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 ⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
“Colonialism is history in the West,” said a South African writer. "But in our countries, colonialism is now.”
Queen Elizabeth II inspects men of the newly-renamed Queen's Own Nigeria Regiment, Royal West African Frontier Force, at Kaduna Airport, Nigeria, during her Commonwealth Tour, in 1956. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis/Getty Images)
NAIROBI — When the children of Kenya’s most famous freedom fighter learned about the death of Queen Elizabeth II, they mourned for England and for the Queen’s family. Death of a parent is never easy, the Kimathi children know. “It is a lot for their country,” said Elizabeth Kimathi, 66. “We feel sorry for them and for the royal family.”
They were thinking about how shortly after Elizabeth Windsor ascended to the throne, the British fought a year-long war to crush the rebellion led in part by their father, Dedan Kimathi — a man then branded a terrorist and now seen as a hero in Kenya. They were thinking about how thousands of fighters were killed and more than 100,000 civilians were forced into detention camps.
How British soldiers tortured their mother. How their father was ultimately hanged, despite repeated appeals to the British government. How many letters their mother wrote to the Queen, pleading for her help finding the gravesite so she could give her husband a proper burial.
As their leaders paid homage to the Queen — with the presidents of Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria among those who offered tributes and praised England’s current partnerships with their countries — residents of former colonies publicly recounted the havoc wreaked by the empire. Online and in private, there have been fraught discussions about the extent to which Queen Elizabeth, whose duties were largely ceremonial, bore responsibility, and how to balance respect for the dead with reckoning of past wrongs.
“The thing that I think Western people need to genuinely try to absorb and realize is that colonialism is history in the West,” said Sipho Hlongwane, a writer based in Johannesburg. “It is a thing of the past, in the West. But in our countries, colonialism is now.”
“The choices she made, she could have made differently,” Hlongwane said of Queen Elizabeth. “You can be born into that level of privilege and make choices that are different, then eat the consequences. Are we seriously not allowed to point that out?”
The Queen’s death has also escalated called by people in Africa and South Asia for the royal family to return riches taken from their lands — including the Kohinoor diamond and Great Star of Africa, which were “gifted” by India and South Africa, respectively. The story of the Great Star of Africa, which was mined in 1905 at a White-owned mine and subsequently given to the royal family, is the story of many of the artifacts in the British Museum, said Hlongwane.
“It may have been done over tea and a handshake,” he said. “But no right thinking person would think that was a fair transaction.”
Shailja Patel, a Kenyan author and activist, said she knew that when Elizabeth died, the “mythmaking machine” would immediately sweep into action. As she watched the media coverage begin, Patel took to Twitter. In a widely shared thread, she noted that the storied Treetops Hotel in Aberdares National Park — where Elizabeth, then just 25, learned she would became Queen after her father’s sudden death — would become the site from which British solders gunned down freedom fighters as if at a “game shoot.”
“What the British did in Kenya,” Patel said in an interview, “they did all over the world … We are just beginning to chip away at the history at the lies and the mythmaking of empire.”
Britain in 2013 apologized for the torture of Kenyan rebels and agreed to pay a settlement of about $20 million to the living survivors, which amounted to about $4,000 per person.
Khan said his grandparents — who experienced violence and had to scavenge for food during the Partition, when British India was divided into India and Pakistan in 1947 — along with his parents, are “weirdly sad about the Queen’s passing.” He attributed their feelings to the Queen’s portrayal within South Asia as “a beacon of prosperity.” (Bangladesh subsequently seceded from Pakistan in 1971 to form an independent country).
Khan said he has countered by bringing up the “horrors that the British Empire brought on South Asia,” including white supremacy and colorism still evident in South Asian culture.
“She conducted herself with amazing grace and dignity,” said Chandra, who now lives in Tennessee, “and at the same time, I think it’s a time to question their role, and also the history and what could be done about[ …]the damage that colonialism left in the Third World.”
Nigerian-born professor Uju Anya sparked an outcry when she wished the Queen — who she declared “a thieving raping genocidal empire” — “excruciating” pain in dying. Anya’s tweet was deleted by Twitter for violating its policies and condemned by Carnegie Mellon University, where Anya works.
As he watched criticism swell on Twitter pile-on, Nigerian journalist David Hundeyin said he was struck by just how “deep-seated the ignorance is about what the issues even are … about what the British monarchy is, and what it represented.”
The country of Nigeria was formed when British rulers decided to merge the vastly different North and South into one nation. They gave political power to the rulers in the North, and when civil war broke out in 1967, Britain backed the federal government, providing funding and weapons. Historians estimate more than 1 million Igbo civilians in Nigeria’s southeast died, many of starvation.
“I’m not sure anyone gets to tell you, ‘oh how dare you. you are not showing decorum. it is not the right time,’” he said. “When is the right time? Who gets to decide when it is the right time? Who gets to decide in the hierarchy of human life, whose life ranks above others?”
Chason reported from Dakar and Venkataramanan from Washington. | 2022-09-12T17:08:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Queen Elizabeth II's death recalls pain of British colonialism - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/12/queen-elizabeth-death-africa-colonialism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/12/queen-elizabeth-death-africa-colonialism/ |
Torrential rain and flooding inundate Chicago, southeastern Wisconsin
More than 5 inches of rain flooded parts of Chicago, while Racine, Wis., smashed its daily rainfall record with more than 9 inches
Widespread heavy rainfall doused the Chicago area on Sunday, with nearly six inches of rain flooding streets, drenching fans at the Chicago Bears’ season-opening football game and turning storm drains into massive geysers.
The rain spread into the area on Sunday morning before quickly ramping up and turning dangerous. In just a one-hour period from 8:40 to 9:40 a.m. local time, 3.5 inches of rain fell in Chicago’s Albany Park. In total, 5.63 inches of rain fell there, according to local storm reports published by the National Weather Service.
Heavy rains also fell across southeastern Wisconsin, with Milwaukee seeing its sixth-wettest day on record Sunday. It got 4.78 inches of rain — more than its average rainfall for the entire month of June. It was the city’s wettest September day on record.
With 4.78" of rainfall as of 1 AM CDT Monday, Milwaukee has set:
💧a daily rainfall record for Sept 11 beating the old record of 2.96" set in 2000
💧 a record one day rainfall total for the month of September breaking the old record of 4.32" set back on Sept 8, 1941#wiwx
Widespread downpours soaked southeastern Wisconsin. A massive swath of more than two inches of rain was recorded from Madison to Racine, causing local streams and rivers to rise.
Racine appeared to be the big rainfall winner of the day. More than nine inches of rain fell on the city, smashing the previous record of 4.8 inches.
In Chicago, the city’s storm drains simply could not handle that much rain falling at once, leading to dramatic scenes on area roadways — and a sloppy football game on national television.
A weather station in Lincoln Square recorded 5.9 inches of rain, one in Portage Park saw 5.86 inches, and another in the western Chicago suburb of Lisle tallied 5.56 inches. In all three cases, the stations recorded nearly three or more inches of rainfall in just an hour-long period — making it difficult for storm drains to keep up.
Several posts on social media showed flooded intersections, with water pooling at the wheels of cars parked along the side of the street. Other videos showed water shooting out of the sewers in Chicago, launching more water onto already flooded streets. Many basements and ground-floor units in the city were reported to have flooded, and Loyola University Chicago’s Cudahy Library remained closed Monday after suffering water damage.
At Soldier Field, the home team Chicago Bears played a wet and wild football game against the visiting San Francisco 49ers. Heavy rain poured on fans at the game — dousing some more than others and causing water to pour into the stadium. On the field, crews tried to brush the water off the field before the game, but much of the damage had been done.
After upsetting the 49ers 19-10, the victorious Bears had fun on the soaked grass field, using it as a slip-and-slide in their celebrations.
RAINY DAY BEARS… @ChicagoBears SLIDING into this season with 2-5” of rain around Chicago … having some fun at @SoldierField pic.twitter.com/k2fTm7H2KQ
Sunday’s excessive rainfall fits into a pattern of more extreme precipitation in the Upper Midwest amid rising temperatures. According to the federal government’s National Climate Assessment, the amount of rain that falls in the top 1 percent of events has increased by 42 percent in the Midwest over the past 60 years. | 2022-09-12T17:12:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Torrential rain and flooding inundate Chicago, southeastern Wisconsin - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/12/chicago-flooding-milwaukee-racine-rain/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/12/chicago-flooding-milwaukee-racine-rain/ |
Patrick Oliver holds a vial of ketamine at the MindPeace Clinic in Richmond. (Julia Rendleman for The Washington Post)
But after working out at his home gym on a recent July weekend, Anthony, a criminal defense attorney in Richmond, found himself serenading his three yellow labradors with 1980s hair band tunes. And it wasn’t an act.
Anthony joked about the impromptu show as a nurse at MindPeace Clinic in Richmond prepared the treatment he credited with his newfound mental well-being: ketamine. The psychedelic, used in medical settings as an anesthetic — and illegally as a party drug — is considered to be a promising but experimental mental health treatment. In a year-long evaluation of more than 400 patients, including Anthony, at three MindPeace ketamine clinics in Virginia, researchers found a significant reduction in symptoms of depression, according to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry on Monday. Largely consistent with past studies, 72 percent of patients saw improvement in their mood and 38 percent were symptom-free after 10 infusions.
While the study has limitations, the findings appear to illuminate how ketamine could offer more than just brief relief to people whose depression is resistant to other medications. For many of the clinic’s patients who spoke to The Post, the drug’s achievements have been life-changing. A retired hospital technician wondered about the career he could have had if he had been able to look people in the eyes during conversations, which he can now. A teenage boy cracked jokes with his mother. Anthony, who said he never goes for a walk, finally stepped out onto the street of his cul-de-sac.
“All of a sudden, you wake up and realize what you haven’t been feeling for 15 years,” he said.
Researchers said the study could offer a greater understanding of the drug’s long-term potential for treating people with depression, and more hope amid a mental health crisis that has worsened during the coronavirus pandemic. Ketamine is just one of a variety of psychedelics, including “magic” mushrooms and ecstasy, that people are turning to for relief amid a greater public acceptance and growing field of research.
Patrick Oliver, the study’s lead researcher and the medical director of MindPeace Clinics, said ketamine therapy could become a mainstream solution to depression and potentially other mental disorders that have long been undertreated. Nearly 46,000 Americans died from suicides in the United States in 2020, according to the National Center on Health Statistics.
“It’s an epidemic, and it’s been going on forever,” said Oliver, a former emergency room physician. “And we’ve found a medication that literally costs pennies to make and is fixing these patients.”
Experts say that ketamine shouldn’t be considered the first option for people with depression or suicidal ideations, given the other medicines and therapies that have been proved effective. The study, conducted by the ketamine clinic on a self-selecting group of patients, has its limitations. Suicidal ideations decreased at least 85 percent after 15 infusions, researchers found. But the study’s authors acknowledged that there is no system to track adverse events and side effects among ketamine patients. Nurses followed up with patients by phone after their treatments and recorded two suicide attempts. Those in the field say more information is needed about the drug’s effects over a longer period with more patients — but, they add, the research is a step in the right direction for a better understanding of ketamine.
‘I don’t know that I’d be here’
Ketamine — introduced as an anesthetic in the 1960s and then embraced by ravegoers who called it “Special K” — can balance certain neurotransmitters, rebuild stronger neural connections and alter the mood processes of the brain.
However, the unofficial, inconsistent nature of how ketamine is used clinically has limited scientists’ understanding of the drug’s real-world effects on patients who get multiple infusions, as past studies have historically stopped after six infusions.
“It’s hard to quantify the level of relief,” he paused, “but I don’t know that I’d be here.”
Dissociative effects
As he leaned back in the large black, reclining chair at the clinic, he ran through the list of what he had tried, including the most commonly prescribed antidepressants, SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) and talk therapy. All had caused a host of side effects including restlessness, sleepiness and dizziness. Ketamine is “kind of a shotgun approach,” Montalbano said, but it was the most effective in his mind.
“I would not do this if I didn’t have to,” he said. “It’s not fun. It’s therapeutic, and it works.”
“I see swirls of color,” he said. “Reds and blues swirling like if you were looking at the cosmos.”
Gerard Sanacora, the director of the Yale Depression Research Program and the Yale New Haven Hospital Interventional Psychiatry Service, said the study, in which he was not involved, raised several concerns about the research: It included only patients who were paying $500 per session out of pocket because insurance does not cover this kind of experimental use of the drug, it does not mention race or ethnicity data, and it provides only limited information about the baseline conditions of the patients. But the data is helpful for researchers, Sanacora said, who are isolated “in ivory towers” and unable to glean how patients at clinics across the country are handling years of ketamine use.
“We still have a little bit more to learn,” said Sanacora, who has treated patients with ketamine in his lab since 2004.
$500 a session
Before he started ketamine treatments, 22-year-old Nicholas was reluctant to try it because his family’s insurance would not cover the twice-a-week sessions that cost about $500 each. A typical ketamine treatment can cost between $400 and $800.
Liz brought along her other son with depression, Benjamin, 18, for a consultation during Nicholas’s appointment. Two months after that appointment, Benjamin was cracking more jokes and Nicholas had gone back to college.
Liz said she took a loan out on her life insurance to pay for her sons’ treatments.
“It’s well worth every single penny,” she said, smiling at Nicholas.
‘I come home’
“I told my husband, ‘Parker is so young, he won’t even know I’m gone,’ ” she recalled, as Dougher prepared her ketamine treatment. “That’s when I realized, ‘I need to do something about this.’ ”
She said she watched as patients would get better at the clinic. She didn’t see anyone’s condition worsen, which encouraged her to ask Oliver if he would take her on as a patient, confiding in him about her struggles.
“He asked why didn’t I come to him sooner,” she said. “I said because I was scared. I’m a nurse, and we’re supposed to be able to handle other people’s problems, not our own.”
She hated the sensation that the psychedelic brought on but noticed an immediate improvement in her mood. She no longer struggled to make herself leave the house for work. She doesn’t think about killing herself. For Harding and her husband, a sheriff’s deputy who has responded to calls involving suicides, ketamine is the answer to a broken mental health-care system. Not only was she saved, she said, but at the clinic, she is part of the important work of helping others.
“I come home every day,” Harding said, “and I’m happy.” | 2022-09-12T17:15:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ketamine shown to curb suicidal thoughts in new research - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/09/12/ketamine-depression-treatment-research/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/09/12/ketamine-depression-treatment-research/ |
Freedom High School briefly locked down after student found with gun
Police said no one was injured and no shots were fired.
A Virginia high school was briefly put on lockdown Monday morning after a student was found on campus with a gun, officials said.
Prince William County police said that a student at Freedom High School in Woodbridge was taken into custody after being found with a gun. Officials said no shots were fired and no one was injured. Police also said the student did not threaten anyone.
A Prince William County police spokesperson said the call to police came in at 10:10 a.m.
A Prince William County Public Schools spokesperson wrote in an email shortly before 1 p.m. that the lockdown had been lifted.
This developing story has been updated. | 2022-09-12T17:15:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Freedom High School briefly locked down after student found with gun - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/12/freedom-high-school-gun-va/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/12/freedom-high-school-gun-va/ |
What if Tucker Carlson’s wrong about more than just Russia?
Fox News host Tucker Carlson discusses “Populism and the Right” during the National Review Institute's Ideas Summit at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel March 29, 2019 in Washington, D.C. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Normally, Tucker Carlson can be found offering his thoughts on American politics in segments that air on Fox News. Late last month, though, he could be seen pontificating on two other channels — at least, once his words had been translated into Russian.
It’s not hard to see why Russian state media would find the following riff from Carlson appealing.
“Joe Biden is calling for an unconditional surrender from Vladimir Putin,” he said in his Aug. 29 broadcast. “Here’s the weird thing. By any actual reality-based measure, Vladimir Putin is not losing the war in Ukraine. He is winning the war in Ukraine and Joe Biden looks at that and says we won’t stop until you proffer an unconditional surrender.”
Thanks to the Internet Archive’s catalog of Russian broadcasts, we can see what happened next.
The host of a program on Channel One Russia introduced Carlson to the assembled panel to discuss.
Then, over at Russia-1 TV, a similar presentation.
No one in the world is more invested in the idea that Russia is winning in Ukraine than the Russian president, hence the alacrity with which television stations loyal to his regime touted Carlson’s assessment.
The Fox News host has been cited regularly on Russian television since the invasion of Ukraine in February, of course. A few days before, he’d been proclaimed “the most popular TV host in the U.S.,” a useful presentation of his authority, if a debatable one. Carlson’s views of the war have consistently been favorable to Russia — not surprising, given that in 2019 he explicitly stated that he preferred Russia win in its then-more-limited conflict with Ukraine. And that’s made him useful to the Putinites.
This time, though, Carlson’s assessment aged particularly poorly. In the days since he scoffed at the idea that Russia was doing anything other than winning, Ukraine has swept into Russian-held parts of the country and pushed Russia back toward its own border. The Washington Post reported on the shift on Sunday:
" ‘They just dropped rifles on the ground,’ " Olena Matvienko said Sunday as she stood, still disoriented, in a village littered with ammo crates and torched vehicles, including a Russian tank loaded on a flatbed. The first investigators from Kharkiv had just pulled in to collect the bodies of civilians shot by Russians, some that have been lying exposed for months."
Military experts attribute the success of the Ukrainian counter-offensive to a number of complicated factors, from erosion of Russian morale and support systems to Western support for the Ukrainian military. Asked about the shift in energy on Monday, the White House described it cautiously: “it is clear they are fighting hard to take back territory.” But the idea that Russia is unequivocally “winning the war in Ukraine,” as Carlson put it, much less “by any actual reality-based measure" has become increasingly hard to defend.
More to the point, it was also hard to defend at the time that Carlson made the claim. That’s why Russian TV jumped on it: it was a rare moment in which someone outside of their own circle was claiming that everything was going fine. (In the wake of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, incidentally, even some of them expressed new pessimism.)
There’s an obvious question that arises here: why, exactly, is Carlson so eager to present Putin as obviously winning? In part, it seems, it’s because of the bubble from which he broadcasts. As the New York Times reported earlier this year, Carlson’s show is increasingly the domain only of like-minded allies. So Carlson followed up his assessment of the state of the war two weeks ago by interviewing retired Army colonel Douglas Macgregor — someone even Fox News’s own Jennifer Griffin once described as an apologist for Russia live on air.
But it’s mostly because Carlson’s point wasn’t about Russia. It was about President Biden.
“This isn’t bad policy,” Carlson said of Biden’s demand for surrender. “This is nuts. It makes no sense. In fact, it only makes sense if the goal is to completely destroy the West in order to make way for Chinese global dominance. What would be the other explanation for this behavior?”
Well, one explanation would be that Biden understood that the Russian invasion — meant to be a blitzkrieg that quickly toppled the Ukrainian government days after it was launched — had stalled and was on the brink of being reversed. That Biden and other outside observers saw Russia’s massive lost of materiel and soldiers as reflective of something more than a cannon-fodder approach to inevitable victory.
Carlson’s untempered praise for the Russian war effort wasn’t simply a naive assessment of the war’s progress. It was an enemy-of-my-enemy play. The Fox News host has invested an enormous amount of energy since Biden’s inauguration in presenting the administration as a dire threat to the political right and to Americans more broadly. So when Biden says that maybe the war isn’t going as Russia expected, this is about clearing the way for Chinese global dominance, apparently. Despite China having already aligned with the Carlson-Putin side in the conflict.
Praising Russia and Putin because they contrast nicely with the American left is hardly new. When Putin first seized Crimea in 2014, some voices on the right praised his strength in contrast to President Barack Obama’s perceived weakness. The rise of Donald Trump brought Putin-fetishism to a new level, with Trump explicitly embracing various autocrats in part because of their performative toughness.
Other Republicans similarly tried to draw a contrast between that sort of bravado and what they presented as the downward slide of the United States. In May 2021, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) amplified a tweet in which an ad for enlisting in the U.S. Army was contrasted with a tough-as-nails presentation of the Russian military.
Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea.... https://t.co/8aVFMW98NM
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) May 20, 2021
The American military, dependent on volunteers, was hoping to demonstrate that it was a welcome place for men and women of every race and religion. But because the ad touched on inclusivity, it was framed as weak — because that served as a bankshot sinking left-wing politics more broadly. It has not gone unnoticed by Cruz’s critics in recent days that his comparison has aged poorly.
Carlson, though, is a special case. It’s not solely that he praises Russia because it is easily contrasted with Biden. He’s obviously enamored of authoritarians in the same way Trump was, in recent months visiting both Hungary and Brazil to hype the leaders of those countries.
Then he overextended himself. Wanting to cast Biden as trying to undermine American hegemony, he scoffed at the entirely defensible idea that Putin’s war wasn’t going according to plan. Aiming to depict the American president, not the Russian one, as a pathetic loser, he leaned into the idea that the invasion was an indisputable success.
For Fox News viewers, then, a question might be worth asking: Is it possible that Carlson’s other claims about Biden’s ineptitude and deviousness are similarly unfounded nonsense? | 2022-09-12T17:56:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What if Tucker Carlson’s wrong about more than just Russia? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/12/russia-putin-ukraine-tucker-carlson-biden/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/12/russia-putin-ukraine-tucker-carlson-biden/ |
Leona Lowery Fitzhugh, right, leads the Washington Women's Chorale in song at a reunion of the D.C. Youth Chorale at St. Luke's Episcopal Church on 15th Street NW. (John Kelly/The Washington Post)
The choral program hadn’t even officially begun at Saturday’s 60th anniversary celebration of the D.C. Youth Chorale and sweet sounds were already pouring from a group of singers.
“They’re just feeling the space,” said Gail Robinson-Oturu, who with Monica Spencer had organized the reunion at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on 15th Street NW. It was still the mix-and-mingle stage of the afternoon, with attendees greeting one another and making bids on silent auction items. But a group of singers had assembled at the base of the altar, seeing how their voices echoed in the vaulted room.
“You can’t stop us,” said Robinson-Oturu.
From its creation in 1961 until its dissolution in 1995, the D.C. Youth Chorale (DCYC) took the finest voices from the city’s public high schools and molded them into a hundred-strong choir. This reunion, sponsored by D.C. Youth Chorale Legacy, was a chance for alumni to reconnect, raise money to support youth arts programs — and sing.
Robinson-Oturu first heard the chorale when she was 11 and it performed at her church, Tabor Presbyterian in Northwest.
“I was just transfixed,” she said.
Robinson-Oturu longed to someday belong. She summoned the nerve to approach Edward Jackson, who directed the choir from 1966 to 1995, confessing to him that her voice probably wasn’t as good as the soloists she had heard.
Jackson said to her: “I don’t need a group of soloists. I need a group of workers.”
Robinson-Oturu became a member in 1968. Several nights a week, students from around the District would come together to practice — first at Roosevelt High, then at other schools.
The approach Jackson used — he described it as “discipline, standards, excellence, success” — earned the D.C. Youth Chorale honors such as a spot on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” a State Department-sponsored tour of Romania, performances at World’s Fairs in New York City and Spokane, and appearances at the Kennedy Center and elsewhere in Washington. Among its members: mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves.
“It stretched my abilities,” said Ivan McDowell, who graduated from McKinley in 1981. He already played the trumpet, but the complexities of choral music were new to him. And if he’d stayed in the brass section, he may never have confronted the foreign languages the choir members were required to familiarize themselves with: Latin, French, German. The group’s repertoire spanned the globe.
The chorale was founded by Frances White Hughes, a music teacher at Anacostia, Roosevelt and Ballou high schools. The early 1960s was a time when gifted and talented programs were starting to catch on, Robinson-Oturu said, putting the focus on academic subjects like math and English.
“She thought the school system needed something for students who were talented in the arts,” Robinson-Oturu said. So Hughes created what at first was called Young Scholars With Special Gifts.
“It was accessible. There was no charge,” Robinson-Oturu said.
Whatever your background — singing church music every Sunday or growing up in a home where music was seldom heard — you would learn. Eventually there was a feeder program from the city’s elementary school and junior highs, run by Yvette Holt.
Reunion attendees on Saturday remembered and celebrated all of the voice teachers and accompanists who had worked with them. Wilma Shakesnider was a direct link to Hughes. Though she’d graduated before the chorus was founded, Hughes taught her. Shakesnider went on to sing opera in Houston, Berlin and New York. She’s 80 now, a bit tentative on her feet, but when she opened her mouth and that trained soprano voice issued forth with a passage from the opera “Herodiade” by Jules Massenet, it raised goose bumps.
Hughes passed the reins to Jackson in 1966. The D.C. Youth Chorale folded in 1995. That was the year Edwards retired from the school system as teacher at Duke Ellington School of the Arts. No one could say exactly why. Perhaps it was just the sort of program that needed a single strong advocate.
The D.C. Youth Chorale’s legacy echoes on in its members, most of whom continue to sing, many of whom teach. Some have started their own groups, including the Washington Women’s Chorale and the Artists Group of Washington, both of which performed at the anniversary celebration.
Detra Battle Washington, a 1979 graduate of McKinley, remembers the way the chorus taught members to blend their voices, to be their best. She teaches voice around the city, including at Howard University.
“When times get rough, music is where I go,” she said. “People who don’t have music, there’s a void in their lives.” | 2022-09-12T18:31:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | For its 60th anniversary, the D.C. Youth Chorale celebrates song - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/12/dc-youth-chorale/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/12/dc-youth-chorale/ |
Ukrainian forces have reconquered over 3,000 square kilometers of territory over the past week — more than all the territory Russia had added to its occupation in the six months since the start of the war. The Ukrainian flag is suddenly flying again over numerous towns and villages, and the offensives in both the northeast and the south are pushing the Russians back. Abandoned Russian tanks and trucks are littering the roads. Is this a pivotal moment in the war? What is Vladimir Putin’s next move?
At a tactical level, the results on the battlefield are important but not definitive. While the Ukrainians have moved swiftly to bloody Russia’s nose, the Russians can simply fall back into defensive positions, consolidate their forces, and defend their gains in Donbas and the vital land bridge to Crimea that runs through Mariupol. As the Russians shift from offense to defense, their military position will get stronger — in military parlance, “defense is to offense as three is to one.”
Operationally, these advances in the Kharkiv region are likewise important, but not yet creating a true tipping point in the war. The Ukrainians have demonstrated two vital attributes in the current offensive. The first is the ability to conduct offensive operations on a multipolar set of axes, simultaneously controlling significant combat movements in the north, east and south — something the Russians have failed to do. They have also demonstrated excellent combined-arms operations, meaning they have coordinated ground troops, artillery, tanks and close air support. Again, the Russian failures here are conspicuous.
In a strategic and psychological sense, the reconquests will have a significant impact on Ukraine and its allies. First, they will allow Kyiv to claim the ability to eventually expel Russia from all Ukrainian lands, including Crimea. While the odds of fully implementing such an ambitious objective are long, the goal will be more credible in the wake of these operations. The successes will also encourage Europe to stay the course on Russian sanctions in the face of a potential recession and energy shortages this winter. And in the US, they will bolster the Biden administration’s claims of a very successful strategy in checking Russian aggression.
But in Russia, they will move Putin closer to a series of more dramatic countermoves — all of which will make this already unstable situation even more dangerous.
The Russian president still has cards to play. Having now forced the Zaporizhzhia nuclear reactor into a cold shutdown (diminishing Ukrainian electricity by 20%), he will continue to use that important strategic terrain to launch attacks against the Ukrainians and defend the approaches to Crimea. More attacks to diminish critical infrastructure (electricity, gasoline, water, internet) may be coming. He could increase the efforts of the Russian air force to simply carpet-bomb Ukraine and demoralize the population — much as he did in Syria, virtually destroying city after city.
Putin may decide it’s time to use chemical weapons (especially if he can create a “false flag” scenario and blame it on the US and Ukraine). Additionally, he could pull back from the agreement allowing grain shipments, so painfully worked out between Russia and Ukraine with Turkey and the International Maritime Organization of the UN.
His biggest problem is going to be manpower. Credible estimates of his losses, both killed and seriously wounded, are above 80,000. At some point soon, especially given reports of cratering morale among units in Ukraine, he may be forced to conscript more troops — a move that will be highly unpopular in Russia, where it is a crime to even call the conflict “a war.”
Although the Ukrainians should be proud of their operational skill, determination and combat prowess, their recent successes will — ironically — increase the potential for the war to expand. At the dark end of the spectrum, the use of tactical nuclear weapons — while highly unlikely — cannot be ruled out, and would probably bring NATO into the conflict with the creation of a no-fly zone.
Our job in the West is to put the right weapons in the hands of the Ukrainians so that they can achieve the best results on the battlefield and the strongest position at the negotiating table, which is probably still months away. But the danger of a widening conflict is rising, and we will clearly have a dangerous autumn ahead of us.
• Putin and the Possibility of Defeat in Ukraine: Leonid Bershidsky | 2022-09-12T18:44:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ukraine’s Wins Make Russian War More Dangerous - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ukraines-wins-make-russianwar-more-dangerous/2022/09/12/6e779b1c-32c3-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ukraines-wins-make-russianwar-more-dangerous/2022/09/12/6e779b1c-32c3-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
It’s advisable to wear headphones and sit in a quiet spot for most home-based hearing tests. (iStock)
Hearing health care isn’t always easy to access. For instance, Medicare pays for a hearing exam only if you have a referral from a doctor. But a growing number of tests — in apps and online — are meant to help you check your hearing on your own.
Some use testing methods backed by solid science, says Nicholas Reed, an audiologist and assistant professor in epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, while others have little evidence to support them.
A key limitation of apps and online tests is that they can’t rule out potentially reversible causes of hearing loss, such as excess earwax, the way an audiologist would during an in-person test. “If you do a self-hearing screen, a person can’t look into their own ear,” says Yula Serpanos, a professor in communication sciences and disorders at Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y.
That said, an online test could serve as a useful screening tool. If you want to try one, consider the following.
Americans can soon buy hearing aids over the counter
Two types of home tests
For most online and app-based tests, you’ll be advised to wear headphones and sit in a quiet spot.
The two main types both have advantages and drawbacks. In pure-tone audiometry, which involves some aspects of the testing that audiologists perform, tones are played in decreasing volumes to determine your specific level of hearing loss. But these hearing tests require the proper equipment to be used — a test given on an iPad, for example, may work with only AirPods headphones — which limits options.
In the second type, known as speech-in-noise or digits-in-noise (DIN), you’ll be asked to identify words, numbers or phrases amid background noise. DIN tests generally don’t require specific hardware. But they’re less precise, and they serve as a more general indicator of a problem.
How to find a good one
The experts we spoke with suggest looking for the following.
Validation: The word “validation” in the description suggests that a test has been scientifically evaluated for accuracy, Serpanos says. It’s even better if the description has a summary of (or links to) the validation studies. One such test is the World Health Organization’s hearWHO app.
Clear, thorough directions: Treat tests that provide scanty directions or explanation of their methods with caution, Reed says. A test should also monitor background noise and alert you if it’s too loud for an accurate result. For a pure-tone audiometry test, the instructions should tell you which type of headphones to use.
The FDA’s new hearing aid won’t solve the bigger problems in the market
What to do with the results
If a reputable online hearing test tells you that you don’t have hearing loss and you don’t suspect you’re having trouble hearing, it’s a reasonably reliable result, Reed says. “Most good tests err on the side of caution,” he says, and are more likely to suggest you might have hearing loss when you really don’t.
If the test says you do have hearing loss, it’s best to think of that as a starting point, Serpanos says. You can take the results to your doctor, an audiologist or a licensed hearing-instrument specialist for further evaluation. | 2022-09-12T18:44:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Need a home hearing test? Check out these apps and online programs. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/09/12/hearing-tests-online-advice/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/09/12/hearing-tests-online-advice/ |
California’s anti-misinformation bill is well intentioned. But it’s a bad idea.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) in Beverly Hills on Sept. 7. (Jerod Harris/Getty Images)
One of the many lessons from the covid-19 pandemic is that misinformation can be deadly. It can lead people to forgo lifesaving precautions and turn instead to potentially harmful therapies. If it’s egregious for politicians and celebrities to purvey misinformation, it’s far worse when the lie peddler is a physician. Surely, such an individual would be in violation of their oath and should be stripped of their medical license.
That’s the thinking behind AB 2098, a bill that passed the California legislature and is waiting to be signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). The measure would make California the first state that could take legal action against health-care professionals for conveying false information about covid-19 and its treatments.
While well-intentioned, this legislation will have a chilling effect on medical practice, with widespread repercussions that could paradoxically worsen patient care.
The bill focuses on physicians accused of disseminating misinformation to patients under their care. (It does not extend to comments in the public domain, such as social media.) On a surface level, this is defensible: The expectation should be that doctors always abide by the gold standard of care. Therefore, those who deliberately give patients advice that counter established guidelines should lose their medical license.
The problem is that medical practice is rarely black and white. Much of the time, broad recommendations are intended to be tailored to the individual patient.
Take the recent guidelines on booster shots. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that everyone 12 and older receive updated boosters. Most doctors would probably agree that elderly individuals should get the new booster right away. But many might advise — as I would — that it’s fine for some patients to hold off and time the booster closer to winter holidays. Some providers might not recommend boosters for children and adolescents, especially if they have already had the coronavirus.
These actions go against federal guidelines. AB 2098, taken to the extreme, could put many practitioners at risk. But is it really right for physicians to be threatened with suspension or revocation of their license for offering nuanced guidance on a complex issue that is hardly settled by existing science?
Indeed, another lesson from covid is that science is constantly evolving. In a public health emergency, official guidance often lags cutting-edge research. Consider how long it took the CDC to acknowledge that the coronavirus is airborne. Should doctors have been censured for recommending N95 masks before they were accepted as an effective method for reducing virus transmission?
Moreover, recovery from infection in combination with vaccination conveys strong protection, but the CDC still does not consider infection to take the place of a booster. If a young patient didn’t want a booster for this reason and their doctor agreed, should this be a punishable violation?
Medical practice is nuanced even when there is clear evidence. For example, studies have shown that steroids are not helpful in outpatient treatment of patients with covid-19. But certain patients, such as individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma, might benefit from them, and physicians need to use their best clinical judgment for their patients’ unique circumstances.
There could also be rare situations in which treatments that definitively do not work might still be prescribed. A colleague told me he prescribed ivermectin to treat covid-19, even though the antiparasitic drug isn’t effective against the disease. If he didn’t, his misinformed patients would have ignored his advice and obtained it anyway from a livestock shop, where the dosages intended for cows and horses could be deadly to humans. This action certainly deviated from what the California bill calls “contemporary scientific consensus,” but that physician shouldn’t have to fear for his license because he tried to reduce harm to his patients.
In a way, though the California bill was introduced by Democratic legislators, it is not unlike the Trump administration’s Title X “gag rule,” which barred health-care providers who worked in clinics that received federal funding from referring patients for abortion care. I strongly opposed the Title X gag rule for the same reason I oppose AB 2098: Both censor what doctors can say to our patients. Both represent political interference with the practice of medicine.
Both measures could also set a precedent with downstream repercussions. Imagine if anti-vaccine legislators introduced a bill that forbids pediatricians from offering parents information on routine childhood immunizations. Imagine if states that already limit reproductive health services or transgender care prohibit health-care providers from discussing options with their patients.
California’s bill is a recipe for medical practice to be subject to the whims of partisan politics. And it challenges the basis of the doctor-patient relationship. At a time of deep division, when trust in health officials has already been eroded, bills that threaten doctors should be reconsidered before unintended consequences create far more problems than the legislation tries to solve. | 2022-09-12T18:45:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | California’s anti-misinformation bill is a bad idea - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/california-covid-misinformation-bill-bad-idea/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/california-covid-misinformation-bill-bad-idea/ |
William Klein, innovative street and fashion photographer, dies at 96
His landmark book, “Life Is Good & Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels,” cast a gimlet eye on the myth of the American Dream
By Andy Grundberg
William Klein in 2012. (Maximilien Lamy/AFP/Getty Images)
William Klein, an American expatriate photographer whose often frenetic and sometimes blurred images of urban street life and modern fashion were wildly innovative while conveying the pointed social criticism of a self-declared outsider, died Sept. 10 in Paris. He was 96.
His nephew Larry Reichman confirmed his death but did not cite a cause.
From his earliest years, Mr. Klein said, he was attuned to seeing the world as a perpetual foreigner. He grew up in Depression-era Manhattan, a Jewish boy in a largely Irish neighborhood where he endured poverty and antisemitic bullying. Self-reliance and a quick eye for his surroundings were means to survival — and so was art. At 12, he began spending weekends roaming the Museum of Modern Art, where his own work would one day be displayed.
After military service, he settled in France in the late 1940s to study painting. But he was soon captivated by photography when he realized how playing with exposures could form, with endless possibilities, a new kind of abstract art. The vibrant blurs he created were a revelation, he said, of the mood he felt swirling around him and his vision of the world in general: its grit, its vibrancy, its gorgeousness, its grotesqueries.
He proudly distanced himself from any school or method as he came to prominence in the postwar years, favoring raw instinct over any established technique.
“I came from the outside, the rules of photography didn’t interest me,” he once said. “There were things you could do with a camera that you couldn’t do with any other medium — grain, contrast, blur, cockeyed framing, eliminating or exaggerating gray tones and so on. I thought it would be good to show what’s possible, to say that this is as valid of a way of using the camera as conventional approaches.”
Vogue’s celebrated art director, Alexander Liberman, who said he saw in Mr. Klein “a wonderful iconoclastic talent,” put him under contract to the fashion magazine from 1955 to 1965. Mr. Klein offered radically original images that incorporated blur, flash lighting, high-contrast printing, and the odd perspectives allowed by wide-angle and telephoto lenses.
“They were probably the most unpopular fashion photographs Vogue ever published,” Mr. Klein told the Observer.
While living on Vogue’s allowance, he embarked on a personal project: a series of photographs taken on the streets of New York with the same techniques he was applying to fashion. In Mr. Klein’s lens, the streets revealed a messy modern world alive with action and opportunity, but also teeming with hostility.
Rejected by Vogue and by American book publishers, the pictures were published in an idiosyncratic, tabloid-style book. Its full title, “Life Is Good & Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels,” was a collage of tabloid headlines.
“New York,” as the book became commonly known, was published in France in 1956 but not in America. Like Robert Frank’s landmark cross-country photographic volume, “The Americans” (1959), Mr. Klein’s book cast a gimlet eye on the myth of the American Dream at the height of the Cold War. Mr. Klein called it “my diatribe against America.”
Although many American art and photography critics disapproved of Mr. Klein’s style — one accused him of “cheap sensational photography” — the book proved enduringly influential. In 1992, Vicki Goldberg, a photography historian and critic, described Mr. Klein in the New York Times as a born rulebreaker who “played a major role in codifying a new outlook” in visual arts.
Mr. Klein’s most reproduced image from the book, known as “Gun 1,” shows a young boy with a clenched, angry expression pointing a gun at the photographer, just inches from the lens. A smaller angelic-looking boy seems to attempt to restrain his companion by putting a hand on his sleeve. The boys were playacting, Mr. Klein explained, but nonetheless seemed to embody the emotional drama of urban life.
“New York” was a multicultural tour de force, featuring many Black and immigrant faces. The telephoto shot known as “4 Heads, New York” features in one frame, according to Mr. Klein, an Italian police officer, a Hispanic man, a Jewish mother and an African American woman wearing a beret.
The book’s design was wildly experimental. Some photographs bleed off the edges of the page; others are grouped in grids. The volume included a separately bound 16-page booklet containing captions for the pictures and a reproduction of a Mad magazine cover, ersatz ads for spaghetti and bras, and other ephemera. This apparent critique of rampant commercialism predated the Pop Art of Andy Warhol.
Mr. Klein characterized his work as “pseudo-ethnographic, parodic, Dada,” the last referring to a playfully absurdist art movement of the early 20th century. He went on to photograph other cities — Rome, Moscow, Toyko — while also pursuing filmmaking, training his lens on people who, like him, had challenged the cultural mainstream.
His subjects included boxer Muhammad Ali, Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver and rock-and-roll pioneer Little Richard. In addition to his documentaries, Mr. Klein created French-language features, including the fashion-world spoof “Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?” (1966) and the comedy “Mr. Freedom” (1968), about a superhero who uses his powers to bolster American corporate and military imperialism.
Despite his prodigious output over more than 70 years, Mr. Klein never achieved the recognition in his native country that peers such as Frank and Richard Avedon enjoyed. The explanation lay partly in his absence. But his independent streak also helped undercut his relationships with editors, art directors and curators. It would be decades before his work received major exhibitions in the United States.
Mr. Klein said he remained a “foreigner” even in his adopted country, always the outside observer primed to see complexities under the surface charm. His 2002 book “Paris + Klein” — showing Rubenesque women in a Turkish bath, African-born protesters demanding their rights, Chinese New Year celebrations — spurned the romanticized vision of the City of Lights.
William Klein was born in Manhattan on April 19, 1926. His father was a tailor who owned a clothing store but lost it in the 1929 stock market crash; his mother was a homemaker.
A precocious student, he graduated from high school at 14 and enrolled at the City College of New York. He left to enlist in the Army, in 1946. While stationed in Allied-occupied Germany, he became a cartoonist for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, and, by his account, he won his first camera, a professional-grade Rolleiflex, in a poker game on the base.
Mr. Klein married Jeanne Florin (also known as Janine) after spotting her in the Left Bank his first week in Paris. She worked briefly as a model and later managed her husband’s schedule. She died in 2005. Survivors include a son, Pierre Klein, and a sister.
Mr. Klein’s first film was “Broadway by Light” (1958), an abstract celebration of the neon nights of Times Square. While continuing to work in cinema, Mr. Klein returned to still photography in the 1980s, as a market for art photographs was being established and his early work was being discovered by a new generation of street photographers.
Major institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern in London hosted retrospectives of his output. The New York-based International Center of Photography bestowed its lifetime achievement award on him in 2007.
When the Pompidou Center in Paris opened a major exhibition of his work in 2006, Mr. Klein told the Los Angeles Times that his most reproduced image — the boy with the gun — had for decades been misunderstood.
“Now, I get phone calls all the time, ‘We are a magazine in Norway and we’re doing a thing on what are our kids coming to,’ ” he said. “I had maybe 30 or 40 covers that were done with that photograph and the headline, ‘What are our kids coming to?’ ”
The children depicted in the photo, he added, expressed two aspects of his own personality.
“You can see in the next shot that the kid’s laughing,” Mr. Klein said. “If you really look at the photograph, it’s a photograph both of them, and me; I was a little tough kid and I was also a little angelic kid scared of some gang down the block.” | 2022-09-12T19:23:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | William Klein, innovative street and fashion photographer, dies at 96 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/12/william-klein-photographer-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/12/william-klein-photographer-dead/ |
‘Splatoon 3’ breaks Nintendo’s streak of shunning competitive players
By Jhaan Elker
(Washington Post illustration; Jordan Strauss/Invision for Nintendo/AP; Nintendo)
Two issues have plagued Nintendo games for years: issues with online competitive play and frequent complaints from fans that motion controls are more of a gimmick than a legitimate way to play. In those regards, “Splatoon 3” is a course correction.
Nintendo, often known as the “casual” brand among gamers, has long faced technical issues with online multiplayer, and hasn’t properly built out a catalogue for competitive gamers in the same way that Sony and Microsoft have. But “Splatoon 3,” which released Sept. 9, offers not just a functional online mode, but also a bevy of new side content, including rulesets that will speak to more competitive players, like Clam Blitz with speedrunners.
This is no mistake, according to Bill Trinen, senior director of product marketing at Nintendo of America. While it wasn’t a singular focus for the designers, Trinen, as well as other developers, kept their eye on Splatoon’s growing competitive scene.
“I was watching some of the more competitive Splatoon players as they were dabbling in the first demo version … Very quickly, we saw players already looking at Squid Roll and figuring out not just how to use it to be defensive, but how to use it to be offensive,” he said. Squid Roll, a new mechanic that offers invincibility frames as you dodge in Squid form, has been studied by the Splatoon community in order to figure out its offensive potential.
“It’s been really interesting to see the way that they’ve been exploring what’s possible,” notes Trinen.
This level of nuance can also be found in the game’s take on motion controls. While it may seem like a joke at first, motion controls are the competitive community’s preferred method to play Splatoon, and “Splatoon 3” expands on what’s already worked in previous games. In a first for multiplayer shooters, motion controls in “Splatoon 3” offer much more accuracy and control than typical stick controls.
“I do use a mix of motion and stick,” Trinen said. (He uses the stick sparingly to turn the camera.) “What’s nice is that the motion gives you just that subtle accuracy with your aiming to begin with. It’s weird because it feels like there isn’t even a learning curve.”
“Splatoon 3” has received positive to mixed reviews from critics. I gave the game a 9.5 on Metacritic; I appreciated that it didn’t shake up the formula too much. Other reviewers, however, pointed to this as a weakness, arguing that the third game had not changed enough from the previous games to merit a purchase.
When asking about his take on these reviews, Trinen referred back to the competitive scene’s response.
“I haven’t had a chance to read many reviews yet, but I would almost wonder, you know, how well do they know the intricacies of Splatoon? Because as we have seen from the competitive players, the people that have played this game the most, they are looking at 'Splatoon 3′ as an amazing, new game that they are all eager to dive into.”
“I feel like for some reason people like to try to pin [its sameness] on Splatoon in ways that they don’t try to pin it on other games of a similar genre.” he states. “There is a brand new single player story mode that has been evolved incredibly … that alone to me is worth it. And then I look at the ways that, you know, the new actions like squid roll, new abilities and new weapons …[they] are going to change up your approach to strategy. It’s going to change the way you play the game.” | 2022-09-12T20:02:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nintendo's Bill Trinen talks Splatoon 3 competitive play, bad reviews - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/09/12/splatoon-3-online-play-bill-trinen/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/09/12/splatoon-3-online-play-bill-trinen/ |
Commanders defensive tackle Phidarian Mathis leaves with a knee injury against the Jacksonville Jaguars. He tore his meniscus and will miss the rest of the year. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
The Washington Commanders are 1-0 but already in search of help. Rookie defensive tackle Phidarian Mathis tore the meniscus in his left knee Sunday and will soon undergo season-ending surgery, according to a person familiar with the situation.
The loss is a blow to the Commanders’ line and to the start to a promising career for Mathis, who was poised to earn significant playing time in Washington’s rotation inside. His injury, coupled with Jonathan Allen’s groin injury, has prompted the Commanders to seek reinforcement.
“It’s tough whenever you have a young [guy] like that go down so early in the season,” Allen said of Mathis. “It’s unfortunate. … We’re going to be fine. We’ve been through this before. We have players who are going to step up and play well. … I feel bad for him having to go out so early in his career.”
To fill the void, Allen played 54 of the team’s 70 defensive snaps against Jacksonville, more than he typically does. Late in the game, he exited with the groin injury, and he said he’s “feeling good” and underwent an MRI Monday morning as “more of a precaution.”
Rivera said the team used defensive end Efe Obada inside as the three-technique (aligned on the outside shoulder of an offensive guard) and once as the one-technique (aligned on the outside shoulder of the center).
“That’s his versatility, and that’s really his worth for us,” Rivera said. “That’s where you find value in players like that, that can switch positions.”
After watching the film of the Commanders’ 28-22 win over the Jaguars, Rivera said he noticed the benefits of the team’s versatility across the board, be it the D-line and secondary, where the distinction between a safety and cornerback is often blurred, the tight ends who have yet to fully show their potential or the receiving corps.
The Commanders played to their varied skill set, and though the game was littered with mistakes and three turnovers, it served as the closest look yet at what Washington’s offense could be with offensive coordinator Scott Turner.
“As those young [tight ends] continue to develop, that’s going to be a pretty good position for us, I believe,” Rivera said. “And the running back position, when Brian [Robinson Jr.] returns, is going to be a pretty good position for us. And we already know the wide receiver position is solid. So we have an opportunity to continue to work and spread the ball.”
Wentz targeted 10 pass catchers Sunday — seven caught passes — and Washington followed a game plan that included many new plays and created confusion for the Jaguars’ defense. On the Commanders’ first third down attempt of the game, they aligned four players — Terry McLaurin, Curtis Samuel, J.D. McKissic and Jahan Dotson — in a bunch formation on the left side, and Thomas was alone on the right side. At the snap, the four on the left took off on different routes, forcing Jacksonville’s defense to account for them all in its soft zone. Wentz hit Samuel on a dig route, and the receiver picked up nearly nine more yards after the catch.
Wentz later connected with running back Antonio Gibson on a post route to set up the team’s second touchdown. He also found McLaurin for a 49-yard score on a go route and began to build a rapport with Thomas, who had three receptions for a 45 yards.
Rivera believes Washington’s offense can and should be even more explosive. First it has to iron out the lingering mistakes — mistakes that nearly cost the team Sunday.
Wentz threw interceptions on consecutive plays to start the fourth quarter, the second of which the Jaguars turned into a score that expanded their lead to 22-14.
Rivera said the first interception was due in part to Wentz holding the ball too long before throwing to Dotson on an out route. Jacksonville cornerback Tyson Campbell jumped the route and picked it off. The second interception was a screen pass in which Travon Walker, the top selection in this year’s draft, turned a mistake into a big play.
“It looked like the defender was actually in the wrong crease,” Rivera said. “... But he came underneath and made a hell of a play. Maybe if Carson sees him coming, he throws it into the ground as opposed to throwing it, trying to throw it to the back.”
Rivera added: “It’s one of those things you tell him, ‘Hey, if you’re going to hang on the guy, throw the ball to him. If not, you’ve got to go a little bit quicker through your progression.’ ”
According to Next Gen Stats, Wentz’s average time to throw was 3.14 seconds, the second-longest in the league through Sunday’s games. (Chicago’s Justin Fields averaged 3.27 seconds against the 49ers.)
Rivera said the team will continue to adjust, especially in the early part of the season. Because starters typically play 20 or fewer snaps in preseason, and because Washington didn’t hold joint training camp practices, their live reps against other teams have been limited. In addition, the Commanders tweaked their systems to better fit their personnel. On defense, the team ran more stunts and rush games up front to get more pressure on the quarterback while still only rushing four.
Coming off a career year, Commanders’ Jonathan Allen is thinking even bigger
“I feel like we were rushing four as one, and I feel like last year and the previous years we really got away from that,” Allen said. “It was more four one-on-ones, as opposed to us working together and playing well together.”
Although Allen was generally pleased with the defense’s showing, he came away disappointed by how it played against the run. The Jaguars totaled 123 rushing yards (averaging 6.8 per carry) and a rushing touchdown and picked up chunk plays on the ground that Allen felt were preventable. Travis Etienne had a 27-yard run in the fourth, and James Robinson added a 22-yarder.
“You just want to be more consistent,” Allen said “You want to have more discipline in your gap control. It wasn’t terrible at all, but from my point of view, any time you give up a run of 10, 15 yards, that’s something you wish you can have back. So there’s definitely room for improvement.” | 2022-09-12T20:11:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Commanders lose Phidarian Mathis for season, focus on cleaning up mistakes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/12/phidarian-mathis-injury-commanders/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/12/phidarian-mathis-injury-commanders/ |
We don’t know what Trump believed. We know what he did.
President Donald Trump watches Marine One from the Truman Balcony of the White House on Oct. 5, 2020, after receiving treatments for covid-19 at Walter Reed National Military Medical Cente. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The day after the riot at the Capitol, Politico spoke with Alyssa Farah Griffin about the violence that had unfolded. Griffin had been part of Donald Trump’s administration until the month before, when she resigned, she said, because she “saw where this was heading.”
The “this” was Trump’s incessant dishonesty about the results of the election. Trump had been insisting since spring 2020 that voter fraud was rampant, months before voting actually occurred. That his claims were unfounded — and that they were transparently self-serving as polling showed him trailing Joe Biden — never dissuaded Trump from making them. Even before the election was held, a plan became obvious: Trump would use the lag between the counting of in-person and absentee votes to suggest that a victory had been stolen from him.
He tried it. It didn’t work. So he tried other tactics: blocking certification, undermining slates of electors and, finally, summoning his supporters to Washington on the last possible day for a “wild” protest. Griffin says she saw it coming, but by December it wasn’t that hard to see.
One comment she made to Politico, though, has stuck with me since.
“I truly believe the president knew — when I was still in the White House in late November, he knew that he had lost,” she said. “And it was something that was almost like tacitly acknowledged, like we’re going to make this painful, but we know what happened. And then, something turned. And I don’t know if it was the wrong advisers getting to him with bad information or what.”
It’s an intriguing idea, that Trump knew he’d lost but then something shifted. It’s an idea that’s been resurrected by new reporting in a book from the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman, in which multiple people say that Trump admitted to them that he’d lost. CNN, which obtained a copy of the book, indicates that Trump told one aide that “we did our best” and another that “I thought we had it.” Some anonymous Republican, you’ll recall, was confident enough about Trump’s grasp on reality right after the election was called to insist to The Washington Post that there was no harm in “humoring him for this little bit of time.”
But then Trump summoned his supporters to Washington anyway.
There are a lot of possibilities here, all dependent on trying to assess how sincere Donald Trump was at any point from spring 2020 to Jan. 6, 2021. Did he really believe mail-in votes were subject to fraud or was he simply setting the stage to reject how those votes turned out? Did he actually believe that he’d lost but tried to retain power anyway? Did he believe he lost but then convince himself that he hadn’t?
The detail that received the most attention from Haberman’s book Monday was that Trump had told multiple people that he simply wouldn’t leave the White House after losing to Biden. This possibility was floated repeatedly at the time by Trump critics who saw his election denialism culminating not in a violent attack on the Capitol but on some sort of weird confrontation on the steps of the White House.
“Why should I leave if they stole it from me?” he reportedly told RNC chair Ronna McDaniel.
But consider that this is simply the flip side of the reports that he’d accepted the election results. In both cases, he references possibilities that never became manifest. He copped to having lost — something he has never come close to admitting publicly. He said that he would never leave the White House — and then scampered off instead, avoiding the traditional transition between presidents.
By the end of November 2020, Trump had plenty of predicate for knowing that he’d lost the election, from internal campaign reports to the collapse of myriad election lawsuits. Griffin says he still accepted his loss at this point, only later somehow changing his mind. If that’s true, it’s as opaque to the outside world as his plan to barricade himself in the White House.
The title of Haberman’s book is “Confidence Man,” a descriptor often shortened to “con man.” In the world of New York City real estate, where Trump made his fortune, the line between salesman and con man can be awfully blurry. Getting someone to buy a dog of an apartment requires telling them what they want to hear and massaging the truth to whatever extent you feel personally comfortable. And there’s nothing like a massive commission check to make you feel quite comfortable with your efforts, quite quickly.
Trump’s political sales pitch often meant being intentionally vague, letting people believe what they wanted to believe about who he was and what he was doing. Maybe he’d simply done a good job convincing Alyssa Farah Griffin of what she wanted to believe in the weeks after his election loss.
On Nov. 20, 2020, Reuters published a report looking at groups of Trump supporters who were willing to take up arms in defense of his assertions about the stolen election. One, Caleb Fryar, dismissed the idea that Trump was being less than sincere.
“If I’m being manipulated by Trump,” he said, “then he is the greatest con man that ever lived in America.” | 2022-09-12T20:15:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | We don’t know what Trump believed. We know what he did. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/12/trump-election-fraud-claims/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/12/trump-election-fraud-claims/ |
The designation of the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument could come as soon as this month
By Maxine Joselow
Bunkers used for artillery practice at Camp Hale in the Eagle River valley of Eagle County, Colo. (Carol M.Highsmith/Library of Congress) (Courtesy of Carol M.Highsmith/ Library of Congress)
President Biden is likely to designate a historic military site in Colorado as a new national monument in the coming weeks, according to two people familiar with the matter, which could bar mining and drilling there.
Colorado’s Camp Hale, a World War II-era military training ground along the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains, and the Tenmile Range have attracted visitors for their stunning landscapes and provide habitat for wildlife including elk, bears, otters, lynxes and migratory songbirds.
Biden has yet to create a national monument since taking office. The new designation would bypass gridlock on Capitol Hill, where Republicans have opposed legislation sponsored by Colorado Democrats — including Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.), who faces a tougher-than-expected reelection race — to permanently protect these sites and other historic state landscapes.
During World War II, Camp Hale served as training grounds for the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division, housing up to 17,000 troops. At an elevation of 9,200 feet, the site was ideal for training in skiing, snowshoeing and rock climbing — skills that ultimately helped the soldiers defeat the Axis in Italy. After the war, some of the same soldiers who toiled at what they called “Camp Hell” returned to the region to help launch Colorado’s booming ski industry.
A Republican who says Trump lost looks to put Colorado’s Senate race in play
Bennet’s bid for a third term has attracted national attention as Democrats battle to keep their razor-thin majority in the Senate. His Republican opponent, Denver business executive Joe O’Dea, acknowledges that Trump lost the 2020 election, unlike many other GOP candidates in toss-up states like Arizona and Pennsylvania.
A White House spokesman declined to comment on the potential monument announcement. Bennet’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since taking office, Biden has used his powers to restore full protections to three national monuments that had been slashed by former president Donald Trump, including Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — known for their historical treasures of Native American art and settlements.
Biden invoked the Antiquities Act to protect 1.36 million acres in Bears Ears — slightly larger than the original boundary that President Barack Obama established in 2016 — while also restoring the 1.87 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante monument. Biden also reimposed fishing limits in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument off the coast of New England that Trump had opened to commercial fishing.
Here's where Biden's conservation record stands
Although it’s unclear how large the new national monument would be, Bennet and other Colorado Democrats have introduced a bill that offers some recommendations for its size and boundaries. The Colorado Outdoor Recreation and Economy Act would protect more than 400,000 acres of public lands, including 28,676 acres surrounding Camp Hale and 17,122 acres in the Tenmile Range. The measure is backed by Sen. John Hickenlooper and Reps. Joe Neguse, Jason Crow, Diana DeGette and Ed Perlmutter.
After passing the House with bipartisan support, the bill has stalled in the Senate amid opposition from Republicans, who have slammed a provision that would withdraw certain areas from new mining and mineral leasing. In May, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee deadlocked 10-10 over the measure along party lines.
“We need to increase American development of energy and critical minerals,” Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), the panel’s top Republican, said at a May hearing. “Now isn’t the time to be permanently withdrawing federal land.”
Over the past 116 years, 17 presidents in both parties have used the law to designate 158 national monuments, according to Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, an advocacy group.
“There are so many conservation bills languishing in Congress that have local support, but it is hard to get anything through the Senate when it comes to land protection,” Weiss said. “This is exactly why the Antiquities Act exists.”
Soon after taking office, Biden set a goal of conserving 30 percent of the nation’s land and waters by 2030 under the “America the Beautiful” initiative. Administration officials have been eyeing Camp Hale since July 2021, when Interior Secretary Deb Haaland visited Colorado and participated in a roundtable discussion with Bennet and Hickenlooper on their legislation to protect the landscape.
Biden officials have continued to look at other potential national monuments across the country. Last week, Haaland visited a site in southern Nevada known as Avi Kwa Ame, or Spirit Mountain, that is considered sacred by several Native American tribes. | 2022-09-12T20:15:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden weighs making Colorado's Camp Hale his first national monument - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/12/colorado-camp-hale-biden-monument/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/12/colorado-camp-hale-biden-monument/ |
Tom Cotton has an idea that could help make the GOP a working-class party
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on May 25. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
The Republican Party will have to shift its economic thinking if it is truly going to become a multiethnic, working-class party. A new bill from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) that would offer federal scholarships for postsecondary vocational education is a good example of how the party can do this.
Cotton’s American Workforce Act, derived from a concept developed by the reform-oriented American Compass think tank, works like this: Every citizen with a high school diploma or GED, but without a college degree, can receive a $9,000 federal voucher to pursue “workforce contracts” with employers. Those contracts would guarantee a full-time job to trainees, coupled with skilled, educational workforce training. The voucher could be used to pay the employer for the costs of that training, up to $1,500 a month. Employers would receive a $1,000 payment for every new employee it hires for a full-time job following completion of the training.
This flexible, employment-based program is exactly what workers without college degrees need. It will help provide them with the skills needed to quickly advance in the modern economy without forcing them to pursue a two- or four-year college degree, which would either be unaffordable or require them to take on thousands of dollars in debt. Many would not even graduate, either because they find the non-job-based aspects of obtaining a degree uninteresting or because they cannot afford to spend years out of the full-time workforce. In other words, Cotton’s program provides the sort of public support we give students in higher education to those without the interest or aptitude for college.
This is the type of flexible, nondoctrinaire thinking a conservative workers’ party needs. Working-class voters traditionally want opportunities to advance but also crave government help to do so. People making middle- or working-class incomes can prosper only with significant aid for education, public services and even retirement. That’s why public support for generous K-12 education, college loans and grants and Social Security and Medicare remains so strong.
Traditional conservative thinking fights against these sentiments rather than works with them. Working-class voters enjoy tax cuts, but they like generous programs that help them more. They would not be anywhere near as well off without the social insurance and social welfare programs initiated by the New Deal. They have never been willing to go back on that innovation, as shown by Barry Goldwater’s crushing 1964 defeat and the continuing unpopularity of former House speaker Paul D. Ryan’s proposed entitlement reforms. Conservative successes, such as the 1996 welfare reform bill and Ronald Reagan’s presidency, have arisen only when they work within the New Deal consensus to introduce more freedom and personal responsibility.
The recent experience in Alaska makes this point crystal clear. Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy took office in 2019 facing a massive budget deficit. He proposed to close it by slashing government spending, something one might expect red-state voters to like. He also offered voters a huge carrot: He restored full funding for the permanent fund dividend, an annual payment funded by the state’s oil revenue that goes to every Alaska resident regardless of age. That would have increased the yearly check by $1,400 per Alaskan, or $5,600 for a family of four. But Alaskan legislators refused to go along because of the proposed spending cuts, and four years later, Dunleavy has largely retreated from his earlier stance.
If voters in Alaska prefer well-funded services to extra thousands of dollars a year, there’s no hope that the nationwide New Deal consensus will be overturned anytime soon. That insight means conservatives who want to increase freedom and private-sector power need to think creatively rather than just say no to anything the government does.
Cotton’s bill would do that while adhering to traditional conservative values. It would funnel the new voucher to employers rather than government-run community colleges. And it would provide enormous flexibility for businesses to design appropriate training programs. No top-down, one-size-fits-all approach here.
It also may not add to budget deficits. The proposal includes a 1 percent tax on the fair market value of the endowments of the largest and richest colleges, which have soared in value with the decades-long bull market. That would raise close to $3 billion this year, perhaps enough to fully fund the new vouchers. It’s an example of what limited — not libertarian — government should look like.
Some conservatives get it. Two groups founded by Trump administration alumni, the America First Policy Institute and Center for Renewing America, are on board with Cotton’s bill. But the traditional heavyweights remain on the sidelines. The Heritage Foundation has not yet taken a position, and scholars from the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution have not yet commented. Their seals of approval would signify that the party’s traditional sources for expertise understand the need for change.
Cotton’s American Workforce Act is an idea that’s time has come. Let’s hope other Republicans see the light. | 2022-09-12T20:16:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Tom Cotton has an idea that could help make the GOP a working-class party - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/cotton-bill-vocational-education-vouchers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/cotton-bill-vocational-education-vouchers/ |
Pages from a Justice Department court filing on Aug. 31. (Jon Elswick/AP)
The dispute between the Justice Department and Donald Trump’s legal team has been growing fast and furious these past weeks, and will stay on the same troubling course — unless Judge Aileen M. Cannon takes the opportunity to cool things down.
The former president’s lawyers filed court papers Monday opposing the government’s request for a suspension of parts of an order for a special master to review documents seized at Mar-a-Lago last month. That order, which Judge Cannon issued on Labor Day, would allow an outside expert to look over the thousands of documents recovered in the search of the property to determine if any are covered by executive or attorney-client privilege. But its reasoning is muddled. A one-time executive doesn’t have the same power to assert privilege as the current one, much less to prevent the sharing of documents with another part of the executive branch. And if a piddling portion of materials are covered by attorney-client privilege, there’s no need to halt the investigation as a whole to identify them.
Unfortunately, Judge Cannon’s order would do exactly that: cut short the investigation, for the indeterminate amount of time it will take to appoint a special master and await their determinations. Her attempt to let the Office of the Director of National Intelligence continue its national security risk assessment but bar the Justice Department from pursuing its criminal probe is untenable — the work of each agency depends on each other. Yet it remains essential that this work continue. The Justice Department has stressed that some classified materials may still be missing — perhaps previously stored in folders with banners marked “classified” that the FBI found empty during its search. The Post reported last week that among the papers recovered is a document describing a foreign government’s nuclear capabilities; more generally, sources have said that materials include details on top-secret operations inaccessible even to many senior administration officials. This case, in short, could carry implications not only for Mr. Trump but also for the country as a whole.
The Justice Department has signaled it will appeal the ruling, but such a result would hardly be worth celebrating given it would also delay the probe’s progress. The much preferred alternative is for Judge Cannon to approve prosecutors’ proposal to alter her ruling: The FBI would be permitted to keep reviewing only the more than 100 classified documents it seized, and the special master, in turn, would be barred from examining them. The special master, meanwhile, would have purview over the many other documents gathered from Mar-a-Lago. This compromise would go above and beyond the protections to which the former president is entitled, and it would also allow today’s government to do its job. That is what the rule of law looks like. | 2022-09-12T20:16:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | How Trump and Justice Department could compromise on special master - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/mar-a-lago-special-master-review-compromise/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/mar-a-lago-special-master-review-compromise/ |
Why not prosecuting Trump would be the most dangerous thing of all
(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
There has been a good deal of discussion about what would happen if Donald Trump were indicted for absconding from the White House with government documents. What precedent would it set? Would his supporters explode in violence that would threaten the stability of the nation? If he were to become president again, how terrible would his vengeance be?
But no one seems to be asking about the practical consequences of not indicting Trump, if the investigation produces sufficient evidence to charge him with a crime.
Rather than venturing into that territory, those arguing in favor of such an indictment have made a simple case: Laws are laws, and anyone who breaks them should be held accountable. There’s no passage in the Constitution saying former presidents get to commit crimes. As Hillary Clinton put it over the weekend, “If the evidence proves or seems to show that there are charges that should be leveled, then I think the rule of law should apply to anyone.”
On the other side, Trump’s defenders have made two sets of claims. The first, offered by only the most enthusiastic cultists — the ones who also believe Trump is an ethical businessman who pays his taxes, deeply respects women, and would never tell a lie — is that he is completely innocent.
The second claim, the one more sane Republicans have gravitated toward, is that even if Trump broke the law, we should cut him a little slack. We wouldn’t want to turn into one of those countries where new presidents prosecute their predecessors, and it already looks bad for the Justice Department to be investigating a former commander in chief.
And Republican politicians obviously hope that fear is more persuasive than legal reasoning. As Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said, if Trump is indicted “there will be riots in the street.”
Many Trump critics, for their part, acknowledge the difficulty of the Justice Department’s position. As Clinton said, “it’s a really hard call,” not because of the legal questions so much as the political consequences.
The implicit argument is that at the end of their investigation, even if Trump has run out of friendly judges to intercede on his behalf and there is ample evidence to support an indictment, the department might still want to say, “He broke the law, but it would be too disruptive to indict him, so we’re going to stand down.”
But let’s not overlook the harm that decision would cause. It would be an official validation of Trump’s approach to the presidency, and indeed his entire life, which operated on the presumption that the law doesn’t apply to those with money and power. The system can be bullied or bought; consequences are for little people, and the likes of Donald Trump can do whatever they please.
The almost inevitable consequence would be greater corruption and lawbreaking among future presidents (and ex-presidents). The essence of the rule of law is that we don’t rely on the good will of either citizens or leaders; they obey the law because they have to, and there are consequences if they don’t. Allowing Trump to pocket sensitive public documents (assuming that’s what he did, which seems more than clear) would send a message to every future president: If you want to break the law, go right ahead, because it’ll probably be too much of a hassle to prosecute you for it.
Avoiding an indictment would also make it more likely, not less, that Trump or another president would turn the Justice Department into nothing more than a political tool. For a hint of what that might look like, see this new book by former U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman, who describes how he was pressured by then-President Trump’s top political appointees in the department to investigate and indict people Trump saw as enemies.
No sane person could believe that having escaped prosecution and been elected again, Trump would say, “Boy, that was close — I’d better leave the Justice Department alone so it can enforce the law in a fair and nonpartisan manner!” Quite the contrary. Having shown the world that politics outweighs the law and victory goes to the most shameless, he’d make his former behavior look like a model of probity and restraint.
And at a moment when the legitimacy of so many institutions is in question, it would effectively mean hoisting a white flag of surrender atop the Justice Department. It’s hard enough already to convince Americans that the law will be applied equally; if the government loses its nerve when faced with Trump and his hooligan supporters, who will believe in its integrity?
Keep in mind, all this predicated on the assumption that, at the end of the investigation, the evidence will be compelling enough to convince a jury there was criminal behavior. What matters is whether the facts show that Trump broke the law, and that the Justice Department believes it can secure a conviction.
If so, Trump should be prosecuted, even if the result is a negotiated plea. To do otherwise would be the most dangerous thing of all. | 2022-09-12T20:16:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Why not prosecuting Trump would be the most dangerous thing of all - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/not-prosecuting-trump-most-dangerous/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/not-prosecuting-trump-most-dangerous/ |
The new report from the Small Business Administration inspector general raises concern the money might have benefited overseas crime syndicates.
WASHINGTON, DC — APRIL 2: President Donald Trump listens to Small Business Administration Administrator Jovita Carranza speaks with members of the coronavirus task force during a briefing in response to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on Thursday, April 02, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The top watchdog for the Small Business Administration, which reported its findings on Monday, said the spending posed a “significant risk of potential fraud.” In doing so, the watchdog underscored the agency’s persistent, costly and well-documented struggles to ensure its vast array of coronavirus aid benefited the cash-strapped firms that needed it the most.
The trouble concerned the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program, or EIDL, an initiative dating back to the Trump administration that provided grants and other financial support to struggling small companies. More than 27.8 million applicants ultimately sought funds from the SBA, overwhelming an agency that had been tasked to oversee a vast array of emergency spending that dwarfed its annual budget.
SBA approved loans with signs of fraud early in pandemic, House report says
Congress required the SBA to disburse its EIDL aid only to those businesses affected by the pandemic and located in the U.S. or its territories. But a crush of applications from foreign sources still flooded the agency over the life of its program — and the SBA repeatedly appeared to fund them anyway.
In total, SBA made 41,638 awards totaling $1.3 billion to applicants that pursued that aid using computers believed to be located abroad, according to the agency’s inspector general. The watchdog said that some of the applications came from what were deemed “high risk” countries, which should have been blocked from filing applications outright. More than $14 million in EIDL aid went to applicants in these unnamed countries, the investigation found.
SBA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In its official reply to the inspector general, included as part of the report, the agency said the $1.3 billion in questionable funds represented less than 0.4 percent of the total $342 billion approved for EIDL.
The OIG declined to identify the contractor that helped SBA create its systems. The watchdog cautioned in its report that not every foreign application may be fraudulent, since it is possible for Americans who reside abroad — or businesses with certain ownership stakes in U.S. firms — to qualify as long as they meet other criteria.
The findings nonetheless add to the myriad headaches facing SBA, which was tasked with managing more than $1 trillion in aid since the start of the pandemic. The agency’s work over the past two years did contribute to a swift and stunning recovery for an economy that had been in free-fall, keeping countless businesses from shuttering for good. But it also carried significant risks for waste, fraud and abuse, the consequences of which have been laid bare in a year-long investigation by The Washington Post.
Much of the suspected SBA theft targeted the Paycheck Protection Program, which provided forgivable loans to businesses. Both the PPP and EIDL date back to the Trump administration.
With EIDL, for example, congressional investigators found this summer that as many as 1.6 million, or 41 percent, of the 3.9 million loan applications received under the program “may have been approved with no actual review by an SBA employee.” Earlier, the agency’s inspector general found that SBA had awarded EIDL funds to criminals that applied using stolen identities, The Post has reported.
And SBA has faced criticism for the way it doled out aid for other initiatives, including a program for shuttered concert halls and other performance venues. Some of those funds ended up going to firms linked to Live Nation Entertainment — an industry giant that some members of Congress said they did not intend to benefit from the law. | 2022-09-12T20:17:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Inspector general: SBA covid aid went to small businesses abroad - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/09/12/sba-fraud-foreign-eidl/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/09/12/sba-fraud-foreign-eidl/ |
Prince George’s raised more questions by removing WSSC official
A WSSC inspector in Montgomery County in 2015. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
Regarding the Sept. 7 Metro article “Pr. George’s throws out WSSC Water official”:
The Prince George’s County Council burnished its sketchy-business-as-usual reputation when it voted to remove Keith E. Bell from his position as the Prince George’s County representative on the WSSC Water board. Mr. Bell had questioned the actions of WSSC Chief Executive and Director Carla A. Reid, an appointee of Prince George’s County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks (D). At Ms. Reid’s request, Ms. Alsobrooks immediately asked for Mr. Bell’s removal.
So the person who, acting in his oversight capacity, raises questions about an organization whose billing system has tripled in cost in three years, uses no-bid contracts for unreliable billing software and dismisses employees who also raised questions can be removed at the request of the target of his questions? That should really engender honesty and transparency at WSSC and guarantee that all WSSC ratepayers will continue to pay for the commission’s failings.
At last week’s council hearing, the phrase “clean slate” came up a number of times to justify Mr. Bell’s removal. I think Prince George’s County voters should seek their own clean slate, starting with the county executive and the County Council.
Michael K. McLaughlin, Laurel | 2022-09-12T20:20:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Prince George’s raised more questions by removing WSSC official - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/prince-georges-raised-more-questions-by-removing-wssc-official/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/prince-georges-raised-more-questions-by-removing-wssc-official/ |
Ranked-choice voting is a winner for all
Ballots are prepared to be tabulated in Maine's 2nd Congressional District election on Nov. 12, 2018, in Augusta, Maine. (Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press)
The Sept. 6 editorial “Our choice? Ranked choice.” supported ranked-choice voting for Montgomery County. So do I. So do a majority of elected officials in Montgomery County. But our state delegate, Marc A. Korman (D), explained that implementing ranked-choice voting in Montgomery County would require a change in Maryland state law.
This could mean that all 23 Maryland counties and Baltimore City would have to implement ranked-choice voting together. The Montgomery County delegation in Annapolis has approved ranked-choice voting many times, Mr. Korman said, but the full House has not gone along.
The editorial said there is “plenty of time” for Montgomery County and D.C. “to change the system before 2026.”
We in Montgomery County are part of a state. D.C. can move more independently, and more quickly, though Congress sometimes intervenes because D.C. does not enjoy the freedom a state does. In both places, people fearful or ignorant of change and who do not vote in the areas that are requesting ranked-choice voting will determine whether we can choose our voting system.
Wendy Leibowitz, Bethesda
The Sept. 6 editorial on ranked-choice voting closed with “Looking ahead, we wish that both Montgomery County, Md., and the District would choose their leaders via ranked-choice voting. Because Democrats are so dominant in both jurisdictions, whoever gets the most votes in the primary becomes a shoo-in for the general.”
How did Arlington fail to make the wish list? We have the same one-party dominance, and our form of government — plurality vote for staggered terms for at-large members of the county and school boards — makes it just as difficult for underrepresented communities to gain election as it is in D.C. and in Montgomery.
Dave Schutz, Arlington
The Sept. 6 editorial in favor of ranked-choice voting, “Our choice? Ranked choice.,” was a welcome endorsement of a proven means to empower voters and to strengthen American democracy. However, it left out two important arguments in favor of this approach and missed an opportunity to address the bigger picture.
The instant-runoff aspect of ranked-choice voting, as opposed to having separate runoff elections and incurring all the associated costs, could save the government millions of dollars. It is already doing so in a growing number of cities and states across the country. Second, ranked-choice voting levels the playing field for third-party candidates, who often lose the support of citizens who favor them because of concerns about “throwing away” one’s vote.
Taking a longer view, it is important to advocate a series of mutually reinforcing actions, including not just ranked-choice voting but also such good governance reforms as ending partisan gerrymandering. Together, they could put our democracy on a solid footing for the next hundred years. The best summary I have found of the 10 most urgently needed reforms is “The Contract to Unite America” by Neal Simon, a former third-party candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in Maryland.
These measures do not favor one party over another, but they do benefit voters while curtailing the power of incumbency.
Alex Counts, Hyattsville | 2022-09-12T20:20:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Ranked-choice voting is a winner for all - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/ranked-choice-voting-is-winner-all/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/ranked-choice-voting-is-winner-all/ |
Remembering Mickey Mantle’s 54
Mickey Mantle's hits the 500th home run of his career on May 14, 1967, against the Baltimore Orioles in New York. (Associated Press) (AP)
As a lifelong Yankees fan, I thoroughly enjoyed “The thrill of a home-run record chase,” David Von Drehle’s Sept. 7 op-ed on Aaron Judge, who is pursuing Roger Maris’s 1961 record of 61 home runs in a 162-game season. I’m rooting for Mr. Judge. However, I see a glaring omission in Mr. Von Drehle’s otherwise well-researched article.
Yes, Maris was chasing Babe Ruth, who hit 60 home runs back in 1927. But Yankee teammate Mickey Mantle, one of the game’s greatest competitors despite numerous injuries, was also hot on Ruth’s trail. Mantle lost to Maris — and Ruth — probably because of a serious infection that landed him in the hospital. He ended up with “only” 54 round-trippers, a single-season record for a switch hitter.
Celeste McCall, Washington
I’m glad David Von Drehle acknowledged that Roger Maris — a reigning MVP and Gold Glove winner at the time — received a raw deal during his 1961 pursuit of Babe Ruth’s single-season record. It’s a shame. Fortunately, Aaron Judge’s pursuit 61 years later has been better received.
Adam Silbert, New York | 2022-09-12T20:20:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Remembering Mickey Mantle’s 54 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/remembering-mickey-mantles-54/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/remembering-mickey-mantles-54/ |
Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman of Pennsylvania last month. (Nate Smallwood/Getty Images)
Debates about debates between candidates running for office are tedious, as barbs are traded over the number of matchups, the timing, the ground rules. But the one being played out in Pennsylvania between Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D) and his Republican opponent in the race for U.S. Senate, Mehmet Oz, is worthy of attention. The race may well determine which party controls the Senate, and voters would benefit from seeing the two candidates exchange ideas and test each other. Mr. Fetterman has seemingly been reluctant to commit to firm debate dates, and that troubling stance has raised questions about whether he, still recovering from a serious stroke, is fit to serve in the Senate.
After suffering a stroke in May, Mr. Fetterman was off the campaign trail for three months and has campaigned little since then; he held a rally Sunday. Mr. Oz has pressed for five debates, but Mr. Fetterman dodged and ducked before tentatively agreeing last week to one but not until “sometime in the middle to end of October.” That’s well after Sept. 19, when voters can start casting mail-in ballots, and it’s short of the two debates that had been the standard during recent competitive Senate contests in Pennsylvania.
Since returning to the campaign trail, Mr. Fetterman has been halting in his performances. He stammers, appears confused and keeps his remarks short. He’s held no news conferences. Mr. Fetterman acknowledges his difficulties with auditory processing, which make it hard for him to respond quickly to what he’s hearing. He receives speech therapy — and we wish him a speedy, full recovery — but the lingering, unanswered questions about his health, underscored by his hesitation to debate, are unsettling.
And he should debate Mr. Oz before voters start casting their ballots. Mr. Oz, for his part, has not exactly conducted himself with glory. The campaign’s offer to fund “any additional medical personnel [Mr. Fetterman] might need to have on standby” during a debate and its mocking comment about Mr. Fetterman not eating enough vegetables were sophomoric and unseemly, made worse by the fact that Mr. Oz is a cardiothoracic surgeon. Both candidates have something to prove to voters, and there is no better forum than a debate. | 2022-09-12T20:33:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | John Fetterman needs to debate more than once for U.S. Senate - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/john-fetterman-pennsylvania-debate-health/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/john-fetterman-pennsylvania-debate-health/ |
Daughter says QAnon conspiracy theory fueled father’s deadly rampage
A QAnon conspiracy theory button sits affixed to the purse of an attendee of the Nebraska Election Integrity Forum on Aug. 27 in Omaha. (Rebecca s. Gratz/Associated Press)
A Michigan man with purported beliefs in the QAnon conspiracy theory was killed in a police shootout Sunday after he allegedly fatally shot his wife and severely injured their daughter at their suburban Detroit home.
The Oakland County Sheriff’s Office identified the man as 53-year-old Igor Lanis of Walled Lake, a small community 30 miles northwest of Detroit. Lanis did not have a history of violence or protective orders against him, officials said, but according to his youngest daughter, who was not home during the attack, Lanis in recent years had grown increasingly in the thrall of the sprawling and baseless conspiracy movement known as QAnon.
Rebecca Lanis, 21, told the Detroit News on Sunday that after Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, her father began consuming “crazy ideas” online, including conspiracies about vaccines and Trump.
“Nobody could talk him out of them,” she told the outlet.
An epidemic of conspiracy theories, fanned by social media and self-serving politicians, is tearing families apart.
On Sunday, police received a 911 call just after 4 a.m. from a young woman who said she had just been shot by her father, the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. When officers arrived at the scene and moved toward the home after hearing a gunshot, Lanis came out the front door armed with a pump-action shotgun and began to fire at the officers.
Police fired back, fatally shooting Lanis.
Officers then saw Lanis’s 25-year-old daughter, Rachel, attempting to crawl out of the front door before they dragged her to safety. She was later hospitalized and listed in stable condition. Rachel Lanis, who had placed the initial 911 call, told police her father had shot her and killed her mother.
Tina Lanis, 56, was found dead inside the home with multiple gunshot wounds to the back from an apparent attempt to flee out the front door, according to the sheriff’s office. The family’s dog was also found dead with multiple gunshot wounds.
Rebecca Lanis, who was staying at a friend’s home for a birthday and was not home during the shooting, did not immediately respond to an interview request Monday. But in a Reddit forum for people who have lost connection to loved ones because of QAnon, she firmly blamed the conspiracist movement for her family’s tragedy.
“I want the media to call out Q because this is all their fault,” she wrote. She lamented how her father’s fall down the QAnon “rabbit hole” changed him from a loving, fun and carefree man to someone who “would get really pissy over the smallest things” and warn of imagined dangers posed by modern medicine or 5G towers.
The sheriff’s office said there is an active investigation into the incident and did not give a motive.
QAnon gained momentum as a viral online movement around late 2017. Its followers waited for posts by an anonymous figure known as “Q” who proclaimed to be a high-level government insider privy to secrets of the “Deep State.”
The movement has shifted its focus and evolved over the years, but has been linked to a growing number of criminal incidents, including the Jan. 6 siege at the U.S. Capitol, where multiple QAnon adherents were arrested.
QAnon reshaped Trump’s party and radicalized believers. The Capitol siege may just be the start.
In a 2019 intelligence bulletin, the FBI listed QAnon among the “anti-government, identity-based, and fringe political conspiracy theories” that “very likely motivate some domestic extremists to commit criminal, sometimes violent activity.”
Last year, a California man who became obsessed with QAnon confessed to killing his 2-year-old son and 10-month-old daughter with a spearfishing gun after becoming “enlightened” by the group. Matthew Taylor Coleman told FBI interviewers that he had received signs that this wife “possessed serpent DNA,” and had passed it to their children.
Jack Bratich, an associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information who researches QAnon, said the group can be especially appealing to people who have been destabilized by a mass trauma — such as the coronavirus pandemic — or who more generally cling to QAnon as a way to cope with a changing world where they feel less comfortable.
“QAnon gave some people a sense of purpose and a narrative that almost assured a certain kind of future,” Bratich said. To preserve that, adherents may act out and behave in almost paranoid ways.
“They may act as if they’re protecting a bunker, and treating other people — even family — like an enemy,” he said. | 2022-09-12T21:25:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Michigan father shot his family, police say. His daughter blames QAnon. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/12/igor-lanis-murder/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/12/igor-lanis-murder/ |
The start of the season was a disaster for the Dallas Cowboys. (Richard Rodriguez/Getty Images)
The NFC East race is a lot more interesting after the first Sunday of the regular season than it appeared to be headed into Week 1.
The Washington Commanders, Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants all won on Sunday, leaving the Dallas Cowboys, last year’s NFC East winner, as the sole loser in the division. That 0-1 record is the least of America’s Team’s concerns. Quarterback Dak Prescott was injured in the season-opening 19-3 loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday night and will require surgery on his thumb, sidelining him between six to eight weeks.
Fading the Cowboys was the smart play before the injury. Now, the NFC East is truly up for grabs, and any of the other three teams could make a claim. The question for bettors becomes what’s the right price for a play on the Commanders, Eagles and/or Giants to make the most of this opportunity?
Adjusting the Cowboys’ preseason power ranking for Prescott’s injury and simulating the season thousands of times indicates that Dallas has a 19 percent chance of winning the division, significantly lower than the Eagles, the new front-runner. According to this model, Washington and New York also have a better chance than Dallas of securing the top spot. The Cowboys’ chances at winning the conference and Super Bowl also declined, as you’d expect.
Converting those probabilities can give us fair-value prices for each team to advance in the playoffs. For example, if you can find the Eagles at +175 odds to win the division — bet $100 to win $175 — that would be a good price. Unfortunately, Philadelphia’s odds to finish on top are now -140, making this wager one to avoid. The Commanders, meantime, should be +330 to win the division, but as of this writing they were +450 on DraftKings. Keep your eyes open for other positive expectation bets based on the following fair-value odds after an unpredictable opening week.
Bets busted in the NFL
Did you hear that sound on Thursday night? It was the sound of thousands of voices wailing, or thousands of groans barely muffled — or maybe thousands of betting slips being ripped up. The Los Angeles Rams, who were slight underdogs against the Buffalo Bills and thus teaser bet darlings in the NFL’s season opener, dropped a clunker in front of a national audience, tanking many multi-bet wagers along the way.
A teaser — a bet that allows you to move the point spread in your favor, generally by six points — with the Rams meant bettors were getting 8½ points, a number many experts thought was too enticing to pass up. All the host Rams needed to do was stay within a touchdown of the Bills — or even lose by eight points. But quarterback Matthew Stafford struggled, throwing three interceptions while completing 29 of 41 passes for 240 yards with a touchdown. He was sacked seven times, with much of the pressure coming from his former teammate, Von Miller.
Two powerhouse offenses made the over, which closed at 51½ points, enticing, but those bets also failed to cash. Put some of the blame on Sean McVay’s shoulders. The Rams’ coach called for a run on eight of 12 opportunities during the first half, leading to just 3.4 yards per play.
The end result was a 31-10 Bills victory, making Buffalo just the second team since 2014 to have at least four turnovers and still win by three touchdowns.
The Pittsburgh Steelers were 6½-point underdogs to the Cincinnati Bengals and walked away with a 23-20 win on Sunday. Before you pop that champagne in your black and gold jersey, let’s have a chat. The Bengals lost that game more than the Steelers won it.
What’s the difference? Cincinnati outgained Pittsburgh, 432 yards to 267, and had 32 first downs to the Pittsburgh’s 13. So how did the Steelers win? Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow had four interceptions (one a pick-six) and two fumbles (losing one), giving him five turnovers. Cincinnati also went 2 for 5 in the red zone, completely sabotaging its chances.
Pittsburgh’s next game is against New England, a team with troubles of its own. However, the Miami Dolphins only outgained New England by 36 yards and capitalized on three Patriots turnovers, meaning New England is likely better than the 20-7 Week 1 loss would indicate. That’s why I will be looking to back New England against Pittsburgh next week.
Bad beats in the college ranks
Anyone holding an over-52.5 ticket for Saturday’s game between Missouri and Kansas State was probably in a sour mood afterward, considering the final score (42-10, Wildcats) landed a half-point short. But how those teams got to that final score made things extra aggravating.
Leading 40-6 after a Missouri punt and looking to simply milk away the 1 minute 22 seconds left in the game, Kansas State’s Anthony Frias II fumbled on the first play of the series, giving the Tigers the ball at the Kansas State 20 with 1:10 left. Missouri worked the ball down to the 1 and was saved by a roughing-the-passer penalty on fourth and goal, with quarterback Cody Schrader punching it in on the next play.
There was one problem for over betters, however: The clock showed nothing but zeros and the Tigers did not attempt the extra point that would have pushed the total over. Game over.
Missouri blocked a Kansas State extra point in the second quarter and Wildcats place-kicker Chris Tennant also missed a 31-yard field goal attempt in the third. Either would have gotten over bettors to the Promised Land.
A similar fate befell over bettors in the Mississippi State-Arizona game, which had a total of 57.5 but landed on 56 after the Bulldogs’ 39-17 victory. Mississippi State place-kicker Massimo Biscardi missed two first-quarter extra points, and the Wildcats had so many opportunities to push things over late in the game.
Arizona marched the ball into Bulldogs territory on each of its last three drives, only to see all three end on downs. Their last drive of the game ended at the Mississippi State 6 and featured a number of dropped passes.
While Baylor closed as a 2.5-point underdog at BYU on Saturday night (per Covers), Bears +3.5 or Bears +4 were widely available a few days before the game before coming back down. Anyone who snagged either of those numbers likely thought they had some nice closing line value at kickoff.
With the score tied at 20 and 2:08 remaining in the fourth quarter, BYU took possession at its 10-yard line and methodically worked its way to the Baylor 18, with Jacob Oldroyd coming on to attempt what likely would have been a game-winning field goal from just 35 yards out. Make it, and BYU wins — but Baylor +3.5 or +4 covers.
Oldroyd missed that one, and wasn’t done yet. In the first overtime, Baylor got the ball first and missed a field goal of its own, giving BYU a clear path to victory. But Oldroyd missed again, this time from only 37 yards out, and things moved on to a second overtime, during which BYU scored a touchdown and then held Baylor out of the end zone. Final score: BYU 26, Baylor 20, the Cougars covering any pregame number that was out there.
The latest from Odds Against | 2022-09-12T21:38:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Dallas Cowboys are now NFC East longshots - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/12/dallas-cowboys-odds-nfc-east/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/12/dallas-cowboys-odds-nfc-east/ |
U.S. President George H.W. Bush during his visit to the Glenarden Community Center in Glenarden, Md., in 1991. Bush visited the center to honor the Midnight Basketball League for its efforts in luring young adults off the street and into a productive environment. (Barry Thumma/AP)
The last time there was a head-shaking crime surge in Prince George’s County, a star was born.
And it’s a complete turnaround from how local leaders are addressing this summer’s perplexing crime surge.
As carjackings, shootings and teen drug dealers dominated the headlines during the height of our nation’s crack epidemic in the 1980s, G. Van Standifer noticed a pattern when he fanned out all his town’s crime reports in front of him: the worst of the crimes happened in his county between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. and most of the victims and the perps were between 17 and 22.
“He always knew how important it was for us to be out there playing, safely,” his son, Nelson Standifer, told me years ago, when we met at his childhood home in Glenarden, where his dad realized that the kids getting in trouble weren’t living in a place as safe as his street.
So he found a way to build one — founding the Midnight Basketball league in a gym. The brilliance of his simple plan sparkled and spread across the nation.
“Here everybody wins,” President George W. Bush said in 1991, when he visited a Midnight Basketball game in Glenarden, after naming the program one of his “1,000 Points of Light.” “It’s about providing opportunity for young adults to escape drugs and the streets and get on with their lives.” (Look at that, he almost sounded like a Democrat).
Crime rates fell in Prince George’s County over the next few years and Midnight Basketball spread across the nation, in troubled cities with high crime rates and in small towns with high boredom rates.
The league still runs in places all over America, but not in the county of its birth. The local league simply ran out of money — donations dried up when crime went down.
“I’ve left messages at the county executive’s office and haven’t heard back,” said Nelson Sandifer, who is trying to bring the league back to his hometown. “Midnight Basketball isn’t the answer. But it’s an alternative. A good alternative.”
Today, that 1990s crime is back. While overall crime rates remain low, August was the single deadliest month the county has seen in decades.
Crime rate climbs in Prince George's County after deadly weekend
“I cannot stand by and continue to watch children who are shot and killed, who are not only committing crimes but harming others, and do nothing about it,” said Angela D. Alsobrooks, Prince George’s county executive (who almost sounded like a law-and-order Republican).
She ranted at the court system: “It’s clear the problem is what happens after the arrests, or in our case, what doesn’t happen.”
So Aisha Braveboy, the state’s attorney in Prince George’s, snapped back, calling Alsobrooks’ words “pure politics.”
And down came the hammer as Alsobrooks announced the enforcement of a long-standing curfew that most of the county had been ignoring for decades.
The people who deal directly with juvenile offenders shot back at Alsobrooks.
“Curfews do not make anyone safer or address any underlying societal problems which are the true root of crime. At best, curfews are an ineffective Band-Aid; at worst, they criminalize our most vulnerable and at-risk children,” Maryland Public Defender Natasha Dartigue and Melissa Pryce, the district public defender for Prince George’s, said in a Wednesday press release.
While Alsobrooks has advocated publicly for increased opportunities and more mental health support for youth to address the violence, at the news conference she laid the problems at their feet: “At this point, these kids don’t just need a hug, they need to be held accountable.”
But curfews don’t always equal accountability, according to an exhaustive study in 2018 by The Marshall Project.
A study by the Justice Policy Center on Prince George’s County in particular came up with few conclusions other than the fact that police simply didn’t have the bandwidth to chase and process curfew violations every night.
For one, it means that police have a reason to stop anyone young-looking at night.
“It just gives them another way to come at us,” said a 17-year-old from Prince George’s named Castro, who wouldn’t get in trouble for violating the curfew, which targets kids 16 and under. He worries it may give police more opportunities for confrontations.
That’s what Jarriel Jordan worries about, too — the setup for more ways that things can go wrong between police and kids. It’s not something police love doing. And he knows “everyone needs to be held accountable,” he said. “But at the same time, this is supposed to be about rehabilitation.”
His nonprofit, Jacob’s Ladder, works with kids when they get out of lockup. That’s when they’re shaken, traumatized, and in a moment when they could be most vulnerable to positive influences.
It’s exactly where Castro is. He told me his last name but I’m not going to use it because he has a future planned out, one that doesn’t involve more time behind bars.
He was locked up on a gun charge for three weeks, then spent seven more months with an ankle monitor. Now, he wants to find some kind of apprenticeship or job or something that gets him closer to his goal while he finishes his senior year of high school.
“But there’s nothing near me,” he said. “I don’t have a way to get around. I just want something to do.” He’s trying to find positive ways to deal with his emotions, his anger, his energy. He’s taking part in Jacob’s Ladder programs and said he was surprised by what helped him.
“They taught me how to calm myself and work on my breathing,” he said. “It was, um, yoga.”
Yes, yoga.
Or Midnight Basketball. Whatever it takes. | 2022-09-12T21:42:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Prince George's County youth need opportunities - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/12/prince-georges-midnight-basketball-curfew/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/12/prince-georges-midnight-basketball-curfew/ |
Emmys 2022 live updates Stars hit the red carpet on one of Hollywood’s biggest nights
Who is hosting the Emmy Awards?
Kenan Thompson, who will host the 74th Emmy Awards, attends the press preview at the Television Academy Plaza in North Hollywood on Thursday. (Dan Steinberg/Invision for the Television Academy/AP Images)
Ashley Fetters Maloy
The 74th Primetime Emmy Awards have arrived, marking the beginning of yet another awards show season. (Yes, we, too, thought that Will Smith’s slap of Chris Rock may have marked the end of the tradition, but Hollywood is nothing if not persistent.)
Television’s biggest night aims to celebrate the best and brightest in an increasingly crowded landscape of streamers, broadcast networks, limited series (that are actually multiple seasons) and talk shows. But who will come out on top? Will “Succession” sweep? Will “Ted Lasso” win best comedy once again? Will “Squid Game” make history as the first non-English-language show to win best drama? Will John Oliver end his “Last Week Tonight” reign? Will someone trip on the red carpet?
HBO has a chance to dominate the night: “Succession,” “The White Lotus” and “Ted Lasso” lead the pack in nominations. Here is the full list of nominees.
The awards race has never been more competitive. TV critic Inkoo Kang weighed the winners and losers of this year’s crop of nominees here.
The nearly Shakespearean HBO drama “Succession,” which earned 25 nominations, the most of any project this year, has a strong showing across its genre’s categories; nearly every member of its main cast earned a nomination. Based on numbers alone, “The White Lotus” has a similar shot at dominating the limited series categories; its cast members hold five of seven slots for best supporting actress in a limited series, and three of seven for best supporting actor.
“Squid Game,” nominated for best drama, stands to make history again after already becoming the first non-English-language show to even compete in the category.
This year, the Television Academy responded to the rapid growth of streaming by using genre to distinguish which categories counted toward the Daytime Emmys, and which were better geared for the Primetime Emmys. Awards in the latter camp are distributed at two ceremonies: the main one, discussed above, and the Creative Arts Emmys, which take place earlier and recognize artistic and technical achievements in prime-time programming.
The Creative Arts Emmys for this season were presented across two nights, on Sept. 3 and 4. Some first-season shows snagged multiple awards, such as Netflix’s harrowing drama “Squid Game” and HBO’s satirical dramedy “The White Lotus,” which won four and five Emmys, respectively. But elsewhere, academy favorites held their ground — HBO’s “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” won best writing for a variety series, for example, and RuPaul once again won best reality competition host for VH1’s “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
Kenan Thompson, the longest-tenured cast member on “Saturday Night Live,” will take the Emmy hosting reins. But don’t expect any potentially risky monologue jokes: “Even if I am roasting [someone], it shouldn’t come across as any sort of malice,” he told the Associated Press.
Thompson’s approach falls in line with the friendly style of comedy he has showcased on SNL, which accounts for five of his six total Emmy nominations (including one win in 2018). Despite all the recognition, this is Thompson’s first time hosting the ceremony, which he said he hopes to maintain as “a night of appreciating artistry and creativity and removing the stress of it all out.”
Because NBC airs Sunday Night Football at this time of the year, and football rules all in the television landscape — even over the awards show meant to celebrate television itself. So Monday it is.
The Emmy Awards, held at Los Angeles’s Microsoft Theater, will kick off Monday, Sept. 12 at 8 p.m. Eastern. Viewers can tune in to NBC to watch the live telecast, which will also stream on the NBC-owned platform Peacock. | 2022-09-12T21:47:14Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Emmys red carpet, winners and analysis: Live updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/12/emmys-2022/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/12/emmys-2022/ |
The company, known for its database technology, sells business software applications that can be used over the internet as well as offering customers the ability to store and compute information through Oracle’s servers, called cloud infrastructure. Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp., the leaders in that market, are far ahead of Oracle. Executives say the Cerner acquisition will give the company inroads in the health care industry, which has been comparatively slow to adopt cloud technology.
Oracle completed its acquisition of Cerner in June. The digital medical records provider generated $1.4 billion in sales in the period, which Catz called its best revenue quarter ever.
Sales of the Fusion application for managing corporate finances rose 33% in the period, compared with 20% last quarter. Revenue from NetSuite’s enterprise planning tools, targeted to small- and mid-sized businesses, increased 27%, the same as the previous period.
Oracle shares were little changed in extended trading after closing at $77.08 in New York. The stock has slipped 12% this year.
(Updates with Cerner revenue in the sixth paragraph) | 2022-09-12T21:47:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Oracle Reports Sales That Meet Estimates, Touts Cerner Deal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/oracle-reports-sales-that-meet-estimates-touts-cerner-deal/2022/09/12/ec2f8eda-32db-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/oracle-reports-sales-that-meet-estimates-touts-cerner-deal/2022/09/12/ec2f8eda-32db-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
FILE - Former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin holds a report during a news conference in San Francisco on Feb. 15, 2022. Boudin said the report showed DNA collected by San Francisco police from a woman who was sexually assaulted was used by police detectives to arrest her years later in an unrelated property crime. Attorney Adante Pointer said Monday, Sept. 12, 2022, he has filed a lawsuit against San Francisco on the woman’s behalf. (AP Photo/Olga R. Rodriguez, File) (Olga R. Rodrigues/AP) | 2022-09-12T21:48:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Woman whose rape DNA led to her arrest sues San Francisco - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/woman-whose-rape-dna-led-to-her-arrest-sues-san-francisco/2022/09/12/c4c6a656-32dd-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/woman-whose-rape-dna-led-to-her-arrest-sues-san-francisco/2022/09/12/c4c6a656-32dd-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko alleges that Twitter flouted its promises to regulators to build a comprehensive security program, igniting concerns about enforcement and resources at the Silicon Valley watchdog.
Peiter Zatko, who is also known as Mudge poses for a portrait. He has worked for Google and Twitter. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
A whistleblower accusing Twitter of failing to comply with a 2011 consent decree is raising questions not just about his former employer’s actions but about the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that is supposed to ensure Twitter abides by its pledge to protect users’ private data.
Whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, Twitter’s former security lead, claimed in his complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Twitter never developed a security system capable of meeting the FTC’s requirement that the platform establish a comprehensive information security program. And despite its promise never to mislead on privacy, Zatko accused Twitter of “extensive, repeated, uninterrupted violations” of consumer protection laws and making “false and misleading statements” about the state of the company’s privacy and security safeguards.
His allegations, filed in July and published by The Post last month, will be argued over in next month’s trial to determine whether Tesla CEO Elon Musk must go through with his April agreement to buy Twitter for $44 billion. Musk claims Twitter has violated the sale agreement, in part by misleading shareholders, so that he is not obligated to complete the deal.
But the issue of the FTC consent decree could also come up on Tuesday when Zatko testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and in meetings he’s expected to have with FTC officials. Critics say Congress has done little over the years to fortify the FTC’s ability to monitor compliance with such consent decrees, which are the agency’s principle means of enforcing U.S. consumer protection laws.
Zatko’s staff told him “unequivocally that Twitter had never been in compliance with the 2011 FTC Consent Order, and was not on track to ever achieve full compliance,” his whistleblower complaint alleges.
Interviews with more than half a dozen current and former FTC officials suggest that the agency would have been unlikely to uncover that alleged noncompliance. The officials said that chronic underfunding and understaffing have left the government’s top Silicon Valley watchdog without the personnel or technical expertise to monitor decrees and levy fines when they are not followed.
Since 2010, the agency has slapped many of the world’s most powerful and valuable tech companies — including Facebook, Google and Snap — with such orders. The orders were initially viewed as a creative way for the agency to police data security abuses in the absence of a federal data privacy law, and a signal to the tech industry that the U.S. government would be more closely scrutinizing their business practices.
Yet the shortcomings of such a regime has become more apparent in recent years, as repeated data abuses have taken place at companies under such orders. At the time of the Cambridge Analytica data-scraping scandal, Facebook was under an FTC order which required it to implement a privacy program. The company ultimately was fined $5 billion for allegedly violating the terms of the order, but critics said it amounted to a blip on the balance sheet of the company, which generates tens of billions of dollars a year.
Lawmakers and former officials are especially alarmed by the allegations about the 2011 Twitter decree, because the FTC recently was investigating the company’s data security practices and already found problems. The 2011 Twitter settlement, which came in the wake of hacks of high-profile accounts including former president Barack Obama, broadly directed the company to establish a security program.
Earlier this year, the FTC and the Justice Department won a $150 million fine and settlement against Twitter for asking consumers to provide phone numbers to keep their accounts secure, then using that data for marketing. The recent order directs Twitter to take specific steps, such as ensuring that users can authenticate their accounts without sharing phone numbers.
Twitter to pay $150 million fine over deceptively collected data
But that settlement did not address many of the more systemic, extensive allegations in Zatko’s complaint, which says the company ran outdated software on its servers, blocked automatic software updates on laptops, and misled the board about the breaches it suffered and the state of its security.
The FTC’s “record shows that it has been unwilling or unable to fully enforce its privacy orders and prevent further violation,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the chair of the Senate Commerce panel focused on consumer protection, who will also be among those questioning Zatko on Tuesday. “The FTC is up against some of the most powerful and profitable giants in the world, and it’s literally armed with a slingshot against a nuclear power.”
Former FTC officials say Congress also bears blame for the lax privacy oversight. For decades, consumer advocates and some lawmakers have pushed for a comprehensive consumer data privacy law that would give the agency more legal authority to police abuses. A bipartisan privacy bill recently advanced in the House, but it is unlikely to become law during a midterm election year with many competing priorities.
The FTC currently uses decades-old consumer protection laws to enforce against privacy abuses, which require it to establish that a company misled consumers about their ability to protect data or demonstrate other harms. That has historically proven to be an uphill battle in court.
Democrats’ efforts to expand the agency’s funding also have faltered. An early version of Biden’s economic package included an additional $1 billion to establish a new privacy enforcement division at the agency. But the funding was omitted from the slimmed down version of the package that was signed into law by President Biden earlier this month.
“I would say to Congress … try harder to pass legislation that gives the FTC more tools and more teeth to oversee this complex area,” said Jessica Rich, who previously served as the head of the FTC’s consumer protection bureau. “I get tired of seeing Congress criticize the FTC when it’s been unable to pass basic, baseline privacy and data security resources for more than 20 years.”
The FTC currently has a staff of about 40 people monitoring compliance with its many hundreds of consent orders across the economy, according to a person familiar with the agency’s practices, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss internal matters. These lawyers do not necessarily have specific expertise in data security and technology, and the agency’s technologists often split their time between reviewing orders and other privacy and competition investigations.
“The same lawyers who ensure that social media companies have robust privacy and data security programs are making sure labels on bed linens are correct,” Ashkan Soltani, a former FTC chief technologist and now California’s privacy enforcer, said in congressional testimony.
Can Washington keep watch over Silicon Valley? The FTC’s Facebook probe is a high-stakes test.
The agency often moves more slowly than the tech industry, with some orders outdated before they come into force. The agency didn’t reach a settlement with MySpace for alleged data security misrepresentations until 2012, when the service was already fading in popularity.
The United States’ privacy enforcement resources lag far behind other Western countries with significantly smaller populations. According to a 2021 report to Congress, the FTC has about 40 to 45 people working in its privacy division. For comparison, the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s office has about 768 people, and the Irish Data Protection Commissioner has about 150 employees. Other countries also have broad laws to protect consumer data in general, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation; the United States does not.
Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University professor who served as the FTC’s chief technologist in the years just after the 2011 Twitter settlements, said that the technologists in the privacy and identity division were stretched, but at least motivated. Enforcement was another story, badly lacking tech expertise.
“My understanding is that the real problem has been on follow-ups, during the customary 20-year term of the consent decree,” Bellovin said.
In part because of staff shortages and scarce resources, the FTC has relied on third-party assessors to monitor whether companies are complying with their privacy commitments. But the assessments are very different from true audits, where professional codes demanded actual tests and evidence, former FTC staffers said.
In assessments, the outsiders paid by the subject companies were allowed to simply take management’s word on technical matters, said FTC expert and University of California-Berkeley Professor Chris Hoofnagle, and in his experience those executives might not know what their engineers were doing.
While under a prior consent decree, for example, Google was certified as compliant on privacy during a period when two major violations occurred, including it being caught using street-mapping cars to suck down WiFi traffic. The omissions of these incidents in the assessments “suggests that the assessor had not read the newspaper for two years,” Hoofnagle wrote in a 2006 book.
Lina Khan, the agency’s Democratic chair, entered office more than a year ago with great expectations that she would improve the agency’s privacy enforcement. The agency has put some teeth into consent orders, including more prescriptive language so that the agency and its assessors can better oversee compliance.
Khan has also called on Congress to give the FTC more funding, while promising to dedicate more resources toward oversight of digital markets.
The agency is also considering more aggressive penalties to deter companies and executives that violate orders, including criminal referrals to the Justice Department if a company misleads the agency in the course of an investigation.
“The commission is committed to enforcing its orders, and potential violations will be investigated thoroughly,” said Sam Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Companies flout FTC orders at their peril.” | 2022-09-12T21:51:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Twitter whistleblower complaint reveals FTC enforcement weak spots - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/12/mudge-twitter-ftc-consent-decrees/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/12/mudge-twitter-ftc-consent-decrees/ |
In ‘Splatoon 3,’ gamers ‘memorialize’ Queen Elizabeth II with memes
The late queen was reportedly a big fan of the Nintendo Wii
(Washington Post illustration; Frank Augstein/AP; Nintendo)
Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest reigning monarch, died Thursday. During her nearly 71-year reign, the late queen presided over a postwar U.K. as it decolonized its territories abroad, was engulfed in a decades-long violent conflict in Northern Ireland known as “the Troubles” and eventually departed the European Union. Since the queen’s passing, tributes and criticism have poured in from all over — including Nintendo’s new video game, “Splatoon 3.”
“Splatoon 3,” the latest title in Nintendo’s family-friendly shooter series Splatoon, was released Sept. 9, just a day after the queen’s death. The game features a hub city called Splatsville where players can indirectly communicate with each other by painting graffiti on the walls, or by drawing illustrations for pop-up text boxes above their characters. And upon the game’s release, the digital city was flooded with memes and references to the queen.
someone has probably found out about the queen's death from splatoon today and i think thats wonderful pic.twitter.com/szumYdJaRj
— brisk ⚡️SPLAT 3 (@brisskwinds) September 9, 2022
Gaming content creator Ultima logged into “Splatoon 3” and was greeted by a graffitied wall reading “The Queen is Dead.” Kotaku editor in chief Patricia Hernandez saw players with text boxes declaring “RIP Queen Elizabeth U Would Have Loved Splatoon 3,” “The Queen died so that we could have Splatoon 3” and “Queen is Temporary, Splatoon is Forever.”
Splatoon 3 players pay respects to the Queen pic.twitter.com/FMtYESXBMC
— WiLLo Davis Ⓥ (@WiLLoDavisRocks) September 11, 2022
Another Splatoon player was spotted with a text box that read “first Nintendo game the queen doesn’t see.” Elizabeth II was reportedly a big Nintendo fan, according to The Daily Mirror. The queen received a Nintendo Wii in 2008 as a gift from Catherine, Princess of Wales (then Kate Middleton) after Catherine observed the queen delightfully playing Prince William’s Wii. Game publisher THQ even attempted to court the queen’s favor by sending a gold-plated Wii to Buckingham Palace as part of a marketing campaign.
Nintendo may be the only major video game corporation that is older than the queen. It was founded in 1889 as a producer of traditional Japanese playing cards called hanafuda (Pokémon would come much later). By the time Nintendo entered the video game industry in 1973, Elizabeth II was already in her late 40s.
Nintendo announced Monday it would not be airing a planned Nintendo Direct (the company’s in-house update and news broadcast) that day, out of respect for the queen. Instead, the event will be uploaded onto Nintendo’s YouTube channel on Sept. 13, 11 a.m. Eastern. | 2022-09-12T21:51:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In ‘Splatoon 3,’ gamers memorialize Queen Elizabeth II through memes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/09/12/queen-elizabeth-splatoon-nintendo-wii/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/09/12/queen-elizabeth-splatoon-nintendo-wii/ |
Three Reccless Tigers gang members sentenced to life in prison
“justice concept, selective focus on nearest part, lens blur f/x” (iStock)
Three members of the Reccless Tigers gang that operated in Northern Virginia were sentenced to life in prison Monday for killing a 21-year-old who had testified about the gang’s violent methods.
U.S. authorities have charged at least 20 associates of the Reccless Tigers with drug trafficking, kidnapping, money laundering or other offenses. Several have pleaded guilty and others have ongoing cases.
Federal prosecutors in Virginia say the Tigers were behind two slayings: an unsolved killing at one of the gang’s house parties, and the 2019 murder of Brandon White.
Joseph Lamborn, of California; Peter Le, of Dunn Loring, Va.; and Young Yoo, of Centreville, Va. — all of whom are in their mid- to late 20s — faced mandatory sentences of life in prison after a jury convicted them in May of White’s killing and other charges. Defense attorneys said they are all preparing appeals.
“You took his life because he had the nerve to testify against a fellow gang member who beat him up, put him in the hospital,” U.S. District Judge Liam O'Grady told Lamborn, Le and Yoo as he imposed their sentences Monday. “Shame on all of you. How senseless.”
White, 21, of Falls Church, owed about $10,000 to Yoo for marijuana when he encountered another gang member, David Nguyen, in August 2018. Nguyen attempted to collect on the debt, took $83 from White and proceeded to beat him, causing injuries including a broken orbital bone and bruised ribs.
After the beating, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing brief, an attorney representing Nguyen and another gang member offered White up to $10,000 in exchange for not testifying against Nguyen. White said his hospital bill from the beating was $74,000 and refused the entreaties, according to court documents.
White ultimately testified under subpoena in Fairfax County Circuit Court in November 2018, and identified Nguyen as the person who assaulted him in August of that year.
On the night of Jan. 31 and early morning of Feb. 1, 2019, Lamborn, Le and Yoo killed White in some woods near Richmond.
“My son was only 21 years old, but he did the right thing when it was difficult,” White’s mother Khairina Worthey said at the sentencing Monday, describing White as a “happy-go-lucky” man who loved motorcycles, wanted to be an aviation mechanic and left behind a young daughter.
“Animals are killed with more integrity than what they did to my son,” Worthey said.
Attorneys for Le and Yoo had argued that, partly because of their youth, a life sentence would constitute cruel and unusual punishment barred by the Eighth Amendment. O'Grady rejected those arguments.
Assistant U.S. Attorney James Trump said Nguyen’s own actions — beating White in front of several witnesses — were what incriminated him. Trump said Lamborn, Le and Yoo were celebrating or getting tattoos after the killing and had not shown remorse.
“Was it worth it? I doubt they think so now,” Trump said. | 2022-09-12T21:55:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Recless Tigers gang members sentenced to life in prison - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/12/recless-tigers-gang-sentenced-prison/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/12/recless-tigers-gang-sentenced-prison/ |
Larry David Smith, accused of killing a Maryland sheriff’s deputy 51 years ago, was ordered held without bond Monday
The recently arrested suspect in a 51-year-old unsolved homicide was ordered held without bond on Monday as new details emerged about his life, including that he’d worked as a security guard before retiring.
Larry David Smith, 70, is accused of fatally shooting a Maryland sheriff’s deputy, James Hall, in a dark parking lot in 1971. At the time, Hall was in uniform and working a part-time security job at the Manor Country Club in Rockville.
Police have long believed Hall came upon someone who had broken into a nearby home. Last week, in announcing an arrest in the case, investigators asserted that the burglar was Smith.
“It is alleged that he took the life of another person, which means he has the capacity to do that again,” Montgomery County District Judge Aileen Oliver said from the bench Monday while ruling that he should be held in jail.
Moments earlier, defense attorney Meghan Brennan had painted a different picture of Smith while asking that he be allowed to be released to home confinement and electronic monitoring.
She said that Smith’s memory and health are poor, that he had suffered two heart attacks, and that he’d retired in Upstate New York after working as a security guard there. Brennan also questioned the strength of the case against Smith, saying it seemed to rest only on a recent “alleged confession” made during four hours of interrogation in New York on Sept. 1.
Smith was recently moved from custody in New York to the Montgomery County jail. While being held there, a Montgomery grand jury is expected to review the police case against him. Should he be indicted, a trial date would then be set in the county’s circuit court.
Earlier coverage: How an old reel-to-reel audio tape led investigators to Smith
About 12 months ago, cold-case detectives took a renewed interest in the case. They saw reference to Smith in old case files, but he was described as someone who might have known what happened to Hall, not as someone who might have actually pulled the trigger. The newer detectives found an old reel-to-reel audio tape of Smith speaking with detectives, listened to it, and heard him discussing details that were never made public — like how many shots were fired.
They also learned that around 1975, Smith changed his name — from Larry David Becker to his current name of Larry David Smith. In part through Facebook posts, investigators said in court records, they found Smith living in Little Falls, N.Y.
Detectives went to see him recently, and during an interview, Smith “did admit to being involved in this shooting,” Assistant State’s Attorney John Grochowski said in court.
He added that Smith changed his name in 1975 to distance himself from the killing and that his relocation to New York shows he remains a flight risk should he be released from jail.
“This defendant has essentially fled the last 50 years,” Grochowski said. “His name was changed. It was 50 years of evading before they finally found him.”
Earlier, infamous Maryland cold case: The Lyon Sisters
Detectives earlier alleged that Smith had a criminal history in the 1970s that included burglary, assault and escape.
In court Monday, Brennan, Smith’s attorney, said there was a far less nefarious reason that he changed his name.
He’d actually been born in Upstate New York as Larry David Smith, she said.
When he was adopted at age 7, she said, he took his adopted parents’ last name of Becker. Indeed, he held that name while living in Montgomery County through the early 1970s, according to court records.
Then, in 1975, while in court for a burglary case, Smith asked a judge if he could go back to using his birth name, according to Brennan. “The court OK’d that request,” she added.
Smith then returned to Upstate New York to try to reconnect with his birth family, she said.
“This wasn’t a person who was trying to willfully evade detectives,” Brennan said.
She said Smith has two daughters, one son and is separated from his wife.
The judge confirmed that Smith did not appear to have any criminal record since the 1970s. But she described the 1975 name change — even if it was approved by a judge — as troubling.
“I find that it might be more than coincidental that that happened after this offense and the investigation was initiated,” Oliver said. | 2022-09-12T23:05:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Suspect in 1971 cold-case homicide worked as security guard - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/12/1971-cold-case-arrest-montgomery-county/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/12/1971-cold-case-arrest-montgomery-county/ |
Japan’s push for global travelers was a rare example of a wildly successful government policy, turning the country into a mass tourist destination for the first time. An initial goal of 20 million visitors in 2020 was smashed with five years to spare, and doubled instead. Construction of hotels and theme parks boomed; politicians spoke of becoming a world leader like France, which welcomes 90 million visitors a year.
Covid put those plans on hold. But it has given Japan an opportunity to use the pandemic-era reset and the weak yen to shift to a smarter strategy.
Visitors will love the weak yen, but Japan may not love them. Even before Covid, the congestion and littering on the ancient streets of Kyoto had become a symbol of the downsides of over-tourism. With its dense concentration of cultural artifacts and sight-seeing spots, Kyoto has suffered from the same problem of overdemand as cities such as Barcelona or Venice, which is attempting to solve the problem with a tourist tax. A proud local population had begun to bristle at the hordes of visitors before the pandemic struck.
Airline capacity will likely stagger the number of tourists returning initially; in any case Chinese residents, who made up more than one-third of visitors before the pandemic, are still unlikely to return due to their own domestic quarantine requirements. So as it opens up to the world, Japan can start to shift expectations.
Instead of concentrating on the sheer number of annual visitors, it should make more efforts to extract value from those who make the journey. Average spending per person amounted to just 159,000 yen ($1,113) in 2019. Over the coming years, policies should double down on ways to encourage more high-net-worth individuals who can afford lengthy (and expensive) stays.
Local buy-in is crucial to avoid another Kyoto situation. Tourists should be encouraged to visit other regions, not just Kyoto, Osaka and Tokyo, and Japan should make it as easy as possible to get there. Policy makers should also think about the type of destinations and experiences foreigners want, rather than simply offering those favored by domestic travelers, who are often older and prefer shorter trips. Japan is still lacking in world-leading luxury resorts, while plans dating back to the era of Shinzo Abe to build casinos have been stalled for years.
Road bumps are ahead. While Japan has no laws requiring masks, there are strong societal expectations nonetheless, and mask-free foreign tourists are sure to become a talking point. Expect objections from the medical community, especially when the next wave of cases hits as the weather gets cold. And the very possible emergence of another new variant in winter could throw things back to square one. But for now, prospective visitors may be able to reclaim one pre-pandemic normality: forgetting about how to process visa paperwork, and concentrating instead on when’s the best time to exchange into yen.
• Japan’s Covid Isolation Has Gone on Too Long: Gearoid Reidy
• Masks Down, Singapore Smiles on High-Earners Again: Daniel Moss
• Relax, This Isn’t the Future of Japanese Tourism: Gearoid Reidy | 2022-09-12T23:18:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tourists Will Love the Yen. Will Japan Love Them Back? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/tourists-will-love-the-yen-will-japan-love-them-back/2022/09/12/0d9547ee-32e7-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/tourists-will-love-the-yen-will-japan-love-them-back/2022/09/12/0d9547ee-32e7-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
As China targets the South Pacific, the U.S. urgently needs to push back
By John R. Bolton
Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, right, locks arms with visiting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on May 26. (Xinhua News Agency/AP)
John R. Bolton served as national security adviser under President Donald Trump and is the author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”
Few areas of the world seem more distant from the United States than the island states of the South Pacific. World War II reminiscences have faded, and the words “South Pacific” now resonate more as a Broadway musical title than a geographic locator. For U.S. national security, this needs to change, sooner rather than later.
Get the maps out; Chinese leaders, diplomats and the military have theirs nearly memorized. Hemmed in by what it calls the “first island chain” (stretching from the Kuril Islands, through Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia), China has longed to break free into the broader Pacific Ocean. Beijing is interested in this wider horizon because its aspirations extend not merely to hegemony along its immediate Indo-Pacific periphery, but to far wider objectives, already reflected in its pursuit of economic interest in Africa and the Western Hemisphere.
Taiwan is thus important to China not just because of nationalistic fervor, but also because dominance over Taiwan would irretrievably pierce the first island chain. Another breakout strategy over the tyranny of geography is to leapfrog the close-in islands and stake out positions across the Pacific — which is precisely what Beijing appears now to be attempting.
The Pacific’s insular nations are small in land mass and lightly populated, although huge when their ocean territories are included. Xi Jinping has marked them as vulnerable, seemingly intent on going island-hopping, using intimidation, bribery or whatever it takes to achieve China’s ends.
The immediate crisis is in the Solomon Islands, where U.S. forces won a critical victory in 1942-1943 on Guadalcanal, a World War II turning point. In August, senior administration officials Wendy Sherman and Caroline Kennedy, whose fathers fought in the Solomon Islands, led a U.S. delegation to mark the 80th anniversary of the battle at Guadalcanal. Signifying growing Chinese hegemony, however, and perhaps issuing an insult at China’s behest, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare failed to attend the ceremonies near Honiara, the capital. Weeks later, a U.S. Coast Guard vessel was denied permission to make a port call, another apparently intentional discourtesy. Most recently, elections scheduled for next May were postponed until 2024, a move that opposition leaders consider an ominous sign of China’s influence.
A Chinese base in the Solomons would directly menace Australia (about 1,200 miles away), harking back to the Japanese threat during World War II. I was recently in Sydney, and found that Australians need no persuading about China’s rising regional threat. What they seek is a more visible, vigorous U.S. presence in the region, and rightly so. The Solomons are in jeopardy now, and while “domino theory” inevitability might not yet obtain, other island states are clearly vulnerable.
America has for too long paid insufficient attention to the South Pacific. In 1945, the United States assumed Japan’s former League of Nations mandate over the new United Nations’ Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. After plebiscites in 1983, one island chain became the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas, thereby remaining part of the United States, adjacent to Guam, long a U.S. territory. Three other island groupings — Palau, the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia — chose independence. (American Samoa is a separate territory.)
These three new nations all signed “compacts of free association” with the United States, which provide that Washington supervises their foreign affairs (short of declaring war), including prohibiting the presence of foreign military forces without U.S. permission. The compacts have been extended once, and are now up for renegotiation because they expire over the next two years.
This is not a moment to falter or for shortsightedness. Fortuitously timed as the renegotiation is, the White House should take full advantage of the opportunity to cement long-term strategic relations with this trio of nations to keep China out. The costs of enhanced U.S. involvement are trivial in the context of global aid budgets; and the sea and land expanses involved are only somewhat smaller than the continental United States itself.
When I briefed President Donald Trump just before his meeting with the three leaders of these freely associated states in 2019, he asked, “Why am I meeting these people?” His successors should not need to ask.
South Pacific responsibilities need not rest on the United States alone. Australia, New Zealand and Britain all have contemporary relationships and regional histories, dating back to naval coaling or whaling stations. France retains three extensive overseas territories (New Caledonia, French Polynesia, and Wallis and Fortuna), represented in France’s parliament, and whose territory is deemed part of the European Union.
Countering Chinese aggressiveness in the South Pacific should be a matter of urgent bipartisan agreement and action, rare as it might be today. The faraway island of Bali Hai, celebrated in a certain musical, is closer than we thought. | 2022-09-12T23:19:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | As China targets the South Pacific, the U.S. urgently needs to push back - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/stop-chinese-south-pacific-expansion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/stop-chinese-south-pacific-expansion/ |
A "now hiring" sign is posted in Garnet Valley, Pa. (Matt Rourke/AP)
COLUMBIA, S.C. — A little-noticed, slow-moving crisis has been infecting states, counties and towns across the country, leaving governments unable to fulfill their most basic functions.
Pandemic-era labor shortages have been well-documented. But the situation for state and local governments is much worse than in the private sector. In fact, the private sector has already recovered the jobs lost early in the pandemic; there are 885,000 more jobs filled in the private industry today than in February 2020.
“It’s on TV when the city is negotiating with the city manager to give them a 3 percent raise,” said National League of Cities CEO Clarence E. Anthony, describing a “fishbowl effect" that doesn’t exist for most private-employer wage negotiations. “People call in, saying, ‘Why do they deserve an increase? They’re public servants!’”
“Do you want to come play in the poopy water?” said Bill Davis, utilities director for Richland County, while taking me on a tour of a wastewater treatment plant. “Or do you want to go make 20 percent, 25 percent more and work at Amazon?” (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)
Staffing shortages can also beget more staffing shortages. Taking on more work to cover for persistent vacancies can burn out employees. In Richland County, emergency medical technicians and paramedics have struggled at times to take bathroom breaks because of relentless 911 calls, county Emergency Services Department Capt. Winta Adams told me. Elsewhere, corrections officers can’t leave when their shifts end because someone didn’t show up for work and jails have minimum staffing requirements. | 2022-09-12T23:19:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | A slow-moving crisis is paralyzing states and cities - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/worker-shortage-public-sector-crisis/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/12/worker-shortage-public-sector-crisis/ |
On the anniversary of Kennedy’s famous speech, Biden insists cancer can be eradicated. Researchers hope his attention reenergizes the effort.
Laurie McGinley
President Biden speaks Monday on the “cancer moonshot” initiative at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. (Evan Vucci/AP)
BOSTON — Leaning into the symbolism of President John F. Kennedy’s aspirational effort to send a man to the moon, President Biden on Monday sought to give a renewed boost to his own “cancer moonshot” initiative, aimed at cutting the U.S. death toll from the disease in half over the next 25 years.
Biden delivered the speech on the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s moonshot speech, speaking from the late president’s museum and library. It was a less-than-subtle effort to convince Americans that the goal of eradicating cancer is not hopelessly out of reach.
“I believe we can usher in the same unwillingness to postpone, the same national purpose that will serve to energize and measure the best of our skills, to end cancer as we know it, and even cure cancer once and for all,” Biden said, borrowing phrases from Kennedy’s address.
During Monday’s event, Biden announced he was naming Dr. Renee Wegrzyn, a top executive at Gingko Bioworks, a biotech firm, as the first director of a new agency called the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H. Established in March to fund health innovation, it is modeled after the Pentagon’s DARPA program, which has boosted high-risk, high-reward breakthroughs like GPS and the internet.
“It’s not enough to invent technology that saves lives,” Biden said. “We need to manufacture advanced biotechnologies here in the United States. Today’s actions are going to ensure that America leads the world in biotechnology and biomanufacturing, creating jobs and strengthening the supply chain.”
The administration’s drive to create ARPA-H has been controversial among some research scientists, who worry the new agency could divert funding from the National Institutes of Health.
In a post in May, Sarina Neote, director of public affairs at American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, warned, “There will be no medical breakthroughs or revolutionary discoveries without sustained investments in basic scientific research. We urge policymakers to prioritize, not plunder, funding for NIH.”
Biden’s top science adviser, Eric Lander, who was initially tapped to oversee the moonshot, abruptly left the administration after he acknowledged mistreating and demeaning subordinates. The administration was criticized for not requesting any new funding to get the retooled moonshot off the ground.
And key positions — including the director of the National Cancer Institute, the head of the new ARPA-H research organization and a top presidential science adviser — have been empty for months. But now, the administration has tapped people for all three roles, fueling hope the moonshot efforts will accelerate.
“So far, the moonshot has been an inside game, without a lot of resources and people in critical positions,” said Greg Simon, who was executive director of the cancer moonshot in 2016, when Biden oversaw it as vice president. “This is the beginning of the outside game.”
The cancer initiative, which was formally relaunched by Biden in February, has held numerous meetings in recent months with the administration’s “cancer cabinet” — officials throughout the government who are working on anti-cancer initiatives — as well as advocates and industry representatives.
Simon praised the administration’s focus on ARPA-H, saying that it will pioneer a crucial role that no other health agency can handle. NIH, which focuses on basic research, “can’t transform itself into a development agency that prioritizes technologies and cures,” he said.
The new agency “is the beginning of an effort to tie the work of NIH to the needs of the population by making leaps and technological forays that NIH is not set up to do,” Simon added. Congress has approved $1 billion for the new agency.
Cary Gross, director of the Cancer Outcomes, Public Policy and Effectiveness Research Center at the Yale School of Medicine, said one part of Biden’s efforts, while not technically party of the moonshot, could make a big difference — a cap of $2,000 per year on out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries.
“If that was the only thing that happened in the first six months of the moonshot, that is a tremendous win,” Gross said.
Gross urged the leaders of the moonshot and ARPA-H “to lean into the idea that there are many prohibitively expensive [drugs] that are on the market that we do not have adequate understanding of their risks and benefits.” He said the administration should come up with a plan to research how well the drugs perform in actual patients, who tend to be older and sicker than participants in clinical trials.
“I think most patients don’t recognize how much uncertainty” surrounds the drugs’ effectiveness, he said.
Edward Abrahams, president of the Personalized Medicine Coalition, an advocacy group that focuses on targeted therapies and other treatments, praised the new executive order designed to ensure that cutting-edge biotechnologies — including cellular therapies critical for cancer treatments — are manufactured in the United States. And he welcomed the announcement of a major clinical trial launched by the National Cancer Institute to test so-called liquid biopsies, blood tests use to detect cancer at its earliest stages.
“These ideas are something the federal government can do to move the needle forward,” he said.
Ellen Sigal, chair of Friends of Cancer Research, said Monday’s steps, along with the new leaders at key agencies, suggest the moonshot effort, along with the current pace of scientific innovation, “could truly change what a cancer diagnosis means for patients.”
“I am not anti-treatment, but we are much more interested in finding early treatments than in trying to prevent cancer in the first place,” Brawley said.
Biden has become a strong advocate for cancer research, with much of his inspiration coming after the death of his son Beau from brain cancer in 2015. His efforts were at times deeply personal — he has used his own connection with cancer to speak with others, frequently on the campaign trail — and at times political, as he turned it into a cause he sought to address with new federal policies.
“Everywhere we go, people share their stories, literally in grocery stories, airports, rope lines,” he said on Monday.
Biden’s anti-cancer efforts also provided a rare moment of bipartisanship in Washington. Biden worked closely with Republicans — including Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — to win passage of the 21st Century Cures bill. It was one of the last pieces of legislation that Barack Obama signed as president, and McConnell also announced that the Senate would rename the law’s cancer program after Biden’s son, an emotional moment that caused Biden to tear up from the presiding officer’s chair in the Senate chamber.
“He’s known the cruel toll this disease can take,” McConnell said of Biden. “But he hasn’t let it defeat him.”
Biden for years had used Beau’s death to speak about, and advocate for, cancer initiatives. He has talked more openly in recent months about the possibility that his son’s cancer resulted from his military service near toxic burn pits in Iraq and Kosovo. Last month, with bipartisan support, he signed the PACT Act, new legislation that provides additional coverage for veterans who, like his son, were exposed to toxic burn pits during their military service.
And while Biden invoked President Kennedy’s aspiration for the moon, also on his mind was Edward M. Kennedy, the late Massachusetts senator and longtime Biden ally who died of the same brain cancer as Beau.
Just after landing in Boston, Biden spoke about Sen. Kennedy campaigning for him during Biden’s first Senate race, in 1972. Later, he reflected on the Kennedys helping him after his wife and daughter died in a car crash shortly after the election.
“Your family was there for me,” he said to Caroline Kennedy, the late president’s daughter who introduced Biden. “And I’ll never forget it.”
The latest: Democrats, led by Schumer, have confirmed 80 of Biden’s judicial nominations
10:18 PMNoted: U.S. sent $1.3 billion in small-business covid aid abroad, raising new fraud fears
9:35 PMBiden: Scientists are exploring using mRNA technology to fight cancer | 2022-09-12T23:20:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden touts cancer 'moonshot' at JFK Library, but challenges remain - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/12/biden-cancer-moonshot/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/12/biden-cancer-moonshot/ |
Whether Ukraine’s gains are permanent, Western intelligence officials said, depends on Russia’s next moves, especially whether President Vladimir Putin orders up reinforcements
By Shane Harris
A Ukrainian soldier approaches a destroyed Russian vehicle on the road to Balakleya, in Ukraine's Kharkiv region, on Sept. 11. (AP)
A Ukrainian counteroffensive that has sent Russian forces into a hasty retreat could mark a turning point in the war and raise pressure on Moscow to call up additional forces if it hopes to prevent further Ukrainian advances, U.S. and Western officials said Monday.
Whether the gains are permanent depends on Russia’s next moves, especially whether President Vladimir Putin implements a military draft or orders reinforcements from elsewhere to offset heavy losses in Ukraine, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share recent intelligence analyses.
In mere days, Ukrainian military forces have retaken nearly all of the Kharkiv region that Russian forces occupied since the opening of the war. The rapidity of the pullback appears to have stunned Russian military troops and commanders, officials said.
“The Russians are in trouble,” one U.S. official said bluntly. “The question will be how the Russians will react, but their weaknesses have been exposed and they don’t have great manpower reserves or equipment reserves.”
Ukrainian forces appeared to be moving ahead carefully and consolidating their gains, another official said, noting that Russian forces seem to have recognized that they lacked the weapons and manpower to hold newly liberated towns and villages in the northeast of the country. Some Russian forces abandoned tanks, armored vehicles and ammunition as they fled.
The officials were skeptical that Putin, who has resisted calling up additional forces, would resort to extreme tactics such as the use of chemical or tactical nuclear weapons. For all their shortcomings, the Russians still have the capability to regroup and hit back hard, some officials cautioned.
But the recent gains have fueled a new sense of optimism that Ukrainian forces could recapture more territory in the coming weeks and potentially force the Russians out of the land that they have held since the war began in February. Ukrainian military and intelligence officials have long been confident of their eventual victory, often in the face of skepticism from U.S. and Western allies.
“Certainly it’s a military setback. I don’t know if I could call it a major strategic loss at this point,” the U.S. official said, echoing others who said that it was too soon to say if the momentum had fully shifted in Kyiv’s favor and that heavy fighting was likely to continue.
Russia holds large amounts of territory in the east and in southern Ukraine, including the strategically important cities of Mariupol and Kherson. Ukrainian breakthroughs there would be more significant than those of recent days, officials said. But fighting in those regions has taken a heavy toll on Ukrainian forces, who say they lack the artillery needed to dislodge better equipped and entrenched Russian forces. | 2022-09-12T23:44:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Intelligence points to potential turning point in Ukraine war - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/12/ukraine-russia-retreat-us-intelligence/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/12/ukraine-russia-retreat-us-intelligence/ |
In this frame grab from video provided by the No on 30 campaign, California Gov. Gavin Newsom urges voters to reject Proposition 30. The ballot measure would raise taxes on people who make more than $2 million a year. Most of the money from the tax would go to programs that help people purchase electric cars. The proposition is funded by ride-hailing company Lyft. (No on 30 Campaign via AP) (Uncredited/No on 30 Campaign) | 2022-09-13T00:50:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | California governor opposes tax on rich in statewide TV ad - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/california-governor-opposes-tax-on-rich-in-statewide-tv-ad/2022/09/12/1ace759e-32fa-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/california-governor-opposes-tax-on-rich-in-statewide-tv-ad/2022/09/12/1ace759e-32fa-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
Transcript: The Path Forward: Retail with Joanne Crevoiserat
MS. GIVHAN: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Robin Givhan, senior critic‑at‑large.
Joining me today is the CEO of Tapestry, Joanne Crevoiserat‑‑sorry about that. I'll say it again. Joanne Crevoiserat. She is the chairman of the New York‑based Tapestry, which includes Stuart Weitzman, Coach, and Kate Spade.
Joanne, thank you so much for joining me, and pardon that slipup over your last name.
MS. CREVOISERAT: No worries, Robin. I've heard it all before. I married that name over 33 years ago, so I'm used to it.
MS. CREVOISERAT: It's great to be here with you. Thank you for having me.
MS. GIVHAN: Before we get started, I just want to remind everyone that we'd love to hear from you. So, please, you can send us your comments and questions by tweeting @PostLive, and hopefully, we'll be able to even get to a couple of your questions.
So, Joanne, I wanted to start sort of a couple years back at the beginning of the pandemic. You were originally the CFO, beginning in August of 2019, and then you became the CEO, and it often seems like women ascend to the top job just as businesses are experiencing some kind of peril. So I'm curious to know what were the initial thoughts, reactions as you realized what the pandemic meant for business.
MS. CREVOISERAT: Well, it was an interesting time, and I would say Tapestry, as an executive team, we were in the process of preparing for change and transformation.
When I joined, as you mentioned, in 2019 as the CFO, we recognized as an executive team the need for us to change the way we did business so that we could amplify and accelerate our performance behind all three of our brands: Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman. And so, as we thought about that, even pre‑pandemic, we said, you know, we want to be ready to do business in what we called at the time the "new world of retailing, and that world to us looks like a world where consumer trends were changing much faster. The speed of change was happening faster and faster, that consumers were more digitally connected, and there was much more innovation in terms of data and analytics in our space. And we had an infrastructure that we knew we could rely on and use and leverage more to connect with consumers, and that environment required us to be more responsive as an organization.
So we were focused on harnessing the power of our organization, the power of our capabilities to move faster, and to your point, the pandemic only amplified those trends. The consumer was changing rapidly through the pandemic, both with the social unrest as well as the changes to their shopping behaviors, being more digital, and wanting to be more connected to brands whose values they shared.
So a lot of the work we had done early in the pandemic was preparing us actually to perform in the pandemic and, even more importantly, perform now that we're coming out of the pandemic and meeting consumers in new places.
MS. GIVHAN: You mentioned the speed at which fashion is changing and how that affects the retail environment. I mean, the pressures for that kind of change, I mean, do you look towards fast fashion? Are you looking at social media? I mean, what are the factors that are really causing that incredible speedup?
MS. CREVOISERAT: Well, you know, our focus is to stay close to our consumers, and, you know, what we're seeing is values really matter. And one of the things that we have done over the past three years is really get focused on the values of each of our brands and become more clear in how we communicate the values of the brand. That's been one part of the transformation. So communicating what and how you communicate with consumers has become so much more important.
And then as you stay close to consumers, the things they value and what they're looking for from a brand in terms of product, we've gone through incredible transformation over the last couple of years in just how the consumer is thinking about casualization and now how they're thinking about reengaging with the real world, and in order to perform as a fashion brand, you have to be close to the consumer and stay ahead of those preferences and be able to bring the creativity that we all bring to our business in to product and innovation in product that the consumer will really value and that will be part of their life.
We are not focused actually on fast fashion, and our brands, all of them, stand for high‑quality product. And it's interesting because we create our products really one at a time. They are crafted to last, and we know that the consumer appreciates that about our brands. And we see consumers choosing our brands because of that fact that they know these are handbags or footwear that they're going to have with them for a long time that will stand the test of time, but that also strike that great emotional cord, that they're really pleased to bring into their wardrobes and wear.
MS. GIVHAN: I know in your recent earnings report, you projected revenue of something, I think, like $8 billion by 2025. I mean, I think we all know that the average consumer doesn't necessarily need a new handbag or a new pair of shoes, regardless of how fabulous they might be. I mean, how are you looking to propel that kind of growth?
MS. CREVOISERAT: Yeah. Well, we're looking at growth across all of our brands and across all of our geographies. We operate a globally diversified business, and we see new consumers coming and engaging with our brands, particularly younger consumers. So, you know, we're not‑‑we're focused on delivering products, as I mentioned earlier, that are crafted to last.
I asked‑‑actually, in one of our stores, we were talking to a store manager about why she loved‑‑we were in a Coach store‑‑why she loved working at Coach, and she said three reasons. You know, the first is "This team is my family," and the second is "I feel that I am empowered to run my business and support it," but the third part of that story was "And I know that I'm selling a product, a beautiful product that our customers will take home with them and have for lifetime."
And our brands actually live longer than a lifetime. We have (Re)Loved program with Coach where we repair, we refurbish. So we're putting product in the marketplace that is, to my earlier point, crafted to last, but we're also introducing this to more consumers around the globe and increasingly a younger consumer who cares and aligns with the values of our product. And, again, those are products that those customers can wear confidently forever.
MS. GIVHAN: I mean, you mentioned that younger consumers, they are increasingly concerned about the impact that fashion has on the environment. Many of your brands focus on leather goods. I mean, how are you balancing those, in some ways, competing ideas, the emphasis on leather goods but also trying to be a good citizen of the environment?
MS. CREVOISERAT: Yeah. Our business is‑‑our‑‑what we call our "social fabric" has been part of our business from the beginning, and our social fabric talks about our focus on our people, the planet, and our communities. And we are executing our ESG initiatives really as part of the fabric of our business. It's so important for‑‑
MS. GIVHAN: I'm sorry. Joanne, could you‑‑ESG, what does that stand for?
MS. CREVOISERAT: Environmental, social, and governance.
MS. GIVHAN: Thank you.
MS. CREVOISERAT: Sorry about that.
MS. CREVOISERAT: I hate to use phraseology, but that is the‑‑that is the bucket that many investors actually ask us about, and it is about sustainability and how we think about it.
And, as I mentioned, we have three pillars to our sustainability programs that have to be part of the fabric of who we are as a company, and those three pillars are around our people and making sure we're driving a diverse and inclusive workplace as well as impacting the communities around us.
And the planet is about our sustainability focus and how we think about and how we're moving forward to make a positive impact. You know, we've committed to procuring 100 percent renewable energy in all of our owned operations, and we have a longer‑term commitment to driving net‑zero emissions by 2050 or sooner, no later than 2050. So we are working on the things that matter and make a difference.
We've done some work on traceability and mapping of our raw material; as you mentioned, leather. Leather is a key component of our product, and it is a material that lasts. And right now, it is a byproduct of the meat industry, but we're also experimenting with other materials and sustainable materials that we're incorporating more and more into our bags, things like recycled polyester and environmentally preferred materials. So we'll continue to test and learn behind that.
We're aggressively moving in that direction, and we're staying, importantly, in touch with what our consumers are looking for from us, and that's our focus. We want to make sure we're managing our business in a sustainable way. It matters for, frankly, risk management in the supply chain, but it also matters because we want to do the right thing for the environment, for our planet, and we want to stay close to our consumers and deliver goods that they expect, which are high‑quality, long‑lasting goods that they can be proud to wear.
MS. GIVHAN: You mentioned the supply chain, and, you know, that is certainly something that is top of mind for anyone in manufacturing, production. I mean, how is that‑‑how are you dealing with the supply chain now, particularly with the zero‑covid policy in China? And how are you balancing that with the things that you mentioned, trying to reduce that carbon footprint?
MS. CREVOISERAT: Well, we‑‑you know, we have seen profound disruption in the supply chain. Our industry is working through, I think, disruptions that, you know, at least in my career have never been as challenging as it has been the last couple of years.
We manage a globally diversified supply chain, which certainly helps us navigate starts and stops. You mentioned zero covid. Actually, very little of our production is in China where that policy has had some disruption, but we've experienced disruption around the world, as has our industry, and navigating that has been challenging.
I think having a diverse footprint has helped. We have flexibility that we're able to move manufacturing around when we see disruption, and our team has proven the ability and the agility to manage through all of the changes and disruptions that we've had. And, actually, we have driven growth above pre‑pandemic levels, even with all of that disruption.
And I think, you know, as we think about the supply chain and managing it, globalization and scale is important, but that diversity and that footprint is important for us to have flexibility and risk management as we're managing through the environment. So those are all critically important, and we're building on our proven capabilities in that area for even more flexibility.
MS. GIVHAN: I know for the luxury market, you know, Russia was always a point of big consumption. How is the Russian war in Ukraine affecting your sales there? Have you, like other companies, pulled out, or what's happening with that?
MS. CREVOISERAT: We‑‑you know, at Tapestry, we had very little business in Russia, actually. We had a small wholesale business, and we have stopped shipping into that, into that market. And, you know, we look at the world and the appetite for luxury goods as an opportunity for us, but that is not a large opportunity.
Where we see our business building, we have real strength in North America, and we have strength in China and Japan. And Europe is a good business, although we are not as penetrated in the European market. And so, you know, we have a lot of confidence in our ability to continue to drive growth, particularly in the luxury goods market in North America, in our key markets of North America and China, and, you know, China has had tremendous disruption over the past year. But we continue to see opportunity long term in that market as well as the rest of Asia and in Europe and in Japan, so, you know, a global footprint, just not much business as all in Russia.
MS. GIVHAN: You mentioned Europe. I've always been curious that, you know, American luxury brands don't usually have an enormous footprint in Europe, and I'm wondering if there are particular cultural reasons, traditional reasons why that might be the case. I mean, Europe is sort of known as, you know, the Ground Zero for a lot of luxury fashion businesses. Is some of that just sort of they are protective of their own?
MS. CREVOISERAT: You know, that's an interesting question. You know, what we see in Europe, we've learned a lot actually over the last few years. With the disruption, it's been an opportunity for us to really learn about our businesses.
You know, we have a pretty big tourist business in Europe. It was driven by a lot of tourism in the market, and certainly, when covid happened in the market for tourism, the tourists weren't showing up at the same level. We had to rethink, you know, how we thought about our business, and we have actually begun‑‑you know, we've been driving growth. Again, our penetration there, it's less than 5 percent of our business. So we have tremendous opportunity still in the market, but we've begun driving significant growth as we've leaned in to talking to a domestic consumer.
And, if you think about our products, our products represent tremendous value in the marketplace compared to the traditional European luxury players, who have continued to take price up. Our products represent a tremendous value, always have, and even more now, and we're getting better at speaking to the domestic consumer in Europe and meeting them both in stores but also in digital channels. And that has really unlocked strong growth in the market.
MS. GIVHAN: The digital channels, does that mean that for you, the brick‑and‑mortar sites are sort of going the way of the dodo? I mean, are you really moving away from that and putting it all into online?
MS. CREVOISERAT: Yeah. That's a question that I hear frequently, and, you know, what I‑‑what I like to say is that digital is an "and," not an "or," because, you know, leaning into digital is leveraging the capabilities that we've invested in over time and meeting the customer where they are. And, to me, it's not about whether a customer chooses to shop only in online or in store. The consumer is becoming more omnichannel‑connected, and they may start their journey in a digital space from discovery to purchase to advocacy. That happens over a continuum, and it could start online and end with a purchase in a physical store, or it could start in a physical store and end with a purchase online. It could start on social media. We've become better at engaging consumers and actually transacting on social media.
So there are a number of different paths the consumer may take, and our focus at Tapestry is to follow the consumer, to meet the consumer where they are, and provide a seamless and consistent experience for that consumer, regardless of where they engage our brands.
Now, certainly, during the pandemic, when stores were closed, the consumer was shopping online, and that was‑‑you know, that's how they could engage with our brands. But, importantly, the store represents an important physical touchpoint, and I think, even most importantly, they have an opportunity, the consumer, to connect with our associates when they're in a store environment. And, in fact, that has been a real differentiator, I think, for our business because our associates are such passionate brand ambassadors. Even when stores were closed, our customer was reaching out to our associates for engagement. So we've begun and our associates are beginning to become influencers of their own right, meeting consumers not only in a physical store but also in virtual spaces. And that, I think, has potential even more to amplify our brands and blurs the lines even more between the digital and the physical.
MS. GIVHAN: I know one of the biggest areas of turnover in terms of employee was‑‑employees was in the area of retail. How are you finding hiring new associates, retaining associates, training them so that they understand the product and they are able to engage with customers? I mean, are you having those same kinds of hurdles in hiring employees that so many other industries are?
MS. CREVOISERAT: Yeah. Well, in fact, we are not seeing the same challenges that others are, and I believe it's because we have a long history of recognizing the power of our associates and rewarding them. You know, our store managers receive equity. They're owners of our business, and I walk into stores today, and I talk to associates who have eight, ten, twelve years of experience with our brands. And that, I know from my over 35 years in this industry, is unusual, and there is a passion that our teams have behind our brands. And we've rewarded that. You know, we reward that with how we pay. When all of our stores shut down in the pandemic, we continued to pay our associates.
And today, even when I go to our stores‑‑and I'm in stores quite frequently‑‑I hear from our associates how much they value that experience. They still talk to me about the way the company treated them during the pandemic is something they'll never forget, and they have a passion and a commitment and a level of engagement that is, you know, in the top quartile of our industry. And that is what powers our business, and that is what powers our brands.
MS. GIVHAN: You mentioned that sometimes your store associates are sort of micro‑influencers, but recently, you signed on with perhaps the influencer of influencers, with Kim Kardashian now the brand ambassador for Stuart Weitzman. I am curious. How much can Kim Kardashian sell? I mean, she's out there a lot.
MS. CREVOISERAT: Yeah. So we think about our influencer strategy in multiple tiers, right? We have a big celebrity influencer that has large reach and get‑‑and drives awareness for our brands, but we also have influencers who represent our brands and, you know, even micro‑influencers. So it's not just one touchpoint of the brand.
And you mentioned our store associates. Our store associates are passionate about our brands, and they've begun engaging in social media in and of their own. So they're creating followings. Our customers can be passionate advocates for our brands, and they influence many.
But, you know, as we think about and as we talked about our business over the last few years, it has been about getting close to our customer. But it's also been about brand building, and we want to make the investments behind our brands that drive growth and health for the long term.
And we have changed our P&L to focus on that. We've generated a lot of efficiencies in our business, and we're driving higher operating profit. But we're doing that also with higher marketing spend so that we can continue to invest in our brands and ensure that we, as I said, protect them and help them grow for the long term.
And, when we think about an investment like Kim Kardashian, we do it with a strategic intent. Stuart Weitzman is a real gem of a brand. Our customers love the brand for the fashion and for the comfort and fit that it provides, but Stuart Weitzman has an opportunity to drive awareness. It has low awareness in the markets where it trades. So, if you're trying to build, as we are, with that brand, awareness, higher awareness for our brand, particularly with the younger millennial consumer, there's no better investment than we can make, we believe, than with Kim Kardashian, who will help, help us amplify the brand, let lots of people know about it. And we know that when consumers come to our brand, we have‑‑they're 70 percent‑‑there's a 70 percent that they'll return to the brand. So to know the brand is to love the brand, and we think this will help more people know the brand.
MS. GIVHAN: I mean, I'm always curious about the impact of social media and influencers. Do you get to a point where someone like a Kim Kardashian or, you know, Jennifer Lopez who has been an ambassador for Coach, where their impact becomes just too diluted?
MS. CREVOISERAT: Well, authenticity is important as it relates to influencers and the customer today, and the customer understands when a brand is authentically showing up in their feed. So it is important for us to find influencers who authentically connect with our brands, and Jennifer Lopez authentically connects with Coach, has been part of the Coach story for decades, honestly, from her video back in the '80s until all the way through today. She's very authentic New York celebrity, yes, but authentic to Coach, and I think that's why it works. She also speaks to multiple generations and multiple ages.
So we feel great about our partnership with Jennifer Lopez, and we're looking forward to the impact that Kim Kardashian will have with Stuart Weitzman.
MS. GIVHAN: Well, I would love to ask, since you were recently appointed to the board of GM, if there are lessons that the auto industry can learn from the fashion industry.
MS. CREVOISERAT: Well, it's a tremendous honor to join the GM board, given their focus on innovation and the transformation that they're driving. You know, their ambition to become all electric with a vision for a world with zero crashes, zero congestion, and zero emissions is certainly something that I am proud to be a part of. And I'm looking forward to being part of those discussions.
And, you know, as I draw from my own experience at how to engage consumers with brands and brand building, you know, I hope to bring that to the company and drive that brand loyalty and engage with consumers in new ways.
MS. GIVHAN: As we wrap up, I would love if you could look into your crystal ball and give us a sense of what you see to be the future of retail, and in your perfect world, what would it look like?
MS. CREVOISERAT: So we just rolled out our three‑year‑‑as you mentioned, our three‑year ambition, and we talk about‑‑we called it "future speed," and what I see happening is consumer trends moving faster and faster. And to win in retail and to win in fashion, I believe that we have to stay close to our consumer, and we have to move with agility to drive innovation at every touchpoint of our brands. And we've engineered our organization to be able to deliver for our consumers wherever and however they choose to engage with our brands‑‑that's whether it be in a digital space or a physical space‑‑and to really talk about the purpose and the drivers behind our company as Tapestry as well as each of our brands, because that is how consumers emotionally connect with brands. And that's our focus at Tapestry, and we're looking forward to making it happen.
MS. GIVHAN: Well, I very much appreciate your time today, Joanne. That's all the time that we, unfortunately, have. So thank you very much for being with us.
MS. CREVOISERAT: Thank you, Robin. It's a real pleasure.
MS. GIVHAN: And, if you would like to know more about what’s coming up with Washington Post Live, please go to our website at WashingtonPostLive.com where you can find information about upcoming programs.
I'm Robin Givhan. Thank you very much. | 2022-09-13T00:51:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transcript: The Path Forward: Retail with Joanne Crevoiserat - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/09/12/transcript-path-forward-retail-with-joanne-crevoiserat/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/09/12/transcript-path-forward-retail-with-joanne-crevoiserat/ |
UNITED NATIONS — A former member of Afghanistan’s parliament urged the world on Monday to label the Taliban a “gender apartheid” regime because of its crackdown on human rights, saying the apartheid label was a catalyst for change in South Africa and can be a catalyst for change in Afghanistan. | 2022-09-13T00:51:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Former Afghan MP: Taliban is a `gender apartheid' regime - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/former-afghan-mp-taliban-is-a-gender-apartheid-regime/2022/09/12/0ce5727e-32f6-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/former-afghan-mp-taliban-is-a-gender-apartheid-regime/2022/09/12/0ce5727e-32f6-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
Ex-MLB player turned police officer dies in car crash en route to 9/11 event
Anthony Varvaro spent four of his six MLB seasons with the Atlanta Braves. (AP Photo/Chris Szagola)
Anthony Varvaro, a former MLB pitcher who became a police officer in his native area of New York, died Sunday in a car crash while on his way to work at a 9/11 memorial event in Lower Manhattan, according to a professional organization and major league teams for which he played. Varvaro was 37.
The Port Authority Police Benevolent Association said that Varvaro was “struck and killed by a wrong-way driver” early Sunday.
“Police Officer Anthony Varvaro will always be honored and never forgotten,” association head Frank Conti said in a statement. “Anthony’s wife and four children will remain in our hearts and will forever be a part of the PAPD Family.”
Raised in Staten Island, Varvaro pitched for three seasons at St. John’s University in Queens before he was drafted in 2005 by the Seattle Mariners. He reached the major leagues with Seattle in 2010, then spent four seasons with the Atlanta Braves before ending his playing career in 2016 with the Boston Red Sox organization. Varvaro went into law enforcement the following year with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
In a 2017 ESPN feature, Varvaro said that while growing up in the Staten Island neighborhood of Westerleigh, he was surrounded by civil service employees, teachers, nurses and other members of “professions that are pretty much dedicated to giving back.”
During his 2015 season with the Red Sox, Varvaro said, he was experiencing arm issues and felt his playing career was at “a crossroad.” Having submitted his name for a possible position with the Port Authority, he accepted a chance offered to him by the agency to join its police academy.
Varvaro told ESPN that when he was nearing the end of his training, he listed a preference to work at the World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan.
“To be able to work at that specific location, going back to the day of Sept. 11, 2001,” he said, “I feel like I’m honoring everyone who lost their lives that day.”
Varvaro “represented the very best of this agency, and will be remembered for his courage and commitment to service,” Port Authority officials said in a statement (via the Associated Press).
“On this solemn occasion as the Port Authority mourns the loss of 84 employees in the attacks on the World Trade Center — including 37 members of the Port Authority Police Department — our grief only deepens today with the passing of Officer Varvaro,” Port Authority Chairman Kevin O’Toole and Executive Director Rick Cotton said Sunday in their joint statement.
According to Staten Island Advance, his wife, Kerry Thomson, is a grandniece of Bobby Thomson, the former New York Giants player immortalized for his “Shot Heard 'Round the World” home run in 1951. Thomson and Varvaro attended the same Staten Island high school.
Before Monday’s game between the New York Mets and the Chicago Cubs, a moment of silence was held for Varvaro at the Mets’ Citi Field.
Mike Hampton, the head coach at St. John’s who was an assistant when Varvaro played there, said he was “at a loss for words that we’ve lost as exceptional a human being as Anthony.”
“Not only was he everything you could want out of a ball player,” Hampton said in a statement, “he was everything you could want in a person. My heart goes out to his family, friends, teammates and fellow officers.”
RIP PAPD PO Anthony Varvaro, EOW 9/11/22.
PO Varvaro was killed by a wrong-way driver while reporting to a PAPD 9/11 WTC detail. He served the PAPD 6 years, was 37 & survived by his wife & 4 children.
Anthony, rest in the Lord's eternal embrace. Always Honored, Never Forgotten pic.twitter.com/6U2LmUASLy
A right-handed reliever, Varvaro notched an ERA of 3.23 over 166 major league appearances and 183⅔ innings. His best season came with the 2014 Braves, for whom he delivered a 2.63 ERA in 61 appearances.
The Red Sox said Sunday they were “deeply saddened” by his death and offered condolences to his family.
“Words cannot express our heartbreak and how much we will miss Anthony,” Varvaro’s family said Sunday (via Staten Island Advance). “We are together today remembering Anthony’s accomplishments on the field and his service with the PAPD. But more importantly, how the little things were so much bigger to him, and he cherished every moment spent with friends and family.” | 2022-09-13T02:22:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Anthony Varvaro, MLB pitcher turned Port Authority cop, dies in car crash before 9/11 event - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/12/mlb-pitcher-port-authority-officer-car-crash-911-memorial/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/12/mlb-pitcher-port-authority-officer-car-crash-911-memorial/ |
My view on this changed when he went away to college and shared a two-bedroom suite with others. Compared to his suitemates, my son is neat, clean and considerate of the shared space.
Is this the way people are living? Are parents not teaching their children some basic level of cleanliness and how to share space?
I sent my son with cleaning supplies and showed him how to clean a bathroom. He knows how to clean a kitchen because he has been helping me clean up after meals at home. In one situation he was the only one that brought cleaning supplies. Cleaning supplies are a necessity!
Concerned: Adulting Lesson Number One: Never let your mom see your dorm room.
Today’s college students often enter shared living quarters never having shared a bedroom or bathroom. They’ve never done their own laundry, washed a dish, paid a bill, written a thank-you note, or had to clean up after themselves or others.
The whole idea of preparing an “adulting checklist” is somewhat infantilizing. These lessons — on taking care of oneself and contributing to the care of the group, should start with children at around age 4. Picking up toys, helping to set the table, and helping with cleanup and laundry should all be demonstrated in early childhood. Later, earning, saving and spending money should be layered onto these other valuable lessons.
For other parents: Yes, stress the positive aspects of keeping your space clean (show them how), and emphasize the pro-social benefit of contributing to the welfare of the group.
Dear Amy: Could you please advise me if it is okay to use the word “hate” in a sentence — if one uses it in a “polite” tone?
An example would be, “I hate it when a lot of things go wrong at the same time.”
Kathy: A long-running admonition during my own childhood was my mother’s warning about not using “four-letter words.”
Unlike other parents’ rules, hers had a twist, however. She said we could swear our heads off if we wanted to — only in the barn — (mostly, we didn’t), but we couldn’t say the word “hate.” Instead, we were instructed to say, “I dislike immensely.”
M: This grandmother definitely has a full plate. Thank you for your suggestion. | 2022-09-13T05:02:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Amy: My son's roommates don't help clean their college dorm room - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/09/13/ask-amy-college-roommates-messy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/09/13/ask-amy-college-roommates-messy/ |
Dear Carolyn: I am a bit confused. I know boundaries = YOU decide what you think, what you discuss, whom you see, where you go, how you spend your time, what you value, where you live, how you guide the trajectory of your life. I know gaslighting is being [twisted] out of your own judgment. But sometimes I feel like the two concepts are playing tug-of-war. For example, if my partner is choosing to spend time with his friends instead of prioritizing our family and our home, he is exercising his right to do what he wants. So when I talk to him about putting our family low on his priorities, am I pushing his boundaries? If he calls me sensitive for feeling sad, is he gaslighting me? Why is this hard to understand?
— Tug-of-War
Tug-of-War: This is a good example to dissect — though I’m sorry you’re having to live it:
Your partner is exercising his right to do what he wants. It is, always, his call to be with his family at the home he helped create, or with his friends. A rephrase, if it helps: Each of us always has a choice whether to be a decent, responsible adult or a self-indulgent adult-baby.
So, the matter of choice is pure — it’s his to make.
But that doesn’t mean choices come without consequences, and it doesn’t mean you’re prohibited from having or opining civilly on his choices.
Speaking up offers another case study: If you witness someone being selfish but you’re a disinterested observer — it doesn’t affect you and nobody asked your opinion — then it’s not your place to comment. If you were, say, his parent who lives independently of him, and you harangued him about his responsibilities, then you’d be crossing a boundary.
But as the person living with him and counting on him to meet his shared responsibilities, and who now has to do his share because he chose his friends over his family, you get to say exactly what you think of his choices. And attach consequences in the form of, say, securing your assets and calling an attorney.
Some of this will involve your mutual understanding of how much friend time is okay, which couples do need to talk about early on in good faith. Are you upset that he goes out once a week for a couple of hours? Nightly into the wee hours? What’s his attitude toward your social time? These affect the power dynamics.
On the feelings issue: You get to feel what you feel. But you don’t get to make your own facts. So, if you feel detached from your partner, then you feel what you feel. But if you declare, “You’re never home!” to a spouse with one measly bowling night, then your partner has grounds to say, “That’s not fair. I’m here six nights a week.” And then engage with you on the actual source of your feelings.
However you engage with someone — even hyperbolically — it’s not okay for them to respond dismissively. “You’re too sensitive” is a no; “I disagree that one night equals ‘never home’ ” is a yes.
Some people are indeed too sensitive — they react big to small things or take innocent ones as threatening — but brushing them off with emotional accusations isn’t the answer. Listening is, and specific facts are. Even when it turns out the relationship isn’t salvageable.
This is why gaslighting is tricky and persistent. It targets facts, so when you feel upset and try to stand up for yourself, you’re told there’s no solid place to put your feet.
It can help to talk to disinterested third parties, write down what you know, and consult the National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE or thehotline.org. | 2022-09-13T05:02:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: Am I controlling him or is he gaslighting me? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/09/13/carolyn-hax-control-gaslighting-relationship/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/09/13/carolyn-hax-control-gaslighting-relationship/ |
Miss Manners: I don’t like when my students wear hats indoors
I've been telling them that when you wear your hat inside, it gives the impression that you are in a hurry to leave. That makes your host (or teacher) think you don't want to be in their company, and that would be rude.
While appreciating your efforts to teach courtesy to your pupils and your children, Miss Manners is grateful to have the opportunity to help you do so on a deeper level. Otherwise, you may get some difficult questions.
But — here comes the deeper lesson — that does not mean that a given society’s customs may be ignored with impunity. Symbols are always arbitrary but can nevertheless carry great emotional weight. A hat on — or off — could be extremely offensive, given the setting and circumstances.
You will have to teach them that the question is not whether people approve of these rules, but whether they are even aware of them; that they should ask the question in a nonprejudicial way; and that they should ask people of different ages.
©2022 by Judith Martin | 2022-09-13T05:02:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Miss Manners: I'm don't like when my students wear hats indoors - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/09/13/miss-manners-hats-off-indoors/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/09/13/miss-manners-hats-off-indoors/ |
Big wins for “Ted Lasso” and “Succession,” and some meaningful nods to “Squid Game” and “Abbott Elementary” at Monday night’s Primetime Emmy Awards
Analysis by Travis M. Andrews
Sheryl Lee Ralph accepts the Emmy for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series for ABC’s "Abbott Elementary" at the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards on Monday in Los Angeles. (Phil McCarten/Invision for the Television Academy/AP Images)
Perhaps, after the past two years, you’re a little weary of surprises. If so, the Emmys are the awards show for you. They are more predictable than the Department of Defense master clock. Let’s put it this way: John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” won outstanding variety talk series for the seventh time in a row. Even John Legend playing piano during the “In Memoriam” reel felt like a rehash.
The 74th Primetime Emmy Awards seemed determined to bore the viewer into submission, an interesting choice considering a tight “Monday Night Football” game — you know, the kind of television that people actually still watch — was just a channel flip away.
Last week, Ian Stewart, one of the show’s producers, told the Hollywood Reporter of the show: “We want funny as hell and everyone celebrating together.” Everyone may have been together, but that’s about as close to his goal as they came. In fairness, standing out in a year with a Grammys featuring a heartfelt plea from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and an Oscars best remembered for one A-lister slapping another is a steep hill to climb. Monday’s Emmys show, on NBC, felt like a battle between pretty good speeches and pre-written lame jokes. It felt like we had stumbled into some corporate event. Wrong ballroom at the Wyndham.
Ironically, the most pleasurable moments of the night were the very ones the Emmy producers kept trying to cut short: the speeches. Case in point: After being cut off several times, Jennifer Coolidge started dancing to her walk-off music (“Hit the Road, Jack,” seriously?) after taking home the award for outstanding supporting actress in a limited series in HBO’s “The White Lotus.”
Some were powerful, such as veteran actress Sheryl Lee Ralph’s speech after winning an Emmy (outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series for ABC’s “Abbott Elementary”) after more than four decades on the tube, in which she celebrated by belting out a heartfelt rendition of “Endangered Species” by Dianne Reeves; or Lizzo sobbing as she accepted the trophy for reality-competition program.
Others were quirky. Jerrod Carmichael, accepting the award for outstanding writing for a variety special for “Jerrod Carmichael: Rothaniel” while clad in Puff Daddy’s white fur coat over a bare torso, said, “I wanted to win. I’m happy I won,” before ending by saying: “Goodnight everybody, I’m going to go home. I’m not, like, a sore winner, but I’m going to go home because I can’t top this right now.” Michael Keaton, winning outstanding actor in a limited series for his role in Hulu’s “Dopesick,” thanked his haters.
But the show itself felt staid, leaving the audience members thinking to themselves, “Haven’t we seen this before?” Despite the existence of more television than ever on more services than ever, most categories felt split between a couple of shows: “The White Lotus” vs. “Dopesick.” “Ted Lasso” vs. “Abbott Elementary.” (At times, “Ted Lasso” vs. “Ted Lasso.”) “A Black Lady Sketch Show” vs. “Saturday Night Live.” (In this case, they were literally the only two shows nominated in the outstanding variety sketch series category.)
Some of the night’s big winners may feel slightly familiar. Zendaya took home lead actress in a drama (HBO’s “Euphoria”) for a second time, while Jean Smart won lead actress in a comedy (HBO Max’s “Hacks”) again. Jason Sudeikis took home outstanding lead actor in a comedy series for Apple TV Plus’s “Ted Lasso,” which once again took the Emmy for outstanding comedy series. HBO’s “Succession,” which led the pack with 25 nominations, took home outstanding drama and a bevy of other awards.
A few awards flipped the recent Emmy script. The wins for “Abbott Elementary,” which included Quinta Brunson’s award for outstanding writing for a comedy series and Ralph’s acting Emmy, hinted that network television might be making a comeback. Meanwhile, Netflix’s breakout hit “Squid Game,” the first foreign-language series nominated for outstanding drama, took home outstanding actor in a drama for Lee Jung-jae and outstanding directing for a drama series for Hwang Dong-hyuk.
“People keep telling me I made history, but I don’t think I made history by myself,” Hwang said when accepting his directing award. “I truly hope ‘Squid Game’ won’t be the last non-English series here at the Emmys. And I also hope this won’t be my last Emmy either.”
Back in its old home — downtown Los Angeles’s Microsoft Theater — for the first time since the pandemic began, the Emmys once again looked like the Emmys. Mostly gone were the Golden Globes-style dinner-party seating of 2021 and the mostly virtual interface of 2020 that reminded viewers of the Zoom meetings they had spent the day enduring. Instead, some people were seated at tables in a dinner party-esque setup while everyone else sat in theater-style seating … watching the party guests.
Longtime “Saturday Night Live” cast member Kenan Thompson served as a reliable host, donning tails and a top hat, dubbing himself “mayor of television” and kicking the show off by introducing an aggressively modern, choreographed dance number set to iconic TV theme songs (“Friends,” “The Brady Bunch, “Law & Order,” etc.) and their remixes. (Is this TikTok, you might ask, moments after Thompson dismissed the social media platform as “tiny vertical TV.”) It served as a critical reminder that live television does not include a “skip intro” button.
He saved the monologue for about a half-hour into the show, during which he lobbed soft quips at streaming services — particularly Netflix, to which he pledged his salary from the evening. “I loved ‘Squid Game.’ And if you don’t know what ‘Squid Game’ is, it’s this contest you enter when you’re in massive debt and desperate for money,” Thompson said. “Joining the cast next season? Netflix.”
In fact, the crosshairs were on streaming all night. Later Bowen Yang, angling to be the night’s host, suggested Thompson could disappear “like a show on HBO Max.” It makes sense: The night arrived smack dab in the middle of a flash point for streaming services, which find themselves raising prices, adding commercials and cracking down on password-sharing while fighting over subscribers.
But, mostly, it was business as usual. A few shining moments included Moe from “The Simpsons” asking if there was “Beau Tocks” in the audience and the appearance of the “red light/green light” statue from “Squid Game.” Depending on your age, the true highlight was probably when Kel Mitchell — of “Kenan & Kel” — showed up and ordered a Good Burger from his old comedy partner.
If the well-run if overly familiar ceremony reminded us of anything, it was that a bit of chaos can be a balm, even when the idea of another surprise seems exhausting. No one needs to be slapped, of course, but an impromptu song, an off-the-cuff speech or some unexpected waterworks are the reasons we watch live television in the first place. Let’s hope the awards ceremony celebrating television keeps that in mind next year. | 2022-09-13T05:24:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 2022 Emmys recap: Stale show, but some stellar speeches - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/13/emmys-2022-recap-ted-lasso-sucession/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/13/emmys-2022-recap-ted-lasso-sucession/ |
LONDON, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 12: Labour party leader Sir Keir Starmer and UK prime minister Liz Truss leave the Palace of Westminster after the Presentation of Addresses by both Houses of Parliament in Westminster Hall at the Houses of Parliament on September 12, 2022 in London, England. The Lord Speaker and the Speaker of the House of Commons presented an Address to His Majesty on behalf of their respective House in Westminster Hall following the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The King replied to the Addresses. Queen Elizabeth II died at Balmoral Castle in Scotland on September 8, 2022, and is succeeded by her eldest son, King Charles III. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images) (Photographer: Leon Neal/Getty Images Europe)
That might seem like a time of maximum advantage for Labour leader Keir Starmer. Polls before Liz Truss took office showed Labour with as much as a recent 15-point lead; many voters felt Starmer would make a better leader than Truss. But public opinion can change rapidly. The Labour leader benefited from Boris Johnson’s self-destruction, Tory Party divisions and fears of a looming cost-of-living crisis. But Johnson is gone, and it’s not clear the other tailwinds will blow as strong under his successor.
Nor can Starmer assume voters will turn against Truss. The past few days have brought her extraordinary public exposure even if her role has largely been to stand by and soothe. It was Truss who had to address the nation when the news of the Queen’s death broke; Truss who will travel with the new king around the country; and Truss who will host leaders and luminaries from around the world at a state funeral for the ages.
Truss, the ultimate political animal, appears to be floating above the fray of politics, somewhere in the ether with the royal family at the moment. Even her critics have fallen silent for the simple reason that Britain can’t afford for her to fail at this delicate moment when the world is watching. She’ll soon be off to the United Nations General Assembly, another big stage opportunity to burnish her leadership credentials. These halo effects may be short-lived but first impressions of a leader can also go a long way.
It may be the second time that history has been unkind to Starmer. It didn’t help that the pandemic broke out soon after he took the reins of the Labour Party — it was hard for him to reach out to members and the broader public over Zoom. He seemed remote in part because he was. With a global and national health crisis, he had little choice but to row in behind the government. And when he did criticize the Conservatives over various pandemic policy failings, Johnson simply branded him Captain Hindsight. Starmer wisely used the opportunity to do some internal party housecleaning, but he couldn’t expect the public to take much notice.
His well-earned reputation for lawyerly competence worked in his favor when he could attack Johnson’s character, catch him out over policy details or call attention to various ethics scandals under his administration; but none of those lines of attack are available now. Truss is hard-working and in command of the details. Her government is far more diverse than Labour’s shadow benches.
The biggest problem for Starmer is that Truss has pitched her government’s tent on more traditional conservative ground, emphasizing tax-cutting and aspiration, while also providing the scale of relief for households and businesses that Labour itself has called for. If Labour is to win, it has to mount a Ukraine-sized counteroffensive in the former Red Wall seats that the Conservatives won in 2019. And that will require appealing to their aspirations and hopes, not just their fears and resentments.
But how to do that when the government is spending some £150 billion ($75 billion) to shield households and businesses from rising energy prices and promising to cut taxes?
Starmer may have cleared out most of the Corbynite elements from the upper echelons of the party, but that’s still a long way from presenting a cohesive governing vision. Labour is still seen as the party of unions at a time of widespread public-sector strikes, even as Starmer has kept his distance from the picket lines and awkwardly ordered his shadow bench to keep theirs. He wants to win over Brexit voters by showing he has moved on, but still opposes the government’s populist policy of confrontation with the European Union over Northern Ireland. He wants to show his party is business-friendly and driven to pursue growth, but it’s hard to see his big economic idea of a windfall tax on energy companies being an election-defining issue, even if it’s popular among voters now.
Starmer is convinced otherwise, of course. “This is the basic political divide,” he told Parliament. “They want to protect the excess profits of the oil and gas companies and we want to protect working people.”
In a week’s time, the politics button gets unpaused. The great and the good who convened to honor the Queen will return home. The King will recede somewhat from the public glare, and the new government will set out plans to fund the cost-of-living relief and deliver the promised economic growth.
It’s difficult to say whether those as yet undetailed policies will prove sufficient. Governments normally lose elections rather than oppositions winning them. But it would be wrong for the Labour Party to assume another Tory leader will be driven out. Voters will expect the opposition to offer some big ideas of its own. So far they aren’t in evidence. | 2022-09-13T05:24:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Liz Truss Has Stolen the Labour Party’s Thunder - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/liz-truss-has-stolen-the-labour-partys-thunder/2022/09/13/c0e4fbb6-3321-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/liz-truss-has-stolen-the-labour-partys-thunder/2022/09/13/c0e4fbb6-3321-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
In elections later this month in Italy, Giorgia Meloni, a former minister in a center-right government, is likely to become the country’s first far-right leader since Benito Mussolini. Her coalition partner Silvio Berlusconi is an old and loyal friend of Vladimir Putin; another of her electoral allies, Matteo Salvini, also admires the Russian demagogue and fulminates against immigrants and the European Union.
Meloni’s rise matters not only because Italy has been since the early 20th century a bellwether for far-right movements in Europe. More critically, Manfred Weber, president of the European People’s Party (EPP) — a family of mainstream, center-right parties across the continent — has publicly endorsed Berlusconi’s coalition with Merloni.
Unlike in many non-Western countries, right-wing parties in Europe and North America have a long record of respecting democratic norms. Take the EPP. It has the largest presence in the European Parliament; European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is a member. Recent leaders such as former German Chancellor Angela Merkel worked hard to isolate far-right elements. The EPP kept a fastidious distance from Germany’s xenophobic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), for instance.
In this the party was adhering to a long tradition. For decades after the calamities of Nazis and Fascism, even conservative European politicians were quick to marginalize the extreme right, recognizing that its hate-filled ideology was fundamentally incompatible with the basic values of democratic societies.
Against this backdrop of mainstreaming pariahs, Weber’s embrace of a far-right-dominated alliance seems especially sinister. It weakens the European Union’s own criticism of illiberal regimes in Hungary and Poland, and it enables further legitimization of neo-fascist movements such as Vox in Spain, which has already entered the Spanish political mainstream through its partnership with the center-right People’s Party.
Indeed, criticism of Biden’s speech in Philadelphia confirms that many mainstream politicians and journalists are either indifferent to or prepared to normalize the rapid degeneration of once-respectable right-wing parties. The United Kingdom’s most prominent politicians and journalists kept boosting the disastrous Tory government of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, despite mounting evidence — from his attempt to illegally prorogue the British parliament to tearing up an international treaty over Northern Ireland — of his contempt for democratic norms and the rule of law.
As growth slows, inflation rises, heat waves and floods become routine, energy shortages loom, and more and more citizens feel helpless before such changes, right-wing parties in western Europe and the US are likely to become more raucously extreme. They have few new solutions for today’s destructive economic and environmental crises. They can, however, channel social unrest to their advantage by reheating identities of race, religion and ethnicity, and retailing myths of national greatness.
• Biden Can’t See Why US Democracy Is in Trouble: Clive Crook
• Republican Paranoia Could Cost the Party: Jonathan Bernstein
• Not Everything You Dislike Is ‘ Anti-Democratic’: Tyler Cowen | 2022-09-13T05:25:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Right-Wing Parties Are Selling Out Across Europe, Too - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/right-wing-parties-are-selling-out-across-europe-too/2022/09/13/c1824e3e-3321-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/right-wing-parties-are-selling-out-across-europe-too/2022/09/13/c1824e3e-3321-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
BEIJING — President Xi Jinping is using his first trip abroad since the start of the pandemic to promote China’s strategic ambitions at a summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and other leaders of a Central Asian security group.
The Chinese leader is promoting a “Global Security Initiative” announced in April following the formation of the Quad by Washington, Japan, Australia and India in response to Beijing's more assertive foreign policy. Xi has given few details, but U.S. officials complain it echoes Russian arguments in support of Moscow’s attack on Ukraine. | 2022-09-13T05:25:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | China's Xi heads abroad to promote strategic role - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/chinas-xi-heads-abroad-to-promote-strategic-role/2022/09/12/add4f9a0-3316-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/chinas-xi-heads-abroad-to-promote-strategic-role/2022/09/12/add4f9a0-3316-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
FILE - This photo provided by the North Korean government shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un delivers a speech during a parliament in Pyongyang, North Korea, Sept. 8, 2022. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. Korean language watermark on image as provided by source reads: “KCNA” which is the abbreviation for Korean Central News Agency. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP, File) (朝鮮通信社/KCNA via KNS)
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea warned Tuesday North Korea that using its nuclear weapons would put it on a “path of self-destruction,” in unusually harsh language that came days after North Korea legislated a new law that would allow it to use its nuclear weapons preemptively. | 2022-09-13T05:25:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Seoul says N. Korea will self-destruct if it uses nukes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/seoul-says-n-korea-will-self-destruct-if-it-uses-nukes/2022/09/13/12d9ea52-331e-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/seoul-says-n-korea-will-self-destruct-if-it-uses-nukes/2022/09/13/12d9ea52-331e-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
Live briefing: Long lines form for queen’s viewing in London; King Charles III heads to Northern Ireland
King Charles III arrived in Edinburgh on Sept. 12 which marks the beginning of the second leg of the queen’s ceremonial journey to her final resting place. (Video: The Washington Post)
Long lines are forming in London as mourners jostle for a glimpse of Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin as it makes its way to the British capital Tuesday, in the latest leg of its ceremonial journey to her final resting place at Windsor, near London. Officials had warned of a wait as long as 30 hours.
King Charles III and Queen Consort Camilla are in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, on Tuesday morning to meet with political leaders and hear condolences. For many Irish people, the queen’s death has raised mixed emotions: the Republic of Ireland gained its independence from Britain in 1922, ending eight centuries of English political and military intervention. Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom, and unresolved tensions between nationalists and unionists loyal to the Crown led to decades of violence.
Northern Ireland’s devolved government is in disarray, a potentially thorny situation that could put a wrinkle in the king’s charm offensive to greet subjects in all four corners of the United Kingdom.
In Edinburgh on Monday, crowds thronged the city’s cobblestone streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of the hearse that transported Queen Elizabeth to St. Giles’ Cathedral. King Charles addressed Scotland’s parliament and pledged “to always seek the welfare of the people.”
As the king and his siblings followed the queen’s coffin through Edinburgh, police detained a man filmed heckling Prince Andrew, the queen’s third child, who has been the subject of numerous controversies. “Andrew, you’re a sick old man,” the protester called out. The Duke of York was forced away from his public royal duties after one of Jeffery Epstein’s victims alleged he had sexually abused her. Andrew has denied the abuse allegations and has not been criminally charged.
King Charles and Camilla fly to Belfast in the morning. There, they will attend an exhibition on the late queen’s relationship with Northern Ireland, and meet with local politicians.
The Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly will offer official condolences to the king at 1:20 p.m.
Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, the queen’s coffin will be taken from St. Giles’ Cathedral at 5 p.m. and transported to a local airport. At 6 p.m., the coffin, accompanied by Princess Anne, will be flown aboard Royal Air Force aircraft to west London. It’s expected to arrive at about 6:55 p.m.
The coffin will then travel by hearse to Buckingham Palace, where the king, Camilla and other royals will receive it. The coffin will then rest in the palace’s Bow Room, which is often used for state events.
Hundreds of citizens in the former British colony of Hong Kong queued for hours under the blazing sun to pay respects to the late queen. Recently, some textbooks were revised to say that Hong Kong was never a British colony but was occupied, aligning with Beijing’s narrative about the city’s history.
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she expects her country to become a republic eventually, but that her government has no plan to push the issue following the queen’s death. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also appeared to play down the likelihood of a vote on a possible Australian republic during his current term.
The queen’s beloved corgis roamed Buckingham Palace as if they owned the place. What happens to them now? They’ll live with Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson at Royal Lodge, a residence on the Windsor estate.
What happens at Queen Elizabeth’s funeral? The public will be able to view the coffin in Edinburgh until Tuesday, as the queen’s last ceremonial journey takes her from Balmoral castle, where she died, to her resting place in Windsor.
Diana, Harry and Andrew. The queen sought to keep her family’s private affairs out of the public eye. What are some of the scandals the royal family weathered during her 70-year reign?
Crowds lined Edinburgh’s Royal Mile for a glimpse of the queen’s coffin. But Scots have complex feelings about the late queen — and independence. What happens next?
The queen’s legacy is complicated in the United Kingdom’s former colonies. Some of them fought violent struggles to secure their independence during her reign. “As their leaders paid homage to the queen — with the presidents of Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria among those who offered tributes — residents of former colonies publicly recounted the havoc wreaked by the empire,” Rael Ombuor, Rachel Chason and Meena Venkataramanan write.
Claire Parker contributed to this report.
Live updates: From Edinburgh to London, thousands queue to mourn the queen | 2022-09-13T05:26:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The death of Queen Elizabeth II: Latest updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/queen-elizabeth-death-king-charles-latest-updates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/queen-elizabeth-death-king-charles-latest-updates/ |
FILE - This April 1938 photo shows the USS Oklahoma. Sailor Herbert “Bert” Jacobson, 21, from Grayslake, Ill., to be laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery on Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022 — more than 80 years after he was killed in the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor. Scientific testing that was started a few years ago on remains of men whose bodies were pulled from the USS Oklahoma after the attack has led to the identification of Jacobson and nearly 400 others. (AP Photo/File) (Uncredited/AP) | 2022-09-13T06:56:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sailor killed at Pearl Harbor to be laid to rest, at last - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/sailor-killed-at-pearl-harbor-to-be-laid-to-rest-at-last/2022/09/13/65a193fe-3326-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/sailor-killed-at-pearl-harbor-to-be-laid-to-rest-at-last/2022/09/13/65a193fe-3326-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
(Ting Shen/Bloomberg)
“Right now, I have the strongest record of growing manufacturing jobs in modern history.”
— President Biden, in a tweet, Sept. 10
Regular readers know we are often wary when a president proclaims success in creating jobs. Presidential decisions and new laws can certainly impact job creation — over time. But it is hard to disentangle the importance of those factors from broader economic forces that are beyond a president’s control.
When we saw this tweet, we immediately thought “coronavirus.” The global pandemic that emerged early in 2020 destroyed millions of jobs, though some rehiring began almost immediately. Almost 1.4 million manufacturing jobs were lost from February to April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but then 233,000 were regained in May. By the time Biden took office in 2021, the number of manufacturing jobs in February was about 560,000 below the level of a year earlier — meaning more than 800,000 had been regained before Donald Trump left office.
The United States finally returned to the pre-pandemic level of manufacturing jobs in June of this year. Biden undoubtedly would credit passage of his coronavirus relief package in March 2021 as providing the necessary spark. But major relief packages were also passed under Trump, illustrating why it’s so hard to credit any single president for job gains under his watch. About 525,000 of the restored jobs came after passage of Biden’s covid relief bill, smaller than the number recovered under Trump.
This chart of BLS data, via the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, puts the manufacturing job gains in context. It shows a pretty steady gain since June 2020, though the gains briefly started to flag in April 2021, indicating that Biden’s covid relief package might have helped restore some momentum.
Now, with that context in mind, let’s look at Biden’s tweet: “Right now, I have the strongest record of growing manufacturing jobs in modern history.”
When we first saw the tweet, we assumed that he was comparing 19-month periods of different presidents. Under Biden, about 630,000 manufacturing jobs have been gained, or 5.2 percent, from February 2020 to August 2021.
That’s a pretty good record, but it was topped by Richard M. Nixon. From February 1972 to August 1973, more than 1.3 million manufacturing jobs were added, or 7.6 percent. Given that Biden was a senator back in 1972, we would have thought this was still “modern history.”
But it turns out Biden was not making this comparison at all. Instead, he was talking about the monthly job-creation average over the entire presidencies. Note this White House chart making the point in more detail.
This is a strange way to do it. It mixes the records of presidents who served one or two terms — or less. Biden of course has not yet served two years, meaning he has far fewer months to divide into the total. A lot could change in the next two-plus years — which is apparently why the tweet includes the phrase “right now.”
Interestingly, Trump played the same game. In his 2020 State of the Union address, just before the coronavirus tanked the economy, he claimed: “Incredibly, the average unemployment rate under my administration is lower than any administration in the history of our country.” Trump was also comparing his uncompleted term to the four- or eight-year average for other presidents.
His line brought bad karma. Within weeks, the economy collapsed and unemployment soared, rendering his claim incorrect.
We also find it ironic that the White House chart depicts Barack Obama as a manufacturing-job loser. During the Obama administration, when Biden served as vice president, White House spokesmen insisted on saying manufacturing-job growth should be measured from the low point reached during the Great Recession in February 2010 — not from when Obama took office a year earlier. Obama’s flacks claimed that he should not be tagged with the earlier job losses because he inherited a plunging economy. Moving the starting point to February 2010 turns Obama’s lackluster job record into a big 900,000 gain in manufacturing employment.
Apparently that spin has been forgotten.
(A president takes the oath of office Jan. 20. But for the Current Employment Statistics survey, employers report data to the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the pay period that includes the 12th of the month — before the new president takes office. So February, not January, would actually cover the first pay period after the new president took charge. Depending on whether you start counting in January or February, it results in a swing of 200,000 manufacturing jobs in Obama’s record. Such a huge difference in a two-term presidency because of a one-month shift simply shows how mindless and arbitrary this game can be.)
The White House declined to provide an on-the-record comment.
Once again: The number of jobs in the United States rises and falls for reasons that sometimes have little to do with a president’s policies. While Obama had the bad luck to start his presidency during an economic swoon, Trump and Biden had the good fortune to start their presidencies during economic booms. But as Trump found out, that luck does not always last.
In this case, comparing the monthly manufacturing jobs records of presidents who served four years and eight years with Biden’s 19 months is as silly as Trump’s unemployment claim during his 2020 State of the Union address. The tweet mitigated the claim somewhat with the phrase “right now” — acknowledging that it could change — but it’s still a misleading metric even if the numbers add up.
Two Pinocchios | 2022-09-13T08:09:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden’s flimsy claim he has the ‘strongest’ manufacturing jobs record - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/bidens-flimsy-claim-he-has-strongest-manufacturing-jobs-record/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/bidens-flimsy-claim-he-has-strongest-manufacturing-jobs-record/ |
“I’m close to fluent, not perfect,” CJ Abrams said of his Spanish. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
When the Washington Nationals’ infield met at the mound for a pitching change Friday, most of the players gathered there grew up in Spanish-speaking countries. Joey Meneses, a native of Mexico, was playing first base. Second baseman Luis García was born in New York but spent most of his childhood in the Dominican Republic. César Hernández, filling in at third, is from Venezuela.
They all shared the same first language — except for shortstop CJ Abrams, who is from Georgia. Over the years, though, Abrams has learned Spanish. So when he’s in the huddle, he’ll listen and occasionally join in with his teammates.
“I’m close to fluent, not perfect, but rookie ball helped a lot with the Padres, instructs, just talking with all of my teammates,” Abrams said.
Abrams has already made himself at home with his teammates during his brief time in Washington. He’s not a man of many words, but he’s often laughing and conversing with his Spanish-speaking teammates in the clubhouse.
“A lot of [my] teammates only speak Spanish and they learn English,” Abrams said. “We [should] try to learn Spanish as well.”
Before Abrams became a top prospect, and then a part of Washington’s rebuild, he was a freshman at Blessed Trinity Catholic High in Roswell, Ga., where he took Spanish from teacher Jodi Gucer. Gucer remembers her former student as a serious kid who was mature for his age and picked up the material easily. Abrams was quiet. He didn’t go out of his way to speak in class and didn’t ask many questions.
Gucer said quiet kids often get overlooked, but typically they’re paying attention, observing and absorbing information. That was what Abrams did. When Gucer would call on Abrams, he would know the answer.
“He was fearless,” Gucer said. “He wouldn’t hesitate. He would just respond. It wasn’t like he would get nervous or anything like that. Very, like, stealth. Cool. Confident, but not cocky.”
Holly Jiménez had him in class the next two years, and the two became close. Jiménez called Abrams humble and said he treated others with respect. She ran Division I track and later ran marathons. She joked that she and Abrams used to occasionally argue at the end of class, in Spanish and English, about which sport was more difficult.
“Sometimes when he wanted to prove his point, especially the first year, it would be in English. He was good at Spanish, though,” Jiménez said. “And I remember I was like, ‘Well, if you really are going to do this, and go play professional, you need to be paying attention because you’re going to have a lot of teammates that you can practice with.’ ”
Jiménez said Abrams never expressed a desire to learn with an eye toward the future, but he was interested in a wide variety of subjects, including Spanish, business and math. He had a strong foundation, but Jiménez said that by the time he was a junior, she noticed he had increased his time practicing and speaking Spanish.
Jiménez said students are sometimes afraid to speak up because they’re afraid to make mistakes, but Abrams was never timid and didn’t care that his grammar wasn’t perfect. That set him apart. After he reached the pros, Abrams would message Jiménez about how much he enjoyed talking to his teammates — even if there was a learning curve.
Abrams said he used what he learned in class when he turned professional but noted, “School and actually applying [Spanish] is a lot different.” Most notably, the conjugations and tenses were difficult. There are also variations of the language, depending on what country someone is from, so slang and differences in dialect can be a barrier.
He said his Spanish-speaking teammates make mistakes when speaking English, so he doesn’t feel any embarrassment when he makes errors in Spanish. Most notably, he and García — the Nationals’ future in the middle infield — have become close. They joke in the clubhouse in both languages, and García said Abrams understands Spanish well.
“Yeah, that feels good,” García said. “We play in the middle infield. We’re always talking in the middle of the game, and I speak English and he speaks perfect English. But he’ll speak in Spanish and I speak perfect Spanish. We’ll speak in whatever . . . we feel comfortable with.”
In a way, Abrams follows in the footsteps of Brian Dozier, a member of Washington’s 2019 World Series team, who learned Spanish during his playing career. The Mississippi native said it helped him bond with his teammates.
Neither Gucer nor Jiménez would have predicted that Abrams would have continued with Spanish; they often can’t guess that with the students they teach. But both also said they aren’t surprised.
“I always tell my students, I ask them, ‘What’s the one thing that stands between you and being fluent in Spanish?’ And they say all sorts of things: It’s motivation,” Gucer said. “CJ had to be motivated to learn it. No one can necessarily motivate you — I think that comes from within.” | 2022-09-13T08:18:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How CJ Abrams became comfortable as a Spanish speaker - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/cj-abrams-spanish-nationals/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/cj-abrams-spanish-nationals/ |
Shortly after Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban notched up a fourth landslide election win in April, the European Union triggered a probe that may ultimately deprive his government of billions of euros in funding. Long concerned about what it calls the erosion of the rule of law under Orban, the EU sees getting him to change course as vital to bolster democracy and EU unity. Failure may dilute the EU, strengthen polarization or even rekindle talk of Hungary’s potential exit from the bloc.
Since 2010, Orban has made it harder for outsiders to hold the government to account. He’s appointed loyalists to the courts, the chief prosecutor’s office and the media authority. A big parliamentary majority allowed him to write a new constitution that opposition critics condemned as an attack on democracy and human rights. And he’s targeted minorities, including the Roma and LGBTQ communities, seeking to limit their rights. In 2019, Hungary became the first EU country to lose its rating as a full-fledged democracy at Freedom House, a Washington-based advocacy group that assesses political systems. Meantime, Transparency International, a not-for-profit graft watchdog, rates Hungary as among the most-corrupt countries in the 27-nation bloc.
3. What changed?
The European Parliament voted in 2018 to trigger a rule-of-law probe against Hungary into what it called “a clear risk of a serious breach” of the EU’s democratic principles. A new legal process adopted in 2020 allows the EU to potentially cut off funding when its financial interests may be undermined. The European Commission, the EU’s executive, triggered that so-called conditionality mechanism in late April. It has until late September to make its recommendation to the European Council, where leaders of EU member states make the most important decisions.
The two are intertwined but the commission must limit its probe to areas that could affect the EU budget and undermine the financial interests of the bloc. So while Orban’s comments on racial purity, his clampdown on independent media or his restrictions on LGBTQ rights have triggered condemnation from others within the EU, they aren’t the focus of the investigation. The independence of the judiciary, however, is in the spotlight as it’s seen as central to a country’s ability to tackle graft and issue unbiased judgments.
5. How much money is at stake?
The European Commission hasn’t stated how much is at risk. The country’s share of the 2021-2027 EU budget is about 36 billion euros ($36.5 billion). There’s also Hungary’s 5.8 billion euro share of pandemic recovery funds. The EU has delayed releasing that, citing corruption concerns. The forint has been one of the world’s worst-performing currencies this year, with investors citing uncertain outlook for EU funds as contributing to the selloff.
6. How has Hungary’s government reacted?
At first, Orban’s ministers attacked the EU decision to start the investigation, calling it a political move to help the just-defeated opposition. But conscious of the need to unlock EU funds, the government has offered what it’s calling a “comprehensive” package of steps to address corruption concerns, including the setting up of a new anti-corruption agency.
7. Is that enough?
That’s unclear. Orban has been adroit at outmaneuvering EU institutions over the past decade and critics see his promises of reform ringing hollow. For example, he’s pledged to make the anti-corruption agency “independent.” But other nominally autonomous institutions in Hungary are nonetheless heavily influenced by Orban and his ruling party, including the courts. This time, the EU could make the disbursement of money conditional on the actual implementation of any pledges. The commission also could recommend funding be cut or that the probe against Hungary be closed. The final decision by the leaders would come one to three months later. | 2022-09-13T08:27:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why the EU Is Getting Tough on Hungary’s Orban - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-the-eu-is-getting-tough-on-hungarys-orban/2022/09/13/89543cd8-333b-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-the-eu-is-getting-tough-on-hungarys-orban/2022/09/13/89543cd8-333b-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
SEATTLE — Geno Smith threw two first-half touchdown passes, Denver fumbled twice at the 1-yard line in the second half, and the Seahawks beat the Broncos 17-16 in Russell Wilson’s return to Seattle.
PHOENIX — Mookie Betts hit a three-run homer, Cody Bellinger added a two-run double and the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Arizona Diamondbacks 6-0 behind Tyler Anderson, becoming the first major league team to clinch a playoff spot this season.
CLEVELAND — Angels star Mike Trout homered in his seventh consecutive game, one shy of the major league record, but the AL Central-leading Cleveland Guardians beat Los Angeles 5-4.
SAN FRANCISCO — Rookie starter Spencer Strider struck out nine over five innings but allowed a season-high nine hits as his winning streak ended at four, and the Atlanta Braves missed a chance to gain ground in the NL East, losing to the San Francisco Giants 3-2.
NEW YORK — Carlos Alcaraz’s U.S. Open championship moved him to No. 1 on Monday at age 19, making him the youngest man to lead the ATP computerized rankings since they began in 1973.
BOSTON — Nonbinary athletes will be able to run in next year’s Boston Marathon without having to register as members of the men’s or women’s divisions. | 2022-09-13T08:27:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Monday's Sports In Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mondays-sports-in-brief/2022/09/13/66946b0c-3334-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mondays-sports-in-brief/2022/09/13/66946b0c-3334-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
Giorgia Meloni’s astonishing rise is changing both the politics and political tone of her country.
Giorgia Meloni, who heads the Fratelli d’Italia party, is likely to become Italy's first female leader after this month's general election. (Valeria Ferraro/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images)
ROME — The favorite to be Italy’s next prime minister has rocketed almost from out of nowhere.
What will surely change, though, is Italy’s tone. Meloni takes shots at the “LGBT lobby” and the “globalist” left. She highlights anecdotes about immigrant crime. She has said that “everything we stand for is under attack” — Christian values, gender norms. Some of her stances — like opposition to gay adoptions, for instance — don’t get much traction among Italian voters, but she cites them as evidence that she cares more about principles than popularity.
Those on the left have sounded the alarm, saying that Meloni could push Italy into Europe’s illiberal bloc, alongside Hungary and Poland, fighting against diversity and agitating against Brussels. Her opponents argue that her views can veer into the extreme. They cite past remarks — such as a speech from 2017 — in which Meloni said mass-scale illegal immigration to Italy was “planned and deliberate,” carried out by unnamed powerful forces to import low-wage labor and drive out Italians. “It’s called ethnic substitution,” Meloni said at the time, echoing the far-right “great replacement” conspiracy theory.
For now, Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party — the Brothers of Italy, a name that echoes lyrics in the national anthem — is the most popular in the country, favored by roughly one-quarter of voters. It has a coalition agreement with other parties on the right, giving it overwhelming odds to prevail against a fractured and reeling left. The right-wing bloc has said that the premier job should go to the leader of the party with the most votes. Still, following the Sept. 25 general election, the president, Sergio Mattarella, has final say on who gets the mandate.
Meloni acknowledged in her Post interview that Italy is facing extraordinary challenges. She mentioned the rising cost of energy and raw materials, uncertainty about whether the pandemic might come roaring back, and Italy’s towering public debt — which perpetually leaves the country several missteps away from crisis. There’s a reason Italy has had 11 governments in the past 20 years.
A savvy campaign strategy
“Salvini had won the lottery ticket,” said Giovanni Orsina, director of the school of government at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. “Then he lost it and Meloni got it.”
Even those who disagree with Meloni’s politics concede that she strategized wisely.
Especially as it pertains to her positions on Europe, she has moderated more noticeably than the other Western European nationalist who earlier this year made a run for power, France’s Marine Le Pen. While Le Pen’s platform had ideas that would have led to standoffs with Brussels — like prioritizing national law over E.U. law — Meloni’s does not, said Luigi Scazzieri, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Reform.
“This kind of sanitization and Europeanization has gone a lot further in Meloni’s case than in Le Pen’s,” Scazzieri said.
Enrico Letta, the president of Italy’s center-left party and Meloni’s chief sparring partner on social media, made the point in an interview with The Post that Italy isn’t in the midst of a sudden far-right surge. In European elections in 2019, Salvini’s League got 34 percent of the vote. Meloni’s party got 6 percent. As then, roughly two-fifths of Italians still favor the far-right parties; the difference is that Meloni has siphoned off much of Salvini’s support.
“It’s not a wave — it’s her,” Letta said. “Part of the country is betting on her, because she is young and new.”
He predicted that her honeymoon would “end soon,” and that the inevitable compromises would sully her reputation.
Meloni, and those around her, said she has built her party up with no shortcuts.
“We took the longer route,” she said. “Italians today understand that we’re a very reliable party.”
Well prepared for confrontation
“Years later I’m grateful to those rednecks,” Meloni wrote.
All these years later, Meloni references her adversaries all time, sometimes with glee. On Facebook, she cites skeptical or critical news headlines. On the trail, she talks about how the left is obsessed with trashing her and is doing “everything to stop us.” Even in a video she released last month, rejecting any party ties with Italy’s fascist past, she noted that suggestions to the contrary had been “inspired by the powerful media circuit of the left.” In her interview with The Post, she explicitly cited the “globalist” left as an enemy, and said the West is “paying for the weakness” of its ideology, which she said seeks to flatten differences in identity.
Italy has had all sorts of leaders — including Silvio Berlusconi, with his politics-as-theater approach to governing (and who six years ago discouraged a pregnant Meloni from running for mayor of Rome, saying a “mother cannot be mayor”).
Meloni is hardly the first to relish political combat. But some Italians worry she’ll further polarize the country and loosen some of the restraints in society. Edith Bruck, a Holocaust survivor and poet who lives in Rome, and who has befriended Pope Francis, noted Meloni’s shorthand way for introducing herself: as a woman, a mother, an Italian and a Christian.
“What is the implication of that?” Bruck said. “That she isn’t Muslim or Jewish? It all goes back to the idea that Europe is Christian and non-Christians are a threat.”
Meloni’s allies see it differently. Giovanbattista Fazzolari, a Brothers of Italy senator who has known Meloni since she was a teenager, said Meloni would represent the whole country, but that there could be “exceedingly hard” clashes with entrenched powers that she judges aren’t working “for the good of the nation.”
During a speech on the island of Sardinia, a young man with a rainbow flag evaded security and made his way onstage. He was beginning to talk about his desire for legalized same-sex marriage when Meloni interjected.
As the man left the stage, she said, “I respect people’s courage to stand up for what they believe in.” | 2022-09-13T08:27:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Who is Giorgia Meloni? Far-right leader may be Italy's first female prime minister. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/giorgia-meloni-italy-election-right/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/giorgia-meloni-italy-election-right/ |
Giorgia Meloni, leader of the right-wing Fratelli d'Italia party, is poised to become her country's first female leader after the general election on Sept. 25. (Francesca Volpi/Bloomberg)
This recent interview with Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party and likely her country’s first female leader after the upcoming election, has been edited for length and clarity. | 2022-09-13T08:28:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Giorgia Meloni’s interview with The Washington Post - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/giorgia-meloni-italy-interview/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/giorgia-meloni-italy-interview/ |
Ukrainian forces recaptured most of the Kharkiv region. Despite setbacks, the Kremlin insists that the war will continue on Sept. 12. (Video: Reuters)
Ukraine’s successful counteroffensive and a subsequent retreat by Russia have fueled optimism in Kyiv and the West that the tides of the war are turning. But Moscow on Monday said it would not back down from its ambitions. Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region could mark a turning point in the war, Western officials said. The development prompted a Russian retreat — described as a “regroup” by Moscow. “The Russians are in trouble,” one U.S. official told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share recent intelligence analyses. “The question will be how the Russians respond.”
The Kremlin’s top spokesman said Monday that Russia’s war on Ukraine will continue “until the goals that have been set are achieved,” and he maintained the government’s phrasing of the conflict as a “special military operation.” Russia’s ambitions have shifted during the war. After failing to capture the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, in the early days of the invasion, it is now focusing on capturing the eastern Donbas region.
Those goals in Ukraine’s east are threatened by Kyiv’s reclamation of the city of Izyum, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a D.C.-based think tank. The development in the Kharkiv region — with Izyum’s positioning nearly essential for Russian offensives in the area — “ended the prospect that Russia could accomplish its stated objectives in Donetsk Oblast,” the institute wrote in an analysis Sunday evening. It added, “The loss of Izyum dooms the initial Russian campaign plan for this phase of the war.”
Ukraine’s military said Monday that it had retaken another 20 towns and villages in the past 24 hours. The claims could not be independently verified, but photos of Ukrainian flags raised in Bohorodychne and Sviatohirsk, on the banks of the Donets River, were widely circulated Monday on social media. The Institute for the Study of War reported that Kyiv has retaken more territory in the past five days than Russia has seized since April. See maps of Ukraine’s gains here.
Kyiv and Moscow have indicated that they are interested in an agreement to establish a protection zone around Europe’s largest nuclear plant, Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, said on Monday. Both sides were “engaging” and asking “many questions,” as the details of the agreement were still being worked out, he said.
Oleksandr Shapoval, a renowned dancer at Ukraine’s National Opera ballet, was killed in combat in eastern Ukraine, said a senior Ukrainian official, Anton Gerashchenko, confirming media reports. Shapoval went to battle voluntarily and served as a grenade launcher, he said. An opera employee wrote on Facebook of Shapoval: “Eternal glory and memory to the hero!”
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to meet in Uzbekistan this week, the leaders’ first face-to-face meeting since the start of the war and Xi’s first trip abroad since the pandemic. China is one of only a few countries to maintain friendly relations with Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, though Beijing has come under criticism for its ongoing support of Moscow.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said he will propose a peace plan for the war, suggesting that a “mediation committee” be established that includes Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Pope Francis and U.N. Secretary General António Guterres. López Obrador, who has not issued sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, called for a truce of at least five years.
Russian state TV pundits long painted the invasion as a “special military operation” that is achieving its goals of “demilitarizing” and “denazifying” Ukraine. But the setbacks of the past few days sent Kremlin-friendly television shows and newspapers into a frenzy, as they struggled to explain to audiences why Ukraine had retaken more land than Russia had captured since April.
The result, writes Post reporter Mary Ilyushina, was the broadcast of unusually tense scenes to millions of Russian households, with some uncharacteristically blunt concessions. | 2022-09-13T08:28:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russia-Ukraine war latest updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/russia-ukraine-war-latest-updates/ |
Emmys: 12 things to know, from Sheryl Lee Ralph’s speech to Zendaya’s omnipresence
Sonia Rao
Kenan Thompson was technically host of the Emmy Awards, but his “Saturday Night Live” co-star Bowen Yang showed up as “backup co-host,” just in case. (Phil Mccarten/Invision/AP)
Yes, the Emmy Awards were on a Monday this year — it happens occasionally thanks to football. So if you missed the Hollywood glitz and glamour of a weeknight ceremony, here are some of the biggest highlights from the three-hour telecast, which gave the most trophies to HBO’s “The White Lotus” (five), followed by Apple TV Plus’s “Ted Lasso” (four).
And while there were quite a few repeat winners (“Ted Lasso” won best comedy for the second time; Julia Garner continued her “Ozark” reign; “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” may never lose an Emmy again), some newcomers had pretty good nights, as well.
“The White Lotus” picked up five trophies at the 74th Emmy Awards in Los Angeles on Sept. 12. The show had many repeat winners as well as first-time awardees. (Video: Allie Caren/The Washington Post)
1. ‘Succession’ won the top drama prize
At 25 nominations, “Succession” was primed to do well — and it did. In addition to winning best drama, the HBO series landed an Emmy for supporting actor Matthew Macfadyen, who beat co-stars Nicholas Braun and Kieran Culkin, and a writing win for creator Jesse Armstrong.
Armstrong, who is British, delivered some spicy remarks criticizing the monarchy while accepting the Emmy for best drama. The writer called out King Charles III, still referring to him as a “prince” just days after the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II.
“Big week for successions: New king in the U.K. This for us. Evidently a bit more voting involved in our winning than Prince Charles,” Armstrong said. Emmy-nominated actor Brian Cox, who is Scottish, jokingly nudged Armstrong to “keep it royalist.” Armstrong quickly responded by clarifying that he was “not saying we’re more legitimate in our position.”
“We’ll leave that to other people,” he concluded.
Complete recap of the 2022 Emmy Awards
2. A song-and-dance number opened the show
Hosting an award show is probably atop the list of Hollywood’s least desirable jobs these days — all those mean tweets! — but Kenan Thompson was a good sport, opening the ceremony by wearing a top hat and declaring himself the mayor of television. Given his lengthy run on “Saturday Night Live,” he may as well be. (His pal Pete Davidson showed up later in the ceremony to call him “an absolute treasure.”) Thompson helped kick off the show with a song-and-dance number like we’ve never seen, joining some backup performers to show off interpretive dances to famous TV theme songs including “Friends,” “The Brady Bunch,” “Stranger Things,” “Game of Thrones” and … “Law & Order.”
3. Sheryl Lee Ralph had the best acceptance speech of the night
Sheryl Lee Ralph finally got her flowers (and an Emmy trophy) for her supporting role on the ABC sitcom “Abbott Elementary.” The veteran actor, who garnered a Tony nod in 1982 for her role in Broadway’s “Dreamgirls” and later endeared herself to the fan base of the beloved UPN sitcom “Moesha,” took the stage to a standing ovation. She opened her speech by singing a few lines from “Endangered Species” by Dianne Reeves.
“I am an endangered species,” she belted. “But I sing no victim’s song / I am a woman, I am an artist / And I know where my voice belongs.”
Ralph, 65, understood the power of the moment, urging “anyone who has ever, ever had a dream and thought your dream wouldn’t, couldn’t come true, I am here to tell you that this is what believing looks like,” she said. “This is what striving looks like!”
“Don’t you ever, ever give up on you,” she continued, “because if you get a [show creator] Quinta Brunson in your corner, if you get a husband like mine in your corner, if you get children like mine in your corner, and if you’ve got friends like everybody who voted for me, cheered for me, loved me …” Ralph trailed off before raising her trophy in the air. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!”
Judge all the looks from the Emmys red carpet
4. Kenan Thompson zeroed in on Netflix in his monologue
After he was done dancing, Thompson returned for a more classic monologue a little later in the show, taking shots at some of the expected targets. He remarked of “Euphoria” star Zendaya’s recent birthday: “26 is a weird age in Hollywood. You’re young enough to play a high school student, but you’re too old to date Leonardo DiCaprio.” He also spent time dunking on Netflix’s financial woes, reminding everyone that “Abbott Elementary” used its Emmy marketing money to buy supplies for public school teachers. “That’s what it’s all about! It’s about helping those in need,” he said. “That’s why all my salary from tonight’s show is going straight to Netflix.” Later, Bowen Yang appeared as his “backup co-host,” joking that something crazy could happen and Thompson “could vanish into thin air like a show on HBO Max.”
And of course, the SNL stalwart appealed to the hearts of millennials everywhere when he coordinated a surprise reunion with his former Nickelodeon co-star, Kel Mitchell of “Kenan & Kel.”
I’m here for that Kenan and Kel reunion. I love seeing them together! Nostalgia vibes in full effect. https://t.co/66SRNXlddA
— CJ Johnson (@cjjohnsonjr) September 13, 2022
5. ‘The White Lotus’ and its stars won big
This year, five-time Emmy winner “The White Lotus” was the show that couldn’t be stopped. Creator Mike White won two awards — for writing and directing — while stars Murray Bartlett and Jennifer Coolidge won in the supporting actor categories, which were stacked with fellow “White Lotus” stars. The show itself also won best limited series. (We’ll pretend that at least one of those awards actually went to “Enlightened,” the HBO series White co-created with Laura Dern years ago that was canceled much too early for our liking.)
The most memorable speech of the bunch was certainly Coolidge’s, during which she noted that she took a lavender bath earlier in the night that “made me swell up inside my dress.”
“I’m having a hard time speaking,” she continued. “But anyway, this is so thrilling.”
Soon enough, producers gave Coolidge the cue to wrap up. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing!” she exclaimed before dancing to the music playing her off.
6. Jimmy Kimmel refused to move during Quinta Brunson’s speech
While presenting the award for best writing for a comedy series, Jimmy Kimmel pretended to be passed out on the stage next to Will Arnett, who quipped that it was the “13th time in a row” the late-night host lost best variety series and that Kimmel “just got into the skinny margaritas back there.” It was your standard, if corny, awards show gag, but viewers were left unimpressed when Kimmel continued the bit after Quinta Brunson was announced as the winner for “Abbott Elementary” and after she quipped “Wake up, Jimmy. I won!”
It was a historic accomplishment for Brunson, who became only the second Black woman to win the category (Lena Waithe won in 2017 for a standout episode of Netflix’s “Master of None”) and the third Black person overall (Larry Wilmore won the award for “The Bernie Mac Show” in 2002). Brunson pulled off the feat as star, creator, executive producer and showrunner of the ABC series — the only network comedy in the nominee mix this year. (Wilmore was among the people Brunson thanked “for teaching me to write television as well as he did” during her moment onstage.)
Some social media users did not appreciate the optics of the White late-night host lying prone while Brunson received one of their industry’s highest honors for her work. Asked about the moment backstage, the “Abbott Elementary” creator told reporters she knows Kimmel personally and that the late-night host has been supportive and encouraging of her career. At the same time, Brunson — a comedian of the social media era — acknowledged that she hadn’t yet seen what Twitter had to say about it.
“Tomorrow maybe I’ll be mad at him,” Brunson joked to reporters backstage. “I’m going to be on his show on Wednesday, so I might punch him in the face.”
7. ‘Squid Game’ won several historic awards
The Korean-language Netflix drama, which became a global phenomenon immediately after bowing on the streamer last year, was nominated in several major categories (and 14 overall). Despite steep competition (from “Succession” and “The White Lotus” in particular), the series — which follows financially desperate people as they compete in a series of deadly games in hopes of erasing their debts — pulled off historic wins at Monday’s ceremony.
Star Lee Jung-jae became the first actor from a foreign-language series to nab the top acting prize in the drama category. Writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk, who earned the best directing trophy, teased the show’s upcoming second season during his acceptance speech. “People keep telling me I made history, but I don’t think I made history by myself,” Hwang said of his big win. “I truly hope ‘Squid Game’ won’t be the last non-English series here at the Emmys. And I also hope this won’t be my last Emmy either.”
8. Oprah reminded everyone that the Emmys are a big deal
Excuse me, anyone who is complaining that the Emmys don’t matter: The producers know you exist, so they brought out none other than Oprah Winfrey to set the record straight. Before presenting the lead actor in a limited series trophy to Michael Keaton for “Dopesick,” Winfrey reminded everyone how exclusive the Emmy statues actually are. Calling the trophy “the most coveted television accolade on the planet,” the consummate host said that with 8 billion people on Earth and only 25 Emmys awarded on Monday, the chances of winning were about 300 million to 1.
She turned that into a classic Oprah inspirational speech about never giving up: “It starts with a dream, a dream strong enough to endure the knockdowns and rejections. You can lose a role or lose a whole series, but there is one thing you can’t lose — and that’s the belief in yourself.”
9. Lizzo gave a moving acceptance speech
Emmy producers didn’t dare play off Lizzo, who delivered an emotional speech while accepting best competition program for “Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls,” on which women vied to become the pop star’s backup dancers. The Grammy-winning performer took the stage with other women who worked on the show: “The stories that they share, they’re not that unique — they just don’t get the platform,” she said.
Amid several shout-outs to her “big girls,” who cheered her on from their balcony seats, Lizzo reflected on what the competition show’s win would have meant to her years ago.
“When I was a little girl, all I wanted was to see me in the media,” she said. “Someone fat like me, Black like me, beautiful like me. If I could go back and tell little Lizzo something, I’d be like, ‘You’re gonna see that person, but b----, it’s gonna have to be you.”
10. Zendaya won her second Emmy for ‘Euphoria’
Even before Zendaya won her second Emmy for playing a teen struggling with drug addiction in HBO’s “Euphoria,” she was a hot topic at the ceremony as presenters, nominees and even host Thompson shouted her out from the stage. The actress, who won the same category at the virtual 2020 ceremony, is the first Black woman to win the Emmy for lead actress in a drama series more than once and is the youngest two-time Emmy winner ever.
In her acceptance speech, which she gave following a standing ovation from her peers, Zendaya thanked fans of the show for sharing their own addiction and recovery stories with her. “My greatest wish for ‘Euphoria’ was that it could help heal people,” she said. “I want you to know that anyone who has loved a Rue or feels like they are a Rue … I am so grateful for your stories, and I carry them with me and I carry them with her.”
11. The ‘Only Murders in the Building’ trio was everywhere
Hulu’s breakout comedy “Only Murders in the Building” went 0-for-6 during the show, but starring trio Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez spent plenty of time in the spotlight — mostly for a bunch of “she’s so young, they’re so old!” jokes. Thompson noted that the actors were seated right in front, so if they won, “it should only take [Martin and Short] 15 minutes to walk up here”; Yang said their dynamic was “like watching Lady Gaga take care of two Tony Bennetts.” (In reality, Short helped several people up the steps to the stage himself.)
More charitably, announcer Sam Jay described them as “two legends and an actress who has more Instagram followers than there are people on this earth.” Although the three poked fun at one another when they presented the award for variety talk series (Gomez: “You know what I love about working with these guys? No paparazzi, ever.”), they made it clear that they get so much attention because they actually like one another.
12. Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak reunited … again
Is it just us, or does it seem like Kaling and Novak appear together at every award show? The real-life best friends and former stars of “The Office” presented best writing for a limited series, once again setting Twitter ablaze with theories about a potential romance between them.
Kaling has previously expressed that Novak, her ex and the godfather of her two children, is just a friend — but that didn’t stop her from joking onstage about forming “insanely complicated” ties to colleagues. Kaling also poked fun at the “lazy” nominees for how few episodes they were tasked with writing, whereas network writers like her and Novak had to write 22 episodes a year that “would take up your whole life.” Bet the “Abbott Elementary” team appreciated that one. | 2022-09-13T09:32:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Emmys: 12 things to know, from Sheryl Lee Ralph’s speech to Zendaya’s omnipresence - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/13/emmys-sheryl-lee-ralph-zendaya-quinta-brunson/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/13/emmys-sheryl-lee-ralph-zendaya-quinta-brunson/ |
A'ja Wilson's mother, Eva, and father, Roscoe Jr., were with her Sunday as she received the WNBA MVP award from Commissioner Cathy Engelbert. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
LAS VEGAS — Roscoe Wilson Jr. goes to see his daughter at least once per week.
There’s no conversation — Roscoe just hangs out and watches her for 15 or 20 minutes, maybe takes a few pictures. Sometimes he doesn’t even get out of the car.
Mostly, Roscoe gazes up at A’ja, who’s standing there on one foot, more than 11 feet tall, bronzed from head to toe, basketball in hand, ponytail streaming behind her. The statue of the two-time WNBA MVP was installed on the campus of the University of South Carolina in 2021, and Roscoe can’t stay away.
“I don’t want to sound like I’m crazy, but hey, you know,” Roscoe said with a laugh.
Eva Wilson essentially rolls her eyes at her husband’s routine. He’ll even make excuses for why he wound up outside Colonial Life Arena, where the Gamecocks play their home games. The statue is the third on the Columbia campus to represent a specific individual and is the first of a woman.
“ ‘Oh, I just happened to be [over there]’ — you didn’t happen to be nowhere,” Eva said, mimicking their conversations. “You ain’t happen to be by the statue. I’m like, ‘Roscoe, really?’ It would not surprise me, to be honest, if Roscoe [did] go every day.
“If somebody said, ‘Eva, I work at the Colonial Life Arena and I see your husband every day,’ it wouldn’t surprise me. And I work downtown — what, two miles from it — and I don’t.”
They were on the court next to the real A’ja Wilson on Sunday, beaming with pride, as she received her second MVP trophy from Commissioner Cathy Engelbert before the start of the WNBA Finals. She has led the Aces to the championship series for the second time since the franchise moved to Sin City in 2018. The team drafted Wilson with the No. 1 pick that year, has advanced to the semifinals in four straight playoffs — losing, 3-0, to the Seattle Storm in the 2020 Finals — and won a franchise-record 26 games this season. The Aces and Connecticut Sun began their best-of-five series Sunday; Las Vegas took a 1-0 lead with a 67-64 victory at home.
Wilson, who is named after a Steely Dan song, also won her first defensive player of the year award this season. She averaged 19.5 points, 9.4 rebounds and 1.9 blocks and shot 50.1 percent from the field while extending her offensive weaponry beyond the three-point line for the first time in her career. In the Game 1 victory, she set the tone early and finished with 24 points, 11 rebounds, four blocks and two steals.
Wilson made sure to mention her parents when talking about winning the award, something she said she wasn’t gunning for despite it being a two-woman race between her and Seattle forward Breanna Stewart. She called them before the announcement and received screams in response.
These moments have been decades in the making: Her parents represent a dichotomy of her growth as a person. Roscoe is a former professional basketball player who spearheaded her development on the court. Eva handles things off the court in a stern yet loving manner. She runs her daughter’s Burnt Wax candle company and tries to keep her from buying too many handbags — an interest passed down from Eva — as she teaches the 26-year-old about finances. The lecture from Eva may not have worked so well: Wilson walked into the Game 1 postgame news conference with a new Louis Vuitton bag.
“It was just a feeling that just never gets old,” Wilson said of making the call to her parents. “I’m so glad that they’re able to enjoy this moment with me . . . because without them there is no me — without them taking those sacrifices and driving me to those AAU games where I played zero minutes. It’s big.”
The Wilsons wouldn’t even wash that AAU jersey — No. 22 on the Palmetto 76ers — when their daughter got home. At first, she wasn’t playing enough to get it dirty. They considered whether the financial commitment was worth it. Eva joked that A’ja was content with being a cheerleader for her teammates.
“[At] 11 or 12 years old, A’ja was sorry at basketball,” Roscoe said. “I mean, absolutely sorry. I don’t have a problem saying it.”
Sometimes she would come home in tears after workouts with Roscoe. They would do an extra half-hour of practice before and after games. Dad would put her through the Mikan Drill — a developmental technique for post players — as she wore a 20-pound vest. Roscoe always emphasized fundamentals and conditioning, which he picked up playing overseas, and those drills were part of the process. The sessions often would end with A’ja coming into the house and running to Eva to complain about Roscoe screaming at her during the workout. His response: “Deal with it.”
Eva understood what was happening when the two would walk in and not speak to each other.
“I’m like, ‘Okay, all right, y’all, come on now,’ ” Eva said. “But it was what it was, though. Nobody speaking. Nobody talking.
“My side always was: ‘Okay, A’ja, let’s put things into perspective. He’s only guiding you because he’s been there, done that. He’s not riding you because he just wants to ride your back. He’s riding you because he wants you to be successful. And if this is something that you truly, truly, truly want to do, then you’re going to have to listen.’ ”
Roscoe added: “I didn’t feel bad about it. Well, I felt bad sometimes because she really would get frustrated.”
Fifteen years later, Wilson is one of the best basketball players on the planet. She has some of the best footwork in the WNBA and a knack for attacking the glass with a quick second jump. In three consecutive wins to beat the Storm in the semifinals, Wilson averaged 30.0 points, 12.3 rebounds and 2.3 blocks while shooting 64.2 percent. She doesn’t get sped up despite being swarmed by extra defenders, and she played all but four minutes during the four games against the Storm.
Brewer: As Sue Bird’s career nears its end, her true impact comes into focus
Roscoe remembered his daughter, as a middle-schooler, saying she wanted to be the best player in the country and win a high school championship, a college championship and an Olympic gold medal. She has accomplished all of those — and a WNBA title is the only thing missing.
Hall of Famer and ESPN analyst Rebecca Lobo said Wilson is more decisive than ever and has gotten better in every area. Lobo added that she has the perfect demeanor and has a feel for when to be demanding with teammates.
Fellow ESPN analyst LaChina Robinson noted Wilson has taken “huge jumps” in her leadership and being vocal with teammates. She said Jackie Young, winner of the WNBA’s Most Improved Player Award, was empowered by Wilson to be confident and aggressive. Wilson grabbed control of the huddle in the fourth quarter of Game 1 and had choice words that teammate Chelsea Gray called “the right thing in the right moment.”
Roscoe’s father was a minister and his mother was a missionary, so A’ja was raised in the church and faith remains a large part of their family. His trips to campus to stare at a statue of his daughter have significance. He remembers the days when African Americans weren’t allowed to play at South Carolina as Jim Crow laws ruled the South. Eva’s mother, Hattie Rakes, was a single mother of four working multiple jobs; Rakes grew up four blocks from where that statue stands and was forbidden from stepping foot on the grounds. She would have to walk completely around campus to get to the other side. Decades later, her granddaughter is immortalized there.
“He’s like, ‘I talked to you today; you didn’t say much,’ ” Wilson said of her dad and the statue. “I love that. That’s my biggest thing about the statue is having my parents enjoy it. It ain’t even about me. It’s just, I can only imagine how big they smile. For them to be able to drive by that on the way to work is so big to me.”
Eva added: “That’s progress. For A’ja and for our family, that is just a testimony to what can happen.” | 2022-09-13T09:50:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A'ja Wilson's parents are along for the ride in WNBA Finals - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/aja-wilson-parents-wnba-mvp/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/aja-wilson-parents-wnba-mvp/ |
Albert Pujols watches his 697th career home run. At least someone was there to watch it. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)
By the time Albert Pujols hit his historic home run Sunday in Pittsburgh, I was on southbound Interstate 79 heading home.
I missed him tattooing a 2-0 pitch in the top of the ninth inning into the distance, toward the skyline and the intensely yellow Roberto Clemente Bridge. I missed the ball landing somewhere beyond right-center and igniting a scramble between three grown men who dived headfirst into the front row for the souvenir. I missed the proud caravan of St. Louis Cardinals fans, my people, going bonkers and turning PNC Park into their Steel City vacation rental.
Their shouts of “Albert! Albert! Albert!” energized an otherwise dreary Sunday, all because they had the privilege of witnessing something special. That ball Pujols hammered drove in the go-ahead runs in the Cardinals’ comeback win; more importantly, it was his 697th home run, the fourth most in Major League Baseball history.
And where was I during this unforgettable moment that those fans will be telling their kids and grandkids about until their dying day? Back in my car, thinking about how, on my deathbed, I’ll be recounting the September afternoon when I missed what should have been the hands-down greatest highlight in my life as a baseball fan.
Oh, I was at that game. I specifically chose that weekend, and that city, with the intention of seeing Albert one last time. This summer, I’ve scrolled through so many of my friends’ vacation pics on Instagram. Some of them have gone to Capri, Italy; Marrakesh, Morocco; and Porto, Portugal.
I went to Pittsburgh.
It should’ve been the vacation of my dreams. Everything lined up perfectly. Pujols came into Sunday tied with Alex Rodriguez at 696 homers. Instead of sitting out the last game of the road trip, he was in the lineup — playing first base, just like old times. He was even batting cleanup. Anything could happen, and I would be there, in person, to see it for myself.
Ten-year-old me would’ve been so proud, thinking I turned out to be the coolest grown-up ever. But by the seventh inning, 42-year-old me kept wondering how traffic might be on the 4½-hour drive back to Washington.
It’s so hard to be both a mature adult and a sports fan. The two roles just don’t work together.
Who has the stamina to stay up until 2:50 a.m. and watch one of the greatest U.S. Open matches of all time? Sorry, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, but do you mind wrapping up your thrilling, five-set, five-hour smackdown already? We’ve got work in the morning.
And who among us can truly shame those Miami Heat fans who left Game 6 early? Yeah, sure, it was the 2013 NBA Finals and Ray Allen was about to hit that unforgettable three-pointer, the stuff of legend, but have you ever navigated downtown Miami gridlock? You would’ve left after the national anthem.
That’s why, in retrospect, I side with my buddy Wesley’s dad. Wes Buchek and I have been friends for almost three decades, sharing our love for St. Louis sports. The Bucheks, however, were a bit more die-hard, attending more games at Busch Stadium than I ever did. That is, of course, until the sixth or seventh innings.
When the Buchek boys were little, their dad got them tickets to tons of weeknight games, but they always had to leave their seats early. Their dad needed rest; he worked a good, honest job and had to punch the clock in the early a.m., for crying out loud. And Wes — poor buddy — remembers one sad car ride back home, listening to KMOX radio when Bernard Gilkey hit a two-out single in the bottom of the ninth to snap the Montreal Expos’ seven-game winning streak.
Even today, life keeps getting in the way of Wes catching some of the Cardinals’ magical moments. He and his wife, Amanda Verbeck, having not had a getaway in a while, went off into the boondocks over the weekend. They didn’t have WiFi and therefore missed out on watching Albert slam No. 696. But while Wes was being a responsible husband, I was going to be the big kid cheering on the oldest kid in the park.
Pujols is defying what “the end” should look like. He scripted a Hall of Fame career during his first 11 years in St. Louis. He was a once-in-a-generation talent, but he left for the obscurity of the Los Angeles Angels. (Sigh, if only that city would stop poaching our finest treasures.)
But thankfully, this season Albert returned to Baseball Heaven, and he’s once again wearing the birds on the bat. He came back to retire as a Cardinal, but he’s nobody’s ornament. He’s not just the aging ballplayer who smiles and waves as he receives gifts from opposing teams and polite applause from rival fans. Instead, he’s pursuing 700 home runs with a mighty swing that’s still one of the most feared in baseball.
At the Home Run Derby, Albert pulled off an improbable upset of hard-hitting Kyle Schwarber in the opening round. Last month, he crushed two homers in Phoenix, passing Stan Musial for second all time in total bases. And recently, in his last at-bat against the Chicago Cubs, he won the game with a pinch-hit two-run bomb in the eighth.
And he’s doing this while looking like somebody’s tío with that belly protruding over his belt and a hairline that’s going, going, gone. That’s what makes his 22nd and final season so special. He’s one of us — a real-life adult.
Albert and I, we’re the same age. So I understand why that six-pack of abs is now just a cask of lard. And yet, he’s got me loving baseball like I did when I was a child. Every night I’m refreshing Twitter — the modern-day equivalent of the next morning’s box score — to see if my balding, bulging Tío Alberto has done it again.
That’s why I drove to Pittsburgh, to lounge in the upper deck and wait on history. Then, adulthood started tapping on my shoulder, asking important questions such as whether the gas prices are better in West Virginia or Maryland.
The Cardinals were down 1-0 and treating this game against the last-place Pirates as though it was required reading. They looked lifeless, and Albert was 0 for 3. After he struck out, Lars Nootbaar was caught stealing and Tyler O’Neill ended the seventh, I headed for the exits, thinking it was safe to start the long drive home.
As I walked the Seventh Street Bridge and heard the fireworks from a Pirates solo home run, I felt even more justified. Still, I kept hearing the protests of my 10-year-old self: Stay! Albert still has one more at-bat!
I was less than an hour into my trip and still trying to shake that nagging feeling when I checked the final score. Cardinals, 4-3. Pujols HR. I wanted to slam my head against the steering wheel.
I called Wes for comfort. It felt as though he laughed for a minute straight. He had me on speakerphone, and when I shared what might be the worst decision in my sports life, he said Amanda buried her head in the pillow.
I went to Pittsburgh to see my favorite ballplayer, my peer, accomplish history. His final season has already been a lesson in unexpected endings. Sunday, he gave me one final reminder: If you don’t stick around until the end, you never know what you might miss. | 2022-09-13T09:50:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Albert Pujols is showing us the magic of sticking around - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/albert-pujols-home-runs/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/albert-pujols-home-runs/ |
Should you cancel your contract to buy a home?
The most common reasons for a contract to be canceled are the buyer's financing falling through, a home inspection producing an undesirable finding or an appraisal not reflecting the value of the offer for the home. (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Real estate sales contracts were canceled at a higher rate in June than since the pandemic-related housing boom began: Nearly 15 percent of them were canceled that month, according to analysis by Redfin real estate brokerage.
Whether you’re a buyer or a seller, once you’ve signed an agreement to transfer ownership of a house, you probably want that transaction to be completed. But contracts can be canceled by either side for different reasons, so it’s smart for buyers and sellers to understand their rights and responsibilities when it comes to real estate contracts.
We asked for advice from Kelly Martinez, a real estate agent affiliated with the Vienna/Tysons Corner office of Coldwell Banker Realty in the Mid-Atlantic; Corey Burr, a real estate agent with TTR Sotheby’s International Realty in Washington; and Andrew Detweiler, founder and broker of the Rockville Real Estate Exchange in Rockville, Md. All three answered via email and their responses were edited.
What are common reasons for a contract to be canceled?
Detweiler: The most common reasons for a contract to be canceled are the buyer's financing falling through, a home inspection producing undesirable finding or an appraisal not reflecting the value of the offer for the home. In the case of home inspections and appraisals, these issues can usually be resolved if both parties can reach a meeting of the minds during a negotiation process.
Burr: The most common reasons for the cancellation of a contract are the inability of the seller and buyer to resolve issues discovered in an inspection, having an appraisal valuation come in below the sales price and the lender's not approving a loan in underwriting. These three areas of the contract are typically covered by standard contingencies, but in the white-hot market of the last two years, many buyers decided to not include them. As the market cools a bit, the marketplace is seeing these typical contingencies return more often.
Martinez: Buyers are voiding under home inspection contingencies when sellers are refusing to do repairs or under financing contingencies with rapidly changing interest rates stifling affordability, especially in the new construction space where contracts may have been ratified more than six months ago when rates were much lower. Additionally, in the less competitive market, FHA and VA buyers now have an opportunity to purchase with appraisal contingencies, which have stricter requirements than other financing options, which are also resulting in more canceled contracts.
Is it typically the buyer who cancels a contract — or do sellers sometimes cancel?
Detweiler: It is almost always the buyer who is going to be the one to cancel the contract because they are the ones protected by contingencies and have multiple “outs.” Unless the buyer does not perform in accordance with the contract, the seller does not have the right to cancel. Probably the most common example of when a seller might cancel the contract would be if the buyer has repeatedly missed their settlement date and the seller does not believe the buyer will be able to complete the transaction.
Martinez: In most states, once a contract is ratified, sellers don’t have a right to cancel, unless they don’t want to agree to something the buyer is requesting, such as home inspection repairs or reducing the price due to low appraisal.
Burr: Contracts are typically canceled because of buyer actions. For example, a buyer with a financing approval contingency can cancel a contract if the loan is not approved. A buyer can cancel a contract that includes an appraisal contingency if the appraisal valuation comes in below the sales price and the buyer and seller can’t agree on a price revision. The standard language in most local associations of Realtor’s forms allows for either a seller or buyer to cancel a contract if the two sides can’t reach an agreement on the resolution of inspection issues.
How can buyers protect themselves in a transaction and make sure they’ll get their deposit back if a contract must be canceled?
Detweiler: The best way for buyers to protect their deposit during a transaction is to work with someone who understands the contract and ensures appropriate protections are in place. Again, the most common protections include financing, home inspection and appraisal contingencies — but there are others as well. These contingencies come with timelines, so it’s important to keep an eye on those, too. In most cases, it is extremely hard for a buyer to lose their deposit unless they do something very egregious from a nonperformance standpoint.
Martinez: A stable market means that home inspection contingencies are back on the table, and this is a good thing for buyers, as it gives them a level of confidence that they are making a solid investment in a suitable home. The key to buyers getting back their deposit is to ensure they are not in default. The contract must be canceled under a contingency or HOA/condo document review period for the buyer to keep their deposit.
How can sellers protect themselves and increase the likelihood of their contract going through?
Burr: Sellers can greatly increase the chances that a contract will not be canceled by being very reasonable in the resolution of items discovered by the buyer’s inspection. By either agreeing to address issues at the seller’s cost prior to settlement or providing a seller credit to the buyer’s closing costs so the buyer may address these items at the buyer’s expense after settlement is the best way to move a sale forward to settlement. Trying to make sure the buyer has the financial ability to get a loan approved is essential. This can be achieved by insisting on a lender preapproval letter that states the buyer’s credit report has been reviewed and is satisfactory as well as having a discussion with the lender to make sure the buyer’s assets, income and debts have been verified.
How to ensure you have adequate internet service when buying a home
Martinez: Sellers need to understand that the market is rapidly changing and stabilizing. With the market being more balanced, so too are negotiations and sellers may have to agree to do home inspection repairs to keep a contract in play. Getting contingencies cleared and removing the opportunity to cancel as soon as possible is critical. Sellers should order HOA/condo docs before going active so that docs can be delivered with a ratified sales contract.
Detweiler: It sounds overly simplistic, but I advise sellers the best way to make sure they get to the finish line is to try to discern whether the person offering to buy your house really wants to buy your house. It is usually very, very easy for a buyer to find a way out of a contract. However, if the buyer really wants it, there is almost always a way to get to the finish line. Between conversations with the other agent as well as signals in the offer itself (for example, a low earnest money deposit), there are often subtle indicators as to whether the buyer really wants the house or is more likely to walk away, as is often the case with an investor or a nervous first-time home buyer. If the buyer is financing, it’s also extremely important for your agent to vet the buyer’s lender and understand the due diligence done on them — and, to every extent possible, understand the buyer’s financial stability. A buyer who is spending every penny they have to make a down payment is going to be much more likely to walk away if, for example, it looks like they must replace the roof in a few years, than someone who has ample reserves.
Any other tips about contracts?
Detweiler: Read them! And make sure your agent can explain them in detail. However, you should also understand there is an enormous amount of latitude and gray area in contracts and in the business. On the buyer’s side, you’ll want to make sure the contract is written so your earnest money deposit is protected and if you do want out, you’ve made your right to do so as indisputable as possible. On the seller side, even if a buyer violates a contract provision, it is extremely unlikely for it to be worth a seller’s time to pursue any legal recourse. | 2022-09-13T09:58:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Should you cancel your contract to buy a home? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/13/canceling-contract-to-buy-a-home/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/13/canceling-contract-to-buy-a-home/ |
Nina Totenberg was friends with RBG. Got a problem with that?
The NPR correspondent recounts their longtime, controversial relationship in her new memoir ‘Dinners With Ruth’
Nina Totenberg, left, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a photo from Totenberg's new book “Dinners with Ruth.” (Yassine El Mansouri/Elman Studio)
When Nina Totenberg invited Justice Brett Kavanaugh to one of her big semiannual parties a few years ago, she warned the younger guests — her office interns, her husband’s surgical residents — to be civil under her roof. “I made very clear to everybody I wanted them to behave,” says NPR’s star legal correspondent. “This is what we might call neutral ground.”
Totenberg had met Kavanaugh when he was a judge, long before the sensational Senate confirmation hearings and the allegations of sexual assault, which she covered in all of their controversial details. After he was confirmed to sit on the Supreme Court, she saw no reason to jettison a relationship of almost two decades.
Kavanaugh spent most of the party not talking to lawyers or judges but to the interns and residents. “Everybody was appropriately nice, as far as I could tell,” says Totenberg. It’s the same gathering where Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg arrived after the crowd thinned and held what is best described as a small salon for rapt guests.
This has been Totenberg’s balancing act for the past 50 years, navigating that fine line between the professional and personal while covering the Supreme Court. Along the way, she’s become friends with judges and justices — most notably Ginsburg, the inspiration for her new book, “Dinners With Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships.”
These friendships, writes Totenberg, made her a better, more generous person, teaching her about showing up when it counts. But they also, she argues, made her a better reporter: Getting to know justices as people — as well as jurists — leads to smarter, more nuanced coverage of an institution as complicated and important as the court. It is a very personal approach to journalism, an easy target for charges of favoritism and cronyism, which Totenberg — for the most part — has brushed off.
It is an old-school view of reporters and their sources, predicated on building mutual trust and respect. It’s one that has made Totenberg, 78, the best-known and most respected legal affairs reporter in America. “You’re either covering people from the inside or the outside,” she says. “I like to think I do both.”
Totenberg‘s book chronicles a relationship that began when Ginsberg was teaching law in New Jersey and ended 49 years later when the justice and feminist icon died in 2020. Along the way, the two women supported, shopped, gossiped, played and mourned together — all while reaching the pinnacle of their respective careers.
As a young reporter in Washington, Totenberg’s portfolio at a small weekly included Congress, the Justice Department and the Supreme Court. In 1971, she was reading a legal brief that she didn’t understand and called up the Rutgers law professor who wrote it: Ginsburg.
One woman was brassy and fearless (J. Edgar Hoover called Totenberg a “persistent b----” in a note to an aide that she saw); the other soft-spoken and methodical. But they bonded over the lack of professional opportunities for women and the jobs they were denied. What started as a professional connection quickly developed into personal affection and mutual admiration. In 1975, Totenberg joined the fledgling National Public Radio (where she met colleagues and lifelong friends Cokie Roberts and Linda Wertheimer) and focused on legal affairs. Five years later, Ginsburg was confirmed as a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court and moved to the nation’s capital.
By then, Totenberg had added an unusual reporting strategy to her tool kit: an invitation to dinner at her tiny Capitol Hill home. One of her first guests was Justice Lewis Powell and his wife, Jo, along with one other couple she can’t remember.
“Oh, God, I can’t believe I did that,” she says. “I wouldn’t have thought I could do this if I hadn’t already had lunch in his chambers and he had been incredibly nice and willing to at least discuss how he did his work — not what he did but how he did it.”
She would not have, she says, invited a member of Congress to dinner, but 50 years ago justices were not considered political actors in any traditional sense. “What they do is incredibly difficult and complicated, and so it does help to know them — not just as that guy sitting up there, that woman sitting up there.” And she’d read that the way legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee got to know John F. Kennedy was at dinner parties. “So I thought I should try to do that.”
So began five decades of dinner diplomacy. Powell, then Sandra Day O’ Connor (who reprimanded her hostess for cutting the leg of lamb “against the grain”), William Brennan, Antonin Scalia and, of course, Ginsburg. Scalia and Ginsburg were polar opposites in terms of personality and ideology, but were famously close. Totenberg called them both friends.
What made the friendship between Scalia and Ginsburg work
“If there is one trade secret that I have found for making and keeping and nurturing friendships, it is the act of sitting down together for a meal,” she writes.
The relationships between reporters and the people they cover has been a subject of debate for decades. Joan Biskupic, CNN’s legal analyst and author of several acclaimed biographies of modern justices, described how she finally persuaded Scalia to sit down with her for her book on him — and it also involved a personal, out-of-office encounter.
“I ran into him at a wedding,” Biskupic told C-SPAN in 2019. “And, he was like, ‘You can talk to all my friends but you can’t talk to me at all.’ ” But something about the social event changed his mind: She shared some of her reporting about time his parents spent in Italy; Scalia confided that’s where he was conceived. “He called me the next day, and he said, ‘Come see me.’ ” Scalia eventually gave Biskupic 12 interviews for the biography.
Totenberg writes that she never got a scoop from Ginsburg, never discussed cases or juicy tidbits about the other justices. She never called her “Ruth” in public. The two women sat down for interviews more times than they can count and only once clashed: After Ginsburg publicly criticized then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016, she apologized and asked Totenberg not to bring it up during an interview two days later. “That’s my job,” Totenberg answered. “I’m going to ask you about it as I would anyone else. And if you want to get mad at me right there, that’s fine.”
Then again, Totenberg already had an extensive network throughout the legal world and a few massive scoops. In 1987, she reported that Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg (no relation to Ruth) smoked marijuana with his students at Harvard Law School — a revelation so scandalous at the time that he withdrew his name from consideration. Four years later, she landed the first broadcast interview with Anita Hill where the law professor publicly accused nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.
In 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nominated by Bill Clinton to the highest court. The question is unavoidable: Would Totenberg have shared a damning piece of information about her dear friend?
“If I felt that I couldn’t report it for some reason, I would have given it to somebody else at NPR,” she says. “But my guess is that I would have reported it.”
Totenberg writes that she switched to her professional mode as soon as the nomination was announced: “In fact, I actually distanced myself from my old friend. I had no role to play except as a reporter. It would be inappropriate to celebrate the moment with her or to advise her in any way. Even to spend time with her. Our roles were obvious to each of us and they were entirely separate.”
Objectivity should never be confused with fairness, she argues. “Nobody is purely objective. It is not possible. … What all of us are capable of is fairness.”
The friendship of the two women was well known inside Washington, less so outside the Beltway — until after Ginsburg’s death, when Totenberg released a touching on-air tribute.
Though both maintained that the relationship never crossed professional lines, critics saw a conflict of interest or, at the very least, the appearance of bias. Some believe any reporter with a close personal relationship must recuse themselves from covering that person; that would have effectively prevented Totenberg from ever reporting on the court.
A less extreme solution, says NPR’s public editor, Kelly McBride, is that Totenberg and her editors should have been more transparent about the friendship over the years. “It’s clear that everything that Nina brings to the beat is of value,” McBride says. The problem: “Most listeners didn’t know and it caused a lot of people to question how you remain fair — and I think you can.”
What should have happened, says McBride, was more frequent public disclosure and an explanation from NPR on how Totenberg and her editors make decisions about covering the justices. “Look at the declining trust in media — why wouldn’t you be as transparent as possible?”
Nina Totenberg was close friends with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Was that a conflict for NPR?
Now it’s all in Totenberg’s memoir: How the two enjoyed dinner parties (cooked by their husbands), trips to the opera and concerts, and the occasional escape to shop. Their friendship deepened during the long illness of Totenberg’s first husband, former senator Floyd Haskell, and the death of Ginsburg’s beloved husband, Marty. Ginsburg officiated at Totenberg’s 2000 wedding to her second husband, surgeon David Reines, who became a trusted confidant to Ginsburg as she faced her own health challenges over the past two decades. In the last year of her life, Ginsberg had dinner at Totenberg’s home almost every Saturday.
Totenberg is still furious that then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to allow Ginsburg’s casket to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda in 2020. McConnell had voted to confirm her; now he denied that tribute to her service and did not pay his respects when the Democratic-controlled House decided to place her casket in its Statuary Hall, she writes. (“The protocol is for a Supreme Court justice to lie in repose at the Court,” not the U.S. Capitol, said a spokesman for McConnell’s office.)
Totenberg ends the book wondering how the Supreme Court will change going forward: “Today’s Court is very different from the one she sat on.” The veneer of civility required of the nine justices to work together has been eroded, she writes; Ginsburg would been appalled by the leak of the draft opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization abortion case and then “white faced with fury” about how Justice Samuel Alito used her writing from three decades earlier out of context to justify the decision: “Its visceral tone, plus the needless legal landmines planted for exploitation later, undermines not just the image of the Court, but the reality.”
But it’s still fascinating to her — whether the court is still, as Chief Justice William Rehnquist used to say, the “crown jewel” of our system of government, or something different now.
“I’d had friends say to me, ‘How can you do this at all dispassionately?’ ” Totenberg says. “These are friends who disagree with what the court is doing. And I say, ‘Because it’s a great story.’ We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg, I suspect.” | 2022-09-13T09:58:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nina Totenberg was friends with RBG. Got a problem with that? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/09/13/nina-totenberg-ruth-bader-ginsburg-rbg/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/09/13/nina-totenberg-ruth-bader-ginsburg-rbg/ |
With “Breathless” in 1960, the filmmaker rode the crest of the French New Wave movement to liberate a hidebound movie industry.
Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard gives a news conference for the presentation of his film “Sauve qui peut (la vie)", on May 21, 1980 during the 33rd Cannes International Film Festival. (Ralph Gatti/AFP via Getty Images)
Jean-Luc Godard, the European filmmaker and cinematic rule-breaker regarded as one of the most influential, uncompromising and at times befuddling artists of his era, once declaring “a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order,” has died.
French President Emmanuel Macron announced in a tweet on Tuesday the loss of this “national treasure.” Godard was 91. The cause of his death was not immediately announced.
Over six decades, Mr. Godard’s output of more than 90 features, documentaries, shorts and videos defined him as one of the most productive, mischievous, didactic, subversive and polarizing of moviemakers.
Starting with his 1960 debut feature, “Breathless,” Mr. Godard rode the crest of what became known as the New Wave, a group of young film critics — including François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol — who took up directing to liberate what they regarded as a calcified movie industry. “We barged into cinema like cave men into the Versailles of Louis XIV,” Mr. Godard said.
Many critics have come to see “Breathless” as a galvanizing work of art, shunning linear narrative and anything smacking of convention — like consistency of perspective in narration and unobtrusive editing. Mr. Godard used jump cuts to unsettle; the editing technique, which cuts a frame or two from a scene, is now common in film and music video but was startling in the early 1960s.
The American critic Susan Sontag hailed Mr. Godard in 1968 as one of “the great culture heroes of our time,” putting him alongside Pablo Picasso, James Joyce and Igor Stravinsky as revolutionizing their respective fields of art. Mr. Godard’s unpredictable iconoclasm appealed to Sontag, who noted his “prodigal energies, his evident risk-taking, the quirky individualism.” It wasn’t that he was steadily brilliant, she wrote, but that he was brimming with ideas and seldom repeated himself.
Sontag wrote that Mr. Godard helped create a new language of cinema with movies that were “both achieved and chaotic, ‘work in progress’ which resists easy admiration.” Yet his enthusiasts were wide-ranging, including Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci and Jim Jarmusch. He also had an incalculable impact on international art-house cinema.
At his best, Mr. Godard was responsible for some of the most sublime moments of 1960s screen time, including the comical and barbaric car pileup in “Weekend” (1967) as a lashing at greed and materialism; the 10-minute interlude of postcards meant to evoke plunder and adventure in the 1963 antiwar film “The Riflemen” (“Les Carabiniers”); the cocktail party in “Pierrot Le Fou” (1965) where bourgeois guests mouth the scripts of television commercials; and the impromptu pop-music dance by a trio of crooks in 1964′s “Bande à part” (Band of Outsiders).
Where a playfulness and exuberance pervaded his early films, Mr. Godard gradually became more politically dogmatic. His feature “Sympathy for the Devil,” filmed in 1968 and released in 1970, alternates scenes of black power revolutionaries and Maoist agitprop with lengthy shots of the Rolling Stones recording the title song. Critics dubbed it nearly unwatchable.
Mr. Godard continued making movies through recent years, mostly elliptical, philosophical essays such as “Notre musique” (2004) and “Film socialisme” (2010). Changes in public taste and his challenging, ceaselessly provocative style limited his audience to serious film buffs and connoisseurs, but the impact of his early work on generations of moviemakers cannot be overstated.
Mr. Godard was not easily flattered. When Tarantino named his production company A Band Apart, the French filmmaker quipped of the homage, “He would have done better to give me some money.”
Anna Karina, luminous star of French New Wave films, dies at 79
In 2010, a controversy arose when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided to award Mr. Godard an honorary Oscar for his life’s work. The citation read: “For passion. For confrontation. For a new kind of cinema.”
The award revived a long-standing debate about whether Mr. Godard’s support of Palestinian causes was rooted in anti-Semitic attitudes. He had spent part of his youth under the tutelage of his maternal grandfather, who favored the pro-Nazi Vichy French government. “He was anti-Jew,” the director once said, “whereas I am anti-Zionist, he was anti-Semitic.”
Jean-Luc Godard was born in Paris on Dec. 3, 1930, and was the second of four children of a Swiss doctor and a French banker’s daughter. He grew up in Nyon, Switzerland, where his father opened a clinic.
He had settled in Paris in the late 1940s and embraced a bohemian lifestyle that included watching hundreds of films a year at a movie house that drew such like-minded cineastes and future directors as Chabrol, Rohmer and Truffaut. To support himself, Mr. Godard stole books from his grandfather’s collection of first editions and sold them.
“He was an extraordinary critic, hurling down one dogma after another,” the film historian David Thomson wrote of Mr. Godard.
After making short films, Mr. Godard vividly demonstrated the ideals of the New Wave with “Breathless,” about a gangster on the run (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and the American girlfriend who betrays him (Jean Seberg).
Jean-Paul Belmondo, jaunty star of New Wave classic ‘Breathless,’ dies at 88
Much of “Breathless,” made on a shoestring budget, was filmed by handheld camera on the streets of Paris. Jump cuts lent a jolting pace. Working with no more than a brief plot outline prepared by Truffaut, Mr. Godard wrote new dialogue every day. References to Humphrey Bogart gangster films and other cultural reference points brought a winking freshness to the script.
“Breathless,” one of Mr. Godard’s few commercial successes, brought out his contrarian nature. Soon after its release, he told an interviewer he hoped his next film would be a flop, explaining, “I prefer to work when there are people against whom I have to struggle.”
In the meantime, Mr. Godard continued to excite the film world with his next batch of movies, including “A Woman Is a Woman” (1961) and “My Life to Live” (1962), both of which starred Karina (as a stripper and a prostitute, respectively). She also was featured in “Alphaville,” a 1965 science-fiction fantasy presumably set in the distant future but filmed in contemporary Paris.
One of Mr. Godard’s most unlikely projects was “Contempt” (1963), for which he was given an unprecedentedly high budget by his standards — $1 million. The picture starred Brigitte Bardot, the French actress renowned worldwide for her pneumatic figure and sexy pout. Mr. Godard fought with his producers, who wanted any excuse to show Bardot in the buff. He tacked on a nude bedroom sequence in which she asks her screenwriter husband (Michel Piccoli) to comment on every part of her body. The scene was more absurd than sexy.
“Weekend” is often considered a turning point for Mr. Godard. He became engulfed in the student protests and strikes of 1968, proclaimed himself a Maoist, set up an independent production center in Grenoble, France, and began turning out experimental videos full of communist ideology.
Mr. Godard’s marriages to Karina and actress Anne Wiazemsky ended in divorce. Since the early 1970s, he had been the companion and collaborator of the Swiss filmmaker Anne-Marie Miéville.
Reemerging in the 1980s based in Rolle, Switzerland, Mr. Godard again embraced feature productions, and critics praised him as an impeccable visual stylist and masterful technician. He lost none of his ability to provoke, as when he portrayed the Virgin Mary as a gas station attendant in “Hail Mary” (1985). Mr. Godard befuddled English speakers more than usual when “Film socialisme” was released in 2010 with English subtitles that barely hinted at what was being said in French.
Inscrutability did not bother Mr. Godard. “I’d rather feed 100 percent of 10 people. Hollywood would rather feed 1 percent of 1 million people,” he once told the Los Angeles Times. “I’m always doing what is not done. And what I’ve never done is what everyone else is doing. I still think you can be an artist in making movies.” | 2022-09-13T09:59:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jean-Luc Godard, rule-breaking master of French cinema, dies at 91 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/13/jean-luc-godard-french-new-wave-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/13/jean-luc-godard-french-new-wave-dies/ |
For more than a decade, Pakistan has banned some international aid groups
Analysis by Rafeel Wasif
Aseem Prakash
Displaced people wait for food at a camp in Sehwan, Pakistan, on Sept. 11.
Pakistan continues to grapple with unprecedented floods. By some estimates, 15 percent of the country’s population has been affected and more than 1,200 lives have been lost. Flood-related damage may run as much as $30 billion, and experts warn of food instability and disease outbreaks in the months ahead.
Even in good times, Pakistan’s government would probably not have the resources to mount effective relief and rehabilitation operations, given the scale of the devastation. But Pakistan faces an acute economic crisis reflecting multiple factors, including a sharp rise in energy prices because of the war in Ukraine.
The government has asked the international community for support, and several countries are providing generous assistance. However, there is one important element missing in the relief effort: support from international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). That’s because in 2010, the government instituted a ban on several international NGOs. And despite massive floods, domestic political considerations make it difficult for the government to overturn this ban and allow NGOs to deliver flood relief. Here’s what you need to know.
In some countries, NGOs are no longer welcome
More than 60 countries now have laws that restrict international NGOs or foreign funding for the operations of local NGOs. These restrictions are a remarkable policy shift — since the end of the Cold War, NGOs and other civil society organizations have worked alongside governments and markets to sustain democracy and promote economic development. Yet some governments are now instituting restrictions on international NGOs, a shift that has accelerated in recent years with the onset of the “democracy recession.”
Why the crackdown? Some governments claim that international NGOs and international funding for local NGOs interfere with domestic politics. This is powerful rhetoric because countries across the world are sensitive to foreign interference in local affairs — and international NGOs tend to be based in Western countries.
Domestic politics further complicate Pakistan’s NGO ban
In Pakistan, the immediate cause for the government’s refusal to allow relief efforts from international NGOs is also part of the high-profile political fight between the government and the opposition, led by former prime minister Imran Khan.
Imran Khan dissolved Pakistan’s parliament. How did that happen?
In April, Khan resigned after a no-confidence vote in parliament — and he claims that the U.S. orchestrated his removal from office. He is organizing mass rallies to demand early elections, and in the process is drumming up anti-Western sentiment.
Khan’s actions make it difficult for the government to welcome relief efforts by international NGOs. The current political dynamics — along with deep-rooted suspicion of the United States among many in Pakistan — make it difficult for the government to accept desperately needed help from many international NGOs.
As governments around the world have cracked down on international NGOs, there have been few domestic protests. Why haven’t international NGOs seen more support from the citizens in countries that the NGOs want to help?
Citizens have complex perceptions about foreign donors
Our research reveals a complex picture of domestic support for foreign funding for NGOs. To understand more generally how Pakistanis felt about foreign-funded NGOs, we commissioned a face-to-face survey with 530 respondents, conducted by Gallup-Pakistan in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city, with a population of more than 13 million. Lahore is the capital of Punjab province, which accounts for more than half of Pakistan’s population.
While no city in Pakistan is immune from sectarian conflicts, Lahore, unlike other major cities such as Karachi, Peshawar or Quetta, has witnessed lower levels of sectarian conflict. This meant that we had a better chance of getting truthful responses from survey respondents. Moreover, we were careful not to provoke reactions when asking about madrassas, religious education centers focused on the study of Islam — which many in Pakistan often associate with sectarian (Sunni vs. Shiite) violence.
Using survey experiment techniques, we asked a sample of 530 adults randomly selected from different Lahore neighborhoods whether they were willing to donate to a hypothetical local madrassa providing K-12 education. In different frames of our experiment, we noted that the madrassa does not receive foreign support or noted that it receives support from donors in the United States, Germany or Saudi Arabia.
We find that respondents’ willingness to donate diminishes when the hypothetical madrassa accepts money from donors in Saudi Arabia and the United States. However, we do not find such hesitancy when the money is coming from Germany.
What does this tell us about foreign NGOs, and the U.S. credibility crisis in Pakistan? After the CIA ran a fake vaccination program in their hunt for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, perceptions of U.S. support for any NGO created public suspicion. Indeed, Pakistan banned Save the Children in the aftermath of the revelations about the bin Laden case, though there’s no evidence that the global charity was involved.
Might Pakistan’s public support NGOs that receive funding from Saudi Arabia, for instance? Saudi Arabia is a fellow Muslim country, one with a history of very high approval ratings in public opinion polls in Pakistan. After all, much of the rhetoric against international NGOs is directed against U.S. NGOs, reflecting the Islam-vs.-the-West narrative. Our survey found that local support diminishes when the madrassa received money from Saudi Arabia.
The bottom line is that in the context of Pakistan, public perceptions about international NGOs or international support for domestic NGOs are nuanced. Government policy does not always clearly reflect public opinion. Rather, party politics may be dictating the policy — and in this case, the government may think it can ill afford to come across as favoring “American” NGOs, an issue that Khan and the opposition could exploit.
For Pakistan’s looming humanitarian crisis, domestic politics may continue to impede international assistance efforts — despite a growing call within Pakistan-based charities to revisit the NGO policies.
Rafeel Wasif is assistant professor in the Department of Public Administration at Portland State University.
Aseem Prakash is the Walker family professor of arts and sciences and director of the Center for Environmental Politics at the University of Washington in Seattle. | 2022-09-13T09:59:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pakistan is asking for urgent flood relief. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/pakistan-flood-assistance-ngos/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/pakistan-flood-assistance-ngos/ |
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro arrives in Brasilia on Wednesday to preside over a military parade commemorating the bicentennial of the country's independence from Portugal. (Eraldo Peres/AP)
With Brazilians struggling with double-digit inflation and an election just weeks away, President Jair Bolsonaro swung into action.
The right-wing populist has cut fuel taxes to reduce prices at the pump and sent monthly cash transfers to poor families. He has created cash benefits for truck and taxi drivers and dispensed $20 to families in need to buy gas cylinders for cooking.
In recent weeks, energy prices have stabilized, inflation has declined and employment has grown. But it might not be enough to save Bolsonaro’s job.
Recent polls by Datafolha and IPEC show Bolsonaro, 67, still trailing his principal rival in the October election — former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 76 — by more than 10 percentage points. When the field is reduced to a head-to-head matchup, the gap widens.
“Voters are saying ‘Too little, too late,’” said Thomas Traumann, a journalist, consultant and former spokesman for former president Dilma Rouseff, a Bolsonaro predecessor.
“After three years of Bolsonaro,” he said, “people are distrustful of his intentions and many of them believe this is all just maneuvering for the election.”
Bolsonaro, a former army officer, was a fringe congressman pursuing a long shot bid for the presidency in 2018 when Lula, the presumed front-runner, was imprisoned on corruption charges.
Bolsonaro ran against graft in a country roiled by scandals and a stagnant economy. Rouseff was impeached for allegedly violating budget rules. Her successor, Michel Temer, was accused of accepting bribes and money laundering. And scores of officials in Brazil and across Latin America were implicated in the Oderbrecht scandal, in which the Brazilian construction giant allegedly paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes.
Bolsonaro tapped into anti-establishment frustration to manage one of the great election upsets in Latin America’s largest country,
But now Lula is out of prison, his conviction annulled, and Bolsonaro is struggling, unable to overcome the scars caused by his chaotic handling of the coronavirus and the multiple corruption investigations into his own administration.
At the height of the pandemic, Bolsonaro dismissed covid-19 as a “little flu” and promoted the unproven and possibly harmful remedy hydroxychloroquine. He has expressed skepticism of vaccines — he suggested they could cause women to grow beards and turn people into crocodiles — in a country that has embraced them. Brazil has recorded more than 34.5 million cases and 684,000 deaths. Both are presumed to be undercounts.
Surveys now show that more than 40 percent of Brazilians rate Bolsonaro’s administration as “bad” or “very bad.”
He has tried to win voters back with government spending. In August, he began giving $120 monthly cash payments to 20 million families through Auxilio Brasil — Brazil Aid.
Floundering in the polls, Brazil’s Bolsonaro woos a surprising new demographic: The poor
Jorciely Carvalho, a 28-year-old street vendor in Sao Paulo, says government assistance since the start of the pandemic has helped her family cover the basics.
But as food prices skyrocketed this year — milk, for instance, has gone up 79 percent in the past 12 months — life has become more challenging for Caravalho, her husband and her three-year-old daughter. She can no longer cover the cost of the ingredients she needs to sell desserts, her second job.
Bolsonaro, she said, is an “incompetent person who has made a terrible government for the most needy in our country,” and she will not vote for him.
The race has tightened, a bit. Datafolha recorded a 5-point narrowing from June to this month. But with the first round of the election set for Oct. 2, and polls showing most Brazilians have made up their minds, time might be running out for Bolsonaro.
“This election has been a battle of rejections, and it seems like the people are rejecting Bolsonaro more resoundingly,” said Mauricio Moura, founder of the polling firm IDEIA Big Data. “The financial aid provided by Bolsonaro is just not enough to minimize much negative feelings about the overall economic environment.”
If no candidate achieves a majority in the first-round vote, the top two will face off in a second round on Oct. 30.
Lula, a former union leader, was president for two terms from 2003 through 2010, when his social programs, funded largely by a regional commodities boom, helped lift millions out of poverty. Attorney Marco Aurelio Carvalho, a top adviser to Lula, said his “comfortable” lead reflects the recognition that Brazilians “now live in a very different country” than the one he left.
“Now we are a pariah,” Carvalho said. He said Bolsonaro’s aggressive and often profane manner, and his attacks on women and journalists, have left the population “tired of this war.”
Bolsonaro’s chief of staff disputes the polls. Ciro Nogueira said internal surveys commissioned by the center-right Progressives Party show a much tighter race, and he’s confident Bolsonaro will take the lead “within the next 10 days.”
Nogueira acknowledged the president inspires a high “rejection” rate, and said it’s because he’s an “unconventional politician who expresses a lot of what he thinks.” He touted what he called “an unprecedented economic success,” with inflation falling and unemployment at its lowest level in at least five years.
Bolsonaro has attempted to court women, who make up 52 percent of eligible voters. But given his history of misogynist remarks, it’s been a challenge.
As a congressman, he once told a fellow legislator that she was not worthy of being raped. During the first televised debate in the current campaign, the journalist Vera Magalhães asked about the country’s coronavirus vaccination rate.
“I think you go to sleep thinking about me,” Bolsonaro responded. “You have a crush on me.”
Bolsonaro has increasingly relied on his wife to help soften his image. First lady Michelle Bolsonaro has campaigned more actively in recent weeks, attending rallies and making television appearances.
She has brought her own flair to the contest. She recently shared a video that showed Lula, a Christian, at an African-derived religious ritual and alleged he was connected with “the underworld.” She has said the presidential palace was “overtaken by demons” during previous administrations before it was consecrated on her husband’s watch.
Gabriela Sá Pessoa contributed to this report. | 2022-09-13T09:59:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Bolsonaro trailing Lula in Brazil presidential election - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/bolsonaro-lula-brazil-election/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/bolsonaro-lula-brazil-election/ |
FILE - Film director Jean-Luc Godard smokes at Cannes festival, France on May 25, 1982. Director Jean-Luc Godard, an icon of French New Wave film who revolutionized popular 1960s cinema, has died, according to French media. He was 91. Born into a wealthy French-Swiss family on Dec. 3, 1930, in Paris, the ingenious “enfant terrible” stood for years as one of the world’s most vital and provocative directors in Europe and beyond — beginning in 1960 with his debut feature “Breathless.” (AP Photo/Jean-Jacques Levy, File) | 2022-09-13T09:59:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | French media: Iconic director Jean-Luc Godard dead at 91 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/french-media-iconic-director-jean-luc-godard-dead-at-91/2022/09/13/5a595a30-3345-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/french-media-iconic-director-jean-luc-godard-dead-at-91/2022/09/13/5a595a30-3345-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), candidate for the U.S. Senate, speaks at an election watch party event at the Varsity Club at Camping World Stadium on Aug. 23, 2022, in Orlando. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
MIAMI — A record number of Black men and women are running for U.S. Senate and governor this fall, with the potential to increase diversity in the nation’s top elected offices, which are still overwhelmingly held by White men.
The unprecedented number Black contenders for higher office comes at a time where racial and cultural fissures run deep in America. And as the fall campaign heats up, some of the candidates are bracing for racially-tinged attacks on their policies and character, highlighting their concern that African Americans still must run near-perfect campaigns to be successful.
Most of them have not made explicit appeals based on race in their campaigns, but many of those running as Democrats have embraced issues popular with minority voters and with the liberal base more generally, including voting rights and student loan relief, as well as access to abortion, which has emerged as a key issue in this year’s midterm elections.
Here in Florida, for instance, Rep. Val Demings, the Democratic nominee for Senate against Sen. Marco Rubio (R), has homed in on abortion and at a recent campaign stop drew a subtle comparison between abortion restrictions and slavery.
“I don’t think anyone wants to go back to being treated like property, or being treated like a second-class citizen,” she told voters as she campaigned in a stuffy South Florida recreation hall recently. “We know what that feels like, and we are not going back.”
Some of this year’s marquee Black candidates for statewide office are well established in their states. The list includes Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Rep. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.), both of whom are running for reelection, and Democrat Stacey Abrams, who is making her second bid for governor in Georgia after running a strong campaign in 2018. But most are making history as the first to win major party nominations for Senate or governor in their respective states.
Currently, three Black Americans are members of the Senate: Scott, Warnock and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.). Vice President Harris, who is of Black and South Asian descent, serves as president of the Senate. Black Americans hold 56 seats in the House, plus two non-voting delegate seats for D.C. and the U.S. Virgin Islands. There are no Black governors at present.
Much as former president Barack Obama did during his historic campaign in 2008, the candidates are using their personal stories and life experiences to connect with a cross-section of voters. Consider the pitch Mandela Barnes, the Democratic Senate nominee in Wisconsin, is making to voters as he campaigns to become the state’s first Black senator. He recounts his upbringing in inner-city Milwaukee and compares the challenges his working-class parents faced to the economic strains American families continue to face.
“The members of the Senate, they don’t reflect America,” Barnes, who is running against Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, told supporters at a recent campaign event in suburban Milwaukee. “Most Senators don’t live in the American experience, they haven’t dealt with the challenges a majority of Americans deal with.”
Q&A with Mandela Barnes, Wisconsin’s Democratic nominee for Senate
Black candidates remain “a long way from the promised land,” Patrick stressed, but he increasingly believes race isn’t nearly as much of “a barrier” as it has been in the past.
“I think what we are seeing is a whole bunch of candidates who are saying, ‘If that’s an issue, that is somebody’s else’s issue because there is more to me than that, and I am going to try to get people to see all of me,' ” said Patrick, adding that he’s had conversations with many of the Black candidates who are running for statewide office this year.
Some candidates, like Barnes and Wes Moore, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in Maryland, ran good primary campaigns and won over voters. Others, like Demings and Cheri Beasley, the Democratic nominee for Senate in North Carolina, locked down early support from Democratic Party leaders and had no serious opposition. Herschel Walker, a University of Georgia running back who was awarded the 1982 Heisman Trophy, won the Republican nomination for Senate in Georgia with the backing of former president Donald Trump.
Many of the Black statewide candidates face considerable challenges — most of the Democratic candidates are running in red or Republican-leaning states; one of the three Black Republican candidates is running against Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D) in heavily Democratic New York.
Stefanie Brown James, executive director of the Collective PAC, said the number of Black candidates this year represents a transformational moment for American politics.
“It really shows that people understand that Black candidates can represent their issues no matter where they reside,” said Brown James, whose group works to elected liberal Black candidates.
Charles E. Jones, a retired professor and researcher of African American politics, race and public policy at University of Cincinnati, is not so sure. In 2006, while he was a professor at Georgia State University, Jones co-authored a study with Judson L. Jeffries, a professor at Ohio State University, that found “Whites are reluctant to vote for Black candidates, especially Black high profile state candidates.”
Jones believes that "race is still very salient in society” a continues to be a barrier for Black candidates. “The numbers do speak for themselves. You still have a rarity of Black members in the U.S. Senate and the governor’s house.”
The number of Black statewide hopefuls who remain competitive through Election Day will determine if “this is really a significant development for African Americans seeking higher office," Jones said. “Clearly, if you have most of them have the same viability of a Stacey Abrams, then we really could say we have a break through on that glass ceiling.”
The large class of Black statewide candidates comes four years after Abrams and Andrew Gillum, the Democratic nominee for governor in Florida, surprised political observers by running such competitive campaigns. Abrams, the first Black woman in the country to win a major party nomination for governor, lost to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) by 54,000 votes. Gillum, who was vying to become Florida’s first Black governor, lost to Republican Ron DeSantis by 32,000 votes.
In this year’s campaigns, Brown James noted Black candidates have been raking in campaign cash due to a surge of support from major high-dollar donors, including a return of in-person fundraisers at wealthy liberal enclaves such as Martha’s Vineyard, and low-dollar contributions from party activists.
While White women over 50 remain the biggest driver of small dollar donations to Democratic campaigns, Black candidates this year are also tapping into the growing willingness of the Black professional class to make political donations, said Akilah Ensley, a Florida-based fundraiser who specializes in helping Black candidates.
According to campaign finance reports, two of the three top Democratic Senate fundraisers this cycle are Black. Warnock, who is seeking a full term after his victory in 2021 in a special election runoff handed Democrats control of the Senate, has so far raised $60 million. Demings, meanwhile, has raised $47 million — about $20 million more than Rubio, according to OpenSecrets.org.
The top fundraiser among Senate Republicans is also Black — South Carolina’s Scott, who has taken in $33 million so far.
Patrick, who served as governor of Massachusetts from 2007 to 2015 and now is co-director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, cautions that many Black candidates remain hamstrung by “polls and punditry.” He said both Charles Booker, who is running against Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Deidre DeJear, the Democratic nominee for governor in Iowa, are impressive candidates who are not getting as much as attention and support as he thinks they deserve.
In his first race for governor, Patrick recalls how he initially struggled to convince elected leaders and the media that he could win. He even had to work to convince Obama, then a newly-elected senator from Illinois, that he could win.
But both Patrick and Brown James, who was African American vote director for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, said donors are finally acknowledging that a new generation of Black leadership has emerged within both parties. In the post-Obama era, both Black churches and civic organizations are producing bolder Black political leaders who are more willing to enter tough, high-profile races. That is creating political opportunities not only for Democrats but also growing numbers of Republicans.
Besides Scott, who is being talked about as a possible contender on a future presidential ticket, many Republicans consider Kentucky’s Black Attorney General, Daniel Cameron, to be a rising star in the party.
Scott, a former House member who was appointed to his Senate seat in 2013 and won a full term in 2016, is heavily favored to win reelection. His opponent, South Carolina State Rep. Krystle Matthews, who won the Democratic Senate primary, is facing calls from some in her own party to drop out after conservative activists released secretly recorded audio in which she allegedly disparages White people. Matthews said her comments had been mischaracterized and is refusing to quit the race.
Cosby H. Johnson, a 36-year-old Black man who last year was elected mayor of Brunswick, Ga., said the nation’s contentious political culture is nudging more African Americans into statewide elections.
“Our country has gotten so crazy and divisive that is has pushed very normal people who would otherwise say, ‘I am going to leave that to the [politicians]’…to now say: ‘Hey I am going to give this political thing a try,' ” said Johnson, who previously worked for the Georgia Chamber of Commerce.
In Maryland, Moore, a 43-year-old former nonprofit executive, is thought to be positioned to become the first Black governor of Maryland.
Moore, who has never held elected office, is facing Republican Daniel L. Cox, a state delegate who has aligned himself with Trump. Over the summer, Moore outraised Cox by nearly 1o to 1 — $1.8 million to $195,000.
But eight years ago, Maryland Republican Larry Hogan (R) shocked political observers by defeating Anthony G. Brown, who is Black and at the time was lieutenant governor, in that traditionally Democratic leaning state. Maryland, where African Americans make up 31 percent of the population, has never elected a Black governor or U.S. Senator. In 2018, Hogan defeated another Black candidate, Ben Jealous, a former national president of the NAACP. Brown is on the general election ballot this year as the Democratic nominee for attorney general.
Justin Schall, a Democratic strategist who managed Brown’s 2014 campaign, said Black candidates still encounter “bias” from White voters, especially in gubernatorial campaigns. He believes that is one reason Gillum and Abrams narrowly lost in 2018, in what otherwise was a good year for Democratic candidates nationally.
“I think for some people, and I am not even sure it’s a conscious thing … But the idea of them being the one person in charge, and the guy and or gal making the final decisions, still seems problematic,” said Schall, who worked on Warnock’s successful campaign for the 2020 special election for Senate in Georgia.
Schall believes the dynamics within American politics have evolved, with younger voters — many of whom grew with Obama as president — more receptive to voting for Black candidates. The country’s political system has also become so polarized that partisanship — not race — is now what largely drives voter behavior, Schall and other political strategists said.
Black Democratic candidates, however, are bracing for an onslaught of negative ads with racial undertones, especially on matters involving crime and policing.
In Florida, Rubio is accusing Demings of wanting to “defund the police,” even though Demings is the former chief of Orlando’s police department. The Deming’s campaign has now printed up one-word campaign signs that read: “Chief.”
In Wisconsin, a state that was rocked by racial unrest after police shot a Black man in Kenosha in 2020, some Democrats also worry about GOP attacks against Barnes.
The Johnson campaign has already aired an ad that attempts to link Barnes to the policies of Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), three women of color often characterize as “radical” by conservative politicians and activists. The ad includes a dark, unflattering photograph of Barnes and accuses him of being “dangerously liberal on crime.”
Charles Franklin, a law school professor and the director of the Marquette Law School poll, said Barnes’s challenge will be whether he can make inroads in more rural parts of the state, as Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a White Democrat, did in 2018. He said Barnes’ obstacles there will be have more to do with ideology than race.
“In the northern part of the state, which has become more Republican, any Democrat may now have trouble making inroads there,” Franklin said.
On the campaign trail, Barnes talks about growing up in a household where his mother was a teacher and his father was a “third shift autoworker,” how he got the opportunity to go to college and leave one of Milwaukee’s toughest neighborhoods.
“If I can grow up and be your lieutenant governor, I think every child can at least have that same opportunity,” Barnes said during a recent speech, in which he described Johnson as being linked to big money interests in Washington.
Joe Pinion, the Republican nominee for Senate in New York, notes he was raised in Yonkers by a single mother who was a nurse and former nonprofit executive. Pinion, who launched his campaign on Martin Luther King Day, said his upbringing is one reason he has embraced such policies as fighting child poverty and building more neighborhood health clinics.
“These are issues that are very much are aligned with my personal upbringing,” said Pinion, adding that he’s the first Black Senate nominee from either major party in New York history. “My desire to see conservative principles brought to fruition is rooted in my experiences as a Black man in America,” he said.
In Florida, Demings travels around the state in a bright blue bus, with a towering photograph of herself emblazoned on its side. When she enters some campaign events, attendees hear the Katy Perry lyrics: “You’re gonna hear me roar.”
Demings, 65, who was raised in Jacksonville, recounts how she was told as a young child that she was the “wrong color” to “amount to anything.” She said proved her skeptics wrong by becoming the first member of her family to go to college, and the first woman to lead Orlando’s police department. She told an audience in South Florida recently that she believes her message of expanding health care and economic opportunities is resonating with voters and she feels upbeat about her chances to win the Senate race.
“Is it easy? Hell no, it isn’t easy,” Demings said. “But we didn’t build a great nation on easy. We built a great nation on hard work.” | 2022-09-13T10:07:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mandela Barnes, Stacey Abrams among Black nominees for Senate, governor - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/13/record-number-black-candidates-higher-offices-aim-reshape-us-politics/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/13/record-number-black-candidates-higher-offices-aim-reshape-us-politics/ |
“I need him — he’s my dog,” Walker Cousineau, 14, told his mom when he saw the dog’s shelter profile
Walker Cousineau and his deaf dog, Dave, are now constant companions in Bentley, Mich. (Mindy Cousineau)
Walker Cousineau called out to his mother the moment he saw a photo of a happy-faced white pit bull mix on Facebook.
“This dog is deaf. Just like me!” Mindy Cousineau recalled her 14-year-old son telling her.
Then he told her: “I need him — he’s my dog.”
The caption on his adoption photo read, “He’s a 9, but he can’t hear you snore at night.”
Right away, Mindy and her husband Jim Cousineau jumped in the car with Walker that Sunday afternoon, July 31, and drove from their home in Bentley, Mich. to the BISSELL Pet Foundation’s Empty the Shelters adoption event in Midland, about 35 miles away.
“We asked to see the deaf dog they called Puppy, and as soon as they brought him out, we knew there was no going back,” said Mindy Cousineau, 42.
Her son bonded immediately with the 6-year-old pooch that had been dropped off at the Midland shelter about a month earlier, she said.
Walker immediately knew what he would name him: Dave. He always giggled at the line “Hey, Dave, listen up, please!” from the “Despicable Me” movie, his mom said. The laugh line was delivered by Steve Carell’s character to a misbehaving minion, and seemed like a fitting place to find his new dog’s name.
“He thought it would be funny because Dave [the dog] can’t listen up,” she said.
The photo Walker had spotted of the dog on the Humane Society of Midland County’s Facebook page had been posted just two days earlier.
“It was pure luck that Walker saw it,” Mindy Cousineau said. “It was love at first sight.”
“We already had two dogs at home, but when we saw Dave plop down into Walker’s lap, it was a done deal,” she added. “It was like Dave was saying, ‘This is my person.’”
Walker is in 9th grade and has high-functioning autism and bilateral hearing loss, she said, noting that her son can hear high-pitched tones but uses hearing aids to help him hear low-pitched sounds.
“Walker could hear pretty well until he was almost 10 and had influenza A,” Mindy Cousineau said, adding that she thinks that’s what caused his hearing loss.
“He has meltdowns sometimes, and he has been teased at school,” she said, explaining why Walker was happy to have some extra emotional support. “When he showed that he related to Dave because he was deaf, we knew it was meant to be. They became instant friends.”
Dave also needed some extra love, said Casey Nicholson of the Humane Society of Midland County.
Dave was in a home where he was neglected and left outside to run free, then he was taken into another nearby home where he did not get along with the chickens on the property, so he was surrendered to the shelter, Nicholson said.
“When he arrived here, we were told he was deaf,” Nicholson added.
Dave quickly became a staff favorite because of his gentle demeanor, but he had been passed over for adoption because of his deafness, she said, noting that the dog was in the shelter for nearly a month before the Cousineau family showed up to take him home.
More than 22,000 shelter pets across the country were adopted during the BISSELL Pet Foundation’s month-long event — in which 32,000 pets were looking for homes, said Brittany Schlacter, a spokesperson for the foundation in Grand Rapids, Mich.
About 7,000 animals that were not adopted during the event were placed in various shelters when space opened up, and Dave — one of them — was one of the last to find a home, she said.
“Dave and Walker’s friendship is the perfect reminder that there is a family for every shelter pet waiting for their second chance,” Schlacter said.
Mindy Cousineau said when they opened their front door, Dave strolled inside the house like he owned the place and right away started playing with the family’s other dogs, Doug and Darry, and Walker’s younger brother, Chase, 12.
“He acted like he’d always lived with us,” she said. “When he walked in, it was like ‘Here I am! I’ve arrived!’”
Dave sleeps on Walker’s bed and is never more than three feet from his side when he’s not at school, Mindy said.
“We’ve noticed a huge difference in Walker’s attitude and behavior since Dave showed up,” she said. “He’s more relaxed. When Dave sits next to him, he tells him his troubles.”
“I just love him — I can tell him anything,” added Walker.
He and the rest of the family were surprised to learn that Dave already knew sign language commands. They’d taught basic sign commands to their other dogs years earlier, Mindy said. Dave had apparently been taught by a previous owner.
“He understands if you sign the words sit, stay, speak, shake, come, good boy and leave it,” said Mindy, noting that she’s been signing “leave it” a lot because Dave often picks up things he’s not supposed to have.
“He came here already knowing this, so somebody had to have loved this dog,” she said. “He’s really smart and he’s really happy. And now Walker is enjoying teaching him some new commands.”
Shelter workers didn’t know how Dave lost his hearing, Mindy said, but they told her he was probably born that way. In fact, studies have shown that dogs with a white-colored coat are more prone to deafness.
Whatever the reason, he’s a perfect companion for Walker, she said.
“We all accept him and love him,” Mindy said. “He’s a fun-loving dog, and he’s helping Walker to want to spend more time outside. They run around in the yard and play fetch.”
Dave has also helped her son to gain more confidence, she said.
“Walker has become more social and he’s talking now to kids at school,” she said. “He even decided to join the school football team. He’s opened up because of Dave.”
She said that Dave has more than earned his favorite regular treat of freshly peeled bananas.
“He’s the only dog out there where you can open a cheese wrapper and get no reaction whatsoever, but when you open a banana, he’s all over you,” Mindy said.
Walker said he’s fine with getting jumped on and knocked over by Dave.
“Dave is my buddy,” he said. “He’s a bit of a bed hog, but really I don’t mind.” | 2022-09-13T10:46:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A deaf dog's forever companion is a Michigan teen with hearing loss - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/09/13/deaf-dog-adopt-cousineau-dave/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/09/13/deaf-dog-adopt-cousineau-dave/ |
David Byrne is always onto the next adventure
For nearly 50 years, from Talking Heads to ‘American Utopia,’ he’s charted his own path
David Byrne poses for a portrait on the set of his upcoming show "Theater of the Mind" in Denver on Aug. 13. (Stephen Speranza/For The Washington Post)
DENVER — They have gathered for David Byrne’s funeral, sitting in a bright room facing a coffin that’s been customized to also serve as a piano. A childhood photo of the deceased rests on a stand nearby. A guest book, too. But before anyone can tear up, the coffin lid opens and up pops David Byrne. Except it’s not the wiry singer of “Psycho Killer” but a 6-foot-2 Black actor named donnie l. betts who peppers the assembled with questions: “Am I still dead? Am I still me? Am I alive again? Am I still David?”
A few rows back the real David Byrne, the white-haired singer who did indeed once front a rock band called Talking Heads, rolls into a chortle. He has seen this coffin thing many times. It still gets him.
“It’s just funny to have the actor come out of a coffin that looks like a piano,” he says. “I don’t think of it as being myself.”
Byrne is here in Denver putting the finishing touches on “Theater of the Mind,” a sprawling project that’s part installation, part performance piece. It arrives only months after he wrapped “American Utopia,” the Broadway smash that featured him, bare footed and gray-suited, singing, dancing and delivering bite-size commentaries. The production won a Tony and set a house record for weekly ticket gross at the Hudson Theatre. As is typical for Byrne, the two pieces share almost nothing stylistically.
At 70, Byrne remains an original, a recognized rock star who is just as likely to publish a book of black-and-white sketches as make a new album. In a culture driven by nostalgia, he seems allergic to the easy repeat. Over the last decade, Byrne has created a musical about Imelda Marcos set in a disco, filmed a documentary on marching band color guards, collaborated on a record with St. Vincent, launched an online news issues magazine and appeared in “John Mulaney & The Sack Lunch Bunch,” a tipsy children’s special for which he wore a blue “Frozen” dress and confessed his fear of volcanoes. What he has not done is perform with his onetime band, Talking Heads. They last played together at their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2002. Jerry Harrison, the group’s multi-instrumentalist, says that he’s given up nudging Byrne to reunite.
“There’s a lot of fans who would like to see us reform, so I’m disappointed we don’t do it,” he says. “But David has always said he never wants to do something just for the money.”
“Theater of the Mind” predates “American Utopia.” Byrne and Mala Gaonkar, an investment fund manager who is also a creative writer, have been working on some version of the show since at least 2015. The production costs $4 million with Byrne’s nonprofit, the Arbutus Foundation, supplying 15 percent of the budget. It is being presented with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts in 15,000 square-feet of an industrial building. Byrne will not be part of the performances but several guides — some women, some men, but all going by the name David Byrne — will usher in groups of 16 people through seven rooms that represent a different stage of life. And even if the guide character shares some personal details with the actual Byrne, “Theater of the Mind” is not overtly autobiographical. The production, he hopes, will make you contemplate not his life but the ideas that drive it.
One of “Theater of the Mind’s” main themes is how people change. The idea is peppered throughout the script and it’s a subject Byrne and Gaonkar often discuss.
“What it feels like to us is that there's a continuity and we're the same,” Byrne says. “Oh yeah, I have maybe some different opinions now or I wouldn't do that anymore, but I used to do that. And then the more you think about it, the more you think, I may have the same physical body in some sense, but I'm a completely different person than I was however many years ago. There’s a real possibility that you really are a completely different person. That's profound.”
That’s about as close as Byrne will ever get to linking his personal life to his work. He has always resisted the idea of a straight memoir (“it would be too boring”) but is conscious of what it means to be a public person with brand recognition. It’s why he hesitated, at first, to use his name for the main character of “Theater of the Mind.” That currency can be useful, he concedes, but “I want to make sure that I’m not promoting me. I’m promoting the show.”
Fittingly, “Theater of the Mind” throws curveballs at those looking for breadcrumbs of Byrne’s real history. The script finds the guide talking about being 19 and taking a brainless job as a security scanner in Glasgow, Scotland, to support his art. But the real Byrne’s family moved out of Glasgow when he was two. The guide’s mother, we learn, dabbles in painting and the prop department has provided a few of her wildly sexualized canvases. But it is actually Tom Byrne, the real Byrne’s late father, who painted as a hobby. The electrical engineer favored works done in the style of Henri Matisse.
“To me, it makes it more exciting thinking that it’s from David’s life because I respect David and I’m interested in sort of digging into that, whether or not it’s true or not,” says LeeAnn Rossi, who has worked with Byrne as a producer for a decade. “That’s kind of what the show is about anyway. What is real? And he’s been pretty clear and honest about sort of how he’s felt like he’s changed over time as a human.”
Byrne is polite and warm enough in conversation. If he doesn’t buy into a question, he doesn’t fake it and play along. He gives a quick response and waits for a subject that engages him more. He doesn’t invite probing into his personal life and tends to keep the chat going through data he’s gathered — about a place’s history, a study he read about in a magazine, or an innocuous question about your own habits. (“Did you do any cooking during the pandemic?”)
His manner, his clear lack of interest in confessionals can make it feel almost wrong to cheapen the conversation by going off the professional grid. (For the record, he divorced artist Adelle Lutz in 2004. They share one daughter and a grandson.) It also seems fruitless to push too hard to see where life merges with art. It somehow feels cleaner to leave that art open to interpretation.
It’s that type of abstract dislocation that made Talking Heads so effective. He created it with his avoidant eyes, that anxious voice, which sometimes seemed to be shouting that morning’s front page, and the jagged rhythms delivered through his Gibson 12-string. The songs were short stories, where characters discovered the holes in the American Dream ( “Once in a Lifetime”) or merely tried to survive (“Life During Wartime”). And somehow Byrne managed to write one of the sweetest love songs of the 1980s (“This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody”).
A few years ago, comedian John Mulaney, a longtime fan, sent Byrne an email to tell him how much “Glass, Concrete and Stone” meant to him. The song, the opener on Byrne’s 2004 album, “Grown Backwards,” resonated when Mulaney began to take note of how early his father had to get up for work. He thought of it again when he started traveling intensely for gigs, waking before dawn for his next flight.
“And he wrote back,” Mulaney laughs, “and said, ‘It’s amazing how many songs I have about you.’ ”
This air of mystery also lets Byrne explore his own growth in a way that’s both public and private. Years ago, Byrne self-diagnosed himself as being on the autism spectrum. The suggestion came first from his friend, Darcy Lee, who ran a gift shop. She had watched the behavior others labeled odd or quirky. Huddling in the corner at parties. Disappearing from social events without a warning. One day, Lee was reading an article about Asperger’s syndrome.
“I’d never heard of it and she was just kind of like, ‘David, this is you,’ ” Byrne says. “She goes on to read about people who are fairly mildly on the spectrum. And I thought, I’m not totally that way now but a lot of those kinds of behaviors and feelings were things I totally got.”
When he was a boy, Byrne remembers a birthday party in which he simply hid in another room until it was over. And as Talking Heads found a first taste of stardom in 1977, his unapproachability came off as almost high theater — except that it was no performance. The stage, Byrne says, was the only place he could escape and feel free to express himself.
That feeling of being different began early. In Baltimore, where his family settled after emigrating — Tom Byrne, an electrical engineer, had been hired at Westinghouse — they lived in a relatively working-class neighborhood. But they got Scientific American magazine and went to political protests and art museums.
“The other kids in elementary school, they went to Ohio and thought that was really far,” says younger sister Celia Byrne, now an epidemiologist in Maryland. “We camped across the country and my parents felt like exploring America was important. We’d also go and visit relatives in Scotland.”
Music became an outlet. He played guitar. He experimented with loops and overdubs on a reel-to-reel tape machine his father set up. He kept playing when he got to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1971, eventually forming a band with classmates Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz and former Modern Lovers keyboardist Harrison. For just over a decade, from roughly 1977 to 1988, they proved capable of playing anything: funk, electronics, world beat, or four-chord rock as they went from darlings of New York’s CBGB’s scene to one of the biggest rock bands in the world.
In “Theater of the Mind,” the guide Byrne talks to an earlier version of himself.
“Maybe we just see things differently,” he says. “Differently enough that maybe you and I aren’t the same person anymore.”
It’s easy to see how this line in particular might relate to Byrne. In Denver, he politely makes suggestions to his collaborators. In Franz’s 2020 memoir, “Remain in Love,” he is a microphone-hurling hothead who rarely, if ever, gives anyone else credit. Byrne, who has not read the book, did not dispute the portrayal.
He talks of making 1984’s “Stop Making Sense,” the Jonathan Demme concert film of the band’s carefully choreographed road show. The Byrne who oversaw the production, with its detailed lighting cues and the appearance of his iconic, oversized suit, was not the soft-spoken “DB” found in the “Theater of the Mind” rehearsals. He says he changed, in part, after working on 1986′s “True Stories” film. That production taught him to learn to trust others and delegate authority. That could also help relieve the intense pressure he felt to make everything perfect.
“Before that I thought, ‘Nobody understands what I want to do,’ ” he says today. “I have to be the boss guy. ‘No, don’t do it that way. You’ve got to do it this way. No, you f---ing idiot.’ And I might have been right but you don’t have to deal with people that way. You can sort of include people and make them part of your vision or idea.”
Does he long to make peace with Franz and Weymouth and try one final farewell tour? No. Byrne talks of feeling physically ill from the tension while the band was recording their final album, 1988’s “Naked.” He’s pleased to hear that Harrison, who he gets along with and has seen “American Utopia” on Broadway, has been exploring the 1980 Talking Heads record, “Remain in Light,” with a band that includes guitarist Adrian Belew. Of the anger directed at him by Franz, he remains perplexed.
“Like I said, I know that I wasn’t the easiest person to work,” he says. “But I guess a part of me just says, that was a long time ago. Can you just move on? Surely you’ve got better things to do.”
That Byrne has shied away from the expected has cost him fans in the past. Just after Talking Heads ended, he recorded “Rei Momo,” a masterful and danceable, Latin-inspired album that included Celia Cruz and Johnny Pacheco. On the ensuing tour, he played just two Talking Heads songs. Neither was “Psycho Killer” or the band’s lone, top-10 hit, “Burning Down the House.” A Latin-inspired album may not have appealed to the Patrick Batemans of the world, but at least it was music. Soon Byrne moved on to lectures centered around PowerPoint presentations. He published a book of photos. He began to show his art in galleries and museums.
The awkward, withdrawn art school kid somehow also became the grand collaborator who Pitchfork once described as someone who would partner with another artist if you promised him “a half-empty bag of Doritos.” “That wasn’t a compliment,” Byrne wrote in “How Music Works,” his 2012 book, “through, to be honest, it’s not that far from the truth.”
He made music with Fatboy Slim and Selena. He launched projects that allowed him to indulge his own curiosities. In 2016’s “Contemporary Color” film, Byrne wanted to create a new appreciation for color guards, the sabre-tossing crews that usually accompany marching bands. He recruited Nelly Furtado, Nico Muhly and public radio host Ira Glass for the project to collaborate with different color guards for a filmed performance. There is also Reasons to Be Cheerful, an online magazine that features stories written by Byrne and others about how problems, from disease spread to food shortages, were solved through new ideas.
The thread that runs through all of these projects is his desire to make art that people don’t immediately think of as art. Or to bring elements from one discipline or arena into another. In “American Utopia,” a production packed with familiar staples of his catalogue, Byrne took particular pride in collaborating again with choreographer Annie-B Parson.
“I’d worked with her for a while and really like her work and I thought, ‘These audiences would never go to one of her shows,’ ” he says. “You just move it into a different context and it takes on a whole different meaning. People can go, ‘Oh I get it now.’ ”
And something inside Byrne changed. He became more comfortable with himself, and in turn, his rock star past. He had the Asperger’s epiphany and learned to adapt, no longer needed to flee social settings. There would still be things he resisted — politely dismissing Mulaney’s suggestion he wear a “Stop Making Sense”-esque oversized suit jacket in the Netflix special, for example — but he also learned the joy he can bring by embracing some of his past. In “American Utopia,” the crowd would rise, dancing as soon as he began plucking the D string that marks the opening of “Burning Down the House.”
“Uplifting, exhilarating, thought provoking, poetic,” said actor Jude Law after seeing the show one night. “It’s very hard to capture that kind of joyfulness.”
In Denver, Byrne arrives for a recent rehearsal just before noon, wheeling through the back door of the factory space. There are no green M&M demands on his rider, but for this production he did require that his black Tern folding bike be shipped. (The last car Byrne owned was a Citroën that he drove in the late 1980s when he lived in Los Angeles.) The crew is already assembled, working out the kinks in the elaborate computer program meant to trigger effects in each room, talking through budget and audience projections, making updates to the script. When Byrne arrives, he first huddles with Charlie Miller, the executive director of the DCPA’s Off-Center program, and then with Gaonkar, who rolls in on a bicycle he rented her.
“Theater of the Mind,” which runs through Dec. 18, mashes the theatrical, audience participatory experience of a “Sleep No More” with a narrative of a life in reverse. There are perception-bending brain games, serious moments of contemplation and bits also meant to entertain. In one room, at an AstroTurfed staging of the David Byrne character’s 10-year-old birthday party, Lynyrd Skynyrd plays on a small radio as audience members don goggles and try to toss metal washers into an oddly elusive bucket. The activity says something about perception — the goggles were developed by a scientist in London — but is also just simple fun. Byrne breaks into laughter as he watches the newcomers in the group discover how hard it is to throw a washer into the bucket. And then, after they’ve adjusted, how difficult it is to adjust back to “normal.”
“If you are worried that this change is permanent, that we have completely messed up your eyesight, I know I was, well don’t worry, just keep tossing the washers,” the guide tells the group.
Byrne is detail-oriented, keeping a pencil in his left hand to scribble notes on paper. He does not oversee as much as participate in the walk through, wanting to understand what it will feel like for an audience member. Over two days of observation, he never raises his voice, never snaps.
The weeks in Denver will end when “Theater of the Mind” gets running. Then Byrne will be onto his next project. His home remains Manhattan, where he works out an office space that’s packed with old tapes, books and even an Oscar. (Best original score, “The Last Emperor,” 1987.)
In that space on a Tuesday in July, Byrne’s Ramis, a full-size bike he’s modified, is across from the door. Even on winter nights after “American Utopia,” he would emerge from the stage door, helmet strapped on, to head home on his two-wheeler. In Denver, I had asked to ride with him one morning to rehearsal but he had a problem with a wheel and ended up renting an electric scooter for the 3 1/2 mile commute from his temporary apartment. He makes good on the rain check back in New York and we start out down Grand Street in the heat of the late afternoon rush hour.
Keeping up with him can be deceivingly daunting. On this day, he wore no helmet, only a Panama hat, and a pair of Mary Janes without socks. We scooted past convenience stores and a fish market, turned onto FDR Drive and the Con Edison power plant.
“I love the feeling of floating with the bike,” he says during the ride. “Not that I’m doing anything fancy. I love that I kind of have agency.”
I fumble with my phone at red lights, trying to record what he’s saying.
At one stop, he tells me how he had struggled to write music during the pandemic but now had a stack of lyrics on his desk, waiting for him to pick up his Quinto guitar and compose. I asked if he could ever leave New York. I imagined all of the activity, the noise, the action sparked his creativity. “I always tell myself, wouldn’t it be nice to live someplace a little less fast, a little less aggressive,” he says. “But I haven’t done it.”
Along the East River, we ride down the path next to the water. There are no more cars, but the pavement is congested with pedestrians and other bikers. Byrne doesn’t seem to notice. He flicks his bell occasionally, but most of the time he just weaves in and out like a slalom skier. I’ve put my phone in my pocket by this point, too focused on steering to ask more questions. He is up ahead, floating across concrete. I just want to make sure I can keep up with the man in the Panama hat. | 2022-09-13T11:30:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | David Byrne is always onto the next adventure - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/13/david-byrne-profile-interview/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/13/david-byrne-profile-interview/ |
Peak bond-issuance week is in the books, and high-grade corporate bond deals are hanging tough in the face of recession fears and surging risk-free rates, a trend that appears to be extending into the second week of September. It’s a sign that the market remains open for the companies that need it, welcome news for businesses hoping to avoid the risk of a liquidity crunch. If the US is set for a downturn, it won’t be the bond market’s fault.
The week after Labor Day — Week 36 — is often the busiest time of the year for the purveyors of new corporate bonds, and the past week and change haven’t disappointed. Investment-grade issuers sold more than $54 billion in bonds last week, led by retailers and financial companies. Walmart Inc., Target Corp. and TD-Dominion Bank were among the companies that were active. Although it was just average by Labor Day week standards, the showing will come as a relief in a year that has experienced historic drawdowns in the bond market and spotty business for underwriters. Year-to-date investment-grade issuance in the US is down about 7% compared with the previous five-year average, but this important week ended up matching recent precedent.
Ultimately, that’s a reminder that investors aren’t necessarily the ones getting cold feet despite interest-rate uncertainty and economists’ growing warnings of a potential recession. Rather, the slump has mostly come down to companies’ reluctance to pay market-rate interest rates. The Bloomberg US Corporate Bond Index of investment-grade securities now has a yield of around 4.95%, close to the highest since 2009. Companies are also paying higher new issue concessions, the extra yield they pay over their existing debt. So far this year, companies have paid 12.7 basis points in such concessions compared with two in 2021, excluding supranational, sovereign and agency debt, according to Bloomberg markets strategist Brian Smith. Last week, the concessions were 13 basis points.
In general, companies that have the flexibility aren’t in any rush to pay these rates. If the Federal Reserve is able to engineer the elusive “soft landing” for the economy — if inflation ebbs without too much pain in the labor market — yields could come down meaningfully. Even if the US dips into a recession, company borrowing costs could conceivably decline amid speculation about Fed rate cuts. Investment-grade credit spreads may simultaneously widen, but perhaps only 75 to 85 basis points at the high end. The situation could even be a net improvement for issuers.
But many blue-chip companies simply have strict financing schedules that they try to keep and don’t bother trying to perfectly time the vagaries of the market. For the less frequent issuers, perhaps the biggest motivator for raising money now is the fear that the future could hold even higher borrowing costs because of sticky high inflation that forces the Fed to get even more aggressive. Under the nightmare stagflationary scenario, risk-free rates would rise while credit spreads widened as well. Fortunately, few economists have that as their base case. With all those crosscurrents, it’s not likely that the spurt of excitement in the new-issue market will last much longer — not at this pace. Bloomberg Intelligence Chief US Credit Strategist Noel Hebert projected a muted $125 billion to $135 billion in investment-grade bond sales this month, around the weakest September in seven years. The second week after Labor Day tends to be fairly busy, but the momentum fades quickly in the latter part of September. And as Hebert notes, a number of deals were pulled forward into August. The size of the current window of opportunity may depend in part on how markets receive the consumer price index report on Tuesday, which should indicate further moderation in headline inflation but probably won’t be enough to drastically change the Fed’s strategy.
For now, the big takeaway is that the primary bond market remains open for business. Investors are getting a decent carry at these levels, and they will continue to bring their money to the corporate bond market as long as companies are willing to pay the going rates. That should be a bulwark against real deterioration in the corporate outlook. So in that sense, Labor Day week was a welcome victory for the bond market. | 2022-09-13T11:30:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hot Corporate Bond Market Puts Buyers’ Strike on Ice - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/hot-corporate-bond-market-puts-buyers-strike-on-ice/2022/09/13/0737bc34-3354-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/hot-corporate-bond-market-puts-buyers-strike-on-ice/2022/09/13/0737bc34-3354-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
By Harry Stevens
It was the summer that wouldn’t quit. From early June to straight past Labor Day, waves upon waves of heat scorched and baked the country, smashing thousands of temperature records along the way.
And summer may have saved its worst for last: Oppressive heat in the West that finally broke Saturday set hundreds of records on its own. Meteorologists described it as the most extreme September heat wave ever observed in the Western United States.
Broken temperature records,
June 1 through Sept. 7
More than 7,000 daily temperature records across the United States were broken this summer, a Washington Post analysis of data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration revealed. In the third-hottest summer on record, more than 400 monthly records and 27 all-time records also fell.
Daily temperature records, meaning the highest temperature ever recorded at a particular station on a particular calendar date, are broken more frequently than monthly records, which indicate the highest temperature ever recorded during a whole month. Breaking all-time records — the hottest temperature recorded at a station in its entire history — is even rarer.
Such records are but one measure for tracking and quantifying summer heat. Other metrics can offer a longer-term perspective, such as a location’s summer average temperature over time.
Taken together, the records show a country coping with hotter days that fuel larger forest fires and longer, more intense droughts.
Tens of thousands of weather stations across the United States, from big cities to small towns, in deserts and on mountain slopes, feed data to NOAA’s daily temperature database. Of those stations, some 7,600 have at least 30 years’ worth of daily temperature data, enough for scientists to draw long-term conclusions about climate changes. The Washington Post analyzed those stations to discover where and when records had been broken from June 1 through Sept. 7.
[Heat-wave map: See where Americans face the most extreme heat risk]
Heat fell upon the country in waves, causing a spate of record-breaking temperatures across the Southwest in June, wildfires that scorched Northern California and the Pacific Northwest in July, and destruction to Midwestern farms in August, culminating in a barrage of sweltering days across the West in early September.
Amid a June heat wave that roasted the Southwest, the weather station in Tucumcari, N.M., population 4,872, recorded an all-time high of 112 degrees on June 11.
“It was pretty brutal,” said Ron Warnick, the lone full-time reporter at the Quay County Sun, Tucumcari’s weekly newspaper. To make matters worse, the town had to close its swimming pool because of a leak, and decades of drought have long since dried up Tucumcari Lake.
[London hit 104 degrees. That’s like 128 degrees in Las Vegas.]
“Folks here generally handle the heat well, but I heard people complaining who are lifers in Tucumcari,” Warnick said. Even his dogs refused to play outside.
The all-time high in Tucumcari was among scores of heat extremes across the country in mid-June. Daily records first were set in Phoenix, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, while Denver hit 100 degrees on June 11, tying its record for the earliest day the city hit triple digits.
A man walks by a formerly sunken boat along the shoreline of Lake Mead near Boulder City, Nev., on June 22. (John Locher/AP)
As the heat wave crept east, it set records from Texas to Wisconsin. St. Louis recorded its warmest June night on record, and Milwaukee posted its highest June heat index, a measure of how hot it feels factoring in humidity, in 48 years: 109 degrees.
Late June brought searing temperatures to the Southeast, with daily record highs being set from New Orleans to Raleigh.
July’s most widespread unusual heat occurred mid-to-late month, when searing temperatures set records in the West and South. Salt Lake City tied its all-time high of 107 degrees, while Oklahoma City soared to 110, its highest July temperature on record.
As Texas registered its hottest July on record, Houston hit 105 on the 10th, matching its highest temperature ever observed during the month. Austin soared to 110 the same day, establishing a July record.
To conclude July, a prolonged heat wave in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest set records for the longest streaks with highs at or above 90 and 95 degrees in Portland and Seattle, respectively. Medford, Ore., posted a high of 115 on July 29, tying its highest temperature in 111 years.
Amid this heat wave in the Northwest, a forest fire ignited on July 29 near McKinney Creek Road, by the Klamath River in Northern California. The McKinney Fire would grow into California’s largest and deadliest fire of the year to date.
Angela Crawford leans against a fence as the McKinney Fire burns a hillside above her home in Klamath National Forest, Calif., on July 30. (Noah Berger/AP)
That day, about 55 miles to the southeast, a weather station on a mountain slope near Dunsmuir, Calif., recorded an all-time high of 106 degrees. Dunsmuir’s mayor, Matthew Bryan, thought that sounded low. His thermometer hit 111, he remembered.
The wind patterns kept the McKinney Fire from threatening Dunsmuir, but the town, situated at the bottom of a canyon, is uncommonly vulnerable to fires. In recent years, Western wildfires have become hotter and less predictable. Bryan said he worries that Dunsmuir could become the next Paradise, the California town that was almost completely destroyed by the Camp Fire in 2018.
“It’s an existential crisis,” Bryan said. “It’s not as if we can do anything this week, this month or this year that’s going to really stop the threat.”
August kicked off with an oppressively hot and humid air mass over the Plains. On Aug. 1, Des Moines posted a low of just 82 degrees, its warmest low temperature since 1936. Meteorologists said “corn sweat,” or the moisture exhaled into the atmosphere by the crop, intensified the humidity.
The weather station in Bridgewater, S.D., a farming town of 511 people, recorded an all-time high of 107 degrees on Aug. 3.
“That first week of August was a bugger,” said Lyndon Hofer, a farmer who lives six miles south of Bridgewater. “I believe it probably broke records all around.”
Hofer grows corn and soybeans. In normal summers, he gets between 160 and 180 bushels of corn per acre. The drought and heat wave slashed his yields by more than three-quarters. Many acres grew nothing at all. Crop insurance covered his expenses, but he made no profit this year.
“When you get the two thrown together, extremely high temperatures and then no moisture, well, it just takes a matter of a few weeks and everything burns up,” Hofer said.
In his five decades of farming, Hofer has noticed the weather upon which his livelihood depends has changed. “When it’s dry, it gets drier. When it’s cold, it gets colder. When it’s hot, it gets hotter,” he said. “If somebody asked my opinion, I’m not a big believer in climate change. But weather does seem to be getting more extreme.”
America is on pace for its lowest corn yield since the drought of 2012, according to analysts at Rabobank, which collects data about commodity markets. Yields in all crops could be down by as much as a third compared with last year, according to the American Farm Bureau.
The Northeast emerged as the other hot spot in early August. Boston saw six straight days at or above 95 degrees between Aug. 4 and 9, its second-longest such stretch, capping the city’s hottest 30-day period on record. The heat was made worse by severe drought in the region at the time. Massachusetts was among five states in the Northeast to have its warmest August on record.
The heat wave that gripped California and other parts of the West for more than a week was the most severe ever recorded in September, weather experts said, confirming what California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) called the “hottest and longest on record” for the month.
On Sept. 7, a temperature station in Calistoga, Calif., a town of 5,346 people, hit 118 degrees.
Nearly 300 weather stations recorded their hottest September temperatures ever. Salt Lake City, Sacramento and Reno, Nev., broke their September records multiple times and by large margins.
It was the “greatest September heat wave ever west of the Rockies hands down,” tweeted weather historian Maximiliano Herrera on Wednesday.
What temperature records say about climate change
In a stable climate, temperatures bob back and forth like a seesaw, equally likely to break high records as low ones. But in a warming world like ours, the seesaw is weighted toward the high side.
Over the past two decades of summers, far more record highs have been broken than record lows. This summer, more than three times as many high records were broken than low ones.
Number of daily record highs and record lows broken from June 1 to Sept. 7, 2000-2022
Hover to see the numbers for each year
Without climate change, the orange bars and the blue bars in the chart above would balance each other out. In about half of the years, the blue bars would be longer; in the other half, the orange bars would be longer.
But in 19 out of the 23 summers since the year 2000, more record highs have been broken than record lows, so the orange bars are almost always bigger than their blue counterparts.
Dylan Moriarty contributed to this report.
Daily temperature records were downloaded from NOAA’s Global Historical Climatology Network daily (GHCNd) database. A daily record indicates the extreme (highest or lowest) temperature at a particular weather station on a given date. Monthly records indicate the extreme temperature at a station for a whole month, and an all-time record indicates the extreme temperature ever recorded at the station. The analysis includes only those weather stations that have at least 30 years’ worth of data, each of which with at least 182 days of recordings, the standard used by NOAA.
Shaded relief data was downloaded from Natural Earth.
Harry Stevens is a graphics reporter at The Washington Post. He was part of a team at The Post that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the series “2C: Beyond the Limit.” Twitter Twitter
Jason Samenow is The Washington Post’s weather editor and Capital Weather Gang's chief meteorologist. He earned a master's degree in atmospheric science and spent 10 years as a climate change science analyst for the U.S. government. He holds the Digital Seal of Approval from the National Weather Association. Twitter Twitter | 2022-09-13T11:31:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Maps show all the temperature records broken in summer 2022 - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2022/temperature-records-summer/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2022/temperature-records-summer/ |
As schools struggle to find educators, some no longer require college degrees
By Moriah Balingit
An empty classroom. (iStock)
When students returned to class this year, a growing number of them were greeted by adults with no teacher training and, in some cases, no more than a high school diploma.
States desperate to fill teaching jobs have relaxed job requirements. Public officials are openly challenging the idea that a degree in education should be a prerequisite for getting into the classroom and are aiming to undo long-standing license rules. Some states now permit people to teach without finishing college in certain cases, and many increasingly rely on substitutes — who are usually not required to have college degrees — to fill teaching jobs full-time.
The pandemic created staffing crises in many schools. In other places, such as Oklahoma and Arizona, they existed long before 2020, driven in part by low teacher pay, cuts to school spending and decreased interest in the teaching profession.
The moves to address those problems today come as right-wing politicians paint schools and universities as bastions of liberal ideology. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who had previously called a college degree “a magic piece of paper which likely would have cost too much anyway,” recently introduced a programs to put community college students and military veterans in classrooms with mentor teachers.
“The teachers that become great teachers don’t become great teachers because they’re sitting in some university lecture hall listening to some professor bloviate,” DeSantis said when he announced an initiative to allow community college graduates to teach under a mentor teacher for two years. “What makes a teacher great is actually being there, doing it, watching experienced teachers and seeing what they do that works, working directly with students.”
Many states have loosened job criteria over the years to draw more people into the teaching profession. In 2019, only 15 states required candidates pass a basic skills test — which measures whether they have a grasp on math, reading and writing — according to a report from the National Council on Teacher Quality. Many states allow people to work on short-term licenses while they are still in teacher preparation programs. In the pandemic, more states loosened requirements, some just temporarily.
“So we put our least prepared, least qualified, least experienced teachers into the schools where students need the most,” said Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality. She said states have been eroding prerequisites for years, with many doing away with requirements for exams that test whether aspiring educators actually know the material they want to teach. “When we do this, we ignore in the research on how you should teach kids specific skills like reading or early numeracy or the knowledge base that exists for successfully serving students.”
“There’s that old saying that everyone thinks they know everything about schools because they’ve been to school,” said Chris LeGrande, the principal of Guthrie High outside of Oklahoma City. He has managed emergency-certified teachers who did not know how to plan lessons that filled class time and left students to their own devices if their lessons ended early. “I see a lot of kids on phones,” he said, “which I consider wasted instructional time, which ultimately is not beneficial to our students.”
Florida — where shortages in some places are acute and where teachers labor under a raft of recently-passed laws that restrict how they talk about race and sex education — has boosted teacher pay. It also introduced an initiative that will permit military veterans to teach alongside a credentialed teacher for two years and then lead classes alone, provided they’ve served four years of active duty, acquired 60 college credits, and enter a five-year teacher’s license program. As of Friday, 341 people had applied to participate in the program.
Arizona’s state board of education voted earlier this year to permit substitute teachers, who need only a high school diploma, to serve as full-time classroom teachers for an entire school year in response to its state staffing pinch. It also allows those earning bachelor’s degrees teach under a mentor for two years thanks to a law passed this year.
“Schools are struggling to find substitute teachers, which is causing learning disruptions for students and placing pressure on teachers and administrators,” the board members wrote.
Paul Tighe recently left his job as superintendent of the Saddle Mountain Unified School District on the outskirts of Phoenix. During his tenure, he said, it became so difficult to find qualified teachers that an elementary school ended up hiring two parents who were working on their education degrees to teach elementary school classes by themselves. The term “substitute teacher” has become a misnomer at many Arizona schools, because many end up teaching full-time to fill vacancies, instead of being a backup for a teacher who’s out.
“We basically gave them on-the-job student teaching,” Tighe said.
Oklahoma has introduced an “adjunct teacher” program that allows school boards to hire anyone who passes a background check as a teacher, so long as state education officials also sign off. According to John Waldron, a state lawmaker who represents Tulsa, there have been 248 applications for adjunct teachers this year.
Oklahoma state Rep. Jessica Garvin (R) said she believes teacher preparation is important, but she also thought the state’s requirements were too rigid — and were keeping out people in other careers with the potential to be great teachers. So she introduced a bill to expand the program, which previously permitted them to work only part-time.
“I was like ‘You could amputate my leg, but you can’t go teach anatomy?” Garvin said. “I just felt like that was so restrictive.”
Waldron, a former history teacher now serving as a state representative, worries that desperate school districts will hire people unfit to be in classrooms. Waldron ran for office in 2018 after budget cuts and low-teacher pay prompted a statewide teacher walkout that eventually led state lawmakers to increase education funding and raise teacher salaries. It has done little to stem the shortage, Waldron said.
“We hit rock bottom, broke through and found a whole new bottom,” Waldron said of the new teacher adjunct law.
Oklahoma, which has long contended with acute teacher shortages, passed a law a little more than a decade ago permitting districts that had exhausted all means to find qualified educators to get an “emergency certification” for anyone who held a college degree, even if they had no training.
It was meant to be a stopgap in extraordinary circumstances — in the program’s first year the state issued 32 licenses — but the emergency seems never to have ended. Last school year, the state board of education issued more than 3,600 emergency teaching licenses, according to KOSU, an NPR affiliate in the state. It is on track this year to break that record, increasing the proportion of untrained educators among the state’s 45,000 person teaching corp.
At a roundtable with reporters last week, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said that, to draw people in to the teaching profession — and to keep them there — working conditions need to improve. He listed a litany challenges facing teachers: they feel under attack, micromanaged and disrespected; they are not given the resources to help their students succeed; and they sometimes have to take on second jobs just to make ends meet.
“Better working condition also means that we revisit normalizing that teachers could work in classrooms that are 95 degrees all day with a class of 27 students,” Cardona said. “If we’re serious about lifting the profession, if we’re serious about cutting education, we must invest in our educators.”
In a letter to school leaders in December, Cardona spelled out ways schools to recruit and retain teachers, including using coronavirus relief funds to boost teacher compensation, focusing on the well-being of staff, and getting more people in to the profession by covering the cost of their teacher preparation courses in exchange for a commitment to teach in the district. He also urged states to set up teaching apprenticeships — programs that pay for an aspiring teacher’s education and allows them to work and be paid while they earn their degree.
But nowhere in the seven-page letter did he suggest doing away with job requirements.
“When the nation’s report card is showing that our students have dropped drastically — to provide educators who are not qualified or trained in the pedagogy of teaching is a slap in the face to the profession,” Cardona said. | 2022-09-13T11:31:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | States are lowering job requirements for teachers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/13/teacher-requirements-shortage-jobs/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/13/teacher-requirements-shortage-jobs/ |
The water crisis in Jackson has been decades in the making
Mississippi’s Black residents have long fought for access to clean water.
Perspective by Thomas J. Ward Jr.
Thomas J Ward Jr is assistant dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Farmingdale State College-State University of New York, and author of two books, "Black Physicians in the Jim Crow South" (University of Arkansas Press, 2003), and "Out in the Rural: A Mississippi Health Center and its War on Poverty" (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Jackson City firefighters and Humana volunteers help distribute more than 40,000 bottles of water and 3,000 MREs to Jackson, Miss., residents Sept. 2. (Steve Helber/AP)
Jackson, Mississippi’s largest city, is facing a water crisis. While the situation was triggered by torrential rains and the flooding of the Pearl River, which then overwhelmed the city’s main water plant, the system was broken even before the recent flooding. Jackson’s (mostly Black) residents have endured years of periodic water shutdowns and boil orders because of burst pipes and high lead levels.
Mississippi is the nation’s poorest state, and Jackson is an impoverished city. In the midst of this crisis, Gov. Tate Reeves (R) has tried to shift the blame to the city’s leadership, stating that “water is not free,” and floating a proposal to privatize the water system in Jackson. But the water crisis is about more than a lack of funds. There are many (majority White) areas of Mississippi where the water and sewer systems are well-maintained, so such crises do not occur. In fact, Mississippi has a long history of White political leaders purposefully, and sometimes illegally, steering needed funding away from Black communities. In response, Black Mississippians have demanded access to clean water and public services, recognizing that these are fundamental civil rights issues.
In 1970, Rosedale, a small, predominantly Black town of about 2,500 residents, deep in the Delta along the Mississippi River, became a site of protests. Black citizens staged boycotts of downtown businesses to try to put pressure on the all-White local government to improve municipal services in the Black sections of town.
Central to their demands were clean water and sewage services, as at that time few homes in the Black community of Rosedale had running water or were connected to the city sewage system. The problem was so severe that when it rained, human feces washed down the unpaved streets of Black Rosedale. At that time, the Rosedale protests got no national exposure, and most Americans did not view water and sewage as civil rights issues, especially in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But to the people of Rosedale, the fight for clean water and sewage access was a fight for basic civil rights long before the term “environmental justice” was coined.
The leader of the Rosedale protests was Johnnie Todd, later elected the town’s first Black mayor. Todd worked at the Tufts-Delta Health Center, a federally funded War on Poverty project in Bolivar County. As part of its mission to improve the health of poor residents, the center established an environmental division to examine living conditions throughout the county.
Andrew James was the director of that division, and what he found in Bolivar horrified him. Only 29 percent of the Black population in the county had piped water; most relied on pumps, hydrants or water hauled in from nearby towns. Some resorted to gathering water from irrigation ditches found on the cotton plantations that they lived and worked on. Most disturbingly, James found that many families stored their water in old 55-gallon drums that had contained pesticides and other agricultural chemicals.
James found the sewage situation no better, as 90 percent of the Black residents in the county had no flush toilets, relying instead on “sunshine privies,” outhouses that were little more than untreated holes in the ground. As James toured the county, he was struck by “the existence of sewered white areas and non-sewered black areas. … Essentially the black man is taxed to support an important health service for whites, and he is denied it.”
The negative health implications of the water and sewage situation forced James and his team to come up with creative solutions. Unable to build a sewage system because of a lack of funds, they tore down the old sunshine privies and built sanitary ones in their place. To deal with the water crisis, James developed a simple drilling system to bring clean water to the rural poor. Using a sawed-off telephone pole with two handles attached, his two-man teams drove pipes into the rich Delta soil until they hit clean ground water. In the coming years, orange-handled pumps appeared in fields all over Bolivar County, bringing clean drinking water to those who desperately needed it.
The triage done by James and his team provided some relief for Bolivar County’s poor, but the growing awareness that they faced glaring discrimination in access to city services drove Black citizens in Rosedale and other areas of the Mississippi Delta to agitate for greater change.
The Rosedale boycott began in August 1970 and lasted more than a month. As many as 100 people turned out, and picketers demanded that the mayor meet with the Black community and “give us something concrete.” In addition to sewage in the Black sections of town, they also called for road repairs, street lighting and recreational facilities, along with the hiring of Black police officers.
Eventually the Rosedale government met with Black boycott leaders, reassuring them that the city had applied for federal funding for sewage improvements. But activists were not convinced, and they reminded officials that the city had received federal funds in the past but never spent them on the Black sections of town.
While the boycott energized Bolivar County’s Black residents, it was the courts that would ultimately bring some resolution to the situation. Concurrent with the protests in Rosedale in 1970, the NAACP, the ACLU and Tufts University brought suit to force changes. In 1971, in Hawkins v. Shaw, a federal court ruled that cities must equalize funding for public services in Black and White neighborhoods. It proved to be a landmark case that did finally force Southern municipalities, including those in Rosedale and throughout Bolivar County, to provide services for all residents. But fair distribution and guarantees around the quality and safety of those services were rarely achieved.
The crisis in Jackson, while acute, is a legacy of this problem, and it is not unique to Mississippi. In neighboring Alabama, a 2017 study by the United Nations found conditions in Lowndes County (which is more than 70 percent Black) to be like those in Rosedale in the 1960s, with residents suffering from diseases caused by impure water and raw sewage. The water crisis in Flint, Mich. (another majority Black city), which captured the attention of the nation eight years ago, remains unresolved today. Meanwhile, in Maryland, a richly funded state with politically liberal state leaders, students in many of the majority-Black Baltimore public schools have been unable to drink the tap water for years. These are only a few examples of the many U.S. cities where the water is undrinkable for many of its least-privileged residents.
The Rosedale protesters of 1970 were committed to the ideal that government should provide all of its citizens with basic equal services, and that clean water and sewage was a civil right to be demanded. Their cause is as relevant today as it was more than 50 years ago. | 2022-09-13T11:31:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The water crisis in Jackson has been decades in the making - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/09/13/water-crisis-jackson-has-been-decades-making/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/09/13/water-crisis-jackson-has-been-decades-making/ |
Masculinity In America
A MOTHER’S CHARGE
In cowboy country, a single mother tries to raise her boy to be a good man
By Jose A. Del Real
In her home state of Wyoming, Sarah navigates how to raise her son the right way. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
In Johnson County, Wyoming
The waitress knows to be chatty and cheerful. She makes $3 per hour and lives on tips, so she smiles as she walks through the restaurant, especially at the men, who seem to expect it most. Her hair is long and curly; her clothes are tight. A lip ring and several tattoos hint at some irreverence but mostly they draw attention to her age, 23 years old.
She introduces herself by her first name, Sarah, and for all anyone here knows or cares, these facts mark the beginning and the end of her story.
But at home, after she puts her 5-year-old son to sleep, she sometimes starts to cry and can’t stop. She cries because the man she was building a life with betrayed her trust and abused her body. Because she should have left him but she stayed. Because of all that happened next.
More customers walk in. She gives them menus and takes their drink orders. She summons a bubbly voice to ask how their days are going.
Work, for now, is this steakhouse in Buffalo, a rural town in northeast Wyoming at the base of the Bighorn mountain range.
Home, for now, is a 10-acre ranch owned by her grandmother that has become Sarah’s makeshift safe house. It is March, and winter has turned to spring since they came back home from out of state.
She does not have a plan.
She does not have any money.
Out here in the heart of cowboy country, she barely has any cell reception.
But she has her precious and precocious son. She is astounded by the thoughts he can formulate. She thinks he might be an honest-to-God genius.
“Momma, are balloons made out of molecules just like we are?” he asks her.
“Momma, do you have peripheral vision?”
“Momma, what is the hottest planet? Is it Venus?”
He might be able to change the world, Sarah often says, if she can figure out how to raise him the right way. But she is also overwhelmed by the fear that her sweet boy could one day become a bad guy, like so many of the ones who have hurt her. Like the one they just escaped. She is worried about what he has already learned, or mis-learned, about what it means to be a “real man.” About all the ways she has already let him down.
“Men just take and take and take and take. That’s what they are taught,” she says.
When her son was still a toddler, Sarah began to read about “toxic masculinity,” a phrase that had become more widespread on the internet amid the #MeToo movement. She started to think about the ways gender had shaped her own life, about the cruel whims of men she had endured and was expected to endure.
Strict and traditional notions of manhood, she believed, were not just dangerous but an outright lie — used to control women and men alike. Nowhere did this seem more relevant than in the back roads of her home state of Wyoming, the cradle of the American cowboy, where she had seen firsthand how violence, exaggerated masculinity and misogyny could reinforce one another.
These concerns extend beyond ideology into the realm of public health. Males are overwhelmingly responsible for violence in the United States, according to the most recent crime data published by the FBI. They committed about 80 percent of all reported violent crimes in the country in 2020, including 87 percent of homicides and 96 percent of rapes. Men themselves are often the targets, making up nearly 80 percent of people murdered in the country and also nearly 80 percent of suicides.
Women, meanwhile, disproportionately suffer from harm within their households. Among female homicide victims, according to past studies, half were killed by an intimate partner, compared with about 1 in 13 male victims. About 90 percent of all victims of rape are female.
The more she thought about the perils of masculinity, and the violence she had experienced firsthand, the more Sarah committed to raising her son to be a gentle and vulnerable man, an anti-cowboy even here on the frontier. It felt like an act of defiance. She scoured the internet for free research for “boy moms.” She took notes on parenting tips pushed to her phone by social media algorithms.
That was how the world would change, she thought. One child at a time. Her child.
But in the years that followed, Sarah saw her dreams repeatedly collide with her reality. She saw, again and again, how her trauma could be passed down to her son. She has struggled with how much blame she deserves for that inheritance.
Now, she is back on the family ranch. She feels so much sorrow and guilt for what has happened, for what she has exposed her child to, that she struggles to get out of bed in the morning. She is thinking about what her grandmother told her, that she “can’t keep swimming upstream forever.”
If she stays here, as her grandmother has offered, Sarah does not have to worry about the electricity getting cut, about paying rent, about constant hunger pangs. But small-town life in Wyoming means small-town rules. It means raising her boy a certain way, according to tradition and all the standards of gender that entails. It means living her life a certain way, too.
And so at work, for now, Sarah is the lightest possible version of herself. She is a pretty thing to be consumed in small bites.
Sarah is driving too fast up the highway into town to pick up her son from prekindergarten. She drives first along the north fork of the Crazy Woman Creek, then past the entrance to Crazy Woman Canyon, and finally past Crazy Woman Square on Buffalo’s main street. Sarah ponders these landmarks as she pulls into the parking lot of the school in a GMC Jimmy that was once teal but is now overtaken by rust.
Sarah brushes past the other parents without saying hello, her eyes trained on the ground while she walks her little boy to the car. When Sarah has a day off, they spend the late afternoons together drawing, or playing make-believe, or learning to skateboard. Today they drive to a playground.
“I don’t have even one friend,” her son says. “No one likes me for some reason.”
He is being bullied at school, and sometimes he bullies back. But his face brightens when he spots two children. He swings his head to throw back his hair. It is long, blond and stringy, and constantly falls in front of his eyes.
“Maybe that kid with the long hair will want to be my friend,” he says, running off.
He comes back a few minutes later.
“Mom, it didn’t work,” he says as tears form.
Sarah’s own eyes moisten. Her face falls.
The truth is that stability has been elusive on the meager wages of a single mom with a GED. They have moved around so much over the years, and her son hasn’t had much practice building healthy friendships with other kids.
About 1 in 4 children growing up in the United States live in single-parent homes, according to census data, and about 80 percent of single parents are single mothers. Such households are particularly vulnerable to poverty, hunger and housing instability.
For single mothers raising young boys, there is the added challenge of trying to raise sons amid escalating political polarization over American masculinity. Is it nature or nurture? Good, bad or neither? Sarah’s heart fluttered with guilt a few years ago when her son told her he wanted a dad. Nearly 8 million boys in the United States — about 1 in 5 — are being raised without a father figure in their household. For Sarah, these challenges have been exacerbated by her significant mental health struggles, including bipolar disorder and addiction to drugs that include methamphetamine.
Wherever they go, she imagines people are asking themselves, “What kind of mother is that?”
Sarah briefly considered an abortion when she became pregnant at 16 years old, but she did not have the money to travel to the nearest clinic in Colorado. Instead, she dropped out of high school. Her son’s father sometimes cheated on Sarah and their relationship didn’t last long. She accused him of domestic violence, which he denied.
Her life had been marked by instability even before then. When she was a toddler, her single mother abandoned her, landing Sarah in foster care. She sometimes thinks back to the intense hunger she would feel before she was adopted at 4 years old. After she was sexually abused in elementary school by a male member of her adopted family, she told therapists and her adopted mother what was happening but soon recanted her story for fear she would be sent away.
As the #MeToo movement kicked off in 2017, Sarah was 18 and living in Casper, Wyo. Her son was still a baby and Sarah was always short on cash. She began to have sex for money. She had struggled with postpartum depression, she said, and when her family found out about the sex work she felt so much shame that she overdosed on pills. For a time after that, Sarah performed in sexually explicit camera shows to supplement her income. No matter what she did, there was never enough money.
That was why, about two years ago, Sarah briefly thought about putting her son up for adoption. But she knew too many people who had been abused in the foster system like she had been. She couldn’t trust that he would end up in a safe home, and so she couldn’t go through with it.
Soon their luck appeared to change: Sarah began a relationship with a tattoo artist who made a good living. Although he did not always treat her well, she says that felt like a small price to pay for some financial security.
“Look, Mom, there’s more kids!” Sarah’s son whispers to her now.
He points to two boys who have just stepped onto the playground, one about his age and the other about 9 or 10 years old. The middle-aged man they are walking with leaves them at a park bench.
Sarah’s son is beginning to play with the boys when a woman walks over and summons them wordlessly. Their mom.
“Bye,” the smaller boy calls out.
It is a custody handoff between two divorced parents, the kind in a neutral public space where the two parents never interact. But Sarah doesn’t realize that. She thinks the other mom took one look at her and decided her kids were too good to play with her son.
Sarah recently cut her hair very short and is wearing a shapeless Carhartt coat over a Beetlejuice striped crop-top. She imagines all the things the other mom was thinking.
Why is she dressed like that?
Why is her hair so messy?
What kind of mother is that?
The ranch where Sarah and her son are staying adjoins a 2,600-acre cow-and-calf operation, the heart of the state’s agricultural economy. This is the land of real cowboys, the inspirational backdrop for countless fantasies about American masculinity.
Sarah is in the garden when her brother comes out of the trailer where he lives, across the gravel driveway, and tells her about a branding that’s coming up next weekend. It’s a big community event during which calves are marked with hot iron. But first, the calves must be separated from their mothers.
“It’s so sad. They’re taking the babies away from their moms, right after they’re born,” Sarah says.
“They’ve been together for three or four months already,” he says.
“I know don’t what’s worse,” she says.
Her brother responds with a shrug. That’s ranch life. Hamburgers and steaks make their way to dinner plates across the country from here, including at the restaurant where Sarah sometimes serves an item from the menu called the Crazy Woman Ribeye.
But there are uplifting parts, too. He tells Sarah about a neglected horse he has been rehabilitating, and he invites them to come see it later. It seems like a great activity for a boy.
As they drive down a dirt road to the stable later that day, her son seems less than thrilled.
“I do not want to get kicked,” he tells her urgently.
The neighboring ranches they pass can be sized up in any number of ways. By land. By cattle and crop. By water access.
And also by recent suicides. They are endemic out here, especially among men, who, according to data by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accounted for 84 percent of suicides in Wyoming, which has the highest rate per capita of any state. Another part of ranch life. The male suicide rate in the state is more than twice as high as the national average.
The romance of the American cowboy is lost on Sarah. She thinks about the combination of delusion and despair and entitlement she has seen in so many of the men around her. She toggles between empathy and rage.
Sarah suspects that a lot of the unhappiness men feel has to do with the gaps between the script they internalize and the reality of modern American life. “Real men” are meant to be stoic providers, lone cowboys who dole out justice and protection. But the world has changed, not to mention the economy. Why shouldn’t norms around gender change as well? Sarah wonders. What do working women like her get out of the gender bargain?
“I think men are scared,” she says. “They’re so ashamed to even talk about their emotions that they’re not even going to admit that they need help.”
In 2020, still reeling from her favorite cousin’s suicide, Sarah began a serious relationship with one of his close friends. Her new boyfriend was edgy, which she was often drawn to in men, but also willing to be vulnerable with her. They talked about their difficult childhoods. She told him how much it still hurt that the man who sexually abused her as a girl was never held accountable or even ostracized from their family. He shared stories about all the friends of his who had died of overdoses or had gone to prison.
He gave her a lot of affection. Sarah remembers feeling surprised when he said he loved her a few days into their relationship.
“I was just so thirsty for any love that I took it,” she says.
He also began to introduce her to drugs that she had never tried before, she says, an escalating menu of narcotics that included heroin and fentanyl.
Financially, their relationship gave Sarah the greatest sense of stability she had ever known. The amount of money he made as a tattoo artist was unbelievable to her, hundreds of dollars in a single day. He encouraged her to try becoming a tattoo artist, too, and he promised to teach her. She had always loved drawing, and this seemed like a way to get paid for it.
She felt like something was finally working in her life the way it was supposed to. Sarah hoped her grandmother, who had gone to college in the 1950s and had a middle-class life, was proud to see her finding her way.
Sarah was also impressed by her boyfriend’s interest in her little boy, she says now. He offered to babysit and began to co-parent with her. The three moved in together in Casper. Her son called her at work one day, she recalls, to say he wanted this man to be his dad.
Some things make more sense in hindsight.
Her boyfriend could be controlling, Sarah says, though it began in small ways that were hardly perceptible to her. He would pour water on her when he didn’t like what she was wearing. Other times, he would physically restrain her when they argued, enough that it hurt. He would also hound her to take drugs with him, she says, even when she was too tired and not in the mood. She went along with it. She told herself it was okay because she only did so when her son was safe and asleep.
“I’d think, like, ‘You’re never going to find somebody to love you if you don’t loosen up every now and again,’ ” she says. “I should have known better, but I didn’t.”
Even when her boyfriend hurt her, Sarah thought about all he had endured as a child, and she felt pity for him. She felt like she could help him.
In late spring of 2021, they moved together to Mississippi’s Gulf Coast on the promise that he could make good money there doing tattoo art and Sarah could continue learning as an apprentice. One day, while they were arguing, she recounts, he wrapped a seat belt around her neck and began choking her.
She found a private safe house for battered women, she says, where they spent her son’s fifth birthday.
Sarah felt shocked by how isolated and vulnerable she had become. She looked down at her body and realized it was covered with tattoos inked by this man, brandings that now felt grotesque. She realized that he had used affection and curated vulnerability as a weapon against her. It was another kind of toxicity.
“We’re brainwashed as women. We’re so sympathetic to men to the point where it’s dangerous,” she says. “We’re supposed to give and give and give until you have nothing left to give. And then you continue to give.”
Nearly $3,000 in stimulus payments from Washington helped her get on her feet. She bought a used car and got her own place.
That should have been the end of it.
But when a male neighbor began to bang on her door one night, she called her ex-boyfriend for help. They had been texting. He started coming around again.
“That’s when I really f---ed up,” she says.
Back at the ranch now, Sarah’s brother is giving her and her son a tour of the equipment they use to brand the calves. He assures Sarah that they are treated well and with dignity. He begins showing them how to train a horse not to buck, to “break it” so it is safe to ride.
Here, Sarah sees proof that a “real man” can be someone who helps people around him without exacting a price. It was her brother who drove down to Mississippi from Wyoming to bring her back home. They refer to it as “the rescue mission.”
“I feel like when men hear us talking about toxic masculinity, they think we’re trying to make them into the bad guy,” she says. “That’s not really how it is. I feel like they just don’t understand what masculinity is. It doesn’t have to be toxic.”
Sarah looks around the property, breathing in the familiar scent of mud and manure. She feels bittersweet. They have a steady life here. But she is unsure how much longer she can stay. She drinks heavily some nights and is becoming restless. Since she left Mississippi she has stopped shaving her armpits, another reclamation of her body, another rebellion.
Is this the kind of life she wants for herself? For her son?
She asks the little boy what he thinks.
He says the ranch is okay.
“I didn’t like the South because I was attacked,” he adds.
The adults hold their breath.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
Her body is tense, but her voice is sweet. Her face is neutral.
“When I was attacked by the ants!” he tells her.
He bursts into a laugh.
It’s just a funny story.
When he misbehaves or throws tantrums, there is nobody better suited to soothing this little boy than Sarah. If he is getting frustrated, she patiently tells him things like “let’s slow down, kiddo.” If he is unable to focus, she calmly instructs him to “remember your breathing.” When he begins to yell, she tells herself and then him that “anger is usually just sadness with nowhere to go.”
Right now, he is refusing to pick up the Legos at the public library in Buffalo, so she goes over what they’ve learned together about compromise. He interrupts her repeatedly and yells at her.
“If you want to do fun things, then you need to respect me, kiddo,” Sarah says now. “Compromising means we can do things you want to do, but also things I want to do.”
He starts to clean.
He stops again a few minutes later.
“Mom, when I was in — what state was that?” he asks.
Sarah’s entire body tightens. Her eyes narrow.
“Mississippi? Louisiana? Montana?” she asks, one by one, trying not to sound urgent.
“Montana,” he says, referring to a recent trip with his grandmother. “Mom, when I was in Montana, there was a guy who was a king. But he turned out to be a bad guy. His name was Pete!”
Sarah’s shoulders relax suddenly, but her eyes stay dim.
Sometimes her son shares normal stories from his imagination, but other times he shares difficult memories from their time living with her ex-boyfriend. Sometimes those things blend together.
One evening in August 2021, about a month after Sarah and her ex got back together, her son’s babysitter came into the tattoo shop in Mississippi where Sarah and her boyfriend worked.
The sitter pulled Sarah aside to say that her son had recounted being abused by Sarah’s boyfriend. The boy, standing with Sarah now, struggled to explain where and when it happened; the last few years were a blur of new states and new apartments. But Sarah believes much of the abuse must have taken place in Wyoming, before she stopped using drugs. While she was unconscious.
Disparate memories crashed together like puzzle pieces. Red marks on the child’s ear that he said were from Miles, his imaginary friend. The escalating pressure from her partner to use harder and harder drugs. The offers to watch her son while she did so.
Overcome with emotion outside the shop, Sarah vomited onto the street.
A co-worker took her and her son to the Gulfport Police Department. The department later interviewed her son, Sarah says, but would not pursue charges on the sexual abuse claims she made on her son’s behalf because the alleged abuse happened in Wyoming. Sarah told friends she felt disrespected and belittled during the initial interview. A police escort accompanied Sarah home to gather her essential belongings, according to the co-worker, who added that they were never contacted for questioning.
Sarah also called police in Casper, where officers opened a case. They requested notes from the Gulfport police’s interview with her son, but the investigation went nowhere because of a lack of evidence. A month later it was closed, according to public records; no one told Sarah and she never followed up.
Those first few days, she would break down crying in front of her son. But a therapist warned her that if he saw her get upset, he might not tell her — or anyone — if something like that were to happen again.
Sarah felt herself pulled back to the sexual abuse she had experienced as a child. She thought about how family members were still mad at her for saying something. How inescapable the cycles of male entitlement and violence and trauma that had shaped her life seemed now. And she felt like she was to blame. Perhaps what hurt Sarah most was the realization that her substance abuse, which she had rationalized as a Band-Aid to her pain, had played a key role in her son’s suffering.
In the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 13 boys are sexually abused as children, and in the vast majority of cases the abuser is known by the family. The abuse can cause a lifetime of mental health challenges including depression, addiction and increased suicide risk.
On the internet, Sarah found research that said children who are abused are likelier to become perpetrators. She asked herself, could her son one day hurt others?
Sarah struggled financially being on her own again, even with a few loans from her grandmother. She didn’t try to sign up for public assistance because she hadn’t been able to recover her identification from the home she shared with her ex-boyfriend, who did not respond to requests for comment from The Washington Post that were delivered through four active social media accounts and by email. He was also unreachable by telephone and text message, including at a phone number associated with his tattoo business in Las Vegas, where a man who picked up the phone said that he did not know anyone by the name of Sarah’s ex-boyfriend before ending the call.
Sarah felt herself unraveling.
She and her son moved in with friends, but she quickly wore out her welcome. She began to use meth regularly during that time, and soon relied on it to stay awake at various jobs. She would go long stretches without bathing and relinquished basic care of the boy to roommates for days at a time.
In her spiral, Sarah became consumed with her own pain, an unreliable narrator of her story and his.
She kept going like that for several months.
In a moment of clarity, she realized something needed to change.
That’s when Sarah’s grandmother persuaded her to let go of her pride and to come back to Wyoming. To live on the ranch and to start over closer to home. She and her son could be home by Christmas.
Now it is late May. They have been back in Wyoming for six months. Sarah stopped doing meth the day before she left Mississippi, she says, and hasn’t started again, though she has cravings. On the ranch, so long as her grandmother is alive, Sarah has enough money to buy her son toys and even to go to the nail salon occasionally.
On social media, raucous debates among white-collar professionals over the virtues and limits of the #MeToo movement draw millions of clicks.
In the American heartland, conservative politicians warn of a war against American masculinity.
In this little library in Buffalo, Wyo., Sarah’s eyes strain to keep the Legos in focus.
Sarah’s son climbs onto her and she holds him while he yells. Sometimes she hears from other parents, strangers, that she should not let him throw fits like that.
Finally, he calms down and they finish cleaning up.
As they drive back to the ranch, they pass Crazy Woman Liquors and Crazy Woman Fine Art Gallery and Crazy Woman Candles and Gifts. Beyond it all lies Crazy Woman Mountain.
“I just know there’s going to be so much for me to do in order to make up for all the s--- I put him through,” Sarah says later that evening. “So yeah, he has room to throw a temper tantrum. I don’t even call it a temper tantrum. It’s him expressing his emotions. And that’s fine.”
She will carry the guilt for the rest of her life.
She worries about all her little boy will carry.
With some research, two versions of the myth of the Crazy Woman emerge, though the sourcing is thin no matter where you look.
In the first version: A White woman’s family is killed by Native Americans, and she goes crazy from grief.
In the second: A Native American woman is the sole survivor after a deadly attack on her village, and she goes crazy from grief.
The woman’s reaction to this immeasurable trauma is all anyone knows about her, or cares to know about her. The Crazy Woman label is so ubiquitous in the region that few people ask any follow-up questions. The woman’s race and context shifts, but her hysteria remains. She is at once a phantom and a cautionary tale, inscribed into the landscape of northeast Wyoming.
What is this story for? What is it about?
Sarah thinks she knows.
“Nobody gives a s--- what you’re going through, what you’ve gone through,” she says before a double shift at the restaurant, drawing pulls of relief from a vape pen. “If you don’t leave that at the door, you just become the crazy b----.”
The details don’t really matter to anyone. The shame is what sticks.
But did she ever find a way to cope with her sorrow?
Did she go to work the next day?
Every day now, after he gets home from prekindergarten, Sarah’s son insists that it was the official last day. And every day Sarah argues with him that he still has a few more days to go.
“I have a calendar at home,” she says one afternoon after she picks him up.
“Well then look at it!” he responds.
She knows exactly when his last day is. She has been counting down.
It is June now, and Sarah has abruptly decided it is time for them to leave the ranch. They’ll leave as soon as school is out for the summer.
Sarah quit her job at the restaurant last week, hastily, after the other women at work began to make comments about her refusing to wear a bra. They accused her of trying to sexualize herself, Sarah fumes, though she just wanted to be more comfortable.
“What part of my body don’t they understand?” she says on her way to pick up her final paycheck. “My Nana keeps saying I can’t always swim against the current, so I’m switching rivers.”
She has managed to save up $650 during her time on the ranch.
Sarah is sporting a new tattoo on her forehead, a Japanese symbol in red ink inspired by an anti-hero, Gaara, from an anime series she and her son like to watch together. Sarah finds comfort in the show’s characters. Each one has a terrible past, but, despite all their struggles, they change for the better.
Her son likes that there are bad guys that the good guys have to battle.
Sarah’s plan is to move to a nearby town with her sister, who has a 1-year-old baby. They will help each other with child care; her sister will work the overnight shift, and Sarah will work swing shifts from midafternoon to late evening. She has submitted four applications for temporary jobs while she figures out what to do next. She feels steady.
Sarah is starting to dream again about working as a tattoo artist, maybe even at an all-women tattoo shop. Or perhaps she will enroll in courses at the local community college.
But she is startled when her son tells her that he choked one of his classmates recently on the playground.
She asks what he means by “choked.”
“This is the backstory: He caught me taking his stuff,” he tells her. “Then he taught me a lesson. He whacked me in the head.”
Now she is remembering that a teacher offered her parenting classes.
Sarah thinks about how her little boy sometimes puts his hand across her mouth, and she wonders if he learned it from her ex-boyfriend, who she has recently been looking up online. She has been following the Johnny Depp defamation trial against Amber Heard and worries she could get sued for warning others about the alleged abuse, especially in the absence of official police charges.
“What if someone came into your room and took your stuff?” she asks her son.
“I would probably punch them in the face!” he says, laughing.
She is always trying to figure out which of his behaviors are just normal boy things.
“Do you remember what I told you about respecting people’s boundaries?” Sarah tells him.
He looks at her. His face turns tough. Then it turns sweet.
“Oh, yeah,” he says.
In this moment, in every moment like this, Sarah maps a way forward: If she can raise her son to be a good man, it will be by teaching him to talk about his feelings and to ask for help. No matter how painful it is.
She wants him to know that his sadness has a place to go. That she can handle whatever it is.
She wants that to be true, at least.
But some days, Sarah’s despair is once again becoming so profound that it consumes her entirely. It leaves little space for her son. Her addictions are under control, she tells herself, and yet she also admits the ache is there — for alcohol now in particular, but also for male attention. The feedback loop of pain and temporary relief and more pain is familiar; she doesn’t know if she is really strong enough to break it. She relies on her son to steady her, to give her purpose.
Sarah wonders briefly if she should stay on the ranch after all, where her grandmother acts as a guardrail. But she dismisses it just as quickly.
A few minutes later, Sarah’s son cuddles up to her. He is carrying some balloons Sarah bought him at the grocery store earlier in the day.
“Momma, I want to use these balloons for my birthday party because I don’t want them to go to waste.”
In a few weeks he is turning 6.
The little boy waves a bubble wand at Sarah, whose eyes look far away. He looks puzzled as he flips the see-through tube upside down, then right-side up. He asks why the air pocket always stays on top and the liquid falls to the bottom.
“Do you know what gravity is, baby?” Sarah asks, focusing in on him.
“Yeah, it helps you stay on the ground, like stay on the earth,” he says. “We’re using gravity right now.”
Sarah explains that the water is heavier than the air in the tube, so it always gets pulled down to the bottom. He is impressed.
Sarah beams with pride.
She rubs her hands through his hair.
They giggle together.
Sarah has already packed two black trash bags full of clothes and is beginning to fill a third when tears start to fall down her face. The past year hits her all at once.
“He probably hasn’t even told me half of what was done to him,” Sarah says now, in private, taking big gulps of air.
She can hear the boy outside talking to the other grown-ups. She marvels at his resilience, and fears it, too.
“Congratulate me because it’s my last day until kindergarten!” he tells them, ecstatic.
Soon there will be a new home and a new classroom and a new schedule. Maybe at his new school, he wonders, there will be some kids who want to be his friends.
Sarah gets her breathing under control.
Her son is in the next room, pulling out school supplies from his backpack. A crayon box. A miniature blow-up beach ball. A paper crown that says “I did it!”
Sarah believes that it is not too late to turn trauma into triumph. That she can keep her focus on her son’s future and not her past. That she is strong enough to do so. This is a mother’s charge, she tells herself, and it may yet save her or break her.
She dries her face and steps out into the living room, where her son runs to ask her if they can draw together.
The Washington Post does not identify victims of sexual or domestic violence without their consent. To protect the privacy of Sarah’s son, The Post has not named him and has identified Sarah only by her first name. The Post has not named Sarah’s ex-boyfriend because no charges were filed against him by two police departments that Sarah contacted with allegations of abuse. He did not respond to numerous requests for comment from The Post. The present-day action described in the story was observed firsthand. Events taking place before 2022 were reported through public documents and corroborating interviews. | 2022-09-13T11:31:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | In cowboy country, a troubled single mother tries to raise her sweet boy to be a good man - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/13/masculinity-america-wyoming-single-mother/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/13/masculinity-america-wyoming-single-mother/ |
For Democrats, Alaska’s special election offers singular lessons
Democrat Mary Peltola in Anchorage on Aug. 31. Peltola won the special election for Alaska's only U.S. House seat, besting a field that included Republican Sarah Palin. (Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News via AP)
Last month, when Mary Peltola won the special election for Alaska’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrats gained major ground — literally. By flipping that seat, they doubled the amount of land they represent in the lower chamber of Congress, reflecting how unusual it is that the party was able to succeed in the massive rural state.
Of course, Peltola’s victory won’t necessarily translate into broader success for Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections. It would be easy to dismiss her race as idiosyncratic: She faced a deeply unpopular opponent in Sarah Palin; Alaska has the nation’s highest rate of voters not affiliated with a major political party; and the state recently adopted ranked-choice voting. These factors made a traditionally deep-red district more attainable for a Democrat — especially one who ran her campaign on “Fish, Family, & Freedom.”
First, Peltola’s success demonstrates the value of putting a genuine effort into regions where Democrats have historically not invested enough. Although Alaska hadn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. House since 1972 — and it’s one of the most rural states in the country — Peltola emerged victorious. To be sure, it can be difficult to predict which seemingly long-shot races are worth pursuing — but if Democrats put up a real fight in as many races as possible, they can sometimes find themselves electing a Mary Peltola in Alaska, a Jon Tester in Montana, a Laura Kelly in Kansas. (See also: former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy.) That isn’t possible when Democrats allow Republicans to run unopposed, or when they nominate candidates who serve as little more than decoration on the ballot.
Second, this race shows us what a genuine effort looks like. Despite the increasing nationalization of congressional campaign efforts, Peltola didn’t win by pulling in money, attention and phone-bankers from the contiguous 48. Her meager $380,000 war chest pales in comparison with those in other toss-up special-election campaigns. Pat Ryan pulled in more than $1.5 million for his upset in New York’s 19th Congressional District last month, and in 2017, Jon Ossoff spent more than $30 million to lose in Georgia’s 6th. Both of Peltola’s Republican opponents — Palin and Nick Begich III — significantly outraised and outspent her. Still, she prevailed. (Though make no mistake, she will certainly need plenty of financial support to succeed in November!)
With little out-of-state money, Peltola focused on connecting with voters about in-state issues — including, most significantly, fish. An Alaska Yup’ik Native, Peltola can point to a lifetime of fishing on the Kuskokwim River and boasts such professional titles as “Salmon Fellow,” so she offered practical expertise about a resource that provides subsistence, sport and sales for her constituents.
Third, Alaska’s special election demonstrated the power of ranked-choice voting to pull a consensus candidate from the fray. Among first-choice votes, Peltola led the pack by nine points, but she crossed the critical 50 percent threshold thanks to people whose first choice was Begich — 29 percent of these voters crossed party lines to rank Peltola over Palin.
Thanks to efforts by advocates nationwide, the system is reaching more voters. According to the nonpartisan electoral reform organization FairVote, 55 cities, counties and states will adopt ranked-choice voting by their next election — and a November ballot initiative could put Nevada on the path to doing so. But the state’s Democratic Party is mobilizing against the initiative — even though Democrats used ranked-choice voting themselves for the 2020 presidential caucus. Perhaps the party that has lately positioned itself as singularly committed to democracy ought to be more supportive of reforms that give voters more control.
Ultimately, a politician succeeds by genuinely connecting on the issues that matter most to their community — like “pro-jobs, pro-fish, pro-family, and pro-choice” Peltola. | 2022-09-13T11:31:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | What Democrats can learn from Alaska's special election - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/democrats-alaska-special-election-lessons/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/democrats-alaska-special-election-lessons/ |
Jeff German, host of “Mobbed Up,” poses on the Strip in Las Vegas in June 2021. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)
When Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German wrote an article in May on allegations of mismanagement facing the Clark County public administrator’s office, he conducted a videotaped interview with the subject, Robert Telles. German had documented allegations of a hostile workplace environment as well as favoritism for an employee with whom Telles was carrying on an “inappropriate relationship.”
As German’s article notes, Telles’s unhappy subordinates had gone to the extreme of videotaping a rendezvous between Telles and the employee in the back seat of her car at a parking garage.
“Obviously you can’t talk to the people I deal with on a daily basis,” Telles told German. “But from my social media, from everything you can see, I am about nothing but justice, fairness and just being a good person. And it sickens me; it destroys me that someone would even level, like, accusations like that.”
Rhonda Prast, the Review-Journal’s assistant managing editor for investigations and engagement, worked on the piece with German, and she remembers the tone of that interview: “The exchange looks professional and courteous,” she says.
That was then. Last week, authorities arrested Telles and charged him with murder in the Sept. 2 stabbing death of German. “Telles was upset about articles that were being written by German as an investigative journalist that exposed potential wrongdoing, and Telles has publicly expressed his issues with that reporting,” Las Vegas police Capt. Dori Koren said in a Thursday news conference. Telles has not yet entered a plea in the case.
At the time of his death, German was working on a follow-up article about Telles, and he had made a public-records request for that piece. News of his slaying stunned his colleagues and unnerved journalists across the country — not only because of the brutal circumstances but also because of the broader conundrum at the heart of the case: How can reporters possibly know whom to fear?
Telles has not been convicted of any crime. Relations between him and German clearly deteriorated as the journalist pursued his reporting, however, and many of Telles’s subsequent actions raise questions.
As German kept writing pieces about Telles through Nevada’s June 14 primary elections, there was a shift in the public administrator’s demeanor. In a volley of tweets, Telles trashed his journalistic investigator:
And this one, too:
Just what was Telles getting at with his comment about German doing “double duty”? Prast was baffled. “He and I were talking because one of them didn’t make any sense,” Prast says, referring to this nonspecific claim of wrongdoing. She asked German if he was concerned, she told the Erik Wemple Blog, and he said no. “‘I’ve had much worse, bigger threats than this in the past,’” Prast recalls German replying.
“Reporters are used to being criticized on social media and it didn’t look like a dangerous threat,” Prast says. German had worked as a journalist for four decades, covering courts, crime and the mob, among many other topics. “This is a guy who for 40 years ran down mobsters and gang members and crooks and really bad guys — and he was never scared of any of them,” Glenn Cook, executive editor of the Review-Journal, tells the Erik Wemple Blog, adding that Telles is a “guy who is literally at the bottom of the ballot.”
Telles serves as Clark County public administrator, an elected position that fell between county treasurer and state university regent (District 6) on a list of candidates on the June primary ballot. The public administrator’s office is a small entity entrusted with securing the property of the deceased while a search for “family or the decedent’s executor is performed,” according to its website. Telles lost the Democratic primary for the post — though he remains public administrator until his replacement takes office after the general election — after German’s stories about his mismanagement. As Cook hastens to note, however, the stories documented no criminal wrongdoing — “just a bad person and a bad administrator.”
German’s exposé on Telles contains a gem or two. To document Telles’s misfeasance, his co-workers took video of him meeting with a colleague, Roberta Lee-Kennett, in the back seat of her Nissan Rogue. A retaliation complaint filed with the county by one of the staffers in the office — which is cited in one of German’s stories — reads, “Physical contact with a subordinate in a public place and letting that subordinate use favoritism she is getting from these inappropriate meetings to secure power and privileges above others in the office is affecting most of the staff in an extremely negative manner.”
Both Telles and Lee-Kennett offered highly quotable responses when German asked them about these meetings. “They said they just talked about the problems in the office and only hugged each other,” German wrote. Lee-Kennett suggested the back seat “because she wanted to make sure Telles would listen to her concerns face to face.”
Such explanations notwithstanding, German didn’t get too animated about the Telles scoops, according to his colleagues. “This story doesn’t even come close to Jeff’s top 20 or top 40, probably,” Cook says. “In terms of investigative journalism that makes you say ‘Wow,’ on a scale of 1 to 10, this is maybe a 4or a 5.”
The Review-Journal, Cook says, has been aggressive in responding to the security concerns of its journalists — from arranging for security, walking staffers to and from their cars, and moving their parking spaces to seeking restraining orders. However, German “never came to us and told us that he’d received a threat or was scared.” Citing the circumstances of the attack on German, Cook notes, “It’s terrifying for the staff to understand that this is possible, and it is alarming to journalists everywhere that the person that you would least expect to be capable of something like this actually might be.”
Killings of journalists in the United States are rare, with the Committee to Protect Journalists tallying 16 such incidents since 1992. Though it’s hard to generalize about the circumstances, three of the 16 are categorized as “dangerous assignment” and many others “murder.” In June 2018, Jarrod Ramos killed five people at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, in what prosecutors termed an act of revenge over how the paper had covered a misdemeanor he’d committed.
What’s more, journalists commonly receive death threats from extremists and unhinged people on the internet. Cook distances those circumstances from the allegations in German’s case. “We’re not covering an extremist organization; we’re not covering a rally that’s inciting violence; we’re covering a duly elected official,” he says. Beyond the implications for journalists’ safety, Cook says this case shows how important it is for voters to take seriously “every race on the ballot” and for news organizations to “pay attention to every office, too.”
Briana Erickson, an investigative reporter who worked alongside German, says that he was “an institution, really — someone that I would come to if I needed to get perspective on something from his decades from knowing the lay of the land.” Cook says he was a journalism “lifer.” “I never heard Jeff mention the word retirement to me once. I firmly believe he was going to grind away on this till the very end, and even if someone else was in the executive editor’s chair or in the investigations editor’s chair, he was going to get that tip and he was going to do this story.” | 2022-09-13T11:31:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Jeff German never suspected his reporting would get him killed - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/jeff-german-journalist-murder-robert-telles-/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/jeff-german-journalist-murder-robert-telles-/ |
Is being transgender a medical condition?
By Jennifer Finney Boylan
(Jake Hawkins for The Washington Post)
Jennifer Finney Boylan is a professor of English at Barnard College of Columbia University and a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her next book, “Mad Honey,” co-authored with Jodi Picoult, is scheduled to be published in October.
Many years ago at a wedding reception, a transgender woman showed me a scan of the human brain. One section — the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, in fact — was highlighted. “You see?” she said. “It’s not my fault!”
The thing that was not her fault (she said) was being trans. Research at the time suggested that this particular brain structure in trans women was much more like that of cisgender women, rather than cis men, lending some support to the idea that transness is a neurological condition, not so different from cerebral palsy or epilepsy.
As opposed to, say, simply being someone who’s obsessed with stilettos and sponge cake.
When I came out in 2000, I remember trying to explain my situation by using some of this same language. I begged people for understanding and kindness. My voice was more than a little apologetic. Please, I said to those I loved. I’m hard-wired this way! It’s not my fault!
Twenty-two years later, the idea that trans people need to explain themselves to others feels a little weird. Being trans is no longer something we believe we need to apologize for. It is, at least in some circles, a thing to celebrate.
And yet, even as the idea that trans people are a curiosity that needs to be explained by science fades from currency, the very medical care that science has developed and that trans people need is being taken away. Conservatives are trying to curtail it, in hopes of erasing us altogether.
Last month, Florida became at least the ninth state to bar trans people from using Medicaid to help pay for gender-affirming care.
The reason? Transition care is not, the state has determined, a medical necessity.
In a report issued in June, the state went against decades of medical opinion. “Florida Medicaid has determined that the research supporting sex reassignment treatment is insufficient to demonstrate efficacy and safety,” said the report, which is signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).
As a result, many people who have been on hormones for years, and in some cases decades, will be forced to de-transition if they cannot find other coverage, or if they are unable to pay for health care themselves.
When I read about this, I wondered, briefly, whether any “proof” that being trans is at least in part about neurology would have altered Florida's decision.
Back in 2000, the protocol for treatment (which guided my own transition) required at least three months of psychological counseling before the prescribing of hormones and a minimum number of months on hormones before approval for surgery. At the time, the protocol also required that a candidate for surgery live in the “target gender” for a year, without going back, to make sure he or she knew what she was getting into.
I didn’t have any trouble following all those rules, back then. I really did want to be careful.
But one person’s guidelines are another person’s gatekeepers.
Nowadays, the standards are much more flexible. Being trans is no longer about the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. It’s about rejecting the binary confines of gender. It is, in short, about being free.
It’s this new freedom, I think, that’s given conservatives like DeSantis the sense that they have to put a stop to this trans business once and for all. Making trans care more accessible has led some anti-trans activists to fear that coming out as trans is a fad, like Hula-Hoops or CB radio.
Being trans is many things, but one thing it is not is a Hula-Hoop. It is a medical condition, requiring dependable and affordable treatment, but it is not only a medical condition. It is about rejecting the binary — but it is not only about that either.
In the end, the one thing our diverse community might share is a desire for the right to be able to make our own decisions about our bodies, and to get the care we need.
But in Florida and elsewhere, actually caring for trans people is not really the goal. Jeannette Cooper, the co-founder of Partners for Ethical Care believes “no one is born in the wrong body.”
Her group is focused on the treatment of children, admittedly a more complex and contentious area. But her statement reminds me of a slogan folks used to throw my way — and still do, now and again: “God doesn’t make mistakes.”
By this, they mean that God knows whether you’re supposed to be male or female and that it’s not up to us to mess with that. It is funny how the people who say this to me often wear glasses, or hearing aids. Because eyesight or hearing, I guess, are things we can fix without hurting God’s feelings.
What I really want to do when I hear that phrase is to agree. I am no mistake. I am someone God made, someone who was sent here for at least two important reasons. One, as a challenge to me — to see whether I was courageous enough to live up to the task I had been given.
And two, as a challenge to others — and to DeSantis not least. Are you loving enough, Governor, to try to grasp the humanity of someone like me, someone you do not understand? Is there room in your heart to accept the possibility that I know my own soul, and what is necessary for me to live with grace?
In Florida, and in eight other states, the answer is no. | 2022-09-13T11:31:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Is being transgender a medical condition? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/trans-health-care-medicaid-jenny-boylan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/trans-health-care-medicaid-jenny-boylan/ |
(Trina Dalziel/Illustration for The Washington Post)
When TikTok user Buggystops Kitchen posted a video in July of the individualized menus she gives her children — each sheet offering a few options for breakfast, lunch and dinner that she knows that particular kids likes — she caused quite a stir. Viewers watched the video more than 500,000 times and wrote more than 950 comments reflecting the well-worn debate over whether children should eat what’s put in front of them or be allowed to choose their food.
Some commenters were horrified: “My kids eat what I serve. I’m not running a restaurant & I’m not a short order chef,” wrote one. Others were impressed, adding comments such as: “I feel like this is a win win win. They feel like they have [a] say, you know they will eat it, the deciding what to make is done. Genius.”
On her blog, the mother of seven (who did not respond to several emailed requests to discuss the menus) explained that she created the system because she was weary of throwing away food and didn’t enjoy nagging her children to eat meals they didn’t want. The menus, she wrote, worked like magic. “No more wasted food. No more tears due to being forced to eat foods they either didn’t like or just were not in the mood for. No more feeding the dog under the table. No more hassle for me.”
But when it comes to feeding kids, it doesn’t have to be a situation in which “either you cater totally to your kids or you make them eat no matter what,” said Anne Fishel, a family therapist, Harvard associate professor and co-founder of the Family Dinner Project, a nonprofit that promotes family meals, which decades of research have shown can benefit children’s physical and psychological health.
I'm a food writer. Here's how I feed my picky kid.
Feeding a family is a fraught endeavor. And, in some cases, parents need to provide different menus for kids with allergies or food sensitivities or for those on the autism spectrum. “But for the vast majority of kids, we’re just talking about individual preferences,” Fishel said. “And I think there are ways that families can honor those without being a short-order cook.”
By finding this middle road, parents can help their kids have healthy relationships with food, Fishel said. Here are some ways to approach mealtime that may help you find a good balance.
Prioritize eating together
Fishel acknowledged that the impulse to feed children whatever they desire is understandable. “Parents want to make their kids happy, and giving them the food that they like to eat is a very rewarding way to do that,” she said. One of her greatest concerns with doing so, however, is that making individual meals is so time- and energy-consuming, so it may interfere with dining together and sap parents’ energy levels for engaging with kids at the table.
“It’s hard enough to get families together, even though a lot of people agree that family meals are really important,” agreed Blake Jones, an associate professor and developmental psychologist at Brigham Young University who focuses on health issues. A 2015 review of family meal research found that the reported frequency of family meals per week varied from about 33 percent of meals to about 61 percent. (There is some evidence that the pandemic has increased the frequency of family meals.)
Seven research-backed tips to make the most of family meals, no matter how often they happen
Research has found physical and psychological benefits for children whose families dine together. One study concluded that children and adolescents who eat with their families three or more times per week have healthier diets and weights than those who share fewer than three meals per week. Another determined that frequent family meals improve mental health among adolescents. A review of earlier studies suggested that frequent family meals made teens less prone to risky behavior. Even parents can benefit emotionally from family meals.
Eating together doesn’t have to be a long, formal affair. Research led by psychologist and family development expert Barbara Fiese found that the average beneficial family meal lasted only about 18 to 20 minutes. “That’s a pretty short time to be associated with all these benefits,” Jones said. “So it’s not just that you eat together. Maybe it’s what you do during the meal.”
Focus on competent eating
One thing parents should do during family meals is take the long view, according to registered dietitian and family therapist Ellyn Satter. “When feeding children, the goal is not to get food into them today,” Satter said. “That goal is to help them learn positive eating attitudes and behaviors for a lifetime.”
Satter defines eating competence as a child’s “ability to go to a meal and look it over without freaking out, picking and choosing from what is available and eating as much or as little as they want of the food that their parents have put in front of them.”
Competent eaters grow up to have regular meals, consume a variety of foods and feel relaxed about eating, Satter said. “They generally have positive attitudes about eating, as opposed to this negativity, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t do this or that.’ ” Studies also show that they have high-quality diets.
By contrast, when parents indulge a kid’s limited palate, “that child grows up to be eating the same narrow range of food that he started out with,” Satter said. “Moreover, he’s afraid of the food that’s in the world.” Research has shown that picky eaters don’t eat as healthfully and have more social phobias than non-picky eaters.
Satter advises parents who want to raise competent eaters to follow her Division of Responsibility in Feeding, which says parents are responsible for what, when and where food is provided. The child is responsible for how much and whether they eat.
Be considerate without catering
Parents still should consider a child’s tastes when providing a meal, however. “Part of the parents’ what, when and where job is to be considerate of the child’s limited experience with food,” Satter said. When a parent plans a menu, they should always include “one or two food items that the child readily accepts or ordinarily eats and enjoys.” So, if a child arrives at the table and sees a bunch of unfamiliar food, they will also see something they know they like. And if a child doesn’t eat, you ask them to stay with you at the table to enjoy the other benefits of family dinner.
By serving foods that a child hasn’t encountered before, “you give a child a chance to familiarize himself with that, to try it, to see somebody else eating it. And that’s the way palates expand,” Fishel said. And if a child refuses? “It’s not a misery to a child for one night not to want to eat everything that’s on offer because there’s some foods they don’t like,” she said. After all, they might be served something they love on another night. “I don’t think that a parent should spend a moment of feeling guilty about promulgating that life lesson.”
And there are ways to recognize individual tastes while getting across the message that “we’re still a family eating together,” Fishel said. For example, families can serve a meal, such as tacos or macaroni and cheese, that can be customized with toppings.
Let kids serve themselves
Sharing food from the same serving plate (family-style) increased cooperation among both friends and strangers, according to a study by Kaitlin Woolley and Ayelet Fishbach. Although the study did not include families, “it’s quite likely that the same principles hold in that context,” Fishbach said.
Cooperation aside, serving meals family-style offers other benefits. By letting your children serve themselves, Jones said, rather than dishing it out for them, “you’re teaching the child, ‘Okay, get a little bit and then see how you feel, and then, if you want more, you can take it.’ ” This helps children develop autonomy and learn to recognize satiety cues.
Satter also had advice about dessert: “Put a serving of dessert at each place on the table when you set the table. And let everybody eat it when they want to. Before or during or after the meal. No seconds.”
Why? Because when we “use dessert as leverage to get them to eat their vegetables, you’re teaching them to overeat twice: once to eat the vegetables when they don’t want them, and then … to eat dessert when they’re already full of vegetables.” You’re also teaching your kids that dessert is the only valuable part of the meal. “Any time you use a food as a reward, the one you’re rewarded with becomes the preferred food.”
Don’t make the food the centerpiece of family meals
This seems a bit counterintuitive, but family dinner isn’t really about food. Fishel suggests promoting an attitude that tells kids: “We’ll have a range of food on the table. Eat what you want. We’re not going to talk much about it. We’re going to talk about your days and about the news and about what we’re going to do this weekend.”
Whatever you serve your kids, whether it’s the same meal or a bunch of individual meals, the focus should be on the ambiance around the table. “It’s kids feeling that they can talk and people want to hear what they have to say,” Fishel said. “It’s a warm and welcoming atmosphere that really brings the mental health benefits and the cognitive benefits and the nutritional benefits.” | 2022-09-13T11:32:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Are you a short-order home cook? Here’s how to find a better way. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2022/09/13/family-meals-nutrition-benefits/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2022/09/13/family-meals-nutrition-benefits/ |
Here’s what persuades Americans to support democracy over party
Our new study tested 25 different approaches with both Republicans and Democrats. These three made a difference.
Analysis by Robb Willer
Jan Voelkel
Sisters Lori Ediger, on left, of Aurora, Neb., and Diana Johnson of Henderson, Neb., listen to presentations during the Nebraska Election Integrity Forum on Aug. 27 in Omaha. (Rebecca S. Gratz/AP)
American democracy is facing arguably its greatest stress test since the Civil War. Less than two years after an attack on the peaceful transfer of power, many prominent figures are undermining U.S. democratic ideals. More than 120 Republican nominees in the midterm elections deny that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, including prominent Senate candidates like Herschel Walker in Georgia and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, although not a single credible audit or court hearing has found evidence of election fraud.
Yet there is little sign that U.S. voters will punish candidates who are breaking democratic norms — such as acknowledging that their preferred candidate lost the last election. Research finds that the majority of voters of both major political parties report that they would continue to support their party’s candidate even if the candidate did such undemocratic things as reducing the number of polling stations in areas supporting the rival party or ignoring court decisions by judges appointed by someone in the other party.
But why do voters support undemocratic candidates? And what might motivate Americans to elevate democratic principles over partisan gain?
To answer these questions, we designed a massive experimental study called the “Strengthening Democracy Challenge.” Together with collaborators from Stanford University, MIT, Northwestern University and Columbia University, we used crowdsourcing to recruit more than 250 testable ideas for how to improve Americans’ democratic attitudes, designed by researchers, activists and practitioners from around the world. We received a wide range of submissions and selected 25 to evaluate in a tournament-style experiment.
In April and May, we tested these approaches in a massive online survey with more than 32,000 participants recruited by Bovitz from opt-in panels. The sample was designed to approximate the national U.S. population of Democrats and Republicans with respect to gender, age, race, education and strength of party identification. We randomly assigned participants to one of the 25 approaches, or to be in one of two control groups. We used weighting to protect against bias that could result from participants dropping out of the study at different rates, depending on which group they were assigned to.
Participants in the study had different experiences depending on which group they were assigned to, and these different experiences reflected different strategies submitters thought would improve Americans’ democratic attitudes. For example, some participants were assigned to a group that all viewed a short video of the Republican and Democratic nominees in the 2020 Utah gubernatorial race — Spencer Cox and Chris Peterson — speaking together in support of the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Other groups had different experiences — some viewed videos, others interacted with a chatbot or read short essays — with the content varying based on the submitting team’s strategy. Before completing the study, all participants answered survey questions related to democracy and polarization, allowing us to examine how responses might vary depending on which group the participants were randomly assigned to.
For example, we asked participants how likely they would be to vote for four hypothetical candidates representing their own party on a scale ranging from 0, if they definitely would vote for the other party’s candidate, to 100, if they definitely would vote for their own party’s candidate. In each question, the candidate from the participant’s party was described as having done something anti-democratic that helped their own party: reducing the number of polling stations in districts likely to support the opposition, ignoring unfavorable court rulings, prosecuting journalists and saying they would deny the results of elections their party lost.
We then measured which of the 25 approaches most reduced support for these undemocratic candidates, compared with responses from the two control groups.
Republican candidates are increasingly sharing misinformation, new research finds
What worked to increase Americans’ commitment to democracy?
One of the most effective approaches showed respondents vivid images of societal instability and violence after democratic collapse in several countries, including Venezuela and Zimbabwe, before culminating in footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, with narration highlighting the potential for democratic failure in the United States. The success of this approach — which on average reduced support for undemocratic candidates by 4.5 points on a 100-point scale — suggests that Americans simply aren’t imagining what might happen to their own society if democracy were to fail.
Another top-performing approach built on the fact that Democratic and Republican voters greatly overestimate how much voters from the rival party support subverting democratic norms; partisans’ estimates of how much their rivals report supporting anti-democratic actions are more than twice as high as their rivals’ actual reported support for these actions. We found that this approach, which simply provided respondents with the accurate polling data, led to a 4.2 point reduction in support for undemocratic candidates.
These strategies influenced people’s commitments to democratic rules either by correcting their sense of how willing their rivals are to break the rules or by making them take seriously the threat of backsliding into social chaos. However, our results revealed another, less obvious strategy: reducing partisan animosity.
For example, one approach had respondents watch a recent viral U.K. video, produced by Heineken, showing conversations between people with different political orientations connecting with one another and finding mutual respect over pints of beer. Though the video focused on ideological differences in the United Kingdom, it strongly reduced American respondents’ animosity toward the other side more than any of the other approaches we tested. It also reduced partisans’ willingness to support candidates endorsing undemocratic moves — probably because by reducing animosity for rival partisans, it made respondents less determined to defeat the rival party no matter what.
U.S. democracy is in crisis. Civics education can help.
These findings fit with other research on Americans’ voting. According to one analysis, American partisans’ voting is more influenced by their animosity for their rival partisans than by their liking for their fellow partisans, a tendency that has grown steadily since 1980. Our results show that partisan animosity also encourages people to tolerate unethical moves by their own party’s leaders — and thus can erode democracy.
Understanding why many voters are willing to consider voting for undemocratic candidates can help policymakers, activists and others to overcome these motivations — knowledge that may be useful for those who want to motivate Americans to defend fair play in the U.S. political system.
Robb Willer (@RobbWiller) is a professor of sociology, psychology and organizational behavior and the director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford University, where he studies the social and psychological forces shaping Americans' political attitudes.
Jan Voelkel (@JGVoelkel) is a PhD candidate in sociology at Stanford University, where he studies social change, group conflict and morality. | 2022-09-13T11:32:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why do voters support undemocratic candidates? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/midterms-election-deniers-republicans-democrats/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/midterms-election-deniers-republicans-democrats/ |
Voters to cast ballots in final primaries, with heated GOP fights in N.H.
Contested GOP races have divided party leaders, exposed differing positions on the 2020 election, and pitted far-right candidates against more moderate rivals
Republican candidate for Senate, retired U.S. Army brigadier general Don Bolduc, during a campaign rally at an American Legion Hall. (Josh Reynolds for The Washington Post)
Voters are heading to the polls in three states, marking the end of this year’s nominating process for the two major parties: Delaware, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. The primaries allow voters one more chance to choose party standard-bearers after months of fierce intraparty battles that highlighted divisions on both sides over policy, personality, and ideology, among other things.
The races in New Hampshire captured the interest of national strategists in both parties heading into Tuesday, since they will help shape the fight for control of both chambers of Congress in November. The Republican primary for U.S. Senate pits retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc against state Senate President Chuck Morse.
Bolduc, who has led the GOP field in some pre-primary polling, has echoed Donald Trump’s false claims that the former president won the 2020 election. He has voiced openness to abolishing the FBI, accused party leaders of “rigging” a 2020 primary that he narrowly lost, and has been highly critical of Republican Gov. Chris Sununu.
Morse is backed by Sununu, a relative moderate in the party who rejected efforts by Senate GOP leaders to recruit him to run against Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.). A group with ties to Senate Republican leaders has run ads on Morse’s behalf and Morse has defended the validity of the 2020 election in New Hampshire, even as he did not oppose GOP challenges to results in a pair of other states.
Through mid-August, Republican candidates who claimed inaccurately that the 2020 election results were fraudulent had prevailed in more than half of the races they’ve run in this year, according to a Washington Post analysis of hundreds of federal and state primaries. That record reflects in part the continued influence in the GOP of Trump, who continues to falsely assert in public comments that the election was stolen from him.
Trump has not made an endorsement in the New Hampshire Senate primary or either of the state’s House primaries, a noticeable absence after weighing in on scores of other intraparty contests this year.
Sununu, whose family is an institution in New Hampshire politics, had called Bolduc a “conspiracy theorist.” Still, at a weekend stop at a seafood festival here, he said that he would support Bolduc or any other Republican who won the nomination. On Monday, Sununu predicted a close GOP race, but said he believed Morse would win.
For a time, national Republicans viewed the path to winning back control of the Senate as potentially running heavily through New Hampshire. When Sununu opted instead to seek reelection, local and national Republicans coalesced around Morse as the strongest alternative to Bolduc — who has embraced the fight against the party establishment.
“It’s just noise. I’ve combated that for two years,” said Bolduc in an interview after a Saturday evening town hall in Laconia.
National Democrats have signaled a belief Hassan would have an easier time holding her seat in November against Bolduc, and they have spent millions attacking Morse — a strategy of interference they’ve employed in GOP primaries around the country.
While New Hampshire has leaned Democratic in the past few presidential elections, Republicans believed it was within reach in a midterm year that looked dire for Democrats. While Democrats are still at risk of losing the Senate, public polling indicates they are faring better than expected in many of the tightest races in the country.
The Democratic incumbents in the state’s two U.S. House seats are also facing challenging reelections in November, according to nonpartisan analysts, heightening the stakes of the Republican primaries in both contests. In the 1st Congressional District, Matt Mowers, a 2016 Trump campaign aide who worked in the 45th president’s administration, is vying for a rematch against Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas, who narrowly defeated him in 2020.
The primary has divided House GOP leadership, with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) supporting Mowers and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the Republican Conference chair, supporting Karoline Leavitt, a former staffer of hers and ex-member of the Trump White House press team.
Leavitt is portraying herself as an “America First” insurgent running against the Washington establishment, even as she touts her endorsement from a top House Republican. She has emphasized that she has called the 2020 election rigged and Mowers hasn’t. Mowers has said there were “irregularities” in the count.
“The people are with me,” Leavitt told reporters in Londonderry, N.H., on Thursday night, before speaking at a rally with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.).
Also on the ballot is Gail Huff Brown, a former TV news anchor and the wife of Scott Brown, former Republican senator from Massachusetts. Her TV ads emphasize her support for “choice” and New Hampshire’s new law on abortion. Access to the procedure is legal but limited in the state.
A similar dynamic is playing out in the 2nd Congressional District, where Keene Mayor George Hansel (R), who favors abortion rights and is endorsed by Sununu, is facing Robert Burns, a former Hillsborough County treasurer who is running to his right and opposes abortion rights. As in the Senate race, Democrats have spent money highlighting Burns, who they see as easier to defeat in the fall than Hansel. Democratic Rep. Ann Kuster is the incumbent seeking reelection.
While Burns acknowledges that Biden won in 202, he has claimed that “a ton” of other unspecified elections were “stolen” in 2020. Hansel has recognized Biden’s win.
In Rhode Island and Delaware on Tuesday, Democrats are navigating some high-stakes contested primaries of their own. An open seat in Rhode Island’s 2nd Congressional District to replace retiring Democratic Rep. Jim Langevin is seen as one of Republicans’ most promising chances to flip a seat in their endeavor to win back the House majority. There, state Treasurer Seth Magaziner, former Commerce Department lawyer Sarah Morgenthau, and former state Rep. David Segal are among the Democrats vying for the nomination, with some notable differences between them.
Only Segal has supported the Biden administration’s decision to forgive up to $10,000 of student loan debt for many borrowers. Republican Allan Fung, who carried the district in two failed runs for governor, is unopposed for his party’s nomination. President Biden carried the district by 14 points in 2020, giving Democrats hope of retaining the seat in November.
There is also a contested Democratic primary for governor. Gov. Dan McKee (D), who replaced Gina Raimondo after she was appointed to Biden’s cabinet to lead the Commerce Department, has competition from Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea, business executive Helena Foulkes, and former Secretary of State Matt Brown. Foulkes received a late assist from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) who came to the state to campaign for her on Sunday.
“If I didn’t think that she could win this, I would have never encouraged her to put herself in the arena,” Pelosi told voters in Providence. “She is about getting the job done.”
Brown and running mate Cynthia Mendes, a state senator, got a late endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who did not campaign in the state. Both Democrats are part of the Rhode Island Political Cooperative, a liberal project to replace the state’s more conservative leadership and pass an agenda that includes a $19 minimum wage and universal health care.
Weigel reported from New Hampshire. | 2022-09-13T11:32:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Voters cast ballots in final primaries, with heated GOP fights in N.H. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/new-hampshire-bolduc-morse/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/new-hampshire-bolduc-morse/ |
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan addresses parliament Sept. 13, following an escalation in military hostilities with Azerbaijan. (Tigran Mehrabyan/PAN photo/Reuters)
Deadly clashes erupted Monday night along the border between Azerbaijan and Armenia near the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, in a flare-up of a decades-long conflict.
The Armenian Defense Ministry said in a statement that Azerbaijani forces attacked “both military and civilian infrastructure” overnight in areas of Goris, Sotk and Jermuk using drones and large-caliber firearms.
Military officials in Azerbaijan acknowledged the strikes but accused Armenia of a “wide-scale provocation,” planting mines near border facilities and shelling Azerbaijani positions earlier on Monday.
Armenia called these allegations “an absolute lie” and blamed Baku for the renewed hostilities.
“For the moment, we have 49 killed, and unfortunately, it’s not the final figure,” Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said, addressing his parliament. Azerbaijan said its army also suffered losses but did not provide figures.
Five ways the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict will change the map
Azerbaijan may have sought to seize an opportunity while Armenia’s key ally, Russia, has diverted all its attention to the troubled invasion of Ukraine where it suffered a strategic blunder last week, according to some analysts specializing in the South Caucasus.
“This escalation takes place when Russia is distracted as never before after the collapse of the Kharkiv front, and offensive action against Armenia can surf the global wave of revulsion for Russia since Armenia is formally Russia’s ally,” Laurence Broers, an associate fellow of Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia program, said in a tweet.
Broers added that Baku is enjoying “unprecedented leverage in every direction” as Russia now relies on transit routes through Azerbaijan to connect with Iran and Asia amid growing global isolation.
The European Union has also grown more dependent on Azerbaijan for energy as it seeks alternatives to Russian gas.
On Tuesday, Armenia appealed to Moscow for help, saying it would invoke the Russia-led regional security bloc called the Collective Security Treaty Organization as well as the U.N. Security Council.
“Defense ministers of Armenia and Russia reached an agreement to take the necessary steps toward stabilizing the situation,” Yerevan said following a phone conversation between Armenian Defense Minister Suren Papikian and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu.
The Russian Foreign Ministry later said it was “extremely concerned” about the developments and urged parties to adhere to a cease-fire agreement brokered by Moscow. The truce, which was supposed to take effect at 9 a.m. local time, has reportedly been broken since then.
Pashinyan also called U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and French President Emmanuel Macron to request “an adequate” response to the hostilities.
Blinken, in a statement, said that Washington was “deeply concerned” over the situation.
“As we have long made clear, there can be no military solution to the conflict,” the U.S. statement said. “We urge an end to any military hostilities immediately.”
Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh mourn a lost war but doubt that peace will last
Turkey, which is allied with Azerbaijan, said Tuesday that Armenia should cease provocations and focus on peace negotiations.
The long conflict in the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which began in the late 1980s, was redrawn by a full-scale war in 2020, in which Azerbaijan recaptured territories that Armenia had occupied for decades.
The six-week-long war ended with military victory for Azerbaijan and a fragile Moscow-backed truce, in which Armenia surrendered large swaths of territory. Analysts have argued that the 2020 cease-fire deal, and the presence of Russian peacekeepers, are unlikely to bring full stability to the region.
The conflict is being closely watched from Brussels.
As part of the E.U.’s bid to wean itself off Russian fossil fuels, the European Commission in July inked a major gas deal with Azerbaijan that aims to double the country’s exports to the E.U. within a few years.
The E.U. is pushing to “diversify away from Russia and to turn towards more reliable, trustworthy partners,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said then. “I am glad to count Azerbaijan among them.”
Though Europe is uncommonly united on the need to curb or cut energy imports from Russia, von der Leyen’s comment — and the deal — raised eyebrows. Critics questioned whether it was fair to call Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev a trustworthy partner, or if it was wise to double down on fossil fuel deals with authoritarian governments in general.
Meanwhile, European Council President Charles Michel in recent months has sought play a peacemaker between Baku and Yerevan, hosting meetings between the two sides. Aliyev and Pashinyan met in Brussels in late August for talks.
Emily Rauhala in Brussels contributed to this report. | 2022-09-13T11:33:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Armenia and Azerbaijan trade fire as conflict flares near Nagorno-Karabakh - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/armenia-azerbaijan-karabakh-border-conflict/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/armenia-azerbaijan-karabakh-border-conflict/ |
SFPD used a woman’s rape kit DNA to arrest her. Now she’s suing.
The woman said she felt 'violated again’ following months-long stay in jail on charges that were eventually dropped
A pedestrian walks in front of San Francisco Police Department headquarters on Sept. 12. A woman whose DNA from a sexual assault case was used by San Francisco police to arrest her in an unrelated property crime has filed a lawsuit against the city. (Jeff Chiu/AP)
“I didn’t know that it would be used against me,” the woman told KTVU in March. “I didn’t know that that could happen. I didn’t know that was even possible.
“I just feel violated again,” she added.
The woman, identified only as Jane Doe in court documents, filed a lawsuit Monday against San Francisco’s municipal government and several San Francisco Police Department employees for allegedly violating her constitutional protection against unlawful search and seizure. In her suit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern California, Doe said she was “re-victimized” by her arrest and a months-long stay in jail before the charges were eventually dropped. She is seeking an unspecified amount of money, a court order forcing officials to remove her DNA from their records and an injunction barring them from storing other crime victims’ DNA in a permanent database.
Neither the city and county of San Francisco nor the police department immediately responded to requests for comment from The Washington Post late Monday. But Jen Kwart, spokesperson for City Attorney David Chiu, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the city “is committed to ensuring all victims of crime feel comfortable reporting issues to law enforcement and has taken steps to safeguard victim information.”
San Francisco police use rape kit DNA to identify survivors as suspects in other crimes, district attorney says
Law enforcement officers took a DNA sample from Doe in November 2016 and led her “to believe that her DNA would not be used for any purposes other than investigating her sexual assault,” the lawsuit alleges.
Instead, over the next five years and unbeknown to her, the woman’s “DNA was likely tested in thousands of criminal investigations, though the police had absolutely no reason to believe that she was involved in any of the incidents,” according to the suit.
“While all charges stemming from this incident against Plaintiff Doe were eventually dropped, the appalling, exploitative, and unconstitutional nature of Defendants’ practice cannot be ignored,” the suit states.
Language in the lab report, stating that the DNA match had been made “during a routine search” of the crime lab’s database, suggested the practice was not an isolated incident, Boudin said at the time.
“I was horrified,” he added, vowing in an interview with The Post to stop using “this sort of evidence” to prosecute crimes, “both on ethical grounds and also on legal grounds.”
At a police commission meeting the following month, SFPD Capt. Sean Perdomo told commissioners he had discovered that 17 DNA profiles from crime victims — 11 of them from rape survivors — had been used by police to identify suspects in unrelated criminal investigations. The captain said he believes only Doe’s DNA match resulted in an arrest.
“The use of department DNA evidence is an issue that we want to make sure that we have the public’s trust, that we never put ourselves in a position to disincentivize our victims from coming forward,” he added.
“We should never be in this position again,” he added.
That may soon apply to police across California. Late last month, California lawmakers passed legislation that would ban law enforcement officials from using crime victims’ DNA for anything other than finding a suspect in that crime. The legislation was delivered to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk on Friday.
“It’s already hard enough for sexual assault survivors to make the decision to come forward, report a crime, and undergo an invasive rape kit exam at the hospital,” state Sen. Scott Wiener (D), who represents San Francisco, said in a statement released in May when the bill first passed the Senate.
“The last thing we need,” he added, “is to send a message to survivors that if they come forward, their DNA sample may be used against them in the future.” | 2022-09-13T12:09:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Victim files lawsuit after police used her rape kit DNA to arrest her - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/13/san-francisco-rape-dna-lawsuit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/13/san-francisco-rape-dna-lawsuit/ |
Russell Wilson leave the field after his first game with the Denver Broncos, a loss in Seattle. (John Froschauer/AP)
SEATTLE — In a shiny mint suit and black bow tie, Russell Wilson was overdressed for this awkward affair. He looked like he was going to a gala, with his sparkling shirt studs and patent leather shoes, instead of a contentious homecoming. If Wilson expected a celebration when he packed that outfit, he ended Monday night with a more subdued state of mind.
The Denver Broncos quarterback, playing his first game with his new team in the city he just departed six months ago, experienced a sound he’d never had directed toward him at Lumen Field. Booooooo! He listened to fans compare him to Alex Rodriguez, orchestrator of Seattle’s most bitter superstar departure, who took a $252 million deal from the Texas Rangers more than two decades ago. The old signs of “Let Russ Cook” had been revised to read “Let’s Cook Russ.” Through it all, he played with admirable focus, dissecting the Seattle Seahawks for 340 passing yards. At the end, it was the five yards he wasn’t allowed to go after that dominated the conversation.
At the end, Wilson watched from the sideline as Brandon McManus attempted a 64-yard field goal with a victory at stake. McManus missed. The Seahawks prevailed, 17-16, over Wilson and over the assumption that life after Wilson is guaranteed to be dreadful. A crowd of 68,965 erupted in chants of “Geno! Geno!” for Wilson’s old understudy, Geno Smith, who just resurrected his career at 31 after spending eight years as a backup.
Nevertheless, Wilson called the night “special.” Considering how it played out, the most apt descriptions were bizarre and troublesome. A single game, even one this wacky, won’t define Denver’s season unless the Broncos let it. That said, they’ll need to work quickly to smooth over such a perplexing defeat.
“We didn’t get it done,” Wilson said, “but there’s so much more that we can do.”
In the record book, it counts as a typical, season-opening road loss for a transitioning team with a new franchise player. But it will be remembered as a debut in which rookie head coach Nathaniel Hackett showed he’s still a teething leader. At the most critical moment, Hackett took the football out of the hands of one of the greatest clutch quarterbacks of this era. He opted to have McManus kick what would have tied for the second-longest field goal in NFL history instead of going for it on fourth down and 5 from the Seattle 46-yard line.
Wilson had completed a 9-yard pass to running back Javonte Williams on third and 14 with 1 minute and 11 seconds remaining. The Broncos still had three timeouts, and the entire playbook would’ve been available to them on a potential fourth-down try. But Hackett had the team run the clock down to 20 seconds before calling a timeout to bring in McManus.
“That’s a long field goal to hit,” Hackett admitted in explaining his decision. “I think he’s capable of that, but obviously I wish we would’ve gotten a lot closer. It put us in that weird spot there because we were in the field goal range, but we were on the fourth-down situation. We just made the decision we wanted to take our shot there on that one.”
Despite winning a Super Bowl and playing at a Hall of Fame level for 10 years in Seattle, Wilson wanted the Seahawks to trade him, mostly to escape Coach Pete Carroll’s conservative offensive philosophy and play for a team that gave him greater responsibility to decide games with his arm. In his first game in a Broncos uniform, he commanded an offense that produced 433 total yards. He patiently carved up a young defense with green cornerbacks. But at the conclusion of a final drive that could’ve reintroduced his greatness, Wilson was a spectator. He was Russ, cooked by the poor choice of his inexperienced head coach.
“I was surprised that they took Russ out there at the end,” Carroll said.
To be fair, Hackett had two low-percentage options. One necessitated the unlikely; the other demanded a historic feat. However, Wilson has made a career out of specializing in the former. Denver traded five draft picks and three players to acquire him from Seattle. Before this season opener, it negotiated a contract extension with Wilson worth up to $245 million that doesn’t begin for another two years. He is in Denver to end the Broncos’ six-season playoff drought and return them to perennial contention. In a sense, Hackett called an audible on a decision the franchise has already made.
Afterward, Wilson didn’t question his coach.
“I believe in Coach Hackett,” Wilson said. “I believe in what we’re doing. Also, I don’t think it was the wrong decision. I think [McManus] can make [the kick]. Obviously, in hindsight, he didn’t make it. But if we were in that situation again, I wouldn’t doubt whatever he decided.”
Of course, if Wilson had doubts after Week 1, the Broncos would be in crisis. It’s too soon for fissures to develop. It’s not too soon for scrutiny, though. Denver pulled off a trifecta that indicates poor preparation and discipline. The team committed 12 penalties, failed to score a touchdown in four trips to the red zone and lost two fumbles after snapping the ball at the 1-yard line. In second half alone, the Broncos made three trips inside the 10-yard line and came away with just three points.
“Bad deal,” Hackett said of the sloppy execution. “That starts with me. I’ve just got to be sure we’ve got a better plan.”
Overall, the Breakup Bowl hinted that both the Seahawks and Wilson should be okay on their own. There’s little reason to think Wilson, still in his prime and on a team with good talent and solid weapons, will slide. The Seahawks were the big question mark. They needed to show life and provide hope as they reconstruct their roster. Even without Wilson, there’s still some magic in the franchise. On Monday night, Smith gave an electric performance in the first half and finished 23 of 28 for 195 yards and two touchdowns.
He left the field declaring in an ESPN interview, “They wrote me off. I ain’t write back, though.”
Later, he explained of his long journey from perceived bust to resurrected starter: “I’ve just been working. That’s what I mean by, ‘I never wrote back.’ I don’t listen to stuff like that. I just work. I know what I have inside of me.”
When the game ended, Wilson greeted Carroll at midfield and then hustled over to congratulate Smith. Then he took a long, unfamiliar trek to the visitors locker room. The losing locker room. He put on that suit and hoped it would hide the disappointment.
In the house of his old team, he said of his new team: “The great thing is I told these guys is we’ve got to be unwavering.”
He repeated the adjective.
“Unwavering.”
On Monday night, Wilson found closure. There is no time to revisit the old or celebrate the new anymore. The season has begun, and so has the urgency. | 2022-09-13T12:13:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russell Wilson's Seattle return ended badly for the Broncos - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/russell-wilson-seahawks-broncos/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/russell-wilson-seahawks-broncos/ |
Sen. Patrick Leahy on how and why the Senate is a ‘broken place’
Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) was elected to the Senate in 1974. (Jay Westcott)
Patrick Leahy, 82, is the senior Democratic senator from Vermont and president pro tempore and chairman of the Appropriations Committee in the U.S. Senate. His memoir, “The Road Taken,” was released in August.
You’ve said the Senate is a “broken place.” As the longest-serving member of the Senate now, could you shed some light on how it got there?
Well, the Senate was never a perfect place. But it was a better place. Any representative branch of government is going to have a lot of differences. I look at the years of fighting against segregation and all these other things. But the Senate has been the conscience of the nation. It came together after Watergate and in a number of other times of crisis. World War II is an example. The Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, we came together. Today, it’s not the conscience of the nation. It’s not the body where people seek consensus, where Republicans and Democrats work together, except in some instances. There are far too many people more interested in getting something out for the next news cycle than they are taking advantage of it being a six-year term and doing things for the long term.
How do you think it got that way?
I saw some of the changes coming during the Newt Gingrich period. Before that, you had Democratic leaders, like Tip O’Neill, Republican leaders like Bob Michel, who worked together in the House, which made it easier to work together with the Senate. And we had leaders in the Senate — Republican and Democratic — who worked closely together. Gingrich, ignoring his own personal life, went after attacks on Bill Clinton and shoved aside the kind of work that Bob Michel would do as Republican leader in trying to get consensus. And developed a cadre of people who were win-at-all-cost. Many of them then went on to the Senate. It’s around that time you started seeing the changes.
January 6th was a kind of microcosm of everything, of the polarization. I think back to when we had the count of the electoral vote with Al Gore’s campaign for president. He felt that with an accurate recount in Florida, he probably had enough votes to have won the presidency, but he presided over the counting of the electoral votes and made it very clear that George W. Bush would be declared president.
Then we see January 6th — first the posturing, and it really was posturing, by some [saying] that we have to invalidate or do over some of these votes, and speeches being made that were aimed for the camera and for Donald Trump’s approval more than what was best for the Congress. Then, within minutes of that, we suddenly had armed agents coming onto the floor of the Senate, which we never do. Even when the vice president’s there, the Secret Service will wait outside. They’re rushing Mike Pence off the podium, off the presiding officer’s table. And I glance to my side and here’s a man standing there in body armor with “Police” printed on it, carrying a machine gun.
What were you thinking then?
I didn’t know what to think at that point. After 48 years, I’d never seen anything like that. There are certain rules of decorum, as you know. I’d been a prosecutor for eight years, I’d been at crime scenes and so on, but this was a shock. They said, “We’ve got to get you all out of here,” and rushed us down and went to another building, walking underground. And then, once they started turning on the television in this safe area, you could see the mood changing: Some of the people who had been doing the loudest histrionics and contesting were suddenly very quiet.
With those who had been posturing now quiet — and maybe chastened — did you have a sense that there would be more of a coming together?
I thought that we were going to probably be able to complete our work. A number of the ones who were going to contest the votes made it known to other senators they were no longer going to contest. Some continued to, of course, but others were, “Let’s get this done.” Everybody there knew not only that Joe Biden had millions of more votes than Donald Trump, he also had more electoral votes.
So, at that point, did you think talk of the “big lie” would fade away among your colleagues?
I hoped that that would happen. You know, my Irish-Italian nature is always optimistic. But that was a short-lived optimism. Privately, a number of senators would say, in the Senate gym and whatnot, “Maybe we’ve gone too far.” But I was waiting for someone to say it publicly.
Does it frustrate you when people you’ve worked with and know have a different public version?
It bothers me. That is why I’ve had my, what I call, “Prayer Hour and Holy Water” meetings. I invite a number of senators — always get an equal number of Republicans and Democrats — just to sit and talk. Because everybody knows there’s never been a word that’s leaked out from those meetings, it encourages people to be more forthcoming, and we often find we have more in common than we think. Also, when I’ve led congressional delegations anywhere in the world, I’ve tried to get Republicans and Democrats across the political spectrum. Because when you’re on that airplane for sometimes hours at a time and you’re spending breakfast together and so on, you find there’s a lot of things that you agree to. Some of my best legislation has come from after one of those trips. Legislation banning the export of land mines, and the War Victims Fund, with Republican support.
But when you have so many people who see themselves as being the next president and feel that they’ve got to constantly say something that will break through the evening news, you forget that the Senate is a place you’re supposed to come together, to take the long view, not the passing partisan or political view. That’s not being done, and I think it hurts the country. I worry, also, that the hyper-partisanship that we see in the Senate is also being reflected in the Supreme Court. And that is, in many ways, going to hurt America even more.
And, of course, you led the Senate Judiciary Committee for years.
Yes. And when we were complaining about Republicans breaking the rules to jam through some Supreme Court justices for Donald Trump — the same ones that supported blocking, not even allowing a hearing of Barack Obama’s nominee of Merrick Garland — I heard someone say, “Well, you Democrats would vote against Republican nominees.” I looked at all the Republicans on the committee, and I said, “Is there any one of you who’s voted for more Republican nominees to the judiciary than I have? I don’t think there is.” The first Republican nominee I voted for was John Paul Stevens.
I’m not suggesting the Senate, or the Supreme Court, is supposed to be on some kind of a pedestal, but I am suggesting that they should have the credibility, so the American public, when there’s a difficult decision, can take it seriously.
When the Senate and Supreme Court are seen as partisan, they lack legitimacy in people’s eyes. There’s been a lot of talk recently about the real possibility of civil war — is that something you think about?
Yes. And that could be defined in several ways. It could be states refusing to follow the law. It could be more insurrections. The availability of weapons you usually see on the battlefield, people are carrying them — I should add, I’ve always been a gun owner; I earned my letter in college as a member of the rifle team — but this has gotten out of control. And when you have states that don’t want to teach history, don’t want to talk about the good and bad of the country, and when you see the racist, the anti-religious comments that are made, it is really frightening.
Do you see courage? Do you see hope?
Yes. One of the reasons I wrote the book, and I don’t expect everybody to take it as gospel, is I hope enough will read it and realize we’ve had better times.
One of the things I talk about in the book was when I was asked to come to King Hussein of Jordan’s funeral. I rode over on Air Force One — Bill Clinton was president. We had Gerry Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush on there. Now, Jimmy Carter had defeated Gerry Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush had defeated Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton had defeated George Bush. And we’re sitting around a conference table, and they’re like old buddies, swapping stories, talking about things that we’ve all got to come together on. And I just sat there quietly and thought, “Here’s an example of the way we should be.” And now you wonder: Can we do that again?
If you were to give advice to new senators now, what would that be?
Keep your word. But also realize you don’t have the answer to everything. Seek out other senators, talk to them, get to know them, listen to them. You’ve got to have people who can trust each other, but also know each other. Trying to work only with people who are in absolute agreement with you, that’s a mistake. Bringing everybody together — that’s why you do it, and that’s the way you do it.
When the Senate shut down here about three years ago, under Donald Trump — the longest shutdown we’ve had — Kay Granger, who was the ranking member of Texas, conservative Republican, she’s in my office, and she’s looking at a number of the photographs I’d taken. And she told me, which I didn’t know, that she had taught photography in high school. So, then we started talking. It was like, “Well, what kind of an f-stop would you use on this? Blah, blah, blah.” We had something in common. And away we went to work out our differences. | 2022-09-13T12:18:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sen. Patrick Leahy on how and why the Senate is a ‘broken place’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/09/13/patrick-leahy-senate-congress-vermont/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/09/13/patrick-leahy-senate-congress-vermont/ |
Redondo Beach officer believes treatment amounted to discrimination, harassment and retaliation under California labor laws
When Officer Daryn Glenn became a canine handler for the Redondo Beach Police Department in 2021, she made history, she says, becoming the first Black woman to achieve the coveted role at the California department.
But once she became pregnant, everything changed, she alleges in a new lawsuit.
The day Glenn announced her pregnancy in October 2021, her supervisors removed her from patrol for “safety reasons,” the lawsuit states. She was also told she could not work patrol because the department did not have “maternity uniforms for pregnant officers,” she alleges.
When Glenn brought the issues to her union, according to the lawsuit, its president replied, “If you want to stay in [the] canine unit, I can push you down the stairs or kick you in the stomach.”
In the lawsuit filed on Friday in California Superior Court, Glenn alleges that her treatment at the department in Los Angeles County amounted to discrimination, harassment and retaliation under California labor laws. She is suing the city of Redondo Beach and its police department for unspecified damages related to losses in earnings, professional opportunities and her overall well-being.
Joe Hoffman, the Redondo Beach police chief, told The Washington Post in an email that the department has launched an internal investigation into Glenn’s allegations with the assistance of its legal counsel.
“The Redondo Beach Police Department takes seriously the allegations contained in the lawsuit,” Hoffman said.
He added that it is the department’s policy to move pregnant officers to “temporary modified duty” to “avoid potentially hazardous environments or activities” and said the policy was formulated with an outside consultant. The issue has been the subject of negotiations with the police union, Hoffman said. He told The Post that Glenn’s position has been kept open for her and that she can continue her canine training when she returns from leave.
The Redondo Beach Police Officers’ Association, the department’s union, did not respond to a request for comment.
Glenn’s case highlights the challenges pregnant officers sometimes face in overwhelmingly male police departments. Women make up less than 13 percent of law enforcement officers nationwide, according to FBI statistics, and in recent years there have been multiple legal complaints from female police officers who say they were discriminated against because of their pregnancies.
Renee Abt, a detective with the U.S. Park Police, settled a lawsuit with the agency in 2015 after she alleged she had been given clerical work after announcing her pregnancy, The Post reported. The legal action led to the agency revising its policies. And beginning in 2017, Jennifer Panattoni, an officer with the Frankfort, Ill., police department, launched a case claiming that she was forced to go on leave during both of her pregnancies. The lawsuit was settled, resulting in the department agreeing to change its policies.
Under federal law, forcing a pregnant police officer into a “light-duty” assignment if she wants to continue her regular assignment can be a form discrimination, according to a 2003 Justice Department analysis. California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act similarly prohibits employers from discriminating against pregnant employees.
Eleven of the Redondo Beach Police Department’s 92 sworn officers are women, and only one of its female officers is Black, according to department statistics.
Glenn joined the department in 2017 and became a dog handler in 2021 after training and testing for the position, according to the lawsuit. That October, after she learned she was pregnant, she informed her supervisors, who swiftly removed her from her patrol position, citing “safety” concerns, the lawsuit alleges. Glenn was moved to work dispatch, a “light duty desk assignment,” the lawsuit states, adding that the department also took away her patrol vehicle.
When Glenn raised her concerns with the union that the department was discriminating against her, its president, Robert Carlborg, made the comment about pushing her down stairs, according to the lawsuit.
And when Glenn told her superior, Lt. Corey King, about the comments, he told Glenn to ignore them, the lawsuit states. King, who is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit, did not respond to a request for comment from The Post.
In November, during a canine training exercise, King tried to cajole Glenn into leaving the canine unit because it would be “too hard to work as a canine handler as a new single mother,” he said, according to the lawsuit. That day, King told Glenn that she would no longer be allowed to attend the trainings, which were required for her to continue as a canine handler, the lawsuit says.
About a month and a half later, department officials told Glenn that they had decided to sell her dog, and she turned it over in January. Glenn continued to work her desk job until she went on maternity leave in June, the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit alleges that a male officer with a disability was given different treatment than Glenn when he continued working patrol and attending canine trainings without concerns for his safety.
And, according to the lawsuit, he got to keep his dog. | 2022-09-13T12:39:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pregnant Redondo Beach police officer taken off patrol, lawsuit says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/13/daryn-glenn-lawsuit-canine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/13/daryn-glenn-lawsuit-canine/ |
The women in ‘Killers of a Certain Age’ are no coastal grandmothers
In Deanna Raybourn’s thriller ‘Killers of a Certain Age,’ four assassins on the brink of retirement get a chance to show their stuff one more time
Review by Maureen Corrigan
(Berkley; Holly V Rice)
Let’s get all the patronizing comparisons out of the way because “Killers of a Certain Age,” by Deanna Raybourn — about four women who’ve reached the mandatory retirement age for professional assassins — is so inventive, the only ageist wisecracks it deserves are the ones its characters make about themselves. Perhaps, one can hope, condescension to senior sleuths and spies is fading out of fashion altogether, given the success of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series and the boomlet of mystery and suspense novels featuring older protagonists, including Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Death in her Hands” and the forthcoming “Secret Lives,” by Mark de Castrique.
Richard Osman's 'The Man Who Died Twice' book review
Raybourn’s story opens in 1979, with our four heroines on their first mission, posing as flight attendants on a private plane to carry out the execution of a Bulgarian bad guy and his henchman. They rely on hypodermic needles laden with poison and, when things go awry, their own highly trained bare hands and a knife. In flashback chapters, Raybourn (author of the Veronica Speedwell series) describes how the young women were recruited by a black ops organization known only as “the Museum,” an offshoot of the OSS and its British counterpart, the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Qualifying for an all-female squad known as “Project Sphinx,” their job has been “to eliminate people who need killing.”
Rayburn’s narrative toggles between the quartet’s early exploits and the present, when their collective career is coming to a close. Now in their 60s, their lives have been marked by change and loss. Helen, whose “refined” beauty once drew comparisons to Jackie Kennedy, is a widow stuck in grief. Mary Alice is finding it harder to sustain her false cover stories to her beloved wife about her “work trips.” Natalie, once a flirty “gamine” finds that her sexual stocks have fallen along with her boobs. Billie — our main character and part-time narrator — tries to tamp down regrets about all the years she let work take precedence over a private life.
But Fate has something else in mind. Experiencing an intense bout of hot flashes (avoid eating spicy food!), Billie dives into an isolated walk-in fridge for relief. When she emerges, she spots a former colleague — an explosives expert named Brad — masquerading as a crew member. It doesn’t take long for the women to figure out the cruise is a ploy to gather them together to efficiently rub them out. But why? Before they can solve that mystery and save their lives, the superannuated Sphinxes have to deal with the vicious Brad.
What ensues is an extended escape executed by this quartet of agents-gone-rogue to figure out who in the Museum has marked them for death. From a rubber dinghy adrift in the Caribbean to a safe house in New Orleans to the drafty English manor where the women’s training began decades earlier, the book sweeps through place and time. “Killers of a Certain Age” is a singular suspense story thanks to its deftly fluctuating tone, which is by turns comical, violent and unexpectedly affecting.
“If I’d known the job in Qatar was my last, I would have paid more attention,” Helen says.
“I would have paid more attention to all of them. It’s gone so fast I’m going to miss the adrenaline,” Natalie says. “I mean, how else am I going to find anything that makes me feel that alive?”
Indeed, Billie concurs: “It’s like going from playing high-stakes poker to nickel slots for the rest of your life.”
Granted, the women are talking about their profession as black ops assassins, but it’s impossible not to root for these dangerous dames and their refusal to let themselves be put on the ash heap — a phrase that, in this thriller, should be taken literally.
Maureen Corrigan, who is the book critic for the NPR program, Fresh Air, teaches literature at Georgetown University.
Berkeley. 368 pp. $27 | 2022-09-13T13:01:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Killers of a Certain Age, by Deanna Raybourn book review - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/09/13/thriller-killers-of-a-certain-age/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/09/13/thriller-killers-of-a-certain-age/ |
Home-buying strategies in a changing market
Despite current challenges, the right tools can enable buyers to land a property
Alexandra Lewis and her fiancé Kevin Cawley were looking to buy a home in Montgomery County. But houses in their price range — up to $500,000 — were either too small or needed too much work. This four-bedroom, two-bathroom house in Hyattsville, Md., was more what they were looking for. (Craig Hudson/For The Washington Post)
In December, Alexandra Lewis and her fiancé Kevin Cawley learned the rent on their apartment in Alexandria, Va., would jump from $1,900 to $2,300 a month in February. That was simply too high, said Lewis, a caseworker. The rent hike prompted her and Cawley, a D.C. government employee, to explore buying a house.
Although she expected mortgage rates to be in the 2 percent range — a friend had obtained a mortgage around that rate in the early days of the pandemic — Lewis was shocked at how high rates had risen.
“I think the market was just going up and down and we ended up locking on a day where it was at 4.6 percent, unfortunately,” said Lewis, 26.
Lewis may have been disappointed at 4.6 percent but rates have continued to move higher. The latest survey by Freddie Mac puts the average for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 5.89 percent. Rates are only slightly higher than the historical average of 5.07 percent, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA).
Higher mortgage rates and home prices have put affordability at its lowest point since 1989, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Home prices remain elevated but have started to decline. The Case-Schiller index for June showed prices were up 18 percent year-over-year, but that was down from 19.9 percent in May. Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the NAR, has declared the housing market is in a recession in terms of declining sales and building.
All of that makes finding a home more challenging for first-time buyers — but not impossible. Lewis and Cawley had savings and good credit going for them. Plus, they compromised on a second-choice location where their dollars stretched further. They also tapped into additional funds through a first-time home buyer program.
“The concept of affordable housing is one that feels like a huge challenge for prospective buyers these days,” said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst for Bankrate.com.
Mortgage bankers and real estate agents advise clients that just because you can afford a house doesn’t mean you should spend that much.
“I try to counsel clients not to be house poor,” said Wendy Banner, an associate broker with Long & Foster in Bethesda, Md. “Pay raises are not automatic. People are more reluctant to buy into what they may be making in the future.”
Banner suggests setting a budget based on what a buyer is comfortable spending each month on housing.
“Monthly mortgage payments for a typical U.S. home have risen by more than $400 since January. Those seriously considering buying are being forced to carefully examine their budgets,” said Jonathan Lee, vice president of Zillow Home Loans.
Here are some strategies buyers can use:
Make a list of must-haves and want-to-haves. “You’re never going to get 100 percent of what you want,” said Tania Tinsley Little, a broker with eXp Realty in Raleigh, N.C. “Aim to get 65 percent to 70 percent of what you want.”
Improve your credit scores. A better score can reduce the cost of borrowing money. “Check your credit score before you start,” said Hamrick.
Meet with more than one lender. “Talk to a lender first,” said Susan Sonnesyn Brooks, a D.C.-based agent with Weichert Realtors, who represented Lewis and Cawley. “Before you go see this house, see if you’re qualified.” Lewis and Cawley prequalified with a lender before looking at homes. Although they were prequalified for a $500,000 mortgage, they limited their search to properties listed up to $420,000. “We didn’t want to go to the max,” said Lewis.
Joel Kan, an economist with the MBA, suggests getting your documentation in order, such as tax returns, income statements, bank statements and pay stubs. “Get everything you need to close on that loan,” he said.
Check how long a home has been on the market. Overpriced houses tend to sit on the market longer. The longer a home lingers on the market the more likely a seller may be willing to entertain a price cut. “Days on the market have gotten a little longer,” Little said.
Adjust your expectations. Lewis and Cawley were looking to buy a home in Montgomery County. But houses in their price range — up to $500,000 — were either too small or needed too much work. A four-bedroom, two-bathroom house on the market for $382,000 in Hyattsville, Md., a city in Prince George’s County, was more what they were looking for, even if the location wasn’t. “It kind of looked like my childhood home, two stories on a hill,” said Lewis. “It pulled my heartstrings.”
Check out first-time home buyer programs. The lender Lewis and Cawley used, Movement Mortgage, told them about a Maryland Mortgage Program called Flex 3 percent Loan, which comes with a down-payment assistance loan equal to 3 percent of the first mortgage. Their total down payment was $25,000, $15,000 in cash and $10,000 from the Maryland program. Although their monthly mortgage payment of $2,616 is higher than their rent would have been, “why would we continue to rent when we could buy something and build equity,” Lewis said.
Make a larger down payment. Larger down payments can lower your interest rate. “A lender is looking at the risk,” Yun said. “A larger down payment means less risk. You might be able to negotiate a rate that is a quarter percentage point lower."
Ask for financial help. Ask a relative to loan or gift you down-payment funds. Find someone to co-sign your loan. If you are single, ask a parent or grandparent to co-sign the loan, said Little. You might get a better mortgage rate.
Pay points to lower your rate. A point is a fee paid to a lender equal to 1 percent of the loan amount. Sometimes it makes sense but it depends on how much the upfront cost will lower your mortgage rate and how long you intend to live in your home, said Lee.
Consider an adjustable-rate mortgage. An adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) can have a slightly lower rate than a 30-year fixed, said Kan. If you plan to sell the home before your mortgage resets to a higher rate, it can be an option. But beware that if rates are higher when your loan resets, it can be costly, creating a higher monthly payment. Some ARMs adjust every six months after the initial locked-in rate and some have no caps on the increase, said Banner. | 2022-09-13T13:01:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Strategies for buying a home when prices and mortgage rates are high - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/13/home-buying-strategies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/13/home-buying-strategies/ |
Normally, the party expecting a good year also will have a big advantage in recruiting strong candidates. This time, that doesn’t appear to have happened for the Republicans, especially in top-of-the-ballot statewide races. Probably the most prominent case is in Pennsylvania, where Doug Mastriano appears to be a particularly weak candidate in the governor’s race. Meanwhile, several candidates that Republicans tried to convince to run, such as Arizona Governor Doug Ducey for the Senate race, chose to pass.
In an era of abundant campaign financing, very few viable candidates will be starved for cash, and Democrats aren’t having the kind of campaign money problems that have sometimes plagued parties having bad years.
This doesn’t mean Republicans won’t wind up doing well; it just suggests that their success is more dependent on voter opinion right now than it would be if they had a big edge in resources.
A combination of subpar candidates and luck of the draw in opportunities is making things difficult for Republicans in Senate and gubernatorial contests. Republicans had a challenging Senate map this year to begin with, given that they were protecting seats in two states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, that Joe Biden won in 2020, while Democrats aren’t defending any Senate seats in states that Donald Trump won that year.
All told, there are up to seven potentially competitive open or Democratic-held Senate seats in which Republicans have wound up with disappointing candidates, while Democrats largely have the candidates they want in each of those seats.
Some of those suboptimal Republican candidates will surely win. With such a polarized electorate, the quality of the candidates might not matter as much as their party identity. But the most likely outcome is that Republicans will lose at least a few elections because of the candidates they ran.
So what does this add up to? Current polling is looking quite good for Democrats — the “just the polls” version of FiveThirtyEight’s forecast has the House close to a toss-up and Democrats actually gaining a couple of Senate seats. But given the closeness of many contests, any late-breaking developments will matter. It’s also possible that Democrats who appear to be polling better than Biden will wind up falling short as attitudes toward Biden and other Democrats come into alignment closer to the election.
Then again, both Biden’s approval ratings and perceptions of the economy have been on the rise, and it’s at least possible for that to continue all the way through Election Day. What tends to matter for elections is the direction of the economy, rather than the current circumstances; it’s usually better for things to be bad but improving than good though not as good.
One reason voters turn against the president’s party during midterms is that public policy sometimes moves too far toward that party’s preferences. But this time, there is a major exception in the form of the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion. There is plenty of evidence that the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade has mobilized supporters of abortion rights, though it’s hard to know just how meaningful that will be.
Add to the uncertainty the fairly wide margin of error that all polls always have, along with the possibility that we could get a larger polling error.(1)
A final wild card is the Covid-19 pandemic, which even in diminished form still weighs on many aspects of voters’ lives. All election forecasts are based on previous similar situations, which means that this year we have little information to go on.
Republicans get one more chance to help themselves in Tuesday’s primary in New Hampshire, where mainstream conservatives are fighting to defeat less-electable candidates to challenge Democratic incumbents in a Senate and two House elections. Especially in the Senate race, where retired Brigadier General Don Bolduc is the more Trump-aligned option running against State Senate President Chuck Morse, what happens in the primary could determine the outcome in November.
(1) Even when the polls have been off, as many were in 2016 and 2020, and less so in 2018, they still gave us a lot of insight into what would happen. | 2022-09-13T13:02:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Midterms Are Now Even Harder to Predict - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-midterms-arenow-even-harder-to-predict/2022/09/13/e766204c-335f-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-midterms-arenow-even-harder-to-predict/2022/09/13/e766204c-335f-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing listing the tricolored bat as endangered after its population declined due to white-nose syndrome
The tricolored bat, one of a dozen bat species affected by white-nose syndrome. (Missouri Department of Conservation)
It thrives in the cold and dark, infesting the muzzles of sleeping bats. The deadly fungus hops from bat to bat, stirring the winged mammals from their winter slumber while they cluster in caves. It can drive bats to dehydration and starvation, leaving cave floors littered with carcasses.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday proposed adding the tricolored bat, one of several species affected by the deadly fungus, to its list of endangered species. The bat’s population has declined so dramatically over the past decade that it may now vanish from the wild.
The decision by federal wildlife managers underscores the threat of extinction facing hundreds of thousands of species worldwide. The decline of bats in particular — due in part to deadly disease, as well as other harms — threatens to upend ecosystems and hurt farms that rely on the voracious insect-eaters as pest control.
The culprit harming these bats is known as white-nose syndrome, an exotic fungus first discovered about 15 years ago in an Upstate New York cave that has since spread across more than half the bat’s range. Sick bats — with fuzzy growths on their noses — have been found from the Atlantic coast to the foothills of the Rockies, with impacted colonies seeing declines of more than 90 percent.
“It’s pretty heartbreaking to go in and see what were once huge colonies of bats that are now struggling,” said Jonathan Reichard, the national white-nose syndrome assistant coordinator at the Fish and Wildlife Service, describing caves where he would see “dying bats crawling around in the snow.”
The tricolored bat in particular “has been in trouble for a long time,” said Beth Buckles, an associate clinical professor of biology at Cornell who co-authored a major paper describing the disease. She thinks the decision is long overdue.
“It takes a while to get things listed, I understand that,” she said. “But bats are in a really bad way.”
Stress of climate change is aging lizards before they’re even born
No one is quite sure when or how white-nose syndrome arrived.
“We’ve always assumed that it was what we call human-mediated transportation,” said Jeremy Coleman, national white-nose syndrome coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Experts suggest it could have arrived, for example, on the boot of a spelunker who trekked it in from Europe or Asia.
But scientists are sure the fungus — dubbed Pseudogymnoascus destructans for its destructive nature — is not from around here. “We are very confident that it is not native fungus to North America,” Coleman added.
With mighty immune systems, bats can harbor many pathogens without getting sick — including, potentially, the coronavirus behind the pandemic among humans.
But the cold-loving fungus has evolved to attack bats at their most vulnerable, during hibernation when they huddle together. Like a vampire, the fungus works best in the dark. Despite its name, the disease can also creep along bats’ wings, leaving lesions and making it harder for the mammal to retain water.
“We call it white-nose syndrome,” Buckles said, “but the fungus is all over their wings.”
The tricolored bat gets its name from the alternating dark and light patches on its fur. In warmer months, the tiny mammal feasts at night on beetles, moths and other insects along river banks and at forest edges. They find food in the cover of darkness by screeching an ultrasonic pitch and listening for it to bounce back.
The tiny species, which can weigh less than a quarter, faces threats beyond this disease. Shifts in temperature and precipitation due to climate change can disturb roosting and foraging. And the blades of wind turbines can strike and kill the animals.
But white-nose syndrome remains by far the biggest menace.
A dozen different bat species are impacted by white-nose syndrome. Federal officials proposed earlier this year to list the northern long-eared bat as endangered. The agency is considering granting a third species, the little brown bat, federal protections as well.
And the endangered Indiana bat was on a path to recovery before the arrival of white-nose syndrome, said Winifred F. Frick, chief scientist at the nonprofit Bat Conservation International.
“As we all experienced during covid, responding in real time to disease is really challenging,” she said. “And it’s even more challenging when you’re talking about wildlife.”
Passed nearly a half-century ago, the Endangered Species Act makes it a crime for people to harass animals threatened with extinction. The law has been critical for reviving the numbers of gray wolves and other iconic North American creatures from poaching and habitat destruction.
But the agency acknowledges that imported diseases pose a different sort of threat. Researchers are now exploring a plethora of novel treatments — including antifungals, probiotics, ultraviolet lights, vaccines and even genetic engineering — to fight the fungus without harming other species.
“We didn’t even know the disease existed until 12 years ago or so,” Coleman said. “Coming up with these strategies to treat wildlife disease is somewhat unprecedented.” | 2022-09-13T13:02:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A deadly fungus is driving these bats toward extinction, government says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/13/bat-endangered-white-nose-syndrome/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/13/bat-endangered-white-nose-syndrome/ |
By John Carucci | AP
Hugh Jackman arrives at the premiere of “The Son” at Roy Thomson Hall during the Toronto International Film Festival, Monday, Sept. 12, 2022, in Toronto. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
TORONTO — Since he was a high school student, Hugh Jackman wanted to play the roguish traveling salesman Professor Harold Hill in “The Music Man” on Broadway. He’s fulfilled that dream — but all things must come to an end. | 2022-09-13T13:02:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hugh Jackman eyes the end of the 'The Music Man' on Broadway - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/hugh-jackman-eyes-the-end-of-the-the-music-man-on-broadway/2022/09/13/ce208cac-335b-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/hugh-jackman-eyes-the-end-of-the-the-music-man-on-broadway/2022/09/13/ce208cac-335b-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
‘See How They Run’: An Agatha Christie-adjacent whodunit, with laughs
The murder mystery-comedy is set in the 1950s, against the backdrop of the long-running play ‘The Mousetrap’
Sam Rockwell, left, and Saoirse Ronan in “See How They Run.” (Parisa Taghizadeh/Searchlight Pictures)
While fans of the murder mystery genre count the weeks until the release of “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” the eagerly anticipated sequel to 2019’s twisty, sharply funny “Knives Out,” they can take the edge off their appetite with “See How They Run.” Starring Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan as a pair of odd-couple Scotland Yard officers investigating a theater-world murder in 1950s London, this larky meta-whodunit both subverts and pays homage to “The Mousetrap,” Agatha Christie’s famously long-running play. After opening in London’s West End in 1952, “Mousetrap” has been running continuously — except for a pandemic-induced break — for more than 28,000 performances.
The popular show has, almost as infamously, never been made into a movie. Hold that thought. It figures somewhat prominently here, and for reasons other than the fact that you can’t stream it on Amazon before watching “See How They Run.” Though after seeing the new movie, you may want to.
As “See How They Run” gets underway, the “Mousetrap” cast and crew — which, in a nod to verisimilitude, includes characters based on “Mousetrap” stars Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson) and his wife, Sheila Sim (Pearl Chanda) — are celebrating the show’s 100th performance. An obnoxious but entirely fictional Hollywood director named Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody) is in town to discuss a film adaptation with the British movie producer John Woolf (Reece Shearsmith) and would-be screenwriter Mervyn Cocker-Norris (David Oyelowo), when Leo turns up dead. Woolf, like several other characters in “Run,” is based on a real person; Cocker-Norris, whom Oyelowo renders with an amusingly priggish persnickety-ness, is not.
“Life imitates art,” reads a headline in a newspaper. But in some ways, “See How They Run” is a case of art imitating life.
In reality, death isn’t why the play was never adapted for the screen; there’s a far more fascinating explanation, which I’ll leave for “See How They Run” director Tom George and writer Mark Chappell to reveal, in one of the film’s deliciously ironic twists.
Called onto the case are Rockwell’s jaded, slightly boozy Inspector Stoppard and Ronan’s aptly named Constable Stalker, a dogged if untested police rookie who writes down everything she observes in her notebook — including this advice from the more experienced Stoppard: “Do not jump to conclusions.” Stoppard’s name echoes the playwright Tom Stoppard, whose one-act play “The Real Inspector Hound,” like this film, parodies the cliches of a “Mousetrap”-style stage mystery.
To that end, “Run” includes several suspects, all of whom have legitimate motives to do Leo in, including creative differences and secrets they’d rather keep hidden. It helps that this victim was widely disliked. It also helps the multilayered nature of this very loosely fact-adjacent film that the backstory of “The Mousetrap” itself is loosely based on true events. That’s another thought to hold in the back of your mind while watching the film, which is, true to form, larded with flashbacks and the occasional on-screen title detailing the passage of time.
And yet “do not jump to conclusions” is pretty good advice for audiences, too, as the red herrings pile up in “See How They Run.” The colorful characters of Stoppard and Stalker loom large here, as detectives so often do — Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple — in such fare. But even larger is the shadow cast by Christie’s 1952 play, which provides a fun backdrop, if one rendered irreverently, for this diverting puzzle within a puzzle.
PG-13. At area theaters. Contains some violence, bloody images and a sexual reference. 98 minutes. | 2022-09-13T13:02:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ‘See How They Run’: An Agatha Christie-adjacent whodunit, with laughs - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/09/13/see-how-they-run-movie-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/09/13/see-how-they-run-movie-review/ |
Chris Christie is leaning into his antiabortion creds
Good morning ☀️ Today's newsletter is a collab with Theo Meyer, co-author of The Early 202. Want more from Theo? Sign up for The Early here.
Today’s edition: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) plans to introduce a new bill this afternoon imposing a federal limit on abortion. The FDA scheduled its expert advisers to review an application for the first over-the-counter birth control. But first …
Chris Christie teamed up with leading antiabortion activist Marjorie Dannenfelser
In the months before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, prominent antiabortion leader Marjorie Dannenfelser started meeting with Republican governors to talk through how the aftermath of the court’s decision might play out.
She was joined in many of those meetings by an unlikely ally: former New Jersey governor Chris Christie.
But he’s also opposed abortion for decades, and he’s leaning into his antiabortion stance as he considers running for the White House again in 2024. His work with a leading antiabortion group could help Christie score points with social conservatives, who play a major role in Republican primary politics. Christie called Dannenfelser during an interview with Axios' Alayna Treene in late June, but the extent of their work together hasn't been previously reported.
“He’s just been a fantastic communicator and a great mind in terms of the politics of this, in conversation with governors across the country — but especially with governors who are in purple-y type states,” Dannenfelser, the head of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told The Early 202. “He was in a deep-blue state as a pro-life governor, vetoed Planned Parenthood funding every single time, and remained in office.”
The politics of abortion have become more difficult than many Republicans anticipated after Roe was overturned. There is now an intraparty battle across the country over how far to restrict abortion access, with divisions over whether to include exceptions for rape and incest spilling out into the public sphere.
The pair spoke with at least eight Republican governors across the country in the months before the court struck down Roe to help prepare states to defend antiabortion laws already on the books, answer questions and discuss the impact of a potential ruling overturning the nearly half-century-old constitutional right to an abortion. Dannenfelser has spoken with many more on her own — at least 22 in total. Christie said in an interview last month that he hadn't spoken with governors about abortion recently, but didn't rule out getting involved in those discussions again.
Christie said he was considering another presidential campaign and planned to make a decision later this year or early next year. But he said his meetings with governors had nothing to do with his political future.
He said his position shifted around 1995 after he heard the heartbeat of his second child at a prenatal appointment during his wife’s first trimester. When he ran for governor, he eschewed advice to embrace abortion rights as former Republican governors Thomas Kean Sr. and Christine Todd Whitman had.
“We’d had a number of pro-life Republicans run for the U.S. Senate and lose, so there was the thought that you can’t win unless you’re pro-choice,” said Mike DuHaime, who ran Christie’s 2009 campaign. “He basically said, ‘Well, we’ll find out.’ ”
Republicans in many of the states in which Christie and Dannenfelser have talked to governors have restricted abortion, with laws already on the books springing into effect once Roe was overturned.
The pair spoke with Govs. Greg Gianforte (Mont.), Spencer Cox (Utah), Mark Gordon (Wyo.), Mike Parson (Mo.), Doug Ducey (Ariz.), Kristi L. Noem (S.D.), Brad Little (Idaho) and Eric Holcomb (Ind.), according to SBA Pro-Life America.
Christie insists he and Dannenfelser weren't advocating for a particular gestational limit on the procedure. Dannenfelser has repeatedly said she’s helping states be “as ambitious as they can be.”
But many state legislatures have been out of session since the ruling overturning Roe, meaning they haven’t passed new laws bolstering state support for women and children since the Supreme Court’s ruling. And it could be a hard sell, given policies like paid family leave could cost the state. Noem recently called for the South Dakota legislature to create a paid family leave policy. Her conversation with Dannenfelser led in part to Noem’s renewed focus on paid family leave, according to her office.
In Utah, Christie and Dannenfelser “encouraged the governor to focus on helping vulnerable women and children,” according to Cox’s office. A spokesperson said the governor recently launched a new Office of Families, which could come with new policy initiatives, but said specifics weren’t yet available.
On tap today: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) will introduce a new version of his “pain-capable” bill at a noon news conference. Antiabortion leaders, such as Dannenfelser, will be in attendance. The expectation is that the bill would impose a federal 15-week limit on abortions, but Graham’s staff did not return a request for comment from The Health 202. His previous versions of the bill would have banned abortion at 20 weeks.
FDA to weigh over-the-counter birth control pills this November
The Food and Drug Administration has scheduled a joint meeting of its external advisers to review Perrigo’s application of its daily birth control for over-the-counter use.
The details: The joint meeting will be held Nov. 18 with the agency’s Nonprescription Drugs Advisory Committee and the Obstetrics, Reproductive and Urologic Drugs Advisory Committee. If approved, Perrigo’s Opill would become the first daily contraceptive pill available over the counter in the United States.
The meeting will be held roughly four months after the company’s affiliate HRA Pharma filed for a prescription-to-over-the-counter switch for Opill, a progestin-only pill that has been in use with prescription since its approval in 1973.
In a bid to recharge the effort, Biden touts ‘cancer moonshot’ in Boston
President Biden’s “cancer moonshot” initiative has been mired by a series of setbacks and struggles in its earliest months. But experts are optimistic that new actions by the administration may have been enough to shift the effort’s trajectory to a better course, The Post’s Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Laurie McGinley and Matt Viser report.
Researchers are hoping Biden’s speech on the initiative in Boston yesterday will re-energize the effort and convince Americans that the goal of eradicating cancer is not out of reach.
Key context: The moonshot initiative to cut the nation’s death toll from the disease in half over the next 25 years has been hampered by a lack of staff, resources and people in key positions at government health agencies, according to several cancer advocates and experts familiar with the situation.
But now, the administration has tapped candidates to fill vacancies in leadership positions at federal office’s central to the initiative’s goals — including the National Cancer Institute and Biden’s new high-stakes research agency ARPA-H — fueling hope that the moonshot efforts will accelerate. Experts say that — coupled with other legislative wins, like a forthcoming $2,000 annual cap on out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries — signal that the effort’s goal might one day be within reach.
Even still, some experts urged the administration to take a broad view of the moonshot, including finding ways to help cancer patients based on what is already known about the disease, in addition to pursuing technological advances.
Learn more about the initiative in Biden’s remarks delivered yesterday on the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s famous “moonshot” speech:
An Indiana judge won’t hear arguments until next week on a lawsuit seeking to block the state’s upcoming ban on abortion, meaning the new law will take effect Thursday, the Associated Press reports.
In the largest strike of private-sector nurses in U.S. history, about 15,000 nurses in Minnesota walked off the job yesterday to protest understaffing conditions and poor wages at roughly 16 hospitals across the state, The Post’s Lauren Kaori Gurley reports.
The U.S. government may have mistakenly awarded more than $1.3 billion in coronavirus aid intended to help shore up small businesses’ finances to foreign applicants, according to a new report from the Small Business Administration’s Office of the Inspector General. The watchdog’s findings raise new suspicions that the program might have helped fund overseas crime syndicates, our colleague Tony Romm writes.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has approved the nation’s first Medicaid-covered mobile crisis intervention services program to be launched in Oregon, the agency announced yesterday.
Inside a city’s struggle to vaccinate gay Black men for monkeypox (By Fenit Nirappil | The Washington Post)
Biden turns urgently to critical task of holding the Senate (By Marisa Iati | The Washington Post)
A congressman wasn’t allowed on a flight — because of his wheelchair (By Amanda Morris | The Washington Post) | 2022-09-13T13:02:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Chris Christie is leaning into his antiabortion creds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/chris-christie-is-leaning-into-his-antiabortion-creds/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/chris-christie-is-leaning-into-his-antiabortion-creds/ |
Rep.-elect Peltola joins the U.S. House of Representatives this week and is on the ballot again in November
Analysis by Elise Blasingame
Rep.-elect Mary Peltola (D-Alaska) at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Sept. 12. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/AP)
A special election to fill Alaska’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in late August produced a stunning outcome. When Mary Peltola begins her four-month term this week, she’ll be the first Alaska Native to serve and the first Alaskan Democrat in the House since 1972. Peltola will run again for this seat in November for a full term.
Of course, being descriptively Native does not guarantee that someone will substantively represent tribal interests. Research suggests that gender and Native identity are significant influences on Native women in politics. If Peltola’s previous actions are any indication, there is reason to believe her Native identity is a salient and present influence on her policy choices.
Peltola has deep cultural ties in Alaska
Peltola is a member of the Yup’ik people, an Inuit community who mostly live along the western coast of Alaska, which has one of the highest Native populations in the United States. Peltola’s background also gives her a unique perspective on one of the leading industries for Alaskans — fishing.
Peltola commercially fished with her father from an early age, working in the industry throughout her career. Peltola was even an Alaskan Salmon Fellow, charged with developing stronger connections among the many sectors with a stake in the future of Alaska’s salmon. Peltola describes herself as “adamantly Pro-Jobs, Pro-Fish, Pro-Family and Pro-Choice.”
Being “pro-fish” is a bit more nuanced than one might expect. The Yup’ik have fished for salmon along the Kuskokwim River for centuries. But salmon runs have diminished greatly in recent years, prompting Alaskan officials to intervene to protect the species.
In 2012, several Yup’ik fishers were charged for continuing to fish after the state ordinance was in place. They appealed the charges, citing their religious right to the practice of fishing. The Yup’ik lost the appeal of their case, with the court stating that “the health of the diminished king salmon run outweighed the fishermen’s individual rights.”
In her role as executive director for the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, Peltola advocated for regulation processes to include “Tribes and Traditional Knowledge in federal fishery management decisions.” This was a move to uphold Alaska Native cultural practices and acknowledge the impact of overfishing. Peltola has continued to make fish a central aspect of her campaign, bridging ecological concerns with those of Native fishing communities.
Can you tell we’re pro-fish? pic.twitter.com/w8eCha3w3b
The cultural practice of fishing and preparing salmon is about more than just food for many communities in rural Alaska. Bernadette Demientieff, a member of the Gwich’in people, expressed optimism about Peltola’s win: “I feel a little bit of relief knowing that somebody will be down there that can really relate and understand what it is to be Alaskan, to be Alaska Native and to have that connection to our homeland.”
A Native American will be in charge of the Cabinet department that has shaped Native American lives
Peltola joins a growing Native caucus
The first Native women elected to Congress won their seats relatively recently — Deb Haaland (D-N.M., Laguna Pueblo) and Sharice Davids (D-Kan., Ho-Chunk) took office in 2019. Haaland then became the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary when she was sworn in as secretary of the Interior Department in 2021.
Peltola’s win adds one more voice to the historically small caucus of Native legislators in Congress. Including Peltola, six House members identify as Native — three Republicans and three Democrats.
And Peltola may not be alone. Lynnette Grey Bull, who is Northern Arapaho and Hunkpapa Lakota, won her Democratic primary last month in Wyoming. She will face off in November against Harriet Hageman, who defeated incumbent Liz Cheney. Democrat Charles Graham of the Lumbee Tribe won his primary and would be the first Native member of Congress from North Carolina. In Nevada, Democrat Mercedes Krause of the Oglala Lakota Nation will also advance to the general election.
Native American identity is a central focus for each of these candidates. For example, Grey Bull’s Twitter bio states she is “Indigenous to the core.” Her campaign site includes an Indigenous Policy Platform, in addition to her broader policy priorities.
Is representation for Native women on the rise?
Peltola may be part of a larger trend toward increased representation for Native women across U.S. legislatures. Of the 53 Native women who ran for state or congressional seats in 2020, 31 won their respective races. This tally includes Yvette Herrell (R-N.M., Cherokee) the first Native woman from the Republican Party to be elected to Congress.
These Native female lawmakers consistently signaled a commitment to support tribal communities. Between 2018 and 2021, Native female legislators at the state level filed appropriations requests directed at tribes and Native interests totaling more than $500 million.
These lawmakers also worked to “Indigenize” their respective houses of government. Haaland, for instance, wore a ribbon skirt to her swearing-in ceremony. Debra Lekanoff, who is Tlingit/Aleut, incorporated drums and traditional Salish Coast practices during her ceremony at the Washington state legislature.
From boarding schools to termination policies, U.S. legislatures have historically been hostile toward Native language, dress, spiritual practice and, above all, the right to self-govern. By reclaiming the right to engage in culturally significant practices, Native female lawmakers are subverting those norms and paving the way for a growing caucus of Native voices.
What will Peltola prioritize?
Peltola also served on the Orutsararmiut Native Council Tribal Court, exposing her to a variety of common concerns for Alaska Native communities. Peltola served as the youth representative in the 1990s for the National Congress of American Indians, the largest interest group representing tribal concerns at the federal level.
In 1999, a state court found that Alaska’s system for funding school facilities violated the federal Civil Rights Act and racially discriminated against Alaska Natives. In response, Peltola sponsored multiple bills aimed at realizing adequate funding for schools serving Alaska Native communities. During her decade as a state legislator, Peltola also sponsored legislation to ensure that Alaska’s history curriculum included Native history and perspectives.
It remains to be seen what policies and priorities Peltola will support in Congress, but Native communities in Alaska and beyond will certainly be watching.
Elise Blasingame (@enblasingame) is a PhD student at the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs, where she studies Native American politics and issues of representation. She is the author of “Holding Office in Native America: The Policy Choices of Native Women Legislators” in Distinct Identities II (Routledge, forthcoming). | 2022-09-13T13:03:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mary Peltola is the first Alaska Native elected to Congress - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/peltola-alaska-house-native-american/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/peltola-alaska-house-native-american/ |
The last seconds of the Broncos’ loss were excruciating for Peyton Manning
Brandon McManus, not Russell Wilson, took the spotlight with the Monday night game on the line for the Broncos in Seattle. (Stephen Brashear/AP)
The last seconds of the “Monday Night Football” season opener between the Denver Broncos and Seattle Seahawks were nerve-racking to watch. And that doesn’t begin to describe how the Hall of Fame quarterback who led the Broncos to their most recent Super Bowl win felt about it.
Peyton Manning’s reaction was on full display live during ESPN’s “Manningcast” with his brother Eli and special guest Shannon Sharpe. They watched with reactions ranging from disbelief to silent horror as Broncos Coach Nathaniel Hackett, in his first game as an NFL head coach, took the ball out of Russell Wilson’s hands with the game on the line.
Rather than allow Wilson, the former Seahawks quarterback for whom the Broncos traded three players and a wealth of draft picks to Seattle in March, to try to convert on fourth and five from the Seattle 46, Hackett let the play clock wind down, then took one of his three remaining timeouts with 20 seconds left on the game clock and sent out Brandon McManus to try a 64-yard field goal that would have won the game. The ball went wide left, sending the Broncos home on the wrong end of a 17-16 score.
The whole series was maddening for Peyton Manning. “I think we should call time out, like, now,” he said, squirming in his chair with just over 50 seconds left in the game.
Sharpe, the former Broncos tight end, was the Mannings’ guest for the last part of the game and he was losing his mind, mostly because Wilson wasn’t targeting ... the tight end. He yelled at one point, nearly cursing and causing Eli Manning to worry, “Shannon’s making me nervous.”
"I'm drinking now." - @ShannonSharpe watching the Broncos on the ManningCast pic.twitter.com/xX7dIFjdxb
It was a baffling head coaching debut for Hackett, who opted not to put the ball in the hands of a nine-time Pro Bowl quarterback and one-time Super Bowl winner — the guy the team gave a five-year, $245 million contract extension this month.
What to know from NFL Week 1: The Chiefs are fine. The Patriots sure aren't.
Instead of asking Wilson, who had thrown for 340 yards, to throw (or run) for five more, he went with a kicker whose career best field goal was 61 yards. It almost worked.
“He got this. He got this,” Sharpe said before the kick, pointing out that McManus’s first kick attempt before Seattle called a timeout had hooked. When it missed, he added, “I told them to start it at the right upright and it would hook right in.”
Eli Manning pointed out, “Shannon is undefeated in calling what they should have done.”
Sharpe replied: “Eli, you heard me say, ‘Start it at the right upright,’ because he hooked the first one, so start it at the right. But he didn’t start it enough.”
Peyton Manning observed silently, letting his slumping body language tell the story along with a rueful smile and shake of his head. As the brothers signed off, he predicted, “The Broncos are going to be just fine.”
Earlier in the show, he did take a small dig at kickers when Eli Manning asked when they have their position meetings. “They don’t,” Peyton cracked. “There are no kickers’ meeting rooms. They don’t exist.”
Over on the ESPN game broadcast, analyst Troy Aikman predicted the end-of-game sequence “won’t sit well with Russell Wilson.” And ESPN’s Ryan Clark tweeted, “I ain’t paying $256 Million to let my kicker kick a 64 yard field goal on 4th and 5.”
But Wilson, who was booed in his first game back at Lumen Field, was diplomatic about the whole thing, praising McManus as “the best field goal kicker maybe in the game.”
Nor was he going to throw Hackett, hired after two seasons as Green Bay’s offensive coordinator, under a bus.
“I believe in Coach Hackett,” he said. “I believe in what we’re doing. I believe in everything. Any time you can try to find a way to make a play on fourth and five, then that’s great, too. But also, I don’t think it was the wrong decision. I think he can make it. Obviously in hindsight, we didn’t make it. But if we get in that situation again, I wouldn’t doubt whatever he decided.” | 2022-09-13T13:03:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nathaniel Hackett's game management in Broncos loss stuns Peyton Manning - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/nathaniel-hackett-peyton-manning/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/nathaniel-hackett-peyton-manning/ |
By Menachem Wecker
Seth Kinman, a hunter and trapper, had a penchant for gifting animal-bone chairs to presidents. This one is made of grizzly bear parts. The photo was taken between 1860 and 1875. (Brady-Handy Photograph Collection/Library of Congress)
It’s hard to talk about Washington without mentioning chairs. The city is the seat of government. The most influential people in Congress chair committees. Politicians unseat one another in elections and in congressional shuffles. But few pay attention to the actual objects upon which our leaders sit.
A forthcoming book, “The Art of Seating,” recommends taking chairs seriously both as sculptures and political statements. “Just through the singular lens of the chair, you can see progress of the young nation up to and including the present day,” its author, Brian J. Lang, chief curator of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, told me. His book relays the stories of 57 chairs, including some from America’s early government.
Chairs, notes James Zemaitis, curator and director of museum relations at the New York design gallery R & Company, have broadcast power from the start, when stools elevated chieftains on the battlefields. As for the symbol-laden interior design choices at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Matthew Costello, senior historian for the White House Historical Association, puts it this way: “It’s a much more complicated story than ‘I’m just going to pick a chair’ or ‘I need a sofa.’ ”
Nineteenth-century U.S. government chairs quoted stylistically from ancient Greece and Rome to connect the young democracy with historical ones. But there were problems: When it came across the ocean, furniture made for European cafes — where people leaned in to talk — required braces to accommodate American back leaners. “Leaning back in a chair is an American trait,” Zemaitis told me. Sitters found that out the hard way when three Executive Mansion chairs broke within four months after being installed in 1810 — which the designer, Benjamin Latrobe, blamed on men leaning back too far. “Perhaps he was so fixated on creating the Greek-inspired design that he didn’t really think about what the average person is going to do when they sit in these chairs,” Costello told me.
In 1857, oak chairs designed by Thomas Ustick Walter, architect of the Capitol extension under President Millard Fillmore, debuted in the House chamber. Their “hardy, hard wood” symbolized “the durability of the nation and the government, which would be tested less than a decade later by the Civil War,” Lang told me.
Hunter and trapper Seth Kinman, who had a penchant for gifting animal-bone chairs to presidents, offered Andrew Johnson one made of grizzly bear parts. (He claimed to have killed 800.) The chair, which looks very uncomfortable, appears in a 19th-century illustration of the White House.
A century later, when she learned of a side table by Parisian furniture maker Pierre-Antoine Bellangé in storage at the White House, Jacqueline Kennedy, a noted Francophile, retrieved as many of the original suite of 53 pieces as she could. This included chairs, sofas and tables — all acquired in 1817 by President James Monroe’s administration. The originals were upholstered in red but without the eagle decorations Monroe had hoped for. “It just goes to show that even the president of the United States can’t get what he wants,” says Costello.
The White House collection eventually acquired nine of the original Bellangé pieces that had been sold at auction. Today, the chairs and couches look much plusher: They were re-upholstered during the Obama and Trump administrations and, following original specifications, packed with horse hair — including 86 pounds for each sofa.
Inspired by Lang’s book, I went to the bowels of the Rayburn House Office Building, where the business of congressional chairmaking and repair proceeds with little fanfare (and where I got to see a lot of horse hair up close). There, I visited with Carol Swan, manager of the upholstery and drapery shops, which fall under the House Office of the Chief Administrative Officer.
Swan gets angry when she sees people leaning back in chairs in congressional offices. “I would smack them in the head, believe me, to protect the chair,” she says. “People don’t move chairs nicely or think about the age of the chairs. Chairs get pretty abused in this place.”
I also met Corey Gates, lead upholsterer, who with Swan was preparing for the annual restoration of the speaker’s chair, made in 1941 for Sam Rayburn, the formidable Democrat from Texas who is the building’s namesake. When testing swivels, the two have occasion to sit in chairs they repair, and they report some are less comfortable than one would imagine. According to Swan, everyone in the Cannon House Office Building wants one of the “Turkish”-motif easy chairs, which start very firm but get cozier and fit a member’s body perfectly after five years. “I’ll tell him,” she recounts, “ ‘In five years, this will be comfortable to you, sir.’ ‘Oh, you think I’ll be around then?’ ‘Yeah. You might be.’ ”
Swan and Gates relayed some interesting tidbits: that there’s Kevlar in the seats on the House floor, so legislators can hide behind them to protect against gunfire if necessary. That bomb-sniffing dogs have taken bites out of the upholstery. That members of Congress have had their office furniture poached by other members when they put items in the hallways for repair.
Darren Dahlstrom, manager at Rayburn’s cabinet shop, where furniture is repaired, told me he thinks often of the prestige of his work, particularly when attending to a speaker’s or other leader’s chair. “Not so often with the staff,” he deadpanned.
In the finishing shop, manager John Garcia has been working on many pieces from the Cannon Caucus Room, where the Jan. 6 hearings take place. “We see that on TV, and we say, ‘That’s our work. We did that. We touched that,’ ” he says. “It’s humbling to realize that you’re really making history.”
Menachem Wecker is a writer in Silver Spring. | 2022-09-13T13:49:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Seats of power: How chairs help define our history and leadership - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/09/13/chairs-book-power/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/09/13/chairs-book-power/ |
Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the British royal family’s finances are being scrutinized anew
The crown of Queen Elizabeth II at the state opening of Parliament in London in 2005. (Anwar Hussein/Pool/Getty Images)
For the British royals, the death of a loved one is the same as in any wealthy family. After the immediate mourning, there’s an uncomfortable question: What happens to the money?
With the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the rise of King Charles III to the throne, the question is being asked widely. And although the House of Windsor doesn’t share many of its financial details, certain things are known.
Unlike other rich families, the royals are given favorable treatment by the government. Neither Charles nor his siblings will have to pay inheritance tax on whatever assets are passed down from their mother, thanks to a 1993 agreement with the government. In announcing it, then-Prime Minister John Major told Parliament that a royal inheritance simply shouldn’t be taxed, citing the “unique circumstances of a hereditary monarchy.”
Forbes, for example, pegged her net worth at $500 million (around 430 million British pounds, although we will use U.S. dollars here for simplicity). Britain’s Sunday Times put it at $430 million in its 2022 list of Britain’s wealthiest people. In his 2020 book, “The Queen’s True Worth,” McClure estimated it was $468 million.
Regardless, that’s only a fraction of the royal family’s assets. Forbes estimates its worth at $28 billion, pointing to the business front of the royal lineage known as “Monarchy PLC.”
The family’s most impressive official holding is the Crown Estate, a portfolio of assets that includes luxurious London properties worth $19.2 billion. Although formally owned by the family, it is under the control of the British government, which receives the hundreds of millions of dollars the portfolio generates each year.
But the government then gives 25 percent of the Crown Estate’s profit back to the royals under what is known as the “Sovereign Grant.” In 2021, the royal household’s public financial statement listed the grant at about $99 million — money intended to pay for the upkeep of palaces and to meet other expenses. The royals’ significant security costs are not included and instead are paid for out of the British government treasury.
The reigning monarch also controls the Duchy of Lancaster, an “ancient body” responsible for a huge portfolio that encompasses 71 square miles and is worth more than $950 million. The duchy, which was set up in 1399, reported $27 million in profit last year.
The queen’s will has not been made public, and historically, the royal family has not released such details after a monarch’s death.
The portfolio of land and property in the Duchy of Cornwall, which dates to 1337, is significantly larger than the Duchy of Lancaster. It encompasses 0.2 percent of all land in Britain, including the storied Lord’s Cricket Ground and, less glamorously, HM Prison Dartmoor. But its self-reported profit for the most recent tax year was slightly lower than the Lancaster portfolio’s.
The royal family will continue to receive the Sovereign Grant since the new king on Saturday reaffirmed his decision to “continue the tradition of surrendering the hereditary revenues” from the Crown Estate in return for the grant.
For the rest of Britain, any inheritance valued over $380,000 results in a 40 percent tax bill. But King Charles will pay nothing on properties, jewels and investments that probably are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The British government outlined the reason in a 2012 memorandum: “The Monarchy as an institution needs sufficient private resources to enable it to continue to perform its traditional role in national life, and to have a degree of financial independence from the Government of the day.”
As prince, Charles paid a voluntary 45 percent income tax on his personal income from the Duchy of Cornwall. But the arrangement was shrouded in secrecy, with little public oversight of the expenses claimed against this income. His total annual tax liability was not disclosed.
The duchy itself does not pay corporation tax or capital gains tax. In 2013, following reports in the Guardian that the duchy was deliberately avoiding taxes, British lawmakers said it had an “unfair advantage” over other businesses and called for more transparency.
The royal family is under few requirements to disclose details of its wealth, and there are few ways for prying eyes to get a look. The family’s communications with the government are exempt from Freedom of Information requests. Their official papers are kept secret by Britain’s National Archives for at least 50 years.
The lack of transparency has led anti-monarchy groups including Republic to call the monarchy an “unaccountable public institution that has the power, secrecy and influence to willfully abuse its position.” Prem Sikka, a British academic who now sits in the House of Lords, has called the family’s opaque business dealings “the remnant of a bygone feudal age.”
Without a change, many details of the royal family’s private wealth may never be known. Some revealing facts about the Duchy of Lancaster’s offshore investments, for example, came out only in the 2017 Panama Papers leaks. Those detailed roughly $13 million in offshore accounts.
And after Prince Andrew, one of his brothers, reached a settlement with a woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her when she was 17, questions followed about how the money for the settlement was raised. The case was linked to Andrew’s controversial friendship with American financier Jeffrey Epstein, a sex offender who died by suicide while awaiting trial.
For both monarchists and republicans, the royal family’s balance sheet is a point of contention. Do the royals cost the government money or do they make it money?
Anti-monarchy groups dispute claims that the royal family brings in money — “a figment of the spin doctor’s imagination,” they say — and contend that the monarchy actually costs the country about $400 million a year. McClure, the expert on the royals, has estimated the government’s cost to protect the family at well over $100 million annually.
Reports in the British press have suggested that King Charles, a conservationist by nature, hopes to “slim down” the monarchy with fewer “senior royals” involved in public engagements. He has also talked about opening up more royal properties to the public, a move that could theoretically bring in more revenue.
How much exactly? Don’t hold your breath. | 2022-09-13T14:20:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How rich is the British royal family? No one knows for sure. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/royal-family-wealth-charles-inheritance/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/royal-family-wealth-charles-inheritance/ |
Those kids, by the way, are the lucky ones. The unlucky ones who didn’t make the cut got trapped in the maw of for-profit schools selling the mirage of success. Two million students enrolled in for-profit colleges in the fall of 2010, the peak year for the industry, almost 10 times as many as did 20 years before. On average, they paid some $14,000 more per year than students at public institutions. Many ended up with a worthless degree or no degree at all. (Following years of scandals, annual enrollment in for-profit colleges has fallen back to about one million.)
Appropriations to pay for public higher education have declined to $9,327 per fulltime equivalent student, according to the higher education officers association. That’s about 10% less than at the turn of the century.
Free College in America Is a Bad Idea. Just Look at Europe: Allison Schrager | 2022-09-13T14:33:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Deliver Students From Debt by Investing in State Schools - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/deliver-students-from-debt-by-investing-in-state-schools/2022/09/13/f9a14710-3368-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/deliver-students-from-debt-by-investing-in-state-schools/2022/09/13/f9a14710-3368-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
FILE - Oprah Winfrey arrives at the premiere of “A Wrinkle In Time” on March 13, 2018, in London. Winfrey has selected a prison memoir by Jarvis Jay Masters, currently on death row in San Quentin State Prison in California, for her latest book club pick. Masters’ “That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row” was first published in 2009. (Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP, File) | 2022-09-13T14:34:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Winfrey selects prison memoir 'That Bird Has My Wings' - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/winfrey-selects-prison-memoir-that-bird-has-my-wings/2022/09/13/3a6c3840-3369-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/winfrey-selects-prison-memoir-that-bird-has-my-wings/2022/09/13/3a6c3840-3369-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
A detailed inventory of documents and other items retrieved from former president Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate. (Jim Bourg/Reuters)
The chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee has requested that the National Archives conduct a review into whether presidential records from the Trump White House have all been accounted for after the Justice Department recovered roughly 100 classified documents and 48 empty folders with banners marked “classified” from his residence last month.
In a letter sent Tuesday to the acting archivist of the United States, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) urged the Archives to “seek a personal certification from Donald Trump that he has surrendered all presidential records that he illegally removed from the White House after leaving office.”
Justice Dept. says it would accept Trump’s candidate for special master
Maloney also called on the agency to “conduct an urgent review of presidential records recovered from the Trump White House to assess whether presidential records remain unaccounted for and potentially in the possession of the former president.”
In the six-page letter, Maloney underscored concerns about the dozens of empty folders for classified materials recovered by the FBI during the Aug. 8 search of the former president’s residence at his Mar-a-Lago Club, writing that “sensitive presidential records may remain out of the control and custody of the U.S. Government.”
“Although it is not clear from the inventory list why these folders were empty, the apparent separation of classified material and presidential records from their designated folders raises questions as to how the materials were stored and whether sensitive material may have been lost or obtained by third parties,” Maloney wrote.
The chairwoman requested an initial assessment of findings from the Archives by Sept. 27, and also called on Congress to consider potential legislative revisions to the Presidential Records Act. | 2022-09-13T14:34:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | House Oversight panel asks Archives to assess whether White House records remain in Trump’s possession - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/trump-documents-oversight-archives/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/trump-documents-oversight-archives/ |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.