guilt:
“I killed her. I hounded her to the death. I followed her every movement. I gave her no peace. For I bought the papers. I read the stories and I looked at the photographs. They did this for me. How can I live with that?”
Diana’s final hours: Dodi’s yacht, a Ritz suite, a diamond ring and relentless photographers
As the days passed without a statement or even a glimpse of the queen dressed in black, her subjects’ anger grew. They wanted to see the grief they were feeling reflected in their sovereign. Newspapers channeled, or perhaps stoked, the flames with their headlines:
“WHERE IS OUR QUEEN?”
“SHOW US YOU CARE”
“YOUR PEOPLE ARE SUFFERING, SPEAK TO US MA’AM”
By the end of the week, people who had never before considered it were openly questioning whether Britain needed a monarch at all.
Finally, the queen returned to London to give Diana her due. The first departure from protocol came when her car arrived at the gates of Buckingham Palace. Instead of driving through, the car stopped and the queen got out. Soon, she was walking by the tides of flowers and greeting the crowd — stiffly, awkwardly, but there.
That evening, she gave an address live on television — another departure from protocol for the death of woman with no official role. The queen appeared nervous, and while paying tribute to the princess, she hinted at the public anger at her silence and stoicism.
“We have all been trying in our different ways to cope,” she said. “It is not easy to express a sense of loss, since the initial shock is often succeeded by a mixture of other feelings: disbelief, incomprehension, anger — and concern for those who remain.”
The next day, the day of the funeral, came the biggest breach of protocol of them all. The queen stood with her family, and as Diana’s funeral cortege passed by, she bowed her head.
It was not a quick bow, nor a shallow one. The woman accustomed to being bowed by the world now lowered her head and humbly honored the princess.
More than anything, it was the bow that broke the fever of anger directed at the queen and her family. Now, 25 years later, as the world prepares to lay the queen to rest, it is still remembered among her long list of achievements. | 2022-09-10T13:19:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Queen Elizabeth II bowed to Princess Diana's casket in 1997 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/09/10/queen-elizabeth-princess-diana-funeral/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/09/10/queen-elizabeth-princess-diana-funeral/ |
Artist shares her light with others ... and it’s neon
By Jasmine Vaughn-Hall, The Baltimore Banner | AP
BALTIMORE — If you ask her, how she started making neon lights was a happy accident.
Selena Carter was working in the Built Environment Applied Research Lab at Morgan State University, learning how to laser cut plywood. One day, she came across a piece of slime green-colored fluorescent acrylic in the lab and started thinking about how something like that would look lit up.
After several Amazon purchases, trips to Home Depot, broad discussions about electricity with her father, and a lot of experimenting, she made her first neon sign. It took almost a year and many more signs after that to perfect her practice, she said.
The Baltimore native who grew up in the Mondawmin area had no idea this newfound hobby was setting her on the path of entrepreneurship. She also never dreamed she would have fans — over 22,000 followers on Instagram and more than 21,000 on Twitter.
“You never know what people like from you until you show them what you do,” Carter said.
Carter uses a combination of laser and acrylic cutting, designing, electrical wires and more to make special-order neon light signs for customers, and she created a master class to teach others how to make them, too. Carter’s neon signs light up several Baltimore businesses. A bright white “pinky’s up” sign sits in Cuples Tea House on North Howard Street. A neon pink, Gothic font sign spelling out “status” illuminates Status Studio on Greenmount Avenue. Carter also created a large “The Future is Creamy” sign and a few others for an ice cream spot in Nebraska.
Carter was waiting tables at The Cheesecake Factory before she began experimenting with neon. She didn’t care for waiting tables at all and much of her shift she spent jotting down to-dos that had nothing to do with waitressing and everything to do with getting out and doing other things. Carter was plotting, she said, a way to get out of the food industry. She ended a shift at The Cheesecake Factory in 2019 and never went back.
That same year, she posted her first neon sign, which spelled out her name, on Twitter. People loved it and her post received over 15,000 likes and dozens of comments. She immediately started taking orders to make signs for others and built a website. Originally, her brand was called Design House 1129, but she later changed it to By Selena Carter.
Carter decided she wanted to share what she knows and teach others, she said, because she’s truly come a long way. She remembers wishing there were more opportunities for her to learn when she was figuring out soldering irons, electrical wire, brackets and other aspects of making neon lights.
During the pandemic, Carter created the master class to share resources with others and find a way to further monetize her new talent. People who purchase the virtual class, which costs $100, get one-on-one video tutorials from Carter and a detailed list of supplies with links for where to buy them. They’re also able to join her private Facebook page to talk about the class and share things they’ve created.
Nasir Ali, owner of the Bmore Creative Instagram page, purchased Carter’s master class in July. As an art teacher in Baltimore County schools, he’s a big supporter of looking for ways to express his creativity. He also appreciated Carter’s thorough approach and willingness to share what she knows.
“It was really good seeing someone doing their own thing, but also giving back,” Ali said.
Carter always had an artsy and creative side, she said. They’re qualities she wishes her parents had invested in more. But they stressed the traditional route of attending a good high school — Western High School in Baltimore — and then moving onto college at Morgan State University’s School of Architecture and Planning. Her interest in architecture and interior design came from her father, a contractor. He would take her to his project sites and she remembers how much work he put into his developments.
Carter said her time spent in the BEAR Lab at Morgan inspired her to create new things because she was around other creators.
Carter tells her students that making neon lights takes practice and consistency. Her creations may come across as easy to construct on social media, but there were moments when she wanted to give up and sat on her kitchen countertop discouraged because a light fell apart or wouldn’t turn on.
And, those were just the technical difficulties.
Carter, 27, needed to find a balance between school, a thriving business and taking care of her 6-year-old son. She decided to take a break from Morgan once her son started grade school, but plans to go back someday. Carter has about a year left to get her degree, she said, and she wants her portfolio to be “top-notch” by the time she graduates. Outside of school, though, she’s still contributing to her portfolio.
Carter also took a mental vacation for six months this past year to recharge, reflect, and come back better. She had major successes, but she was working so much she wasn’t taking it all in.
“I told myself, ’If you don’t take a break, everything’s gonna fall apart,’” she said.
She officially came back this summer, renting a space at Open Works. Carter wants to create and teach another master class and eventually expand her neon light business. Baltimore has given her a lot of love and support but she could see herself venturing to another state to expand.
There are ways to give back and be a positive catalyst for change in the city beyond being present, she said. Carter would also like to immerse herself in other artistry, like upholstery and interior design.
“I’m a person that’s gonna live a lot of different lives,” Carter said. | 2022-09-10T13:19:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Artist shares her light with others ... and it’s neon - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/artist-shares-her-light-with-others--and-its-neon/2022/09/10/b35a7c7a-3108-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/artist-shares-her-light-with-others--and-its-neon/2022/09/10/b35a7c7a-3108-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html |
By James Baron, The Free Lance-Star | AP
Sam Wang, 56, poses for a photo, Saturday, July 23, 2022 in Stafford, Va. Wang is busy training for the biggest marathon of his life—a 50-miler in early October. In preparation for that race, Wang is getting ready mentally and physically, including 8½-hour runs through the county covering over 40 miles. (Peter Cihelka/The Free Lance-Star via AP) | 2022-09-10T13:19:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Virginia runner will tackle 50-mile marathon in October - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-runner-will-tackle-50-mile-marathon-in-october/2022/09/10/bfc83538-3108-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-runner-will-tackle-50-mile-marathon-in-october/2022/09/10/bfc83538-3108-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html |
Roberts says Supreme Court will reopen to public, defends legitimacy
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. talks to fellow Supreme Court justices and lawmakers as they attend President Biden's State of the Union address during a joint session of Congress on March 1 at the Capitol. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Jr. defended the integrity of the Supreme Court Friday night in his first public remarks following a tumultuous term, saying that disagreement with the court’s decisions should not lead to questions about its legitimacy.
“The court has always decided controversial cases and decisions always have been subject to intense criticism and that is entirely appropriate,” Roberts told a gathering of judges and lawyers in Colorado. But he said that disagreement with the court’s role of deciding what the law is has transformed into criticism of its legitimacy.
“You don’t want the political branches telling you what the law is. And you don’t want public opinion to be the guide of what the appropriate decision is,” said Roberts, who added, to laughter, “Yes, all of our opinions are open to criticism. In fact, our members do a great job of criticizing some opinions from time to time.”
“But simply because people disagree with an opinion is not a basis for criticizing the legitimacy of the court,” he added.
With the support of three justices chosen by President Donald Trump in the past five years, the Supreme Court now has a 6-to-3 conservative majority. Those justices sent the court on a dramatic turn to the right in the term completed this summer, overturning Roe v. Wade’s guarantee of a constitutional right to abortion, striking a gun control law in New York, limiting the Biden administration’s power to confront climate change and scoring victories for religious conservatives.
With sweep and speed, Supreme Court conservatives ignite a new era
The court’s approval rating has dropped to one of its lowest levels ever in public opinion polls, led by unhappy Democrats and a lesser extent by those who view themselves as independent.
Roberts was interviewed by two fellow judges at the Bench & Bar Conference of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. He was not asked about one of the things that made the term so contentious: a leaked draft of the court’s abortion opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
The leak of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s draft opinion shocked the court, which prides itself on keeping internal deliberations secret. Roberts in May ordered an investigation into the leak to Politico, but he has said nothing publicly about it since.
Earlier at the same conference, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said the internal investigation was continuing and that he hoped a report would come soon. He did not say whether it would be made public.
“Improper efforts to influence judicial decision-making, from whatever side, from whomever, are a threat to the judicial decision-making process and inhibit our capacity to communicate with one another,” Gorsuch said
The decision has led to protests outside the homes of the justices, most particularly Roberts and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who live near each other in suburban Maryland.
Karlik reported from Colorado Springs | 2022-09-10T13:20:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Chief Justice Roberts defends Supreme Court's decisions, legitimacy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/10/supreme-court-roberts-legitimacy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/10/supreme-court-roberts-legitimacy/ |
She saw her Hollywood career wither after protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee. She then spent decades as an impassioned voice on humanitarian matters.
Actress Marsha Hunt in the 1940s. (AP/ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Marsha Hunt, a Hollywood actress who played all-American girlfriends, wives and mothers during the wartime 1940s and saw her career wither after protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee’s witch hunt into communist activity in the film colony, died Sept. 7 at her home in Sherman Oaks, Calif. She was 104 and had spent the last six decades as a redoubtable humanitarian activist.
A photo of her was sent to every paper in Los Angeles with text about how the radiant cover girl was turning down many studio offers. Of movies, she was quoted: “No pictures for me.”
The intrigue worked, landing her a contract at Paramount studios and the romantic lead in her first film, “The Virginia Judge” (1935), opposite Robert Cummings. With her heart-shaped face and wholesome allure, Ms. Hunt was cast in more than a dozen films in her first two years on-screen — some opposite John Wayne and Buster Crabbe. Few were distinguished enough to catapult her to cinematic heights.
Ms. Hunt said she begged studio executives to end her run of dewy-eyed coeds and romance-minded ingénues and give her a better range of parts, even if it meant a drop from marquee billing. She said Paramount officials told her she seemed ungrateful, given her stardom. After her contract expired, she became a prodigious freelancer, often at low-budget “poverty row” studios.
“I was 20 years old then and I was a has-been because I had only played sweet young girls,” she told the publication Film Talk in 2004. “I took anything I could get, just to keep busy,” she added. “I worked at studios that made pictures — and I mean whole feature films — in six days.”
A small role in the popular Andy Hardy series — as a spendthrift wife in “The Hardys Ride High” (1939) — led to a contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the most prestigious studio in town.
Ms. Hunt became one of MGM’s most reliable and appealing stalwarts of second-tier features. In “Kid Glove Killer” (1942), a taut suspense film with light-comedy elements, she played a fetching assistant to Van Heflin’s forensic scientist. She was Robert Young’s warmhearted wife in “Joe Smith, American” (1942) and brave pilot Franchot Tone’s sweetheart in the wartime propaganda film “Pilot #5” (1943).
She also won supporting roles in A-list productions including “Pride and Prejudice” (1940) starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, “The Human Comedy” (1943) with Mickey Rooney, and “The Valley of Decision” (1945) with Gregory Peck and Garson.
“I didn’t care about billing,” Ms. Hunt told Film Talk. “I didn’t care about being the lead, fame or anything like that. I didn’t want to be a star: I wanted to be the best actress I could possibly become and they were letting me grow with every role.”
In addition to her screen work, Ms. Hunt also became known for her volunteer activities raising morale and funds for the Allied war effort in World War II. She embarked on a USO tour of Canada and Alaska, sold war bonds and became captain of a team of hostesses at the Hollywood Canteen, which catered to servicemen on leave. “I think I danced with five thousand men every Saturday night,” she later said.
Her career waned after the war. In a small role, she was cast against type — as a vamp — in “Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman” (1947) starring Susan Hayward as an alcoholic chanteuse. Ms. Hunt also had the bad luck of being the good girl in the crime drama “Raw Deal” (1948).
Successfully, she turned to TV and Broadway to boost her profile and demonstrate what Hollywood failed to fully capture of her range. Reviewing her work as Viola in an NBC production of “Twelfth Night” in 1949, New York Times TV critic Jack Gould praised her understated charisma and mastery of making Shakespeare’s couplets sound effortlessly conversational.
Her work as a parson’s wife opposite Maurice Evans in a well-received 1950 revival of George Bernard Shaw’s “The Devil’s Disciple” landed her on the cover of Life magazine — a major publicity coup. Her timing was unfortunate. Her name also appeared soon after in Red Channels, a pamphlet that stoked anti-Communist paranoia and had tremendous influence over hiring decisions by TV and film studios.
The most serious charge, Red Channels noted, was Ms. Hunt’s membership in the Committee for the First Amendment. This group of about two dozen high-profile entertainers, including Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, flew to Washington in 1947 to protest the House Un-American Activities Committee’s imprisonment of 10 noted writers, directors and producers who had refused to reveal their political allegiances.
Decades later, she recalled the HUAC inquest as “an appalling display of the denial of citizens’ rights.” It was an era when livelihoods were destroyed by innuendo about fealty to Moscow, and while she was never jailed or charged with any crime, she found that work was drying up. She told the New York Herald Tribune in 1956 that she twice signed anti-communist loyalty oaths to procure jobs in film and TV, but that she drew the line at taking out an advertisement in trade papers.
“I’ve been up for several pictures, but it’s quite an unyielding wall,” she said to the Herald Tribune. “The price of work today is guilt and repentance. I’m not guilty so I can’t repent. If only I had been a Communist, I could have joined with the other prodigal sons and daughters and would have been welcomed back into the fold.”
Ms. Hunt worked periodically after the blacklist era — notably as the mother of a disfigured war veteran in “Johnny Got His Gun” (1971) — but she said the “momentum” to her screen career was gone.
She gravitated to activism, propelled by a two-month around-the-world trip in the mid-1950s. Being exposed to what she called the “extremes of beauty and splendor and . . . the squalor of abject poverty” spurred her involvement with the American Association for the United Nations. (The group supports the world body and is now known as the United Nations Association of the United States of America.)
As president of the San Fernando Valley chapter, she raised money and served as an impassioned voice on food insecurity, refugee crises and other humanitarian matters. After a homemade bomb destroyed the office in 1963 — part of a pattern of similar terrorist attacks aimed at the U.N. group and interfaith officials in the area — she spoke out against right-wing extremism. Decades later, she worked on alleviating homelessness in the Los Angeles area.
Recalling her blacklisting, she told Film Talk: “I was told that in fact it wasn’t really about communism — that was the thing that frightened everybody — it was about control and about power. | 2022-09-10T14:24:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Marsha Hunt, movie star blacklisted for HUAC protest, dies at 104 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/10/marsha-hunt-actress-blacklist-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/10/marsha-hunt-actress-blacklist-dead/ |
Catcher Israel Pineda completes quick road to majors with Nationals call-up
Catcher Israel Pineda tore through the Nationals' minor league system this season. (Benjamin Rusnak/Getty Images)
PHILADELPHIA — The Washington Nationals have called up a handful of young prospects this year to test their luck in the majors. The latest is Israel Pineda, a 22-year old catcher who has made a quick rise through the Nationals’ system.
Pineda wasn’t supposed to be in the majors so soon, but Keibert Ruiz was placed on the injured list Friday with a testicular contusion that will sideline him for at least three weeks and could end his season. So Pineda will join Riley Adams and Tres Barrera behind the plate down the stretch.
“I feel really, really good. I feel excited because this is my best year,” Pineda said on Friday. “So I worked a lot for this year and I’ve (gotten) really good results right now.”
Pineda, the Nationals’ 26th-ranked prospect according to MLB.com, started the season at Class A Wilmington where he played in 67 games before being called up to Class AA Harrisburg. He made 26 appearances there before being called up to Class AAA Rochester on Aug. 31, where he played in six games before being recalled.
Across the three levels, Pineda ranked second among Nationals minor leaguers in RBI (71) and fifth in slugging percentage (.458). In his first three professional seasons from 2017-2019, Pineda hit just 11 home runs. But in 2021, he showed an increase in power by hitting 14. And this season, he’s hit 16 homers, seven of which came during his time in Harrisburg.
Pineda said he didn’t expect to jump levels so quickly this year, he just focused on playing his best baseball and letting his game speak for itself. Nationals Manager Dave Martinez said the team talked to him before this season about managing his pitching staff and limiting his chases — two common points of development for a young catcher.
“We kept eyes on him and he has done well,” Martinez said. “He cut down his chase tremendously, he’s hitting the ball really hard. He understands that he needs to stay in the middle field. Like I said, he’s just another young catcher that we developed that we like a lot. He’s gonna get an opportunity to play and hopefully he does well.”
Despite his quick rise through the system, Pineda did struggle in his brief time with Class AAA Rochester. He went 2-for-3 with a homer, five RBI and two walks in his debut before going hitless in his next 18 at-bats with seven strikeouts, although he did walk three times.
Martinez said the plan will be for Pineda to split the remaining games with Adams and Barrera. It’s likely that Pineda will need more time to develop at Rochester, though a successful season-ending stint with Washington could help his chances of sticking in the majors. Even if he does struggle, Pineda could wind up backup to Ruiz in the future.
The Nationals haven’t been afraid to give players with little experience at the highest minor league level opportunities in the majors. Joan Adon, a member of the same 2016 international signing class as Pineda, made four starts above High-A before this season and just one start in Rochester, yet was in the Nationals rotation to open the season. Evan Lee hadn’t pitched above Class AA before making his debut in early June.
Pineda walked through the visiting locker room on Friday at Citizens Bank Park with a slight grin full of nervous excitement. A few teammates, including Adams, walked up to him, congratulated him and gave him a hug. Adams said he was familiar with Pineda from watching him on the back fields at Spring Training.
“I swear there was a time where I don’t think he ever got out, so I’m excited to watch him hit,” Adams said. “Anything he needs, Tres (Barrera) and I are here to help him and work on it. Excited to see him when he gets a shot out there and it’ll be fun.”
When Pineda got the news of his call-up from Rochester manager Matthew LeCroy on Friday, he called his wife and his parents to let them know. On Aug. 30, he was in Harrisburg. Just 10 days later, he found himself in a major league clubhouse.
“I worked a lot last offseason with my arm, my defense, my receiving and more of my hitting,” Pineda said. “So I think that’s why I’m here right now … and I’ll continue to work every day, no matter what.” | 2022-09-10T15:38:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Catcher Israel Pineda the latest Nationals prospect to earn call-up - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/10/nationals-israel-pineda/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/10/nationals-israel-pineda/ |
Fashion fight: This reformer wanted to change the way women dressed
Wendell Mansions in Northwest Washington was built in 1906 by feminist Anna Jenness Miller. (John Kelly/The Washington Post)
It is possible that when Anna Jenness Miller made a featured appearance at the Wells Corset Studio at 13th and G streets NW in November 1918 — during the foundation garment shop’s annual sale — some in Washington did not remember her. The newspaper ad announcing her presence noted helpfully that she was an “authority on matters of feminine interest.”
She was much more than that. At the turn of the 19th century, Jenness Miller was one of the most interesting women in America: an author, a lecturer, a suffragist, a publisher, an inventor, a leader in the effort to free women from restrictive clothing, a business executive and a real estate magnate. She developed elegant buildings in some of the priciest neighborhoods in the District.
And yet, had you ever heard of her? Answer Man had not, until he heard from Chris Leinberger, who lives in a handsome building developed by Jenness Miller at 2339 Massachusetts Avenue NW. Lamented Leinberger: “She has been lost to history, but what a lady.”
Indeed. Anna Jenness — her family called her “Annie” — was born in 1859 in New Hampshire. She came from distinguished stock, related on her mother’s side to Oliver Wendell Holmes (senior and junior) and abolitionist Wendell Phillips. She attended Emerson College.
Jenness Miller was someone who wondered why things were the way they were and what it would take to change them. For example, why were American women encouraged to torture themselves with cage-like corsets, don yards of cumbersome cloth and carry around a heavy protuberance called a bustle?
She crisscrossed the country lecturing on the topic of “dress reform,” posing such rhetorical questions as: “What is there about this burdensome aggregation of long skirts worn by women of every social grade, with endless complications of loops, puffs and a weight that is death to health and happiness, and to prolonged usefulness, that women should continue in this bondage?”
Jenness Miller was among reformers who attacked the problem from the inside out. She advocated changes in women’s underwear, recommending more pliable corsets. Better yet, women could ditch the corset entirely in favor of one-piece union suits.
As for outerwear, she designed split skirts. Her sister, Mabel Jenness, wore one in 1890 on a much-publicized horse ride in New York City. Mabel refused to ride side saddle — it was bad for the spine, she argued — so she dressed in a “bifurcated” skirt, mounted her horse like a man. Some onlookers were shocked.
Anna married an Indiana dry goods merchant named Conrad Miller. But rather than jettison her name, she just added his. And it appears that when his company went bankrupt, she gave him a job in her growing publishing business. In 1887, she founded a magazine that covered sensible fashion and other topics, eventually naming it after herself: Jenness Miller Monthly.
She received a patent for a way of lacing boots that did away with the fidgety button-and-hook method. Then she designed a type of low boot she claimed would help women with “tender” feet. A newspaper ad in The Washington Post noted: “They are shaped and sloped to allow the ball of the foot to rest flat and give free play to the joints and muscles, and afford just the exact width and length to save binding the foot or cramping the toes.”
Jenness Miller wrote at least eight books, including one called “Mother and Babe.” This contained general parental advice, along with patterns mothers could use to sew their own maternity clothes. She was a mother herself, of a daughter named Vivian, who posed for photos wearing Jenness Miller’s creations.
Readers might have been surprised to find amid the diet and exercise tips in “Mother and Babe” a chapter titled “When Women Should Refuse Motherhood.” In it, Jenness Miller outlined various scenarios in which a woman might not want to have children, including “when she does not love her husband” and “when her husband’s approaches arouse instinctive protest.”
Wrote Jenness Miller: “No man has the right to force childbearing upon a woman because she is his wife. Wifehood is a sacred obligation, and the marriage bond is degraded when it becomes a slave’s chain to drag a woman’s spirit and body into unwilling captivity.”
Jenness Miller became a widow in 1910. She continued to be active in the suffrage movement, participating in the 1913 suffrage demonstration in Washington that was disrupted by male hooligans. (She later testified to Congress that the D.C. police had refused her request to protect the voting rights demonstrators.)
And Jenness Miller bought and sold property along Embassy Row. She acquired some houses after they were constructed. Others she developed herself. They included one at 23rd Street and Massachusetts Avenue NW, near Sheridan Circle, called Wendell Mansions. The name of the fancy building, today a co-op, comes from that illustrious branch of her family.
Jenness Miller died in 1935 in New York City. One hopes she would be pleased with the strides women have made since then, though it is likely she would still find room for improvement. | 2022-09-10T16:12:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Anna Jenness Miller preached the gospel of sensible dress for women - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/10/dress-reformer-anna-jenness-miller/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/10/dress-reformer-anna-jenness-miller/ |
Chelsea Van Thof began calling for the barrier after her long-term partner, Peter Tripp, jumped from the William Howard Taft Bridge in April
Chelsea Van Thof and Peter Tripp met while studying to become veterinarians. (Chelsea Van Thof)
Four months and 12 days after the death of her long-term partner, Chelsea Van Thof sat down and wrote to him.
“I realized, today, that fall is coming,” she wrote. “That means flannels. And flannels mean you. I don’t know how I’m going to get through that.”
She wrote about the shows he was watching — “How am I ever supposed to watch the Haunting of Hill House ever again?” — and a board game they used to play.
“None of this is okay,” she wrote. “How do people do this? How do people go on living their lives? We should have moved to NH. We shouldn’t have come to DC. You would have been happier. We would have been closer to your family. There wouldn’t have been as many bridges to jump off of.”
On April 13, Dr. Peter Tripp, a 29-year-old veterinarian who made a career of taking care of animals and a habit of taking care of people, walked out of the couple’s Northwest Washington apartment to the nearby William Howard Taft Bridge and jumped to his death.
Since then, Van Thof, who is also a veterinarian, has been mourning his loss and fighting to keep more people from ending their lives in the same way. A website she created in his name contains a grief journal that offers intimate glimpses of the life they lived together and the one she is now living without him. It also details her push to bring more attention to the high suicide rate among veterinarians and her effort to get a suicide barrier added to Taft Bridge.
“After diplomat Ben Read successfully implemented a barrier on the Ellington Bridge in the wake of losing his daughter in 1986, the Taft was supposed to be next,” the website says. It then notes that the bridge “remains unprotected, to this day.”
Van Thof said she believes Tripp would still be alive if the bridge had a barrier.
“I know he would be here,” she said. “It would have cut though the impulse.”
In a Washington Post article that ran Wednesday about suicides at the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, my colleague William Wan wrote: “Decades of research have shown nets and barriers to be the most effective measure against bridge suicides. Because of the impulsive nature of many suicides, taking away easy access drastically reduces deaths.”
“In 2003, Toronto erected barriers at its most lethal bridge, which averaged nine suicides a year. In the decade that followed, suicides dropped to almost zero,” the article reads. “When D.C. authorities installed fencing at the Duke Ellington Bridge, which crosses Rock Creek Park in Northwest Washington, suicides decreased by 90 percent, and jumps at nearby bridges did not increase.”
Van Thof was on the Ellington Bridge when she learned that Tripp had jumped from the Taft Bridge, which carries Connecticut Avenue over Rock Creek and is located just blocks from their apartment. She had been sleeping and woke up to their Dalmatian, Hugo, barking. Minutes later, she received a concerning text from Tripp and went looking for him with a friend. They were searching within the radius where his phone last pinged when Van Thof looked through the suicide barrier on Ellington Bridge and saw the flashing lights of police cars below Taft Bridge.
“The next day, I was infuriated,” she recalled. “I was just infuriated that a bridge right next to an identical bridge didn’t have the same barrier. That’s how this started.”
This is her effort to keep the next person in a crisis who ends up standing on that bridge from taking an action that can’t be undone.
On Wednesday, a resolution in support of a Taft Bridge barrier was adopted by Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners for the Adams Morgan community. In June, a similar resolution was adopted by Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners for the Woodley Park community. Van Thof is now focused on getting support from the D.C. Council and D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser.
If past efforts to get fences and nets added to bridges across the country are any indication, the most vocal resistance will come from individuals and groups who don’t want views and aesthetics altered by a barrier. Those are valid concerns, but preserving lives outweighs preserving landscapes. The country is in the middle of a known mental health crisis, and barriers have been proven to reduce the number of bridge suicides.
The construction of a barrier on Taft — and other bridges — is long overdue. Van Thof has also expressed support of the Barriers to Suicide Act, which calls for establishing a program to facilitate the installation of nets and barriers on structures across the country.
“Peter was the best person that I’ll ever meet,” she said, “and this is what he would have done.”
They lost a friend to suicide. Now, they’re on a 4,300-mile journey to help other young people who are struggling.
Van Thof and Tripp met while getting their doctorate degrees in veterinary medicine at Tufts University. She dreamed of working with wildlife; he gravitated toward cows and other livestock. As she tells it, it was just one of the many ways they were opposite.
She said they were best friends before they started dating. After they graduated in 2019, the two lived and worked together in Oregon before moving to the District, where he worked for District Veterinary Hospital in Brookland and she worked temporarily for Lap of Love, which does in-home euthanasia, before starting a fellowship with the State Department.
An obituary for Tripp describes him as possessing a gentleness that made him wonderful with animals and a dependability that made him someone his fellow humans leaned on. He regularly donated platelets, and he donated bone marrow after he received a call saying he was a match for someone in need.
“Those who love him are heartbroken that he was so adept at helping others but was somehow unable to ask for help for himself,” the obituary reads.
The national suicide hotline changes to 988
Van Thof said she knew that veterinarians were at much higher risk of dying by suicide than the general population — male vets are reportedly 2.1 times more likely and female vets 3.5 times more likely — but Tripp gave her no indication that he was considering ending his life. She said she found out only after his death that he had looked up the number for the suicide hotline but never called. She also discovered that on the day he died, he had scheduled a future appointment to see a therapist.
In the grief journal entries Van Thof posts online, she talks directly to Tipp. On Thursday, she told him about the ANC vote.
“Your resolution passed in the other ward near your bridge, babe,” she wrote. “Now it will go to city council and the mayor. You are going to save lives, even though you couldn’t save your own. Neither could I. I think a part of me feels that if I advocate hard enough for suicide prevention, I’ll get another part of you back, whatever that may mean. Nothing will bring you back, though.” | 2022-09-10T16:13:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | After a veterinarian’s death, a DC bridge could get a suicide barrier - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/10/veterinarian-suicide-bridge-barrier/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/10/veterinarian-suicide-bridge-barrier/ |
FILE - This Feb. 7, 2012 photo shows a cross on a grave at the Wounded Knee National Historic landmark in South Dakota. Two American Indian tribes in South Dakota have agreed to purchase 40 acres of land near the Wounded Knee National Historic Landmark on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. (Rapid City Journal via AP) (Uncredited/Rapid City Journal) | 2022-09-10T16:26:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | South Dakota tribes buy land near Wounded Knee massacre site - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/south-dakota-tribes-buy-land-near-wounded-knee-massacre-site/2022/09/10/361f4af4-311e-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/south-dakota-tribes-buy-land-near-wounded-knee-massacre-site/2022/09/10/361f4af4-311e-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html |
David Vines White, the Garter Principal King of Arms, reads the Principal Proclamation from the balcony overlooking Friary Court after the Accession Council at St. James's Palace as King Charles III is formally proclaimed Britain's new monarch, in London on Sept. 10. (Jamie Lorriman/Pool via Reuters)
In a centuries-old ceremony televised Saturday for the first time, complete with troops and trumpets, Britain’s Garter King of Arms officially proclaimed Charles III king of the United Kingdom.
Why do we care?
It’s a fair question — and one I have been asked a lot as an American royal watcher. Here’s a short answer: Some of us just like this stuff. We delight in the pomp of royal ceremonies (whether for the history or the opulence). Some people follow personalities as though the House of Windsor is a real-life soap opera. Not everyone cares, of course, and they don’t have to. If you believe, as I do, that all people are created equal, the concept of a hereditary monarchy is archaic. And as recent reactions to the queen’s death on Black Twitter and Irish Twitter indicated, for many people the British monarchy’s legacy is inextricably linked to slavery, racism and colonialism. As one writer noted: “For many of us who are descendants of colonized ancestors, it’s difficult to mourn a person who represents a legacy of oppression.”
There’s another reason to be interested in — and even respect — the monarchy: as an institutional force for stability that partisan politics could never provide.
To my eye, the new king aims to project continuity in his mother’s tradition. We won’t know for a while which ways Charles may break from her approach. But the heraldic customs on display, unseen for many decades, underscore that part of the challenge before him is to show the relevance in our age of the ancient institution he now leads.
Some handy links for keeping up with the transition: “Operation London Bridge” was the not-so-secret code name for the plan of all the events that would follow the queen’s death. Here are the details that The Post has confirmed about her funeral plans, with a visual guide here mapping her journey to her final resting place. And, ICYMI, watch King Charles III’s first official address.
In her seven-decade reign, Elizabeth II visited more than two dozen U.S. cities. See images in our slide show.
The queen was “The Boss” — but was she a feminist? asks London correspondent Karla Adam. “The queen wasn’t known for making bold declarations about the rights of women — and some Britons held that against her.” Still, others saw her as a feminist icon.
Post editorial cartoonist Michael de Adder marks “The end of an era.”
The people of Ireland largely sympathize with Britons over the death of their queen — with some exceptions, writes Post reporter Claire Parker. Politicians were quick to praise the late monarch’s efforts to repair relations between the countries, “but for many Irish, the occasion of the queen’s death — and her legacy — surfaced emotions that were much more mixed.” (Related: Post political reporter Matt Viser reminds us that when President Biden, a proud Irishman, first met the queen, he followed his mother’s instructions not to bow.)
Britain’s late queen was the most disciplined public figure of the past century, writes Post Opinion columnist Fareed Zakaria. “In a confessional age, when we post every idea, urge, impulse and image that pops into our heads, this woman kept her own counsel.”
A share from @washingtonpost
Do you have questions about Britain’s royal transition? Submit them here and I may answer them in a future edition of the newsletter. | 2022-09-10T16:26:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Post Elizabeth newsletter: Britain has a new king. Why do people care? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/10/post-elizabeth-newsletter-king-charles-why-we-care/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/10/post-elizabeth-newsletter-king-charles-why-we-care/ |
The Las Vegas Aces will take on the Connecticut Sun in the Finals
Connecticut Sun players DeWanna Bonner (24) Odyssey Sims (center) and Jonquel Jones helped lead a stunning comeback to beat the Chicago Sky in Game 5 to advance to the WNBA Finals. (Charles Rex Arbogast/AP)
1MVP showdown
2The Point Gawd
3Under the radar
4Awards galore
5Don’t forget
LAS VEGAS — The WNBA will crown a first-time champion as the Finals begin with a pair of organizations that have been close, but unable to win a title.
The Las Vegas Aces will host the Connecticut Sun on Sunday for Game 1 of the five-game series. The No. 1 seeded Aces finished the regular season with a 26-10 record and knocked off the Seattle Storm in four games to advance to the Finals. The Storm swept the Aces to win the 2020 championship.
The Sun needed five games to dispose of the reigning champion Chicago Sky, and closed it on the road with an 18-0 run to finish off Game 5. Methodically, the Sun posted a 25-11 regular season record and return to the Finals for the first time since 2019, when they lost to the Washington Mystics. The organization was also the Finals runner-up in 2005 and 2004.
Here are five thing to know before watching the WNBA Finals:
MVP showdown
Aces center A’ja Wilson and Sun forward Jonquel Jones represent the last two MVP winners. Wilson has led Las Vegas to the Finals for the second time since the franchise relocated in 2018, when it selected the South Carolina star with the No. 1 overall pick. She won her first league MVP in 2020 and averaged 19.5 points, 9.4 rebounds, 1.9 blocks and shot 50.1 percent from the field en route to being named 2022 MVP and defensive player of the year.
Jones had a quieter year than her 2021 MVP campaign with 14.6 points, 8.6 rebounds and 1.2 blocks while shooting 51.3 percent. The 6-foot-6, 215-pounder is a matchup nightmare, but the Sun’s shift to a more balanced attack has Connecticut back in the Finals. Jones was named second team all-defense this season, Most Improved Player in 2017 and Sixth Woman of the Year in 2018.
The Point Gawd
Aces point guard Chelsea Gray — nicknamed the Point Gawd — is a four-time all-star, but was left off the 2022 team. She has been out to prove a point ever since, averaging 15.8 points, 6.2 assists and 3.3 rebounds after the all-star break. Gray has upped her play even more in the playoffs with 24 points, 7.7 assists and 4.3 rebounds in the postseason, including spectacular moments in Games 3 and 4 to close out the Storm. There’s already a championship ring on her finger from her 2016 run with the Los Angeles Sparks, and they returned to the Finals in 2017. Gray may be the best point guard in the league and she knows what it takes to be the last team standing.
The WNBA had five teams in 2022 that were heads-and-tails above the rest of the league. The Aces, Sky, Sun, Storm and Mystics were the only teams to finish the regular season with winning records and the No. 5-seeded Mystics were four games ahead of the No. 6-seeded Wings. The Sun, somehow, wasn’t in the majority of conversations. There was a focus on the Aces or Sky earning the No. 1 seed. The Storm was making one last run before Sue Bird retired, Breanna Stewart was an MVP candidate and Tina Charles joined the team late. The Mystics were the No. 1 defensive team in the league and Elena Delle Donne’s comeback intrigued fans.
Connecticut finished one game behind the Sky and Aces, but somehow flew under the radar of national attention. The team was just consistently solid with the No. 3 scoring offense (85.8 points per game) and the No. 2 scoring defense (77.8). The Sun was the only one of those top five teams without a player in the league’s top 18 scorers. Still, here it is as one of the last two teams alive.
These two teams brought home the lion’s share of regular season awards, though it was the Aces that really loaded up.
Wilson was named MVP and defensive player of the year. First-year coach Becky Hammon was named coach of the year as the team won a franchise-record 26 games and earned the No. 1 overall seed. Guard Jackie Young was selected as Most Improved as she was a first-time all-star and averaged career highs in points (15.9), rebounds (4.4), steals (1.4) and three-point percentage (43.1) to go along with 3.9 assists. The addition of a consistent three-point shot gave defenses fits.
Sun forward Brionna Jones was named sixth player of the year one season after being named Most Improved. She moved to the bench with Alyssa Thomas healthy and averaged 13.8 points, 5.1 rebounds, 1.2 steals and shot 56.9 percent from the floor.
The Aces heavily rely on their starting five, including first-time all-star Kesley Plum. The All-Star Game MVP was third in the MVP voting after posting career highs in points per game (20.2) and assists per game (5.1). She also shot 42 percent from behind the three-point line.
Sun forward Thomas finished fourth in the MVP voting. The three-time all-star averaged 13.4 points, 8.2 rebounds and a career-high 6.1 assists. Thomas was Ms. Do Everything for Connecticut as she also shot 50 percent from the field. She was named second team all-defense. | 2022-09-10T16:52:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Las Vegas vs. Connecticut: What to know about WNBA Finals - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/10/wnba-finals-las-vegas-connecticut/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/10/wnba-finals-las-vegas-connecticut/ |
Rare collectibles and items made with gold or silver are worth the most, experts say. The mass-produced mugs and tea towels? Not so much.
By Jaclyn Peiser
Memorabilia on display at the Royal Yacht Britannia on May 16, 2012, in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Royal Barge played a key role in the Diamond Jubilee Thames Pageant. (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
Lambert of London, a gift shop less than a mile northeast of Buckingham Palace, will be out of Queen Elizabeth II souvenirs by the weekend.
“We had a whole burst of online orders last night, and a lot of stuff has gone out the door today,” Michael Blumberg, an employee, told The Washington Post in a phone interview Friday. “We didn’t expect her majesty to leave us, so it’ll be a week or so before the new stock arrives.”
Major events surrounding the royal family often lead to surges in sales for everything from tchotchkes to fine china and gold coins. Jubilees, in particular, are worth millions in memorabilia sales. For the queen’s recent platinum celebration, the Center for Retail Research found that spending on souvenirs, memorabilia and gifts reached over 281 million pounds, or more than $326 million.
But marking of the end of the longest reign by a British monarch opens up new opportunities for retailers and buyers, experts say. And for those who have collected rare items over the years, her death marks the start of those items’ expected rise in value.
Tchotchkes and rare collectibles of the queen won’t immediately increase in value, according to Antony Charman, a founder of Vintage Trading Solutions. His company often buys rare items from people who were left antiques or collectibles by deceased relatives. It’s an investment that pays off as time goes by and items become rarer.
“Collection is a long game,” he said. “It’s going to be a number of years before they actually do become worth money. They haven’t become worth more money because the queen has died and overnight they’ve gone up in price.”
Value is also determined by quality and rarity, experts say. A china tea set commemorating one of the queen’s jubilees that was mass-produced won’t be worth much. But limited edition items — where maybe only 100 were produced — will eventually sell for more.
“It would mainly be items made of probably gold or silver — that have an intrinsic value for their metal weight — that you would see kind of uplift in their value now that the queen is gone,” Charman said, pointing to limited-edition gold coins and elaborate platters decorated with the monarch’s profile.
But recency bias could cause a short-lived spike in value, he added. Charman guessed that if he held an auction, selling the company’s collection of rare items such as postage stamps and china commemorating the queen’s coronation, he could probably make more money on them now than waiting about three months because people are feeling nostalgic or sentimental immediately after the queen’s death.
Platinum Jubilee souvenirs, from mugs to Barbies to corgi cakes
Even though the majority of tchotchkes and souvenirs may not be worth much, consumers’ desire to commemorate the queen through tea towels, bobble heads and mugs will continue in the weeks after her death, experts predict. And the trend is likely to be international.
“I think there will be an enormous surge of interest because she is the longest-serving monarch in all of Britain’s history,” said Martin Cribbs, the vice president for brand management at Beanstalk, a global licensing agency.
James Constantinou, the managing director of Prestige Pawn Brokers, added that souvenir manufacturers and the official royal gift shop — which temporarily shut down its website moments after the announcement of the queen’s death — probably will soon sell collectible items marking her passing. And there may continue to be a rush from consumers to buy souvenirs commemorating the queen as manufacturers phase out items with her likeness to make room for ones of her son King Charles III.
The staff at Lambert of London hasn’t yet placed orders for items celebrating the new king.
“Thousands of people will be around for the funeral and the coronation,” Blumberg said. “We may be in with new stock, but we may not. You can’t plan for these things, unfortunately.” | 2022-09-10T17:57:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Queen Elizabeth souvenirs aren't worth much money yet - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/10/queen-death-souvenir-value/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/10/queen-death-souvenir-value/ |
Kenyans in Nairobi read newspapers Sept. 9 with coverage of Queen Elizabeth II's death. (Brian Inganga/AP)
In the global north’s imagination, the queen is a symbol of decorum and stability in the post-World War II world. But to people of places that Britain invaded, carved up and colonized over centuries, the 96-year-old grandmother — and the rest of the royal family — evoke complex feelings, to say the least.
There are those who have a reverence for the royal family, as well as for Britain in general. Trust me, there are plenty of Black women across the African diaspora who loved Princess Diana. And I’ll never forget cringing as my father’s Ghanaian schoolmate, during a visit we made to her home in Accra, showed us pictures of her tourist trip to Buckingham Palace. “They ruled us,” she said. “So, we are British!”
But for many, the British — by extension the queen — remain guilty for the nation’s historical crimes.
Uju Anya, a Carnegie Mellon professor who is Nigerian, came under intense attack after tweeting Thursday, “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is dying. May her pain be excruciating.” Those are harsh and hateful words toward the queen, but they shouldn’t be surprising — not to anyone who has truly grappled with the generational agony of families, such as Anya’s, that have suffered massacre and displacement at the hands of the British.
Defenders of the queen, of course, have their answer to that. They suggest she was something of a “liberator,” since decolonization occurred during her reign, and that the people thus “liberated” should be grateful. Again, the historical record is the crucial thing: When Elizabeth ascended to the throne in 1952, she inherited a Britain with a weakened grip on global power. Rebellions were gathering strength in its colonies. The economic drain from the conflicts, coupled with the growing independence movements in Africa and India, all but forced Britain to pull back.
Yet, even then, Britain under Elizabeth did not just let its prized colonies go. From 1952 to 1963, British forces crushed the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, forcing between 160,000 and 320,000 Kenyans into concentration camps. Kenyan tribes are suing the British government at the European Court of Human Rights for land theft and torture.
Royalists will argue, too, that as a constitutional, symbolic monarch, Queen Elizabeth bore little responsibility for the ills that occurred during her long reign. But symbols matter. Elizabeth willingly took on the role of representing British power and wealth. She willingly adorned herself with jewels plundered from former colonies. Her image is on the currencies of many former colonies; by stewarding the British Commonwealth, she willingly took on the symbolic, patronizing role of “white mother” to the darker peoples’ of the former empire. All while reportedly banning “coloured immigrants or foreigners” from serving in royal clerical roles until the 1960s.
And still others say we shouldn’t talk ill of Britain at this moment. That the past is long gone. That we should forget about it. But I’m living proof that the past is present.
My mother, born in pre-independence Nigeria, recalls having to celebrate “Empire Day,” marching in stadiums and singing “God Save the Queen.” Several years after Nigeria’s independence in 1960, Britain sided with the Nigerian forces to crush the Biafran secession efforts. Some 1 million people of the Ibo ethnic tribe were killed or starved to death. My grandfather, who was one of the chief financial officers of Biafra, was forced to flee the country with my mother and siblings.
It shouldn’t take the death of a monarch to bring this colonial history to light, but this is where we are. The public relations imagery of a dedicated, elderly grandmother devoted to her corgis, and the Hollywood-ification of the royal family, serves all too well to blunt questions about empire. When the opportunity comes to surface truth, it must be seized.
Because there’s one more way the royalists have it wrong — this conversation is about the future, too. Hagiography of Queen Elizabeth and the fading British Empire obscures the truth not only about Britain but also about our current world order, which is built on that history. We can speak the truth about that history even as we pause to wish her spirit and her family well during this transition. And then we must get back to work — to dismantle the present-day vestiges of the racist, colonial empire she so dutifully represented. | 2022-09-10T17:57:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Yes, Britain's colonial brutalities are part of Queen Elizabeth's story - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/10/britain-colonial-brutalities-queen-elizabeth-death-commentary/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/10/britain-colonial-brutalities-queen-elizabeth-death-commentary/ |
FILE - Actor Marsha Hunt arrives at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Luncheon in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Aug. 13, 2013. Hunt, one of the last surviving actors from Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s who worked with performers ranging from Laurence Olivier to Andy Griffith in a career disrupted for a time by the McCarthy-era blacklist, has died. She was 104. Hunt died Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2022 at her home in Sherman Oaks, Calif. said Roger Memos, the writer-director of the 2015 documentary “Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity.” (Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File) | 2022-09-10T17:58:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Marsha Hunt, '40s star and blacklist victim, dies at 104 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/marsha-hunt-40s-star-and-blacklist-victim-dies-at-104/2022/09/10/4fd30380-312a-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/marsha-hunt-40s-star-and-blacklist-victim-dies-at-104/2022/09/10/4fd30380-312a-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html |
Queen Elizabeth II's carriage passes through Trafalgar Square on the day of her Coronation at Westminster Abbey, on June 2, 1953. (Mirrorpix/Getty Images)
LONDON — In 1953, Eve Pollard’s parents bought a tiny black-and-white TV so the family could watch Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. Pollard was 7, and she remembers neighbors piling into her house, all dressed up for the telecast — men in ties, women in smart outfits and Pollard in a frilly, checked dress.
“That’s how innocent we were,” said Pollard, a longtime journalist and author in London. “We had just won a war, a great victory, and the queen was so glamorous. Now, we wonder, ‘Who are we? And where are we going?’”
With the queen’s death on Thursday, Britain’s new Elizabethan age is over, replaced by a moment of uncertainty and questions about the future.
Her passing comes as this island nation of 67 million was already mired in dire and complicated times, with the question of national identity — fraught and unanswered since the end of World War II — blurred and divisive.
The prideful proclamations of the Brexiteers — who heralded a new era of “Global Britain” in the aftermath of its break with the European Union — have degenerated into petty legal disputes and sniping with its closest neighbors. The country is experiencing the highest energy cost spikes in Europe and a revolving door at 10 Downing Street that has Britain suddenly looking more like Italy – working on its fourth prime minister in six years.
Regional tensions that have long dogged London are also increasing. The Scottish, already angling for a new independence vote, may find this moment ripe for a fresh start in the absence of a beloved and shared queen. Northern Ireland, whose status has never been totally clear post-Brexit, is jittery, which carries ominous echoes.
“She was the glue that held our nation together for as long as most of us can remember,” veteran Scottish journalist and former BBC presenter Andrew Neil wrote in the Daily Mail. “Through war and peace, social revolution and consolidation, separatist challenges and national unity, here-today, gone-tomorrow politicians (including her 15 prime ministers), from Empire to Commonwealth.”
“… With her gone,” he wrote, “the risk of becoming unstuck and falling apart on so many fronts is all the greater.”
The country moves forward now with a new monarch, King Charles III, who is less popular than his mother and even than his son and heir, Prince William. The new prime minister, Liz Truss, was selected by Conservative Party members and has yet to be tested in a public vote. A recent poll showed only 12 percent of Britons expect her to be a good or great leader, with 52 percent predicting her tenure will be “poor or terrible.”
“There will be a substantial moment of national introspection, a long moment of pause for what the queen’s death means for Britain’s role in the world,” said Tony Travers, a British politics expert at the London School of Economics.
“Britain has a separate head of state and government, and both have changed in the span of two days,” he said. “The passing of a monarch and changing of a prime minister have happened before, of course, but it will be a profound moment for collective self-reflection in the U.K.”
Flowers and other offerings are piling up in front of Buckingham Palace, where crowds have gathered to pay their respects. In interviews, many there said they were impressed by King Charles.
They know he will be different from his mother, but they are also used to him – he’s the longest-ever king-in-waiting. In recent years, and in recent months especially, Charles has been taking on more of his mother’s duties. He stood in for her at major events like the COP 26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, and the ceremonial State Opening of Parliament.
Still, the passing of the queen was jarring. “I woke up this morning and felt really strange. It’s like there’s been a seismic shift in reality,” said Louise Kirby, 52, who works for an aquarium in east Yorkshire. “I got a message from my mother saying, ‘What’s in store for us?’”
She said her mother is a supporter of the royal family and likes Charles but is worried. “Can we cope with another change? We’ve been faced with so many changes worldwide, are we ready for another?”
“Even if the change is good — not that the queen’s death is good — we can all react to change in a strange way,” Kirby said. “There’s a certain level of unease.”
The national outpouring for the 96-year-old queen’s death seems more muted than the collective mourning over the sudden death of Princess Diana 25 years ago when she was just 36.
There’s also a generational disconnect. Many younger Britons care little about the monarchy and see it as a relic of an often-troubled past. Some have chafed at the massive media focus on the queen’s death and say Brexit is a far more important issue.
Still, for millions of people, Queen Elizabeth was a touchstone, a symbol of British pride and greatness, a living bridge to a more glorious time.
When she became monarch in 1952, Britain was the most industrialized nation in Europe, accounting for nearly 10 percent of global trade. Today, its economy is vastly eclipsed by once-defeated Germany, and only marginally larger than that of France.
The quality of its leaders has diminished, from the lion that was Winston Churchill to the scandal-plagued likes of the recently ousted Boris Johnson, known perhaps more for his flubs and flippancy than his stewardship of Britain.
“In 1953, the U.K., its government and its civil servants were highly respected across the world,” said David Edgerton, professor of modern British history at King’s College. “And today, people look on in amazement at our prime ministers and are astonished by their seeming lack of grasp of reality.”
Postwar Britain was hardly a golden age, as the country struggled to modernize its economy and society, resulting in labor strife and often grim economic times. Those problems, along with the Cold War and later violence in Northern Ireland, lasted well into the term of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
Still, at the end of World War II, Elizabeth, then a young princess, had stood alongside a smiling Churchill on V-Day, waving to jubilant crowds celebrating victory over Nazi Germany and hopeful about Britain’s future.
Now war has returned to Europe because another leader, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, is determined to destroy neighboring lands to conquer them. The fighting in Ukraine has interrupted global energy supplies and is likely to force Britain to borrow millions to help heat British homes in a difficult winter ahead.
“This country has always thought we could at least heat our homes,” Pollard said. “Suddenly we woke to find everyone in a real bind. Suddenly we don’t seem to be quite the strong country we felt we were.”
In practical terms, the arrival of a new prime minister is more significant to daily British life than the ascendancy of the new king. The monarch can express empathy with people struggling to heat their homes, but the prime minister can provide money and programs.
But Queen Elizabeth held a unique place in British life. Even people who despise the monarchy liked her. She projected British pride. She was what Britain wanted to see when it looked in the mirror. Her loss is unsettling.
“There is a sense of unease, but people can’t quite put their finger on what the source of that is, except for a sense of change and not knowing quite what the future will feel like,” said Bronwen Maddox, director of Chatham House, the British think tank. “We are moving into a point where Britain is less sure of its role in the world.”
Robin Niblett, Maddox’s predecessor at Chatham House, said Britain was already in decline by the time the queen ascended the throne. Its once-great empire was waning. And Elizabeth’s reign was marked by further deterioration, including the humiliating Suez crisis in 1956, in which British, French and Israeli troops were forced to withdraw from a military operation to retake control of the Suez Canal from Egypt. The episode was widely seen as affirming Britain’s reduction to a second-tier power.
Niblett said the nation has already moved on from being defined “entirely by her.” New cultural touchstones beyond the monarchy, from Harry Potter to “Downton Abbey,” are now the more familiar global symbols of Britain.
While Britain now has a richer and more diverse population than ever, it is also deeply divided along economic and cultural lines in ways that mirror the polarization in the United States.
King Charles III also inherits from his mother the problem of how to deal with growing unease among Commonwealth nations over colonial history and their allegiance to the crown.
Last November, Barbados severed its colonial-era ties to the British throne, declaring itself a republic amid fireworks and cheers. Earlier this year, Caribbean trips by Prince Edward, Elizabeth’s youngest son, and his wife, Sophie, and Prince William and his wife, Catherine, were marred by protests and calls for reparations from countries colonized by Britain that still hold its monarch as head of state.
Six island nations in the region — Belize, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, and St. Kitts and Nevis — have already signaled plans to eventually drop the British monarch as head of state and name their own.
“It is inevitable that the countries where Charles III is now king will become republics,” said Ronald Sanders, Antigua and Barbuda’s ambassador to the United States. “Not because of the death of Elizabeth II, who had been their sovereign for 70 years, but because it has become incongruous that countries that are independent and sovereign should continue to hold to the British crown.”
Maddox said British government officials were reluctant to make changes to long-held traditions that were seen as important to the queen, including the monarch’s role as the head of the Church of England and the hereditary nature of memberships in the House of Lords.
“Conversations that were deliberately avoided out of respect for Queen Elizabeth might be more open and more accessible now,” she said.
Changes on the horizon have been brought into focus by the queen’s death. Whether welcome or not, they have created a disquiet in the country she led.
“It’s given people the feeling that we’re not sure about ourselves,” Pollard said. “The British are worried about where we fit in.” | 2022-09-10T18:23:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Queen Elizabeth's death comes at a time of doubt and uncertainty in the U.K. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/10/uk-queen-death-monarchy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/10/uk-queen-death-monarchy/ |
40-year-old man fatally shot in Northwest D.C., police say
A man was fatally shot Friday night in Northwest Washington, according to D.C. police.
Keith Allen, 40, of Northwest, was found suffering from apparent gunshot wounds when police responded to a call at 11:45 p.m. in the 1300 block of Fifth Street NW, three blocks east of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.
The incident is being investigated as a homicide, police said Saturday. | 2022-09-10T19:15:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | DC man Keith Allen fatally shot, police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/10/dc-homicide-shooting/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/10/dc-homicide-shooting/ |
Roxy Music celebrates 50 years, with a reunion show to remember
Frontman Brian Ferry may not hit the high notes like he used to, but the songs reman amazing.
Review by Dave McKenna
The members of Roxy Music (seen here in their heyday, with frontman Brian Ferry second from left) are touring in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the release of their debut album. (Brian Cooke)
Anyone who attends a high school reunion expecting classmates to look like they did back in the day will surely be disappointed. Likewise for anybody who showed up to Roxy Music’s Friday show at Capital One Arena, (commemorating 50 years since the release of the utterly British band’s debut album) with the expectation that things will sound just as they once had. But, the songs remained the same. And what songs!
Brian Ferry, Roxy Music’s vocalist and once one of the most charismatic and influential frontmen in rock, will turn 77 this month. The sounds and moves that made him famous in the band’s early days are understandably and utterly out of his reach now.
Yet even in the absence of high notes, the night had lots of highlights. Before “If There Is Something,” a sentimental tune off the eponymous debut record that inspired this tour, Ferry told the crowd it was hard narrowing down a set list from 50 years of songs. But, he continued, “we couldn’t go without doing this one.” Among its wistful lyrics: “The grass was greener when you were young.”
The band’s first reference in this newspaper came in a 1973 story about the first wave of rock acts that were using elaborate stage setups and costumes. Roxy Music had gotten more attention from U.S. rock fans for racy album covers than its music. The band was among those cited in the piece for having “played up the element of homosexuality” for “shock value.” No less than John Lennon came to the defense of such bands, saying that, no matter the packaging, it was still rock-and-roll. “The only difference is they’re wearing a lot of paint now,” Lennon told The Post. The band’s shock-rock days were revisited on Friday with a reprise of 1973’s “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” an intensely creepy love song that shows Ferry mulling his affection for an inflatable doll. The knowing crowd jumped to its feet just as the song went from a whisper to a scream, and fans kept roaring as guitarist Phil Manzanera shredded over Paul Thompson’s pounded drums, and banks of spotlights flashed.
The tour venues seem bigger than the band’s popularity after all these years. Hours before showtime seats for the Capital One show were listed for just $7 on ticket reselling sites, and the arena’s entire upper deck was empty. But for the folks who showed up — many of whom were in the same age demographic as Ferry — what they lacked in numbers, they made up for in enthusiasm. Lots of fans came dressed in vintage band T-shirts and/or dinner jackets like those Ferry once wore, while becoming known as the most suave crooner in rock. The flock provided Ferry lots of vocal assistance on 1975’s up-tempo smash “Love Is the Drug.” Nostalgia is an equally powerful narcotic.
Roxy Music would eventually become far better remembered for new romantic balladeering than creepy or up-tempo stuff. And as the show wound down, Ferry led his bandmates on a sort of Murderer’s Row of slow-dance staples from the band’s 1980s catalogue, delivering “More Than This” and “Avalon” almost as spoken-word pieces, as a man who knows his vocal limitations would. The understated arrangements only added poignancy to these classics. Finally came a faithful cover of “Jealous Guy” — a song written by their old defender Lennon, that Roxy Music made famous. This confessional song was among the first tunes in which rock stars showed a vulnerable side. Ferry had already spent the whole show exposing his physical vulnerabilities, and did not push his vocal cords beyond their capacity here either. Manzanera’s guitar solo mimicked the verse’s incredible melody, as did Andy McKay’s sax turn, then Ferry nailed the whistled coda, just as fans remembered it. “Jealous Guy” was an amazing tune when Lennon wrote it half a century ago, and was an amazing song when Roxy Music recorded it. It was also amazing as performed on this night. As long as you know what you’re getting into, reunions can be very satisfying. | 2022-09-10T19:24:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Roxy Music celebrates 50 years, with a reunion show to remember - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/10/roxy-music-capital-one-arena/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/10/roxy-music-capital-one-arena/ |
FILE - Jennifer Hudson arrives at the 75th annual Tony Awards on June 12, 2022, in New York. Hudson will host a new talk show,“The Jennifer Hudson Show,” starting Monday. She is among the newcomers jumping into the void left by the departure of long-running shows hosted by Ellen DeGeneres, Wendy Williams and Maury Povich. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)
They’re joining a daytime lineup that includes continuing talk-variety series “The Kelly Clarkson Show” and “The Drew Barrymore Show”; “Tamron Hall" and ratings leaders “The View,” “Dr. Phil” and “Live with Kelly and Ryan.” | 2022-09-10T21:00:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jennifer Hudson, Sherri Shepherd part of daytime TV makeover - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/jennifer-hudson-sherri-shepherd-part-of-daytime-tv-makeover/2022/09/10/8a21c87e-3142-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/jennifer-hudson-sherri-shepherd-part-of-daytime-tv-makeover/2022/09/10/8a21c87e-3142-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html |
I can’t outrun the risks of being a woman runner. And I’m sick of it.
By Melissa A. Sullivan
Melissa A. Sullivan after completing the 2018 Marine Corps Marathon. (Courtesy photo by the author)
Melissa A. Sullivan is a three-time Marine Corps Marathon finisher and is training for her fourth in October.
I will never forget when I charged up the final hill to complete my first Marine Corps Marathon in October 2018. At the base of the Iwo Jima memorial in Arlington, a young servicemember draped a medal with the famous eagle, globe and anchor insignia around my neck and congratulated me with a resounding OORAH!
Conquering those grueling 26.2 miles was exhilarating. I felt strong. I felt confident. I felt empowered. Until I went on a run a few days later.
It was a fall evening with a hint of crispness in the air. A group of men loitering in front of a convenience store started running behind me in D.C.’s Dupont Circle neighborhood and chased me for three blocks. I was terrified. Now I wasn’t running for a personal record. I was running for my life. My runner’s high was obliterated by the cold, sober reality of being a woman in this sport: Any sense of strength, confidence and power generated by running is fleeting.
I’ve been thinking of this ever since I learned the news last week about the death of Eliza Fletcher, the kindergarten teacher and mother of two children who was killed while on an early-morning run in Tennessee. Fletcher’s routine has been picked apart to somehow justify her fate — classic victim-blaming. But Fletcher could have done everything right as a runner, as most women who are attacked do. It doesn’t matter. The bleak truth is that violence finds us despite our best efforts to prevent it.
Reactions from the running community reveal that encounters such as the one I had are common among female and female-presenting runners of any age, location and ability. In an echo of #MeToo, countless women have come forward to share their stories, demonstrating that it’s in fact more shocking to learn about a woman who has not had a scary experience while on a run.
I’ve been forced off the Mount Vernon trail in broad daylight by an aggressive male cyclist. I’ve been tailed by an Uber driver — “just in case you get tired and need a ride” — despite my repeatedly declining his assistance. A man once exposed himself and attempted to ejaculate on me as I ran on the sidewalk in Navy Yard.
I’ve been catcalled, confronted, cornered, threatened and followed more times than I care to remember. Fortunately, the evening I was chased in Dupont Circle, the presence of a nearby police station deterred the men from pursuing me farther. But the menace is ever present.
Do not run at dawn or dusk. Cover up. Only run in a group. Do not post your run route. Change your run route. Try to de-escalate the situation. Do not back down. Leave one earbud out. Always be aware of your surroundings. Shouldn’t you run on the treadmill instead?
I’m tired of being told to register for a self-defense class (I have). I’m over second-guessing my hairstyle on the way out the door (because a ponytail makes it that much easier for an attacker to grab me). I’m fed up with the well-meaning but unsolicited advice to carry pepper spray, a flashlight and a whistle (I do).
Frankly, it seems not to matter what I do, what the thousands of other women runners who’ve been harassed and confronted while running do — every time we go out on a run, there is a chance we will not finish that run.
A few years ago, a Runner’s World survey found that “43 percent of women at least sometimes experience harassment on the run … compared with just 4 percent of men.” Like so many other women, I’m angry. I’m frustrated. I’m exhausted by the expectation that the onus to prevent the harassment and intimidation of female runners is, should and always will be on us.
Not on a culture that normalizes the objectification, degradation and subjugation of women. Not on the broken justice system. Not on the urban planners who fail to provide sufficient lighting, jogging paths and other safe public spaces to exercise.
Of the various race photos taken of me, my favorite is from the 2019 Marine Corps Marathon. A torrential downpour made conditions miserable that day. I was drenched from head to toe, but I was smiling ear to ear. I remember breezing past the 17-mile marker on solid footing. Radiant and proud, I locked eyes with the camera. When I showed the photo to my boss, she said I reminded her of Wonder Woman.
When I think about why I run marathons, I think about that photo. I run to feel free, to be at peace, to ground myself. Running is my escape and my sacred practice. I intend to keep running as long as I can — dangers be damned. | 2022-09-10T21:00:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | I'm a woman runner. I hate that this puts me at risk. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/10/eliza-fletcher-women-runner-harassment-threats-risk/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/10/eliza-fletcher-women-runner-harassment-threats-risk/ |
Netflix VP says the company understands it’s a long journey to make games
(Netflix/Washington Post illustration)
A new Assassin’s Creed mobile game is coming exclusively to Netflix alongside two other mobile titles, Ubisoft announced Saturday. The games will live on the Netflix mobile app, and feature original content designed by Ubisoft, all building on existing franchises.
Other than an Assassin’s Creed title, Ubisoft is working on a Valiant Hearts game, slated for January 2023. The game will be a sequel to 2014′s “Valiant Hearts: The Great War,” with a new story made by the same team. It’s also creating a follow-up to the action role-playing, hack-and-slash game “The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot.” Called “The Mighty Quest,” the new title is inspired by the roguelike genre and is coming next year.
The games will not include ads or in-app purchases, though Netflix plans to keep the titles locked to subscribers only. Ubisoft declined to share how it will earn revenue in the partnership. The Assassin’s Creed title is meant to cross-promote the live action TV series, first announced in 2020.
“Netflix doesn’t take a lot of big shots like this, but when they do, they back them, and they’re committed to them. And they understand that the journey may be a long one, especially with games, where it takes years to make games,” said Mike Verdu, Netflix’s vice president of games, of the company’s approach to gaming in an interview with The Washington Post.
The future of Ubisoft: Company executives dish on what lies ahead for the gaming behemoth
Market analysts have highlighted Netflix gaming’s dismal adoption rates, as reported on by a third-party app analytics company. Netflix declined to share how many users are playing its games.
“Netflix has so far only managed to convince 1.7 million people among its 221 million subscribers to play games on its platform daily,” said Joost van Dreunen, a lecturer on the business of games at the NYU Stern School of Business. “That’s a relatively low conversion rate and the reason why Netflix will argue it is playing the long game. It runs the risk of spending a bunch of money on content that doesn’t meaningfully improve its business, especially considering the absence of clear revenue models for any of Ubisoft’s announced titles.”
While Ubisoft has released dozens of mobile games in the past, it often shuts down services for them over time. Of the dozen plus Assassin’s Creed mobile titles Ubisoft put out, the only one currently available on Android and Apple operating systems is the role-playing adventure game, “Assassin’s Creed Rebellion.” Ubisoft shut down “Mighty Quest for Epic Loot” in 2016, after thanking players for their time.
“Of course, for any game there is a cycle. So we may end a game when there are not enough users to come on the game,” said Jean-Michel Detoc, Ubisoft’s chief mobile officer. “We see a potential of replayability of [the upcoming] games that can last for very long years.”
“We think Valiant Hearts is really something that can appeal to the large Netflix audience,” Detoc said. “It will be [set] in World War I and it will be a follow-up to the previous one. This narrative and linear game can really be suitable for the users.”
Can video games tactfully handle Nazism and its aftermath? These Czech historians say yes.
Netflix’s Verdu said that players of its games enjoy all different genres and have diverse tastes.
“Our top games are very different. What you can say is it’s an audience that appreciates variety. When you look at Assassin’s Creed, it’s pretty obvious why we would love to work with Ubisoft to bring that to the platform,” Verdu said. “We look for games and franchises that have an enduring value and a special place in people’s hearts and may not have been a perfect fit with the ruthless free-to-play game ecosystem.”
Netflix’s games live within its mobile streaming app, and have an inelegant solution around Apple’s no app stores within its app store rule: Users can click into a game on the Netflix app, then be directed back into the App Store to download the game. If users already own the titles, tapping on the game icons within the Netflix app will launch those games.
Verdu admitted that Netflix hasn’t marketed its games very prominently. The row of titles are visible only when users scroll down on the mobile app.
“You’ll see some changes in the coming months that will give games a bit of a higher profile on the service, which is good,” Verdu said, referring to Netflix’s plans to improve its mobile games platform.
He added that in the long run, Netflix would like to use its algorithmic recommendations that it’s known for with TV shows and film to serve audience members on game suggestions.
“We think that with great personalization and recommendation that we can put games that are very relevant to our members in front of them and that will actually unlock discovery over the long haul, in a really profound way,” Verdu said. “With that said, it’s going to be a long while before you’ll see that flower on the platform.” | 2022-09-10T21:03:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Netflix to get mobile Assassin's Creed and two other Ubisoft games - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/09/10/netflix-assassins-creed-ubisoft-mobile/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/09/10/netflix-assassins-creed-ubisoft-mobile/ |
The future of Ubisoft
Ubisoft executives sought to convey this message at an event in Saint-Mande: As the video game industry evolves, Ubisoft must evolve with it — or die trying.
The future of Ubisoft (Washington Post illustration; Ubisoft)
SAINT-MANDE, France — In this sleepy and well-to-do suburb of Paris, Ubisoft’s new(ish) headquarters stand out. Past a gate and security guards lies a more than 320,000 square foot office building made of glass and metal. Set on a modern campus, the mustard-yellow Floresco building opened in October 2020 and now houses nearly 1,770 Ubisoft employees.
The campus, slightly incongruous here, would fit seamlessly in Silicon Valley. It’s an upgrade for Ubisoft, a flagship of the French tech sector, whose previous HQ was located behind a parking garage and housed about 650 people.
Ubisoft is one of the largest publishers in the video game industry, a multinational effort best known for “Assassin’s Creed,” “Far Cry” and putting Tom Clancy’s name on more things than even the prolific military novelist did. Now, the company and its portfolio of over 100 active games are viewed as a desirable target for competitors as the industry enters a period of consolidation. Ubisoft has also been at the epicenter of some of the most seismic changes to the industry over the past several years, including a reckoning around workplace misconduct — a problem the company’s leaders argue they have properly dealt with and are seeking to put behind them.
As the video game industry evolves, Ubisoft must evolve with it — or die trying. That is the message company executives sought to convey Thursday at an event in Saint-Mande during which they previewed a long-term strategy oriented around a raft of games, partnerships and technologies meant to carry the company into the industry’s next chapter.
Some of these initiatives, unveiled to the public Saturday in a showcase titled “Forward,” include a partnership with Netflix to produce three new mobile games starting in 2023, an expansion of the indie game catalogue available on Ubisoft+, the company’s game-subscription service, and a plan for the future of Assassin’s Creed for the 15th anniversary this year of Ubisoft’s best-known franchise.
The video game industry hasn’t been immune to the economic disruptions of the past few years, including the impact of the pandemic on consumer spending and supply chains. But major players, including Ubisoft CEO and co-founder Yves Guillemot, expect it to grow to more than $300 billion by 2030. Companies seeking a slice of that market face head winds: technologies are changing, as are players’ quality expectations; talent in this field is in high-demand and hard to come by; and norms and standards are evolving, with developers and players pushing back against what they see as a culture of sexual harassment, a lack of diversity and poor working conditions prevalent in the industry.
“This will be a challenging and unforgiving journey: Either you keep up the pace of change or you are out,” Guillemot said Thursday, shortly after it was announced that Tencent had acquired a minority stake in the company Guillemot and his brothers founded in 1986, and through which they run Ubisoft.
While recent flagship titles like “Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla” and “Far Cry 6” have proven successful from a commercial standpoint, ventures into the realm of live service — more easily monetized multiplayer games meant to be perpetually updated — haven’t fared quite so well, with upcoming games like “XDefiant” failing to garner fanfare while previous attempts like the battle royale title “Hyper Scape” and an NFT-laden update to “Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint” crashed and burned. Ubisoft has now endured multiple harsh fiscal quarters and is struggling to find a new hit amid delays and middling releases. In July, before the Tencent announcement, Guillemot called on staff to cut expenses wherever possible.
As the company plans for the future, it is orienting its strategy around a handful of its most successful properties. The newly announced “Assassin’s Creed Mirage” — set in 9th century Baghdad as a throwback to the series’ narrative origins — is Ubisoft’s first step in the direction of a live service future for its biggest franchise. It will be released in 2023, the company announced Saturday, and feature Iranian American actress Shohreh Aghdashloo as the voice of Roshan, mentor to street thief-turned-master assassin Basim Ibn Is’haq.
All the ‘Assassin’s Creed’ games, ranked
After that, “Assassin’s Creed Codename Red” will be set in feudal Japan. It will be followed by “Codename Hexe,” a game with a decidedly witchy feel about which the company has revealed few details other than to say it is being developed by Ubisoft Montreal. Ubisoft will also release a free-to-play mobile game called “Assassin’s Creed Codename Jade,” set in 215 B.C. China.
“Red” and “Hexe” will hook into a larger Assassin’s Creed hub called “Infinity,” alongside multiplayer experiences the company is pursuing, including one code-named “Invictus.” Historically single-player focused, “Assassin’s Creed” may or may not make an elegant leap into this new age of gaming. Doubtless, however, Ubisoft is betting big, marshaling over a dozen studios to create the next set of sequels in the long-running (and parkouring) series.
Ubisoft will also partner with Netflix to produce an “Assassin’s Creed” mobile game. In 2023, as part of the same partnership, they will release mobile games that draw on Ubisoft’s “Valiant Hearts” and “Mighty Quest.”
Ubisoft has sought to grow at pace with these new projects. It hired 4,000 people during the fiscal year ending in March 2022 — nearly a third of them women, according to Chief People Officer Anika Grant. Six hundred of those new employees had previously left the company and were rehired — a sign, says Marie-Sophie de Waubert, Senior Vice President of Studio Operations, “that people feel the change” at Ubisoft.
‘Women make awesome games.’ This summer camp helps them make more.
Since summer of 2020, the company has been the subject of a #MeToo reckoning, with employees accusing leadership of tacitly enabling a culture of misconduct and abuse. While several accused executives left the company in the wake of investigations, some employees — including a collective of current and former employees called “A Better Ubisoft” — continue to report dissatisfaction with how leadership has handled misconduct reports.
“Yes, we stumbled, and we have acknowledged that,” Guillemot euphemistically said Thursday. The CEO — who was named in a complaint filed in July 2021 by a French union and some employees that alleged “institutional sexual harassment” at the company — said Ubisoft “learned a lot along the way” and has “made meaningful progress.”
Since 2020, Ubisoft has rolled out a new reporting system for misconduct, hired a diversity and inclusion team and mandated that company executives receive anti-harassment and anti-discrimination trainings, says Grant, who was hired in April of last year to lead an embattled HR team that had itself been the subject of employee complaints. “It’s not where it was a year ago,” she said. “I do feel that as an organization, we have moved on.”
Members of “A Better Ubisoft” wrote in a Q & A published Wednesday on a website run by the Assassin’s Creed Sisterhood movement, a community of fans that advocate for better gender representation in the franchise, that they consider the changes implemented at the company in the wake of the scandals inadequate. Some of the members, quoted under pseudonyms, said the diversity and inclusion team is “under-staffed and under-funded,” complained of a top-down approach from management and said some of those accused of misconduct were still working at the company.
Grant, the Chief People Officer, said anyone at Ubisoft who has been the subject of a complaint has been investigated. “If they remain, they’ve either been exonerated, or they’ve been appropriately disciplined,” she told The Post.
It is one year to the day that we signed our open letter to Ubisoft management calling for FAR more action to tackle abuse and setting out our four key demands. None of our demands have been met.#ABetterUbisoft #EndAbuseInGaming
A thread 👇👇👇👇👇👇👇 pic.twitter.com/YaXrEGVa0M
— A Better Ubisoft 🤍 (@ABetterUbisoft) July 28, 2022
“A lot of talk and not much walk,” one pseudonymous member of “A Better Ubisoft” was quoted as saying.
“From what I see of the whole company, I do not think that this is fair,” Marc-Alexis Cote, Vice President and Executive Producer of “Assassin’s Creed,” told The Post on Thursday. Cote, who also led Ubisoft’s Quebec City Studio, one of several studios named in complaints two years ago of toxic work environments at the company, said “things have changed a lot since 2020, both within the [Quebec] studio and within Ubisoft at large,” with regular dialogues with staff and the implementation of more “collaborative” and less “competitive” ways of working.
“The Ubisoft of 2022 is not the Ubisoft of 2020. It’s a good thing,” Cote said. “And I hope the Ubisoft of 2024 is not the Ubisoft of 2022, and that we’re on a path to continuous improvement,” he added.
Activision Blizzard lawsuit has video game workers using union tactics — but not unionizing
All of this tumult leaves Ubisoft in an uncertain state as the video game industry enters a period of unprecedented consolidation exemplified by Microsoft’s $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard, Take-Two’s $12.7 billion buyout of Zynga and Sony’s $3.6 billion acquisition of Bungie. The nearly $300 million purchase by Tencent of a 49.9 percent economic stake in Guillemot Brothers Limited increases the Chinese conglomerate’s control over Ubisoft, of which it previously purchased a 4.5 percent stake. According to Guillemot, this will not presage a takeover.
Within Ubisoft, news of the Tencent investment appears to have gone over well with executives, who say they back Guillemot’s message, laid out in an email to staff viewed by The Washington Post, that Ubisoft will remain independent. “From a creative perspective, it’s business as usual — it doesn’t affect us at all,” said Fawzi Mesmar, Vice President of Editorial at Ubisoft.
Still, “the thing that I know for certain about the games industry, having been here for twenty years, is that it’s always going to be changing,” he added. “There is never a dull moment.”
Nathan Grayson contributed to this report. | 2022-09-10T21:03:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ubisoft Forward reveals company's future, Assassin's Creed plans - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/09/10/ubisoft-forward-assassins-creed-tencent/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/09/10/ubisoft-forward-assassins-creed-tencent/ |
Somber songs by Adele, Coldplay and the Cars are being broadcast to meet the mood of the nation
A mourner is overcome with emotion as he pays his respect at the gates of Buckingham Palace in London. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP)
If anyone in the United Kingdom was prepared for the emotional fallout of the death of Queen Elizabeth on Thursday, it was the country’s radio DJs and producers.
According to Ben Cooper, chief content and music officer at Bauer Media Audio UK, a company that operates dozens of British radio stations, at the time of the queen’s death, blue “obit lights” flashed in radio stations around the country. Long-standing protocols, known as “obit plans,” quickly kicked into gear. There would be no more advertisements. No on-air competitions. Prepared playlists flooded the airwaves.
As the country was still processing the death, British radio had already turned down the dial on the pep and begun providing listeners with more somber sounds: Coldplay’s “The Scientist,” for example, Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” The Cars’ “Drive” and a lot of Adele, according to Cooper.
The tonal shift was happening not just at Bauer’s stations, but across the radio landscape as well — from major broadcasters to local stations. Even Fun Kids — the British equivalent of Radio Disney, according to station manager Matt Deegan — switched to playing instrumental versions of children’s movie music to reflect the national mood. For many in Britain — where, according to a recent survey by Radio Joint Audience Research, 89 percent of the population listens to the radio for, on average, 20 hours a week — the expectation was clear: The country is in mourning.
It goes beyond radio. During the official 10-day mourning period, some sporting events and festivals have been canceled. Comedy shows have been removed from TV programming.
Such sensitivity isn’t legally mandated but is widely expected, Cooper says. “Radio stations are the soundtrack for society. And you have to reflect the mood of the nation,” he explains. “It boils down to the fact that this was someone’s grandmother, someone’s mother, and the British population has a huge affinity and love for her. And so when someone dies, you don’t want to play loud music or be in a celebratory mood.”
Deegan, of Fun Kids, says the British Broadcasting Corporation has set high expectations for radio’s response to troubling times. “Here, radio is such a part of people’s lives, and we’re very fortunate to have the public’s interest, so we work very hard to give them something decent to listen to,” he says. “I think that’s why we may be more reflective on a point like this.”
For his station, complying with such expectations can be tricky. “Kids songs are upbeat,” he says. “They’re about dancing around, having a laugh, singing along, and so when you want to do something else, you have to think hard about it.” But you don’t want to be caught playing a song like “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King” right now, he says.
For industry insiders like Cooper and Deegan, the death of the queen is a moment for which they have been meticulously prepared. Cooper has worked in radio for three decades and says the protocol for a major death, such as that of the queen, is “drilled into you.”
“It is something that has been in the back of my mind throughout the whole of my career, that this is something that you have to get right,” he says.
Cooper worked as a producer on a pop music station at the BBC at the time of Princess Diana’s death in 1997 and remembers the grief mounting across several days. “You had to mirror that sadness,” he says. “It lasted pretty much all the way through to her funeral.”
Now, Cooper oversees Bauer UK, which has stations ranging from the pop-centric KISS to a station focusing on the hits of the 1970s to 1990s — all of which have begun playing their format-specific sad songs: Beyoncé’s “Halo,” for example, or Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah.”
According to Cooper, stations are expected to start introducing more midtempo music in the coming days but will return to somber tunes for the day of the funeral, Sept. 19. He has encouraged producers and hosts to monitor the emotional pulse of their audiences.
Some listeners applaud the change. When Polly Sharpe, a 45-year-old lecturer in journalism at Liverpool John Moores University, left the house for the first time after hearing of the queen’s death, she found solace driving to the reflective 1990s music that Bauer’s Absolute Radio was playing. “It was quite nice to have the music to allow me to think about it rather than having the reporters talk to me about how we should be feeling,” she said.
Sharpe heard songs by the English rock group Elbow and other soothing music and thought about the sense of stability the queen had brought her in anxious times. “It felt like we were this tiny island, but at least we had this amazing woman.”
Not everyone agrees about how best to honor the queen. Lex Wilson, 19, who lives outside Newcastle and listens to the radio at work, says the tone doesn’t feel quite right. It’s not that she’s against the queen, she explains, but that the music programming misses an opportunity. “I feel like hearing all of this sad music, it’s not reflecting the celebration of what was such a great and long rule by Queen Elizabeth.”
James Ward, a journalist based in Bristol, simply doesn’t get the fuss. “It’s been absolutely bonkers,” he says. “As you walk down the street, every 20 yards you see the picture of the queen. It’s insane. This is the kind of thing that we make fun of North Korea for doing.”
Listening to the radio, Ward has heard local DJs with no national media experience struggle to meet the moment.
“They’re just dragging out anything that they think sounds plausibly sad,” he says. “I don’t even know how to describe it. Songs I’ve never even heard, like power ballads from the ’80s. There’s this charade of solemnity. It’s not their responsibility to grieve on behalf of the nation, but that’s the task that they’ve been given.”
Ward is alarmed by the way the media has abandoned stories about, say, the energy crisis, which could kill people who cannot afford to heat their homes this winter. “There’s a real kind of sinister side to it,” he says of the incessant mourning. “The lack of impartiality. The assumption that everyone in the country wants this.”
While such sorrowfulness might send Ward to Spotify, Cooper believes this kind of event can actually increase loyalty to radio.
“We talk a lot in the media about streaming services and playlists, but radio is so much more than a playlist,” he says. “It is that connection to the zeitgeist and capturing those feelings in the ‘live-ness’ of radio. I think this moment shows the power of the medium.” | 2022-09-10T23:41:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sad music floods British radio stations as the U.K. mourns the queen - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/10/sad-music-radio-queen-elizabeth/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/10/sad-music-radio-queen-elizabeth/ |
Terrapins 59, 49ers 21
Maryland quarterback Taulia Tagovailoa threw for 391 yards and four touchdowns in a win over Charlotte. (Chris Carlson/AP)
CHARLOTTE — The Maryland Terrapins took a nonconference road trip and found a defense that had no answers for their prolific attack. The Charlotte 49ers offered their Big Ten visitors a stage on which quarterback Taulia Tagovailoa and the talent around him could shine, and Maryland headed back to College Park with a commanding 56-21 victory.
Tagovailoa had a near-perfect first half, competing 20 of 22 passes for 305 yards and four touchdowns. His only two incompletions came on a jump ball in the end zone that a Charlotte defender intercepted and a pass dropped by one of his receivers. Before the teams headed in for halftime, Tagovailoa had already notched a career high in touchdown passes, and Maryland (2-0) was well on its way to a lopsided win.
The Terps’ offensive unit flashed its promise all afternoon at Jerry Richardson Stadium, a small venue that hosted 12,614 fans Saturday. Charlotte didn’t register a defensive stop until late in the second quarter when Comanche Francisco, battling Dontay Demus Jr. on a slightly underthrown pass, secured the interception in the end zone. Before that, Tagovailoa led his team on five consecutive touchdown drives, and the Terps easily seized control of this game.
To score Maryland’s sixth touchdown of the afternoon, Tagovailoa corralled a high snap and raced four yards into the end zone inside the left pylon. Carried by momentum from the run, he continued on a few steps, lifted his arm in celebration and slipped to ground, grabbing his right leg. With the Terps’ history of injuries at the quarterback — and after years of instability — the image of Tagovailoa on the turf in pain surely prompted concern among a scarred fan base, but Tagovailoa helped relieve that anxiety as he jogged off the field.
Tagovailoa had no reason to take the field again, given Maryland’s 42-14 lead at the time of his third-quarter departure, but the redshirt junior returned for just one play and delivered a 25-yard pass when backup Billy Edwards Jr. had to exit briefly. Those few seconds of action provided even more reassurance.
Charlotte (0-3) gave up 559 yards in its previous game against William & Mary of the Football Championship Subdivision, and the Terps capitalized on their opportunity to showcase even more offensive firepower. They finished with 617 yards of total offense, with players from all over the depth chart contributing. That was expected of Maryland against the 49ers, who played in the FCS in 2013 and 2014 before moving to Conference USA. This rare road trip for a Big Ten program to a school from outside the major conferences marked the first of a home-and-home series, with Charlotte playing in College Park next season.
Even as the Terps cruised to the win, the Maryland defense had lapses that prompt concern with tougher opposition on the schedule. The Terps have one more nonconference game — against SMU at home next week — before they dive into the Big Ten slate on the road at Michigan.
Charlotte played without its top two quarterbacks, but with Xavier Williams, the third-string option, primarily leading the unit, the Terps still gave up 388 yards. On the 49ers’ first offensive possession, they converted three fourth-down attempts, including one because of a pass interference call on Maryland, on their way to a touchdown. At the start of the second quarter, the Terps gave up a 50-yard reception followed by a 19-yard touchdown pass to Victor Tucker.
Williams didn’t make any major mistakes but only finished 19 of 35 passing for 191 yards. Maryland struggled to pressure the quarterback, and the Terps’ defense has yet to force a turnover this season. The Terps had to play without starting cornerback Tarheeb Still, who didn’t travel to Charlotte.
After the pair of early scores, Maryland’s defensive effort improved. They kept the 49ers out of the end zone until midway through the fourth quarter.
The Terps’ offensive brilliance overshadowed defensive miscues. After Maryland’s running game showed promise in the opener, redshirt freshman Antwain Littleton II bulldozed up the middle of the field for a 59-yard score early in the game against Charlotte.
Jacob Copeland, a transfer from Florida, had a quiet Maryland debut, then emerged as a strong receiving option here. Copeland scored Maryland’s opening touchdown and added another score in the second quarter, finishing with a team-high 110 receiving yards. Fellow receiver Jeshaun Jones, back for his fifth year after tearing his ACL last season, also had two touchdowns in the first half.
Tagovailoa had an up-and-down showing in the opener, throwing for 290 yards but not completing a touchdown pass for the first time since his Maryland debut in October 2020. He rebounded in emphatic fashion, registering the best completion percentage (27 of 31 for 88.1 percent) in Maryland’s history when players attempt at least 15 passes.
When Edwards took control of the offense in Tagovailoa’s absence, Maryland continued to cruise. He led the Terps on two additional touchdown drives, each capped by scores from young players — first sophomore running back Colby McDonald’s 49-yard rush and then a 17-yard completion to freshman wide receiver Octavian Smith Jr. With under four minutes to go, Maryland logged its first punt of the day. Soon after, the Terrapins left with a win — and a seemingly healthy Tagovailoa on the flight home — hoping this powerful offense will translate to bigger stages. | 2022-09-10T23:41:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Taulia Tagovailoa close to perfect as Maryland routs Charlotte - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/10/taulia-tagovailoa-maryland-football-charlotte/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/10/taulia-tagovailoa-maryland-football-charlotte/ |
On first night, residents split on whether policy will curb gun violence
Karina Elwood
A Prince George’s County police cruiser sits in front of an AMC movie theater in Largo, Md., on Friday, the first night of a curfew for juveniles. (Eric Lee for The Washington Post)
Prince George’s officials began enforcing a long-ignored curfew Friday night, seeking to allay growing concern about violent crime — often committed by or targeting those aged 16 and younger — by stopping county teens from lingering outside in public places.
The curfew, which allows police to issue warnings and eventually fine violators’ parents up to $250, comes after the county saw a record-breaking monthly total of homicides in August and as it continues to struggle with carjackings committed by juveniles. But it went into effect on a relatively quiet night, especially after a Labor Day weekend in which four people in the county lost their lives to gun violence, including a 15-year-old D.C. resident.
FAQ: What to know about the Prince George’s County juvenile curfew
County police — many of whom were stationed in their cruisers in the strip malls that dot the county — did not respond to any fatal shootings Friday. In some parts of Prince George’s visited by a team of Washington Post reporters the mood was one of tension and uncertainty. Many want the curfew to work, and most are unsure if it will.
“Somebody still going to be out shooting,” said Dominic Parker, 14, standing in the parking lot of an apartment complex in District Heights as the midnight weekend curfew approached. “People could do it in the day.”
Parker was with a 17-year-old friend, Kevin Mason. They were talking to Jawanna Hardy and Prince Hamn, community activists who were trying to spread the word for young people to stay inside.
The parking lot was otherwise almost deserted. Parker and Mason had no intention of breaking the curfew; they just doubted it would bring an end to the gun violence that had become a regular feature of teenage life in places like Southeast Washington and parts of Prince George’s County.
Hardy grew up in Prince George’s. She works to stop gun violence with multiple organizations — including County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks’s Hope in Action program — and could understand the teens’ skepticism. But the 30-day curfew, Hardy said, was at least a place to start.
“I don’t know what will end the violence,” she said. “But I know we can’t just sit around and do nothing.”
Earlier that night Hardy and Hamn had been at a Dave and Buster’s in Capitol Heights. It’s a popular gathering place for young people from Prince George’s and D.C., in a shopping center whose parking lot was the site of the fatal shooting of a 13-year-old last year. On Friday, however, few lingered in the cooling autumn air. Inside, past a new sign alerting people of the curfew, a thin crowd ate and drank in the glow of arcade games and big-screen televisions.
It was similarly quiet outside the Boulevard at the Capital Centre mall, in the Largo area, where two teens were shot last weekend in a movie theater’s parking lot. A few people trickled out of the theater Friday as the final showings of the night let out. Just before 12:30 a.m. a lone police cruiser passed by, but no children were in sight.
Prince George’s County's 11 p.m. curfew for kids 16-years-old and under went into effect on Sept 9. Teens and parents in Lanham, Md., shared their thoughts. (Video: The Washington Post)
A livelier scene could be found earlier in the night at the Lanham Skate Center. Just before 11 p.m., dozens of people circled the rink in skates with brightly colored laces under a cluster of disco balls. Skate center assistant manager Nea Thompson, the facility’s self-proclaimed “mother hen,” said she had watched a lot of the kids grow up at the rink. The curfew, she said, is good for them.
“We’ve got to kind of bring them back in,” Thompson said. “We’ve got to try something different in order for these kids to understand that their life is valuable.”
The problem of youth violence was underscored Friday as police in Greenbelt arrested a 13-year-old in connection with a shooting that had happened two days earlier. The juvenile was charged with second-degree attempted murder and additional firearm-related offenses, authorities said.
The curfew — which starts at 11:59 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays and 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, and ends at 5 a.m. — was met with mixed reactions since Alsobrooks announced it Monday. County officials are at odds over the wisdom of the idea and its practicality, while numerous exceptions to the curfew could complicate its enforcement.
“Our goal this week is really just education,” police spokeswoman Christina Cotterman said, “so we’re starting with warnings.”
The policy even divides some families, along perhaps predictable lines. D.C. resident Finis Calhoun pulled into the skate center’s parking lot around 11 p.m. Friday to pick up her daughter, Erin Calhoun, and her daughter’s friend Nylah Ward. Both are 15 and have been skating together since they were 4.
Finis Calhoun said the curfew is a smart way to keep young people safe.
“The children need to be home,” she said.
Her daughter wasn’t so sure. “I get it, from the adult perspective,” Erin said. “You want to make sure your kids are safe. But from the child’s perspective, it’s like taking away from our experiencing life.”
Erin said adults should trust kids more in knowing when to do the right thing when they’re out.
“Teenagers are not just wild-card kids all the time. We are young adults,” she said. “We do know what the world is like, to some extent.”
By 11:15 p.m. — well before the curfew descended — the doors to the skate center were locked, the lights out and the parking lot empty.
Clarence Williams and Casey Parks contributed to this report. | 2022-09-10T23:50:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | PG County curfew to curb violence begins with a night of quiet - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/10/pg-county-curfew-begins/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/10/pg-county-curfew-begins/ |
Top-seeded Iga Swiatek captured the U.S. Open title with a convincing win over Ons Jabeur. “Especially right now when we have to stay united, I’m happy I can unite people with my sport,” the Polish champion said. (Sarah Stier/Getty Images)
NEW YORK — With Serena Williams’s farewell tour spinning right into a frenzy over a handful of rising stars in men’s tennis, it’s possible to understand how the most dominant player in the women’s game for the past two years slid under the radar during the two weeks of this U.S. Open.
She is the first Polish woman to win the U.S. Open. Asked afterward in the on-court ceremony what that might signify, Swiatek looked up to the smattering of Polish flags in the crowd before laughing and responding that she didn’t quite know — she’d had to go home and check first. She only needed to step outside after the match to see a swarm of red and white-clad Polish fans chanting and cheering for her in the center of Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.
The answer finally came to her as she stood beside Jabeur, the Tunisian trail blazer who this summer became the first Arab woman and first African woman to make a Grand Slam final when she played for the title at Wimbledon.
“Especially right now when we have to stay united, I’m happy I can unite people with my sport,” Swiatek said. “I know I’m repeating basically what Ons said — you’re such an inspiration as well — but we’re trying to do our best, be good people and good examples.”
“Hopefully I can inspire more and more generations,” Jabeur said, “ … this is just the beginning of so many things.”
The soundtrack of Swiatek’s tennis is free of yelps or grunts, all squeaking sneakers and the rhythmic thwap of ball against strings. But don’t be fooled — her game speaks volumes.
Just 21, Swiatek authored one of the best winning streaks modern women’s tennis has ever seen when she won 37 consecutive matches and six straight tournaments earlier this year, capping it with a win over Coco Gauff for her second title at the French Open.
Her win at Flushing Meadows hints that the consistency women’s tennis has lacked in its top ranks since Williams won her last major title in 2017 may be on the way.
Swiatek was the first top seed to reach the U.S. Open final since Williams won the event eight years ago. She was also the first woman to reach the French Open and U.S. Open final in the same year since Williams did it in 2013.
She and Jabeur will be the world No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, when new rankings debut Monday.
Swiatek played up to her top seeding throughout the tournament, zipping through the first three rounds despite uncomfortable conditions. She prefers the slower surfaces of clay-court season in spring and had trouble controlling the type of balls the U.S. Open uses yet problem-solved her way into the final. She battled back for victories twice after dropping the first set, in the fourth round and semifinals.
Her triumph on hard court represents a crucial expansion of her game should she want to dominate women’s tennis year round.
“My goal was to play better on hard court more consistently,” Swiatek said earlier this week. “These are the courts that basically are going to show me where my level of tennis is.”
That level was top tier Sunday.
Swiatek entered the match with a formidable nine wins in the 10 finals she’s made since 2019. The first set Sunday was over in a blink, just 30 minutes in which Swiatek ran Jabeur around the court, light and deft as a puppeteer.
Her style is to simply put the ball in play and dominate with her powerful forehand rather than her serve. Swiatek’s unmatched court coverage and ability to whip out a clever shot no matter her body placement frustrated Jabeur into banging her racket on the court in the fifth game.
Jabeur, who had served so well to reach the final, won just 20 percent of points on her first serve.
She finally found a foothold by attacking Swiatek’s serve in the second set and forced a tiebreaker but never could quite flip the momentum. Swiatek clinched the victory on her second match point and collapsed on court after, covering her face with her hands.
Iga Swiatek defeats Ons Jabeur in straight sets to win U.S. Open title | 2022-09-11T00:51:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Iga Swiatek beats Ons Jabeur to win U.S. Open, her second major of year - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/10/iga-swiatek-ons-jabeur-us-open-final/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/10/iga-swiatek-ons-jabeur-us-open-final/ |
Quarterback Xavier Arline and Navy dropped to 0-2 with a 37-13 loss to Memphis. (Daniel Kucin Jr./AP)
If there was one sequence that summed up the difficulty facing the Navy football team, it came early in the third quarter Saturday of a 37-13 loss to Memphis at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium.
The Midshipmen trailed just 13-7 at halftime before punting on their first possession of the second half. Then came two plays that turned the game and underscored the challenges facing Navy Coach Ken Niumatalolo.
On first down, Memphis quarterback Seth Henigan dropped to pass. Navy didn’t blitz, and Henigan, with forever to throw, found Joseph Scates wide open behind the Midshipmen defense for a 79-yard touchdown.
Navy took over after an out-of-bounds kickoff on its own 35. On first down, Anton Hall burst up the middle for four yards, a solid start to a critical drive. Except that Zay Cullens, a fifth-year linebacker, stripped him and jumped on the ball at the Navy 39.
Transfers and turnovers — both were pivotal in Saturday’s loss.
“We simply can’t turn the ball over,” Niumatalolo said during the week. “If we lose the turnover battle, we’re going to lose most games.”
The turnover totals were Navy three, Memphis zero.
As far as transfers go, it was a little more lopsided — the Tigers had 37 in uniform Saturday; Navy had one. When someone transfers into Navy, they start as a plebe — basically, their college career is beginning from scratch.
Once upon a time, Scates would have been watching from the Memphis sideline having transferred from Iowa State in December after three seasons in Ames. Or, perhaps he wouldn’t have transferred at all, knowing he had to sit out a season.
But with the rules now allowing transfers to play right away — at every school except those that compete for the Commander-in-Chief’s trophy — transfers are flooding the transfer portal — and contributing to their new teams right away.
The game was tight after the first half, with Navy scoring on a 62-yard pass from quarterback Tai Lavatai to fullback Hall. Lavatai slightly overthrew the ball, but Hall stretched his arms out, got both hands on it, bobbled it, brought it back, somehow kept his balance and raced into the end zone. It was the first catch of his career.
Hall’s third-quarter fumble hardly ended Navy’s chances, but it continued a disturbing trend for the Midshipmen. Navy lost three fumbles in its season-opening loss to Delaware last week and now has lost four in two games. Last season, even while struggling to a 4-8 record, Navy lost five fumbles in 12 games.
It wasn’t as if the Mids quit after the Hall fumble. Helped by a foolish Memphis penalty, they held the Tigers to a field goal that kept it a two-score game — sort of — at 23-7. Then they put together a classic Navy drive: 21 plays, 74 yards with 11:23 coming off the clock.
There were two problems: Taking that much time off the clock when you are behind in the fourth quarter is not all good. Worse, after Navy scored, the absolutely critical two-point conversion failed: Lavatai’s pass to Hall was knocked down, keeping the margin at two scores. Memphis promptly marched 88 yards and killed 6:01, putting the game away when Brandon Thomas went in from four yards out to make it 30-13 with 6:05 to go.
“We’re hurting as a program,” said Niumatalolo, still clearly upset 20 minutes after the game’s end. “We have great young men, and they’re resilient. We aren’t going anywhere; we’re not throwing up a white flag. We’re devastated now, but we have to get up tomorrow and go back to work.”
As usual, Niumatalolo pointed the finger at himself more than his players. He felt as if the game’s turning point came midway through the second quarter when Navy had driven the ball to the Memphis 29. On second and six, Niumatalolo called a halfback pass, with Maquel Haywood taking a pitch, running left and trying to find tight end Jayden Umbarger in the end zone. But Umbarger was double-covered, and defensive back Quindell Johnson made a spectacular, one-handed Odell Beckham Jr.-type catch for the interception.
“I just killed us with that call,” Niumatalolo said. “It was a horrible call. We had the momentum, especially if we score there. ”
When it was pointed out to him that Haywood had thrown into double coverage, Niumatalolo shrugged and said, “I shouldn’t have put Maquel in that position.”
The halftime stats, like the score, were close to even. By game’s end, like the score, they weren’t close: Memphis finished with 506 yards of offense, including 415 yards passing by Henigan. Navy totaled 314 yards, a decent chunk coming in the fourth quarter after the outcome had been decided. Other than the 62-yard pass to Hall, Lavatai completed two of six passes for 37 yards. He rushed 18 times for 37 yards.
“The touchdown pass was nice — it was good to get something positive,” Lavatai said of the pass to Hall. “But that was just a brief spurt of happiness. I have to be more consistent.”
A week ago, the defense kept Navy in the game until the final seconds. Saturday, it simply didn’t have the speed to keep up with the Tigers wide receivers.
“I feel like we were close,” said linebacker John Marshall, who made 15 tackles. “There were a couple of passes that we could have knocked down that we didn’t. We had flashes where we were very good and moments when we weren’t good enough.”
Navy now has a much-needed week off, a chance to take a deep breath both mentally and physically. Then it has to go on the road to a much-improved East Carolina team and to Air Force, which is 2-0 after beating Colorado, 41-10, on Saturday.
Navy won’t be favored in either of those games. It hasn’t won at Air Force since 2012, when Keenan Reynolds came off the bench and led the Mids to a 28-21 overtime victory. Sadly for Navy, Reynolds isn’t walking through the door anytime soon, although he does live in the Annapolis area. Neither is Malcolm Perry, the last Navy quarterback to beat Memphis, four years ago.
“It isn’t going to change around here,” Athletic Director Chet Gladchuk said, talking about all the Memphis transfers. “The rules are the rules, and if they put us at a disadvantage, so be it. We’ll figure it out. We always do.”
As his players and the brigade of midshipmen stood at attention for the playing of “Navy Blue and Gold,” the alma mater, Niumatalolo stood ramrod straight, singing every word.
Then he headed for the locker room. There was work to do. No white flags. | 2022-09-11T01:35:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Turnovers and transfers doom Navy, which is off to an 0-2 start - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/10/navy-midshipmen-football-memphis/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/10/navy-midshipmen-football-memphis/ |
Manu Ginóbili (left), a four-time NBA champion with the San Antonio Spurs, was welcomed into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame by longtime teammate Tim Duncan (right). (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
Manu Ginóbili and Tim Hardaway took the most momentous steps of their decorated basketball journeys at Symphony Hall in Springfield, Mass., whether that be by “Euro-step” or the “UTEP two-step.”
The pair of electric NBA guards with well-known signature moves were inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame on Saturday, headlining a 2022 class that also included WNBA stars Swin Cash and Lindsay Whalen, NBA coaches George Karl and Del Harris, WNBA coach Marianne Stanley, NCAA coach Bob Huggins and NBA referee Hugh Evans.
Ginóbili, the Argentine star who won four titles with the San Antonio Spurs, was joined by former teammates Tim Duncan, David Robinson and Tony Parker as well as Coach Gregg Popovich. Duncan, who was inducted two years ago, joined Ginóbili onstage as a presenter as fans cheered and shouted “Ma-nuuu.”
After famously sacrificing his own role by agreeing to come off the bench as an overqualified sixth man, the 45-year-old Ginóbili was quick to defer credit for his induction to “every person and team” that influenced his career because he hadn’t been an MVP-caliber player with an overwhelming individual resumé.
A creative and unpredictable scorer known for his change-of-direction moves and passionate play, Ginóbili said that making the NBA felt like “an unreachable dream” during his childhood in soccer-mad Argentina, though he pointed out that basketball was unusually popular in his hometown of Bahía Blanca. He recalled a repetitive childhood — “dribble, shoot, dribble, shoot for six or seven hours a day" — under the guidance of his parents, who were both actively involved in his development.
After turning pro as a teenager and playing in Italy, Ginóbili credited “sheer luck” for bringing him to the Spurs, who selected him with the 57th pick of the 1999 draft without interviewing him or giving him advance notice. The two-time all-star spent the next 16 seasons in San Antonio, winning titles in 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2014.
“We had our priorities straight,” he said. “We never let our egos get in the way. We knew when it was [Parker’s] time, when it was my time and when it was [Duncan’s] time, which was most of the time.”
Meanwhile, Ginóbili was the face of Argentina’s “Golden Generation,” which won Olympic gold at the 2004 Athens Games and bronze at the 2008 Beijing Games.
“I’m not here because I was super special,” he said. “I’m here because I was part of two of the most important teams of the 2000s.”
Hardaway, 56, joined his fellow “Run TMC” partners Mitch Richmond and Chris Mullin, as well as former Golden State Warriors coach Don Nelson, in the Hall. The 6-foot point guard joked that Nelson had “lied to every team” during the 1989 pre-draft process by telling them “that my knees were shot” in hopes that Hardaway would fall to the Warriors. Nelson went on to craft a fast-paced, high-scoring offense around Hardaway, who was known for his rapid-fire crossover and scoring acumen.
“Man, we were ahead of our time,” Hardaway told Richmond and Mullin, who joined him onstage. “I cherish those years.”
Born and raised in Chicago, Hardaway singled out Isiah Thomas as a childhood hero and thanked his mother, Gwendalyn, for taking time off work to show him the proper bus routes to school and for steering the family after her divorce. Hardaway also shared a moment with his son, Tim Jr., a shooting guard for the Dallas Mavericks.
“You have kept the basketball legacy alive and well,” Hardaway said. “I introduced you to the game we love, and we’re so proud of you. We have so much joy watching you play. You be out there hooping your butt off.”
While Hardaway didn’t directly address the controversy surrounding homophobic comments he made during a 2007 radio interview, he thanked Hall Chairman Jerry Colangelo and NBA Commissioners Adam Silver and David Stern for being “men who never wavered in their belief in me even when it wasn’t always popular.”
The night opened with a tribute to Boston Celtics legend Bill Russell, who had been inducted as both a player and a coach before his death in July. Jerry West and Alonzo Mourning introduced a video montage to Russell’s on-court heroics and off-court activism as the likes of Charles Barkley and Dikembe Mutombo looked on from the crowd.
“To be considered among the very best, you must be willing to lay it on the line against the very best,” West said. “I was lucky enough to learn this first hand by facing off against Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics. In his own way, he made all the lives he touched a little bit better.”
Mourning added: “His impact on society as a champion for social justice is the root of our profound admiration for him. We will deeply miss our mentor, our friend, his gigantic smile and infectious laugh.” | 2022-09-11T02:40:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Manu Ginóbili, Tim Hardaway inducted into Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/10/manu-ginobili-tim-hardaway-hof/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/10/manu-ginobili-tim-hardaway-hof/ |
DJ VanHook and his Appalachian State teammates celebrate after their win at No. 6 Texas A&M on Saturday. (Carmen Mandato/Getty Images)
Marshall (winner)
Notre Dame (loser)
Tennessee (winner)
Iowa (loser)
Utah (winner)
Nakia Watson (winner)
Virginia (loser)
Houston (loser)
Kansas State (winner)
Sam Hartman (winner)
Minnesota (winner)
Army (loser)
Fifteen years later, Appalachian State has another top-10 victim.
The former Football Championship Subdivision power in the mountains of North Carolina became a two-word shorthand for titanic upsets when it opened the 2007 season with a 34-32 stunner at Michigan. App State was a back-to-back FCS champion back then, but still not seen as a threat to high-profile programs.
That was then. The Mountaineers have since moved up to the top level of college football, and after a couple years of forgettable years have averaged 10.4 victories a season since 2015. It’s a run that included defeats of North Carolina and South Carolina in 2019, a near-upset of Penn State in 2018, and a wild 63-61 loss at home against North Carolina last week.
So App State winning 17-14 at No. 6 Texas A&M in 2022? An upset, certainly, but not incomprehensible.
The way the Mountaineers looked like the national power by smothering the Aggies and remaining in complete control of the game’s pace was impressive. Appalachian State outgained Texas A&M, 305-186, and it ran 80 plays to the Aggies’ 38. It owned a better than 2-to-1 edge in time of possession.
If there was a blue collar-over-blue chip blueprint, the Mountaineers (1-1) followed it exactly and deserve credit for doing so. Camerun Peoples ran for 112 yards, mostly chipping away for small gains before a 48-yard burst effectively sealed it in the closing minutes. And App State opportunistically converted a pair of fumble recoveries into touchdowns.
Yet Texas A&M played a role in its own demise. It couldn’t stitch together long drives, it wasn’t much of a threat in the passing game and it could not generate stops when needed. The Mountaineers went 9 for 20 on third down and another 3 for 5 on fourth-down conversions.
It’s now Jimbo Fisher’s fifth season in College Station, and he’s being compensated in a manner that suggests the Aggies should be contending for national titles. They’ve looked like that sort of team once in his tenure, when they went 9-1 with a loss to Alabama in 2020 and just missed out on a playoff berth. Last year featured a victory over Alabama, but it was also erratic and produced an 8-4 mark.
It appears more of the same could be on the way this season. What will the Aggies’ 2022 highlight be? The two notable early favorites are winning signing day with the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class and Fisher’s impromptu news conference in May blasting Alabama coach Nick Saban.
That was an entertaining offseason diversion, and everyone promptly circled Texas A&M’s trip to Tuscaloosa on Oct. 8 as one of the season’s biggest games. It won’t be if the Aggies remain inert over the next three weeks. App State was the first team to pick off Fisher’s bunch this year. Without a considerable jolt, it will be far from the last.
Appalachian State wasn’t the only Sun Belt team to make a splash Saturday. There’s a case to be made Marshall’s 26-21 defeat of No. 8 Notre Dame was even more significant.
Yes, the 0-2 Irish’s offensive foibles have been completely exposed, and they shouldn’t have been a top-10 team. That didn’t make the Thundering Herd’s triumph in South Bend any less sweet.
The first-year Sun Belt program (which arrived after a nearly two-decade run in Conference USA) trailed for less than three minutes in the first three quarters. After Notre Dame nosed ahead 15-12 early in the fourth, Marshall stitched together an 11-play, 94-yard march capped by Devin Miller’s 3-yard touchdown catch.
Less than a minute later, Steven Gilmore’s 37-yard interception return for a touchdown made it 26-15 and left the Irish scrambling.
It was Marshall’s first victory over a (nominally) top-10 opponent since stunning Kansas State in 2003.
So you want to be the head coach of the Fighting Irish, huh?
In fairness to Notre Dame’s Marcus Freeman, snap judgments on a head coach after three games are seldom wise. Still, facts are facts: Freeman is the first coach to begin his tenure in South Bend with three consecutive losses.
The first two were a come-from-ahead Fiesta Bowl loss to Oklahoma State and this year’s opener at Ohio State. A lot more short-term questions are going to be asked after a 26-21 loss to Marshall.
Two games into this season, and the Irish’s offensive identity isn’t a particularly strong one. It does not look like a team capable of dropping 40-plus points on nearly anyone, especially with a quarterback in Tyler Buchner who appears to be more of a threat on the ground than as a passer at this stage of his career.
Notre Dame is going to have to win slugfests this year, with a methodical, low-risk, run-heavy approach. It isn’t going to be much fun, but it’s the path to success. A lot went wrong against the Thundering Herd, but the three interceptions — including one returned for a score and another that short-circuited a fourth-quarter drive — are errors this version of Notre Dame simply cannot afford.
Well, now the No. 24 Volunteers have gone and done it. They’ve gotten all of Rocky Top’s hopes up after outlasting No. 17 Pittsburgh, 34-27, in overtime.
A 2-0 start doesn’t guarantee anything, but for a team that showed serious defensive liabilities last season, keeping the score in the 20s during regulation is a sign of progress. Some of that was tied to knocking Pitt quarterback Kedon Slovis out of the game just before halftime, but Tennessee’s defense did have something to do with that.
It’s nonetheless undeniable the schedule sets up reasonably well from here. Tennessee gets Akron and then Florida before visiting LSU off an open date. Three more home games follow (the first against Alabama, the third against Kentucky). Squint at it enough, and a 7-1 start doesn’t seem fantastical.
But first things first. The Vols played a far from perfect game and have plenty of room to grow. They’ll need to do some of it in the next two weeks; the Florida game might just be a bellwether for both programs hoping to recapture their past glory.
It turns out that seven points isn’t enough to win every game, a theory the Hawkeyes have tested two weeks in a row.
It did work in a 7-3 defeat of South Dakota State a week ago when the Hawkeyes stitched together a field goal and a pair of safeties. It didn’t turn out as well in a 10-7 loss to Iowa State despite needing just two plays to cash in a blocked punt early in the first quarter.
Iowa managed 150 total yards, including just 58 yards on 25 carries. The Cyclones own a commendable defense, so chalk some of this up to the opposition. The game also ended in a downpour, though Iowa did manage to get in range for a last-second field goal try to attempt to force overtime (it missed).
In so many ways, it set up as an Iowa sort of day: Low-scoring. Unpleasant conditions. A day when the forward pass was, if not a rumor, then at least rarely combustible. (There were no completions of more than 24 yards and only two completions for more than 16 yards; Iowa had neither).
The Kirk Ferentz formula has always been a bit retro, but it needs to be a reasonable throwback (to, say, the Big Ten of the 1970s or 1980s) as opposed to a more extreme one (like the 1920s or 1930s). Iowa needs to summon some offense, and in a hurry. Even in the Big Ten West, seven points isn’t going to cut it often the rest of the way.
The No. 13 Utes probably would have handled Southern Utah with ease. But the Thunderbirds unfortunately got Angry Utah after its loss at Florida last week and, well, things got ugly in a hurry and then got worse.
Utah rolled to a 73-7 victory, the Utes’ most points in a game since an 82-6 pounding of Texas-El Paso in 1973.
“The game plan was just to come out and dominate,” quarterback Cameron Rising told reporters.
It was quite the homecoming for the Washington State running back, who played two seasons at Wisconsin and rumbled for a pair of touchdowns in a 17-14 victory over the Badgers.
The Cougars managed a bit of conjuring to come out of Camp Randall Stadium with a victory. Teams that commit three turnovers and roll up only 53 rushing yards don’t usually pull off victories at Wisconsin.
But the Badgers had their own set of problems — three turnovers of their own, 11 penalties and a pair of missed field goals. Overall, Wisconsin had four drives of at least 10 plays come up completely empty.
The Cavaliers had the nation’s No. 2 passing offense last season and ranked third in the country in total yardage. They averaged 34.6 points. They weren’t great, going 6-6, but they usually weren’t boring or bottled up.
So to lose in the fashion Virginia did in its first test against a Football Bowl Subdivision team under new coach Tony Elliott — 24-3 at Illinois, with its quarterbacks completing 13 of 36 for 180 yards and two interceptions — is not encouraging.
To give up 146 yards to Illinois running back Chase Brown is perfectly understandable. He was going to get his. For an offense to take a step back despite returning starting quarterback Brennan Armstrong and receivers Keytaon Thompson and Dontayvion Wicks while getting deep threat Lavel Davis Jr. back from injury is less so. Well, except for the whole rebuilt offensive line.
As ever, an offensive line makes all things possible in football. Its apparent absence could make Elliott’s debut season tougher than anyone would like in Charlottesville.
So much for that stealth run at a playoff berth in its final Group of Five season. The No. 25 Cougars survived overtime at Texas-San Antonio last week. They weren’t so fortunate in a 33-30 loss at Texas Tech.
The good news for Houston, which will reunite with its former Southwest Conference rival in the Big 12 next year? Red Raiders fans were so overjoyed by the victory they stormed the field. After Saturday’s loss, the Cougars won’t face a big risk of that happening to them again this season.
The Wildcats were a team last season you had to make an effort to notice. They lost to the four best teams in the Big 12 (Baylor, Iowa State, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State) and went 8-1 against everyone else. Maybe the most notable thing connected to K-State was that Texas Tech and TCU made coaching changes in consecutive weeks after losses to the Wildcats.
But for those who cared to look closer, Kansas State was a consistently good defensive team. It had some games it wasn’t as sharp — against Oklahoma State’s passing game and Iowa State’s rushing attack — but only three opponents managed to score 30 points against the Wildcats, and none of their last seven foes did.
Moving ahead to the present, K-State nearly went two full games without surrendering a touchdown. Go ahead and chalk up the 34-0 blanking of South Dakota last week to an FBS-vs.-FCS mismatch, but Saturday’s 40-12 thumping of Missouri goes down as a bit more impressive.
The Wildcats (2-0) held the Tigers to 222 total yards, and Missouri’s touchdown came on the final play of the game (and was set up by a reserve back’s fumble at the K-State 20 in the closing minutes). Kansas State isn’t an offensive juggernaut, but it might not need to be with its defense. The Big 12 will find out soon enough; the Wildcats visit Oklahoma on Sept. 24.
The Wake Forest quarterback missed several weeks during preseason camp and the Demon Deacons’ opening rout of VMI because of a blood clot issue. He was cleared this week and promptly completed 18 of 27 passes for 300 yards and four touchdowns in a 45-25 victory at Vanderbilt.
To state the obvious, the No. 23 Demon Deacons have a far higher ceiling with the redshirt junior — whose 76 career touchdown passes are a school record — than without him. Having him shake off whatever rust accumulated (and clearly there wasn’t much) in the two weeks before Wake Forest (2-0) welcomes Clemson to Winston-Salem is also beneficial for Dave Clawson’s team.
The most noteworthy part of the Golden Gophers’ 62-10 rout of Western Illinois was the score. It was the most points in any game for Minnesota since a 63-26 pounding of Indiana in 2006, and the Gophers’ total yardage figure (679) was their largest since rolling up 704 yards on Toledo in 2004.
The Black Knights haven’t had an easy go of it, opening at Coastal Carolina and then welcoming defending Conference USA champ Texas-San Antonio to the U.S. Military Academy. And it’s not as if Army is getting blown out; it has yet to trail by more than 10 points.
Nonetheless, the Black Knights sit at 0-2 for the first time since 2015 after Saturday’s 41-38 overtime loss to UTSA. The Roadrunners — themselves coming off an overtime loss to Houston — bounced back from a two-touchdown deficit in the second half and a missed field goal on the last play of regulation to win it on De’Corian Clark’s 7-yard touchdown reception from Frank Harris.
Losses at Michie Stadium have become rare for Army, which was 29-3 at home over the last five seasons. The other teams to upend the Black Knights in West Point since 2017: Tulane (2019), San José State (2019) and Wake Forest (2021). | 2022-09-11T03:06:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | College football winners and losers for Week 2 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/10/college-football-winners-losers-week-2/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/10/college-football-winners-losers-week-2/ |
Seattle Sounders forward Raul Ruidiaz, left, points toward the crowd after he scored a goal against Austin FC during the first half of an MLS soccer match, Saturday, Sept. 10, 2022, in Seattle. The goal was Ruidiaz’s second in the half. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
SEATTLE — Raul Ruidiaz scored two goals and the Seattle Sounders beat Austin 3-0 on Saturday night. | 2022-09-11T03:09:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ruidiaz scores 2 goals as Seattle Sounders defeat Austin - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/soccer/ruidiaz-scores-2-goals-as-seattle-sounders-defeat-austin/2022/09/10/c8d9b134-317a-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/soccer/ruidiaz-scores-2-goals-as-seattle-sounders-defeat-austin/2022/09/10/c8d9b134-317a-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html |
In a Post career spanning four decades, he also oversaw the Outlook section and worked on the local, national and magazine sections
Al Horne was “someone who exuded quiet reserve, a thoughtful person on complicated stories,” a colleague said. (Ellen Horne)
Al Horne, a journalist who spent four decades at The Washington Post, where he edited the Outlook section in the 1970s and then worked on the foreign desk, shepherding stories about the end of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, died Sept. 9 at a hospital in Washington. He was 89.
The cause was a heart attack, said his daughter Ellen Horne.
Mr. Horne was born to Jews in Poland who were forced to flee soon after the German invasion in September 1939. He grew up in New York and, after a brief journalism apprenticeship, arrived at The Post in 1958 as an assistant city editor. He was fluent in Polish and German and, over the next decade, he was an editor on the world and national desks and with The Post’s magazine, then called Potomac.
He ran the Outlook opinion and essay section from 1971 to 1982, then was an assistant foreign editor until retiring in 1997. He went to Warsaw to report on the fall of communism in 1989 — an assignment his daughter said was the pride of his career — but he mostly guided other reporters in the field as they covered the dramatic final years of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
Peter Osnos, a Post foreign correspondent who later founded the publishing house PublicAffairs, said Mr. Horne was “not a newsroom swashbuckler, but someone who exuded quiet reserve, a thoughtful person on complicated stories.”
David Hoffman, The Post’s former assistant managing editor for foreign news, described Mr. Horne as a journalist who “epitomized the era of the editor who was also master specialist.”
“Correspondents were out on the edge of tumult and change — and they could not always see everything happening at every minute — but they knew Al was the wind at their back, weaving in essential context, familiar with the players, lucid in the history,” Hoffman said.
Hoffman recalled working as a White House reporter in July 1989 and filing a story while traveling to Poland with President George H.W. Bush. The article began: “President Bush set foot behind the weakening wall of communism tonight, paying tribute to the accelerating pace of change and declaring that Americans ‘have a fervent wish: that Europe be whole and free.’”
“This was speculative on my part,” Hoffman said, “based on what had been happening, and Al Horne put it right in the paper as written, because he saw it, too. In November, the Berlin Wall fell. That’s what was so special about him, he had sensitivity to foreign correspondents who were discovering, observing, reporting. Although he was on the desk, he was at the shoulder of his correspondents, ever watchful and committed to the best possible story — and these were days when we had one good shot a day.”
Alexander Douglas Horne, who used the byline A.D. Horne, was born Aleksander Einhorn in Warsaw on Nov. 9, 1932. The family, which later changed its surname, settled in the New York City borough of Queens, and his father resumed his career as an insurance company executive. His mother, who had a law degree from a Polish university, became an office manager and bookkeeper.
Mr. Horne was editor of his high school newspaper and attended Williams College in Massachusetts on a scholarship. After graduating in 1954 with a bachelor’s degree in American history and literature, he worked for the Berkshire Eagle newspaper in Pittsfield, Mass., and served in the Army before joining The Post. He edited the 1981 book “The Wounded Generation: America After Vietnam.”
After his retirement, he spent about a decade working as a fill-in summer copy editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris and Hong Kong and maintained his health through sport. As he once summarized his abilities with a flash of wry pride: “I’ve been able to play mediocre tennis into my seventies.”
In 1960, he married Ann Hurd. In addition to his wife, of Washington, and his daughter Ellen, of West Orange, N.J., survivors include six other children, Julia Patchan of Herndon, Va., Owen Horne of Lakeway, Texas, Libby Horne of La Crescenta, Calif., Jennifer Horne of Santa Cruz, Calif., Gary Einhorn of Takoma Park, Md., and Brian Horne of Portland, Ore.; and 11 grandchildren. | 2022-09-11T03:45:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Al Horne, stalwart editor on Washington Post foreign desk, dies at 89 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/10/al-horne-washington-post-editor-obituary/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/10/al-horne-washington-post-editor-obituary/ |
BATON ROUGE, La. — Jayden Daniels completed 10 of 11 passes for 137 yards, threw for three touchdowns and ran for another score in just five drives, and LSU built a 51-0 halftime lead over Southern before cruising to a 65-17 victory on Saturday night in the first matchup of the two universities from Louisiana’s capital city. | 2022-09-11T04:38:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Daniels starts quick, LSU rolls past Southern, 65-17 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/daniels-starts-quick-lsu-rolls-past-southern-65-17/2022/09/10/f0b8a860-317d-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/daniels-starts-quick-lsu-rolls-past-southern-65-17/2022/09/10/f0b8a860-317d-11ed-bcc6-0874b26ae296_story.html |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.