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Montgomery Co. school leaders defend contract given to board member’s spouse
Montgomery County’s schools superintendent defended the system’s decision to award a STEM learning contract to a company owned by a school board member’s spouse and blamed concerns over the award process on an inaccurate document on the board’s website.
During a school system update to the county council Monday, superintendent Monifa McKnight said the $2.37 millon contract for KID Museum has worked for students and they want to keep it.
“We’ve had so much disruption in so many different ways,” McKnight said. “We want to be able to continue services with our students that we found to be successful, and the KID Museum is one.”
The Parents’ Coalition of Montgomery County, an advocacy group, raised concerns before a school board vote last week that the contract for Moco KidsCo, Inc. — the corporation behind the KID Museum based in Bethesda, Md. — was being awarded as a no-bid contract, with no discussion by the school board, a lack of competition and a conflict of interest.
A document previously available online said the contract was being awarded to the lowest bidder to provide a science, technology, engineering and math enrichment program. However, there were no other bidders and no advertisements to attract other companies to make the process competitive.
At the school board meeting last week, President Brenda Wolff acknowledged that the initial document uploaded online was not a correct reflection of how the school system procured the contract.
There was no bidding process because the contract was awarded through a single source contract, because the company provides a unique service, said an official from the school system’s procurement office.
The school district began working with the KID Museum in 2017 to provide STEM enrichment programs, Niki Hazel, associate superintendent of curriculum and instructional programs explained to the board. At the time, the company competed with others and was designated as the lowest bidder. Over the next five years, the program stood out, because other vendors usually provide a general program, but the KID Museum’s program was individualized for the county’s needs, Hazel said.
The contract is an expansion of the program from the county’s middle schools to its elementary schools.
“I think what is causing the issue is that it appeared as if we were trying to hide something. It’s clearly a mistake,” Wolff said. She added that she was “not a big fan of single sourcing” because it could “stifle competition,” and urged caution about the use of single source contracts in the future.
School board member Scott Joftus (District 3) whose wife, Cara Lesser, is the founder and executive director of the KID Museum, said that when he was appointed to the board in December, he notified the ethics review panel of the conflict of interest. The ethics panel advised Joftus to recuse himself from decisions surrounding his wife’s group, he said.
“I think there was some confusion in the public that that has not happened ... that’s not the case,” Joftus said. He abstained from voting on the contract last week.
The Parents Coalition and others in the county raised concerns that the board would approve the contract without discussion since it was on the consent agenda — a part of the meeting for noncontroversial items that usually grouped together for a single vote. The school board pulled the item from the consent agenda and discussed it for about 20 minutes before approving the contract with KID Museum.
One board member, Rebecca Smondrowski (District 2), voted against it, noting before the vote her concerns over not having enough information and the contract’s “hefty price tag.” | 2022-09-13T15:16:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Montgomery parents group concerned about awarding of no-bid STEM contract - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/13/montgomery-county-schools-kidmuseum-contract/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/13/montgomery-county-schools-kidmuseum-contract/ |
Ramsey Lewis, pianist with crossover hit “The ‘In’ Crowd,” dies at 87
He helped launch the ‘soul jazz’ movement, won three Grammys and was a radio and TV host
Ramsey Lewis in 2005. (Charles Rex Arbogast/AP)
Ramsey Lewis, a Grammy-winning pianist who had a major crossover pop hit in the 1960s with “The ‘In’ Crowd” and was a central figure in combining jazz with electronic music and other styles, died Sept. 12 at his home in Chicago. He was 87.
The death, of undisclosed causes, was announced on his website.
Beginning in the 1950s, Mr. Lewis recorded more than 75 albums and was one of the most popular jazz-oriented musicians of any era. Trained as a classical pianist and reared in gospel, he had prodigious keyboard skills and threaded various musical influences throughout his performances.
In 1964, he recorded the commercially successful “The Ramsey Lewis Trio Live at the Bohemian Caverns” at a nightclub on Washington’s U Street NW. Returning to D.C. the next year for an encore engagement, Mr. Lewis and his group were at a coffee shop discussing possible tunes for a follow-up album.
“And our waitress asked, ‘What kind of song you looking for?’ ” Mr. Lewis told The Washington Post in 2006. “We said, well, something fun, maybe something danceable. And she said, ‘You all should do “The ‘In’ Crowd” by Dobie Gray.’ ”
The song, written by Billy Page, was a Top 20 hit for Gray, a rhythm-and-blues singer. Mr. Lewis and his trio, bassist Eldee Young and drummer Redd Holt, worked out an instrumental arrangement of the tune.
“We rehearsed it Tuesday and Wednesday, and that Thursday at the Bohemian Caverns was the first night we played it in public,” Mr. Lewis told The Post. “We closed the set with it, and people started really getting into it. We did it again at the next show, and the same thing happened.
“And the rest is history. Is that what they say?”
As Mr. Lewis led the way with his piano, playing a simple but infectious melody while throwing in tantalizing shifts in dynamics, the audience clapped along with the midtempo rhythm.
“I mean if you listen to that record, we did not coerce or ask any of those people to join in,” Mr. Lewis said in a 2006 interview with the National Endowment for the Arts. “We started playing that song, and it was dancing in the aisles.”
“The ‘In’ Crowd” became one of the most popular instrumental tunes of the era, reaching No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, ranking among songs by the Beatles, Supremes and Beach Boys. Mr. Lewis won a Grammy Award for best small group jazz instrumental — the first of three Grammys — and the album sold more than 1 million copies.
Ever since forming his trio and releasing his debut album, “Ramsey Lewis and His Gentlemen of Swing,” in 1956, Mr. Lewis had favored an eclectic, even populist approach, not unlike that of pianists Erroll Garner and Ahmad Jamal. He reconfigured pop songs in his own way, mixed in a few jazz standards and R&B tunes, while mixing in introductions and cadenzas with echoes of Bach and Chopin.
“I’ve always had a broad outlook,” he told Down Beat magazine. “If it was good music, I could dig it.”
About a year after the release of “The ‘In’ Crowd,” Mr. Lewis’s trio broke up, and he formed a new group that included drummer Maurice White, who later founded the R&B group Earth, Wind and Fire.
He had several more pop-jazz hits, including the million-selling singles “Hang on Sloopy” and “Wade in the Water,” both from 1966. With his growing success, however, Mr. Lewis faced a critical backlash from some writers and musicians who thought he was diluting his musical talent to score pop hits with unchallenging material.
“This is a very sensitive area that we’re entering into,” Mr. Lewis told Down Beat. “Jazz as entertainment and jazz as art. … Count Basie and Duke Ellington’s playing was for dancers, but something happened where jazz entertainment came to be looked down upon by musicians.”
In the 1970s, Mr. Lewis turned to electronic keyboards and synthesizers and toured with Earth, Wind and Fire. His 1974 album “Sun Goddess” became a major hit, but with its disco beats, funk accents and emphasis on electronics, it was squarely in the realm of jazz fusion or “contemporary jazz.” Mr. Lewis’s new music was far removed from the simplicity of the understated acoustic trio albums he had recorded in the past. He recorded songs by country artists, the Beatles, Lionel Richie and Janet Jackson, making no apologies for following popular trends.
“I’ve tried to stay true to my goals,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. “To explore interesting harmonic progressions and work with melodies that sing.”
Ramsey Emmanuel Lewis Jr. was born May 27, 1935, in Chicago. His father was a maintenance worker who directed a church choir, and his mother cleaned houses.
Mr. Lewis began playing piano at age 4, was performing in church by the time he was 9 and studied classical technique for years at a Chicago conservatory and at DePaul University.
“By the time I was 13 years old,” he told the Chicago Tribune, “I figured that I would tour the world playing classical music.”
Because opportunities for Black classical musicians were limited, Mr. Lewis began to work with jazz musicians before forming his trio and signing with the Chicago-based Chess Records. He later recorded for Columbia, GRP and other labels.
By the 1990s, Mr. Lewis had largely given up his experiments with electronic music and returned to the standard piano and jazz styles of his early years. He was praised for his insightful performances of such standards as “Body and Soul” and for his jazz-inflected recordings of classical tunes on his 1999 album “Appassionata.”
When not on concert tours, Mr. Lewis had a second career as a radio DJ with a daily program in Chicago. He was also the host of a weekly television show on the BET cable network, called at different times “Jazz Central” and “Sound & Style.” His syndicated radio program, “Legends of Jazz,” was adapted for television on PBS in 2006.
In addition to performing and broadcasting, Mr. Lewis wrote music, including a ballet suite, a string quartet and a symphonic portrait of Abraham Lincoln, “Proclamation of Hope” (2009), which drew on African American musical traditions.
Mr. Lewis was 80 when he debuted his Concerto for Jazz Trio and Orchestra with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 2007, he was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, the country’s highest honor for jazz musicians.
His marriage to Geraldine Taylor, with whom he had seven children, ended in divorce. He was predeceased by two sons. Survivors include his wife of 32 years, Janet Tamillow Lewis; five children; 17 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
“All music is folk music,” Mr. Lewis told The Post in 2010, explaining how he composed his musical evocation of Lincoln. “Music comes from the folks and is meant to move the folks and connect with the folks. At 75 years old, I finally categorized my music: It’s music for the folks.” | 2022-09-13T15:42:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ramsey Lewis, pianist with crossover hit “The ‘In’ Crowd,” dies at 87 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/13/ramsey-lewis-jazz-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/13/ramsey-lewis-jazz-dead/ |
Customers whose freezers contain HelloFresh ground beef shipped from July 2 to 21 should throw the meat away, the USDA said. (U.S. Department of Agriculture)
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service on Saturday said meat produced at a specific manufacturing location appears to have caused multiple illnesses. The strain detected, O157:H7, causes severe intestinal infection in humans.
The 85-percent-lean ground beef came in 10-ounce plastic vacuum-sealed packages with “EST.46841” printed on them. The sides of the packages also say “EST#46841 L1 22 155” or “EST#46841 L5 22 155.”
HelloFresh, a company based in Germany, said the USDA’s warning “affects a very small portion of HelloFresh customers in the US” who received beef from a particular supplier.
“The USDA issued a public health alert out of an abundance of caution,” the company said in a statement. “We are closely partnering with the USDA and the supplier in question.”
What to know about E. coli symptoms and how to prevent infection
Other foods have also transmitted E. coli, which is short for Escherichia coli. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned in August of a “fast-moving” outbreak in Michigan and Ohio that officials later said may have been linked to romaine lettuce at Wendy’s restaurants. | 2022-09-13T15:55:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | HelloFresh ground beef may be contaminated with E. coli, USDA warns - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/09/13/ecoli-hellofresh-ground-beef/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/09/13/ecoli-hellofresh-ground-beef/ |
Trump faces a new threat: Scrutiny of ‘stop the steal’ money scam
Former President Donald Trump. (Reuters/Andrew Kelly/File Photo)
The upstanding folks around Donald Trump have been hit with a wave of new subpoenas in connection with the Justice Department investigation into efforts to overturn the election, the New York Times reports. Some appear aimed at probing his “Save America PAC,” which raised an enormous pile of cash ostensibly to fight the “stolen” election, then channeled the loot elsewhere.
That’s surely one of the most reprehensible scams that Trump has perpetrated. And so, if it’s producing new legal vulnerabilities for Trump and his allies, well, it couldn’t be happening to a nicer bunch of grifters.
There are approximately 40 new subpoenas, according to the Times, and some are aimed at probing efforts to get fake presidential electors appointed to further Trump’s plot to thwart certification of President Biden’s victory. That’s commanding much attention, as the Justice Department investigation of that particular scheme appears to be seriously advancing.
But the Times also reports this:
For months, associates of Mr. Trump have received subpoenas related to other aspects of the investigations into his efforts to cling to power. But in a new line of inquiry, some of the latest subpoenas focus on the activities of the Save America political action committee, the main political fund-raising conduit for Mr. Trump since he left office.
The Associated Press adds more, reporting that subpoenas have been issued to seek “information about the political action committee’s fundraising practices.”
This is of interest because the Save America PAC’s “fundraising practices” seem to represent the moment when the “big lie” monetized itself into the “big grift” in spectacular fashion.
As the Jan. 6 House select committee documented, Trump and his allies raised as much as $250 million with countless texts and emails that were full of lies about the 2020 election. Some missives, which were sent out in the run up to Jan. 6, 2021, called for donations to an “Official Election Defense Fund.”
But that fund didn’t exist, the committee demonstrated. Much of the money flowed to the newly-created Save America PAC, not “election related litigation.” That PAC donated millions to groups connected to top Trump advisers, the committee claimed, such as former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
In short, Trump’s 2020 lies didn’t just incite the Jan. 6 attack. They also raked in extraordinary sums from people who were likely despairing about Trump’s loss and believed his lie that the election had been stolen from them.
Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. Attorney, points out that a Justice Department investigation into this scheme would likely build on what the Jan. 6 committee learned. Federal prosecutors have likely collected much of the same documentation.
If so, McQuade says, it might implicate something like wire fraud, which requires use of electronic communications.
“Proving a fraud can sometimes be a fairly easy task,” McQuade told me. “All you need to show is that people raised money by representing one set of facts, while knowing that those facts were false.”
McQuade characterized how these charges might look: “They said the election was stolen because they wanted to get people riled up and extract money from them.” An alternate falsehood, McQuade said, might be that the cash was raised with the promise of fighting the “stolen” election but was funneled to other purposes.
We don’t know who, specifically, might be targeted in such an investigation or who it might lead to. But the Times says subpoenas went to “a wide variety” of people around Trump, “from low-level aides to his most senior advisers.”
There’s a certain clarity to this particular scam that is sometimes missing from the Jan. 6 saga. When they defend efforts to overturn the election, Trump propagandists have muddied the waters by suggesting he merely exercised legal options he legitimately thought were open to him.
But in the case of this fundraising, the story may prove much cleaner: Trump and his advisers knew the election hadn’t been stolen from him, but lied relentlessly to the contrary, apparently for the express purpose of getting people to send money that wasn’t even used to “stop the steal.”
It’s unclear whether this investigation, like other ongoing ones, will ever result in charges. But either way, the revelations are politically damaging, in part because this con is so easy to grasp, and the contempt for its marks is so glaring.
What’s more, such probes also stoke the investigative interest of news organizations. That’s already happening: An Associated Press expose digs into the Save America PAC, and documents sordid details about what was actually done with the “stop the steal” booty:
Trump has dedicated the money to other uses. He’s financed dozens of rallies, paid staff and used the money to travel as he’s teased an expected 2024 presidential run.
Unfortunately, Trump’s use of the money for rallies while feinting toward a 2024 run makes it less likely that the scam’s victims will hold it against him. They likely see the rallies as a way for Trump to fight back against the stolen election — on their behalf — and view the possibility of another run as a thrilling prospect, as a way to achieve vengeance over it.
So a good number of Trump’s victims may never be the wiser. But the rest of the country surely will be. | 2022-09-13T15:56:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Trump faces a new threat: DOJ subpoenas targeting 'stop the steal' money scam - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/trump-doj-subpoenas-jan-6-save-america-pac/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/trump-doj-subpoenas-jan-6-save-america-pac/ |
The big takeaway from Trump’s legal filings: He has no defense
Pages from the affidavit by the FBI in support of obtaining a search warrant for former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate. (Jon Elswick/AP)
The Trump legal brain trust’s latest filing has been met with proper ridicule. From its characterization of the documents retrieved from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate as “purported ‘classified records’ ” (Is there some doubt?) to its contention that the former president had the power to declassify documents (even though the absence of classification would not protect him from prosecution under the Espionage Act), the brief is incoherent, to put it mildly. Former FBI special agent Asha Rangappa tells me, “It literally contradicts itself in several places.”
Nevertheless, the filing is quite revealing, even if any rational judge would dismiss it out of hand. It demonstrates that Trump really has no excuse for having highly classified documents unsecured at Mar-a-Lago.
The brief never explicitly claims that Trump declassified any document — only that he had the power to do so. As former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal tweeted, “If Trump really thought he had declassified the documents, he [and] his lawyers would have said so. The fact that they never say in court what they say outside of [court] is itself damning.”
It’s a puzzle what his lawyers think would be a defense. Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weismann tells me, “His only possible defense is ‘I did not know I had government documents at Mar-a-Lago.’ ” But that won’t work, Weissmann says, because “there is so much contrary evidence that we know of already.” As he points out, the government executed its search warrant after Trump’s team said it returned everything because the government knew that assurance was false.
Rangappa offers: “[Trump] seems to be arguing that he converted these into personal records under the Presidential Records Act so they are his or, alternatively, even if they aren’t his the Justice Department can’t institute a separate enforcement action to recover them.” But, of course, the PRA doesn’t rule out an Espionage Act prosecution.
There is a risk of overanalyzing the brief. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe explains, “His defense comes down to ‘I’m President Trump.’ ” Trump seems to balk at the suggestion that he has to explain to the FBI which documents he considers privileged. “To me, that’s equivalent to: ‘Shut up, I explained.’ ” Tribe says. “Not much of a defense.”
Should the government decide to indict Trump, it will do so in D.C., where the grand jury sits and where documents that belong to the government were first taken from the White House. Once he’s before a competent trial judge and a jury, he will be hard-pressed to make any of his many excuses. For example:
“The documents were planted.” There is no evidence for that.
“I declassified them.” Trump’s own lawyers refuse to make that claim in a legal brief. Even if they did, it would be irrelevant under the Espionage Act.
“I get to keep whatever I want.” He might believe that, but that does not make it so in a court of law.
“It’s my attorneys’ fault.” Evidence suggests Trump went through the boxes and that he knew exactly what was included. Moreover, if this devolves into a finger-pointing exercise, his lawyers would have every reason to flip on him if for no other reason than to avoid their own liability.
Trump has spent much of his life saying outrageous, false things. That simply does not work in court when the law is crystal clear and people outside the MAGA cult are rendering judgment. That may explain why Trump’s aim has always been to delay and delay, hoping some future Republican president (himself perhaps!) will, if needed, pardon him. | 2022-09-13T15:56:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Trump has no defense to the serious charges he is facing. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/trump-filing-classified-documents-takeaways/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/trump-filing-classified-documents-takeaways/ |
Anthony Joshua’s team accepts Tyson Fury’s terms for Dec. 3 fight
After his second successive loss to Ukraine's Oleksandr Usyk, Anthony Joshua (right) is ready to fight Tyson Fury. (Hassan Ammar/AP)
The highly anticipated bout between Anthony Joshua and World Boxing Council world heavyweight champion Tyson Fury is closer to reality, with Joshua’s management company announcing Tuesday that it has accepted Fury’s terms for a fight.
258 MGT tweeted that it and “Matchroom Boxing can confirm, on behalf of Anthony Joshua, that we accepted all terms presented to us by Fury’s team. Due to the Queen’s passing, it was agreed to halt all communication. We are awaiting a response.”
Last week, Fury’s promoter Eddie Hearn said Joshua had accepted an offer for 40 percent of the proceeds from the fight, with 60 percent going to Fury (32-0-1, 23 knockouts). The all-British bout would take place Dec. 3, most likely in Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales.
Joshua, the former World Boxing Association-International Boxing Federation-World Boxing Organization world heavyweight champion with a 24-3 record (22 KOs), was offered the Fury fight when rival champion Oleksandr Usyk ruled out fighting again until early 2023 because of injury. Joshua was outpointed for the second successive time by the Ukrainian fighter on Aug. 20 in Saudi Arabia. Joshua had initially hoped for a fight date closer to Christmas, but Fury said the deal was conditioned on fighting either Nov. 26 or Dec. 3. | 2022-09-13T16:00:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Anthony Joshua agrees to terms with Tyson Fury on Dec. 3 bout - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/anthony-joshua-tyson-fury-bout/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/anthony-joshua-tyson-fury-bout/ |
Michelle Boorstein
Britain's King Charles III, with his siblings, mourn Queen Elizabeth II at a vigil at St. Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Sept. 12. (Jane Barlow/AFP/Getty Images)
LONDON — At her coronation in 1953, Queen Elizabeth II was anointed with sacred oils by the archbishop of Canterbury and pledged to rule not just according to British laws, but the “laws of God,” in her role as “Supreme Governor of the Church of England” and “Defender of the Faith.”
She was true to that vow. Her devotion to “Jesus Christ, Prince of Peace” was a fundamental and defining, though sometimes overlooked, pillar of her life.
Now, as her son Charles III takes over, he has by all accounts accepted the responsibilities of his religious titles without reservation. But he will bring a markedly different personal vision of religion and spirituality to the role.
“The queen was very explicit about her Christian faith, but Charles’s is of a different nature,” said Ian Bradley, professor emeritus of cultural and spiritual history at the University of St. Andrews, who has written extensively about faith and the monarchy. “His is more spiritual and intellectual. Charles is more of a ‘spiritual seeker.’ ”
While the monarch’s authority within the church is largely ceremonial, it still matters. The king will formally approve all new bishops, for example. And pronouncements of the crown, especially on something as personal as faith in God, carry a special weight.
Particularly in her later years, Queen Elizabeth II was clear about expressing her beliefs, often citing the “guiding light” of Jesus, especially in her annual televised Christmas message watched by millions.
Many trace her shift in tone to her Christmas address of 2000, when she said, “For me, the teachings of Christ and my own personal accountability before God provide a framework in which I try to lead my life.”
The queen was sometimes referred to as the “last true believer,” said Stephen Bates, the Guardian newspaper’s longtime, now retired, religious affairs and royal correspondent. “She is the most religious sovereign since the [Protestant] Reformation” of the 16th century, he said.
While public assertions of faith are second nature — if not required — for U.S. leaders, they are unusual in Britain, a highly secular nation, where an aide to former prime minister Tony Blair once quipped, “We don’t do God.”
“We have a kind of unease about our politicians and our leaders expressing their faith, and to some extent this extends to the monarchy,” Bradley said. “It’s seen as un-British.”
Despite declining church membership and influence in daily British life, the monarch remains a powerful church symbol; British coins feature the queen’s likeness and letters in Latin that stand for, “By the Grace of God, Queen and Defender of the Faith.”
As his mother was, Charles is a regular churchgoer and clear that his faith is Christian. In his first address to the nation, on the day after the queen died, Charles cited his “responsibility” to the Church of England, “in which my own faith is so deeply rooted.”
“In that faith, and the values it inspires, I have been brought up to cherish a sense of duty to others, and to hold in the greatest respect the precious traditions, freedoms and responsibilities of our unique history and our system of parliamentary government,” he said. It was notable how quickly he placed faith into the context of the more secular “values” and “duty.”
In a 73-year lifetime of being a king-in-waiting, when he was able to speak more freely than he now can as monarch, Charles appeared to stake out a less doctrinaire religious and spiritual stance — even giving it its own title.
Charles said in a 1994 documentary that he was more a “defender of faith” than “the faith.” He questioned the impulse to prioritize one particular interpretation. “People have fought to the death over these things,” he said, “which seems to me a peculiar waste of people’s energy, when we’re all actually aiming for the same ultimate goal.” Instead, he said he preferred to embrace all religious traditions and “the pattern of the divine, which I think is in all of us.”
When presented with the question again more than two decades later, he clarified his remarks, saying: “It’s always seemed to me that, while at the same time being Defender of the Faith, you can also be protector of faiths.”
The “Defender of the Faith” title dates to the 16th century, when it was granted by Pope Leo X to King Henry VIII for his defense of Catholicism. When Henry broke with the Catholic Church, he held on to the title, but now he was defending the Anglicanism of the Church of England.
Charles has long been an advocate for environmental causes, with a passion that Bradley described as “eco-spiritual.” In his 2010 book, “Harmony,” Charles issued a call for a “sustainability revolution” to reverse environmental threats to the planet, which he blamed in part on “the spiritual dimension to our existence” being “dangerously neglected during the modern era.”
In the book, Charles took issue with “empiricism,” the view that since science cannot prove the existence of God, God must not exist. That kind of thinking, he wrote, “elbows the soul out of the picture.”
In an increasingly multicultural nation with a full rainbow of faiths, Charles has long expressed interest in and support for all forms of belief, particularly Islam and Judaism.
His mother also crossed new boundaries in that regard. She was the first British monarch to enter a mosque. Unlike predecessors, she met a succession of popes. On her 60th year on the throne, in 2012, she said the church “has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.”
Pope Francis, as well as British Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Sikh leaders, have all praised Elizabeth effusively since her death.
As the queen was sharing more about her faith, British society was becoming more secular.
According to the National Center for Social Research, church membership has dropped sharply over time, with only 12.5 percent of Britons in 2020 considering themselves members of the Church of England, down from nearly 36 percent in 1985. Of those who considered themselves Anglican in 2020, more than 40 percent said they “never” attend services.
Similar to the United States, British society has in recent years become less reliant on and structured around institutions that were once bedrocks of daily life. The center’s research showed that people who claimed “no religion” rose from 34.3 percent in 1985 to almost 49 percent in 2020.
As the number of worshipers drops, hundreds of historic churches have been taken out of service and turned into apartments, offices, pubs, spas, shops and even sporting centers with rock-climbing walls.
The church has changed in important ways, including a decision in 2002 to allow divorced people to remarry in the church. Three years later, then-Prince Charles and his longtime partner, Camilla Parker Bowles — both divorced — were married in a civil ceremony that was blessed immediately afterward in a chapel at Windsor Castle by the archbishop of Canterbury.
Now king, Charles is the first divorced monarch since Henry VIII — although two of Henry’s prolific string of marriages technically ended in annulment, not divorce.
It was not until 2018, when Charles’s son Prince Harry married American actress Meghan Markle in the same chapel where his father’s marriage had been blessed, that a royal wedding of a divorced partner happened with the full blessing of the church.
How the Church of England has shifted on divorce, from Henry VIII to Meghan Markle
Still, Charles’s admitted adultery (with Camilla) during his marriage to Princess Diana before their divorce in 1996 doesn’t sit right with some British people.
“Hard to celebrate a man who has been an adulterer and has well-known if arcane religious views,” said Bates, the former Guardian correspondent. “If the monarchy stumbles, where does that leave the established church?”
In some ways, Charles’s brand of faith — with greater focus on spirituality than dogma — puts him more in line with the British public.
Bradley said a small movement within the church already wants to see it formally uncoupled from the monarchy and the government. In a country with so many faiths, and so many people who don’t identify with any faith, Bradley said critics of the church wonder “if it can really still claim to be the church of the nation.”
“He has given us a lot of confidence,” said Zara Mohammed, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, the largest group representing the U.K.’s approximately 3 million Muslims. “We regard him as an admirer of Islam and a friend of British Muslims. It’s brilliant to see how he grasps how the U.K. has changed. He sees a more holistic picture and the power of all faiths and diverse communities working together.”
While it’s unlikely that any change in monarch would bring people back into the Church of England, Charles could be a more relatable “Defender of the Faith” for some church members.
“He represents those people who perhaps don’t have a vibrant faith, but have a sense that there is loving God,” said Andi Britt, 58, a human resources executive for IBM in London, who came with his wife, Jane, on Sunday morning to place flowers in the queen’s honor at Buckingham Palace.
“He represents a faith and a God who welcomes people, regardless of how close they feel,” said Britt, who described himself as a “committed Christian” and Church of England member. “I think he represents many people who are just not as sure, or who don’t have such strong convictions — people of faith, different faiths, or no faith.”
Boorstein reported from Washington. | 2022-09-13T16:04:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | King Charles III may bring new approach to ‘Defender of the Faith’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/king-charles-religion-faith/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/king-charles-religion-faith/ |
A man is arrested before the passage of the cortege carrying the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II on Sept. 12 in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Peter Summers/Getty Images)
LONDON — Lawyers and free-speech activists are ringing alarm bells after reports emerged in recent days of police detaining, moving and in some cases even arresting protesters at the events marking the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the accession of her eldest son, Charles.
People have been picked up by police as they shouted against the crown, heckled royals marching by and carried anti-monarchists signs — and in one case, a blank sheet of paper. The police crackdown on such protests has raised questions about freedom of speech during this fraught period for the United Kingdom.
On Twitter, the hashtag “NotMyKing” — after the slogan featured on the sign of a protester who was led away by police in London in a video Monday — was trending early Tuesday. Lawmakers have called on authorities to respect the rights of those who believe the queen’s death should herald the end of the monarchy.
“No one should be arrested for just expressing republican views,” said Zarah Sultana, a member of the opposition Labour Party representing Coventry South in Parliament. “Extraordinary — and shocking — that this needs saying.”
Reports of arrests first emerged Sunday, when a document formally proclaiming Charles as king was read aloud in locations across the United Kingdom. In Oxford, Symon Hill, 45, was arrested after he shouted, “Who elected him?” as the proclamation was read. In a blog post describing the incident, Hill claimed police handcuffed him and did not tell him what he was being arrested for.
The Thames Valley police confirmed to British media outlets that a “45-year-old man was arrested in connection with a disturbance that was caused during the county proclamation ceremony of King Charles III in Oxford.” It said a man was later “de-arrested” and was cooperating with police as they “investigate a public order offence” — though Hill wrote on Twitter that he hadn’t engaged with the police since his initial arrest.
In the United Kingdom, an arrest is more akin to a detention in the United States, however individuals who are charged do end up having to appear before a judge.
In Edinburgh, a 22-year-old woman was arrested outside St. Giles’s Cathedral, where the queen lay at rest at the start of the week, for breaching the peace. She was pictured holding a sign that featured a more vulgar version of the slogan, “Down with the imperialism.”
The woman was later charged under a section of the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act of 2010 that outlaws “threatening or abusive” behavior, an advocacy group she works for said in a statement.
Incidents like these highlight the gaps in protesters’ legal rights in the United Kingdom, Clive Stafford Smith, a civil rights attorney and dual British American national, told The Washington Post.
“For all the complacent publicity that this country is a country of free speech, the British really don’t get free speech in the way that Americans do,” he said.
In Britain, the Treason Felony Act of 1848 makes it a felony for anyone to commit acts intended to deprive the British sovereign from the “royal name of the imperial crown.” The act is not enforced today, said Stafford Smith, but “it’s still on the books.” Some police officers cracking down on protesters in recent days may be enforcing the Public Order Act of 1986 — “an incredibly vague statute that says anything that can provoke public disorder is left to the authority of the police to decide whether to arrest someone,” he added.
The recent Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022 has been heavily criticized for imposing restrictions on protests, though it’s not clear whether any of the protesters were charged under this act, as most of its provisions don’t apply to Scotland.
Activist and lawyer Paul Powlesland said Monday that he was in Parliament Square in London and “held up a blank piece of paper” when a police officer asked him for his information. The officer apparently said “that if I wrote “Not My King” on it, he would arrest me under the Public Order Act because someone might be offended,” Powlesland wrote in a tweet.
A short clip of their interaction went viral on social media, prompting Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stuart Cundy to say in a statement Monday, “We have been making [the public’s right to protest] clear to all officers involved in the extraordinary policing operation currently in place and we will continue to do so.”
Incidents like these have been few and far between as millions of people across the country gather at various events during the 10-day mourning period declared to mark the queen’s passing. “The overwhelming majority of interactions between officers and the public at this time have been positive as people have come to the Capital to mourn the loss of Her Late Majesty the Queen,” Cundy said.
Some on social media, however, pointed to another form of censorship of anti-monarchy views — one based on peer pressure.
In his blog post, Hill, the Oxford protester, said that when he shouted, “Who elected him?” among the crowd, “two or three people near me told me to shut up.” And in Edinburgh, when a 22-year-old heckled Prince Andrew as the procession carrying the queen’s coffin marched down the Royal Mile, videos appeared to show the protester being violently pushed to the ground and shoved by two men in the crowd before police pulled him away.
A Police Scotland spokesperson told The Washington Post via email that a 22-year-old was arrested and then “released on an undertaking to appear at Edinburgh Sheriff Court at a later date.”
“Detaining people for shouting republican slogans, even if they do so in a deliberately coarse and provocative way, is utterly un-British,” said Daniel Hannan, a member of the House of Lords. “I worry that our police are becoming more authoritarian and — worse — that a section of the public is cheering them on.”
“The right to dissent is never more important than at times of patriotic fervour,” George Monbiot, a British writer and activist, wrote Tuesday on Twitter. | 2022-09-13T16:04:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Police arrest anti-monarchy protesters at royal events in England, Scotland - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/queen-elizabeth-death-protests-arrest-police/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/queen-elizabeth-death-protests-arrest-police/ |
By Bobby Ross Jr. | AP
Richard Thomas participates in the 2017 Tony Awards Meet the Nominees press day at the Sofitel New York hotel on Wednesday, May 3, 2017, in New York. Now 71 and starring as lawyer Atticus Finch in a touring production of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the former “The Waltons” star said he still hears fans call “Good night, John-Boy!” after each performance. “It’s kind of astonishing that we’re still talking about a show 50 years later,” he says. (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP) | 2022-09-13T16:05:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | At 50, TV's ‘The Waltons’ still stirs fans’ love, nostalgia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/at-50-tvs-the-waltons-still-stirs-fans-love-nostalgia/2022/09/13/94d6d73e-3375-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/at-50-tvs-the-waltons-still-stirs-fans-love-nostalgia/2022/09/13/94d6d73e-3375-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
President Donald Trump listens as Fox News' Sean Hannity speaks during a rally on Nov. 5, 2018, in Cape Girardeau, Mo. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)
There are two schools of thought about the array of investigations into Donald Trump since he entered the presidential race in June 2015.
School One is that the former president has been unfairly targeted from the outset by overzealous and biased prosecutors or elected officials. That Trump, as he himself has often complained, is a victim of a system determined to keep a hostile outsider at bay. School Two is that Trump sits at the center of a galaxy of dubious activity — and some demonstrated malfeasance — that has spun off a variety of probes and queries.
It would probably be useful for each school to treat the other’s position more seriously. It’s useful, for example, for those who see Trump as incorrigibly corrupt to consider how that generates a demand that politicians will be eager to fill. It’s probably more useful, though, for Trump supporters to consider that perhaps Trump has faced a lengthy list of investigations because he has engaged in a lot of questionable behavior, relying on partisan politics as a shield.
Fox News host Sean Hannity is by all appearances an earnest member of School One, the category in which Trump is simply a humble public servant who faces a barrage of unfair hostility from the elites. On Monday night, he sought to make that point in an unexpected way, presenting his audience with a looooong list of Trump investigations.
“Instead of trying to fix the economy or dare talk about it or the border or the fentanyl or opioid crisis or the crime crisis,” Hannity said, “Democrats have been wasting almost all of their time and billions of your tax dollars with one investigation after investigation into all things Donald Trump. And this has been going on now for years.”
And then came the list. The tactic (which Hannity deploys with some regularity) was to imply unimportance by indicating volume. Surely this barrage, unspooling slowly over Hannity’s shoulder, is proof that Trump’s opponents are trying to use any possible tool to derail him?
If we slow it down, though, picking out the actual investigations included by Hannity, the picture changes. A lot of these investigations ... make a lot of sense. They aren’t ideal for Trump or for those seeking to apologize for the former president on their cable-news shows. When extracted from the cable-news throw-it-at-them-and-move-on format, the evidence at hand certainly seems to bolster School Two’s position more than School One’s.
Here is what Hannity offered and what each investigation involved. (All descriptions are as shown on Hannity’s show.)
Hannity’s list
Russia collusion investigation. I’ll note at the outset that Hannity uses the term “investigation” somewhat flexibly. He includes actual criminal probes, congressional inquiries and vaguer what’s-going-on-here sniffing around. So when Hannity mentions the “Russia collusion investigation,” it’s not really clear what he means. Just the unproven idea that Trump explicitly partnered with Russia to aid his 2016 campaign? Does that include media reporting? Just the work of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III? Who knows.
Regardless, we can explain this in similarly broad strokes. Despite the effort to suggest that the Russia probe was a “hoax,” investigations identified numerous contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russian actors. It established clearly how Russia sought to influence the election and how people on the campaign team — his campaign manager, deputy campaign manager and two policy advisers included — had intentional contact with people linked to Russian intelligence or the Russian government. An internal investigation found that the Russia probe was valid and grounded in real questions; a subsequent effort to undermine it has come up short.
Crossfire Hurricane investigation. “Crossfire Hurricane” was the FBI code name for its investigation into Russian interference. It’s not clear why Hannity breaks this out, unless it’s to differentiate between a “collusion” probe and the FBI effort. But: see above.
One thing Hannity didn’t mention, of course, was the very real questions about efforts to obstruct the Mueller probe that Trump avoided largely thanks to the intervention of his attorney general, William P. Barr.
D.C. investigates inaugural funds. After Trump won in 2016, he formed a non-profit committee to fundraise for his inauguration. It was wildly successful, vacuuming up millions of dollars. A lot of that money ended up being spent for inaugural events at Trump’s D.C. hotel, where prices skyrocketed as the inaugural committee was booking rooms.
The committee and the Trump Organization ultimately settled a lawsuit filed by D.C. for $750,000.
New York investigates inaugural funds. D.C. wasn’t alone in probing how inaugural funds were raised and spent. While Hannity calls this a “New York” investigation, it was actually a federal probe. In January 2020, a prominent donor to the committee pleaded guilty to obstruction charges.
New Jersey investigates inaugural funds. There was also an investigation in New Jersey that began in 2019. Nothing appears to have come from it.
Emoluments clause investigations. When Trump first took office, his failure to separate cleanly from his business interests immediately raised questions about conflicts of interest. That’s particularly the case given the Constitution’s emoluments clause, a line which prohibits the nation’s chief executive from receiving benefits from foreign governments. Like, say, booking a huge block of rooms at one of his hotels.
A lawsuit centered on the emoluments issue was dismissed by an appeals court in 2019.
Ways and Means tax investigation. Trump’s failure to provide tax returns during the 2016 election was a break with decades of precedent. When Democrats took over the House majority in 2019, the Ways and Means Committee subpoenaed the documents, arguing that the president’s complex business dealings demanded more scrutiny than past presidents. It was unsuccessful.
It’s not clear what “investigation” might have occurred in the absence of the documents. But the committee tried again in 2021 and, last month, the request was granted. So we may find out.
Trump hotel lease investigation. This one also wasn’t much of an “investigation.” When the Trump Organization took over the old D.C. post office to develop its hotel, the lease with the government (which owned the building) blocked federal officials from being party to the agreement. Then Trump became a federal official.
The General Services Administration determined in 2017 that the lease was still valid, even with Trump as a signatory. An internal watchdog later decried the decision. The hotel was sold earlier this year.
Foreign gifts investigation. There are rules that prevent a president from accepting expensive gifts from foreign officials for presumably obvious reasons. When Trump left office, it became clear that his administration’s documentation of the gifts provided by foreign governments was unreliable. The House launched an investigation in June.
After its search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last month (see below), federal investigators reported recovering a number of items identified as “gifts.”
Fulton County D.A. 2020 election investigation. The district attorney of Fulton County, Ga. is investigating whether Trump violated the law by pressuring state officials to overturn the certified vote in the state. The investigation is ongoing, with numerous Trump allies receiving subpoenas.
That Hannity simply slots this in the middle of the list is telling. This is a big deal, with a well-documented predicate — the recorded call of Trump asking that votes be “found.” But Hannity’s viewers are asked to simply consider this as equivalent to, say, the New Jersey inaugural probe.
NAACP Michigan Voting Rights Act investigation. Hannity also leverages his loose definition of “investigation” to make his list longer. This one, for example, is a lawsuit filed by the NAACP in response to the efforts of Trump allies to subvert the 2020 election results in Michigan. The suit has not yet been settled; there does not appear to be any “investigation.”
Mar-a-Lago search. Another little trick by Hannity: leverage the pejoratives he and his network have spent months or years constructing as shorthands for the audience to scoff any questions away. What Hannity calls “Mar-a-Lago raid” might also be described as “federal probe into Trump’s unauthorized retention of government documents, including ones marked ‘top secret’.” Or “investigation into mishandling classified materials and possible efforts to obstruct federal investigators.”
To each his own, I guess.
House Oversight classified materials investigation. It’s not uncommon for a criminal probe to sit alongside a civil one. So the House Oversight committee is also investigating whether Trump stashed classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago event space. It is a separate investigation, yes, but largely of the same thing as is being considered by the Justice Department.
January 6th committee investigation. There is a House select committee investigating the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and Trump’s months-long effort to retain power despite his loss in the election. To Hannity and his allies, this is a partisan attack, despite the committee’s inclusion of two House Republicans.
Interestingly, Hannity doesn’t include the federal investigation into the riot on his list, despite abundant evidence that the Justice Department is collecting evidence — including that collected as part of the House’s civil probe.
D.C. A.G. investigation into January 6th. D.C.'s attorney general filed a civil lawsuit of his own in December.
That Hannity includes this on his list is fascinating since the suit doesn’t even target Trump! This is a “Trump investigation” only if one believes that Trump has some ownership over the Capitol riot. Apparently Hannity believes that.
January 6th impeachment investigation. A week after the riot, Trump was impeached by the House for stoking the day’s violence. He was acquitted by the Senate after the chamber failed to meet the two-thirds requirement for conviction. But, in a remarkable rebuke, seven members of Trump’s party voted to convict.
There wasn’t much investigation here, though. There was one article of impeachment predicated on Trump’s behavior prior to and on Jan. 6. Hannity includes it because “they tried to impeach him twice” is another scoffing shorthand among Trump supporters — a two-item version of what Hannity wants this full list to do. As though neither impeachment had any basis in fact.
Ukraine phone call impeachment investigation. Speaking of which! Over several weeks of testimony in late 2019, House investigators outlined how Trump sought to leverage governmental power to pressure Ukraine into aiding his 2020 reelection bid. There was a lot of hand-waving around and rationalization of his actions, but the investigation left little doubt about what transpired. Trump was impeached — and acquitted thanks to Senate Republicans.
Hush money payments investigation. Trump was involved in two separate instances of paying women money to keep quiet about their alleged sexual encounters with him! There were obvious questions about how this might have violated campaign finance law! His lawyer pleaded guilty to his involvement in the schemes! The publisher of a tabloid newspaper copped to involvement in the effort!
For anyone else, this would be the end of their political careers. For Trump, it’s 17th on a list of investigations.
Michael Cohen pardon investigation. The aforementioned lawyer was Michael Cohen. Cohen also said that Trump’s team floated the possibility of a pardon prior to the attorney’s decision to cooperate with federal prosecutors. The Manhattan district attorney reportedly opened an investigation.
Save America PAC investigation. A new entry on the list: the government is apparently investigating Trump’s efforts to fundraise in the aftermath of the 2020 election. In recent days, dozens of subpoenas were issued to Trump allies, some of which apparently involved details about the fundraising.
This investigation overlaps heavily with the criminal investigation into the Capitol riot, as The Washington Post has reported. Same players to a large degree, and the same focus.
White House security clearance investigation. This is another one of those that most people have probably forgotten. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a top presidential adviser, failed to get security clearance from federal officials due to concerns including his interactions with foreign officials. (Kushner’s difficulty documenting his connections is well-established.) So Trump side-stepped the process and gave him clearance. House Democrats announced a probe.
Trump’s net worth investigated in House. The Washington Post reported in early 2019 that Trump had for years offered inflated the components (and value) of his properties to lenders. House Democrats announced that they would investigate whether doing so amounted to bank fraud. More on this in a second.
Use of private email by Jared and Ivanka. After elevating questions about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was serving as secretary of state, Trump was faced with the awkward revelation that members of his own family had used private email after joining his administration.
If that irony isn’t enough for you, how about this: the first investigation in this case was launched not by House Democrats but by the White House itself. The Democrats joined in later.
Again, though, we should step back and pose a question to members of School One: Is this investigation inherently unnecessary or invalid?
Investigation into communications with Putin. In early 2019 — a popular period, as Democrats had retaken the House — the chairs of several congressional committees asked that the White House provide documentation on Trump’s communications with the president of Russia.
There was obviously some politics at play, given the focus on Trump and Russia. But there was also a real question of whether Trump was complying with the Presidential Records Act in documenting his interactions with Vladimir Putin — the law governing retention of documents that also undergirds the Mar-a-Lago search.
Possible money laundering investigation. In May, the Federal Election Commission announced that it had deadlocked on the question of whether Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign committees had engaged in a widespread effort to conceal the nature of hundreds of millions of dollars in spending by moving it through consulting firms.
The FEC is made up of three Democratic and three Republican appointees, meaning that investigations into campaigns have often been blocked by partisan disagreements.
Saudi Arabia nuclear venture investigation. Michael Flynn’s tenure as national security adviser was short-lived but not inconsequential. Whistleblowers told investigators that he’d sought to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia in violation of federal law; the House announced an investigation. Another Trump ally, Tom Barrack, was also reportedly involved; he later pleaded guilty to illegal lobbying on behalf of United Arab Emirates.
New York A.G. Trump property values. So you will recall that the Trump Organization was accused of offering inflated valuations for its properties to investors. Well, it also allegedly understated the values to the IRS in order to reduce tax bills. The attorney general for New York state began an investigation into the discrepancies.
Manhattan A.G. Trump property values. So did the district attorney for New York County, N.Y.
Westchester A.G. Trump property values. So did the district attorney for Westchester County, N.Y. After all, if Trump’s golf course in Westchester was underreporting value, it was underpaying taxes and short-changing the municipality where it’s located.
Trump SPAC/Truth Social investigated. Both the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal law enforcement are probing possible insider trading involving the special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) intended to fund the parent company for Trump’s social-media platform. Here, too, Trump is involved only tangentially, but the probe earns a spot on Hannity’s list.
Inflated insurance claims investigation. Last October, Rolling Stone reported that investigators were looking at whether a Trump property had overstated storm damage more than a decade ago. It’s not clear how extensive this investigation might be.
Bank officer sought Trump job investigation. Perhaps you noticed that we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel here a bit. Add this one to the list: a banker was indicted for approving loans to Trump ally Paul Manafort in exchange for landing a job with the Trump White House. He was convicted of bribery and conspiracy and sentenced to prison.
Should he not have been investigated because his case involved the word “Trump”? That appears to be Hannity’s argument, given that the banker made it onto this list.
Hannity seems to want his viewers to believe that none of this was worth any level of investigation, that all of it was simply an effort to exact revenge against Trump. That any questions about Trump Organization property valuations or Russian efforts to influence the election or Trump’s use of governmental power for his own purposes or other people’s possible insider trading or how Jared Kushner got his security clearance or whether Trump followed document retention laws or how he tried to retain power after losing the election or how his team vacuumed up contributions or how those contributions were reported or how much he paid to coverup alleged affairs — that this is all just people being mean to a guy they didn’t like.
You may judge that for yourself. | 2022-09-13T16:05:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sean Hannity is keeping a list of investigations into Trump. Here’s what’s on it. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/trump-investigations-sean-hannity/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/trump-investigations-sean-hannity/ |
‘Breath of the Wild’ sequel ‘Tears of the Kingdom’ revealed by Nintendo
The game long known as ‘Breath of the Wild 2’ now has a name and release date.
Nintendo announced the title of its upcoming Zelda game, “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom,” during a Nintendo Direct stream Tuesday. The much anticipated sequel to “Breath of the Wild” is slated to release May 12th, 2023.
In a new trailer, the series’ iconic hero, Link, is depicted opening a massive door and dashing across a chain of ruin-filled islands floating high up in the clouds. The islands appear to have a rich, diverse landscape — some green and tangled with large, gnarled tree roots, and others large enough to host entire mountain ranges. Aerial travel seems to be a core mechanic in the game, as Link is shown jumping from a great height and landing on the back of a giant stone glider.
These are the best games to play on Nintendo Switch
In the opening sequence, the camera pans across a series of Mesoamerican-inspired petroglyphs. The first is what appears to be an army of Hylians (the race of elfish humanoids that Link and Zelda are part of) standing against an invading force of porcine soldiers. Then, a petroglyph of a large robed figure with large ears surrounded by seven runes is shown, followed by one of a long-haired character with an eye reminiscent of the Eye Symbol of the Legend of Zelda’s Sheikah tribe.
“Tears of the Kingdom” is the hotly anticipated sequel to 2017’s “Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild,” the first completely open-world title in the Zelda franchise and an acclaimed critical hit. “Tears of the Kingdom” was originally announced at E3 2019 as an untitled sequel to “Breath of the Wild,” colloquially referred to as the Breath of the Wild sequel or simply Breath of the Wild 2. | 2022-09-13T16:07:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tears of the Kingdom, next Zelda title, revealed at Nintendo Direct - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/09/13/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/09/13/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom/ |
By Manuel FernÁndez | AP
Men escape a bull during the ‘Toro de la Vega’ bull festival in Tordesillas, near Valladolid, Spain, Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022. Hundreds of people have taken part in a centuries-old Spanish bull-chasing festival, but under orders once again that the animal should not be harmed with spears or darts. The Toro de La Vega festival in the northcentral town of Tordesillas traditionally saw the bull speared to death by revelers who chased it from the town to outlying fields on horseback and on foot. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez) | 2022-09-13T16:07:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Old Spanish festival ends without gore, but bull still dies - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/old-spanish-festival-ends-without-gore-but-bull-still-dies/2022/09/13/48c4b268-3374-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/old-spanish-festival-ends-without-gore-but-bull-still-dies/2022/09/13/48c4b268-3374-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
Immigrant groups say Fairfax is not doing enough to curb deportations
An ICE officer watches members of the Dreamers group while they protest deportations in front of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services building in Fairfax in 2019. (Marlon Correa /The Washington Post)
A Fairfax County policy aimed at protecting undocumented immigrants from deportation is not being implemented aggressively enough, a coalition of immigrant groups said. Although they also acknowledge that Fairfax has been more aggressive than other jurisdictions on the issue.
In January 2021, the county board adopted a “Trust Policy” that prohibits Fairfax employees — including police officers — from cooperating with federal immigration agents, a move meant to counter the fear that many undocumented immigrants have of dealing with government officials.
Among other things, the county’s sheriff’s office has stopped cooperating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement requests to hold inmates wanted for deportation beyond their sentences.
As part of the policy, much of which was already in practice before it was formally adopted, county agencies also don’t ask residents about immigration status before providing any services.
But the rate of deportation cases that originate in Virginia’s most populous jurisdiction is still higher than some large communities, at about 930 per 100,000 residents, according to a report by a coalition of immigrant groups in Northern Virginia using federal data compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
Still, the deportation case rates are even higher in neighboring Prince William County, at 1,019 per 100,000 residents, and Alexandria, at 1,195 per 100,000 residents, according to the report. Neither has a similar Trust Policy in place.
Those rates include cases from a variety of sources. Among them: ICE arrests in the community, cases where an undocumented immigrant is released from federal prison and enters the ICE orbit, cases that are transferred from another jurisdiction to Fairfax and cases that are old and have not been resolved, the advocates say.
While it’s hard to know whether the higher rate of cases in the county has anything to do with shortcomings in the Trust Policy, the advocates said, the group nonetheless argued that the county could be doing more to stem deportations.
In a letter sent Monday to the Fairfax Board of Supervisors, the group said that the county police department is still leaving undocumented immigrants susceptible to deportation by including too much information in its arrest reports, which go to a law enforcement database that federal immigration agents can mine for potential cases.
The coalition also said the county has not yet begun accepting identification cards provided by nonprofit organizations to undocumented immigrants — a provision of the Trust Policy geared toward individuals without another form of ID.
“If the Board wishes to gain immigrants’ trust, particularly in the area of public safety, it must jump-start implementation of the Trust Policy,” the letter said.
County officials said that no agency in Fairfax, including the police department, interacts with ICE.
Police reports offer some details about the person being arrested but do not reveal exact addresses, County Executive Bryan J. Hill said.
“It’s limited to the block; we don’t put down the actual address,” he said, adding that the county recently hired a director of immigration services whose job is to better coordinate how the Trust Policy is implemented.
Jeffrey C. McKay (D), chair of the county board, said the county takes the policy seriously because it wants all residents to be comfortable with county interactions, particularly in instances where solving a crime may depend on a witness who is undocumented.
“If our residents do not trust the police, it undermines public safety for all county residents,” McKay said.
The immigrant advocates are demanding that the county police further conceal arrest data, do more to eliminate racial profiling by police and reduce the number of arrests for public drunkenness, which disproportionately affect communities of color.
And with about seven deportation cases originating in Fairfax per day, the county should ensure that it is doing everything it can to protect undocumented immigrants, said Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, director of the immigrant advocacy program for the Legal Aid Justice Center.
“Even if it just goes down to six, it’s worth doing,” he said. | 2022-09-13T16:43:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Deportations in Fairfax still too high amid protections, advocates say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/13/immigrant-deportations-fairfax-trust-policy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/13/immigrant-deportations-fairfax-trust-policy/ |
This art show knits together two Washingtons — one homey, one grand
At the Phillips Collection, ‘Lou Stovall: The Museum Workshop’ spotlights a D.C. institution, founded in 1969, with a goal of art that was accessible to all
Lou Stovall at a Dupont Center drawing table in 1969. (Stovall Family)
Some say our nation’s capital has a split identity. There’s the iconic Washington: buzzing with politicians, studded with stone and bronze monuments, filled with sprawling museums. And there’s the homier District of Columbia: birthplace of go-go, the Washington Color School, the half-smoke (debatably), Black Broadway — a place once known as Chocolate City for its predominantly Black population. Between them, there can be a disconnect.
But the Phillips Collection exhibition “Lou Stovall: The Museum Workshop” stitches these two realms together. Here, the local feels as significant as the national, and that’s to Stovall’s credit. As the co-founder of a short-lived but influential studio and exhibition space known as the Dupont Center — set up in 1969 by Stovall and curator Walter Hopps — the longtime printmaker and now six-decade District resident made what you might call a people’s history of D.C. in graphic art.
Stovall’s lively, borderline-abstract posters — many created with D.C. jazz musician and visual artist Lloyd McNeill — feature prominently in the show, and give arts and activism events, big and small, the same distinctive aesthetic flair. On one poster, a blocky, blue figure that appears as improvised as a jazz solo invites viewers to performances by Miles Davis at the now-defunct Bohemian Caverns. On another, loosely connected shapes suggest swaying hands and bobbing heads, promoting the Black Arts Festival, featuring D.C. soul group the Unifics and D.C. painter Alma Thomas. A flurry of elongated red and blue rectangles conjure a rush of bodies on a sign for an anti-Vietnam protest made for the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.
As museums around the country wrestle with how to make their spaces more equitable and accessible to their communities, this show, curated by Stovall’s son, artist and writer Will Stovall, offers a model. Bringing together works made by artists at the workshop and collected by the elder Stovall between 1969 and 1973, along with Stovall’s community posters from 1967 and 1968, the exhibition paints a multifaceted portrait of D.C.: its Black community, its activism, its rich arts scene. After visiting, you step out into the narrow streets of Dupont Circle, just a few blocks from where the center was located, with a heightened sense of history around you.
The Stovall show makes bigger strides than just bringing to life the city’s past. In spotlighting Stovall, it challenges our sense of what kind of artistic labor is considered noteworthy and what kinds of artists are written into history. All too often, we learn about art through the myth of the singular star, the isolated genius. It’s easy to forget how many hands it can take to make a work of art. While striking natural landscapes in the show make clear that Stovall was an artist in the conventional sense — he called drawing his “high skill” — it is Stovall’s role as community organizer, printmaker and collaborator that really comes to the fore.
Stovall was often behind the scenes, functioning as the connective tissue of an outwardly burgeoning art scene. At the Dupont Center, he made prints for such Washington Color School artists as Gene Davis and Thomas Downing, showing them how their abstract images could take on new life in a fresh medium. He printed photographs for William Christenberry. He crafted stretchers for Sam Gilliam’s beveled-edge paintings and collaborated with the abstract painter on almost two dozen works. Under Stovall’s leadership, the Dupont Center fostered artistic talent, but not just the kind fit for a museum. The center offered classes to elementary school students, military personnel on leave from Virginia’s Fort Belvoir and other members of the public.
On the one hand, the show can feel like stepping back in time. Posters crying out for peace and love give it a decidedly 1960s tone. One image announces D.C.’s first bike lanes (with the slogan “Bikes Have Equal Rights”), while another advocates for Charles Cassell’s campaign in D.C.’s first school board election. A 1972 poster showing a jet-black figure with loud orange hair celebrates singer Roberta Flack, on the occasion of D.C.’s first Human Kindness Day.
On the other hand, there’s a way in which the contents of the exhibition feel oddly contemporary. Prints reflect the nation railing against a violent war overseas, the District fighting for political rights, Washingtonians reeling from violent riots, and Black-centric spaces flourishing on the heels of the civil rights movement.
Perhaps that’s why the founding principles of the Dupont Center sound so similar to what museum advocates are calling for today. “What is needed now is something else, something different and more active than the ponderous, national museum,” Hopps wrote when he was dreaming up the institution, which evolved from the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, over 50 years ago. “What is needed is a new sort of local institution, an institution that not only serves the local art audience but vigorously expands it.”
Making art accessible in a city where most artworks hang in grand buildings is no small task. But from his own painterly silk-screen prints to his collaborations at the Dupont Center, it’s evident that Stovall has a knack for giving art the human touch.
Lou Stovall: The Museum Workshop
Admission: Included with general admission of $16; $12 for seniors; $10 for students and teachers; and free for members, children 18 and under, and military personnel. Masks and timed-entry tickets required. | 2022-09-13T17:36:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ‘Lou Stovall: The Museum Workshop’ spotlights a pioneering art space - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/13/phillips-collection-lou-stovall/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/13/phillips-collection-lou-stovall/ |
After Washington's game against the Eagles on Jan. 2, a hand railing collapsed, and fans fell onto Philadelphia quarterback Jalen Hurts. Now, four of them are suing for damages. (Alex Brandon/AP)
Railing collapses at FedEx Field, causing fans to fall and narrowly miss Eagles’ Jalen Hurts
The plaintiffs, however, allege they were “physically and forcefully directed and shuttled back up over the wall” and were instructed by CSC to “get the f--- out of the stadium.” They also claim that any suggestion that no one was injured in the incident or that stadium representatives took appropriate action is “patently false.”
“All of this was avoidable,” Robert D. Sokolove, the attorney for the plaintiffs, said. “What is going to keep these defendants from doing this again and again unless they’re taught a lesson?” | 2022-09-13T17:37:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fans sue Washington Commanders after FedEx Field railing collapse - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/commanders-railing-collapse-lawsuit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/commanders-railing-collapse-lawsuit/ |
Fairfax field hockey starts hot; Wootton volleyball galvanized by pipe cleaners
Halley Beaudoin fires a pass in a Fairfax field hockey game.
Halley Beaudoin remembers being an eighth-grader and watching the Fairfax field hockey team fall to W.T. Woodson in overtime of the 2018 district finals. Tears dropped down everyone’s faces as she hugged her soon-to-be teammates and coaches.
“I’ve always felt like I was a part of it,” Beaudoin said. “It feels like I’ve been here through thick and thin.”
That’s partially because her mother, Amber, has been the coach of this program for the past 22 years. For Beaudoin, who has been playing the sport since kindergarten, senior year feels like full-circle closure to a lifelong presence around the Lions.
Beaudoin began her tenure at Fairfax a bit apprehensive: “You’re the coach’s kid — everyone has these preconceptions of you,” she said. “I really tried hard to establish myself my freshman year.”
She did just that, scoring four goals in her first year, and has since become a star. In Fairfax’s 24-1 season last fall, Beaudoin led the way with 21 goals and 27 assists.
The Lions have begun this season 5-0 and have a fresh motto this fall: “Start together, finish united.”
“They really are unselfish,” Amber Beaudoin said, “and as long as I’ve been coaching, that’s a really good formula for success.”
Going into the fifth and final set of Friday night’s matchup against Damascus, Wootton had something its opponent didn’t — and it may have helped the Patriots pull through, 15-9.
A ball — composed of 15 red pipe cleaners, one for each girl on the team — affectionately named Reggie was their secret weapon.
Reggie hangs off the front of Coach Mary Malinauskas’s clipboard as a representation of how the team’s interconnectedness will help the Patriots achieve their goal of reaching the playoffs.
“I showed them that if you have a goal and you encircle that goal with a pipe cleaner, and then you start adding more pipe cleaners that have the same goal, it becomes sturdy,” Malinauskas said.
Malinauskas came up with the idea during the preseason, when she realized her team wasn’t jelling. The Patriots lost five senior starters, including Montgomery County player of the year Samantha Bolze, and were struggling to find their way.
Against Damascus, the Patriots started out strong, dominating the first and second sets, but were a bit disjointed while losing the next two sets.
Going into the final huddle, Reggie reminded the Patriots that they would have to work together. “That’s our goal — and to be together and around that goal the whole year,” Malinauskas said.
While the rest of the Potomac School cross-country program was in Hagerstown for a team-wide meet, Charlie Ortmans found himself in solitude at the Monroe Parker Invitational in Virginia.
“When you’re there as an individual, it’s a little easier to get in and focus on the race,” Ortmans said. “But there is a disadvantage. You can feel a little lonely on the starting line.”
Ortmans believed the trade-off would be worthwhile. The Burke Lake course offered a chance for the senior to post a standout time that could impress college coaches, who often pay close attention to the event’s results. The plan worked: His 14:53 mark in Saturday’s race was 45 seconds faster than the second-place finisher and the course’s fastest time since 2014.
“Anyone who has become anyone out of Northern Virginia has run this course,” Ortmans said. “I’m looking to have a really meaningful fall. … I probably had a little too much left in the tank at the finish.”
W.T. Woodson (31 points) emerged victorious on the boys’ side after its five fastest runners earned top-12 times. The West Springfield girls (51) placed first, winning convincingly over Langley (110) and W.T. Woodson (116).
This past weekend marked the start of a new era at Walter Johnson. The four-time state champion Wildcats, long viewed as one of the strongest contenders in talent-packed Montgomery County, enter this season with a new coach.
Last fall, days after his 200th career victory, Hector Morales announced his retirement. He will be replaced by junior varsity coach and former varsity assistant Guido Zucconi.
“Huge shoes to fill,” Zucconi said. “An amazing coach and an amazing teacher. He was so good at getting his point across and letting the players learn. I was incredibly lucky to have observed him. I don’t think I would be able to do this if I hadn’t.”
Zucconi inherits a roster that returns just a handful of starters from a strong 14-2-0 campaign. In addition to the annual loss of players to graduation, the Wildcats will be without senior forward Bardia Hormozi, who earned first-team All-Met honors last season, after the Princeton commit opted not to play this fall.
Without Hormozi, and after some injury issues up front, Zucconi is eager to see which players step up on offense.
“First and foremost, I’m looking to see who has the guts to take a shot,” Zucconi said. “You’re not going to score every time, but I want to see who has the guts to miss or have their shot saved. … I want to see who emerges as the people that are willing to take that risk.”
Entering their season opener against Good Counsel on Sept. 2, Calvert’s players were nervous. The opposing Falcons have several Division I-bound players and appeared in national rankings.
But seven minutes in, Calvert goalkeeper Hannah Wilt punted the ball past midfield to forward Abigail May, who beat the goalkeeper one-on-one to score.
“When we went into the half, and we were still up 1-0,” Calvert Coach John Baker said, “they realized: ‘Wait — we just won a half against them. We can do this.’ ”
The Cavaliers maintained that lead to shock Good Counsel. Their momentum carried into last Wednesday, when they beat another nationally ranked team, McDonogh, in overtime. Entering Southern Maryland Athletic Conference play this week, Calvert (4-0) has compiled arguably the D.C. area’s most impressive start.
After his entire starting lineup returned from last season’s 9-6-1 campaign that ended in the Maryland 2A semifinals, Baker knew his squad could be special. Still, Calvert had never topped Good Counsel or McDonogh, perennially among Maryland’s best teams.
“You always think about, ‘What’s your biggest win?’ ” said Baker, who led the Cavaliers to the 2A championship in 2019. “It’s easy to say state championships because that’s at the end of the season and you finish with a win. But at the same time, beating programs like this are right on par with that in my mind.”
The Potomac School is off to an impressive start, notching wins against St. John’s and Flint Hill last week. But the emphasis to this point, and in the near future, is still building camaraderie, captains Maia Phillips and Lauren Foster said.
“We play challenge matches with each other, but honestly, it’s not like a dominating part of our team just because we have to focus on our team activities and getting to know each other as a team,” Phillips said. “So it’s making sure that on bus rides, we’re sitting with people we haven’t really talked to so that everyone gets to know each other, and we have team dinners.”
It can be a challenge for any squad to get new players acquainted with the team structure of high school tennis, especially for players used to competing in individual tournaments. Team activities help along that process.
“We have a tradition to go get Japanese hibachi,” Foster said. “The seniors always take the freshmen in their cars and sort of talk along the way about classes, academics and stuff outside [the team].”
With goals of competing for Independent School League and Virginia Independent Schools Athletic Association titles, the Panthers know getting in sync quickly is a necessity. | 2022-09-13T17:37:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fairfax field hockey starts hot; Wootton volleyball galvanized by pipe cleaners - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/fairfax-field-hockey-starts-hot-wootton-volleyball-galvanized-by-pipe-cleaners/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/fairfax-field-hockey-starts-hot-wootton-volleyball-galvanized-by-pipe-cleaners/ |
In Keibert Ruiz's absence, Nationals Manager Dave Martinez has promised to rotate between Riley Adams (above), Tres Barrera and rookie Israel Pineda. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
At last July’s trade deadline, as the Washington Nationals plotted the first steps of their rebuild, they placed a heavy premium on young catchers. Keibert Ruiz was the biggest name, a top prospect from the Los Angeles Dodgers who headlined the return for Trea Turner and Max Scherzer. Behind him, the team added Riley Adams from the Toronto Blue Jays and Drew Millas from the Oakland Athletics.
So after a 30-hour fire sale, there was a bit of depth where there had previously been none at all. And 13 months later, in the final weeks of a dim season — the first full year of a rebuild that now includes the Nationals dealing Juan Soto back on Aug. 2 — that depth will be put beneath a microscope.
Ruiz, 24, is on the injured list with a testicular contusion and could be finished for the season. In his absence, Manager Dave Martinez has promised to rotate between Adams, Tres Barrera and rookie Israel Pineda, who made his major league debut against the Philadelphia Phillies on Sunday. Behind those three in the minors, there are Millas and Brady Lindsly, who was a fourth-round pick in 2020 and has spent the whole season with the Class AA Harrisburg Senators.
But behind them? That’s when the options for Ruiz’s future backup thin out.
Since Ruiz went to the IL, Adams has started twice and Pineda took the series finale in Philadelphia. Pineda, 22, sped through the system this season and has the most offensive potential of the group. He had 16 homers when he was promoted this past Friday, including seven in a 26-game stretch in Harrisburg. He then made a pit stop with the Class AAA Rochester Red Wings before replacing Ruiz on the active roster. On defense, Pineda has a strong arm but has to improve his framing and game-calling. That’s common for a catcher of his age.
At the moment, he’s beneath Adams and Barrera in the unofficial pecking order. Experience is the differentiating factor. From last September to this July, Adams, 26, had a fixed role of spelling Ruiz here and there. But once he struggled at the plate to begin 2022, he was sent to the minors in favor of the 27-year-old Barrera. Then they were flipped again while the club was in Seattle in late August. Then Barrera was recalled when rosters expanded to 28 players.
Adams’s batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage slash line on the year: .188/.261/.297 in 111 plate appearances.
Barrera’s slash line: .182/.229/.212 in an even smaller sample of 35 plate appearances.
Of the two, Adams has shown much more upside in the box, impressing in his first two months with Washington. Barrera, however, is a stronger game-caller who fits the profile of a traditional backup catcher. Millas and Lindsly do, too, though they’re a good distance from the mix.
Millas, a 24-year-old switch-hitter, started the year with an oblique injury and has bounced between Harrisburg and high-Class A Wilmington. Lindsly, 24 and a left-handed hitter, signed for a $20,000 bonus — well below his slot value two summers ago — and has a 197/260/.322 slash line for the Senators. Taylor Gushue, 28, had left the Nationals, debuted for the Chicago Cubs in 2021 and is now back with the organization and catching in Rochester. Catcher Jakson Reetz, picked in the third round by Washington in 2014, left the club after last season, crushed it in the Milwaukee Brewers’ system, mashing 22 homers in AA, then was briefly with the Brewers in August before he was released and scooped up by the Kansas City Royals on a minors deal.
There’s no rule saying the Nationals have to find Ruiz’s complement internally. If they become contenders again with Ruiz catching, they could pair him with a veteran backup who calls good games and is a rock behind the plate. The Baltimore Orioles have showcased this model with star rookie Adley Rutschman and 38-year-old Robinson Chirinos, who visit Nationals Park for a two-game set this week. And if Ruiz hits for a lot more power down the line, there would be a case to move him to first base to preserve his legs and maximize his bat.
The point is that, for at least another year, Washington’s roster and plans will be very flexible. A handful of spots will be treated like ongoing tryouts. The late-season battle for Adams, Barrera and Pineda — the battle for interest from the staff and front office ahead of spring training 2023 — is just one part of the picture. | 2022-09-13T17:38:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Nationals’ backup catcher spot is up for the taking - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/nationals-backup-catcher/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/nationals-backup-catcher/ |
The NBA has suspended Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver for one year and fined him $10 million after an investigation into his workplace conduct. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)
The NBA has suspended Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver for one year and fined him $10 million after an expansive independent investigation into the organization’s workplace culture concluded that he had used racial epithets and treated female employees by a different standard than their male counterparts, among other violations of the league’s policies.
The independent investigation, which was initiated after an ESPN.com article about Sarver’s behavior last November, conducted interviews with 320 individuals and reviewed more than 80,000 documents, according to the NBA.
Investigators concluded that Sarver had “repeated the n-word” at least five times “when recounting the statements of others,” corroborating allegations made last year by former Suns Coach Earl Watson.
The report also stated that Sarver had “made many sex-related comments in the workplace” and “made inappropriate comments about the physical appearance of female employees and other women.”
Sarver will be barred from attending all NBA and WNBA games and from team facilities, and he cannot appear at public events on behalf of the Suns or the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury. The 60-year-old real estate developer also cannot be involved in his organizations’ business operations or league meetings. His $10 million fine is the maximum allowed under NBA rules.
However, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver stopped short of issuing a lifetime ban to Sarver, a punishment that he doled out to former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who was caught on tape making racist comments.
In a statement, Silver said that the investigation’s findings were “troubling and disappointing,” and that Sarver’s punishment was “the right one, taking into account all the facts, circumstances and context” throughout his 18-year ownership tenure.
“I am hopeful that the NBA community will use this opportunity to reflect on what this great game means to people everywhere and the values of equality, respect and inclusion that it strives to represent,” Silver said. “Regardless of position, power or intent, we all need to recognize the corrosive and hurtful impact of racially insensitive and demeaning language and behavior. On behalf of the entire NBA, I apologize to all of those impacted by the misconduct outlined in the investigators’ report. We must do better.” | 2022-09-13T17:38:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NBA suspends, fines Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/nba-suspends-robert-sarver-phoenix-suns/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/nba-suspends-robert-sarver-phoenix-suns/ |
Then-President Donald J. Trump stops to talk with reporters and members of the media about Michael Cohen in November 2018. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
It was a shocking enough document as it was. Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, had pleaded guilty to illegally concealing hush money paid to two women who were accusing Trump of extramarital affairs. The 2018 charging document implicated Trump, named as “Individual-1,” including saying he attended a meeting about how he might quash any negative stories about his relationships.
And it might have implicated Trump even further, then-U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman now says — were it not for the kind of politically tinged meddling that he says was endemic in the Trump Justice Department.
The New York Times last week briefly noted that Berman’s new book alleged that a Justice Department official tried to get references to Trump removed from the Cohen charging document. And now that the book is out, we have Berman’s fuller account of the events.
Many references to “Individual-1” were left in the document, but Berman says the pressure led to it being watered down. Specifically, he says the document was changed to remove references to the idea that Trump acted "in concert with” and “coordinated with” Cohen to make illegal campaign contributions.
Berman alleges this was done in response to pressure from Edward O’Callaghan, the principal associate deputy attorney general:
O’Callaghan proceeded to identify specific allegations that he wanted removed, almost all referencing Individual-1. It quickly became apparent to [Berman’s deputy Robert S.] Khuzami that, contrary to what O’Callaghan professed, it wasn’t the overall length or detail of the document that concerned him; it was any mention of Individual-1. Khuzami and O’Callaghan went through a handful of these allegations, some of which Khuzami agreed to strike; others, to ensure a coherent description of the crime, he did not.
Sensing that this was going to be a long and adversarial process, Khuzami told O’Callaghan that he was now aware of O’Callaghan’s concerns and the team would redraft the information and remove certain nonessential details.
The team was tasked with the rewrite and stayed up most of the night. The revised information, now twenty-one pages, kept all of the charges but removed certain allegations, including allegations that Individual-1 acted “in concert with” and “coordinated with” Cohen on the illegal campaign contributions. The information now alleged that Cohen acted in concert and coordinated with “one or more members of the campaign.”
O’Callaghan has denied another action which Berman attributed to him — pressuring Berman’s office to prosecute Democratic lawyer Gregory B. Craig to “even things out” after it had prosecuted two prominent Trump allies — calling the statements attributed to him “categorically false.” He didn’t immediately comment on being named in this episode.
But precisely how big a difference was there between the draft charging document and the final version?
To be clear, the document still ultimately said that, "as Cohen himself has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1.” That clearly implicated Trump in the scheme, to some degree. But it said Trump was involved in the payments and not necessarily that he did something illegal himself.
Where Trump’s role was watered down, according to Berman, was in places where the document more directly linked a number of unnamed individuals to the larger scheme.
The final version said (key parts bolded): “Cohen coordinated his actions with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls, about the fact, nature, and timing of the payments.” It added at another point that that Cohen “knowingly and willfully made and caused to be made a contribution to Individual-1 ... and did so by making and causing to be made an expenditure, in cooperation, consultation, and concert with, and at the request and suggestion of one or more members of the campaign.”
Berman says this was emblematic of the kind of unsavory political pressure he faced throughout his tenure — something that will now be the subject of a Senate investigation.
“This was part of an emerging pattern,” he wrote. “If we held our ground with Main Justice, we could usually avert the worst consequences of their interference. But the game they played was nonetheless wrong and dangerous.”
He also wrote that he was comfortable with the final document, though, which contained “everything that truly needed to be in” it. He noted that Cohen later more directly implicated Trump himself.
But it’s worth noting that there is a difference between this coming from Cohen — a convicted felon with credibility issues and plenty of motivation to inform on his former boss — and being stated flatly by the Justice Department itself. What made the charging document so significant was that it came from prosecutors who might have to back up their carefully chosen words with evidence. Indeed, you could make a compelling argument that the document being watered down shows the alleged political pressure Berman decries worked, to some degree.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Berman reiterated that he was comfortable with how the process ultimately played out.
“I think that the charging document kept its integrity, even with certain references to ‘Individual-1’ being taken out,” he said. “There was an incrementalist approach we took to these interferences from Main Justice. And at the end of the day, Cohen in open court identified who gave him instructions.”
Berman said the investigators still had all the information they needed to investigate. Trump has never been charged in connection with the hush-money scheme.
Indeed, the charging document’s mentions of Trump might not have mattered for any potential prosecution. But there’s also the court of public opinion — and the hush-money scheme was one of the biggest scandals of Trump’s presidency. Shortly after the charging document was released in late 2018, it registered as the scandal in which the most Americans — nearly 8 in 10 — said Trump had acted either illegally (38 percent) or unethically (40 percent).
There are valid reasons that documents like the one in the Cohen case might be reined in. These include that certain information might not have been reviewed by a grand jury. Another is that the Justice Department doesn’t want to impugn those who aren’t charged with crimes. (That’s why they refer to those not charged anonymously, but it was obvious who “Individual-1” was.)
But Berman says this was symptomatic of a larger campaign within the Trump Justice Department. And without that campaign, he suggests, we might have seen Trump implicated even more directly in the hush-money scheme — and officially so. | 2022-09-13T18:19:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Berman book says Trump was almost more directly implicated in Cohen hush-money scheme - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/book-doj-almost-implicated-trump-more-directly-crime/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/book-doj-almost-implicated-trump-more-directly-crime/ |
How hard will Democrats campaign against the Supreme Court itself?
Abortion rights activists carry cutouts of Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett in December. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
As the 2016 election wore on, the Supreme Court — and specifically, Senate Republicans’ blockade of nominee Merrick Garland — looked like it might be a potent campaign issue for Democrats. Polls showed an increasing number of Americans thought keeping the seat vacant was wrong. And for a time late in the summer, campaign polls seemed to reflect it as well.
Then it faded. And by the time voters voted, the Supreme Court was actually more of an animating issue for Republicans. While 18 percent of voters said the Supreme Court was their most important issue and voted for Hillary Clinton, 26 percent said the same and voted for Donald Trump.
Not only did Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) bare-knuckle gambit pay off by allowing a Republican president to fill the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat; Democrats failed to exact any quantifiable political price for it.
In overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has now delivered Democrats what seems to be an even more ready-made campaign issue — and one that data suggest could pay and even is already paying dividends. But when it comes to precisely how to talk about the court itself — and how harshly to criticize an institution that could hamstring the Democrats’ agenda for years to come — Democrats have some decisions to make.
What’s become abundantly clear in recent weeks is that views of the Supreme Court have become historically polarized.
A Pew Research Center poll released this month showed 73 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters had a favorable view of the court, compared to 28 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners. That 45-point gap was is the biggest on record since at least 1987.
An NBC News poll conducted last month showed Republicans had a positive view of the court by a 36-point margin, while Democrats had a negative one by a 51-point margin.
Similarly, the court’s abortion decision appears to be one of its most unpopular on record — and on an issue with huge implications for much of the population. Most polls show about 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of it, with the NBC poll showing a 51 percent majority disapprove “strongly.” And it’s difficult to find an analog. However polarizing cases like Bush v. Gore and Brown v. Board of Education were at the time, CNN’s Harry Enten noted recently that polls at the time showed they had majority support.
(About the best comparison I could find: The Supreme Court’s 1989 decision ruling that flag-burning was protected First Amendment speech. A Washington Post poll showed nearly 8 in 10 Americans disagreed with it, including 62 percent “strongly.")
What’s more, the new polls show some of the groups that are most upset with the court are traditionally high-turnout groups — women and more-educated voters — suggesting those voters are there for Democrats to get to the polls if they play it right. Fully 64 percent of Democratic-leaning voters say the court has too much power, and nearly half — 46 percent — have a strongly unfavorable view of it.
There are few emotions more politically potent than anger. The question for Democrats is how to channel and capitalize on that anger — and, by extension, what remedies to offer.
President Biden, the White House and Democratic leaders have decried the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson. But they’ve stopped short of some of their allies’ attacks on the legitimacy of the court itself.
Vice President Harris this weekend called it an “activist court," while Biden has linked the Supreme Court to the most conservative wing of the GOP and decried what he characterized as a concerted attack on Americans’ rights.
“We cannot allow an out-of-control Supreme Court, working in conjunction with the extremist elements of the Republican Party, to take away freedoms and our personal autonomy,” he said in July.
He added last month: “The Supreme Court and the MAGA Republicans don’t have a clue about the power of women in this country. And they’re soon to find — they’re going to find out.”
But some on the left have wished Biden would go further in directly challenging the court’s legitimacy and turning the makeup of the court into a more central and urgent issue. Biden’s and Harris’s comments certainly gesture in the direction of the court being an extension of the Republican political movement, but they’re nothing compared to Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) 2020 broadside against the court or other recent comments from prominent liberals. Biden hasn’t exactly made this a central and consistent part of his electoral pitch.
The danger in going harder after the court itself — and not just its abortion decision — is twofold.
One is that it invites the next question: What are you going to do about it?
There are no ready and near-term answers for Democrats. Packing the court, like nuking the filibuster, is an often oversimplified supposed solution with uncertain potential consequences; it would be very difficult to execute and that could just as well cut against Democrats when all is said and done. (It’s also something Biden has repeatedly declined to embrace.) The alternative might be to push for more modest reforms, like term limits — a path that’s also politically very difficult. Another perhaps unsatisfying option would be to tell Democrats that their votes are important to chipping away at the 6-to-3 conservative majority — when one day, eventually, seats on the court open up.
The second pitfall is that Biden has often preached about the sanctity of institutions — and seems to believe it. Institutionalists adhere to that vision because they see a danger in people regarding institutions as illegitimate. If the entity charged with offering the final word on our laws is indeed written off by half the country, that opens up Pandora’s box both politically and democratically.
Biden might regard the court’s decision as being very bad. But the legitimacy of the court rests on the idea that people don’t necessarily view judges as an extension of the political branches. Pretending judges are unbiased, apolitical beings is overly idealistic, but how hard you question that ideal is a matter of degree.
There’s little question that Democrats could reap political benefits from the Supreme Court’s decision over the next eight weeks without making the court itself so central to its campaign; it’s a much simpler political sales job than the complex process that led to Garland’s blockade. But the lure of an effective bogeyman is often strong in politics. And how the Democrats talk about the court during the stretch run of the 2022 campaign could reverberate for a long time. | 2022-09-13T18:19:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How hard will Democrats campaign against the Supreme Court itself? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/democrat-supreme-court-election/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/democrat-supreme-court-election/ |
From 1964 to 1971, Pan Am airline maintained a list of people who had expressed interest in traveling to the moon, whenever the airline eventually offered service there. (Collection of Art Chimes)
One evening in the early 1960s, Art Chimes went into the backyard of his Livingston, N.J., house and looked up. He was hoping to catch a glimpse of an early U.S. communications satellite called Echo. He did. The satellite — basically a large balloon — zipped across the inky darkness, a moving object against a field of fixed stars.
In 1969, Art made a reservation for a trip to the moon.
Marcia Hoexter also made a moon trip reservation in 1969. Back then she was Marcia Reidinger and living in Silver Spring. She and Art were among 93,000 Earthlings who wrote Pan Am to add their names to a list maintained by the airline.
“So many people have shown serious interest in going to the moon as passengers — despite Astronaut Frank Borman’s warning that the lunar landscape is ‘vast, lonely, forbidding’ — that Pan Am has seriously begun keeping a reservation list,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Douglas Bloomfield wrote that April.
If Burma-Shave’s contest for a trip to Mars — the subject of a column last week — was always meant as a joke, Pan Am’s foray into space travel seemed entirely plausible. And though the airline started compiling the list before the release of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the appearance in that film of a Pan Am-branded “Space Clipper” just intensified the interest.
Pan Am’s list got its unofficial start in 1964 when an Austrian journalist named Gerhard Pistor walked into a Vienna travel agent’s office and asked about a trip to the moon. Rather than toss Gerhard into the street, the travel agent put him in touch with two airlines: the Soviet Aeroflot and Pan American World Airways.
“Aeroflot jokingly replied that the first flight was booked, but that there might be room on the second,” The Washington Post’s Steven Mufson wrote in 1989 in a story about President George H.W. Bush’s space aspirations. “Two weeks later, Pan Am accepted his reservation and said it expected the flight to depart about the year 2000.”
Other would-be passengers began approaching the airline. A Pan Am spokesman said, “We told them we had no plans at the moment but we’d be glad to take your name, and the thing sort of snowballed.”
By 1968, Pan Am’s list had grown to about 180 people. The success of Apollo 8 that year nearly doubled it. Among those on the list were Sen. Barry M. Goldwater and Russian American aviation pioneer Alexander P. de Seversky.
Also on the list, Augustina Dillon, of Philadelphia, who told a reporter, “I am cursed with a blessed Irish imagination.”
She added: “I haven’t done many adventurous things in my lifetime. But I’d welcome this opportunity to get closer to God. We don’t seem to appreciate God and His wonders here on earth. Maybe if we get a little closer we’d appreciate Him more.”
Hoexter — who lives on Capitol Hill now — remembers thinking “That looks cool” when she heard of Pan Am’s list. After contacting the airline, she received a lunar-themed membership card certifying her place in the “First Moon Flights” Club.
Marcia was member No. 16,637, well ahead of Art Chimes’s No. 49,110. Pan Am closed its waiting list on March 3, 1971, at around 93,000 members.
TWA said it was keeping a list, too, but its marketing department seemed unable to garner the same publicity as its rival. Perhaps TWA didn’t want to shell out for numbered cards and the custom envelopes in which to mail them.
Despite the accomplishments of its early years, Pan Am went bankrupt in 1991. Air travel has changed a lot since then. Art never got into space, but he did cover the space program as a reporter for Voice of America.
Retired, he lives in Arlington now, where he ponders an irony: For decade after decade, aviation strode forward, with breakthrough after breakthrough.
“Today the experience [of flying] is enough to deter you from getting on a plane unless you absolutely have to,” he said.
In the form letter Art received from Pan Am, vice president of sales James Montgomery wrote: “Starting date of service is not yet known. Equipment and route will, probably, be subject to government approvals. Fares are not fully resolved, and may be out of this world.”
Today, Virgin Galactic is charging $450,000 for a brief taste of weightlessness. Blue Origin — founded by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos — hasn’t made its prices public. In Bloomfield’s 1969 article, he mused on the cost of Apollo 8 and how the government could have saved money.
Using a fare formula the airlines had suggested to the Civil Aeronautics Board — a flat fee of $10 plus 6.95 cents a mile — three first-class tickets around the moon would have cost $11,196,480, rather less than the $310 million the Apollo 8 mission cost U.S. taxpayers.
Wrote Bloomfield: “The lower price is a product of the free enterprise system. Some sources say it reflects the savings taxpayers could enjoy if sending a man to the moon were a competitive venture by private industry rather than another socialistic government program.”
I guess Elon Musk might agree. | 2022-09-13T18:37:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | More than 93,000 people reserved space on Pan Am to the moon - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/13/pan-am-moon-flight-club/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/13/pan-am-moon-flight-club/ |
(iStock; Preston Keres for The Washington Post; Twila Waddy/Washington Post illustration)
“The Unfolding,” a sharp new satire by A.M. Homes, opens just after that national disaster that reshaped America in the early 21st century. The survivors are stunned, disbelieving, still surveying the damage while muttering, “This can’t happen here.”
That may sound like the shocked response to 9/11, but these are White Republicans in a Phoenix hotel reacting to the election of Barack Obama.
“The news has hit the room like death,” Homes writes. “It’s a rude awakening after hundreds of years and they’re taking it hard. It’s not just that Obama won, it’s as though the founding fathers were assassinated. The truths they held self-evident have become a moving target.” Their American Dream — the supremacy of White men and the sanctity of wealth — has suddenly shattered like a Tiffany lampshade.
“It’s an official apocalypse,” says a major GOP donor. “The world is going to hell and I am not pleased.”
That patrician speaker — provoked to profanity by this calamity — is the protagonist of “The Unfolding.” Homes refers to him only as the Big Guy. His net worth, like his nickname, is obscure but immense. He contributes enough to the Republican Party to be in the room when John McCain calls on Americans to congratulate and support their new president.
Such graciousness — not to mention political stability — now sounds like something from a different century. But for all his old-fashioned values, the Big Guy is ahead of his time. He’s horrified by what McCain’s loss and concession mean for the United States. “I’m shaken,” he tells his wife. “I can’t spend the next thirty years watching it all come undone.”
Things are about to get a lot worse for the Big Guy. While he’s focused on the collapse of his political party, “The Unfolding” also traces parallel tragedies ripping apart his personal life. Over many years of unhappiness, his ferociously thin wife, Charlotte, has restricted her diet to just two food groups: vermouth and maraschino cherries. “I forgot to have my life,” she tells the Big Guy in one of several blistering conversations that Homes creates so well. At the Betty Ford Clinic, Charlotte wonders whether returning to their marriage is the way she wants to spend the next 30 years.
Even more dismaying for the Big Guy is the sudden awakening of his only child, Meghan. His greatest hope for the future, Meghan is a high school senior at a horsy boarding school in the Washington area and possibly the most ingenuous girl since Alice in Wonderland. She takes John McCain’s loss in stride, but other more intimate disruptions make her realize that the world is not at all as her father described. “I’m not okay,” Meghan cries at one disastrous Christmas gathering. “Everything I thought I knew is now a fake.” (Fans of the author’s 2007 memoir, “The Mistress’s Daughter,” will catch whiffs of autobiography floating through here.)
Homes captures the flora and fauna of America’s aristocracy with exquisite precision. Her descriptions of these shiny people, so casual and friendly in their tightly choreographed habitats, reminded me of when I moved to Washington and noticed, as Meghan does, that “a lot of the women in the room and a few of the men look like they’ve had repair work done.”
There can sometimes be a Franzenesque quality to Homes’s family satire — a bitter skewering of parents’ pathetic pomposity and melodrama. Charlotte’s sardonic quips sound like fermented despair. And a scene describing the Big Guy conducting war games with toy soldiers of “the highest quality” on an old pool table leaves no survivors. But Homes retains a quality of resigned sympathy with these anxious, immensely self-important characters — a tincture of compassion that makes them feel all the more piteous.
Roused by Obama’s victory, the Big Guy sits down at his desk and begins drawing a vast diagram of spheres of influence. “He’s trying to figure out what he can build,” Homes explains, “where the parts can act both synchronously and asynchronously without the workings being exposed, something operational and yet scrambled well enough so the identity of those pulling the strings can’t be traced.”
Jane Mayer and other journalists have exposed in alarming detail how the Koch brothers and their ilk have stealthily pulled the country to their private advantage. Homes is working in the same dark territory, but “The Unfolding” provides a different kind of insight into this privileged species — and a lot more comedy.
Much of “The Unfolding” skewers the Big Guy’s monomaniacal plans to drag the country back to its great White roots. His faith in the power of America is rivaled only by his faith in the power of a good memo. “What Comes Next?” he writes “in large letters across the middle of his desk blotter with a blue Paper Mate Flair felt-tip pen.” To answer that question he assembles a group of advisers who have “imagination, insight, and money to burn.” They include a “misinformation man,” an eccentric doctor, a mad general, a political historian, and a judge — wealthy, appallingly obnoxious men of a certain age who attended the right colleges. At their secret meetings — pampered bull sessions at fancy retreats — they make grand plans to assume control of the American body politic. The key is the V.I.S.I.O.N. thing: “Vital, Invisible, Succession, Insurance. Our (or octogenarian). Nation.”
The Big Guy calls his buddies the Forever Men and imagines they’re a modern-day reconstruction of a group that President Eisenhower appointed to keep America operating in the event of a debilitating national emergency. Along with some golf, their first priority is to design and bury a time capsule to carry knowledge of their existence 500 years into the future.
The dialogue in these cringingly hilarious scenes sparks off the page with such vibrancy that I felt as if I were in the room where it happened. As funny as it is, though, there’s an unsettling quality to the comedy in “The Unfolding.” The nefarious plot to retake control of America eventually coalesces around a 15-year plan to sow economic and political unrest, allow the country’s infrastructure to decay, and weaponize media platforms to divide the country “into the thinnest of pathological slices.” One of the Forever Men confidently predicts, “We will see the erosion of civil liberties and the rise of rogue non-politicians.” As this chaos unfolds, a desperate populace will turn with gratitude to men who can re-instill the old values of security and order.
It all sounds absurd — the fever dream of bored millionaires playing at nation-building — but here we are almost 15 years later contending with a political system just as broken as the one they hoped to precipitate. The party that once dined out on the elegant optimism of Ronald Reagan and the combative intelligence of William Buckley has been hijacked by a narcissistic carnival barker and his mob of conspiracy theorists, science deniers and Christo-fascists. “The Unfolding” suggests no solutions to this plight, but it offers irresistible reflection on how the audacity of hope got pushed off the rails and fell into the slough of despond.
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post. This is Charles’s last review for Style. Look for him in the new Book World section starting Sept. 25.
Viking. 396 pp. $28 | 2022-09-13T19:07:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Unfolding by A.M. Homes book review - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/09/13/unfolding-am-homes-novel-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/09/13/unfolding-am-homes-novel-review/ |
Analysis by Brian K. Sullivan | Bloomberg
The climate phenomenon known as La Nina sets off a chain reaction among weather patterns the world over. That can lead to more drought in some places even as it produces flooding and hurricanes in others. La Nina occurs when the surface of the Pacific Ocean along the equator cools and the atmosphere above it reacts. Typically, it happens once every few years. However, the persistence of the most recent case poses the likelihood that the Northern Hemisphere will see its third La Nina winter in a row, a rarity.
1. How unusual is this?
2. What could a third year of La Nina mean?
For California, the biggest farming state in the US, and for the soybean- and corn-growing areas of Argentina and Brazil, it could mean another year of drought. In Australia, it might bring another round of floods across Queensland, Victoria, and New South Wales, where rising waters produced at least $3 billion in insurance claims in early 2022. The price of a cup of coffee could climb if drought afflicts farmers in Brazil while floods hit those in Vietnam and Columbia. Sugar to sweeten it might also cost more if the cane used to make it gets stressed by a lack of rain. Across the Atlantic, there could be even more hurricanes than usual because there, La Nina cuts down on wind shear, one of nature’s ways of putting a break on the destructive storms. In 2020, the Atlantic had a record 30 named storms, and in 2021 there were 21.
3. How does La Nina relate to El Nino?
4. What causes this cycle?
El Ninos occur for reasons unknown, although some scientist think they are a way for Earth’s atmosphere to shed heat into space. They begin with a weakening in the trade winds that push the sun-warmed waters of the equatorial Pacific into a mound in the west. Some of that water flows back east, making the eastern Pacific hotter. The phenomenon affects larger wind currents, shifting moisture-bearing storms away from some places, such as Indonesia and Africa, and toward others, including Argentina and Japan. When the heat from El Nino is spent, the ocean begins to cool. Initially, the Pacific falls into a state between the extremes, the neutral phase. If the cooling continues and sea surface temperatures fall below normal, La Nina occurs. The whole thing tends to play itself out every two to seven years. As has been evident since 2020, however, one end of the pattern can dominate for a time. The Atlantic and Indian oceans have similar events but theirs don’t have the far-reaching impact of those in the immense Pacific.
5. Is climate change affecting the cycle?
Some early models had suggested that as the Earth warmed, the number of El Nino events would rise. However, that doesn’t seem to have happened. So far this century, La Nina has dominated the cycle. It will take more research to tease out why, weather experts say. One theory is that smoke from wildfires in Australia in 2019 and 2020 are a factor, according to Gerald Meehl, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the US. There are so many variables influencing El Nino and its ramifications, US government meteorologist Tom Di Liberto noted years ago, isolating the role of global warming may not be possible. | 2022-09-13T19:07:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | If La Nina Persists, Expect More Drought and Flooding - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/if-la-nina-persists-expect-more-drought-andflooding/2022/09/13/dacdadd6-3392-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/if-la-nina-persists-expect-more-drought-andflooding/2022/09/13/dacdadd6-3392-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
Then-Prince Charles, left, chats with Matt Smith on a farm in Cornwall, England, on July 19, 2022. (Andrew Matthews/Pool/WPA/Getty Images)
When King Charles III assumed the throne last week after the death of his mother, Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, some commentators were quick to point out that the septuagenarian could be the nation’s first “climate king.” After all, the heir to Britain’s throne has spent the last 50-odd years speaking out about climate change, pollution and deforestation. Much has been made of the new king’s penchant for organic farming and his outspoken support for climate action. Last year, at the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, he urged the assembled world leaders to adopt a “warlike footing” to address the rapidly warming planet.
But Charles’s environmental views are complex: He is both a classic environmentalist who loves nature, trees and wild animals, and a traditionalist who has battled against wind energy on his estate, flown around the world in a private jet and once critiqued the growth of population in the developing world. He represents some of the paradoxes of a world coming to grips with climate change: a man with extreme wealth and a significant carbon footprint speaking out against global warming; a political figurehead with very little real political clout.
Many of Charles’s ideas on the natural world are redolent of classic 1960s and 1970s environmentalism — the era in which he came of age. In “Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World,” a 2010 book by the then-Prince of Wales, Charles critiques what he calls the “mechanistic thinking” of factory farming, industrialization and even the Enlightenment, arguing that humanity’s attempt to separate itself from nature has created more problems than it solved. He waxes lyrical in his opposition to gross domestic product, or GDP, as a way of measuring nations’ success. And — in stranger moments — he praises a “sacred geometry” that in his mind unites the architecture of Spanish mosques and planetary orbits.
The new king has also put his ideas into practice on many of his estates. A house he purchased in Scotland has been turned into a kind of environmentalist classroom, where children learn about soil health. His country home boasts an organic farm that Charles started in 1985. And in a head-spinning detail that has been repeated in the news media many times, Charles has apparently retrofitted his Aston Martin to run on leftover wine and cheese.
But there is a more controversial side to the king’s green views, as well. Charles — like his father, Prince Philip, before him — has at times waded into the sticky morass of population growth. In a speech given at the Sheldonian Theater at Oxford University in 2010, then-Prince Charles noted: “When I was born in 1948 a city like Lagos in Nigeria had a population of just 300,000; today, just over 60 years later, it is home to 20 million.”
With population increasing rapidly in Mumbai, Cairo, Mexico City and cities in other developing countries around the world, Charles said Earth cannot “sustain us all, when the pressures on her bounty are so great.” In “Harmony,” he reiterates the same concern, arguing that population growth — long considered an issue too hot to handle — needs to be addressed.
Overpopulation anxieties are not new, and have been echoed at times by other members of the royal family and famous Britons. Philip once called for “voluntary family limitations”; David Attenborough, Britain’s most famous nature broadcaster, has similarly said that “population growth must come to an end.”
There may seem to be a simple logic in laying the blame for climate change on global population, which is now inching toward 8 billion. But there is a long and fraught history of thinkers in developed countries critiquing population growth in developing ones. Betsy Hartman, a professor emerita of development studies at Hampshire College, has said, “In this ideology of ‘too many people,’ it’s always certain people who are ‘too many.’”
And developing countries, where population growth is highest, also have the smallest carbon footprint of each additional person. In Nigeria, for example, each individual accounts for on average 0.6 metric tons of carbon-dioxide emissions every year. In the United States, that number is a whopping 13.7 metric tons. Developed countries, meanwhile, have birthrates that are either falling or relatively stable.
The king’s enthusiasm for clean energy also has some asterisks. He has put solar panels on his London mansion and his country home, but according to Britain’s Sunday Times, has also refused to install wind turbines in the Duchy of Cornwall, a vast land holding covering almost more than 200 square miles. (According to the Guardian, Charles once called wind turbines a “horrendous blot on the landscape.”)
In a way, Charles is emblematic of how old-school environmental values may clash with the needs and requirements of a decarbonized world. Being a traditional environmentalist — one who loves trees, nature and animals — does not mean that you support the changes necessary to combat climate change. In some cases, organic farming can be more carbon- and resource-intensive than conventional farming. Zeroing out carbon emissions will require a vast amount of land for solar, wind and geothermal energy; it will also require advanced technologies — better batteries, machines that suck carbon dioxide out of the sky — that Charles has historically critiqued as being forms of “mechanistic thinking.”
There is, of course, another paradox in the idea of Charles as a “climate king.” The royal family holds wealth that is almost unimaginable for the rest of the world. As prince, Charles traveled the world widely by private jet. As king, he is likely to do even more high-carbon flying, easily placing his personal carbon emissions in the top zero-point-something percent of all humans on the planet. And while carbon footprint is a blunt instrument by which to measure environmental impact, the richest people in the world, including the royal family, live in ways difficult to square with a rapidly warming planet. (According to one study, the wealthiest 1 percent of the world’s population produce double the carbon emissions of the poorest 50 percent.)
The question is whether now, as king, Charles will continue to be a voice on the climate and environment. He has said that in his new position, he won’t be able to be a public advocate as he has in the past. “It will no longer be possible for me to give so much of my time and energies to the charities and issues for which I care so deeply,” he said in a televised address last week. And as king, he will have precious little input into the working of the British government. (Queen Elizabeth II likewise refused, the vast majority of time, to interfere in politics.)
But the new king’s environmental record could still influence the British public, even if he doesn’t hold direct power to make policy. One study published in the journal Nature Energy last year argued that people with high socioeconomic status — which Charles most certainly is — are both highly responsible for global warming and may have disproportionate power to combat the problem. They can do so through their investments, influencing politicians and other powerful people, or generally redefining what the “good life” should look like. In Britain, the Conservative Party is more likely both to approve of the monarchy and to reject pro-environment policies. It’s possible that the example of Charles could sway some members to think more carefully about the environment, climate change and the nature that he holds so dear. | 2022-09-13T19:08:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | King Charles III's climate, environment beliefs are messy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/13/king-prince-charles-environmentalism-queen/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/13/king-prince-charles-environmentalism-queen/ |
Over 90 large fires across seven states are triggering alerts over poor air
A firefighter works to contain the Fairview Fire near Hemet, Calif., on Thursday. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)
Dangerous blazes continue to spread across the West, with 93 large fires burning in seven states.
As smoke plumes rise into the skies, alerts for hazardous air quality are in effect in parts of Oregon, Washington state, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. A special weather statement about hazardous air quality was also issued in east-central California and western Nevada. The smoke is most dense and toxic near its source but has also expanded in lesser amounts all the way to the East Coast.
Idaho — where the Moose Fire, the nation’s second largest, is burning — leads the pack in terms of large fires, according to the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC).
Firefighters are battling 34 large fires in the state, followed by 23 in Montana, 13 in Washington, 12 in California and nine in Oregon. Utah and Wyoming each report one large fire.
In Oregon, eyes are on the Cedar Creek Fire, which has grown to more than 86,000 acres after being sparked by lightning Aug. 1. After days of extreme fire growth, the fire remains uncontained. The rapidly spreading blaze has forced nearly 1,500 evacuations, while blanketing nearby cities such as Bend in dangerously high levels of smoke. Smoke from the fire has prompted alerts in south-central Oregon.
Firefighters are also battling the massive Double Creek Fire in Oregon, which has burned more than 155,000 acres and is currently the nation’s largest blaze. That inferno has prompted the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality to issue an air quality advisory for the northeastern parts of the state.
Fire and heavy smoke conditions in the West are unlikely to abate anytime soon, as hot and dry conditions have left forests ripe for fire growth. Red-flag warnings have been hoisted for much of eastern Wyoming because of hot, dry conditions conducive to fires.
Hazardous air quality conditions — air quality index (AQI) levels of 301-plus — have been observed in at least five states, including California, where the Mosquito Fire continues to burn between Sacramento and Reno, Nev., in the Sierra Nevada.
The Mosquito Fire has forced officials to evacuate more than 11,000 people. At least 25 homes have already been destroyed by the blaze, which has torched more than 48,700 acres and is just 16 percent contained.
Other active and dangerous fires in California include the Fairview Fire, which still burns close to the town of Hemet, though it is now 56 percent contained. Downpours from the remnants of Tropical Storm Kay have assisted crews in containing that blaze. That fire has burned more than 28,000 acres and killed two people who were trying to flee the blaze.
As more fires in the West are ignited and active fires expand, the smoke can travel as far as the East Coast and in the past has even blown into continental Europe. Wildfire smoke has been found to be surprisingly harmful to people even far from the source. A study published in 2021 found that three-quarters of smoke-related cases of asthma visits to emergency departments and deaths occurred east of the Rocky Mountains.
“Smoke is not just a Western problem,” said Katelyn O’Dell, lead author of the study and postdoctoral research scientist at George Washington University.
Wildfire smoke harms more people in the Eastern U.S. than West, study shows
O’Dell suggested there may be a “lack of awareness” in the East about the effects of smoke, “because you’re not in proximity to these large wildfires, and they don’t really impact your day-to-day.”
A departing cut-off low, valley fog, and wildfire smoke on the visible satellite this morning across the Great Lakes/Mid-Atlantic. pic.twitter.com/v48z8uEiA8
— Andrew Pritchard (@skydrama) September 13, 2022
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration described an “expansive area of light smoke” covering most of the Lower 48 state, except for the far southeast and far southwest on Monday. However, computer simulations indicate much of the smoke in the eastern United States is at relatively high altitudes, meaning it shouldn’t substantially compromise air quality near the ground. But NOAA reported some “moderate to thick smoke” had already reached as far east as Colorado, the Dakotas, Minnesota and Iowa.
AirNow.gov, which monitors pollution across the country, showed air quality had worsened to “moderate” in portions of Colorado, including Denver, as well as northern Minnesota and western Iowa on Tuesday.
A total of 49,820 wildfires in the United States have burned 6,726,028 acres this year; both of these numbers are ahead of the 10-year average through Sept. 13.
Research has shown that human-caused climate change has contributed to an increase in the frequency of large fires and the size of the area burned by Western wildfires, as fire seasons become longer and more dangerous. | 2022-09-13T19:08:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Dangerous Western fires spark air quality alerts in numerous states - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/13/wildfires-western-states-hazardous-air-quality/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/13/wildfires-western-states-hazardous-air-quality/ |
FBI announces results of summer crime initiatives across the U.S.
Among the touted successes: Indictments of gang members and the seizing of massive amounts of fentanyl
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray speaks at his installation ceremony in Washington in 2017. (Andrew Harnik/AP)
The FBI announced Tuesday that over the summer agents arrested nearly 6,000 people suspected of committing violence, seized thousands of guns and recovered massive amounts of fentanyl — part of a joint effort with local law enforcement agencies to curb violent crime rates that rose sharply across the country during the first two years of the pandemic.
“I believe the FBI’s most sacred duty is to ensure people can live free from fear in their own homes and neighborhoods,” FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said in a statement Tuesday. “To that end, we dedicate agents, analysts, and technical resources across the country to work with state and local law enforcement on these operations.”
In Puerto Rico, 41 alleged gang members were arrested on drug trafficking and firearms charges. The criminal organization allegedly distributed heroin, cocaine, marijuana, Oxycodone, Xanax and other drugs.
“The charges in this case reflect the Justice Department’s commitment to dismantling and disrupting MS-13, a criminal organization that sows violence, terror and fear in communities across the country,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in August when a grand jury made the indictments in Texas. | 2022-09-13T19:08:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Violent-crime arrests, fentanyl and gun seizures announced by FBI - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/13/justice-fbi-summer-crime/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/13/justice-fbi-summer-crime/ |
The United States has long prided itself on people’s freedom to choose whatever religion they like. The majority has long chosen Christianity.
By 2070, that may no longer be the case, according to the Pew Research Center. If current trends continue, Christians could make up less than half of the population — and as little as a third — in 50 years. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated — or “nones” — could make up close to half the population. And the percentage of Americans who identify as Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and adherents of other non-Christian faiths could double.
Those are among the major findings of a new report from Pew regarding the United States’ religious future, a future in which Christianity, though diminished, persists, while non-Christian faiths grow amid rising secularization.
American secularism is growing — and growing more complicated
Researchers projected possible religious futures for the United States using a number of factors, including birthrates, migration patterns, demographics including age and sex, and the current religious landscape. They also looked at how religion is passed from one generation to another and how often people switch religions — in particular Christians who become nones, a number that has been increasing in recent years.
Researchers projected four different scenarios, based on differing rates of religious switching, from a continued increase to no switching at all. The unaffiliated were projected to grow under all four.
Currently, about a third (31 percent) of Christians become disaffiliated before they turn 30, according to Pew Research. Twenty-one percent of nones become Christian as young adults. Should those switching rates remain stable, Christians would make up 46 percent of the population by 2070, while nones would comprise 41 percent.
If disaffiliation rates continue to grow but are capped at 50 percent of Christians leaving the faith, 39 percent of Americans are projected to be Christian by 2070, with 48 percent of Americans identifying as nones. With no limit placed on the percentage of people leaving Christianity and with continued growth in disaffiliation, Christians would be 35 percent of the population, with nones making up a majority of Americans (52 percent).
If all switching came to a halt, Christians would remain a slight majority (54 percent), and nones would make up 34 percent of Americans, according to the model.
More Americans are becoming secular, poll says
Non-Christian faiths would rise to 12 to 13 percent of the population, largely because of migration, in each scenario. Migration does affect the percentage of Christians, as most migrants to the United States are Christians, said Conrad Hackett, associate director of research and senior demographer at Pew Research Center. “Still the greatest amount of change in the U.S., we think currently and in the future, will come from switching,” he said.
Researchers stressed that the report contained projections that are based on data and mathematical models, and are not predictions of the future.
“Though some scenarios are more plausible than others, the future is uncertain, and it is possible for the religious composition of the United States in 2070 to fall outside the ranges projected,” they wrote.
One reason for the decline in the proportion of Christians and the growth among the nones in the models is age. While Christians have more children than nones, they also skew older. Pew estimates that the average Christian in the United States is 43, which is 10 years older than the average none.
“The unaffiliated are having and raising unaffiliated children while Christians are more likely to be near the end of their lives than others,” Stephanie Kramer, a senior researcher at Pew, wrote in an email.
Using mathematical models, Pew also has projected the future of religion around the world. Those models were adapted for different regions, Hackett said. Muslims, for example, tend to have the youngest population and the highest fertility rates, he said, driving the growth of that faith. But in the Persian Gulf states, migration has brought many Christians from other countries to the region as temporary workers.
The current report takes advantage of the amount of data collected about the U.S. religious landscape. Researchers also looked at intergenerational transmission for the first time, Kramer said.
“The variables we use to study that were: What is the mother’s religion? And what is the teen’s religion?” she said. “If that was a match, we consider the mother’s religion transmitted.”
Researchers also looked at a relatively new trend of disaffiliation among older Americans. Sociologists have long focused on younger people, who are most likely to switch religions. But in the United States and other countries, older people are starting to switch at growing rates themselves.
“It’s not as large-scale, but it’s still significant,” Hackett said. “And it’s contributing to the religious change that we have experienced and that we expect to experience in the years ahead.”
Hackett said that the projections for the country do not show the end of Christianity or of religion in general, which he expects to remain robust. And most nones, while claiming no religion, do not identify as atheists. Instead, Kramer said, the United States appears to be going through a pattern of secularization that has happened in other countries, though “we may be a bit behind.”
Other factors outside the model — such as changing immigration patterns and religious innovation — could lead to a revival of Christianity in the United States, according to the report. But none of its models shows a reversal of the decline of Christian affiliation, which dropped from 78 percent in 2007 to 63 percent in 2020, according to Pew research.
In the report, researchers note that “there is no data on which to model a sudden or gradual revival of Christianity (or of religion in general) in the U.S.”
“That does not mean a religious revival is impossible,” they wrote. “It means there is no demographic basis on which to project one.” | 2022-09-13T19:09:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | US Christians could drop as secularism rises, Pew Research Center finds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/09/13/us-christians-percentage-pew-secularism/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/09/13/us-christians-percentage-pew-secularism/ |
A fan’s perseverance helped put Mike Bass in Washington’s Ring of Fame
Barry Kemelhor with former Washington cornerback Mike Bass on Sunday at FedEx Field. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
From 1980 through 2016, childhood friends Barry Kemelhor and Matthew Maury attended almost every home game for Washington’s NFL team together. More often than not on those Sunday afternoons, one of them would catch sight of the names of franchise greats on the placards circling RFK Stadium and later FedEx Field and comment on cornerback Mike Bass’s absence.
“We would see Brig Owens, Pat Fischer and Ken Houston up there, and we’d think, ‘Mike needs to be part of this,” Maury said recently, referencing the other members of the greatest secondary in franchise history. “Almost every game, we’d make an aside that Mike should be up there, too.”
At halftime of Sunday’s season opener in Landover, Bass became the latest inductee in Washington’s Ring of Fame, his name and No. 41 unveiled on the 400-level facade to the right of the space recognizing his former coach, George Allen. During a pregame ceremony on the main concourse, Bass delivered a speech in which he thanked Kemelhor for his efforts in making the honor possible.
Washington Ring of Fame inductee Mike Bass capitalized on a chance from Vince Lombardi
Kemelhor and Bass had reunited for the first time in 51 years only moments earlier. They weren’t longtime friends or even acquaintances, just two people brought together by a handwritten note from an uninhibited young fan and a surprising dinner invitation from a football pro, bound by a memory — however faded through the years — of a lifetime.
‘You had to pinch yourself’
On Dec. 13, 1971, Kemelhor and Maury, who graduated from Walt Whitman High in 1970, gathered with a few other former classmates at Maury’s house in Bethesda to watch Washington play on “Monday Night Football.” With a win against the Rams at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Allen’s “Over the Hill Gang” could clinch Washington’s first playoff berth in 26 years.
At some point that evening, Kemelhor and Maury learned that Bass’s wife, Rosita, was watching the game at a house nearby. This was a thrilling and unexpected piece of information for the two college sophomores, because Bass, who signed with Washington in 1969 and was in the midst of a career year, was their favorite player.
“When we became great Redskins fans in the ’60s, it was all about offense, but we couldn’t stop anybody,” Maury said. “[Vince] Lombardi comes, our defense gets better and we notice there’s this guy playing cornerback that we’d never heard of. We fell in love with Mike because he was this unassuming guy that no one was paying attention to.”
With Washington leading the Rams 24-10 at halftime, Kemelhor scribbled a note to Bass on a piece of paper. He told Bass that he was his favorite player, and may have included one of the defensive statistics he dutifully tracked that season about how few touchdowns the former Michigan standout had allowed. Kemelhor signed the note with his address and phone number, ran it up the street to deliver it to Rosita and returned to watch the second half.
Bass’s third-quarter interception of Rams quarterback Roman Gabriel — his seventh in Washington’s past 10 games — set up a Roy Jefferson touchdown reception that extended the visitors’ lead to 31-10. Washington held on to win, 38-24.
Kemelhor and Maury drove to Dulles Airport in the predawn hours of Tuesday morning, hoping to catch a glimpse of their playoff-bound heroes upon their return from the West Coast. The excitement of that night was surpassed a few days later, when the phone at Kemelhor’s parents’ house rang. The voice on the other end belonged to Bass.
“He said, ‘I loved your note. I really appreciated it,’” Kemelhor, 70, recalled. “Then he said that he’d like for me and my friends to come over to his house for dinner, because he’d like to meet us and thank us in person.”
Kemelhor called Maury with the unbelievable news.
Shortly after Washington was eliminated from the postseason with a divisional-round loss to the 49ers in San Francisco, Maury and Kemelhor found themselves accompanying Bass on a trip to Waxie Maxie’s record store so he could do some belated Christmas shopping before dinner. When they returned to Bass’s house in Silver Spring, they played touch football in the front yard and shared a spaghetti dinner prepared by Rosita.
“The star cornerback was covering me,” Kemelhor, who had a poster of Bass in his dorm room at Johns Hopkins, said. “You had to pinch yourself.”
“The whole thing was surreal,” Maury said.
Bass helped Washington to its first Super Bowl appearance the following season and earned second-team all-pro honors in 1974. A neck injury prompted him to retire at 31 during training camp in 1976.
Kemelhor and Maury would occasionally reminisce about their visit with Bass, but they would have no further contact with him until 2020. House-bound at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, Kemelhor started reaching out to former classmates and colleagues with whom he’d lost touch. On a whim, he also decided to look up Bass, found his website and sent him an email.
“I’m certain you won’t remember this,” Kemelhor began, “but it was one of the most memorable days of our young lives.”
He went on to describe the “Monday Night Football” game, his note and how surprised he was when Bass called to invite him and Maury to dinner. As was the case in 1971, Kemelhor didn’t expect a response. Twenty minutes later, the phone rang. It was Bass.
“I’m not sure if he was just being polite, but he said, ‘Oh, yes, I remember you coming over,’” Kemelhor said. “I don’t know how he would, but that’s how we reconnected after 49 years. It was like history repeating itself.”
Making the case for Mike
Bass, 77, said he sometimes has trouble remembering where he parked his car on a trip to the grocery store, but he feels fortunate to have most of his faculties and that his early retirement may have been a blessing in disguise. He doesn’t remember any details of his dinner with Kemelhor, and he wasn’t in the habit of inviting strangers to his home, but confirmed that Rosita has always made a killer spaghetti.
With Bass’s blessing, Kemelhor made it his personal mission to get Bass’s name in Washington’s Ring of Fame. Bass had been named to Washington’s “70 Greatest” team in 2002, but the Ring of Fame was a more exclusive club. Bass told Kemelhor the honor would be the “crowning glory” of his NFL career.
“My mom taught me that self-praise is no recommendation,” Bass said. “I firmly believe that, and I probably never would have approached the team about considering me. It was just not my way of doing things, but Barry, he took the lead and was persistent.”
In between planning his Whitman graduating class’s 50th reunion during the pandemic, Kemelhor made the case for Bass. He compiled a list of Bass’s career accomplishments, including his never missing a game over his seven seasons in D.C., 30 interceptions, three return touchdowns and Washington’s first score in a Super Bowl. He provided guidance on the creation of an hour-long, highlight-laden DVD celebrating Bass’s career and mailed a copy to Commanders senior vice president Julie Donaldson in February 2021.
Kemelhor wrote emails to Washington’s front office, including Donaldson, director of alumni relations Tim Hightower, senior adviser Doug Williams and team president Jason Wright, and spoke to both Hightower and Williams on the phone. He kept Bass apprised of his progress, slow as it was with the team in the midst of its rebrand.
‘It came as a major surprise’
Maury wasn’t surprised by his friend’s perseverance because he had seen it before, such as when they helped get former Whitman basketball star Gary Browne inducted into the school’s athletics hall of fame in 2010.
“This is Barry,” Maury said. “He thinks, ‘Well maybe I can find Mike, and maybe if he’s receptive we can get him into the Ring of Fame.’ It’s just an example of how one person can make a difference.”
Ahead of Bass’s birthday in March, Kemelhor emailed Williams again to ask whether the team had given any further consideration to honoring him. Hightower replied two days later to say the team was “finalizing a few plans on this end for the upcoming season with Mike in mind.”
After Bass’s good friend and former teammate Brig Owens died at 79 in June, Kemelhor wrote to the Commanders once more and gently noted that Bass wasn’t getting any younger.
In July, Bass received a call from Wright, Hightower and Williams, who were not made available for this story, informing him that he would be inducted into the Ring of Fame at the team’s home opener.
“It came as a major surprise,” said Bass, who called Kemelhor with the news.
On Sunday, Kemelhor and his wife, Karen, drove with Maury to FedEx Field, their first game together since they gave up their season tickets. They met Bass on the main concourse, and after Kemelhor introduced himself, 51 years since their only other meeting, Bass embraced him.
“I owe a lot to Barry,” said Bass, who had more than two dozen friends and family in attendance. “So much of this was started by him. He’d been a fan of mine for over 40 years, and he really believed in me. He was the one that made the team stand up and take notice.”
“Seeing his happiness and his family’s happiness was very rewarding,” said Kemelhor, who, along with Maury, had 35 commemorative T-shirts made for the occasion and watched the game from the suite the team arranged for Bass. Fittingly, an interception by an unheralded defensive back helped seal Washington’s win.
In a testament to his character, Bass used part of his speech during the pregame ceremony to make the case for two of his former teammates, Jerry Smith and Larry Brown, to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
“I never was the type of player who looked for recognition, but sometimes you are rewarded for not being renowned,” Bass said. “You’re rewarded for consistency and doing your job. If you’re going to have success, let someone else talk about you.” | 2022-09-13T19:09:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mike Bass inducted into Commanders Ring of Fame, with help from a fan - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/mike-bass-commanders-ring-fame/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/mike-bass-commanders-ring-fame/ |
Transcript: Entrepreneurial Equity
MR. RYAN: Well, good morning, everyone. Welcome to Washington Post Live. I'm Fred Ryan, publisher and CEO of The Washington Post, and we're delighted to have you with us this morning.
In the past decade, there's been substantial economic growth among minority‑owned businesses, but substantial challenges remain, especially for female founders who secured only 2.3 percent of venture capital funding in 2020.
Well, we're delighted today to have several guests join us on the stage for conversations about entrepreneurial equity, including the perspective of small business owners and the administrator of the SBA.
First, we're going to hear from the co‑founders and sisters behind Havenly, an online interior design resource, and they'll be interviewed by our senior critic‑at‑large and interior design enthusiast and I should mention Pulitzer Prize winner, Robin Givhan.
Then we'll hear from Isabela Casillas Guzman, the administrator of the Small Business Administration, and she'll join Leigh Ann Caldwell, who's co‑author of the Early 202 as well as anchor of Washington Post Live, and they'll have a conversation about the government's role in supporting all entrepreneurs.
I'd like to begin by thanking today's presenting sponsor, Wells Fargo. We'll hear from them later in the program when Third Way president Jonathan Cowan talks with Wells Fargo & Company CEO and president Charlie Scharf; Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League; and Sheila Johnson, a great entrepreneur and co‑founder of BET and Salamander Hotels.
We'll have a brief video, and then you'll be joined by my colleague, Robin Givhan, to start the program. Thank you for joining us today.
MS. GIVHAN: Good morning, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I'm Robin Givhan, senior critic‑at‑large, and my guests on the stage today are the co‑founders of Havenly. It's the online interior design resource, and as Fred mentioned, I have a deep love and affection for interior design. So I'm really delighted to have today on the stage, Emily Lancaster to my far left and Lee Mayer. Welcome to Washington Post.
MS. MAYER: Thank you for having us.
MS. GIVHAN: I think as everyone is always curious to know about the origin story, so if you can tell us what sparked the idea for an online resource like this.
MS. MAYER: Well, you should jump in, but I think‑‑I think home has been a large part of us growing up. We actually grew up in the area, and home has always‑‑
MS. GIVHAN: Wait. Can I ask you to pause one second?
MS. MAYER: Yeah.
MS. GIVHAN: Because I know your parents are in the audience, and parents always need like, you know‑‑
MS. MAYER: Are they here? They might have also gotten stuck in the‑‑that nasty traffic that I was just stuck in. So they will come here soon.
MS. GIVHAN: Okay.
MS. MAYER: And I will happily embarrass them.
MS. GIVHAN: We'll give them a shout‑out.
MS. MAYER: But home is very important to us, and I think, you know, the spaces that we sort of grew up in were very central to sort of our family's life. And I think as we became adults‑‑so we are six years apart. I'm actually six years older than Emily, so now you know.
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: I didn't say it.
MS. MAYER: But as we‑‑as Emily graduated from high school‑‑or from college and I graduated from business school, we started to talk about different ideas, and Emily is the entrepreneurial one. So I'm like the stuck‑in‑the‑mud, like low‑risk‑taking person, but Em had started a couple other companies. And we were kind of talking about how we wanted to decorate our homes, and I think at some point, we were sort of like how is it possible that no one exists out there that is making this service accessible to people like us. And by people like us, I mean people that didn't have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on design services. That was really just out of‑‑out of what we could afford at the time, and that's really, I think, how we got started.
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: Yeah. I mean, and this was about 10 years ago. So it was really‑‑it was crazy to us that, you know, nothing like this existed, right? You couldn't go online to‑‑you have Pinterest and you had all these other services, but no real service or website allowed you to take your inspiration and really work with someone all digitally, all virtually to kind of design your space. And really, the concept of the business came from a personal need, and, you know, from there, even though there have been different iterations of the business and, you know, we've changed, some tweaks, but the real thesis is there that you can design your space virtually and buy all the furniture in one place and go from there.
MS. GIVHAN: When you said so much of it came from your own needs and desires, I mean, how much research did you do to find out if there really were other people who were wanting this or if you guys were just, you know, part of a very small group? I mean, how did that‑‑how much research did you do to find out what the true need really was?
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: Sure. No, that's a great question. I think‑‑and I don't know if you remember this, but we always tested out a‑‑tested out the concept, right? So, even before we built the website or built the platform, remember we would email people links and have them purchase through us.
MS. MAYER: We did a survey too.
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: Yeah. We did some surveys, and you'd kind of beta‑test the concept‑‑
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: ‑‑just to make sure that there is proof of concept before going all in. But, yeah, I mean, I think that's the first way that we kind of started to dig into it, and then as we started to build the platform, as we started to build the service, you get so many more learnings. And you can tweak, you know, the concept and tweak the service from there as well.
MS. GIVHAN: So, essentially, you were looking to start a family business, and what was the dynamic like? I mean, I always think about, for instance, in other sort of creative industries, there's sort of the creative mind, and then there's the business mind. Did you divide and conquer in that way, or did you both sort of do left brain/right brain?
MS. MAYER: That's a great question. I think, you know, so I don't know that we intended to start a family business. I think we always wanted to like start a business that was growing. We just ended up starting it with each other‑‑
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: Yeah
MS. MAYER: ‑‑if that makes sense, so it's like‑‑but, you know, it sort of wasn't what I had expected necessarily.
I think what's interesting is we're both really similar. So it was actually, in some ways, we had to bring on other people to do the things that we're not really great at. Like, neither of us are really great at, like, detail orientation. She's maybe better at it than I am, but, like, to be perfectly honest, to get the t's crossed and the i's dotted‑‑and we needed to bring on someone else. And then we kind of split up the work a little bit, like, internally versus externally, and it kind of switched based on where we were in our lives.
So, you know, it kind of worked out that way, but it's really funny. We were like‑‑one of the weird things is when you start‑‑when you start something with someone that's really similar to you, it can be really great because you move faster. You can like sort of shortcut certain things.
MS. GIVHAN: You have a shorthand.
MS. MAYER: Yeah. But what's really actually hard is you end up missing things, right? So, like, because we think about things the same way, you potentially aren't able to surround an issue with as much sort of diversity of thought as you would want, I think, when you're starting something new.
MS. GIVHAN: So I'm presuming that you aren't gazillionaires starting‑‑when you started the business.
MS. MAYER: I wish I had been.
MS. GIVHAN: Now you're gazillionaires.
MS. MAYER: I also wish I was.
MS. GIVHAN: But, I mean, what was the process like for raising capital? I mean, did you have the so‑called, you know, elevator pitch? I mean, what did you say to potential investors? How did you find potential investors?
MS. MAYER: Yeah, that's a great question.
So I will say we've raised nearly $100 million in venture capital funding to date. That first million was by far the hardest, and I think, you know, there were two parts of that. Part of it was we were new to it, right? So, you know, we'd never really done it before. All of the content you see now around how to build elevator pitches and how to build pitch decks was sort of in its earliest days when we were raising fundraising, and I think it was, like, just figuring out how to put together a pitch deck and how to connect a pitch meeting with a VC was so foreign to us. So there was a lot of it that was just us, you know, kind of getting used to raising funding.
MS. GIVHAN: How do you even get a meeting? How do you get in front of the right people?
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: I mean, you have to ask. Yeah.
MS. MAYER: You just [unclear].
MS. GIVHAN: As simple as that.
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: Yeah. I mean, you know, we did a‑‑and I still do a lot of cold LinkedIn messaging, a lot of, you know, stalking to figure out what the email is. I mean, you just got‑‑you have to ask, right? And out of a hundred, you know, no responses, you might get one person, you know, who takes an interest or something along those lines.
And then also for us‑‑and I do this with my current business. I have another business that has not raised a ton of venture capital. We are mainly friends and family and angel investing, but with that, you know, you ask your network and you ask your connections, and, you know, this person might introduce you to this person who might know‑‑you know, it's a lot of that.
But I think, you know, the first thing I'll say is don't be, I guess, embarrassed or anything along those lines. You just have to ask and see where, you know, those connections might take you.
MS. GIVHAN: And did you‑‑how long did it take you to sort of hone down exactly the clear succinct description of what Havenly was going to be?
MS. MAYER: You know, I think we still work on it. So every time you fundraise, there are kind of two pieces to fundraising. There is your company and how you're doing, and then there is the market. And those two things‑‑and those two things have to kind of come into alignment.
So a good example is when we were first fundraising, Uber was, like, sort of taking off.
MS. GIVHAN: Yeah.
MS. MAYER: So 2015 is when we raised our seed round funding, and so we were also this marketplace model, right, where we have contractors who work for us as designers. And so we were able to sort of tailor a pitch that spoke to and reflected upon the success of another company that had a similar model.
Now, this last year when you fundraise, it was like a totally different sort of perspective, and the market had a different pitch that they were receptive to. And so each time you go out and you fundraise‑‑and sometimes even for each type of investor or flavor of investor‑‑you're tweaking a little bit here and there to make sure that what you do is communicated in the best way for them to hear and receive it. And so, you know, I think, unfortunately, it's not like you said it and you forget it.
MS. GIVHAN: Right.
MS. MAYER: There's a lot of, like, work involved both before and after a pitch to try and get better and better at every meeting and every sort of subsequent partner meeting, et cetera.
MS. GIVHAN: I mean, we always talk about the challenges that women and minorities face in becoming entrepreneurs, in raising capital. Was that something that was really evident as you were going about this, or was it something that was more subtle? And, also, the field that you were choosing, interior design‑‑
MS. GIVHAN: ‑‑is one of those sort of soft fields, so to speak. I mean, did that make raising capital or just convincing people of the possible success more difficult?
MS. MAYER: I mean, I think‑‑I'd be curious to hear your perspective, Emily, but I think, you know, one of the hardest parts about some of this in these questions is, like, I've only experienced this as me.
MS. GIVHAN: As yourself. Yeah.
MS. MAYER: Right. And so‑‑and so was it hard? Yes, but it's hard for everyone. And, you know, sometimes you experience things where things are a little more pointed. So whether it's because of the industry we're in or because I'm a woman or because, you know, I look a little different from, you know, the majority of people that raise funding‑‑and you get this, like, sneaking suspicion that that might be it in individual meetings.
But what I still say is you see the numbers, and you sort of understand them, right? Like, I see the numbers. I think‑‑I think it was just mentioned. 2.3 percent of venture capital dollars went to women in 2020. It actually came down in 2021. I believe it was 2 percent‑‑
MS. GIVHAN: Wow.
MS. MAYER: ‑‑in the early estimations. So, you know, we're not really making a ton of progress, and you can kind of see why. It's a very subjective process, and so, you know‑‑and there's no data. It's not like I come in with years and years of operating data. I come in with a pitch.
MS. MAYER: And so they have, you know‑‑and an investor really has nothing else to judge me on than the person in front of them, and of course, it becomes subjective, and of course, maybe, you know, biases sort of sneak in. But, again, it's really, I think, in some ways tough to tell.
I'm curious about your perspective because Nurture&, which is my sister's company now‑‑
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: Yep.
MS. MAYER: ‑‑you have a male co‑founder.
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: I do. I have a male co‑founder, and what Nurture& does is we do nursery furniture and furniture for baby and kids, and‑‑
MS. GIVHAN: Which you launched during the pandemic.
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: Which we launched during the pandemic in June of 2020.
And it is interesting, I think, to your point about, you know, you don't have this massive track record when you're going and pitching folks or things along those lines, but one of the things that I do is you just got to prove‑‑you know, we have two years of business‑‑or for Havenly even longer, but we know the numbers, and we know our margins, and we know what makes sense. And putting those hard numbers in front of folks that you're kind of pitching to is one way that I combat the‑‑you know, the "Oh, but you're in a soft, you know, industry," or something along those lines. That's one way I try to prove, oh, this might sound like a feminine industry or something along those lines, but look at these massive numbers, and look at this market size. And look at what we've‑‑what we've been able to do with our limited cash and things along those lines.
But, yeah, I mean, I think we'll see what happens with venture financing, those numbers and stats in the future, but it is really an interesting process. But it's the only one we know.
MS. GIVHAN: Was there ever‑‑I mean, how often would you go into a room and be presenting to people who look like you, other women, other people of color?
MS. MAYER: Back then? I mean, back then, almost never.
MS. GIVHAN: Never.
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: Yeah.
MS. MAYER: I don't think I pitched‑‑I might have pitched women. I don't think we pitched women in our seed round.
Back then in 2014‑‑so there was a little bit of a reckoning in venture capital around at least gender in 2017 for a variety of reasons, but before then, it was really unlikely. Sometimes you'd get women as associates, like the‑‑you know, kind of the more junior individuals, but typically, I remember for a seed round when you'd walk into the partner meeting, which is, like, kind of the final. It's they're held on Monday. It's like the final meeting where you pitch everyone. It was not uncommon to look across the room and see only Caucasian men.
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: Especially out West, especially in California.
MS. MAYER: Yeah. In San Francisco, it was way worse than New York, which was another sort of base of our capital.
And I don't‑‑I don't exactly know why that is. I think it was just a very weird thing because‑‑so an example I always give is oftentimes, at the time, the male venture capital partner that I would be pitching to would say something like, "Oh, I don't know. Let me ask my wife," and I always thought that was super weird. Like, you're a professional investor. Like, when you invest in health care, do you say, oh, I don't know, let me ask like, you know, the person in the hospital down the street? No. You, like‑‑you, like, make‑‑you use your judgment and your years of investing, and you think about the pieces that we're bringing you and the numbers that we're bringing you, and you're supposed to make a call. It's not like, oh, let me ask my wife. Like, that is so reductive, A to your wife and B to me.
MS. MAYER: Like, you know what I mean? Like, oh, your wife could talk about interior design, but she can't, like, opine on the enterprise company you were just investing.
MS. GIVHAN: Right, right.
MS. MAYER: And, you know, that kind of thing kind of, like, drove me up the wall.
But, again, it wasn't‑‑it wasn't intentional. Like, there were some things that were intentional that‑‑and, you know, I thought were abhorrent behavior, but putting that to the side, what's interesting is, like, that individual never thought of it as, like, sexist.
MS. MAYER: And he never thought about what it said about, you know, gender and also his marriage and, like, how he thought, you know‑‑
MS. GIVHAN: What popped into my head is one of those, like, 1950s ads‑‑
MS. MAYER: Oh, yeah.
MS. GIVHAN: ‑‑for like a washing machine being pitched‑‑
MS. MAYER: Yeah, yeah.
MS. GIVHAN: ‑‑to, like, the sweet homemaker.
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: Sure, yeah.
MS. MAYER: Yeah. But how many times did‑‑I feel like we heard that all the time.
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: It's just the structure and the systems that are in place‑‑
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: ‑‑and, you know, again, like Lee mentioned, no one ever thought‑‑you know, no one ever thought of that in a rude manner, but it's just, you know, an offhand column that really conveys the structures and the‑‑you know, the processes that are in place that make it difficult for women entrepreneurs.
MS. GIVHAN: Does that suggest to you that there's a huge percentage of the decisions are based on sort of just gut reaction as opposed to the actual numbers that are being placed in front of him‑‑
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: Well, that was‑‑
MS. GIVHAN: ‑‑as if he didn't trust‑‑
MS. GIVHAN: ‑‑his gut on‑‑
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: Sure.
MS. GIVHAN: ‑‑this topic?
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: But when you hear that first check in because you're such an earlier business, a lot of‑‑you know, a lot of the decision‑making is based on gut, call it, right? And‑‑
MS. MAYER: Or it's more qualitative, right?
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: Yeah, more qualitative.
MS. MAYER: Because, like, again, your first check‑‑so our last round was a far more‑‑you know, like, again, we've got years and years of operating history. You know, I barely had to do any‑‑I mean, it was tough to raise in some ways, but, like, you know, the numbers speak for themselves.
MS. MAYER: Before you have anything, of course, I guess, it's subjective because what else‑‑you know, what else do they have? And, to some degree, I understand that.
I think‑‑I think when we talk about equity, though, what we hope for is something of an even playing field in that subjective evaluation of my business.
MS. GIVHAN: Mm‑hmm, mm‑hmm.
MS. MAYER: And I think it's‑‑you know, it can be tougher, I think, sometimes when either you're in a category that feels less‑‑that feels a little softer, to your point‑‑
MS. GIVHAN: Mm‑hmm.
MS. MAYER: ‑‑or you potentially don't have for whatever reason sort of a connection, whether it's by demographics or something else, to the person that you're talking to.
But, you know, I think to some degree, like, it's‑‑the thing that I struggle with sometimes in these conversations is I never want a woman or a person of color or anyone else that's underrepresented to feel like this can't‑‑they can't do this, right? It can be done. You know, you do have to think differently potentially about how you pitch or who you pitch, but it's totally, you know, doable. It's just harder.
MS. GIVHAN: Well, that kind of leads me to my next question, which is, you know, recently, Kim Kardashian announced that she was starting a private equity firm. Serena Williams has talked a lot about‑‑now that she has evolved away from tennis, that she wants to focus on venture capital. I mean, how important is it to have women, faces like that in that space on the other side of the pitch?
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: Oh, I mean, incredibly, incredibly important, and all the strides that are being made and these big names really bring attention to it. But, also, there are many unnamed women out there who are either angel investing or starting their own funds or SPVs and things along those lines, and this just is a snowball effect of having, you know, that type of diversity on the investment side, which is great.
You know, I think one of the things that's really exciting to see is definitely some of these institutional funds like Kim Kardashian's and Serena's and some other folks, but also, you know, I would say angel investors and women who are just becoming more literate and, you know, investing in start‑ups or things along those lines. There is so much education out there. There is so much access to that education now with, you know, what you guys are doing and free education in that sense, which I think is just really exciting because that means that those people will be investing in different businesses that, you know, the traditional venture capital person might not be interested in, right? So I think that's really exciting.
For example, for Nurture&, our cap table is all angels and a ton of women. My sister invested, right? So being able to have that access to capital, which is, you know, a little bit different than the traditional VC route is just‑‑it's just going to make those pathways for entrepreneurs like us that much easier.
MS. MAYER: It definitely‑‑I mean, one of the interesting things for consumer businesses, the vast majority of consumer decisions in this country are made by typically women or people who identify as women, and I think one of the‑‑and the consumer part of our economy is a fairly large part of our economy. And I think one of the interesting things is, like, so much of what you need to do when you build a consumer company is connect with your audience, and if your investor doesn't understand that, you know, you're really sort of misaligned to begin with. And so the more women‑‑and generally, diversity you have around your cap table or at least around your businesses, it allows you to sort of, again, meet your audience where they are. So, you know, having some sort of a reflection of your consumer base on your cap table or on your board, I think, is just a really important thing.
MS. GIVHAN: I mean, it feels like this conversation has really sort of taken on new urgency in the last‑‑you know, the last few years. I mean, can you point to anything that has really sort of lit a fire underneath the conversation to really sort of bring it to a boil and force people to start considering these issues, or has it just been, do you think, sort of a slow, steady progression?
MS. MAYER: I think‑‑so in‑‑so 2017 was the sort of #MeToo year, if you remember that, and it happened actually very‑‑
MS. GIVHAN: Oh, I do remember.
MS. MAYER: Yeah, I figured you would.
MS. MAYER: It was hard to miss.
But I think in the venture capital industry, they had sort of a separate and earlier reckoning for a variety of reasons, and actually, Havenly‑‑and a board member of Havenly's was involved in an interesting way. And so we kind of got to see the conversation really go from "Oh, yeah, we should work on this at some point in time," like "Wouldn't it be cool if we had more chicks around the table?" to like, "Gosh, we really should pay attention to these women that make up 51 percent of our population and make 85 percent of consumer decisions. And I think that that was a moment.
The weird part is, like, the numbers started to tick up, and then the pandemic hit, and then they kind of came back down. And it's been this, like, stub‑‑that line of like 2 to 3 percent of dollars going to women really hasn't changed much.
MS. MAYER: And I think that that's been a real point of frustration for, you know, a lot of us in this space, not just as women, but, you know, it's the same for, by the way, Black founders and brown founders. Like, a really stubborn, sort of low single‑digit percentage of dollars is really going to those individuals, which is like hard. And, you know, I'm not entirely sure what to necessarily do about it, apart from, you know, continuing to call attention to it.
MS. GIVHAN: Well, also, the topic of building relationships, which is clearly enormous‑‑
MS. GIVHAN: ‑‑as entrepreneurs. I mean, how do you‑‑how did you create a network of people that you can turn to, whether it's angel investors or people who can perhaps offer guidance, connect you to someone else? Are you just like the queen of LinkedIn?
MS. MAYER: [Pointing at Ms. Motayed Lancaster] You are.
MS. MOTAYED LANCASTER: I do a lot of LinkedIn stalking, but, no, I mean, I think in the past few years, there are people that look like us or, you know, women, young females that are getting more interested in this and being able to create and find that community of like‑minded folks so that, you know, you're able to ask for those connections and introductions is I think really paramount.
And, you know, for us, I think we both went to education, you know, schools and things along those lines and being able to tap into those networks. But, honestly, I think just asking everybody, talking to every single person, meeting someone in the elevator and saying, "Hey, I do that," you never know what might come out of it, which I know is like a very, you know, basic answer, but I would attribute a lot of the connections I had made or a lot of the folks that I met to that.
And then the one thing I will say is‑‑and I'd love to hear your take on this, Lee. But a traditional venture capital firm has partners and then a few levels and then call in an associate, right? And, usually, like Lee had mentioned, a lot of those associates, you see a little bit more‑‑you see more women, but it's very hard to get promoted to that partner level. And, you know, it takes years upon years and your own financial capabilities and whatnot, and so what I think is really interesting is I've been seeing more women just start off and spin off and create their own funds and create, you know, their smaller seed funds or things along those lines.
And what's really exciting for me as an entrepreneur is those are the people I want to talk to first, right, the people who aren't part of that, you know, old‑school institutional structure who might be spinning off and doing their own thing, and they're entrepreneurs in their own right even though, you know, they're on the investing side. So that is one place that I always look to when I'm fundraising is what are the newer funds that might have someone who's potentially my age or a female or, you know, Black or Latinx or something like that to really turn to because, you know, I want to support them as well, and that's a really organic, great conversation that you can have.
MS. GIVHAN: I would love to squeeze in an audience question before we have to go because our time is running down, and it's‑‑let's see. Georgia from D.C. asks, "What are the best ways to advocate for BIPOC businesses?"
MS. MAYER: I think there are kind of, you know, two ways of thinking about this. So there is advocating for yourself and, you know, in order to do that, you have to do a lot of the things that we just heard and discussed, so refine your pitch, make sure you know your numbers.
And I think, again, whatever you need to feel confident in presenting your business in the best light is sort of helpful to prepare and then prepare again, and it's really‑‑like, for me, that was actually a really helpful thing to sort of get my own advocacy going for myself was like if I felt nervous, spend a lot of time on preparation, and it kind of helped me arm myself with sort of the best pitch for my business.
But the problem is, I think‑‑and this is what we've sort of been discussing is it's not, unfortunately, just me. I have to be met by the market, and so I think one of the things that's very helpful also is finding people to advocate for you. Who do you know in your network that can help you meet the person that might invest in you, that can help sort of circle back to that investor that you just pitched and talk about how great you are? Who are the bosses you've worked for? Who are the coworkers and colleagues you know, the people you went to school with? Assembling people around you that can really celebrate you to other people is a huge part of helping. I think all of us do as well as we can, but in particular, if you fall into an underrepresented category, it's that important to kind of get it going.
I think the other thing is just find a cohort of people that you feel comfortable talking to that are kind of at the same stage you are at. It's been like a lifesaver for me as an entrepreneur, whether it's other women who are fundraising at the same stage or even frankly other entrepreneurs, period. It's a tough road. Just having a place to kind of vent but also find some solidarity and help is a very, very impactful thing.
MS. GIVHAN: Well, I think we're going to have to leave it there. That's terrific advice, and I encourage you all to go to Havenly.com. Even if you're not interior design obsessives‑‑
MS. GIVHAN: ‑‑it will make you into one.
MS. MAYER: It will make you into one.
MS. GIVHAN: So our program will continue after this brief video. Please stay with us.
MR. COWAN: Good morning, everyone. I'm Jon Cowan. I'm the CEO of Third Way, and I'm thrilled that we are having this conversation today because there is a massive void in the debate here in Washington.
The economy, of course, is a top‑of‑mind issue, and there is a large focus among policymakers about what is ailing capitalism. Everyone likes to focus on the famed 1 percent, and to be fair, income inequality is real and serious. And the wealth gap, especially the racial wealth gap, is a massive problem.
But there is also a different issue that gets far less attention than it deserves. I call it the "2 percent problem." That's because only 2 percent of businesses with employees are Black‑owned, 2 percent. Only 6 percent are Hispanic‑owned, and only 10 percent are Asian‑owned. When you break it down by gender, men own three times the number of small businesses than women. We are never going to fundamentally address the wealth gap in this country and fix capitalism if we don't address the barriers standing in the way of women and people of color. Entrepreneurship must play a central role in that, but it is not part of the national conversation nearly to the scale it must be. We are setting out to change that.
I am thrilled my friend Marc Morial is here.
MR. MORIAL: Thanks.
MR. COWAN: Marc is the CEO of the National Urban League, and I called him last year to say we wanted to build a new effort called the Alliance for Entrepreneurial Equity. We wanted to change the conversation and drive a new federal agenda. Marc said he didn't want to just help; he wanted to run the effort together. And our first partner to come on board was Wells Fargo, thanks to their CEO Charlie's vision and leadership. And I'm also thrilled we're joined this morning by Sheila Johnson, who brings a wealth of experience on these issues from her time as co‑founder of BET, current CEO of Salamander Resorts and Hotels, and a host of other endeavors.
So let's dive in with this amazing, smart panel and start talking about the problem of entrepreneurial inequity in America.
Charlie, let's start with you. The last couple years were especially challenging for diverse entrepreneurs and small businesses. What insights do you have from working with so many small businesses during the pandemic?
MR. SCHARF: Sure. Well, Jon, thank you very much, and thank you for the opportunity to be here with all of you.
You know, I think the groundwork you laid in your opening comments is just incredibly important to just stop for a second and process, which is you do‑‑before you can tackle any problem, you have to be clear what the problem is and acknowledge that there is a problem. Diverse‑owned small businesses, as you pointed out, are just a fraction of what they should be. It's often harder for diverse‑owned small businesses to get the resources that they need, either to start up themselves or to stay in business or to grow, and, you know, this period that we've gone through over the last couple of years with covid has just accentuated that. And I think we at Wells have had the opportunity to learn a tremendous amount, partially through PPP but partially through a program that we enacted after PPP called "Open for Business."
And if you just reflect on PPP for a second, the idea behind PPP was extraordinarily important to step in and help small businesses broadly, certainly were pluses and minuses of it, and there's no question, it was extremely helpful to continue to help the engine of small businesses generally across the country.
But the other side of that is when you look at who is able to access PPP, what was required, what requirements the banks had, how we were trying to get as many people through the funnel at once is very often those who were most in need, which was the diverse small businesses, were the ones not able to access the system. And so, you know, we can talk about the fact that we focused on smaller small businesses and we funded $14 billion of loans and helped 250,000 small businesses, but the reality is there were still a huge amount of small businesses that were still hurting. And that became very clear in conversations that we had with groups like Marc's and with CDFIs that we had relationships across the country.
And so we went down this path of saying, okay, let's figure out how we can help, both learn and get access to a broader population, take the fees that we made in PPP, $420 million, and work with partners that knew those diverse‑owned small businesses, had relationships in ways that we didn't, and through that, I had the opportunity to travel around the country and to meet many of them. And what you realize is just, well, number one, is how important the resources that we were able to provide meant, not just to them but to the communities in which they operate. When you have a chance to travel around to the cities and communities, you see helping an individual small business is helping that community. It's someone that's providing goods or providing services. It's employment. It's a place for people to gather, and that feeds on itself.
And our system is just not set up to support diverse small businesses, very similar to the issue that we have on the consumer side. And, you know, just from a bank's perspective, the way we think about providing credit to small businesses, when someone wants to start something, so much of it has to do with the fact that we have to look at them as an individual, and there are inequities that exist in how we look at individual credit driven by‑‑you know, the biggest one is credit scores because things like rent payments and things like that aren't part of it. And so there is a very, very broad problem that exists.
But I think the most important thing that I took away from this exercise that we went through is that we can make a difference. There are ways to access the community, but you need to partner with people, and you need to come together and make sure you're clear on who you're trying to get the resources to.
MR. COWAN: Charlie talked a lot about kind of the last few years and how all of this was heightened and highlighted and exacerbated by the pandemic, but you've been working to deal with the barriers facing people of color and women entrepreneurs for a long time now. What do you see as the biggest problems out there that you've encountered? Sheila.
MS. JOHNSON: Oh.
MR. COWAN: Yes, it was you.
MS. JOHNSON: Okay.
MR. COWAN: Yes.
MS. JOHNSON: Well‑‑
MR. COWAN: I'll get to Marc in a moment, but you're first.
MS. JOHNSON: Well, I'm going to start back. I'm the third act of my life in starting a business.
MR. COWAN: We should all be so lucky, right?
MS. JOHNSON: Yeah.
MR. COWAN: But, anyway, even myself, after selling BET, I had a lot of money on my hands, and the problem is‑‑and we're going to talk about the elephant in the room in here‑‑we don't get the respect. Women do not get the respect from banks.
And I remember going to a bank and I said, "I really would like you to handle my money," and they didn't take me seriously. So, you know, I moved my money to another bank. I won't tell you which. It wasn't Wells Fargo.
MR. SCHARF: Thank you.
MR. SCHARF: Can you bring it to us, though?
MS. JOHNSON: So I did‑‑
MR. COWAN: I think you'll have a lot of banks calling you after this session.
MS. JOHNSON: Oh. Well, anyway‑‑but the problem that I realized right away is women are just not on the table here. They do not take us seriously. It's very hard for women because we don't have the track record in a business, and it's‑‑I think it's really, really hard.
And so, even with my money, when I decided to build my first resort, you know, men don't use their money. They get investors in there. I could not get an investor because I didn't have the track record. So I had to use quite a bit of my money to start building the track record, and a lot of women do not have that, you know. They just can't do it.
So I built the track record. I mean, we've got seven hotels now, but it is really, really difficult. And one thing that I did learn‑‑and I've put a lot of kids through school and especially women‑‑I said so many women fail in the very beginning, and there's one really basic fact. They do not talk to the family. The family, they have to have that support system to really communicate with them how they're going to build their business, why they want to build this business, and I've seen too many women fail because they do not have that support. Okay.
And then there's steps. They have to find a good lawyer. They've got to get a good CFO. There are so many steps that are right there that they have got to really set up before they even do it.
So, you know, I'm listening to you, and I know it's out there. I know the steps that I've had to go through, but I did not have that support. And I had to build a team around me that really understood my vision, and they didn't come in with their own vision. You got to make sure that you build a support network around you that really understands not only who you are but what your goals are going to be.
MR. COWAN: So, Marc, you all at the National Urban League run, I think, 13 entrepreneurship centers around the country. So a lot of the people who are like Sheila when she started out come through your centers, and I also know that economic empowerment is a personal and professional passion for you. So what do you do for the folks who come through your entrepreneurship centers? What barriers do they face, and how do you help them overcome the kind of barrier Sheila just described?
MR. MORIAL: Well, I want to thank you and The Washington Post. I certainly want to thank Sheila who is a shero for so many of us and Charlie for his partnership and for his leadership.
At this moment, with our 13 entrepreneurship centers and our some‑14,000 small businesses, we are working to help them think ahead. So what does thinking ahead mean?
Our work with the Alliance for Entrepreneurial Equity has a focus on public policy insofar as it relates to entrepreneurial equity. There have been a number of things that have taken place in the last 18 months that place a very important flag of opportunity in front of us. One is the passage of 1.2 trillion in infrastructure dollars for roads, bridges, water systems, airports, rail systems, and the abundant number of contracting opportunities that are going to exist for small‑ and medium‑size businesses, for Black businesses, and other businesses all across the nation really over a 10‑year horizon.
Number two, the CHIPS and Science Act, what just got passed, billions of dollars in both cash and tax incentives that will go to create, if you will, a chips business here in the United States. Well, I want to make sure that those companies‑‑and I shared this with the president in my meeting with him, that those companies that receive that very healthy dose of public subsidy are also going to pay attention to subcontracting opportunities and job opportunities for African Americans or we're going to create a science divide. We're going to take a powerful step forward to subsidize and to support something we need to do, but if we don't do it in an inclusive way‑‑so that is a second, if you will, flag of opportunity.
The third flag of opportunity is the recently passed, if you will, climate bill, which has embedded within it a range of private‑sector, Charlie, tax incentives, cash supports, and some consumer‑side incentives, all designed to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels and to stand up a stronger renewables industry. With all of that public dollars, the dollars of all being injected into the future of the American economy, it is incumbent on the private sector and the public sector to have the will and the plan to make sure that we're not going to create, if you will, a wider climate divide and a science divide and an infrastructure divide, where Black small businesses and small businesses are left behind.
The third flag of opportunity is that the infrastructure bill lifted the MBDA for the first time to a statutory agency and gave it more resources than ever before, and I'm proud that that agency is now led by Under Secretary Don Cravins who helped us get this star‑‑
MR. COWAN: We share your pride.
MR. MORIAL: ‑‑as our executive vice president. So that's the next, if you will, flag of opportunity.
Here is an important public policy barrier that we have to confront, and I want to really raise this. Over the years, in the '80s and the '90s, those opposed to economic equity went into the Congress and passed what are called gross receipts and net‑worth caps placed on Black‑, brown‑, and women‑owned businesses who do business with the federal government. So the theory was you can participate in these disadvantaged business programs, but if you're net worth gets to a certain level, if your gross receipts as a business get to a certain level, you're no longer eligible to participate in these programs. These caps have never been updated, but the theory was that at some point, these businesses could compete in the economic mainstream. The evidence shows that the theory of the gross receipts cap and the net worth cap was flawed and failed.
So, in our work here‑‑and we're having a discussion that sort of melds business and public policy‑‑we have to focus on the public policy barriers and the public policy opportunities, and along with that, if the private sector and the financial services sector works really hard to create both venture, risk, and debt capital for these businesses, we can truly make a difference because of these flags of opportunity. The money that's going to be invested, the money that's going to be spent, these sectors that are going to be enhanced in this country are very, very significant and important, and I don't want us to miss this opportunity. And I don't want us to miss the important steps that have already been taken in a short period of time by the Biden‑Harris administration and this Congress, but understand that these‑‑equity is not self‑executing because the systems were not designed for equity.
So we've got to hammer and push and change and transform, and I think that's why this is such a timely and important conversation.
MR. COWAN: Sheila‑‑
MR. COWAN: ‑‑Marc is talking about hammering and pushing policymakers, so two questions for you. One is we're sitting here in Washington.
MS. JOHNSON: Mm‑hmm.
MR. COWAN: From your decades of experience, what would you say to policymakers they really need to do if they want to bring down these barriers? And then a question, I'm sure, a lot of people here and watching would like to know is, what is the secret to your success? Why have you become such a successful entrepreneur? So we're going to move a little more quickly through these because we're running low on time.
MR. COWAN: But let me put those two to you, and then I'll get back to our other two panelists.
MS. JOHNSON: Well, first of all, as I said, I built a really strong network. I hired people that were smarter than me and that really understood my business.
MR. COWAN: That's tough to do.
MS. JOHNSON: Yeah. And so many, especially women, it's very hard for them to get started, but you have to swallow hard and understand where your limitations are, what are your passions, who are you really, to really build that network. And I had to really be very careful and was making sure that I brought the right people around me, because if you make that mistake, it's bad.
I mean, someone went through $12 million of my money, and they were recommended to me. You got to be careful to build that network.
And there's something I do want to talk about. Jason Wright and myself, we have been chairing a strategic partnership with Greater Washington, and we have raised $4.75 billion that is going to be‑‑
MR. COWAN: Wow.
MS. JOHNSON: ‑‑given away over the next five years, and we're really‑‑
MR. COWAN: Bravo.
MS. JOHNSON: We're really focusing on women minority‑owned businesses because they are just really left out.
Now, the reason why I've been successful at what I'm doing, I really have a good business plan. I really knew exactly where I wanted to go, put the business plan together, shopped it to the most important people I wanted to hire. They share my vision. I check with them. They have respect for me. I also am very committed to diversity. So I make sure that as I'm building my business that I have Black, brown, women, and men working for me whom I trust because if you don't have the people around you that really share your vision, it's not going to work.
Also, the best financial people I could get around me who are going to watch every penny, every dollar. We make so many mistakes by not keeping our eye on the ball‑‑and a good lawyer.
MR. COWAN: Damn good advice.
MR. COWAN: So, Charlie, you talked about the‑‑kind of look back at the pandemic and what you learned through it. Look ahead now. So if you look out over the next few years, next half decade, what does the climate look like for small businesses? What are you worried about? What are you excited about? Just kind of give us a little bit of a tour of the horizon.
MR. SCHARF: And I'll keep this short because I know we're running low on time, and you want to get to Marc.
Marc used the word "divide" earlier today in several different respects, and I think what we see with consumers and what we see with small businesses is very, very similar. And there is a very, very big divide in the health of consumer and small businesses. Those that started very strong that have more wealth are doing really well, have plenty of resources. Their deposits are still as high as they've been. They're spending. They're building inventories if they're small businesses, and they're feeling actually very good about things, even though as they look out, they're concerned. But they've got a real base to fall back on if there's an issue.
When you look at those that went into the pandemic with less resources, many of which are minority‑owned businesses or minorities on the consumer side‑‑and we're really starting to see them struggle. Their deposit balances are down substantially from what they were pre‑pandemic. They're having to spend a lot more on food, fuel, the things that we're all seeing in the inflationary environment. Their discretionary spend or their ability to invest as a business is much more limited than it was, and so, as we look at those things, one of the things that we're trying to protect against is that we don't help contribute to the self‑fulfilling prophecy of when people and businesses need you the most, you can't walk away because you're concerned about the credit.
MS. JOHNSON: Right.
MR. SCHARF: That's what we‑‑that's what got us into the problem that we're into.
So I am‑‑so, you know, overall, I think, you know, things are very strong, but you need to look under the covers and say it's strong for some, not as strong for others, and we all need to focus, which means proactively reaching out, where can we help people when we see the very beginnings of businesses or individuals getting in trouble, so that this racial equity gap that exists doesn't widen.
MR. COWAN: Marc, we have about a minute left. We'll give you the last word. What are you most worried and what are you most excited about, given the dynamics you just described?
MR. MORIAL: What I'm excited about is the spirit and the energy I see amongst young people who want to become self‑employed, who want to be entrepreneurs, who want to create for themselves, who have mastered the art of utilization of technology, culture, and opportunity. And there's just an energy that is indefatigable that exists, and they see and feel the opportunity.
They need a boost. They need a nudge. They need technical assistance. They need to understand the various ways to secure access to capital, and we have to invest in them.
MR. MORIAL: You know, we have to really, really invest time. We have to invest talent. We have to invest treasure in them. That's what makes me optimistic.
What makes me pessimistic is all the old bogus arguments, all of the yesterday thinking: Just hustle a little harder, just work a little longer, and, you know, it will work out. Pull yourselves up by your own bootstraps.
And the moment of George Floyd is a moment to understand, examine structural inequities and to change them and to alter them to create a more just and equitable economic future for the country.
So we have great opportunities at this moment, but we have to lean in and push. It's a private‑sector imperative. It is a government imperative at every level. It is an imperative in the community. So those of us at the National Urban League who have been committed to economic equity and economic empowerment also see entrepreneurial growth as a way to create jobs, produce jobs, produce opportunity for people in the community.
So we're going to all work together. I mean, I am powerfully optimistic but do not have a rose‑colored set of glasses on, and say to people let's not engage in yesterday's arguments, and let's understand that some of the things like this gross‑receipts, net‑worth regime that has existed has to be dismantled for something fresh and new.
MR. COWAN: Brilliant. Well, I want to thank Sheila, Charlie, and Marc for an insightful, rich, and brilliant conversation. I'm sure everyone here and watching has the same feeling I do, which is 20 minutes is now nearly enough with the three of these folks, and we'd like quite a bit more time.
I also want to thank The Washington Post for putting together and hosting this important event on this crucial topic. For those of you who are interested, go to learn more about the Alliance for Entrepreneurial Equity. Go do AEEquity.org.
And, again, thank you all for being here, and thank The Washington Post. We'll turn it over to The Post.
MS. JOHNSON: Thank you.
MS. CALDWELL: Good morning, everyone. I'm Leigh Ann Caldwell. I'm the coauthor of the Early 202 here at The Washington Post and also an anchor here at Washington Post Live.
As you all know, we have been talking a lot today about entrepreneurial equity, and so joining us today is SBA Administrator Isabella Casillas Guzman. Thank you so much for being here and spending your time with us. We have a‑‑
MS. GUZMAN: It's a pleasure. It's my favorite topic, so great to be here.
MS. CALDWELL: A lot of questions to get to.
So, first, I want to start with a little bit of news. The Consumer Price Index data came out today; inflation once again pretty high, 8.3 percent. What more can the administration do to tamp down on that inflation and especially when it comes to small businesses?
MS. GUZMAN: Mm‑hmm. Well, I mean, I think that in context, it's important to remember that the American Rescue Plan really and SBA's role in it in terms of getting relief to small businesses was really critical towards giving them a sound footing and to be able to survive some of the pandemic pressures in the marketplace, and obviously, now dealing with inflation and the tight labor market are the top concerns for our small businesses across the board.
The president has obviously, for some time, called inflation as the number one issue that we need to deal with to ensure that our economy can transition from this historic economic recovery with incredible job growth to a stable, sustainable growth, growing economy.
And, you know, the Inflation Reduction Act, of course, a signature legislative achievement of the president, is cornerstone in trying to make progress towards lowering those costs and investing in our supply chains. And throughout the administration, we've been trying to focus on shoring up our supply chains here domestically to try to help drive down inflation and the pressures of the covid‑disrupted marketplace across the world.
You know, I think that, obviously, working to support, you know, the Federal Reserve and their actions to try to ensure that they fight inflation is really key, but the efforts that are made to lower health costs, lower energy costs within the Inflation Reduction Act are‑‑were important first steps towards continuing to try to sustain this economy for especially our small businesses who are often hardest hit and don't necessarily have that vendor relationship to negotiate and ensure their pricing to make their goods or delivery their services.
MS. CALDWELL: What are you hearing from small businesses, what their concerns are? Is it more about the tight labor market, that it's still hard to find workers, or is it more about inflation?
MS. GUZMAN: It's truly a mix, to be honest, even on the tight labor market issue. You'll find small businesses who maybe were very adept at retaining their workforce, deploying strategies that enabled them to engender that loyalty, whether it was PPP funding to retain their workforce or otherwise, and have not experienced the same challenges in getting workforce, including in high‑impact industries like the restaurant industry. So it's really been a diverse group of opinions.
I would say that I equally hear those two issues referenced, and the labor market because, clearly, small businesses are interested in growing, there is, you know, continued optimism among small businesses. They're excited about the opportunities that present themselves, whether that's contracting to build our infrastructure and the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act are being part of supply chain manufacturing and innovation investments, and the CHIPS and Science Act are more climate related on the Inflation Reduction Act.
So I've seen small businesses positioning for growth, and that's the workforce issue is‑‑remains equally important for them.
MS. CALDWELL: Two and a half years after this pandemic started, what else do small businesses‑‑what challenges do they face to dig out of this pandemic, or how has the landscape changed for small businesses?
MS. GUZMAN: I think there have been a lot of key changes. You know, clearly, relief was really critical for them to survive, but it also gave them an opportunity to pivot and adapt and really think strategically.
There are opportunities on the horizon. Probably, the biggest trend that I see as a silver lining that we've leaned into at the SBA is the adoption of technology, and e‑commerce represents, you know, a huge opportunity for small businesses to grow their revenues. And it's really about that. If those businesses with the strongest balance sheets are the ones that are surviving and looking towards the future and growth, they're able to position themselves to sustain during this time. And so our goal is to really ensure that they can have strong balance sheets, and whether that's through our affordable capital products to help them or through the revenue growth opportunities and the technical assistance that they need to really grow their revenues, in government contracting and exporting abroad and e‑commerce avenues or in their own marketplace.
MS. CALDWELL: Since the pandemic started through the Trump administration, The Washington Post just reported yesterday that, you know, the SBA's oversight arm, the Inspector General, found that $13 billion of aid went overseas. So, you know, what is your response to that? What is the SBA trying to do to tamp down on that, and have you had any sort of broad accounting of how much fraud has taken place in these programs?
MS. GUZMAN: Unfortunately, there was a lot of cleanup that had to be done by the implementation in 2020 of these core programs, Paycheck Protection Program as well as the initial rounds of covid EIDL. Under President Biden, he was very committed to ensuring those funds got into the hands of the businesses they were intended to serve and really targeting the smallest of the small as well as those in underserves communities who were left out of early rounds, you know, Black and brown businesses that‑‑in particular that were not able to access at the same rates, the PPP program, in particular.
So, with that, obviously, you know, that was outreach for the equity perspective but also controls. You know, we have a different approach in implementing these programs and have a collaborative partnership with our Inspector General as well to ensure that we are putting in the right controls, the right technology to tamp down fraud and ensure that these funds are used for small businesses. So that initial analysis of the portfolio to determine how many IP addresses had foreign ties, you know, that was an initial assessment. We're continuing to dig out of that data to work with the IG, the Department of Justice, and the Secret Service as they pursue these cases and determine the real picture of fraud in the end, which we don't know at this point. But, clearly, those controls were put in place in early 2021, and we feel strongly about the fraud risk management that we've put in place at the SBA as a good measure to preventing fraudsters.
MS. CALDWELL: Do you think it will be more than $13 billion? Do you think the number could be much higher?
MS. GUZMAN: No. That's an estimate, the total, potential. You know, there's other reasons that that could have‑‑that estimate could have existed, but clearly, 2020, there was a lack of controls. Speed was the priority, and we focused on trying to ensure that in the future, technology and systems and processes are available to prevent that kind of execution.
Again, you know, I think that we've come a long way and will continue to make strides, and really, the impact of those programs has been profound. You know, there's nearly $800 billion in PPP, you know, nearly a total of $1.2 trillion total, so nearly $400 billion in EIDL and the other high‑impact industries in relief funds. Those, you know, had a profound impact on making sure those small businesses could stay open. They were critical programs, and I think there's, you know, no question of the ability for those to reach our small businesses, especially in 2021, where 96 percent of PPP went to the smallest of the small businesses and underserved, LMI, and rural areas.
MS. CALDWELL: Did the pandemic have a disproportionate impact on minority businesses?
MS. GUZMAN: Most definitely it did, based on multiple findings. In 2020, those‑‑from SBA's perspective, those businesses oftentimes were the ones who did not get early relief from the SBA at the same rates and at the same dollar amounts in addition, but overall, you saw‑‑I was in Los Angeles at the time when it first hit. You saw early impacts in the Asian American community that was impacted by covid pandemic and perceptions of risk in those communities as well as businesses that had already preexisting barriers to capital, preexisting barriers to networks, which you needed as a small business to survive during the pandemic.
MS. CALDWELL: Well, that was exactly where I was going to go next, which is there are barriers to access to capital for small businesses and minority businesses in particular. So how do you tear down those barriers? What can be done, either through the Small Business Administration or the private sector?
MS. GUZMAN: Mm‑hmm. Well, SBA is one of the longest private‑sector partnership with public entities, I think, in federal government. We rely on our networks of lenders, our network of investors within our programs to ensure that we can get to yes for more small businesses to capital.
You know, I think that, you know, within‑‑obviously, one of the biggest challenges we saw during the relief and President Biden discussed this with me, the very first thing he discussed with me, was that it pained him that small businesses that didn't have that accountant or that lawyer on speed dial were not able to get to relief programs initially. And so he wanted to make sure that we could empower all of our entrepreneurs with information and navigation to be able to access programs at the federal level, which was why we launched the Community Navigator Pilot Program.
Of course, the previous guest, the National Urban League, Marc Morial, is one of the Community Navigator's grantees within our program. We've funded 51 hubs across the country and over 400 spokes who focus on underserved women, veterans, people of color, to try to make sure that we fill those knowledge gaps and those connection gaps. That's first and foremost.
But there are learnings from the relief programs and how we can better reach our smallest of the small businesses. SBA had‑‑historically, obviously, our mission is to fill gaps in the marketplace, but we've seen a downward trend in small‑dollar lending. We've seen a drive towards more business acquisition and owner‑occupied real estate in our portfolio and less of those small 5‑ to $25,000 loans that you really want‑‑
MS. CALDWELL: Why is that?
MS. GUZMAN: ‑‑you know, to see happen.
Either there's multiple reasons, but from PPP, obviously, that was a different situation altogether, 11 million‑‑over 11 million small businesses served, thanks to policies implemented, a lot of, during the Biden‑Harris administration, sole proprietors and other small entities. It was more representative of the true medium, you know, small‑‑or rather, micro, small, medium enterprises that SBA truly serves the full gamut of.
And so it's speed to market, how quickly you can, you know, serve businesses with a capital product that is immediate, the distribution network that you deploy, and so with PPP, we had over 5,000 lenders working with us. Typically, it's about 1,500. And then technology, being able to have an intuitive system for them to, you know, work through their lending‑‑you know, their lending presentation so that we can approve the loan as was the case with the direct lending program, EIDL. So we need to focus on that speed and focus on that broader distribution network and technology, and those are the investments that we're making.
With Vice President Harris earlier this year, we announced the expansion of our Community Advantage Program, which is lending through mission‑focused lenders to underserved borrowers, those who are unbanked, underbanked, and represent a lot of those women and people of color who are unable to access capital. So we hope to see the changes in underwriting and eligibility and the expansion of the network pay off in terms of better serving our entrepreneurs with capital.
MS. CALDWELL: Relatedly, you're kind of answering my next questions before I ask them, but Black, Indigenous, people of color entrepreneurs, you know, as you said, it's harder for them to access capital. So through, let's say, you know, VC firms, what are some nontraditional ways that people can access capital?
MS. GUZMAN: Well, I think it's less known that SBA‑‑you know, we provide about $50 billion in capital products every year, and that not only includes our traditional lending portfolio, the 504 or 7(a) loans that banks and other lending institutions work with us on, our micro lending program, but also our small business investment companies. And so we power 300 licensed small business investment companies to provide, you know, capital to growth‑oriented small businesses, and we need to drive more on that risk capital, the venture, early‑stage capital within that program. It's‑‑you know, it has over 37 billion total currently, privately managed through the SBA, and that's a‑‑that's an incredible impact in the community leveraging private capital with federal dollars to get a lot of debt products into the small businesses. But we want to see the venture side, and so we're working hard to ensure that we can transform those programs to incentivize more risk and equity investments as well as broaden the emerging fund managers within our program to ensure that we're reaching underserved populations, those operators who are seeking venture capital. I think that's really key.
The private sector, especially in the venture space, is more diverse than the private equity space, where we tend to work within our SBIC program, and we want to make sure that we're getting to those emerging fund managers within the venture space to put out our capital at the SBA.
MS. CALDWELL: Is it still‑‑is it still hard to open a small business? Is there still too many hoops to go through, and what can be done to make it easier?
MS. GUZMAN: Mm‑hmm. Well, amazingly‑‑and it's through opportunity or necessity‑‑we've had historic rates of entrepreneurship during this time. Since January 2021, 7.8 million people have applied to start a business, and that's a third higher than any other similar period on record. And so we've seen, you know, record numbers of people standing up, raising their hands, seeing opportunity or seeing necessity to create their own job and build wealth for their communities through entrepreneurship.
So I think, you know, it is still challenging, and I always tell small business owners, you need a team around you to support you, which is what the SBA does. We have a network of free advisors. We have great partners on the ground providing content for them to learn how to build a strong balance sheet, the revenues, you know, the strong management of operations and expenses.
MS. CALDWELL: So a question from the audience says, "The overwhelming majority of BIPOC businesses are solopreneurs. How do we provide technical support and access to capital to grow the number of employee‑owned firms?"
MS. GUZMAN: Employee‑owned firms meaning employee ownership?
MS. CALDWELL: So I am assuming this person means, you know, rather than a solo entrepreneur but just has people working for them so they can expand and get bigger.
MS. GUZMAN: Okay. Employer firms. Okay. Yes. We‑‑
MS. CALDWELL: Sorry if that's not the right meaning, but that's how I interpreted it.
MS. GUZMAN: I'll do both of them a little bit.
MS. GUZMAN: Obviously, we want to make sure that more of our solopreneurs‑‑80 percent of small businesses are solopreneurs. We want to make sure they have a pathway to scale and have that growth mindset so that they can build wealth in communities and create jobs, and so empowering them with a strong strategic plan, which obviously that goes back to our networks. But working with, whether it's National Urban League or our small business development centers, our women's business centers, to build a strong plan for growth and ready yourself for capital so that you can get funding. Whether that's a loan or investment vehicle, we want to make sure that small businesses are positioned and that they have a strategy to grow in the market. Whether that's through exports or e‑commerce or government contracting or just expansion in local marketplaces, I think small businesses now more than ever have so many new opportunities to grow their businesses, and we want to make sure they're tapped into those.
I think just in case they're asking about employee ownership, you know, that's something that's an issue that's really near and dear to Chairwoman Velázquez's heart as the chair of the House Small Business Committee. That's something the SBA is working on as well to ensure that employee‑owned companies can continue to thrive as that's an opportunity to bring wealth to more communities.
MS. CALDWELL: Another audience question, this one from Jenny who asks, "What are some ways that investors can help increase and improve opportunities to create generational wealth for people of color?"
MS. GUZMAN: Well, I would say a couple things on that, and the first thing I want to touch on is government contracting. You know, it's $560 billion marketplace, and as the president is really committed to ensuring that small businesses can access contracts and importantly that small disadvantaged businesses can access contracts, you know, we want to make sure that our entrepreneurs of color and that women, that veterans, all of our sole‑source programs can take advantage of government contracting opportunities to grow their businesses and create wealth.
Those programs, the president has assigned a 15 percent goal, growing from our current 10 percent level to 15 percent. It's over $50 billion in contract opportunity for small disadvantaged businesses within our program. We think that that would go a long way towards helping seed these growth‑oriented companies as we have in the past through our 8(a) program and ensure that they can compete in this incredible marketplace.
But beyond that, you know, for small businesses who are interested in whether it's government contracting or trade or what have you, leveling up your skill sets, leveling up your capital readiness is really important in ensuring that we have partners around us at the SBA who can believe in those entrepreneurs and operators and invest in them, and so the expansion of our distribution networks is really critical, I think, to ensuring that we can invest in communities, to narrow those opportunity gaps.
It's as Marc Marial said earlier. It's not about just working harder or anything of that nature. It really is truly making sure that there is investment capital or, you know, lending capital out there available for small businesses to grow, which they are going to need if they want to position their business for longevity, sustainability, and for building wealth.
MS. CALDWELL: You mentioned earlier about the large growth of small businesses coming out of the pandemic. Do you have a breakdown of how many of those are women businesses, people of color‑owned businesses? What's‑‑
MS. GUZMAN: They continue to‑‑for the past 10 years, you know, women and minorities have been growing at the fastest rates. You know, for Latinos in particular, they've grown at 44 percent over the past 10 years versus 4 percent for all others. For the last 10 years, either Black or brown women have always been at the top rates in terms of entrepreneurship, and they continue. Some estimates is the majority of those firms are diverse, and so you see over‑indexing in ZIP codes and communities where Black entrepreneurs are typically situated. And so that's‑‑you know, those are some of the datapoints, but we don't have specific numbers yet. But I know that that's been a trend that's continued.
MS. CALDWELL: And are there any safeguards to ensure that women have equal access to capital as men?
MS. GUZMAN: Safeguards, no. There's opportunity to improve programs, which is what the Biden‑Harris administration is really committed to doing. I think it takes, you know, transformational change within programs to ensure that we're meeting businesses where they are. You know, women and people of color don't necessarily come with a historic wealth creation in their families. You know, they can't just get a loan from their friends and family or get investment from friends and family. So we want to make sure that our products are designed to support them, doing things like reducing collateral requirements within our Community Advantage Program from $25,000 up to $50,000. It goes a long way towards ensuring that we can bet on women and people of color and ensure that they're getting the capital they need to grow.
MS. CALDWELL: And Eduardo from the audience asks‑‑Latinos, specifically Latinos, which you just mentioned are among the fastest growing segment of entrepreneurs. What can be done to maintain this momentum and elevate resources for them to succeed?
MS. GUZMAN: I do really believe, as President Biden believes, it's about that connectivity to the knowhow, and the Community Navigator Pilot Program is a great example of expanding a network of advisors around the country to ensure inclusiveness, to ensure that we're able to provide these emerging entrepreneurs with the success, the critical success tools that they need to succeed, and that capital readiness, the growth mindset, the ability to operationalize their growth plan and export abroad. And so I think that the more success outcomes we can have, the more models and mentors exist in communities to share and incentivize more growth.
MS. CALDWELL: Because it's an election year, midterms are just a couple months away. How‑‑you know, can you talk about the view of Democrats a little bit in small businesses, how it compares to Republicans and‑‑or are they similar?
MS. GUZMAN: Well, fortunately, the small businesses are in communities who impact neighbors, who employ locally. You know, truly are‑‑is a bipartisan issue. I mean, I think that this is something that, you know, we know that all of our communities need entrepreneurship. It seeds growth. They're the ones who create the products and services that we depend on every day. They innovate to solve global problems.
And I believe wholeheartedly that everyone increasingly under‑‑during the pandemic recognizes how important those small businesses are to our success and our economy, and as we see the face of entrepreneurship changing, recognizing that we need to invest in all of our entrepreneurs so that those great ideas can be built and succeed, I think that that has to be imperatively a bipartisan and uniform American ideal in order for us to be globally competitive and for us to succeed.
MS. CALDWELL: How long do you plan to stay on with the administration?
MS. GUZMAN: I have a lot of work at the SBA, and I'm really excited about what's around the corner to ensuring that our capital products are readily available to all, and that our networks are strong and inclusive. So we have a lot of work, and I have a great team. And I am interested in supporting the president's vision of equity to ensure that our economy works for everyone.
MS. CALDWELL: Great. We are out of time. Isabella Casillas Guzman, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.
MS. GUZMAN: Thank you. Thank you so much.
MS. CALDWELL: And our other guest, Theresia, was unable to join today. Last minute, she had an emergency. So we apologize for that.
But thank you all for coming. You can go to WashingtonPostLive.com to get the transcript or to rewatch this program. Thanks so much. | 2022-09-13T19:10:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transcript: Entrepreneurial Equity - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/09/13/transcript-entrepreneurial-equity/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/09/13/transcript-entrepreneurial-equity/ |
Russia spent millions in secret global political campaign, U.S. official says
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow on Sept. 13. (Gavriil Grigorov/Sputnik/Kremlin pool/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
A senior U.S. official, who spoke to reporters Tuesday on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence findings, said the administration decided to declassify some of the review’s findings in an attempt to counter Russia’s ability to sway political systems in countries in Europe, Africa and elsewhere.
“By shining this light on Russian covert political financing and Russian attempts to undermine democratic processes, we’re putting these foreign parties and candidates on notice that if they accept Russian money secretly we can and we will expose it,” the official said.
The senior official pointed to one Asian country they declined to name where the Russian ambassador allegedly gave millions of dollars in cash to a presidential candidate. Officials said that Kremlin-linked forces have also used shell companies, think tanks and other means to influence political events, sometimes to the benefit of far-right groups.
A State Department démarche Monday to U.S. embassies in more than 100 countries described the alleged Russian activities and suggested steps the United States can take to push back, including sanctions and travel bans. The cable, which officials provided to reporters, named Russian oligarchs it said were involved in what it described as “financing schemes,” including Yevgeniy Prigozhin and Aleksandr Babakov. Prigozhin, who is wanted by the FBI, was charged by U.S. officials in 2018 with attempting to interfere in the 2016 U.S. elections. | 2022-09-13T19:46:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russia spent millions in secret global political campaign, U.S. says - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/13/united-states-russia-political-campaign/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/13/united-states-russia-political-campaign/ |
From left, Sabrina Calazans, borrower outreach director at Student Debt Crisis Center, and Howard University students Aiden Thompson and Sydney Stokes rally with other student debt activists outside the White House on Aug. 25, 2022. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)
One-third of all student debt in the United States is held by people under the age of 30. That’s more than $550 billion, as of last year, according to the Education Data Initiative. Most of that is federal debt — money owed as repayment to the government. A third of those age 18 to 30 have student loan debt, a percentage twice that of any other age group.
In other words, it’s people in that age group who might be expected to respond most favorably to President Biden’s announcement last month that he was forgiving a portion of federal student loan debt for millions of Americans. The response of young Americans to such a proposal was unquestionably part of the administration’s calculus; Biden’s approval rating among young people fell farther than with any other age group as his poll numbers sank. Many Democrats hoped and expected that debt relief would help turn that around.
So far, any such political effect is hard to measure.
FiveThirtyEight compiles an average of recent polling that gives us a broad sense of how Biden is viewed by American adults. Over the past year, the trend in his approval had been moving in one direction: downward. But then at the end of July, it reversed. Biden’s approval started heading back up. His net approval — that is, approval minus disapproval — went from minus-22 on July 25 to minus-11 now.
Notice the three dates that are flagged on that chart. The first (labeled A) is June 20, when the average price of a gallon of gas peaked, according to the Energy Information Administration. Then there was the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) by the Senate on Aug. 7 (“B”). On Aug. 24, Biden announced student debt relief.
As you can see, the change in direction predates either of those latter two developments. What’s more, the reversal has been fairly steady; there doesn’t appear to be any acceleration or deceleration in the approval rating related to either the IRA or debt relief. What has continued, though, is the drop in gas prices, now in its 13th week.
On Monday, a poll was released by Investor’s Business Daily indicating that young Americans had seen a surge in approval for Biden that’s attributed to the passage of IRA and debt relief. But that’s not as clear as it may seem, with the paper admitting that debt relief “probably” aided Biden, though “it’s not clear how much.”
That poll also conflicts with data from YouGov’s weekly polling. YouGov’s data shows a turnaround similar to the one seen in FiveThirtyEight’s average. (YouGov’s polls are part of that average but a relatively small part.) It lines up more neatly with the passage of the IRA, in part because it’s a weekly figure and not a daily average. (On the charts below, individual weekly polls are indicated with dots; three-week averages are shown as lines. Net approval compares the averages.)
When we look at Americans under 30 — the group with the most debt — there’s been little to no movement at all. In the past six weeks, that group’s approval of Biden has ranged from 42 percent to 48 percent, including 48 percent in the most recent survey. But that’s where the under-30 group polled in mid-August, too, before debt relief. In the first poll after relief was announced, Biden was at 45 percent.
There’s a lot of volatility in those numbers, admittedly, even using averages. But comparisons over time are useful here for obvious reasons.
Among the next oldest age group in YouGov’s polling, there’s a more noticeable improvement for the president. This is a group that itself has a lot of student-loan debt — even more than the under-30 group, according to Education Data Initiative numbers. Again, though, the increase in approval is more obviously linked to the turnaround in gas prices than debt relief.
In YouGov’s most recent poll, Biden’s approval was back under 50 percent — several points lower than it was before debt relief was announced.
It’s certainly possible that polling has not yet picked up on a surge in approval among younger Americans. It’s also possible that approval will increase once loan forgiveness occurs in a few weeks. This may also be one of a number of issues that have less effect on polling than on possible Election Day turnout. It’s not yet clear.
But then if gas prices keep dropping, the White House may not be that worried about the political effects of debt relief anyway. | 2022-09-13T20:30:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Young Americans may not yet be rewarding Biden for student-debt relief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/biden-student-debt-young-people/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/biden-student-debt-young-people/ |
A Ford F-150 Lightning on a production line of the Ford Motor Co. Rouge Electric Vehicle Center (REVC) in Dearborn, Michigan, US, on Thursday, Sept. 8, 2022. Treasury Secretary Yellen outlined some of the Biden administration’s unfinished economic business in a speech today calling for higher tax rates on the rich and on companies to help pay for social spending. (Bloomberg)
All of this pushes the US toward a greener future. But working to shut out the largest market and maker of EV batteries in the world is short-sighted. That’s because almost every manufacturer operating in the US, or elsewhere, leans on China — not just for raw materials, but for refining them and then ultimately making the powerpacks. In the value chain, the country dominates with 92% of processed materials, 71% of cell assembly and 65% of battery components.
Theoretically, the point of the IRA is to buildout a domestic supply chain as soon as possible, while reducing dependence on China, creating jobs and winning bipartisan support. That’s sensible, but it’s not based on what’s possible over a realistic time frame. Going cold turkey on essential processes means there will still be a cavernous gap between raw materials and the finished battery pack.
In cutting China out, costs will go up by about $30 to $35 per kilowatt hour and around $1,000 on other variable costs, according to analysts from Nomura Holdings Inc. Since the IRA subsidizes materials via tax credits, companies will have to be profit-making to begin with to benefit from that. Yet firms will tell you from bitter experience that making batteries profitably and at scale doesn’t happen quickly for most. Meanwhile, capital expenditure is the highest in the US compared to Europe and China. Costs for labor are surging across America and large disputes in railways and ports — key machinery in supply chains — are ongoing.
As it stands, the law doesn’t massively benefit companies that could actually help jump-start the build-out of a US supply chain, or those with the technology and ability to create a robust system for EVs and their batteries. Instead, it stands to boost the biggest American car companies, along with the maker of some of the most popular cars in the US, Toyota Motor Corp. — all of them well behind global manufacturers in the electric rush. It would have been smarter to incentivize a rapid build-out of factories, resolve labor issues and then get weaned off of China.
Although Korean battery makers with various partnerships and joint ventures with US automakers seem to benefit, the reality is that their hold on processed materials is limited and still dependent on China. Meanwhile, the IRA inadvertently keeps out the likes of Hyundai Motor Co. and its affiliate, Kia Corp., that comes in at number two behind Tesla Inc. in EV sales volume in the US, because they aren’t made there. Globally, too, they are one of the largest by shipments. Consumers clearly like their EVs but the IRA won’t subsidize them now.
A June 2021 White House review of supply chains called China’s practices to stimulate its domestic industry “aggressive” and “well outside globally accepted fair trading practices.” But perhaps there is something to be learned from Beijing’s laser-focused policies. Instead of allowing national security and geopolitics to limit the IRA, legislators should try to understand how China produced some of the most successful battery companies, including the world’s largest, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. , or CATL, and BYD Co. (1)No wonder, then, that CATL will now supply Ford Motor Co. batteries through a recently announced a strategic cooperation, not the other way around.
China’s supply so far has withstood the rising costs of battery materials, power outages, rolling Covid lockdowns and regulatory pressure. Companies there have managed to keep EV battery installations rising across the country. That is no small feat. But subsidies alone don’t encourage that, nor do policies focused on keeping others out.
If the US really wants a share in this sector, it should take a leaf out of Beijing’s book. That means facing its industrial weaknesses and making them stronger.
• The U.S. Is Losing the EV Battery Race: Anjani Trivedi
• Manchin’s Shock Gives Clean Tech a Welcome Jolt: Liam Denning
(1) These firms were big beneficiaries of government largesse, however they aren’t owned and controlled by it. | 2022-09-13T20:39:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Holes in America’s China-Style Industrial Policy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-holes-in-americas-china-style-industrial-policy/2022/09/13/c33f75da-339e-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-holes-in-americas-china-style-industrial-policy/2022/09/13/c33f75da-339e-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
FILE - Darius Campbell Danesh appears at the after party for the opening night of the “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” musical in the Savoy Hotel in London on April 2, 2014. Campbell Danesh, who shot to fame in 2001 on the British reality-talent show “Pop Idol” and topped British music charts the following year with his single “Colourblind,” has died at age 41. His family said Tuesday that he was found unresponsive in his apartment in Rochester, Minnesota on Aug. 11 and pronounced dead by the local medical examiners’ office. The family says the cause of death hasn’t been determined yet. (Jon Furniss/Invision/AP, File) | 2022-09-13T20:39:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Officials: Campbell Danesh died of chloroethane inhalation - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/officials-campbell-danesh-died-of-chloroethane-inhalation/2022/09/13/a330aeca-339f-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/officials-campbell-danesh-died-of-chloroethane-inhalation/2022/09/13/a330aeca-339f-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
What if the United States loses the AI race against China?
Eric Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Futures, speaks during the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, Calif., on May 2. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP)
These days, every pundit and prognosticator is trumpeting the revolution that’s ahead in artificial intelligence. But a new bipartisan report conveys a grim message: The United States is losing the race to develop this technology that will transform every workplace and battlefield.
“Absent targeted action, the United States is unlikely to close the growing technology gaps with China” and will fall behind in the critical AI sector, argues the report. It was issued Monday by a group chaired by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and head of the congressionally mandated National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which put out its findings last year. The new report follows the commission’s work; it was privately funded by Schmidt.
The new report uses unusually stark language in describing the danger posed by China’s rapid advances in critical technologies such as AI, quantum computing, 5G communications and synthetic biology. In a section titled, “What Does Losing Look Like?” it describes a series of significant consequences for the United States should it fail to meet the Chinese challenge. Among the catalog of horrors:
“China dominates the economy of the future and captures trillions of dollars’ worth of value generated by the next wave of technologies.” “China uses its techno-economic advantage for political leverage. Nations — including U.S. allies — reliant on China’s tech swing into the PRC’s political orbit.” “Authoritarian regimes sell the case that they are masters of the modern world.” “An open internet is compromised.” “The U.S. military’s technological edge erodes. The PRC annexes Taiwan.” “The PRC cuts off the supply of microelectronics and other critical technology inputs.”
The report’s authors summarize the catastrophic outcome: “In total, this picture amounts to the unraveling of the order the United States and the democratic world built after World War II and a serious challenge to U.S. prosperity. The United States and other democracies would become economically dependent, losing their engines of prosperity and freedom of action in the world. ... Even if only some of this came to pass, the world would be a darker place for the United States and democracy.”
Frightening technology scenarios like this have become increasingly common over the past decade, and they might overstate the extent of China’s advantage. Chinese economic growth is slowing; its tech sector has been shaken by poorly planned government intervention, and its deteriorating demographic position might not support the “China Dream” of dominance that President Xi Jinping has often advanced. But even so, Schmidt told me in a recent interview, China remains “focused on the deeper technologies,” such as AI, that will command the future.
The bleak report doesn’t just summarize the costs of losing. It argues the United States will, in fact, lose this race without changes in government policy to focus attention better on the technology challenge. “The United States still has no process or person responsible for achieving technology advantage,” the report says. “The U.S public-private ecosystem has vast competitive strengths, but they are un-gathered. America needs a plan for mastering the new geometry of innovation to compete.”
William M. “Mac” Thornberry, a former Republican congressman from Texas who was one of four advisers assisting Schmidt, stated the challenge bluntly in an interview: “If we continue on the current path, we lose.” The report, he says, is intended to explain to Americans, “Here’s what losing looks like to you, individually.”
Essentially, the report argues for national “industrial policy” focused on technology, much like the recently passed legislation to support the semiconductor industry in the United Studies. Schmidt argued that the Chips and Science Act, on its own, won’t be sufficient to reclaim the United States’ lead in technology. “China has a Chips Act every year,” Schmidt contended, through continuous government funding for critical projects.
The Schmidt report is the latest wave of a campaign for greater public and private funding in key technologies. Critics have argued that such directed funding for technology would subsidize already profitable companies such as Google and other tech giants. In that sense, critics contend, Schmidt and the other representatives of the tech sector are advancing their industry’s interests, at a time when there are other powerful claims for government support.
The report counters that there’s need for investments that will benefit all Americans by sharpening the nation’s competitive edge and protecting its values. In the technology competition with China, the report argues, “at stake is the future of free societies, open markets, democratic government, and a world order rooted in freedom not coercion.”
In a foreword to the report, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger sounds a “Back to the Future” note. He writes that the report is modeled on a similar bipartisan project he directed in the 1950s, when the U.S. faced a Soviet Union competitive threat. The aim, back then, was to “explain the issues facing our country that may have been hard for the government to tell the American people.”
Whether America is actually losing the technology race against China is hard to say. The value of this report is that it reminds us how severe a price the United States would pay if optimism about its AI future proved to be wrong.
Opinion|Why Xi’s ‘united front’ is vital to the artificial concept of a ‘Chinese nation’ | 2022-09-13T20:39:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | What if the U.S. loses the artificial intelligence race against China? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/artificial-intelligence-ai-high-tech-race-with-china/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/artificial-intelligence-ai-high-tech-race-with-china/ |
Fast-food workers and their supporters, calling on passage of a bill to provide increased power to fast-food workers, march past the state Capitol in Sacramento on Aug. 16. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP)
California has a habit of pursuing well-meaning policy goals in ham-handed ways. Unfortunately, its new law to regulate the fast-food industry appears to fit the trend.
On Labor Day, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed a bill expanding protections for fast-food workers. The Fast Food Accountability and Standards Recovery Act responds to a real issue: California’s fast-food workers have long reported experiencing retaliation, wage theft and other unacceptable working conditions. A research brief released last month from the University of California at San Francisco and Harvard’s Shift Project found that these employees earn $3 per hour less on average than workers in other parts of the service sector. This margin adds up to more than $6,000 a year, a significant shortfall in a very expensive state.
In a nod to European-style sector-wide collective bargaining, the new law creates a 10-member “Fast Food Council” of employees, franchisees, advocates and government representatives. The council will have the authority to set standards on working hours, conditions — and minimum wages. California’s current minimum wage is $15 per hour for businesses with more than 25 employees, but the council can increase it to as much as $22 in 2023. The law also authorizes counties, or cities with populations of more than 200,000, to create “Local Fast Food Councils,” and establishes a cause of action for workers facing retaliation or discrimination by an employer.
Industry groups argue the law will raise costs for franchise operators, which will then be passed on to consumers. An analysis from the University of California at Riverside, commissioned by International Franchise Association, suggests that a 50 percent increase in worker compensation could result in a 17 percent increase in prices. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for its part, claims the law would “micro-manage the fast-food industry with unelected bureaucrats.”
California’s own Department of Finance opposed an earlier draft of the bill, cautioning that it could “lead to a fragmented regulatory and legal environment for employers and raise long-term costs across industries.” That bill assessment also pointed out that it could be counterproductive, because imposing stricter standards on some sectors could exacerbate delays in enforcement.
The version of the bill that was signed into law is, at least, better than the original. After some pushback, California’s Senate limited its scope to chains with more than 100 franchises nationally, up from 30, and deleted a clause that would have held companies jointly liable for labor violations at franchises.
These are modest improvements, but the law could still impose significant costs on Californians. A smarter approach would be to increase funding for agencies to enforce the state’s already strong labor laws. This could improve oversight and bolster workers’ rights without inflicting financial and regulatory burdens on small businesses. California could also boost its earned-income tax credit, which, like the federal equivalent, offers wage supplements to low-income households without discouraging hiring.
As the council forms and begins to weigh new standards, we hope it will pursue a thoughtful, evidence-based approach that does not add to sky-high inflation or harm job growth. Meanwhile, other states considering adopting California’s model should listen to concerns from business owners and anxious employees, and find better ways to support vulnerable workers. | 2022-09-13T20:40:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | California's fast food regulation attempt is ham-handed - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/california-fast-food-regulation-inflation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/california-fast-food-regulation-inflation/ |
Lay a foundation in STEM
President Biden speaks Sept. 9 at the groundbreaking of a new Intel semiconductor plant in Johnstown, Ohio. (Andrew Spear/Getty Images)
The Sept. 10 Economy & Business article “Biden visit to Ohio chip factory site shows high stakes” highlighted the United States’ efforts to “ramp up” its chipmaking capability under the Chips and Science Act, aimed at strengthening the United States’ technology lead in the world and to help compete against China. The article pointed out some of the benefits and long-term challenges in such efforts, including personnel and long-term investment.
Though the article did mention that some universities are trying to take advantage of the new federal subsidy, I was disappointed to find no mention of plans — or the need for plans — to increase funding for public education, particularly in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Increased funding for STEM education is just as important as investment in chipmaking. It is critical to train and lay a foundation for scientists even before they enter college, and to rekindle America’s interest in STEM education early.
Sol Song, Fairfax | 2022-09-13T20:40:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Lay a foundation in STEM - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/lay-foundation-stem/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/lay-foundation-stem/ |
Pakistan didn’t contribute to climate change — but it’s paying the price
By Hamid Mir
Victims of flooding from monsoon rains carry relief aid in Sindh Province, Pakistan, on Sept. 9. (Fareed Khan/AP)
I have covered wars across the world. I have also reported on many natural disasters. I’ve seen more than my share of death and destruction, but I’ve never wept.
Lately I have been traveling in the flood-affected areas of Pakistan, and I cannot control my tears. My country is drowning in one of the worst environmental disasters the world has ever experienced. After visiting some of the areas hit by the floods, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said he had never seen climate-related destruction on such a scale, and he appealed to the international community to help. Guterres noted that Pakistan is a victim of climate change produced by the more heavily industrialized countries.
This was an important statement. Experts say that Pakistan is responsible for less than 1 percent of global emissions. Now it is paying a heavy price for mistakes committed by others.
One-third of Pakistan is under water, an area equivalent to the size of the United Kingdom. Most of the flooded areas I was able to visit only by boat. I am short of words to explain this human tragedy. Why can’t I control my tears?
When women and children besieged by floodwater saw me, they started crying for help from the rooftops of their homes. They were desperate to be evacuated. I did my best to help, but sometimes I was unable to because my boat was too small. Many people told me that they had gone for days without eating or drinking. I had never thought that I would ever find myself reporting on the death of children in Pakistan from hunger, but this flood has changed all that by stirring up a storm of destruction and disease. In Baluchistan I saw children dying at the sides of the road because, lacking any alternatives, they’d been forced to drink contaminated water from the floods. The most common question I heard in the disaster areas was, “Where is the government?”
Interestingly, all four provinces affected by the flood are ruled by different political parties. Imran Khan’s party, the PTI, runs Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s allies control Sindh and Baluchistan. People in the flooded areas were unhappy with all of them. Most of their parliamentary representatives were missing in action. Flooding victims complained to me again and again about bad governance and mismanagement. Their helplessness brought tears to my eyes many times.
Millions of flood-affected people are living under open skies, without tents or other shelter. They don’t even have graveyards to bury family members who died while fighting the floodwaters. Many have died from snake bites. On several occasions the appalling conditions forced me into the role of relief worker — but then I had to remind myself that I am a journalist. My job, as I see it, is to give voice to millions of my voiceless countrymen.
Two months ago, I warned through one of my columns in The Post that climate change is becoming a bigger threat to Pakistan than terrorism. I wrote that article at the beginning of the monsoon season. Only about 150 people died in the storms that took place around then. Now the death toll is approaching 1,400. More than 33 million people, including 16 million children, have been affected by this catastrophe; 3.4 million children need urgent humanitarian assistance to protect them from the threats of waterborne diseases or drowning. Among the millions of affected people are at least 650,000 pregnant women, 73,000 of whom are expected to deliver next month.
The floods have destroyed more than 1,800 miles of roads and 149 bridges. The waters have damaged 19,000 schools and 900 health facilities. Jail authorities are moving inmates away from prisons facing the threat of inundation. I saw hundreds of date, banana and coconut farms washed away by floodwater. Wheat, rice and cotton crops have suffered immense damage.
The Pakistani economy has suffered losses estimated at $30 billion. The disaster is likely to exacerbate unemployment and hunger. Don’t forget that poverty has always contributed to extremism in countries such as Pakistan.
Our country has the right to demand climate justice. Happily the United States has already announced an aid package.
This isn’t to say that we don’t need to address the problems that are also our own fault. Last week, I visited the flood-hit area of Kalam, where many hotels on the Swat River were washed away. Local people told me that heavy flooding had destroyed these hotels in 2010. Some hotels were constructed again inside the river area after bribing the local authorities. The river has now taken its own revenge on these illegal structures.
Pakistan apparently learned no lessons from the 2010 floods. Deforestation was a major cause of those floods, and it has played a similar role again in the floods of 2022. Climate change activists estimate that Pakistan faces some of the highest levels of disaster risk in the world. We, and the world, need to stop repeating our mistakes if we don’t want matters to get even worse.
Opinion|We don’t owe Afghanistan more | 2022-09-13T20:40:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Pakistan didn’t contribute to climate change but is paying the price - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/pakistan-paying-price-climate-change/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/pakistan-paying-price-climate-change/ |
Floral tributes are left in a park near Buckingham Palace in London following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)
Queen Elizabeth II’s death at age 96 sparked a global outpouring of grief and kind words for a woman who was beloved by many.
But for many Black Americans, especially those with roots in countries that were recently ruled by the British monarchy, the feelings were complicated and nuanced.
In interviews and social media posts, Black Americans said they respected the queen’s sense of duty and her loyalty to her family, but they also saw in her an embodiment of white supremacy and inequality. Even those who admired Elizabeth understood the impulse of the Black women who took to social media to express their disdain for the ruler of a monarchy that had oppressed millions, a stance that earned many of them scorn.
Natalie Hopkinson, an associate professor at American University’s School of Communication, learned that the queen had died from her cousin, an Anglican priest who was born in British-controlled Guyana.
“She very solemnly texted me that the queen had died, and she included a little prayer for her, and I responded, ‘Rest in peace,’” Hopkinson said. “The queen was a human being. She was a grandmother. And by all measures she took the role of queen very seriously, and she tried to do her best with it. But you’re still going to feel a certain way about it all.”
Hopkinson said it’s hard for those who didn’t personally experience British colonialism to understand the complex relationship between the queen and her far-flung subjects.
“You really can’t understand it unless you were, like, a colonized person who lived in a river village in the middle of the rainforest in South America, like my mother did,” she said. “She grew up hailing the queen from her river village with no electricity, and where she had to take a boat to school every day. For a person like her, the queen was a mythical figure from very far away. And so there’s a lot of nostalgia, and there’s a lot of emotion that it dredges up from your childhood.”
Breanna Vivid of Hartford, Conn., is half-Jamaican American and half-African American, and said their Jamaican ancestors were enslaved on sugar cane plantations. Their father lived through Jamaican independence in 1962, nearly 10 years after the queen rose to the throne.
“At first, I admired the queen and the royal family, and it was more because of the glitz and glamour and the importance that they had,” said Vivid, 30. “But when I got older and I started learning more about the atrocities, especially in the countries that my parents come from, that whole entire thing is a mess by itself.”
Vivid said that the queen’s passing presents an opportunity to question the legacy of the British monarchy and its impact on former colonies, including Jamaica and the Indian subcontinent, and their respective diasporas. Calls to return the crown jewels of former colonies have already increased.
“The conversation of reparations has already started in America,” Vivid said. “But now it should be a worldwide thing with the queen’s passing.”
The queen’s death had Melissa Murray, a professor at the New York University School of Law, similarly thinking about her childhood. Murray was raised in the United States but spent long stretches of her childhood summers with her family in Jamaica. As a child, Murray was “obsessed” with the royal family, specifically “the kind of fairy tale element of it.” She said that the royal family just felt “omnipresent” in their lives.
“I was raised in a community where there is tremendous admiration and respect for the queen because of her devotion to duty and her steadfastness,” she said. “But also a recognition that the institution she represents is responsible, maybe primarily, for some of the glaring inequalities that we see around the world in some of these post-colonial societies.”
Murray stressed that her and her family's respect for the queen didn't translate into uncritical veneration of the monarchy.
“I had uncles who would go on for hours about the pillaging of natural resources in Jamaica and how colonialism had essentially divested the country of a lot of its natural resources, and made it dependent on tourism as a principal form of industry” she said. “So it wasn’t just like supplicant Black people. It was nuanced — they could appreciate her devotion to her role while also understanding that the institution to which she was devoted was one that had very real material consequences in their lives.”
Murray, like Vivid, said the queen’s standing shouldn’t insulate the institution of British monarchy from criticism, which Murray said has been building in recent years.
On the day the Elizabeth died, Murray posted a long thread on Twitter trying to explain the complex relationship she and so many other Black people had with the queen. Murray said that while much of the response was positive, she almost immediately received blowback.
Some told her that Elizabeth’s death wasn’t the time to discuss colonialism; some even questioned if she knew what the word colonialism meant.
“I had one person say these people would be walking around with bones in their noses if it weren’t for White people coming to colonize them,” she said.
“I wasn’t saying ‘Let’s dance on her grave’ or anything,” she said. “I felt like you should be able to do two things at once, respect her life and her legacy of service, while also grappling with the fact that the legacy of the institution she represents, and maybe even that she represents, is perhaps more complicated for certain people. I don’t know why so many people are so problematized by the prospect of people of color talking about the very real circumstances in which they live their lives.”
Murray’s post was tame compared with others.
“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying,” Uju Anya, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who is of Nigerian and Trinidadian descent, wrote on Twitter. “May her pain be excruciating.”
The tweet was later deleted by Twitter after an outcry, including by a British tabloid. Leslie Mac, a North Carolina-based political activist and first generation American of Jamaican descent, said that it seemed to her that Black women were attacked for their posts about the queen in ways that others were not.
“They were way more disrespectful things being said on Twitter; Irish Twitter was really going in,” Mac said. “I saw a lot of White male socialists that were speaking out really directly about this, as well. They all didn’t get hate directed at them; it was specifically directed at Black women.”
Murray said the backlash directed at Black women was part of a wider hostility Black women often face when challenging authority.
“It’s all a piece with the antipathy for Meghan Markle,” she said, referring to the Black actress married to the queen’s grandson who was pilloried by the British news media. “It’s like: ‘Why don’t you shut up? Why are you complaining? You’re lucky to be here, just shut up and stop complaining.’”
Mac said that Black people who noted the historical failings of the British empire were trying to correct what she said was a revisionist narrative that was being pushed by many — that the queen was actually a champion of decolonization.
“My grandmother, my great grandmother, to great endangerment to themselves and their families, held clandestine meetings to push for the independence of Jamaica,” she said. “It wasn’t easy. Independence wasn’t just given to them by the queen or her government.”
Mac said that she saw parallels between the blowback and the ongoing fight in the United States over what, and whose, history is passed down.
“It was really unsettling to watch this specific component of white supremacy culture … happening in real time,” she said. “Y’all were really out here telling oppressed people that they needed to have reverence and sympathy for their oppressors.”
Just finished teaching and learned that the Queen passed away peacefully this afternoon at Balmoral. | 2022-09-13T20:42:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Queen Elizabeth's death spurs complex feelings among Black Americans - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/queen-black-americans/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/queen-black-americans/ |
Loveday Morris
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is shown a Gepard antiaircraft gun tank during his visit at a training facility of the arms-maker Krauss-Maffei Wegmann in Oldenburg, Germany, in August. (Morris Macmatzen/Pool/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
But Germany, so far, has been unwilling to grant the request.
Virtually no outside nations have provided tanks to Ukraine, instead sending aging models such as the M113, an armored personnel carrier with tracks that was first fielded by the United States in the 1960s.
Poland and the Czech Republic have provided Ukraine with a few hundred T-72 tanks, a Soviet-era weapon that Ukrainian forces were already familiar with. There is little doubt now that Ukraine could make use of more modern equipment, even if it would require further training.
Days after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, as part of what was seen as a sea-change in the country’s defense policy, Germany said it would send arms. But the government, led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a social democrat, has still agonized over sending heavier weapons, and since then has been criticized for the speed and scope of deliveries.
Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats have historically espoused a policy of detente toward Russia, while Scholz himself is known for an extremely cautious public style.
Germany had initially said it could not spare any of its Marder infantry fighting vehicles, but later pursued a deal to send them to Slovenia instead so the eastern European country could send its own Soviet-era tanks onto Ukraine. This swap system was meant to get tanks to Ukrainian forces more quickly, but those efforts have largely stalled.
Scholz says he is carefully coordinating deliveries with NATO partners. But even among NATO allies there appears to be some frustration with Berlin.
With Europe now painfully weaning itself off Russian oil and gas, Scholz’s government has continued to face criticism for opposing a ban on Russian tourists, and for the limits on its military support for Ukraine.
Ukraine’s current pressure campaign on Germany comes after the latest meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a coalition organized by the Pentagon of dozens of nations providing support to Ukraine. Ukrainian officials, including Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, attended and briefed the group, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said after the gathering.
Germany has defended its record and called attention to its financial and military assistance to Ukraine. In diplomatic and policy circles, however, there is still much talk of Germany’s fading leadership within the E.U. and in European security more broadly.
This summer, Foreign Affairs magazine ran a piece on “Germany’s Ukraine problem.”
“I understand that there is still a certain conservative thinking, there are certain fears, and there is a certain regret about the missed opportunities in the energy sector with the Russian Federation,” Podolyak said. “We all understand this, but there will be no return in the past. And now, in my opinion, is coming a critical moment for Germany when it is necessary to express its real position, the position of the European leader.”
Morris reported from Berlin, Rauhala from Brussels and Lamothe from Washington. | 2022-09-13T21:09:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | To extend offensive, Ukraine demands tanks but says Germany won't help - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/ukraine-tanks-russia-germany-offensive/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/13/ukraine-tanks-russia-germany-offensive/ |
West Virginia becomes 2nd state to pass strict abortion ban post-Roe
Abortion rights protesters chant outside of the West Virginia Senate chambers before a vote on an abortion bill earlier this summer in Charleston. (John Raby/AP)
The West Virginia legislature Tuesday passed a bill to prohibit nearly all abortions, making it the second state to pass a new ban since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in June.
The state Senate passed the bill 22-7, after a brief debate Tuesday. The state House concurred and passed the bill in a 78-17 vote. The ban will take effect 90 days after passage.
West Virginia Republicans moved forward with the strict ban despite signs in other parts of the country that many American voters do not support the Supreme Court’s ruling and largely oppose the harshest restrictions on abortion. A similar effort to pass a near-total abortion ban in South Carolina fizzled out last week, and voters resoundingly rejected a ballot measure in Kansas that would have stripped abortion protections from the state constitution.
Abortion had been legal up to 20 weeks in West Virginia since July, when a state judge blocked a pre-Roe ban that dated back to the 19th century. The state borders several antiabortion strongholds in the Midwest and South, including Ohio and Kentucky. Abortion is legal east of the state line in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
In West Virginia, the Republican-controlled legislature reached a compromise over penalties for doctors who perform illegal abortions that had been a sticking point for some conservative lawmakers. The bill they passed, which now goes to Republican Gov. Jim Justice’s desk, bars abortion from implantation with narrow exceptions to save the pregnant person’s life or in cases of rape or incest, so long as the victim reports the crime.
Justice has indicated that he will sign a bill tightening state restrictions on abortion.
The exceptions for victims of rape or incest limit the procedure to before eight weeks of pregnancy, or 14 weeks for people who are under 18 years old. Doctors who violate the law may lose their medical licenses but will not face criminal penalties. Anyone other than a licensed physician with hospital admitting privileges who performs an abortion faces felony charges and up to five years in prison. Those who receive abortions do not face any penalties.
West Virginians support putting restrictions on abortion more than voters in most other states. A 2018 referendum on a constitutional amendment affirming that “nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to abortion or requires funding of abortions” passed with the support of about 52 percent of voters.
But some lawmakers raised concerns that harsh criminal penalties could drive doctors, especially obstetricians, out of the state at a time when some regions are known to be “maternity deserts” that already face physician shortages.
“You’re not concerned we could lose docs who are practicing OB because of this?” state Senate Minority Leader Stephen Baldwin (D) asked after the amended version of the bill was introduced, referring to obstetrics. He also questioned why the Senate was choosing to vote on the new language without giving physicians a chance to weigh in.
“We’ve had a lot of time where we could have involved docs, but now, today, we’re going to vote on this … and they haven’t had time to read it,” Baldwin said.
State Sen. Tom Takubo (R), who opposed the earlier version of the bill and advocated to remove criminal penalties for doctors, said he believed the new language addressed physicians’ fears that they could be prosecuted for trying to save the life of a patient suffering from a life-threatening pregnancy complication.
“I think once they read what is in this amendment, they will feel comfortable,” he said. “I feel this protects those physicians who are not trying to violate the law.”
Some antiabortion Republican senators opposed the amended bill because they felt it did not go far enough in limiting abortion.
“I’m confident that this bill shuts down the abortion clinic,” said state Sen. Eric Tarr (R), who urged his colleagues to vote no on the new language because he said it carved out too many exceptions.
“I’m also torn and disappointed that my vote now is to decide when do you execute an innocent,” he added. “If life is sacred, when does it become sacred?”
About 100 protesters gathered outside the Senate chamber Tuesday to oppose the bill and could be heard inside the state Capitol as senators discussed the bill. Some observers in the Senate gallery briefly disrupted the body after the amended bill was introduced, shouting their dissent.
Even though West Virginians broadly support some restrictions on abortion, advocates for abortion access say the bill is still at odds with the will of the state’s voters.
Some members of the state House proposed backing away from the bill and instead posing the question directly to voters. They brought up the ballot measure rejected in Kansas last month and suggested West Virginia voters might surprise lawmakers at the polls.
West Virginia’s governor has dismissed suggestions that voters should decide the state’s abortion laws directly.
“Coming down from the U.S. Supreme Court, this is the responsibility of our legislature and our attorney general,” Justice said in August.
Justice called legislators back to the West Virginia Capitol for a special session to consider more stringent abortion restrictions in July.
Days later, the state House passed an initial version of a near-total ban. But the bill stalled after the state Senate became gridlocked over criminal penalties for doctors performing illegal abortions that included fines and prison time. The Senate eventually passed a bill that stripped away many of the penalties for doctors, but the House refused to concur.
State senators and House delegates spent more than a month trying to reach a compromise that could get the bill passed in both chambers. Ultimately, the two chambers managed to find common ground and Tuesday passed the new version of the bill, without criminal penalties for doctors.
Earlier this year, Indiana lawmakers passed the first new abortion ban since the fall of Roe. | 2022-09-13T21:35:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | West Virginia lawmakers pass abortion ban - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/13/west-virginia-abortion-ban/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/13/west-virginia-abortion-ban/ |
Ken Starr in 1998. (John C. Garofalo/FTWP)
Starr used his role as independent counsel to move well beyond the initial investigations into real estate transactions in Arkansas during Clinton’s time as that state’s attorney general in the late 1970s and later as governor. The inquests led to questions over suspect perjury by President Bill Clinton over a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinksy.
Clinton was impeached in December 1998 by the House, but was found “not guilty” by the Senate.
After the Clinton impeachment, Starr would become president of Baylor University in Texas. But in May 2016, Baylor removed Starr as president of the university after an investigation found that the college had mishandled accusations of sexual assault against its football players. Starr remained as chancellor and professor of law. The university also fired its football coach, Art Briles.
“I am very sorry to learn of the passing of my friend Judge Ken Starr. He was a brilliant litigator, an impressive leader, and a devoted patriot,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) | 2022-09-13T21:36:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ken Starr, who led Whitewater investigation into Clinton administration, dies at 76 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/13/ken-starr-whitewater-clinton-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/13/ken-starr-whitewater-clinton-dies/ |
The stunning drop in child poverty is a huge story
“My friends, some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won,” Ronald Reagan declared in his State of the Union address in 1988. he lamented that “government created a poverty trap” that discouraged people from lifting themselves up.
Then as now, it was an idea driven by an ideology that says the government should do as little as possible to help people who are struggling. Then as now, it was refuted by facts.
As a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows, we did something extraordinary during the worst parts of the covid-19 pandemic: In the midst of a crisis that affected every part of our society and could have been economically calamitous, we drove poverty down. As economically painful as the crisis was, the aggressive public spending passed across the Trump and Biden presidencies dramatically mitigated the hardship Americans suffered.
Using just-released figures from the Census, the group reports the results of the pandemic stimulus measures in 2021. In particular, the study looked at the expansion of the Child Tax Credit, which was altered to give monthly payments to eligible families, including those with incomes too low to have income tax liability:
The expanded Child Tax Credit alone kept 5.3 million people above the annual poverty line and helped drive a stunning reduction in child poverty to a record low. Poverty overall also reached a record low and the uninsured rate dropped substantially, with Medicaid and Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace coverage reaching or nearing record highs.
The effect on minority groups was particularly dramatic: “in 2018 nearly 1 in 4 Black children lived in families with incomes below the poverty line. In 2021, fewer than 1 in 10 did.”
It’s important to remember that we define “poverty” as a line one can be over or under. The fact that a family has a bit more income than where that line is placed doesn’t mean they don’t struggle to make ends meet.
But government assistance can mean the difference between a family having enough to eat or not, and being able to pay the rent and utilities or becoming homeless. And it’s clear that antipoverty spending has had a tremendous impact.
This week the New York Times reported comprehensive data showing that over the past three decades, child poverty has declined dramatically, down from 28 percent of American children in 1993 to 11 percent in 2019. Much of the credit goes to the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, which give significant benefits to low-income Americans.
Now here’s the bad news: Sadly, the expanded CTC expired at the end of 2021. Almost all Democrats in Congress wanted to extend the expansion, but Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) refused; he reportedly told colleagues he worried that parents would use the money to buy drugs. Without that extra income, millions of children fell back into poverty in 2022.
That only reinforces what a success story pandemic relief was — even if some of its effects were temporary.
These data are also important for another reason. They undercut conservative arguments that such government help must be accompanied with work requirements, lest it incentivize recipients to slip into a “hammock” of “dependency,” as one wretched formulation of the idea has it.
Arloc Sherman, the vice president for data analysis and research at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, points out that this dramatic drop in child poverty was achieved without work requirements while also being accompanied by widespread voluntary return to work by parents.
“There was a huge decline in child poverty and a very large increase in parents working year round without any work requirements,” Sherman told us. “We did not need to require the parents to work.”
In practice, work requirements often wind up being little more than a weaponization of bureaucracy against poor people, forcing them to spend enormous amounts of time and energy satisfying paperwork requirements, with the threat of their benefits being withdrawn if they make a mistake.
Ultimately, however, the most important lesson may be this: We can choose to make our economic arrangements fairer. We can make collective decisions that children shouldn’t be disadvantaged at a very young age through no fault of their own.
Making the choice to alleviate poverty early in people’s lives, many economists agree, puts children on a path to becoming healthier, happier, more fulfilled, more productive adults. We have perpetually failed to make that choice, but this time, we did make it, and it worked.
“We decided that we could actually try things,” Sherman told us.
Unfortunately, thanks largely to a certain senator from West Virginia, Democratic majorities in Congress were unable to continue the expanded CTC. But the drop in child poverty is a very big story, and if Democrats can somehow hold those majorities, its legacy should ensure that we don’t make that absurd and unnecessary mistake again. | 2022-09-13T21:57:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The stunning drop in poverty is a huge story. We should build on it - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/poverty-decline-pandemic-relief/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/poverty-decline-pandemic-relief/ |
Mainstream Democrats romped in the primaries. Republicans went full MAGA.
Primary voters at a polling place in Chesterfield, N.H., on Sept. 13. (Kristopher Radder/The Brattleboro Reformer/AP)
The 2022 primary season has come to an end — and with it so should any claims that our politics is afflicted by “polarization.”
In both parties, ideological forces did indeed try to pull the center of gravity toward the extremes. But the results were sharply different. In the GOP, the hard right prevailed, very much confirming the impression of a MAGA takeover of the party. In the Democratic primaries, the hard left was a nonentity, and the mainstream triumphed overwhelmingly; for all the chatter about the Squad, socialists, “Defund the Police,” “Abolish ICE,” “Medicare-for-all” and the “Green New Deal,” candidates who self-identified with such views barely registered.
An exhaustive study of all primary contestants for the House and Senate, done by a team led by Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution, categorized the 2,362 candidates (of which 1,397 were Republican) by endorsements, self-proclaimed ideology and use of hot-button phrases. On the Democratic side, only 28 percent of candidates approvingly used left-wing phrases on their websites (Defund, Medicare-for-all, Green New Deal, etc.) or received an endorsement from either Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a member of the Squad, or the left-wing groups Justice for All, Our Revolution or Indivisible. Of the nearly three-quarters of Democratic candidates who had none of the above, about half won their primaries. By contrast, 41 percent of Republican candidates approvingly mentioned former president Donald Trump, MAGA or America First, or had a Trump endorsement or a Trump photo on their websites. Fifty-nine percent of Republicans had none of those — but such candidates prevailed only 30 percent of the time.
The upshot, Kamarck tells me, is that the majority of Republican nominees on the November ballot are MAGA adherents, while the vast majority of Democratic nominees do not identify with left-wing figures or causes.
Looking at it another way, the Brookings researchers found that 36 percent of GOP primary candidates identified themselves as MAGA Republicans, whereas only 1.5 percent of Democrats identified as socialists. And of the 13 candidates nationwide who called themselves democratic socialists, only five won, all in safely blue districts.
“The bottom line here is the left in the Democratic Party is simply not as strong as the right is within the Republican Party,” says Kamarck, a veteran of the Clinton White House who also teaches at Harvard University. The results don’t include Tuesday’s final round of primaries, but there weren’t enough contests to change the overall results much.
The findings put the lie to the Republican caricature of Democrats as a bunch of radical socialists. They also show that the far left is something of a paper tiger, with disproportionate influence on social media and within urban Democratic powerhouses but with a relatively small constituency in the party nationwide.
Though years of decisions by Republican leaders have empowered extremists in the party, the asymmetric dominance of the far right in the GOP (compared to the far left in the Democratic Party) is also a matter of arithmetic: There are simply more right-wingers. For four decades, almost twice as many Americans have identified as conservatives as have called themselves liberals. Though use of the “liberal” label has ticked up a bit (thanks in part to such popular figures as Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York), “it turns out not to be very attractive to the [Democratic] electorate at large,” Kamarck argues. By contrast, “Republicans simply have a better chance of getting to victory with a base strategy than the Democrats do.”
The Brookings analysis is consistent with other studies showing limited electoral clout on the far left. An Axios report at the end of July found that moderate candidates won 14 of 22 congressional primaries when challenged by progressive candidates in competitive seats.
But there’s also potentially hopeful news in here for the return of a sane Republican Party: Three in 5 Republican primary candidates had no mention of Trump or MAGA on their websites, no Trump endorsement and no photo of Trump. Those candidates had a poor winning record, but their very presence indicates that many Republicans are hoping for their party’s fever to break.
The results also show that incumbent lawmakers have less to fear from primary contests than they may think. Such challenges have been on the rise in both parties (64 percent of incumbents up for reelection faced one this cycle), but only 15 of 284 incumbents facing primaries lost to challengers — and nearly half of those were in cases in which redistricting caused incumbents to face each other in primaries.
With a bit more courage, Republican lawmakers might discover that they don’t have to be held hostage by extremists. | 2022-09-13T21:57:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Mainstream Democrats dominated primaries. So did MAGA Republicans. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/primary-results-polarization-far-right/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/primary-results-polarization-far-right/ |
Why a visit to a maximum-security South Carolina prison gave me hope
Violinist Jennifer Curtis and cellist Claire Bryant perform at Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, S.C. (Provided by South Carolina Department of Corrections)
Since then, Stirling has decreased the prison population by about 30 percent and can boast the lowest recidivism rate in the country, at about 20 percent. He has almost doubled officers’ starting salaries to $50,000. He has instituted programs in job training and interview techniques and, in direct response to the riots that occurred under his watch, created the Academy of Hope, where inmates from prisons around the state, many of them former gang members, go to learn communications and other skills to help them stanch the violence. | 2022-09-13T21:57:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Why a visit to Lee Correctional Institution gave me hope - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/south-carolina-maximum-security-prison-hope/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/south-carolina-maximum-security-prison-hope/ |
WASHINGTON — Twitter’s former security chief told Congress Tuesday there was “at least one agent” from China’s intelligence service on Twitter’s payroll — and that the company knowingly allowed India to add agents to the company roster as well. These were some of the troubling revelations from Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, a respected cybersecurity expert and Twitter whistleblower who appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to lay out his allegations against the company. Zatko, who was fired earlier this year, said Twitter’s leadership is “misleading the public, lawmakers, regulators and even its own board of directors.”
LONDON — Just days after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, unofficial souvenirs have rolled out at royal-themed gift shops in London and online marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy. One shop near Buckingham Palace says it pushed its suppliers to work overnight to get mementos ready by Saturday, just two days after the death of Britain’s longest-serving monarch. Now, people have the option to buy fridge magnets, flags, mugs and T-shirts with the queen’s likeness and the dates of her 70-year reign. Some shops say items depicting the new monarch, King Charles III, are on their way. Official merchandise will take longer to arrive to approved vendors, who have suspended sales of royal souvenirs out of respect for the mourning period.
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden has gathered a crowd at the White House to celebrate last month’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. But that’s as a new government report on Tuesday showed how hard it could be to return inflation to prepandemic levels. Despite its name, the law’s impact on inflation is expected to be modest at best. Although gasoline costs have declined since June, the price of housing and food remain especially high in a way that suggests there will be further Federal Reserve interest rate hikes and more economic pain to bring down prices. ___
SEATTLE — Starbucks plans to spend $450 million next year to make its North American stores more efficient and less complex. The company also said it plans to open 2,000 net new stores in the U.S. by 2025. The emphasis will be on meeting the growing demand for drive-thru and delivery. Starbucks recently saw the best week for sales in its 51-year history when it introduced its latest fall drinks. But it says stores need better equipment to make drinks more quickly. Among the things driving the revamp is an ongoing unionization effort, which Starbucks opposes. More than 230 U.S. stores have voted to unionize since late last year.
UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. says food exports from Ukraine and Russia have increased since a July 22 grain deal, but critically needed fertilizer exports from Russia are still down despite the agreement. Insurance, financing and shipping remain issues. U.N. trade chief Rebeca Grynspan, said Tuesday that Russia reported a 12% increase in food exports from June to July. But she said while there has been “important progress,” the U.N. is concerned about fertilizer exports needed by October-November for the northern hemisphere planting season. She warned of a “catastrophic crisis” if fertilizer remains unaffordable for many.
LYNN, Mass. — The largest union representing General Electric Co. workers says it’s reached a tentative deal with the company to speed up pay raises for workers at a Massachusetts aviation plant. Under the agreement, workers at GE’s facility in Lynn would be eligible for raises sooner and could reach the top pay rate after six years, instead of up to 10 under the old system. GE has already implemented an accelerated raise schedule at plants in New Hampshire and Vermont. IUE-CWA Local 201, the union that negotiated the deal, called it a “massive win” for workers. | 2022-09-13T22:10:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Business Highlights: Wall Street downdraft, inflation report - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-wall-street-downdraft-inflation-report/2022/09/13/1c1d376a-33ad-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/business-highlights-wall-street-downdraft-inflation-report/2022/09/13/1c1d376a-33ad-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
How the Starr Report became a literary bodice ripper — and bestseller
By Michael S. Rosenwald
Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr holds a copy of his report while testifying on Capitol Hill on Nov. 19, 1998, before the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment hearing. Starr, whose criminal investigation of Bill Clinton led to the president’s impeachment, died Sept. 13, 2022. He was 76. (Doug Mills/AP)
On Jan. 26, 1998, President Bill Clinton stood at a White House lectern and told the world, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” The fact check of Clinton’s statement took place over a period of months, in both media leaks and legal depositions, culminating in the fall of 1998 with the publication of a bodice ripper with an unusually long title.
The title was:
Communication from the Office of the Independent Counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, transmitting appendices to the referral to the United States House of Representatives pursuant to Title 28, United States Code, section 595(c)
When publishers in New York rushed out copies to America’s bookstores (which still widely existed), they shortened the title to “The Starr Report,” which was easier to market. And that was exactly the point — to turn a prosecutorial document into a Danielle Steele novel.
Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who investigated Clinton for years, died Tuesday, leaving behind a long and complicated legacy. But nothing he did would leave a mark quite like his 475-page report.
Starr expressed surprise when his report shot up bestseller lists around the world. But historians, political analysts and literary critics were hardly bewildered by the book’s success, for two main reasons.
First, the writers he chose.
Starr turned to two experienced lawyers/authors on his staff to write the bulk of the report, including Stephen Bates, who already had written several books and contributed to magazines such as the New Republic and Playboy before penning the ultimate Penthouse Letter.
Which leads to the second reason — the writing itself.
Readers, including professional readers like book critics and actual authors, immediately noticed the report had an unusual tone and structure. “The prose, far from a dry, factual recitation, contained rich, erotic details of the sort we expect from a book-club romance,” wrote Daniel M. Filler, a prominent law professor, in a California Law Review article.
Here is but one example:
En route to the restroom at about 8 p.m., she passed George Stephanopoulos’s office. The President was inside alone, and he beckoned her to enter. She told him that she had a crush on him. He laughed, then asked if she would like to see his private office. Through a connecting door in Mr. Stephanopoulos’s office, they went through the President’s private dining room toward the study off the Oval Office. Ms. Lewinsky testified: “We talked briefly and sort of acknowledged that there had been a chemistry that was there before and that we were both attracted to each other and then he asked me if he could kiss me.” Ms. Lewinsky said yes. In the windowless hallway adjacent to the study, they kissed. Before returning to her desk, Ms. Lewinsky wrote down her name and telephone number for the President. At about 10 p.m., in Ms. Lewinsky’s recollection, she was alone in the Chief of Staff’s office and the President approached. He invited her to rendezvous again in Mr. Stephanopoulos’s office in a few minutes, and she agreed. (Asked if she knew why the President wanted to meet with her, Ms. Lewinsky testified: “I had an idea.”) They met in Mr. Stephanopoulos’s office and went again to the area of the private study. This time the lights in the study were off.
This time!
You might be wondering what happened next. Not to worry — the writers do not leave their audience hanging: “She and the President kissed. She unbuttoned her jacket; either she unhooked her bra or he lifted her bra up; and he touched her breasts with his hands and mouth.”
There was, ahem, more to that little moment.
In addition to the clumsy, awkward sex, there were also clear attempts by the authors to establish Clinton and Lewinsky as literary characters, with hopes and dreams and even favorite books. (Clinton gave Lewinsky a copy of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” which immediately also shot up the bestseller lists.) The writers even employed the old show-don’t-tell rule, meaning they used precise details to establish tension and character.
Classic narrative understatement. A problem. Um, yeah. But what kind of problem? Boss sleeping with intern? President sleeping with intern? Intern doesn’t have the proper pass to be with the president, clothed or unclothed? Readers would have to use their imaginations.
And keep reading.
Critics were not impressed.
“Every time we see Clinton he’s unzipped, and every time we see Monica she’s got her mouth open,” the esteemed writer Cynthia Ozick told the Los Angeles Times. “The narrator is dark, but there’s no introspection, as there would be in a Hawthorne novel. If you want to view this as a literary tale, there’s no search for meaning or a higher truth.”
‘Dear Bill’: The classy letters left in the Oval Office from one president to another
The novelist Pam Houston read it differently. This wasn’t really about sex at all. It was deeper.
“These are people in real pain, like millions of other people in this country, and they need our compassion,” Houston said. “If you read carefully, this is the tale of two slightly overweight people who desperately need to be validated.”
While members on opposite sides of the aisle in Congress did not agree about nearly anything in the report, it seems safe to assume that neither party was sympathetic to the validation interpretation. (We can’t say for sure because the minutes of congressional book clubs are not a matter of public record.)
One armchair reviewer piped up to bemoan a review that compared Starr’s report to work by the late novelist Harold Robbins.
“Contrary to what your biased review indicates, this is not a book at all,” the Amazon reviewer wrote. “It is a comprehensive report to Congress.”
Maybe, but it had a pretty gripping epilogue: Less than a month later, the president was impeached.
A version of this story originally ran on Jan. 26, 2018. | 2022-09-13T22:10:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Kenneth Starr's report became a bodice ripper and bestseller - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/09/13/starr-report-kenneth-death-clinton/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/09/13/starr-report-kenneth-death-clinton/ |
Biden and Kennedys: Ties of Catholicism, power and tragedy
Biden’s visit to the JFK Library this week highlighted the links between the nation’s only two Catholic presidents
Then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden speaks with Sen. Edward Kennedy during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork in 1987. (John Duricka/AP)
President Biden stood in the atrium at the John F. Kennedy Library this week, speaking about his “cancer moonshot” initiative, when he quoted from a letter that the patriarch of the Kennedy family once sent to console another father who had lost a son.
“You think of what he might have done with a few more years, and you wonder what you’re going to do with the rest of yours,” the letter from Joseph P. Kennedy said. “Then one day, because there is a world to be lived in, you find yourself a part of it again, trying to accomplish something — something he did not have time enough to do.”
Left unsaid was how personal those sentiments were to Biden himself. In many ways, he was standing there to urge a renewed fight against cancer as a testament to his own late son, Beau. A chief motivator for Biden’s presidential run, he has said, was to honor a promise to Beau to remain active in public life. And one of the primary ways Biden has tried to honor Beau is to find a cure for the kind of cancer that killed him.
“I give you my word as a Biden,” Biden said earlier in this speech. “This cancer moonshot is one of the reasons why I ran for president.”
But the poignancy of the moment was also in the ties between Biden and the Kennedy family. Part of that is a notable echo between the nation’s first Irish Catholic president (Kennedy, the youngest president) and its second (Biden, the oldest).
Beyond that, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, John’s brother, entered the Senate at age 30, and Biden joined him a decade later, also at age 30, to begin a long friendship and partnership. Ted Kennedy not only showed Biden the ropes — regularly trekking to Biden’s office in Dirksen Senate Office Building — but embodied for Biden the way the Senate should run.
Like many Democrats of a certain era, Biden traces his interest in politics to John F. Kennedy. He was a senior in high school when Kennedy became president, and almost immediately saw similarities, but also differences.
“It’s not like the Kennedys had a lot in common with the Bidens. Kennedy’s father was one of the richest and best-known men in the country,” Biden wrote in his book “Promises to Keep.” “I’d seen the pictures. I knew Hyannisport didn’t look much like Mayfield. Senator Kennedy appealed to me in spite of his money.”
Biden recalled hearing in John F. Kennedy’s speeches and his ideas the same lessons that he had learned from nuns in Catholic school, spurring his interest in a political career.
When Biden first ran for Senate in 1972, his mother hosted “coffees” that were modeled on a Kennedy family technique, even bringing in an old Kennedy hand, Matt Reese, who had helped organize the events for the family.
Biden is hardly alone among Democrats in emphasizing a connection with the party’s most storied family. Bill Clinton’s campaign circulated a photo of him as a young man shaking JFK’s hand. Barack Obama also embraced the Kennedy legacy, and Sen. Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of his young colleague marked a turning point in Obama’s presidential campaign.
But for Biden, the ties are especially stark — not least because Biden, like John F. Kennedy, had to contend with questions about his Catholicism while seeking the presidency. When Kennedy ran in 1960, he had to assure voters he would not answer to the Pope; Biden, for his part, drew attention for deviating from Catholic doctrine, especially on abortion.
JFK's meeting with the Pope foreshadowed Biden's
On Monday, Biden told a story about Ted Kennedy coming to stump for him, one of the biggest campaign events of his first race.
“There were, I don’t know, 6, 7,000 people assembled at St. Anthony’s,” Biden said. “And he stood up and he said, ‘I like Joe Biden a lot. I like him a lot. He’ll be a good — he’ll be very good in the United States Senate. The problem is I think he’s a little too young.’ ”
It was a self-deprecating quip about Ted Kennedy’s own age; he had entered the Senate amid questions about his own youth and whether he had benefited from his family name. But Biden said some newspapers missed the joke, intentionally or not, publishing headlines like “Kennedy says Biden too young to be in the Senate.”
Biden has recalled that after he won, Ted Kennedy took him under his wing, convincing him to come to the Senate dining room to learn the ways of bipartisan dealmaking, or spend time in the Senate gym, leading to awkward moments. (“They were all as naked as the day they were born,” Biden recalled in his book. “I tried hard to keep eye contact, but I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to say.”)
Biden and Ted Kennedy grew close, at times with overlapping ambitions. Biden is the one who warned President Jimmy Carter that Kennedy was going to mount a Democratic primary challenge in 1980. He was later approached as a possible consensus candidate if Kennedy and Carter so bruised one another that Democrats wanted another nominee.
Biden’s own 1988 presidential campaign was derailed by accusations of plagiarism, including a charge that he had lifted some of Robert F. Kennedy’s lines without attribution. At one point, Ted Kennedy sent Biden a note to remind him there was life after a presidential campaign, as he knew from his own painful experience.
At another moment, when Biden was recovering from an aneurysm, Ted Kennedy took the train to Wilmington, Del., to visit him, bringing an etching of a big Irish stag that he’d had framed.
“Every important event in my adult life ... every single one, he was there,” Biden said in emotional remarks after Ted Kennedy died in 2009. “He was there to encourage, to counsel, to be empathetic, to lift up.”
The letter that Biden cited on Monday was written in 1958 by Joseph P. Kennedy, a businessman and U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom. Kennedy had sent the letter 14 years after he had lost his oldest son and namesake in World War II and 10 years after his oldest daughter, Kathleen, had died in an airplane crash.
Unbeknown to the Kennedy patriarch, he was also writing five years before he would lose a second son, President Kennedy, and 10 years before a third, Robert Kennedy, would be struck down.
Joe Biden and the politics of grief
The letter was often cited by Ted Kennedy, who quoted from it in Northern Ireland during a 1998 speech calling for peace.
Biden said in Monday’s remarks that Ted Kennedy’s widow, Victoria, had sent him the quote after Beau died. Ted Kennedy himself had died six years earlier of the same type of fast-moving brain tumor as Beau.
“For so many of us, that’s what we’re trying to do,” Biden said on Monday. “Live a life worthy of the loved ones we’ve lost and the loved ones we can save, with their hope and absolute courage, and with an unwillingness to postpone and with a singular purpose for ourselves and as a nation.”
There is no member of the famed Kennedy family currently in Congress, a rare interval in the decades since John F. Kennedy was elected to the House in 1946. (John Kennedy, the Republican senator from Louisiana, is not related).
During his remarks, Biden addressed Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of the late president and son of Caroline Kennedy, currently Biden’s ambassador to Australia.
“Jack, I believe your generation is the best-educated, most talented generation in our history,” Biden said. “And that’s the reason I’m so optimistic about the future, and that’s not hyperbole.” | 2022-09-13T22:11:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden and the Kennedys: ties of Catholicism, power and tragedy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/biden-kennedy-ties-catholic-tragedy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/13/biden-kennedy-ties-catholic-tragedy/ |
An elf with a mean stiff-arm will take center stage for the Browns
A happier-looking Brownie the Elf has been a part of Cleveland's game-day experience for several years. (David Richard/AP)
To paraphrase the immortal Vince Lombardi: What the elf is going on out here?
Well, what is going on the very center of the Cleveland Browns’ field at FirstEnergy Stadium is a logo. Of an Elf.
Brownie the Elf, to be specific.
As the Browns indicated Tuesday in social media posts, the logo was voted into existence by the team’s fans, who had been given four choices in July for a midfield logo. Two were versions of Brownie that had been used in the past, including one showing him smiling and in a less aggressive pose. The other two were versions of the team’s helmet.
The Browns did not provide a breakdown of the voting, but they said the fan poll “generated an overwhelming response.”
“We’re super excited about the new midfield logo,” Browns executive vice president and partner JW Johnson said in a statement. “We really wanted to engage our fans in the process, and they are — as I’ve said multiple times — undefeated. They’re the best in the league, best in the NFL and, candidly, some of the best in sports. We really wanted to get their involvement and hear what they have to say.”
The Browns have not had a midfield logo at home games since 2016, and there were the only NFL team without one. Previously, the team painted a Browns helmet at midfield.
Brownie the Elf, meanwhile, dates all the way back to the club’s dominant late-1940s run in the All-America Football Conference. According to multiple accounts of the mascot’s history, it began to fall out of favor when former owner Art Modell took over the franchise in 1961. When the Browns were reborn in 1999 following Modell’s relocation of his team to Baltimore (rebranding as the Ravens and leaving the franchise’s history behind in Cleveland), Brownie started to stage a comeback.
Program cover from #Browns first game against the Miami Seahawks played Sept. 6, 1946 pic.twitter.com/52ZHYk3gmF
Unfortunately for Cleveland fans, neither a feisty elf nor anyone else has been able to conjure enough magic to keep their beloved NFL team from being mostly terrible over the past two-plus decades. The Browns have been the butt of countless jokes from opposing fan bases, and the new midfield logo is certain to elicit a fair amount of derision.
At the same time, its whimsical nature and authentically retro look figure to attract admirers well beyond Northeast Ohio.
“We love the helmet logo, but Brownie has been around for a long time,” Johnson said in his statement. “I think people enjoy him, and we haven’t really showcased him as much as we’d like to. … It’s been well-received.” | 2022-09-13T23:37:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | An elf with a mean stiff-arm will take center stage for the Browns - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/an-elf-with-mean-stiff-arm-will-take-center-stage-browns/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/an-elf-with-mean-stiff-arm-will-take-center-stage-browns/ |
By Samuel Oakford
A Ukrainian soldier stands on top of an abandoned Russian tank near a village on the outskirts of Izyum, in the Kharkiv region, on Sept. 11. (Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images)
“The abandonment started from the Russian side pretty quickly once it became clear that the highways and the railway connection north were cut off,” Bronk said.
Video posted by the Ukrainian military on Sept. 11 shows abandoned Russian tanks near Izyum, after Ukrainian forces recaptured parts of the Kharkiv region. (Video: Telegram)
Video filmed by approaching Ukrainian forces on the edge of Izyum is notable for what it shows — and doesn’t show.
The state of the equipment at the site is unclear, though much of it appears to lack significant damage. “You and I get a tank,” someone can be heard saying. “We all get a tank each.”
After Russia captured Izyum, video posted online and satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showed military vehicles at the same site — indicating it may have been used as an equipment hub.
In the video posted Sunday, several tanks and armored personnel carriers are dispersed throughout a wooded area. They appear to be assembled in a circular formation, allowing 360 degrees of visibility, said retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army Europe. It’s possible Russian forces stopped for fuel or were waiting for a mission when they fled, Hodges said.
“If you get out of the tank to escape, it’s because you think the tank is a target,” Hodges said.
“Some of them are no doubt reasonably functional,” he said. “You would expect at a major staging point that there would be quite a lot of equipment that is there specifically because it was damaged or needed servicing.”
Video that circulated on Sept. 11 showed an abandoned 2S19 MSTA-S artillery vehicle on a street in Izyum. (Video: Twitter)
Video shared online after Ukraine's capture of Izyum shows the remnants of a TOS-1A a multiple rocket launcher on a street in the city. (Video: TikTok)
Ukrainian forces published a video showing the husk of a TOS-1A, a multiple-rocket launcher, using its nickname “Solntsepyok.”
“Oh, sunshine!” he says in the video.
Laris Karklis contributed to this report. | 2022-09-13T23:42:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | See the weapons Russian troops abandoned in Izyum, Ukraine - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/09/13/russia-retreat-abandoned-weapons-izyum/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/09/13/russia-retreat-abandoned-weapons-izyum/ |
Queen Elizabeth II stood for continuity until it was too late to change. (Jane Barlow/Pool/AP)
She ascended to the throne in 1953 wearing a coronation gown that was fairytale-like in its extravagance. Created by Norman Hartnell, it was embroidered with silver and pearls and paid homage to the national emblems of Great Britain and the countries of the Commonwealth. The young Queen Elizabeth II, not long out of her teenage years, with the glow of youth and a tinkling bell of a voice, pledged her life to duty. The mythology of her exceptionalism, with all the accompanying custom-made accoutrements, spoke of privilege at a time when such a concept was not under broad interrogation. She spent a lifetime upholding the past with her brightly colored suits and dresses and her matching hats. Her attire was optimistic, formal and authoritative; it did not speak of dominance by brute force in the way that a military uniform would. Her enduring image is that of a pleasant church lady, not of a soldier, a table-pounding tyrant or a browbeating aristocrat.
The royal funeral was a reminder of the value of rituals
Live updates: Twitter shareholders approve Elon Musk’s takeover deal | 2022-09-13T23:42:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | After a lifetime of vivid symbolism, Queen Elizabeth II faded to gray - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/13/after-lifetime-vivid-symbolism-queen-elizabeth-ii-faded-gray/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/13/after-lifetime-vivid-symbolism-queen-elizabeth-ii-faded-gray/ |
Javier Marías, celebrated Spanish author, dies at 70
His books sold nearly 9 million copies around the world with intricate and multilayered plots of crime, espionage and moral quandaries
Javier Marías in Madrid in 2015. (J P Gandul/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Javier Marías, a renowned Spanish author who used multilayered plots and complex literary structures to explore the labyrinths of spy craft, smoldering obsessions and the tipping points between commitment and betrayal, died Sept. 11 at his home in Madrid. He was 70.
His death was announced by his Madrid-based publisher, Alfaguara, citing pneumonia as the cause.
Mr. Marías’s body of work — more than 15 novels and collections of short stories and essays — was hugely popular in the Spanish-speaking world and translated into dozens of languages including English. He sold nearly 9 million copies, led by his three-book spy saga “Your Face Tomorrow” often regarded as his masterwork.
He remained, however, lesser known in the United States despite having American connections from his father’s university posts and receiving reviews that often placed him among celebrated contemporary authors such as Orhan Pamuk, J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster.
The overriding themes of Mr. Marías’s novels ranged widely: murder mysteries, international espionage, family secrets and more. He could keep it light or go graphically violent. Yet all his novels had a heavy overlay of emotional and moral fog that left the characters — sometimes interpreters and translators like he was once in real life — trying to grope their way ahead.
“He wrote thrillers like a poet,” said a tribute to the author in the Guardian.
Mr. Marías often spoke of memory as having its own intrinsic weight. The past is always pressing on the present, he told interviewers. It can be as personal as a remembered conversation. Or as collective as the repression of the dictatorship led by Gen. Francisco Franco in Spain from 1939 to 1975.
He built his prose like a scaffolding to hold up the heaviness of the memories, decisions and quandaries of his characters. He could craft sentences that ran for hundreds of words. Adjectives and adverbs sprout everywhere. He could veer off into rabbit-hole digressions that could wend for dozens of pages.
In “Your Face Tomorrow,” a three-volume, 1,274-page spy tale first released in Spanish as “Tu Rostro Mañana” between 2002 and 2007, Mr. Marías takes 150 pages to fully unfold a scene in which someone is nearly killed by a sword.
“A description is also a digression and so is dialogue,” he said in 2017. “You could do without any of those things. To write is precisely that, to delve and to digress.”
That style mostly always worked, giving Mr. Marías a reputation as a virtuoso storyteller whose canvas was much larger than the story itself in the mold of Marcel Proust or Herman Melville.
“As in the best novels and most successful magicians’ acts, one comes away heavy with emotion, wondering how in the world he pulled it off,” said a 1997 review in the Sydney Morning Herald of the English translation of “Un Corazón Tan Blanco,” or “A Heart So White,” an elliptical plot in which an interpreter comes to realize he barely understands his family or himself.
This kind of onion-peel plot was Mr. Marías’s favorite ground. His main characters often confronted moral ambiguities and crossroads. In the epic “Your Face Tomorrow” — a reference to Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” when elder son Hal begins to realize that he is turning against his former companions — a Spanish translator is recruited by British intelligence but later questions his role as interpreter and everything the spy cell stands for.
His imagined worlds straddled between the moral grayness of John le Carré’s spy novels and the allegorical sweep of Miguel de Cervantes’s “Don Quixote.” Fiction, he said, can be more reliable than reality to getting nearer to truths.
John le Carré, who lift spy novels to literature, dies at 89
“The only things that can be fully told, without rectification, without the possibility of someone saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no. That’s not the way it was,’ is fiction,” Mr. Marías told the Danish arts website Louisiana Channel in 2018.
In his own life, Mr. Marías also presented many sides.
He professed government-skeptic libertarian views, but praised how the European Union helped Spain became “a normal European country” after the dictatorship. He sometimes supported the national accord, the “pacto de olvido,” or pact of forgetting, after Franco’s death that blocked blame-casting over his regime for decades; other times, he questioned whether the pact left the country in a psychological straitjacket.
In Madrid, he rented two nearly identical apartments near Plaza Mayor. One had dark furniture, the other had the same decor in white. A Paris Review journalist wrote that both were cluttered with stacks of books, DVDs of American movies (many starring comedian Jerry Lewis), and TV series including “Bonanza” and “Friends.”
He liked to playfully note that his own literary journey began in Paris’s decidedly non-chic side during the summer of 1967 helping his filmmaker uncle, Jesús Franco, who churned out mostly low-budget flicks such as “In the Castle of Bloody Lust” and “Marquis de Sade: Justine” starring Jack Palance and Klaus Kinski. The B-movie settings became the backdrop for Mr. Marías’s first novel, “Los Dominios del Lobo” (“The Domains of the Wolf”) in 1971.
Mr. Marías took some fun in being “king” of the imaginary monarchy of Redonda, a real uninhabited Caribbean island in Antigua and Barbuda that was once self-declared a “kingdom” by an eccentric shipping magnate in the late 19th century.
Redonda has become a sort of whimsical realm for authors, artists and others who create what is widely called an “intellectual aristocracy.” Mr. Marías became “Xavier I” in 1997 after the abdication of British author Jon Wynne-Tyson, who had once visited the island. Mr. Marías never got around to it.
“I have never been monarchic,” he joked in a tongue-in-cheek interview with the Paris Review.
‘Dialogue’ as translator
Javier Marías Franco was born Sept. 20, 1951, in Madrid, the son of writer Dolores Franco and Julián Marías, a philosopher who opposed Franco’s Nationalist side in Spain’s 1936-1939 civil war and faced possible execution after Franco’s forces took control. (The family name of Mr. Marías’s mother is no relation to the dictator.)
Mr. Marías’s father was banned from teaching and took two visiting professorships in the United States, the first at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and then at Yale University in Connecticut. That experience gave the young Mr. Marías a foundation in English that he would refine as a translator after his graduation in 1973 with a degree in philosophy and literature from Complutense University of Madrid.
From 1983 to 1985, Mr. Marías lectured at the University of Oxford on the theory of translation — and used his time there as fodder for “All Souls” (1989) about a fictional relationship between a student and a visiting Spanish professor.
Many literary observers, such as University College London professor Gareth J. Wood, drew links between Mr. Marías’s expressive style and his ability to render in Spanish the nuances and complexities “in dialogue” with writers such as Laurence Sterne, Thomas Browne, Vladimir Nabokov and William Faulkner.
Mr. Marías said that his ideal literature school “would require students to know at least two languages and translate books.”
Survivors include his wife of four years, Carme López Mercader, an editor; two stepchildren; and three brothers. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
Among his prizes was the International Dublin Literary Award in 1997 for “A Heart So White” and Spain’s highest literary award for the crime tale “The Infatuations” (2011). He turned down the Spanish prize, saying he did not want to be seen as “favored” by the government.
In the book, he may have taken a self-deprecating jab at the Nobel Committee for never having received the prize. A secondary character, a pompous author, has already written his Nobel acceptance speech — in Swedish. | 2022-09-13T23:42:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Javier Marías, celebrated Spanish author, dies at 70 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/13/javier-marias-spanish-author-dies/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/13/javier-marias-spanish-author-dies/ |
TORONTO — Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne’s careers were, perhaps, always on a collision course. Their similar red-haired, fair-skinned appearances have long been compared. At the 2017 Golden Globes when they presented together, host Jimmy Fallon introduced them by rapping “Chastain and the Redmayne” to the beat of Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Membrane.” | 2022-09-13T23:43:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Chastain and Redmayne on teaming up for 'The Good Nurse' - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/chastain-and-redmayne-on-teaming-up-for-the-good-nurse/2022/09/13/fa09a7f6-33b3-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/chastain-and-redmayne-on-teaming-up-for-the-good-nurse/2022/09/13/fa09a7f6-33b3-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
Parents sued Washington Hebrew Congregation in 2019, claiming leaders ignored warning signs as a teacher sexually abused toddlers. (Perry Stein/The Washington Post)
A prominent Reform synagogue in the District has argued that parents suing over alleged child sex abuse waived their right to bring forth a lawsuit when they signed activity waivers upon enrolling their children in school, court documents show.
A group of parents in 2019 sued Washington Hebrew Congregation, claiming that leaders at Edlavitch-Tyser Early Childhood Center ignored warning signs as a teacher sexually abused toddlers. The suit also said the employee was allowed to be alone with students despite District regulations that require at least two adults to be present with toddlers in licensed child development centers.
Now, recent developments in the years-long suit have brought renewed attention to the case. In July, attorneys for Washington Hebrew Congregation filed a motion for summary judgment, a request to the court to make a ruling before a trial. The school’s attorneys argued parents waived their rights to bring forth a lawsuit when they filled out paperwork to enroll their children in the preschool, according to court records.
Among those documents that parents completed was a consent and liability waiver that stated “neither parents nor their children will bring claims against WHC or any of its employees for personal injuries sustained ‘as a result of’ a child’s ‘participation in these activities [of the Washington Hebrew Congregation’s Edlavitch-Tyser Early Childhood Center],’” court documents show.
But parents understood those “activities” to include “typical preschool activities,” parents’ attorneys responded in court records. “Not a single plaintiff parent who signed the release contemplated that it would cover injuries sustained as a result of their children being sexually abused by a trusted WHC employee.”
Karen Dunn, a lawyer for nine of the plaintiff families, urged the court to deny Washington Hebrew Congregation’s motion for summary judgment.
“Among other absurdities, WHC’s reading of the release’s text would require the court to find that damage caused by sexual abuse was damage caused by participation in a school activity,” Dunn said in a statement.
According to court documents filed by the parents’ attorneys, the former teacher was allowed to be alone with 3- and 4-year-olds “in the woods, in the bathroom, and elsewhere.” The employee was also not properly vetted, the families — who are not identified in the lawsuit — claim.
Fourteen children were allegedly abused, according to court documents.
Because the teacher was not criminally charged or listed as a defendant in the lawsuit, The Washington Post is not naming him. Following a high-profile investigation in 2018, D.C. police said there was “insufficient probable cause” to make an arrest.
Attorneys declined to comment on the argument that parents had waived their right to sue.
“The families’ claims are the subject of a pending lawsuit. The families’ identities and all of the evidence about their children is under seal, so Washington Hebrew Congregation cannot comment outside of court on the merits of their claims. It will continue to defend itself in court,” said a statement from a school representative.
The statement also said that families’ allegations have been taken seriously since they were reported.
“As soon as Washington Hebrew Congregation learned of the allegations, it reported them to the Metropolitan Police Department and Child Protective Services,” according to the statement.
The school on Friday filed a response to the plaintiff’s opposition to summary judgment, calling their argument “fundamentally flawed,” adding there is “no material factual dispute” the alleged child abuse occurred while in the care of Washington Hebrew Congregation staff.
“Plaintiffs’ entire case is premised on the minors being injured ‘on school property, during the school day, by a member of the teaching staff,’” attorneys for the school wrote.
The defendants also said the plaintiff’s argument that “sexual abuse is not a school activity” is essentially a request that the court nullify the waivers parents signed. Under that reasoning, the school’s attorney’s said, any injury could be deemed not to be a school activity to “circumvent the release.”
It is unclear how often this type of argument is used in cases of alleged child sex abuse. Joan Meier, a professor and director of the National Family Violence Law Center at George Washington University, called the school’s defense outrageous.
“It’s almost unimaginable to me that the standard liability waiver would be applied to child sexual abuse because that waiver is designed for the kinds of things that happen in preschools, like kids falling off a climbing structure,” Meier said. “There is no way any parent would put kids in school if that was the case.”
A trial date is scheduled for March 13. | 2022-09-13T23:54:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Washington Hebrew school says parents waived right to sue over sex abuse - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/13/washington-hebrew-congregation-school-abuse-lawsuit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/13/washington-hebrew-congregation-school-abuse-lawsuit/ |
Sony reveals ‘Tekken 8’ and new ‘God of War: Ragnarok’ trailer
Tekken is entering the current console generation with a bang
Sony announced several new titles Tuesday during State of Play, its annual live stream showcasing what players can expect from its PlayStation video game brand. Among those revealed include “Tekken 8,” “Rise of the Ronin” and “Like a Dragon: Ishin!” alongside updates for already announced games, including a new story trailer for the upcoming “God of War: Ragnarok.”
Tekken fans have been waiting seven years since “Tekken 7” for the next title in the fighting game series. Sony officially confirmed “Tekken 8” with a debut trailer featuring series icon Jin Kazama locked in a furious, rain-drenched duel with his hero-turned-heel father, Kazuya Mishima. The trailer is a dazzling visual spectacle with flashy lightning effects, Tekken’s trademark gunpowder-like impact explosions and absurdly muscled physiques that’s all meant to show audiences that “Tekken 8” will be taking full advantage of the PlayStation 5’s next generation bells and whistles. The game does not yet have a release date.
Team Ninja unveiled “Rise of the Ronin,” an open-world action RPG set in Japan during the 1800s. Players will take on the role of a currently nameless ronin, an itinerant samurai with no master, who wanders through a country locked in civil war after the Black Ships of the Perry Expedition forced Japan to end its isolationist policy under the threat of destruction. The game is set to release in 2024 as a PlayStation 5 exclusive. In 2022, Team Ninja announced “Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty,” another open-world action RPG that’s based on a fantastical interpretation of one of China’s most revered literary works, “Romance of the Three Kingdoms.”
Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, the developer behind the celebrated Yakuza franchise, announced a remaster of 2014′s “Ryu ga Gotoku Ishin!” titled “Like a Dragon: Ishin!” The mainline Yakuza games are set in contemporary Tokyo, primarily in the fictional district Kamurocho (which is based on the glitzy, real-life Kabukicho), but the franchise has also created a small spinoff series set in 19th-century Japan. “Like a Dragon: Ishin!” will put players in the sandals of Ryoma Sakamoto, a real-life revolutionary and instrumental figure in Japan’s Meiji Restoration. However, this game is not a history lesson. Expect to see Ryu Ga Gotoku’s brand of over-the-top action and zany humor interspersed with gangster movie drama. “Like a Dragon: Ishin!” has a February 2023 release date.
A new story trailer for “God of War: Ragnarok,”which comes out Nov. 9, shows the father-son god-slaying duo Kratos and an older Atreus fighting otherworldly horrors and clashing with the Norse god Thor, who was set up in the previous “God of War’s” ending as the main antagonist. Fans of the series should be prepared for the end game since developer Santa Monica Studio confirmed that “God of War: Ragnarok” will be the end of the franchise’s Norse Saga arc.
Some other notable updates from the State of Play include fantasy game “Demeo” for PlayStation VR2, “Pacific Drive” (an intriguing horror driving game) and sci-fi action game “Stellar Blade” from Korean developer Shift Up Corp. | 2022-09-14T00:47:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sony reveals 'Tekken 8' and new 'God of War: Ragnarok' trailer - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/09/13/tekken-8-playstation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/09/13/tekken-8-playstation/ |
It’s hard to remember what a normal aviation market looks like. Still, we’re getting closer to it with each passing week.
Passenger traffic in North America and Latin America in July was just 10% and 11.5% below levels in the same month of 2019, the International Air Transport Association said last week. In some places, numbers are even healthier. In Brazil, the world’s fourth-largest domestic aviation market was hit hard by 685,000 Covid deaths, sending its largest carrier LATAM Airlines Group SA into bankruptcy. That’s flipped, with domestic traffic in July ahead of 2019’s levels. The airports in Cancun and Las Vegas recently posted record passenger numbers.
Things look a bit worse as you head east. Across the world, traffic is still down by a quarter, and in Asia-Pacific numbers are off by nearly half. And for air cargo, which boomed in 2021 thanks to congestion in land- and sea-based freight and the post-Covid rush of goods consumption, the return to more normal pre-pandemic transport patterns is mildly bad news.
Still, Ryanair Holdings Plc’s passenger numbers in the peak month of August were a full 22% above the same level in 2019, and Qantas Airways Ltd. was confident enough in the future to spend A$400 million of its cash on a share buyback. The industry as a whole may become profitable again as soon as next year, according to IATA.
If air transport is putting Covid behind it, airline stocks don’t seem to be getting the news. The Bloomberg World Airlines Index last week fell close to its lowest point since November 2020 — a month when international traffic was running at less than 12% of the previous year’s levels.
One thing is clear from those strong records for summer holidays, Cancun and Las Vegas: it’s leisure passengers who’ve been driving the recovery. Corporate spending before Covid accounted for about 30% of revenues and a higher proportion of profits, but its road to better health has been longer. The Global Business Travel Association had predicted a return to normalcy in 2024, but last month pushed that forecast back 18 months to 2026.
There are short-term factors driving that. In Asia, lockdowns and border restrictions are persisting months after they started to be lifted in the rest of the world. Hong Kong, the archetypal business-class destination, has recorded just 124,100 visitor arrivals so far this year — less than a day’s worth of border crossings during its heyday. In Europe, the war in Ukraine has meant that Russia — one of the world’s biggest spenders on outbound travel, with $37 billion of expenditures in 2018 running ahead of outlays by Japan, Italy or Australia — has been mostly cut off from international travel.
Underlying those issues, however, is a long-term shift. By rights, business travel should be doing well at the moment. Inflation, fuel and ticket prices tend not to be the drivers of demand for a section of the cabin whose costs are paid out of corporate accounts. Instead, it’s economic activity that opens up expense accounts — and corporate profits in the US passed $3 trillion in the June quarter, up 27% from their highest level pre-pandemic.
The fact that corporate travel is not picking up right now is a sign of just how much the shift to video-conferencing and away from burning fossil fuels for the sake of in-person meetings has changed the nature of business. That’s a potentially permanent development that will force airlines to rethink business models built on the resilience of premium-class demand.
Looked at that way, the question we should be asking about the state of airline share prices is not why they’re so weak, but why they’re so strong. The best performing carriers so far this year are mostly those with the least to boast about — Asian airlines that are still facing largely shutdown airspace. The five top stocks are all based in developed Asia — Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd., Eva Airways Corp., Japan Airlines Co., ANA Holdings Inc., and Singapore Airlines Ltd.
That’s a sign that investors are valuing the potential of an aviation sector roaring back to life far more than they are the grim reality of airport queues, grumpy passengers, cost pressure from rising fuel prices and persistent debt hangovers from the pandemic era.
The enterprise value of the Bloomberg World Airlines Index is running at about 6.6 times its forecast earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization. That’s well down on its abnormal levels during Covid, when there were no expected earnings to speak of — but it’s comfortably above where things were at almost any other month in history.
The dismal performance of airline stocks of late isn’t a result of carriers posting disappointing results. Instead, it’s a sign that investors are slowly coming to terms with just how bad things really are.
• Beleaguered US Airline Passengers Deserve a Bill of Rights: Brooke Sutherland
• Stuck In Air Travel Hell? Blame the Long Shadow of Covid: David Fickling | 2022-09-14T01:13:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Air Travel Has Almost Recovered. Airlines? Not So Much - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/air-travel-has-almost-recovered-airlines-not-so-much/2022/09/13/c8c0bc56-33c3-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/air-travel-has-almost-recovered-airlines-not-so-much/2022/09/13/c8c0bc56-33c3-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
4 convicted in Jan. 6 Capitol west terrace tunnel attacks on police
The Lower West Terrace was the site of some of the worst violence, as officers dug in against a surging mob
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) greets D.C. police Officer Daniel Hodges, who was attacked during the Capitol riot. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Four men were convicted Tuesday of assaulting or impeding police officers in some of the most violent attacks in the Jan. 6, 2021, siege at the U.S. Capitol, including a case in which one D.C. officer was pinned to a door and another in which an officer was dragged down steps and beaten with poles and sticks.
Three of the men were convicted at a bench trial in front of U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden but had other counts against them dropped, making McFadden the first federal judge in Washington to acquit members of the mob of felony charges. He found that while all three battled police, only one was clearly intending to obstruct Congress as it met to confirm President Biden’s election victory.
In a separate case, a fourth man pleaded guilty to assault.
The Lower West Terrace of the Capitol was the site of some of the worst violence on Jan. 6, as police dug in against the mob unaware that other Capitol entrances were already breached. Officers testified at trial about a slow and steady advance of rioters that they managed to thwart at heavy cost over 2½ hours. They suffered bruises, concussions and fractured bones; one was forced into medical retirement.
Patrick E. McCaughey III of Ridgefield, Conn., used a riot shield to pin D.C. police officer Daniel Hodges to the tunnel door, McFadden found, and hit another officer in the hand. Tristan C. Stevens of Pensacola, Fla., tried to engage the group in coordinated pushes, and personally shoved Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell with another riot shield. David Mehaffie of Kettering, Ohio, directed members of the mob in and out of the tunnel.
All three argued that they were merely trapped between violent protesters and police, an argument McFadden dismissed as “implausible.”
The defendants “knew what was happening,” he said, and were part of “shocking violence … no police officer should have had to endure.”
Separately on Tuesday, Jack Wade Whitton of Locust Grove, Ga., pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan to assaulting police with a dangerous weapon at the same Capitol entrance about an hour later. He admitted to throwing kicks, punches and objects, telling police, “You’re going to die tonight,” and dragging a D.C. officer identified as B.M. down the stairs to be beaten by other rioters.
Whitton, 32, faces a statutory maximum penalty of 20 years in prison at sentencing on March 6 before Sullivan, or roughly five to eight years based on federal sentencing guidelines as set in a plea agreement.
In the case of the three who faced trial, McFadden agreed that McCaughey, 25, used a riot shield as a dangerous weapon against Hodges, causing “significant pain and large bruises.” But he found that in other attacks on police, McCaughey and Stevens used the shields in ways that could not cause severe harm.
“I do not believe that a shield is inherently a dangerous weapon,” he said. McFadden said he did not find support for Gonell’s testimony that Stevens, 26, also attacked with a police baton.
Gonell’s and Hodges’s testimony was “more that of victims than typical law enforcement,” McFadden said, potentially colored by their “understandable anger and resentment” toward the rioters. But he said he believed that any inaccurate recollections by the officers were unintentional, and that their testimony was largely supported by video evidence.
McCaughey and Mehaffie, on the other hand, both “shaded their testimony” to help themselves “more … than the facts allowed,” McFadden found.
Testifying in his own defense, Mehaffie, 63, said he was shoved into police lines by the crushing force of the crowd, shouted “Don’t hurt the police!” and had to fight his way back out of the tunnel. On video, he can be heard shouting, “Push! Push! Don’t throw things!” He said he was trying to control conflict as the crowd advanced and play a negotiating role, telling police, “If we don’t push, you won’t push.”
There was “no negotiation,” D.C. police officer Abdulkadir Abdi testified earlier. “Their objective was to get into the Capitol and we were pretty much in their way.”
Mehaffie struggled to explain why, if his goal was to avoid confrontation, he pounded on the glass doors, told other rioters they had to scale the walls for “battle,” helped pass a riot shield forward and remained in the tunnel.
“I don’t know that I had any expectation except to keep moving,” he testified.
McCaughey testified that he backed off when Hodges began screaming, showing that he had no desire to cause harm. McFadden said Hodges’s “gut-wrenching cries of pain” appeared to have inspired a “moment of humanity” in McCaughey but that his prior actions “cannot be undone by his subsequent kindness.”
The judge found that only McCaughey was trying to stop the counting of votes, based on comments he made to friends and to police, while Mehaffie and Stevens’s reasons for trying to get into the Capitol were unclear. Prosecutors argued that their intent could be inferred from their aggression.
“They were absolutely determined to get inside the U.S. Capitol building that day, no matter what stood in front of them,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jocelyn Bond said in closing arguments at the bench trial. “They put their words behind it, they put their actions behind it.”
Stevens did not testify; his attorney Lauren Cobb argued in closing that he used the riot shield to protect himself from police batons. He only “bopped” an officer with it when pushed from behind, she said.
“The only plausible explanation” for Steven’s behavior, which included cursing and spitting at officers, was that he wanted to join the attack, the judge said.
McFadden said that there was less evidence of intent to disrupt Congress in this case than in previous Jan. 6 trials he has overseen. But he was also skeptical of defense claims that the three men only wanted to voice opinions. “They’ve been demonstrating outside. They’ve been demonstrating all day. Why go to such efforts, why hurt multiple officers just to go in and demonstrate inside? It doesn’t pass the laugh test,” he said.
McFadden noted that two officers testified that they were more hesitant to use force at the Capitol on Jan. 6 because of the Black Lives Matter movement and the previous summer’s racial justice demonstrations. The judge, however, directed blame at political leaders as well as the rioters, opining that the trial showed “the chaos and violence that can occur when senior government leaders fail to support law enforcement officers,” and suggesting that police should have been more aggressive and had more support on Jan. 6.
McCaughey, Mehaffie and Stevens will be sentenced in January and face many possible penalties.
McCaughey was taken into custody after the verdict; McFadden said that after his “incredible” testimony, “I frankly don’t trust that he would return for sentencing.” | 2022-09-14T01:13:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Four men convicted in high-profile attacks on police during the Jan. 6 attack - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/13/tunnel-hodges-jan6-capitol-verdict/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/13/tunnel-hodges-jan6-capitol-verdict/ |
The Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. (Calla Kessler/The Washington Post)
Why are some Army bases named for Confederates?
About one-third of estimated cost will be dedicated to base name changes, the commission said. The vast majority of the remaining cost, nearly $41 million, will address items found throughout the military. It will cost just under a half-million dollars to address Confederate items at the military academies at West Point and Annapolis, the commission said. | 2022-09-14T01:13:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S. military's Confederate renaming project will cost $62 million - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/13/confederate-names-us-military/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/13/confederate-names-us-military/ |
Pieper Lewis speaks with attorney Paul White during a sentencing hearing on Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2022. The Des Moines teen pleaded guilty to killing her alleged rapist in June 2020. (Zach Boyden-Holmes/The Des Moines Register/USA Today Network)
Pieper Lewis was sleeping in the hallway of an apartment complex when she first encountered the man she would come to think of as her boyfriend. She was 15 years old, on the run from an unstable home life in Des Moines, Iowa.
He gave her a place to stay and called her his girlfriend. But then, by her account, he started listing her on dating websites. Men had paid to have sex with her seven or eight times when, she said in a guilty plea, she killed one of them.
The teenager said she had been forced on the night of May 31, 2020, to go to 38-year-old Zachary Brooks’s apartment, where he allegedly plied her with alcohol and drugs and sexually assaulted her repeatedly. Seeing him sleeping afterwards, something snapped in her.
“I suddenly realized that Mr. Brooks had raped me yet again,” Lewis wrote in pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter and willful injury, “and was overcome with rage.”
She stabbed him dozens of times and was arrested on murder charges a day later. Prosecutors did not dispute her trafficking allegations, and a Polk County judge said in court documents there was evidence that appeared to support them. Still, in a case with parallels to other sex trafficked teenagers who killed their assailants, she faced up to 20 years in prison.
On Tuesday, Polk County District Judge David M. Porter sentenced Lewis, now 17, to five years of probation to be served at a residential correctional facility, in what he called “a second chance.” He deferred Lewis’s judgment, allowing her record to be expunged if she completes probation. In a requirement that Lewis’s attorneys argued against, he said he lacked the discretion to avoid requiring her to pay $150,000 in restitution to Brooks’s family.
Before the judge handed down his ruling, Lewis took the stand. She read from a powerful statement, opening with, “Today, my voice will be heard.” Over several minutes, she described the trauma she had endured, along with her attempts to take ownership of her actions and move forward.
“I wish the events that took place on June 1, 2020, never occurred," she said. “But to say there’s only one victim to this story is absurd.”
The man she named as her trafficker has not been charged. A Des Moines Police Department spokesman did not respond to The Washington Post’s questions about whether investigators had looked into Lewis’s claims.
Across the country, other teenagers who were allegedly sex trafficked and involved in a killing have spent years in prison, their abuse in many cases either unmentioned or dismissed in court. In Ohio, Alexis Martin pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to life in prison after prosecutors said she participated in a plan to rob her alleged trafficker, who was shot to death during the crime. In Wisconsin, Chrystul Kizer faced a life sentence for killing her abuser.
The state of Ohio vs. a sex-trafficked teenager
Cyntoia Brown spent 15 years in prison for killing a man who paid for sex with her while she was trafficked at age 16. Then, in 2019, after advocates rallied to her side in the wake of the Me Too movement, her sentence was commuted and she was released. Her story helped draw attention to teenagers with similar stories, leading some authorities to reconsider how they should be treated.
Lewis’s case has also sparked attention, outrage and calls for her release. She has been held in juvenile detention since her arrest in June 2020.
“No one has ever denied that she was a victim, and yet the way that she’s being treated is not the way that we would expect a victim of trafficking, let alone a minor victim of trafficking, to be treated,” said KellyMarie Meek, coordinator of prevention and public health initiatives at Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault.
In the years before she met Brooks, Lewis’s childhood was frequently marked by trauma, according to court records.
Days after being born, her attorneys wrote in court documents, she returned to a hospital severely malnourished. She was placed in foster care, her parents’ rights terminated, and then was adopted by Billy and Leslie Lewis. When the couple divorced in 2019, Lewis, then in middle school, began acting out. Her mother reacted with what Lewis’s attorneys called “Draconian parenting measures,” removing her bedroom door and forcing her to sleep on a mattress on the floor.
Rules posted on her bedroom wall said she could not have contact with her siblings and must stay in her room until told to come out.
In her guilty plea, Lewis laid out the series of events that led to the killing. She said she ran away three times in the early months of 2020 — and for good in March 2020. With nowhere to stay, she bounced from the apartment of one adult to the next, at times facing abuse.
She spent the first few months at the apartment of a classmate’s older sister, babysitting in exchange for shelter, until a disagreement that ended with Lewis sleeping in the apartment complex hallways. A 40-year-old man took the teenage girl in, but when he turned violent, she was back to the hallway.
In April 2020, another resident of the complex, a 28-year-old man, moved Lewis into his unit in the building. He began arranging for her to have sex with men, she wrote in her plea. Among them was Brooks, with whom she was forced to spend three days in May 2020. She said he assaulted her multiple times.
“I did not want to have sex with Mr. Brooks because I believed that [the 28-year-old man] was my boyfriend,” she wrote. “I did not want to go to Mr. Brooks’ apartment but I had no other place to go.”
On May 31, Lewis’s alleged trafficker told her she needed to “turn that trick” with Brooks again to get marijuana. She cried and said she didn’t want to go, according to her plea, but he held a knife against her neck. Frightened, she got into Brooks’s car and went with him to his apartment.
He gave her alcohol and told her to undress. She wrote that she hoped he would fall asleep: “I tried to remain calm and kept thinking he will pass out and I will leave his apartment at first light.” He assaulted her five times before falling asleep, according to what she said in her plea.
Lewis was looking for her clothing when she noticed a knife on a nightstand and rage took over. She stabbed Brooks 37 times and then fled in the early-morning darkness.
“My intentions that day were not just to go out and take somebody’s life,” Lewis said in court Tuesday. “In my mind, I felt that I wasn’t safe. And I felt that I was in danger, which resulted in the actions. But it doesn’t take away from the fact that a crime was committed.”
Prosecutors had previously indicated that they might request prison time, but in court on Tuesday, they called instead for probation and placement in a women’s facility.
They said the case required balancing rehabilitation against protection of the community. While noting that they had not disputed Lewis’s claims of being trafficked, they said that in killing him, she had taken matters into her own hands, leaving Brooks’ children without a father.
Chrystul Kizer, the Wisconsin Supreme Court and a watershed sex-trafficking case
Matthew Sheeley, one of Lewis’s lawyers, argued that her actions were directly tied to her status as a victim of human trafficking. He argued against the requirement that she pay Brooks’s estate, telling the judge, “I don’t believe that the Iowa Legislature intended to require a 15-year-old girl... to pay her rapist’s estate $150,000.”
Placed in a safe environment with support, Sheeley said, Lewis would not pose a risk to the community. He pointed out that she had recently graduated from high school while in detention — a year ahead of her class.
He said the Pieper Lewis who was prosecuted for first-degree murder “is not the Pieper Lewis that we know.”
In her statement in court, Lewis said she would prevail no matter what the judge decided. She rattled off goals for herself, like becoming a fashion designer, looking out for other girls like her and telling her story. She called herself “a phoenix.”
"Some days I feel like giving up, she said, “but yet again, I am the light at the end of the tunnel. I flicker brighter than the simple thought of my own future. I must prevail.” | 2022-09-14T02:31:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pieper Lewis sentenced to probation in killing of alleged rapist - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/13/pieper-lewis-sentencing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/13/pieper-lewis-sentencing/ |
Man is slain in Prince George’s, police say
Victim was found in the Hillcrest Heights-Temple Hills area
A man was shot and killed in Prince George’s County on Tuesday night, police said.
The victim was found about 8:40 p.m. in the 2500 block of Iverson Street in the Hillcrest Heights-Temple Hills area, according to the police. He died at the scene.
The site is on a residential stretch of Iverson, about a mile southeast of the border between the county and D.C. It is a few blocks west of Branch Avenue.
The homicide appears to be the first in the county since a curfew was imposed on teenagers last weekend as a response to a spike in killings last month. | 2022-09-14T02:44:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man is fatally shot in Prince George's, police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/13/man-shot-prince-georges/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/13/man-shot-prince-georges/ |
ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — Nathaniel Hackett started out his news conference Tuesday admitting his error in attempting a 64-yard field goal instead of keeping the ball in Russell Wilson’s hands in the closing seconds of the Denver Broncos’ 17-16 loss to Seattle. Then, he waffled and ended up defending the dubious decision more than lamenting it. | 2022-09-14T02:45:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hackett flops in his head coaching debut for Denver Broncos - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nfl/hackett-flops-in-his-head-coaching-debut-for-denver-broncos/2022/09/13/21107610-33cb-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nfl/hackett-flops-in-his-head-coaching-debut-for-denver-broncos/2022/09/13/21107610-33cb-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
Though such greetings are understandably off-putting, Miss Manners notes that they gain the greeter nothing when they appear to slide off the recipient without effect. Whether this means responding with “Oh, you know me — busy, busy, busy!” or “Where have YOU been hiding? It really has been a long time” will depend on how much time and effort you wish to invest.
My mother is 90 years old and has to plan all the meals, etc., when they visit. I did the cleaning, which is difficult because I also work full time. They never once complimented the house, the cooking or the little things my mother did to make their visit nice.
When did this become okay? My mother won’t let me approach them to make it crystal clear, as she thinks I am being rude.
Your mother does not think you are being rude, dear. She thinks you intend to be rude, and she is right to stop you, if only until you slow down enough to allow for there being more than 36 hours between Tuesday and Friday. | 2022-09-14T04:12:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Miss Manners: How do I respond to greetings with impolite undertones? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/09/14/miss-manners-greetings-respond-tone/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/09/14/miss-manners-greetings-respond-tone/ |
Las Vegas Aces forward A'ja Wilson, right, guard Jackie Young, center, and center Kiah Stokes celebrate during the second half of the Aces' Game 2 win in Las Vegas. (John Locher/AP)
LAS VEGAS — A’ja Wilson has been a star here throughout this WNBA season. As her Las Vegas Aces have pushed toward these WNBA Finals, she has been featured on massive video boards on the Las Vegas Strip and been the focus of the media’s attention just about every day. Each quarter inside Michelob Ultra Arena, which sold out again Tuesday with an announced 10,211 — she has been serenaded with chants of “M-V-P!”
Wilson’s play during the regular season earned her the league’s most valuable player and defensive player of the year honors. Somehow, her postseason play has been even better.
She led the Aces to an 85-71 win over the Connecticut Sun in Game 2 of the best-of-five finals, scoring 26 points to go with 10 rebounds and a block. The victory gave Las Vegas a 2-0 lead in the best-of-five series. Game 3 is Thursday in Connecticut.
Wilson set the tone from the outset. She scored eight of her team’s first 14 points and had 18 by halftime.
After the Aces were held to a season-low 67 points in Game 1, the No. 1 scoring team in the league wasn’t about to have repeat of that performance. Las Vegas attacked the paint with Wilson in the post or Kelsey Plum driving to the rim.
And when possessions got ugly, point guard Chelsea Gray went into her bag of tricks with off-balance and fadeaway midrange jumpers. Gray was knocked down while making a three-pointer, a sequence that gave the Aces an 80-60 lead.
Plum bounced back from a six-point performance in Game 1 with 20 on Tuesday and Gray added 21.
The Sun simply didn’t have the offensive firepower to keep pace. Jonquel Jones, last season’s MVP, had her moments, but her 16 points couldn’t offset Wilson’s performance. Alyssa Thomas, who finished fourth in MVP voting, had a quiet 13 points, three rebounds and four assists. Courtney Williams poured in 18 points, but the Sun shot just 42.2 percent from the field compared to the Aces’ 51.6. Sixth player of the year Brionna Jones had 10 points and six rebounds.
The Sun never led after taking an early two-point lead in the first quarter and was outscored 46-28 in the paint.
Similar to Sunday’s series opener, the Aces came out fast, blowing to a 23-15 lead after the first quarter. In Game 1, the Aces led 25-17.
Sun Coach Curt Miller had stressed the need to create better shots and that was the case early as his team found some success sending cutters to the basket, but that the Aces started to pick up the defensive intensity halfway through the quarter. That’s when the runs began. Las Vegas closed the quarter on a 9-1 stretch with pull-up jumpers from Gray and Riquana Williams and a three-pointer from the top of the arc from Jackie Young. That stretch was pushed to 13-1 into the second quarter to take a 12-point lead.
The Sun shot just 35 percent in that first quarter, but Jones got aggressive and Connecticut put together a pair of runs, including a 12-6 stretch to close the quarter and keep the score a manageable 45-37 at halftime.
Aces Coach Becky Hammon was critical of her team’s ball movement in Game 1, when Las Vegas produced just nine assists. The Aces had 11 by halftime Tuesday.
But Connecticut started the second half fast, using a 9-2 run to cut the lead to 49-46. That would be as close as the Sun would get.
The Aces had a scary moment midway through the third quarter when Gray went down with what appeared to be an ankle injury. She was unable to get back on defense, but scored a jumper in the paint as the ball came back down. Gray checked out of the game afterward and headed to the locker room. At the three-minute mark of the quarter, Gray returned, still limping, and completed a three-point play after being fouled. The three points capped a 14-5 run in which Las Vegas grabbed control again and pushed the lead to 63-51. | 2022-09-14T04:12:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A’ja Wilson and the Aces handle Sun, move a win away from WNBA title - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/wnba-finals-aces-sun-aja-wilson/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/13/wnba-finals-aces-sun-aja-wilson/ |
The death of Queen Elizabeth II sparked a wave of sympathy for the British royals. Tributes have come in from around the world, while the streets of London have been packed with mourners. Some queued up by the thousands to pay their respects across Britain. Polls show a surge in support for King Charles III, never the most popular British royal.
But amid all this, there are signs of something far more uncomfortable for the long-standing U.K. monarchy: Scrutiny.
In the days since the queen’s passing, there have been sometimes vicious debates about her family’s role in Britain’s bloody colonial history. The detail that Charles will not pay an inheritance tax on the assets passed down by the queen, an inheritance likely worth hundreds of millions of dollars, has raised new questions about the unusual and secretive financial arrangements of the family.
Meanwhile, the arrest of anti-royal protesters on British streets has raised new questions about the way Britain handles criticism of the Royal sovereign.
All in all, the overwhelming public sentiment in Britain and much of the world remains supportive of the royal family amid what is, at its simplest, a death in the family. But as the lengthy period of mourning goes on (the queen’s funeral is just under a week away), the U.K. public will have plenty of time to think about the royal family — and what it means for the country.
The discussion is hardly limited to Britain. Given the British Empire’s once-storied status as a place on which the sun never sets, links to the royal family can be found all over the world, for better or worse.
Reporting from Nairobi — a place with a bloody history with Britain — The Washington Post’s Rael Ombuor described how even the families of former Kenyan freedom fighters felt sympathy for the British people and the royal family in particular. But they also remembered the bloody fight that Britain imposed on the anti-colonial forces in the country.
Along with fellow Post writers Rachel Chason and Meena Venkataramanan, Ombuor detailed the mixed feeling across British colonies at what one Kenyan author and activist called the “mythmaking machine” already at work for Elizabeth and the royal family.
“The thing that I think Western people need to genuinely try to absorb and realize is that colonialism is history in the West,” Sipho Hlongwane, a writer based in Johannesburg, told The Post. “It is a thing of the past, in the West. But in our countries, colonialism is now.”
Though the queen had largely ceremonial powers, the government she represented caused pain and suffering for many, while the royal family enriched itself. The family’s famous crown jewels contain the Kohinoor diamond and Great Star of Africa, “gifted” by India and South Africa. There are fresh calls to return them.
The wealth of the royal family is controversial and secretive. As I wrote this week, for the rest of Britain, any inheritance valued over $380,000 results in a 40 percent tax bill. But Charles will pay zero dollars on whatever he inherits from his mother and neither will any of his siblings.
This is just one of the unusual arrangements between the British government and the royal family, which offer huge tax advantages for the monarchy and shroud even basic questions about their wealth — like how much money they actually have — in layers of secrecy and obfuscation. The queen’s will is not made public and is instead kept under lock and key, part of a century-old year royal legal quirk that began with a strange story of family jewels bequeathed to a prince’s lover.
These questions are unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon. Charles himself has already been at the center of many of them; as prince, his Duchy of Lancaster — an “ancient body” and huge portfolio that encompasses 71 square miles and is worth more than $950 million — was accused of dodging taxes and having an unfair advantage over other private businesses.
Britain’s foremost liberal newspaper, the Guardian, has already published an editorial calling for Britain’s parliament to put more pressure on the royal finances and said the inheritance tax deal “needs to be reviewed.” The enormous cost of the queen’s funeral, most of which will be born by the British taxpayers, could add to this pressure.
Who is Britain's new king? A visual biography of Charles III
Even before all this new scrutiny, many Britons were skeptical of the royal family. And so when crowds of royal well-wishers gathered in the streets over the weekend, often there were protesters among them. But police have moved in to silence these demonstrations, even arresting some of the men and women behind them.
As The Post’s Annabelle Timsit reports from London, the “people have been picked up by police as they shouted against the crown, heckled royals marching by, carried anti-monarchists signs, and in one case, a blank sheet of paper.” The move has raised alarm in Britain, with lawmakers calling the police action an infringement of the right to protest.
“No one should be arrested for just expressing republican views,” Zarah Sultana, an opposition member of parliament representing Coventry South, wrote Monday on Twitter. “Extraordinary — and shocking — that this needs saying.”
After the controversy, the hashtag “NotMyKing” trended on Twitter — a reference to a slogan on a sign one protester who was filmed being dragged away Monday. But some legal scholars have argued that the restriction on protests amid the Royal mourning has raised questions about the nature of freedom in Britain.
“For all the complacent publicity that this country is a country of free speech, the British really don’t get free speech in the way that Americans do,” Clive Stafford Smith, a British American civil rights attorney, told The Post.
How will the royal family handle the scrutiny? Charles is widely expected to make changes to the way that the monarchy operates in Britain, including downsizing the spacious royal households and taking a more active hand in the businesses that make up their wealth.
But the new king is already 73 years old, eight years older than when most Britons retire. He has spent much of his life pushing the boundaries of the royal family’s largely ceremonial power. Though he has seen a significant rise in his approval ratings after the queen’s death, he has historically divided opinion and republican groups are sizing up their opportunity.
The sympathy will likely fade. But the scrutiny could grow. | 2022-09-14T04:13:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | British royals face something else scrutiny after queen's death - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/14/british-royals-scrutiny-queens-death/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/14/british-royals-scrutiny-queens-death/ |
Even as his troops retreated in disarray in eastern Ukraine last week, Vladimir Putin opened a new front in his war against the West: a “battle for cultural supremacy.” The Russian president declared his top foreign policy goal would be to lead a global counteroffensive against the “imposition of neoliberal views by a number of states.”
Russia, he claimed, is uniquely qualified for this task because it can offer the world an alternative to liberalism. “Centuries of history have given Russia a rich cultural heritage and spiritual potential that has put it in a unique position to successfully spread traditional Russian moral and religious values,” the statement said.
This will sound awfully familiar to any reader of recent Russian history. A hundred years ago, leaders of the new Soviet Union made similar claims of a Moscow-centered worldview to challenge liberalism. As Communists, they framed the contest in socioeconomic terms; proudly godless, they were hardly likely to invoke Russian religious values. It was no less a “battle for cultural supremacy” for that.
Putin, who tends to look back on the Soviet era through rose-tinted glasses, seems to have forgotten why his side lost that battle: It didn’t have sufficient weaponry. And his Russia is, if anything, even less equipped for the fight. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde (or Shakespeare, or Mark Twain), you shouldn’t engage in a battle for cultural supremacy when you’re unarmed.
Growing up in India in the 1970s, I had a ringside view of the contest — and remember how and why the Soviets lost, even though the field was tilted to their advantage. Although nominally non-aligned in the Cold War between Washington and Moscow, New Delhi leaned heavily to the Soviet side. After all, the USSR had supported India in its regional rivalry with US-backed Pakistan, providing arms, industrial knowhow and trade on favorable terms. Indians were encouraged to regard the West, and especially the US, with suspicion, even hostility, whereas the Russians were to be regarded as friends.
We were also discouraged from consuming Western products: Import restrictions kept most American brands out of reach, so the Soviet disadvantage in that area was not as great a handicap as it might have been. We never got to compare Ford and General Motors cars to Lada and Volga clunkers, for instance.
But when it came to cultural products, the Soviet disadvantage couldn’t be concealed. Indians, especially young Indians like myself, consumed Western literature, music, cinema and fashion. Although Moscow shipped quantities of books to India — translated into Indian languages and sold at heavily subsidized prices — they never gained much cachet with my cohort. There was no Soviet equivalent of the Hardy Boys or Betty and Veronica. Even those inclined to more serious literature found the Soviet offerings tended to tail off sharply after Pushkin and Chekov. (We did, however, read Russian authors Moscow proscribed, like Solzhenitsyn.)
My collection of rock and pop albums had no Soviet representation, there was no such thing as a cool pair of Soviet sneakers, and although the Indian state TV channel dutifully aired Soviet movies, the local cinema halls featured the much more popular Hollywood fare. As a result of this exposure to Western culture, we generally admired Western lifestyles, which were shot through with liberal values.
All this helped the West, and especially America, exert soft power in India that squadrons of MiG-21s or Soviet manufacturing technology couldn’t match. And in my hometown, the port city of Visakhapatnam, it didn’t escape our attention that the Soviet engineers who were seconded to the local steel plant were just as enthusiastic as we were about American rock albums and blue jeans.
If the cultural contest seemed one-sided then, it is absurdly so now. Putin’s Russia has produced few, if any, cultural products of note. In a world far more receptive to non-English entertainment, there are no famous Russian soap operas, no R-Pop craze. Rollywood isn’t a thing. RT, the Kremlin’s 24-hour “news” channel, offers its viewers and listeners a parallel universe of conspiracy theories and out-and-out lies, but has gained little traction.
If Russia is dwarfed by the likes of South Korea and Turkey in the cultural sphere, Moscow has little to offer outside it. Unlike the Soviet leaders he idolizes, Putin has no socioeconomic ideology to impress upon the wider world. Aside from military hardware, no Russian products or services are coveted by anybody. (And the damage wrought by US and NATO military equipment has also diminished the appeal of Russian weaponry.) Indians may be happy to buy cut-price Russian oil, but they are even more pro-Western than those who grew up in the 70s.
What little soft power Russia did have — mostly the product of shared language and history, and necessarily confined to its immediate neighborhood — has been greatly undermined by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The war has also rendered hollow his invocation of Russian moral values.
And never mind taking the fight to the West, Putin may not even be able to win the cultural contest in his own backyard. Tellingly, the pro-Putin rapper and entrepreneur who took over the Starbucks franchise network are replacing it, not with Russian tearooms, but with a cheap knock-off of the original.
Putin’s Russia doesn’t even have the soft power of a Frappuccino. | 2022-09-14T05:43:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | An Unarmed Putin Wants a Culture War With the West - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/an-unarmed-putin-wants-a-culture-war-with-the-west/2022/09/14/36dc20a6-33ea-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/an-unarmed-putin-wants-a-culture-war-with-the-west/2022/09/14/36dc20a6-33ea-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
Poles Can’t Live With Germans, Can’t Live Without Them
WARSAW, POLAND - AUGUST 31: A worker puts up posters, including one (C) that demands monetary reparations from Germany for the destruction Germany inflicted on Poland during World War II, on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II on August 31, 2019 in Warsaw, Poland. Lawmakers from the Polish governing Law and Justice Party (PiS) have suggested Germany owes Poland up to EUR 850 billion. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images) (Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images Europe)
Poland will demand reparations for World War II from Germany, the ruling party in Warsaw announced the other day. A parliamentary commission has pegged the amount at 1.3 trillion euros, which is about the same in dollars and equivalent to between two and three annual budgets of the German federal government. Oh dear.
As eager as postwar Germany has been to atone for its Nazi past, there’s no chance that Berlin will pay any of this sum, as the Poles are well aware. But that’s not what this is about. Instead, the gesture by Poland’s hard-right Law and Justice party (PiS) speaks volumes about other afflictions ailing the European Union.
To wit: There’s the rise of populism and nationalism in several member states, which will be on particularly vivid display in PiS’s campaign for next year’s election. Then there’s the contentious and ambiguous role of Germany within the EU, a bloc it probably should, but either can’t or won’t lead. And there’s the way all the resulting tensions keep frustrating the EU’s raison d’etre — the internal reconciliation that would allow its nations to jointly confront external threats such as an autocratic Russia.
There’s no point in arguing about the number, 1.3 trillion. A “true” amount — tallied in human suffering as well as material damage — would be uncountable multiples higher.
And that’s where the problems start, as viewed from Berlin — or indeed from any other world capital that once ordered or oversaw atrocities committed in its name somewhere. Once you start compensating the descendants of some victims, where and when do you stop?
Berlin’s official reply to all reparations demands — Greece is another country that keeps asking — is frustratingly legalistic. After World War II, West Germany paid nominal indemnities to Israel, Yugoslavia and other nations. East Germany indemnified its communist big brother, the Soviet Union, which was in turn supposed to allot part of the sums to its communist little brother, Poland.
During the Cold War, the Germans therefore deemed other people’s war claims either settled or still pending a final arrangement with the Allied Powers. That closure came in 1990, with the Two Plus Four Treaty among the two Germanies and the Soviet Union, US, UK and France.
Since then, the Germans have maintained — as Chancellor Olaf Scholz again told the Poles last week — that the books are closed. As the Greeks joke: Before reunification, the Germans said it was too early to negotiate; afterwards, they said it was too late.
But to get bogged down in such hairsplitting, the Germans like to point out, is to miss the whole spirit of European integration. It’s supposed to be a “peace project,” an idealistic leap of reconciliation, as embodied in the mutual embrace of Germany and France — enemies-turned-friends, with aspirations to become family.
Poland, like the other member states formerly behind the Iron Curtain, entered the EU late and had different motivations for joining. It was in a hurry to escape Russia’s orbit and enter the West’s. But rather than submerge its identity into a new European one, it also wanted to catch up on its own nation-building, after centuries during which it was partitioned, moved, invaded and tormented by people speaking either German or Russian — and sometimes, as in 1939, by both.
Simultaneously, the whole EU has for years been debating the latest iteration of the old “German question.” This is the recurring problem that Germany, smack in the middle of Europe, is either too weak (as in the 17th or early 19th centuries) or too strong (in the late 19th and early 20th) to allow balance in the continental states system. Today’s version might be that Germany is too small to lead but too big to follow.
The EU, whose founding institutions were designed in the ashes of a German war of aggression, was built to prevent any member nation, and specifically Germany, from ever again dominating the others. At the same time, the club — with 27 members and more in the queue — is fragmented and dysfunctional enough to need leadership, a role for which its largest country is the obvious candidate.
In Germany, this conundrum led to a long “hegemony debate.” Most Germans, still traumatized by the Nazi past, reject the role of leader — it doesn’t help that the word translates to Fuehrer. They often quote the writer Thomas Mann, who feared a “German Europe” while yearning for a “European Germany.” During the euro, refugee and other crises, however, Germans also realized that the EU only functions when Germany takes the initiative.
Other Europeans have been just as torn. They loathe being lectured by Germans — on how to save money, in Athens or Madrid; on how to uphold the rule of law, in Warsaw or Budapest; on anything, in Paris or Rome. In Brussels, Germans often come across as humorless and hypocritical, the worst combination. One of the first countries, along with France, to break the EU’s vaunted fiscal rules — originally drafted by the Germans — was Germany itself, in 2005.
But most Europeans also understand the need to reconcile with Germany and to implicitly accede to its leadership. “I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so,” quipped Radoslaw Sikorski in 2011, when he was Warsaw’s chief diplomat, “but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity.” Yet he added: “Provided you include us in decision-making, Poland will support you.”
Since Sikorski’s remark, things have mostly deteriorated. In 2015, Poland followed the example of Hungary and elected populist nationalists who’ve been in power since. Step by step, PiS has compromised judicial independence, press freedoms and the rights of LGBTQ citizens, while ranting against Brussels and Poland’s historical enemies, the Germans over here and the Russians over there.
Previous PiS campaigns have featured bogeys such as Muslim migrants, queer and trans folk, Brussels technocrats and others allegedly bent on corrupting authentic Polish-Catholic mores. To win next year’s election, PiS has decided to roll out the ugly German again.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the party’s leader, talks of “German-Russian plans to rule over Europe” and of the EU becoming a “Fourth German Reich.” He slanders his opposition as wanting to make Poland an “appendage of Germany.” As though directly rebutting Sikorski in 2011, the current Polish foreign minister, Zbigniew Rau, recently said that “the EU needs not German leadership, but German self-restraint.”
The Germans, for their part, have — largely out of parochial absent-mindedness — lived down to stereotype. Ignoring Sikorski’s plea, they have not included the Poles — or Balts or others — in their decision-making.
The worst instance of their neglect was Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline built — after Russia’s first attacks on Ukraine in 2014, no less — under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. Running right next to Nord Stream 1, this link was supposed to supply cheap Russian hydrocarbons to help Germany’s energy transition. The Germans were also convinced that doing more business with Russian President Vladimir Putin would keep him meek.
By contrast, the Poles and other eastern Europeans (including the Ukrainians), recognized both Nord Stream pipelines as geopolitical schemes by Putin to make the connectors running through their own countries irrelevant, so he could blackmail or starve them at will. Worse, the whole project looked like yet another separate Russo-German deal over their heads, the sort history has taught them to fear.
This year, as Putin weaponized Russia’s energy exports, the world found out who was right (the Poles) and wrong (the Germans) in that argument. I’m not aware of any German politician who’s explicitly apologized to Warsaw, Riga, Tallinn, Vilnius or Kyiv for the pipelines — or for all the Kremlin coddling that went with them.
These eastern capitals — whose countries once made up what the historian Timothy Snyder calls the “bloodlands” between Hitler and Stalin — are now on the front line against Putin’s assault on Ukraine and decency. The four within the EU and NATO are leading the Western alliance in calling out Putin’s lies and modeling the courage to resist.
Berlin, for its part, has merely fallen in line behind its eastern EU partners. Its resolve came late and often appears wobbly. Leadership — by Germany as a country or Scholz as a chancellor — looks different.
There are two tragedies in this story. The first is that Kaczynski, PiS, and their populist ilk in other countries are playing with fire. They’re besmirching European ideals of reconciliation and wrecking dreams of strength in unity. Instead of asking for reparations for what Hitler did in World War II — that is, instead of stoking resentment — they should be linking arms with all their European friends to defeat Putin.
The second tragedy is that the Germans are no wiser. Thomas Mann is probably turning in his grave. Europe is not German, and nobody wants that. Nor, however, is Germany any closer to being genuinely European.
Germany will never again be the threat to Europe it once was — these days, Russia plays that part. But that’s hardly a high standard. Not only the Poles, but all Europeans would be forgiven for feeling that they can’t live with the Germans, but can’t live without them either. | 2022-09-14T05:43:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Poles Can’t Live With Germans, Can’t Live Without Them - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/poles-cant-live-withgermans-cant-live-without-them/2022/09/14/378d826a-33ea-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/poles-cant-live-withgermans-cant-live-without-them/2022/09/14/378d826a-33ea-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
UK Energy Relief Plan Will Lead to Higher Interest Rates
LONDON, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 12: British Prime Minister Liz Truss leaves Westminster Hall 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 Markus Schreiber - WPA Pool/Getty Images) (Photographer: WPA Pool/Getty Images Europe)
A key part of new Prime Minister Liz Truss’s plan to counter the effects of the UK’s energy crisis is to cap for two years the amount that households pay for electricity and six months for businesses. What’s shocking about the proposal is not that it was made, but that the government gave no indication of how much it will cost. My back-of-the-envelope calculations puts it at 150 billion to 200 billion pounds ($175.3 billion to $233.8 billion).
There is much not to like about this “relief” package. History is littered with failed experiments in such price controls. Contrary to Truss’s claims, it will not bring down inflation except in a narrow mathematical sense. In the short term, the government’s actions will keep the consumer price index lower than where it would be otherwise. If the costs of consuming electricity are capped for two years, then parts of CPI that are affected by that will drop to zero, perhaps less if energy prices fall. Some economists think CPI may drop by half for the legislated period.
But CPI is only one measure of inflation – and a rather arbitrary one at that. The result of such a huge loosening of fiscal policy — perhaps 5% of gross domestic product — means that other, broader measures of inflation are likely to continue rising faster than they would have otherwise. Perhaps the caps were unavoidable, given the damage suffered by households and companies from surging energy costs, but I strongly suspect the package will just repeat the problems wrought by large government spending in the pandemic. There just isn’t the potential to increase supply in the economy to cope with the boost to demand from such massive government outlays. If nothing else changes, CPI will resume its rise, and that means interest rates and bond yields will be headed much higher.
The good part of the package is a seeming determination to increase the supply of energy across the board, including in fossil fuels. The overturning of a ban on fracking isn’t half as important as the government auctioning a whole lot of extra North Sea licenses. Most important of all is that this is the first government of a big economy in many years to admit that rich countries need to invest much more in existing sources of energy. It is also a tacit admission that governments have been shortsighted in denigrating existing sources of energy.
Egged on by activists and certain investors, a weirdly millennial way of thinking about climate change has taken hold in just about every big economy government. There’s no doubt that activists and the Bank of England were delighted that oil and gas investment last year in the UK had fallen to a quarter of its level in 2013. Under Mark Carney, its previous governor, the Bank of England became one of the most prominent critics of fossil-fuel investment. Getting rid of a fairly inexpensive source of energy and not being able easily to replace it with something else is irresponsible in the extreme. It’s no coincidence that energy prices have soared as a result of efforts to stop fossil-fuel investment. It is probably no coincidence, too, that the Bank of England announced on the same day as Truss’s energy package that it would lend 40 billion pounds to energy companies.
Why the alarmism now? As in many other modern debates, the shrillness of many people’s views about climate change and fossil fuels in the UK seems inversely proportional to how much things have changed. In absolute terms, the UK consumes less energy than in 1970, even though its real GDP is three times larger and its population far larger. Since 1990, according to the Office of National Statistics, the UK’s energy intensity — how much energy it uses for a given unit of output — has halved. The country’s carbon ratio — the amount of carbon dioxide produced per unit of output — has fallen by two-thirds in the same period. Those numbers are extraordinary.
It remains to be seen how much the current government has the appetite and ability to push through reforms to the energy market and to boost investment in fossil fuels. And, frankly, such efforts won’t have much of an impact even if it does. Energy is one of the most global of markets. Governments need to stop trying to appear virtuous and actually do something virtuous. That means having something like a plan and explaining to people that fossil fuels are going to be needed for some time. More From Other Writers at Bloomberg Opinion:
• Iron Lady? Let’s Hope Truss Is No Laughingstock: Max Hastings
• Liz Truss’s Plan Could Avert a UK Recession: Raphael and Hanson | 2022-09-14T05:44:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | UK Energy Relief Plan Will Lead to Higher Interest Rates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/uk-energy-relief-plan-will-lead-to-higherinterest-rates/2022/09/14/3733a4b6-33ea-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/uk-energy-relief-plan-will-lead-to-higherinterest-rates/2022/09/14/3733a4b6-33ea-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
By Hannah Schoenbaum and Gary D. Robertson | AP
FILE - A portion of Wood Peck Road near Bradshaw’s Garage outside of Goldsboro, N.C., washed away due to flood waters caused by Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Nearly six years after extreme rainfall and flooding from Hurricane Matthew damaged many North Carolina homes, some homeowners are still left waiting on repairs. A new bipartisan General Assembly committee tasked with investigating the delays holds its first meeting Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2022, on the four-year anniversary of when Hurricane Florence made landfall in North Carolina. (Casey Mozingo/The Goldsboro News-Argus via AP, File) | 2022-09-14T05:44:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pandemic, labor shortage keep hurricane victims in limbo - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pandemic-labor-shortage-keep-hurricane-victims-in-limbo/2022/09/14/12d462a8-33eb-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pandemic-labor-shortage-keep-hurricane-victims-in-limbo/2022/09/14/12d462a8-33eb-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
Lateshia Beachum
Thousands of mourners lined up on Sept. 13 for hours to pay their respects to Queen Elizabeth II as her coffin arrived at Buckingham Palace. (Video: The Washington Post)
Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin will travel through London from Buckingham Palace to the Palace of Westminster on Wednesday in a military procession, the latest leg of a 500-mile ceremonial journey that takes the late monarch from Scotland, where she died, to her final resting place in Windsor, just outside the capital.
Hundreds of troops and military horses have been rehearsing for days to ensure the event runs smoothly along streets crowded with mourners bearing flowers and Union Jack flags. The procession will include members of the royal family and senior staff, who will walk in silence — to the beat of muffled drums — led by King Charles III.
The royal family will gather for prayers at Buckingham Palace in the early afternoon before accompanying the queen’s coffin on its journey to Westminster Hall. The somber procession will travel via Queen’s Gardens, the Mall, Horse Guards and Horse Guards Arch, Whitehall, Parliament Street, Parliament Square and New Palace Yard.
Police detained and arrested anti-monarchy protesters at royal events in England and Scotland in recent days, alarming lawyers and free-speech activists. Lawmakers have called on authorities to respect the rights of those who believe the queen’s death should herald the end of the monarchy.
London’s Heathrow Airport said some flights would be disrupted Wednesday “to ensure silence during the ceremonial procession.” Airlines will notify passengers about any flight changes, the airport operator said in a statement. Further flight disruptions are expected Monday, the day of the queen’s funeral.
The queen’s coffin will leave Buckingham Palace at 2:22 p.m. and arrive at Westminster Hall at 3 p.m. to lie in state until Monday’s funeral. Washington Post live video coverage begins 8:30 a.m. Eastern time.
The Archbishop of Canterbury will conduct a service, attended by the king and the rest of the royal family.
The public will be able to visit 24 hours a day between 5 p.m. Wednesday and 6.30 a.m. on the day of the funeral, the government said.
Who will be at the queen’s funeral? The event is expected to attract hundreds of world leaders, among them presidents, prime ministers and fellow monarchs, not to mention their security details. Security arrangements for the various foreign dignitaries in attendance will be complicated. They have been encouraged to fly commercial, when possible, to avoid congestion at private airfields and to take shared buses to avoid clogging London’s roads — though an exception may be made for President Biden to arrive in his armored presidential limousine, known as “the Beast.”
Where will the queen be buried? After Monday’s funeral, the queen’s coffin will move to Windsor Castle, where she spent weekends. There, the coffin will travel in a final procession to St. George’s Chapel, where she will be laid to rest next to her husband, Prince Philip, who died last year.
What kind of monarch will King Charles III be? The king has said he wants to balance tradition and progress. He has deep thoughts on fast fashion, hedgerows, parking garages and organic tomatoes. He has championed sustainability and lobbied for action on climate change. He will also bring a markedly different personal vision of religion and spirituality to the role.
How are former colonies mourning the queen? As their leaders paid homage to the queen, some residents of former British colonies reflected on darker parts of the queen’s legacy.
Black Americans, especially those with roots in countries that were recently ruled by the British monarchy, see complications in the adulation of Queen Elizabeth II. In interviews and social media posts, “Black Americans said they respected the queen’s sense of duty and her loyalty to her family, but they also saw in her an embodiment of white supremacy and inequality,” reporters Emmanuel Felton and Meena Venkataramanan write. | 2022-09-14T05:45:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The death of Queen Elizabeth II: Latest updates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/14/queen-elizabeth-death-king-charles-latest-updates/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/14/queen-elizabeth-death-king-charles-latest-updates/ |
Queen Elizabeth II meets with Commonwealth leaders at Buckingham Palace in London in 2018. (Jay Allen/GCHOGM/Getty Images)
“Within our region, there is a definite push toward bringing home the head of state,” Henry Usher, Belize’s minister of constitutional and political reform, told The Washington Post. “I think it’s important that we can’t be having a head of state that’s living thousands of miles away and is not in tune with what’s happening locally. … The rallying cry in the Caribbean is that the people are sovereign.”
William and Kate, touring the Caribbean to celebrate queen’s jubilee, draw anti-colonial protests, demands for reparations
But severing ties with the monarchy can be easier said than done. Nearly every constitutional reform commission in the Caribbean since independence has recommended declaring republics, and leaders in several nations have pledged to do so — but have faced obstacles.
Belize can abolish the monarchy through legislation, as Barbados did, though Usher said the government plans to hold a referendum on reforms from the constitutional review. Other realms have constitutions that require the passage of a referendum — some with a simple majority; others with a supermajority.
After his election in May, he appointed his country’s first-ever “assistant minister for the republic,” tasked with explaining and expanding support for a referendum on declaring a republic. He has said such a vote would not come until a second term — should he win one.
Across the Tasman Sea, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told reporters it was likely that the country would become a republic in her lifetime — she’s 42 — but she didn’t believe it was “on the agenda anytime soon.” | 2022-09-14T06:31:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What the death of Queen Elizabeth II means for the Commonwealth realms - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/14/commonwealth-realm-republic-canada-jamaica-australia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/14/commonwealth-realm-republic-canada-jamaica-australia/ |
A man is reflected on a photo of Queen Elizabeth II in a Hindu temple, in the district of Southall in London, Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022. In a church in a West London district known locally as Little India, a book of condolence for Queen Elizabeth II lies open. Five days after the monarch’s passing, few have signed their names. The congregation of 300 is made up largely of the South Asian diaspora, like the majority of the estimated 70,000 people living in the district of Southall, a community tucked away in London’s outer reaches of London and built on waves of migration that span 100 years. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung) | 2022-09-14T07:19:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A London diaspora district remembers a queen — ambivalently - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/a-london-diaspora-district-remembers-a-queen-ambivalently/2022/09/14/4ddc5712-33f9-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/a-london-diaspora-district-remembers-a-queen-ambivalently/2022/09/14/4ddc5712-33f9-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
LONDON — When Rachel Brading was a child she waited hours to see Queen Elizabeth II pass by her hometown in the midlands of England. Forty years later she was waiting again, one among a crowd of thousands hoping to catch one last glimpse of the late monarch’s coffin before her burial. | 2022-09-14T07:20:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | "History": Thousands come for last glimpse of queen - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/history-thousands-come-for-last-glimpse-of-queen/2022/09/14/fc12e8c6-33fb-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/history-thousands-come-for-last-glimpse-of-queen/2022/09/14/fc12e8c6-33fb-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
Package explodes at Boston’s Northeastern University, injuring one
A 45-year-old staff member suffered a hand injury when the package detonated in Holmes Hall
By Gina Harkins
Emergency responders and law enforcement respond after a package delivered to Holmes Hall at Northeastern University in Boston exploded on Sept. 13. (Nicholas Pfosi/Reuters)
Campus police responded to the blast at Holmes Hall about 7:15 p.m. The brick building on Leon Street houses the school’s journalism newsroom; the women’s, gender and sexuality studies program; and the campus writing lab.
An ambulance took the 45-year-old man to a hospital, where he was treated for a minor hand injury, authorities said. A search of the area turned up another similar package that was later deemed safe by the Boston Police Department’s bomb squad, according to Felipe Colon, a police deputy superintendent, speaking during a news conference Tuesday night.
The second package was found near Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, on the edge of the Northeastern campus, the Associated Press reported. Police did not specify to whom the packages were addressed.
“I take very seriously that this city is home to … our littlest learners up to our college students and university staff,” Wu said.
Northeastern’s campus will be open Wednesday, according to campus police. | 2022-09-14T07:58:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Package explodes at Boston’s Northeastern University, injuring one - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/14/northeastern-university-explosion-boston/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/14/northeastern-university-explosion-boston/ |
E.U. pushes emergency energy measures amid fallout from war in Ukraine
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at a news conference in Brussels last week. (Virginia Mayo/AP)
BRUSSELS — The European Commission will push ahead with emergency measures to tackle the energy crisis, including a windfall tax on some energy companies and binding targets to reduce consumption during peak hours, a sign of growing concern that the fallout from Russia’s war in Ukraine is pushing the region toward recession.
The plan, outlined in European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s annual State of the European Union address on Wednesday, comes after weeks of debate about the best way to tackle high energy prices. It does not include a price cap on gas — something that the commission floated but that proved divisive.
“Russia keeps actively manipulating our energy market,” von der Leyen told members of the European Parliament gathered in Strasbourg, France. “This market is not functioning anymore.”
The annual speech comes more than six months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, upending Europe’s post-Cold War security architecture and its energy strategy. The 27-member bloc moved with uncommon speed and unity, pulling together to hit the Kremlin with unprecedented sanctions and offering financial and military support to Ukraine.
But the European Union’s efforts to hit Russia’s war machine have accelerated Europe’s energy and cost-of-living crisis, sending the price of electricity, as well as food and other essentials, way up. There is a growing fear that Europe is heading for a recession that could lead to social unrest in the region and ripple around the world.
In recent weeks, E.U. officials have held urgent meetings on measures to control the price of electricity and stabilize power markets, with the commission floating a range of ideas that would have once been considered extreme. The European Central Bank raised interest rates last week for the second time this year in a bid to cool off inflation without pushing the economy over the edge.
The White House is watching the situation closely. Aides to President Biden have been reviewing their efforts to export liquefied natural gas to Europe, to determine whether there’s any additional way for American producers to help. In a visit to Brussels last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. will not “leave our European friends out in the cold.”
Since February, the European Union has taken steps to wean itself off Russian energy in the name of limiting Russian revenue and loosening the Kremlin’s grip on Europe. To some extent, it appears to be working.
Russian pipeline gas now makes up just 9 percent of E.U. gas imports, for instance, not the 40 percent it was at the beginning of the year. The E.U. reached its goal last week to get gas stores to more than 80 percent well before the weather turns in November.
In the short term, however, prices remain high and national governments are paying hundreds of billions to try to keep people afloat.
“Reducing demand during peak hours will reduce demand, and it will bring prices down,” von der Leyen said Wednesday, referring to her proposal for mandatory power curbs during peak hours.
She justified the proposed windfall tax by noting that while profits are good, in these times, they “must be shared and channeled to those who need it most.” | 2022-09-14T08:02:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Von der Leyen's state of the union to detail emergency E.U. energy measures - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/14/eu-emergency-energy-measures-russia-ukraine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/14/eu-emergency-energy-measures-russia-ukraine/ |
Britain's King Charles III and his siblings follow the hearse carrying their mother's coffin on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Sept. 12. (Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters)
EDINBURGH, Scotland — Not far from the city’s ancient center, Anna Torrens and Ben Goddard, both 20, patiently stood in an hours-long line to pay last respects to their late queen. Self-described monarchists, they should be easy sells for King Charles III — who spent a day on the ground here for “Operation Spring Tide,” his inaugural tour of the United Kingdom as monarch.
But as much as they adored Queen Elizabeth II — “She was kind of a mother figure to everyone, wasn’t she,” Torrens mused. “Everyone loved the queen,” added Goddard — they see Charles in a more skeptical light.
“He’s got a lot to prove,” Goddard said, adding that much of what he knows about Charles comes from the Netflix series “The Crown.” “Looking back at my education, there wasn’t much about the monarchy. Not much on [a future] King Charles. They brushed passed that — if anything, because he’s had a very scandalous life.”
Charles, a king-in-waiting for 73 years, ascends to the throne with a central challenge: Ensuring the future of the House of Windsor, with the disadvantage that he is less popular than his mother.
Almost no one sees the passing of the queen as the end of days for the British monarchy, the heads of state of these isles and the remnants of a once vast empire. But British republicans — a minority who want to abolish the monarchy — nevertheless sense an opportunity with Charles in charge.
For Charles, it raises a question that’s a twist on the words once spoken by his ex-wife, Diana.
Can he be the king of people’s hearts?
“All the polling shows the majority of English people still want to retain the monarchy,” said Brian Feeney, a political commentator in Northern Ireland, where Charles and Camilla breezed through on Tuesday. “To what extent that loyalty is to the queen, and whether it will be maintained by Charles, is the question.”
Ten years ago, according to YouGov, 75 percent of Britons were in favor of “continuing the monarchy,” a figure that dropped to the low 60s earlier this year. And while the queen’s personal popularity still hovered at around 81 percent before her death, support for Charles was far lower, at 54 percent.
He has appeared to gain backers in the emotional aftermath of his mother’s passing. Pundits have praised him in recent days for displaying the bearing and gravitas of his kingly station. In a new YouGov survey, 63 percent of Britons said he would be “good king,” up from just 32 percent in May.
Yet one in three — or 35 percent — also say they’d like to see him retire before his death to make way for his more popular son William, compared to 25 percent who had said his mother should step down early. Fewer than half say he will do a “good job at being a unifying figure” for all parts of Britain.
Charles has begun to set the tone for his reign, and mount something of a charm offensive, in meticulously planned stops this week in each of the “four nations” of the United Kingdom: England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.
He has taken the royal “walkabout” — first popularized by his mother in the 1970s — to a more tactile level, reaching out to touch people, shaking with both hands. He accepted a cheek kiss from one emotive subject on the Mall in London — a breach of royal protocol, but perhaps a public relations coup. In Belfast on Tuesday, he patted children’s heads. He sought out a corgi on the rope line, who gave him a lick. He gave the sense that he didn’t want to leave.
The response from anti-monarchy groups within Britain has been muted. A handful of protesters have been arrested or threatened by British authorities — including a man who heckled Prince Andrew in Scotland on Monday — prompting criticism from some politicians, as well as human rights and free speech activists.
Short of launching a new Twitter hashtag — #notmyking — the group Republic has limited its lobbying efforts. Spokesman Graham Smith said activities would ramp up after the late monarch’s state funeral. He said the organization had seen “thousands” of people sign up since the queen’s death.
“There’s been a big drop in popularity of the monarchy in the last few years, and that’s while the queen has been on the throne,” Smith said. “Charles is not equipped to turn that around. Where people were very reluctant to criticize the queen directly, that is not the case with Charles. We now have this completely different monarchy, reduced to fairly unimpressive men, who no longer have their heat shield — the queen.”
Though they exist everywhere, royal skeptics in the British Isles tend to defined by two factors: generation and geography.
In a May YouGov poll, 31 percent of those between ages 18 and 24 said Britain should have an elected head of state, compared to 33 percent who backed continuation of the monarchy. In contrast, large majorities of older generations vastly preferred the current system.
“I understand the history of [the monarchy], and I understand how important it is in society,” said Katie Ford, a 19-year-old university student in line to pay respects at Queen Elizabeth’s coffin in Edinburgh. “But at the same time, like, it’s hard for me to say that it’s a good idea for, you know, something that costs this much money to be happening when there are so many people who are struggling.”
Polls suggest the monarchy enjoys less support in Scotland than in Britain as a whole. Scottish nationalists have said they would keep the crown in the event of independence from the United Kingdom. But some wonder whether Charles will exert the emotional grip the queen had on the Scottish people.
Elizabeth’s suggestion that Scots “think very carefully” during the 2014 independence referendum was seen by many as influencing hearts and minds to remain in the union.
“I feel like we stayed because a lot of people like the queen and felt something towards the queen,” Torrens said. “But I’m not quite sure, if they were to do another vote in a couple of years time, with Charles on.”
The monarchy — an institution steeped in the tea of colonialism — is even more polarizing within Northern Ireland.
“Every political scientist who looks at the north of Ireland identifies it as a political ethnic conflict caused by colonialism,” Feeney said. “The north … is the last part of [British colonial rule in Ireland]. That is why there continues to be political, ethnic divides, with conflicting identities and allegiances. People in the north of Ireland who are not British don’t see themselves as part of the same polity.”
The reception was warm for the new king in Belfast on Tuesday. Northern Ireland Assembly speaker Alex Maskey, a Sinn Fein politician who was once jailed for his connection to the Irish Republican Army, paid tribute to Elizabeth as someone who “showed how a small but significant gesture, a visit, a handshake, crossing the street, or speaking a few words of Irish, can make a huge difference in changing attitudes and building relationships.”
The queen’s 2012 handshake with Martin McGuinness, then-deputy first minister of Northern Ireland and a former IRA commander, marked a historic moment in the peace process.
Queen Elizabeth II in her own words: Her most memorable remarks
Yet while Northern Ireland’s political leaders came together to honor the late queen this week, a Brexit-related boycott by the Democratic Unionist Party has prevented the formation of a new power-sharing government since May elections. Meanwhile, Sinn Fein, now the largest party in Northern Ireland, still does not recognize the authority of the British monarchy.
Based on a changing political landscape and demographics, Charles can reasonably expect Northern Ireland’s drift from the United Kingdom and movement toward Irish unity to accelerate during his reign.
Charles also takes over at a delicate time in broader British politics — when the country is confronting its worst bout of inflation since the 1970s, and energy bills have skyrocketed. He may find increased resistance to taxpayer money being used to support royal estates and activities.
Royal watchers expect him to push for a slimmed-down, somewhat modernized monarchy. Experts say that could mean fewer royals on official duties, and perhaps even the opening of parts of Buckingham Palace for public events.
It will be a fine line in a country that is known for — and seemingly revels in — exceptional pomp and circumstance, and where royal enthusiasts seem to shudder at the notion of the more casual “bicycle monarchies” of continental Europe where royals can often be found cycling rather than riding in Bentleys.
“I think that what Prince Charles has already indicated is that the monarchy will be smaller. It’s going to be more like a Scandinavian monarchy in the future, but not in a bad way — more informal,” former prime minister David Cameron told the BBC on Sunday. “He stopped as he entered Buckingham Palace and talked to people in the crowd, and that was a signal that he was sending that he wanted people to feel that he was approachable.”
Charles has gone through decades of public rehabilitation since the years of his disastrous marriage to Princess Diana. He has won praise for his charity work and his prescient warnings of species extinction and climate change. He has also benefited from a reappraisal of his adultery, gaining a measure of sympathy for apparently being pressured into marriage while in love with another woman: His now second wife and the queen consort, Camilla.
But Charles is still carrying baggage. And within Britain, at the heart of some people’s reluctance toward the new king is not so much a distaste for hereditary privilege or the shadow of colonialism but the ghost of Diana.
“I am not a fan of Camilla. I was a fan of Diana,” said Belfast bartender Pamela McMurray, 37. “Obviously, you don’t know the person personally, but you have certain loyalties, so that is where that stems from.”
Ferguson reported in Belfast. | 2022-09-14T08:51:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Can King Charles III win over the U.K. as its new monarch? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/14/uk-king-charles-win-monarchy-support/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/14/uk-king-charles-win-monarchy-support/ |
The Biden administration is launching more federal hate-crimes investigations, raising questions from some about which cases are picked
Matthew Greenman on 42nd Street in Manhattan on Sept. 8 (John Taggart for The Washington Post)
His counterprotest didn’t last long. Moving toward the sidewalk, investigators say, he was attacked by Saadah Masoud — a founding member of Within Our Lifetime, a Palestinian activist group — who punched him and dragged him across the pavement, causing a concussion.
In June, the Justice Department charged Masoud with a federal hate crime, saying he targeted Greenman, who is Jewish, because of “his perceived national origin, and actual and perceived religion.”
The case is part of a surge of federal hate-crime prosecutions this year under Attorney General Merrick Garland; in the first six months of 2022, the Justice Department filed 20 cases, a pace that would eclipse any single year of the Obama or Trump administrations.
Officials tout the prosecutions as one way the Biden administration is trying to address a spike in hate crimes — an effort President Biden will highlight Thursday at a White House summit on countering bias-fueled violence.
But Masoud’s prosecution also raises questions about how these cases are chosen and what federal interests are served by pursuing them. A lawyer for Masoud said her client, who has pleaded not guilty, is a fervent “anti-Zionist” who opposes Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people and is being unfairly prosecuted over his political ideology.
Former Justice officials said the department’s policy has generally been to defer to local prosecutors and step in only if localities either do not bring charges or fail to win convictions. Federal authorities also look to intervene in jurisdictions that lack strong hate-crime statutes or sufficient resources to fully investigate crimes.
Jonathan M. Smith, a high-ranking Justice official in the Obama administration, said it makes sense that the department is taking on more cases. But with limited resources, he said, prosecutors should focus on those with a clear federal interest, such as attacks by organized hate groups whose networks cross state lines.
“A lot of what might be happening on a more common basis is probably best prosecuted locally,” Smith said, “and you should not try to create a federalization of prosecutions that essentially gets into what one thinks of as street crime.”
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who oversees the civil rights division, said prosecutions are just one tactic in a broad federal strategy to combat hate and send a message of deterrence. She pointed to efforts to improve FBI data collection, a boost in federal funding for local jurisdictions and civil remedies, such as a settlement agreement with a Utah school district where minority students faced racial harassment and discrimination.
With hate crimes up, “naturally you’d expect to see us prosecute more cases,” Clarke said. “This is a priority for the department — standing up to hate, making sure victims know the federal government will respond and communities understand that we are with them, and making sure to send a strong message to perpetrators that they will be held accountable.”
The case against Masoud has geopolitical overtones. Antisemitic attacks in New York and other major cities have spiked in recent years, due in part, experts say, to rising extremism within the U.S. and growing tensions over Israel’s decades-long occupation.
But legal experts said nothing stands out as an obvious reason that the case rose to federal attention. The Justice Department declined to discuss the specifics of why it took the case. A year earlier, three pro-Palestinian demonstrators assaulted a Jewish man in Times Square; that case is being pursued on the local level by the Manhattan district attorney.
Gerard Filitti, Greenman’s lawyer, said his client reported the assault, spoke to a New York City police detective and identified Masoud from a photo lineup. Soon, Greenman was summoned to meet with federal investigators from the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. Federal prosecutors charged Masoud with attacking Greenman and alleged that he had assaulted two other Jewish people in 2021.
“The detectives saw this as a serious issue and that Masoud was definitely a repeat offender,” Filitti said, “so they took it to the U.S. attorney’s office.”
Despite the Justice Department’s push, federal hate-crime prosecutions remain rare.
From 2009 to 2020, the federal government averaged about two dozen cases annually. That’s a tiny fraction of the 8,263 hate crimes reported across the United States in 2020, the most in two decades, according to the FBI. Experts said evidentiary standards can be particularly difficult in hate-crime cases because prosecutors must prove a defendant was motivated by bias.
Prosecutors concluded 85 percent of their hate-crime investigations without filing charges, according to a Washington Post review of federal data. Authorities cited a lack of evidence in about half of those instances; other reasons included decisions to put federal resources toward other priorities.
Direct federal intervention has been “scattershot,” said Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. “Prosecutors by their nature are conservative. They’re not going to lean too far in on a case, unless there’s a mandate from Main Justice to crack down.”
A review of recently filed federal cases shows that several involve the damaging of religious institutions, such as synagogues and churches, which are protected under a specific federal statute. Others relate to high-profile crimes — such as the mass shooting at a predominantly Black grocery store in Buffalo in May — that drew national attention.
The Justice Department also has begun to prioritize cases exacerbated by the pandemic, after Congress passed new hate-crime statutes last year. In August, federal prosecutors won a conviction against a Texas man charged with assaulting an Asian family that he accused of spreading the coronavirus.
Experts said the Justice Department appears to be shedding its historic reluctance to press hate-crimes complaints in cases where local authorities already have filed charges. In February, the department won convictions in the cases of three White Georgia men, who already were sentenced to life in state prison for killing Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man, in 2020.
“I think they’re trying to make a point that regardless of whether there’s a local prosecution or not, there’s a legitimate federal interest,” said Marc Stern, the chief legal officer at the American Jewish Committee. “To the world at large, federal government intervention lends a measure of seriousness.”
The Justice Department also steps in when smaller jurisdictions request help. Eric Jenkins, the police chief in tiny Paola, Kan., said his department went directly to the U.S. attorney’s office to prosecute Colton Donner, a White man who pleaded guilty in February to hate-crime charges for threatening a Black man with a knife in 2019. Donner was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison.
“We would have just felt that the federal route would produce better results and be more appropriate,” Jenkins said. “We wanted to treat the case with the severity it deserved.”
Benjamin Wagner, who served as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California in the Obama administration, said local and federal authorities try to work collaboratively. But in some instances, he said, if “a U.S. attorney decides they are done waiting and need to move quicker and show this is on the front-burner, they can jump the line and charge the case.”
Last November, during his swearing-in as the first Black person to be the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams announced plans to create a civil rights unit, citing a spike in hate crimes against Jews and Asian Americans.
Antisemitic attacks in New York, which increased sharply in 2021, surged again in the first few months of 2022.
The pro-Palestinian rally where Greenman was injured occurred on April 20. It began outside the Israeli Consulate, with marchers carrying anti-Israel signs and chanting “globalize the intifada.”
Videos show Greenman wearing the Israeli flag and Masoud following him, and marchers stomping on and setting fire to what appears to be the same flag. A separate video of Greenman’s assault, captured by a bystander, shows a man striking him, while shoving away a person trying to intervene.
The New York City Police Department declined to say why its detectives ended up working with federal prosecutors, rather than the state-level prosecutors working for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D). Williams’s office also declined to comment. Filitti, Greenman’s lawyer, said the detective with whom Greenman worked suggested to him that Bragg’s office did not seem interested.
Bragg drew criticism shortly after taking office in January when he told his staff not to prosecute some lower-level offenses to be able to focus on violent crime. But an official in Bragg’s office said police never brought Greenman’s case to the office’s attention, and she noted that Bragg successfully lobbied for $1.7 million in city funds to launch a dedicated hate-crimes unit, calling it a “top priority.” His office is prosecuting a record 103 hate-crime cases, including 15 alleged antisemitic incidents.
“This case was taken directly to the Southern District by the NYPD hate-crimes task force,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the active case. “We didn’t have a say in that.”
Rhidaya Trivedi — who is representing Masoud along with Ron Kuby, a prominent defense attorney and talk show commenter — compared the altercation between her client and Greenman to a “bar fight” and said the federal government lacks jurisdiction to prosecute because Masoud did not assault Greenman over his religion or presumed national origin.
Rather, she said, Masoud was reacting in the heat of the moment to Greenman’s Israeli flag, which some Palestinians view as a symbol of Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.
“This is ideological,” Trivedi said. “If this was a Ukrainian who captured a Russian flag, you would not rush to say this is a hate crime. We’d say this is an act in an ongoing debate in an active and ongoing war. This is a very dangerous argument the government is making.”
Masoud’s trial is scheduled for February. If he is convicted, he faces up to 10 years in federal prison, a stiffer penalty than if he were prosecuted under New York statutes, experts said. Greenman said he hoped the Justice Department’s involvement will elevate attention about what happened to him.
“It shows people that this is unacceptable,” he said. “We live in a country where you are allowed to express yourself without getting beat up.”
Sarah Cohen contributed to this report. | 2022-09-14T09:12:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Alleged New York hate crime in sheds light on rare federal prosecution - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/14/justice-department-hate-crime-prosecutions/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/14/justice-department-hate-crime-prosecutions/ |
Biden administration under pressure as Afghanistan faces enormous hunger crisis after U.S. capture of reserves
A woman prepares dinner in a camp for internally displaced people outside Herat, Afghanistan, on March 14. (Lorenzo Tugnoli for The Washington Post)
The Biden administration on Wednesday announced it will create a new fund out of some of Afghanistan’s frozen central bank reserves, aiming to alleviate the country’s mounting humanitarian crisis without enriching the Taliban, which rejected previous attempts at a compromise deal earlier this year.
After the fall: The wrong plane out of Afghanistan
The announcement follows more than a year of fighting over whether the Biden administration should return the $7 billion in Afghan assets that became inaccessible to the country’s leaders after the Taliban’s rise to power in August 2021. Economists say the freezing of these funds has fueled the collapse of Afghanistan’s economy and its hunger crisis, but the Biden administration and other analysts have said the Taliban cannot be trusted to administer such substantial amounts of money. Biden officials also announced in February that half of the $7 billion in funds would be separately earmarked for litigation filed by the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The deterioration of Afghanistan’s economy has put pressure on U.S. officials to explore how they might be able to turn the funds back over to the country’s central bank. In June, U.S. officials met with Taliban leaders in Doha, Qatar, to discuss potential compromises that would allow technocrats at Afghanistan’s central bank to use the funds under close supervision to ensure the money does not fall into Taliban hands. The Taliban has rejected those proposals.
With a deal elusive, economists and aid groups have grown increasingly concerned about Afghanistan’s economy amid an exodus of capital and people. The United Nations estimated in August that approximately 4 million children are malnourished and close to 95 percent of the country is not getting enough to eat. Some economists say the new fund is insufficient to meet the country’s needs, given that the central bank reserves are critical for shoring up a currency that has cratered. A severe drought and a devastating hurricane have also combined to make what some experts have called the world’s greatest humanitarian catastrophe.
“This move can’t possibly compensate for the harm to the Afghan economy and millions of people who are starving, in large part because of the U.S. confiscation of Afghanistan’s central bank reserves,” said Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal think tank.
Taliban puts on show of force to celebrate anniversary of U.S. withdrawal
Still, the United States is leaving open the possibility that Afghanistan could eventually reclaim the bank assets in full. Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo sent a letter on Tuesday to the Afghanistan central bank saying that it must meet three conditions — demonstrate political independence from the Taliban, implement anti-money-laundering guidelines, and add a “third-party monitor” — before the United States could consider returning the funds.
“The shortcomings of economic management are contributing to the economic and humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan,” Adeyemo wrote in the letter.
He added, “There is currently no institution in Afghanistan that can guarantee that these funds would be used only for the benefit of the people of Afghanistan.” | 2022-09-14T09:34:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S. to redirect Afghanistan’s frozen assets after Taliban rejects deal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/09/14/taliban-frozen-assets-afghanistan-biden/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/09/14/taliban-frozen-assets-afghanistan-biden/ |
Xi Jinping speaks in Hong Kong on July 1. He is expected to meet Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Uzbekistan this week as the pair solidify their "no limits" partnership. (Justin Chin/Bloomberg)
President Xi Jinping on Wednesday left China for the first time in almost three years, marking his reemergence on the international stage with a tour of Central Asia intended to strengthen his goal of forging an alternative world order not dominated by the West.
The trip comes ahead of an October congress of the ruling Communist Party where Xi is expected to extend his rule indefinitely — cementing his position as the country’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong and giving him scope to more aggressively pursue his vision of China as a dominant global power.
"Xi’s trip abroad is intended to signal confidence that he has secured a once-unthinkable third term in office, as well as to reinforce his desire to be seen as leading an anti-Western alliance of nations,” said Craig Singleton, a senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former U.S. diplomat.
On Thursday, Putin and Xi are expected to hold their first face-to-face meeting since February, when the two declared a “no limits” partnership in Beijing, less than three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. After months of supporting Russia without endorsing the war or providing material support that would invite secondary sanctions, senior Chinese leaders have recently signaled stronger support as Putin faces military setbacks against Ukrainian forces.
Li Zhanshu, China’s third most-senior leader, said on a visit to Russia last week that his country understands and “fully supports” Moscow’s “core interests and security concerns” and accused the United States and NATO of pushing onto Russia’s doorstep. “In these circumstances, Russia has taken measures that they believe must be taken. The Chinese side understands and in various aspects has lent its support with coordinated action,” he said.
Yet China, worried about international sanctions, is likely to continue offering mostly rhetorical support for Moscow. Xi’s high-profile visit to a region historically dominated by Russia also highlights how Beijing is emerging as the more senior partner in the relationship. Since the 2013 launch of the Belt and Road initiative, Xi’s flagship foreign policy designed to connect countries more closely to Beijing through trade and infrastructure projects, China has invested heavily in railways, pipelines and other infrastructure in the region.
“Russia has views and interests in Central Asia and China has been slowly eating away at them. This does offer China an opportunity because Russia really is on the back foot,” said Theresa Fallon, director of the Center for Russia Europe Asia Studies in Brussels.
Ahead of the SCO, founded in 1996 by the China, Russia, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan to resist a Western-dominated world order, Beijing has donated 67 limousines made by the Chinese luxury carmaker Hongqi, as well as 40 buses, for use by state leaders at the summit.
“It’s kind of saying we are really the host. We are here,” Fallon said.
Xi’s visit to Kazakhstan overlaps with that of Pope Francis, prompting speculation that the two may meet amid negotiations between the Vatican and Beijing on renewing a deal on the nomination of bishops. The Vatican has said there are no plans for a meeting, and the pope said during his flight to Kazakhstan that he was “always ready to go to China.”
Beijing and the Holy See broke off relations in the 1950s after Beijing insisted that Catholics in the country worship only in churches recognized by the Chinese government. In 2018 the two sides reached an agreement that would pave the way for official ties by giving the Vatican final say over bishops nominated by Beijing.
Xi’s activities abroad may help distract from challenges at home, where he faces a severe economic slowdown and discontent over the country’s strict “zero covid” policy. In recent years he has also faced international scrutiny over a crackdown on minorities in Xinjiang, the northwestern Chinese region that borders Kazakhstan. Accounts of the campaign’s brutality, including the detention of Uyghurs and others in re-education camps, first emerged from ethnic Kazakhs who had escaped the dragnet. Last month, a United Nations report concluded that China may have committed crimes against humanity.
Still, ahead of the crucial political meeting next month there appear to be few threats to Xi’s position. “For Xi, he’s done the internal victory lap and this is his way of doing that externally,” said Raffaello Pantucci, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Vic Chiang in Taipei and Lyric Li in Seoul contributed to this report. | 2022-09-14T09:34:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | China’s Xi lands in Kazakhstan ahead of expected meeting with Putin - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/14/china-xi-putin-meeting-kazakhstan-uzbekistan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/14/china-xi-putin-meeting-kazakhstan-uzbekistan/ |
Before Trump’s endorsement and the pandemic catapulted Dan Cox to the GOP nomination for governor, he was a polite freshman lawmaker in Annapolis’s super-minority, pushing parental rights and abortion restrictions far outside Maryland’s political mainstream
Ovetta Wiggins
Del. Dan Cox (R) in Annapolis on June 30. (Brian Witte/AP)
Long before Donald Trump elevated his primary bid for governor, Del. Dan Cox was a polite backbencher in the Republican super-minority, building his reputation in Annapolis as a thoughtful yet inflexible lawyer whose legislation rarely passed.
Cox (R-Frederick) held the door for Democratic colleagues, earnestly suggested an acerbic GOP friend pick up “How to Win Friends and Influence People” — and championed bills often far outside Maryland’s political mainstream.
“He was on the typical freshman path, finding his way,” said House Minority Leader Jason C. Buckel (R-Allegany), who supported Cox’s primary opponent. Then, “Dan’s sense of self and sense of himself as legislator really changed.”
The pandemic fueled Cox’s political trajectory. He said he never considered running for governor in heavily Democratic Maryland before his fight against shutdowns, mask restrictions and vaccine mandates focused his ambition and rallied supporters.
“I had no plans, never even crossed my imagination,” said Cox, 48. His record of passing two bills, tacking on a few amendments to others and casting votes on the fringe of his own party would not normally portend a shot at the state’s top job. Neither would calling the 2020 election of President Biden “stolen” in a deeply Democratic state, nor attending a conference in Gettysburg, Pa., this spring that promoted QAnon theories.
But now he’s at the top of the GOP ticket, waging an uphill campaign against a Democratic opponent who has outraised him 10 to 1. Cox’s record as a one-term state lawmaker illustrates what he did — and tried to do — when he had a position of power.
A constitutional lawyer by training, Cox summarizes his legislative philosophy as “power to the people” by curtailing government’s influence — though he supports the government’s protection of what he calls natural rights, including those of fetuses and parents.
Over four years, he introduced 14 bills that would restrict or roll back access to abortion and offered multiple additional budget amendments to strip state funding for low-income women seeking the procedure. He sought to make concealed-carry permits available to all handgun owners who wanted one for self-defense. He pushed for tax cuts big and small. And he voted with just two other Annapolis lawmakers to keep an old law that makes spousal rape legal.
Alongside bills about black bear hunting, sex offenders’ homes, alternative treatments for soldiers with PTSD and remembering Pearl Harbor, Cox heavily emphasized parental rights both in custody battles and in the classroom or school board meetings. Well before he launched a long-shot run that drew Trump’s endorsement, he proposed limits to executive power for public health emergencies.
Asked if he would push similar antiabortion proposals as governor, Cox said, “I do have a consistent and transparent record of service to the people of Maryland, whereas my opponent, Wes Moore, has no record.” (Moore, the Democratic nominee, is an author and former nonprofit executive who has not held public office.)
Cox pushed to limit distribution of drugs for medical abortions, add informed-consent requirements, let medical providers refuse to perform abortions and ban the procedure altogether after a heartbeat is detected.
Three times, he pushed bills to outlaw abortions of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome, allowing for exceptions for cases of rape or incest. He challenged colleagues in a hearing to “look in the mirror. … Is the person looking back at you perfect? … What if your flaws were identifiable through a DNA test? … Would you be here given your imperfections?”
“He is a devout Christian man who tries to make decisions based off of what he thinks God is calling him to do,” said Del. Lauren C. Arikan (R-Harford), who serves alongside Cox on the Judiciary Committee. “He’s very thoughtful and kind.”
Arikan’s office neighbors Cox’s, and she echoed colleagues who said privately that even in disagreement he was unfailingly polite. She said it’s in contrast to her approach. “I rub people the wrong way all day, every day,” she said, and laughed recalling how Cox gently recommended she read Dale Carnegie’s 1936 self-help classic on winning friends.
Like many freshmen, Cox’s legislative victories have been rare. When he successfully amended a bill exempting orchards and farmers markets from a ban on plastic bags in 2020, his colleagues broke out into applause. Once during a marathon committee hearing, in 2019, he tacitly acknowledged the futility of his bill that would require at least two school employees to carry guns, drawing laughs by saying, “I’m hesitant to get into my full testimony and just ask you to pass it and we’ll be done.”
The two bills Cox did get passed came in his first year, in 2019. One set up a task force to review all criminal and civil violations in Maryland code looking for collateral consequences. The other requires the national hotline for human trafficking to be posted prominently near marriage license clerks in courthouses.
He said recently that he pitched the latter bill after a constituent came to his office, weeping about being a trapped in a seven-year marriage to her trafficker. But when it came to other marquee human trafficking laws that advocates pushed, Cox was in a small minority who voted against them.
He was one of 21 lawmakers to vote against raising the minimum marriage age from 15 to 17. In at interview, he said a pregnant 16-year-old should be allowed to marry the father.
Cox was one of five members of the House of Delegates to vote against a “safe harbor” bill that forbids prosecuting child sex-trafficking victims for prostitution. He said he was convinced that the prosecutions protected children and that police needed the “tool in the toolbox” as leverage to persuade victims to help “catch the pimps” because nothing else would overcome the children’s fear of the traffickers.
“Every single police officer that testified, to my recollection, in front of our committee indicated that they do not ever mistreat a minor in the prosecution of prostitution,” he said.
Maryland may finally protect child sex-trafficking victims from prosecution
He pressed for bills regardless of whether he could get them enacted by Democrats, because he viewed his role partly as a spokesperson for the people who elected him.
“I’m not going to back down from what my constituents need,” Cox said, referring to his rural district near the Pennsylvania border that voted for Trump by 10 percentage points in 2020. “And so we’re going to have hearings and public hearings. That’s the beauty of the legislative process, to make sure that my constituents’ voices are heard.”
Colleagues on both sides of the aisle described him as principled and didactic. But his policy choices drew more attention than his colleagues’, particularly after the pandemic.
By the time Trump took note in the fall of 2021, Cox had used pandemic outrage to elevate his platform online, tapping into a national vein of conservative grievance about governmental overreach.
It started weeks into the pandemic, in May 2020, when he unsuccessfully sued Gov. Larry Hogan, a fellow Republican, in federal court over the scope and duration of pandemic-related shutdowns. By then, Maryland was reporting about 950 cases per day, 1,250 people had died, and vaccines were still more than six months from emergency approval.
This year, with Trump and Cox sharing Hogan as a political foe, Cox made what historians have called the first serious effort to impeach a Maryland governor. (Republicans joined Democrats in unanimously voting it down in committee.)
Cox’s low profile shifted. His social media following swelled in 2020 and beyond as he joined other organizations to become a leading voice against stay-at-home orders that shuttered business and churches. His advocacy and its contrast to Hogan, he said, prompted people to ask him to consider running for governor.
“It began in a simple way of simply advocating for common-sense understandings that if we’re going to have Walmart and big box stores open and liquor stores, that we certainly can have small businesses open and churches open with similar standards,” Cox said. “I think it just demonstrates the beauty of the American system that sometimes we’re required by the people to step up and do more than what we had anticipated. And hopefully it’s all for the better of everyone.”
In his law practice, Cox took on work challenging pandemic restrictions, filing lawsuits on behalf of businesses, private citizens and organizations against public officials in Charles, Montgomery, Anne Arundel and Harford counties. All were ultimately dismissed.
In 2021 and more so in 2022 after he’d declared he was running for governor, Cox began to speak out more and file more legislation that sent a signal to the conservative base, colleagues say. Cox sought to forbid coronavirus vaccine mandates and introduced legislation to let people collect unemployment benefits if they were fired for refusing to get vaccinated. (“No jabs for jobs” is a campaign promise to voters.)
“He was pleasant and seemed, you know, fairly normal as far as ordinary social interactions go,” said David Moon, a liberal Democrat from Montgomery County. “But over the course of the four-year term, I would say he definitely started doing some of these hot-button issues. I don’t recall him doing ‘don’t say gay’ bills when he first got here, but certainly that’s what he was doing towards the end.”
Moon said that based on his experience with Cox in the General Assembly, he has been telling Democrats not to take him for granted in the election. “He’s obviously a Trump-molded conservative firebrand at this point, but my read on it is he seems like a bit of a calculating guy,” Moon said.
“It’s very easy to put him into a caricature … as not a formidable, strategic mind,” Moon said. “I’m not sure I feel the same way about Dan Cox.”
The issue of parental rights was a defining one for Cox long before it galvanized the right and helped lift Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) into office in 2021. Earlier that year, Cox likened a bill on mental health access for tweens to the Nazis’ trampling of Jewish rights during the Holocaust. He pushed to forbid discussion of gender identity in public schools before the fourth grade and to notify parents so they can opt out of history or sexual-education curriculum of which they disapprove.
Annapolis colleagues from both parties say that although Cox is often branded as Trump-aligned, they have far different styles.
“He doesn’t have a tremendous amount of bombast in his personality,” said Buckel, the leader of the House GOP caucus. “He says and does things that aren’t always popular, but he does it from a place of principle and always respectfully. … He certainly has his moments of rhetorical flourish.”
Arikan said Democrats and Cox’s foes aren’t being honest about him. “There’s a sweetness to him that they can deny now, but they all know it in their hearts,” Arikan said.
“I’ve never really heard him be cruel or purposefully hurtful toward someone,” she said. “It’s never passive-aggressive, which is the bread and butter of politics in Maryland. He doesn’t do any of that backstabbing crap.”
At a rally in Pennsylvania this month, Trump celebrated Cox’s primary win as a defeat for Hogan. Cox stood and gave a thumbs-up to the crowd in Wilkes-Barre. “He’s got a tough race,” Trump said.
“This is my fault,” the former president continued. “Larry Hogan’s not going to be supporting you only because I’m supporting you. I don’t know what that means, but Maryland has a great man running and I hope you’re going to do well. And we’ll be out there helping you, okay?” | 2022-09-14T09:47:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Dan Cox's unlikely path to become the GOP nominee for governor of Md. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/14/dan-cox-nominee-maryland/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/14/dan-cox-nominee-maryland/ |
Conan O’Brien remembers Norm Macdonald one year after the comic’s death
The longtime ‘Late Night’ host reflects on his favorite guest, and his ‘superhumanly brave’ comedy
Perspective by Conan O'Brien
Norm Macdonald and Conan O'Brien in 2009. (Paul Drinkwater/NBC Universal/Getty Images)
Comedian and writer Norm Macdonald died on Sept. 14, 2021. Conan O’Brien, on whose late night talk show Macdonald made some of his most memorable appearances, delivered this tribute at a private memorial for Macdonald earlier this year that took place during the Netflix Is a Joke festival in Los Angeles, attended by a few dozen of Macdonald’s friends and fellow comics. O’Brien shared his speech with The Washington Post on the first anniversary of Macdonald’s death.
Good morning. I’d like to begin by telling you the last words Norm Macdonald spoke on this earth. He said “When I go, make sure they have a memorial for me. See to it that it is part of a much larger festival promoting a streaming service. Arrange it hastily and make sure you have it early in the morning. Make sure that many of the tributes are on videotape and that Rob Schneider is featured prominently. And finally, hold it in a theater in some part of Hollywood frequented by male prostitutes.” Norm, this is for you.
Of course I do want to thank Norm’s family and [longtime manager] Lori Jo [Hoekstra] for being here today and giving us all a chance to celebrate the funniest man any of us have ever met. I want to be clear, I am not here this morning to eulogize or memorialize Norm. My motives are selfish. I’m here because I want, finally, to understand Norm. Norm was the most completely original person I have ever met. He didn’t look like anyone else, talk like anyone else, or follow many of the basic principles of comedy. He lived in his own, strange world populated by hobos, French Canadians, cardsharps, trappers, a pig with a wooden leg, farmers, hooligans, and, for reasons no one will ever understand, Frank Stallone. His patter was an insane mix of folksy, rural phrases — a wandering, genteel yarn-spinner from the backwoods, and all of this masked the fact that he was completely fearless and shockingly blunt. He was Mark Twain, if Mark Twain was obsessed with prison rape and crack whores.
When Norm died there was an explosion of grief and appreciation, but everything I read was deeply unsatisfying. “One of the greats, a true original, one of a kind … .” That can and will be said about every comedian at this festival. I know, because I’ll be the one saying it after everyone speaking today is dead. That’s right, I plan to outlive every comic in this room and I will bury you all with hollow praise. I will dance on your grave, Nealon.
What distinguished Norm Macdonald was one quality: He was superhumanly brave. The media loves to talk about “brave comedy” and they’re usually wrong. Bravery isn’t a Trump joke that gets applause and pat on the back from the New York Times, bravery means tremendous risk and, often, loss. Norm was highly principled and he paid dearly for his refusal to compromise. He lost jobs — many jobs — because he followed his own insane, outlandish North Star. Jim Downey, Norm’s cohort on Weekend Update and a speaker today, told me that Norm would bomb with a joke at dress rehearsal and then tell it again on air, when he knew, with certainty, that it would get nothing. On my show, Norm would tell long, seemingly pointless stories, all lies, and hang it all on one punchline that might or might not land. Early in my “Late Night” run, after Norm left the stage, Andy Richter leaned over to me and said, “That guy doesn’t care in a way that terrifies me.”
We all know that Norm would lose his job if he kept telling O.J. jokes, and that he persisted and was fired. But Norm took big, frightening swings constantly. Once, Norm came on my show during Oscar Pistorius’s trial for murder. Norm went out of his way to say that he had no problem with the murder — that didn’t trouble him. He said his issue with Pistorius was that he had blades for legs. “Conan, I think one of the basic requirements for being a sprinter is … having legs. You can’t be on the team, you’re not a biped.”
Norm was so outrageous that I would always start laughing the minute he came out from behind the curtain. Those apple cheeks, dimples and his gleaming pumpkin eyes — the eyes of a true sociopath — would have me giggling like a schoolgirl before he had even said a word.
I can think of no better example of Norm’s fearlessness and gall than to relate the behind the scenes tale of the Moth story. Norm had paneled brilliantly when I called for a commercial and said, “We’ll be right back with more Norm Macdonald.” Norm was shocked and during the quick break, with the band playing, he told [show producer] Frank Smiley and I that he didn’t have any more material — he thought he was only doing one segment. “How much time do I have to do?” Norm asked and we told him “seven minutes.”
I didn’t know it then, but Norm had heard a joke one week prior from Colin Quinn. It’s a 15-second joke: “Moth goes into a podiatrist’s office and says I have a problem, doc — I think I’m going mad. The doctor says ‘I’m a podiatrist, not a psychiatrist — why come to see me?’ Moth says, ‘Because the light was on.’ ”
So Norm, with no preparation, launches into an epic Chekhovian tragedy. Suddenly, the Moth is trapped in an existential despair. We hear all about his loveless marriage, the death of his daughter Alexandria, and his estrangement from son, Gregarro Ivinalititavitch. The story goes on and on, straying as far from the punchline as anyone could. And then, at last, after an entire segment, Norm sticks the landing perfectly. The punchline worked, but it was all about the journey with Norm. Like any common criminal, or Picasso, Norm broke rules with gusto, and it was his impish joy in the destruction that touched us all so profoundly.
Most of us did not know how that Norm was sick, and many of us couldn’t understand why it was so hard to connect with him in his final years. When I wrapped up my show last spring, I wanted to have Norm on as a guest and I was told he couldn’t be there. He was the best panelist in the history of talk shows and easily the most beloved guest in the 28 years of my career. On my last night, June 24, many of my friends an colleagues were sending out nice messages and Norm sent out a tweet that is quintessentially Norm in all his delightful shaggy dog glory:
“It was a historic night and my only regret was not being there live. But, I was glued to my tv and thrilled to be watching my heroes move on. Hard to believe it’s been 28 years. The best is yet to come. Congratulations to the greatest ever, the mighty Montreal Canadiens!” Yes, the Canadiens had won the Western Conference Finals on the night of my last show and he needed, rightly, for me to know exactly where I stood.
There would be no sentimentality from Norm, and he wouldn’t want it today. Selfishly, I don’t feel badly for Norm, I feel badly for all of us. They have discontinued my favorite brand of soda and I am eternally pissed. In a world where there is more comedy than at any other time in our civilization, the good is rare and the exceptional is divine. Norm Macdonald, at his best, was a divinely hilarious, brave and absurd anomaly — a backwoods Canadian hick with the phrasing of a poet, a mad bomber and destroyer of worlds who was, simultaneously, a principled and loyal friend. So let’s remember him today, retell his jokes as best we can, and then do it again tomorrow and the next day. We will spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out that demented lump of coal, and I cannot think of a better use of our time.
Will somebody please give Norm Macdonald another TV show? (August 2016)
Norm Macdonald had one last secret (May 2022) | 2022-09-14T10:22:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Conan O'Brien remembers Norm Macdonald a year after his death - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/14/norm-macdonald-conan-obrien/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/14/norm-macdonald-conan-obrien/ |
The queen is also at the center of Netflix’s Emmy-winning period drama, “The Crown,” which follows her reign across decades; Claire Foy portrays her in the first two seasons, and Olivia Colman took on the role in Seasons 3 and 4. It’s no secret that the drama has taken liberties, at times controversially so, in its storytelling. But the series — which creator Peter Morgan recently called “a love letter” to the U.K.’s longest serving monarch — has also shed light on the inner workings of the royal family in ways that the news, broadsheet gossip nor carefully crafted palace statements ever could.
‘Hyde Park Corner’ (Season 1, Episode 2)
The show’s second episode depicts King George VI’s (Jarred Harris) death, which followed a period of ostensible recovery (his actual diagnosis, lung cancer, was kept a secret) and thrust the palace into chaos. News of the monarch’s death reaches Elizabeth while she and her husband, Prince Philip (Matt Smith) are in Nairobi, carrying out a royal tour on behalf of her father. The king’s death is conveyed to Elizabeth without words as she spots Philip’s trenchant expression from across the well-manicured lawn of their lodge. The princess’s worst fears are confirmed when the aide who informed her husband of his father-in-law’s passing bows his head before her.
How ‘The Crown’ shaped a generation’s view of Prince Philip
‘Scientia Potentia Est’ (Season 1, Episode 7)
Another Season 1 episode suggests Queen Elizabeth, who was tutored privately as a child, harbored insecurities around her lack of formal education. The series shows Elizabeth confronting her mother about why she was denied the chance to learn more traditional subjects including literature and math, seen as “undignified” topics of study for a future queen. “Sewing, needlework and saying poems with [teacher] Crawfie,” she tells her mother. “That is not an education.” The Queen Mother reminds Elizabeth that she also studied with the Vice-Provost of Eton College — a fact supported by real-life accounts of the royal’s upbringing — but Elizabeth reminds her those lessons consisted of “being drilled in matters of the Constitution.” In “The Crown,” she hires a private tutor to help fill in some scholarly gaps in hopes of being able to converse more naturally with visiting heads of states, politicians and other dignitaries.
‘Gloriana’ (Season 1, Episode 10)
Princess Margaret’s (Vanessa Kirby) well-documented love affair with Peter Townsend (Ben Miles), a divorced Royal Air Force officer, is a source of steamy drama in “The Crown’s” first season. It all comes to a head in the season finale, as Elizabeth ponders whether to let her 25-year-old sister defy tradition and marry a divorcé less than two decades after their uncle Edward (Alex Jennings) abdicated the throne to do the same with the twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson (Lia Williams). In the end, Elizabeth — despite personally liking Townsend, who worked as an equerry in the royal household, and longing to see her sister happy — backed Parliament and the Church of England in ruling that Margaret would have to give up her royal income and leave England to marry Townsend.
‘Aberfan’ (Season 3, Episode 3)
“The Crown” devotes a standout episode to the 1966 disaster that killed 140 people, most of whom were schoolchildren, in the Welsh mining town of Aberfan. Queen Elizabeth drew criticism for waiting more than a week to visit the horrific scene of the tragedy — one of the first to be televised and covered around the world — which occurred after an avalanche of coal waste and slurry slid down a mountain following days of heavy rain.
‘Tywysog Cymru’ (Season 3, Episode 6)
As Charles (Josh O’Connor), known to have a complicated relationship with his mother, battles his family over his desire to be with the woman of his choosing (Camilla Parker Bowles, as she was then known), he steps up his royal duties, delivering a speech in Wales amid increased calls for independence in the region. Though he nails the speech (in Welsh, no less), his mother, who later reads a translation of his address, is unimpressed, having picked up subtle allusions to Charles’s issues with the monarchy.
‘Fagan’ (Season 4, Episode 5)
The most recent season of “The Crown” recounts a horrifying breach in palace security that enabled Michael Fagan (Tom Brooke) to break into Buckingham Palace — twice — gaining access to the queen’s private bedroom on his second illegal visit. On “The Crown,” an appropriately alarmed Queen Elizabeth calmly talks to the stranger, who details his personal woes amid economic instability. The plot line matches some reports of the 1982 intrusion, but in 2020, Fagan told the Independent that his exchange with the queen was much briefer. “She went past me and ran out of the room, her little bare feet running across the floor.”
Fact-checking ‘The Crown’: What the man who broke into the Queen’s bedroom really wanted | 2022-09-14T10:22:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 'The Crown' episodes that reveal the most about Queen Elizabeth II - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/14/queen-elizabeth-the-crown/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/14/queen-elizabeth-the-crown/ |
How does a mortgage rate buydown work?
A temporary buydown provided by the seller allows the borrower to have more money available during the early years to handle furnishing and renovation costs. (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Higher mortgage rates — up nearly double over a year ago — cut into affordability and increase monthly payments for buyers.
Rising rates are particularly challenging for buyers who may be struggling to afford their first home or those who hope to move up into a larger and more expensive property. While there are multiple strategies to manage higher mortgage rates, one option to consider if you have some extra cash is to buydown the interest rate temporarily.
We asked for advice about this strategy from Peter Idziak, an attorney based in Dallas at residential mortgage law firm Polunsky Beitel Green; David Cox, a sales manager and senior loan originator in Boulder, Colo., with Cherry Creek Mortgage; and Karla Melgar, a senior loan officer in La Plata, Md., with Embrace Home Loans, which is based in Middletown, R.I. All three answered by email and their responses were edited.
What is a buydown and how does it work?
Idziak: A temporary buydown is a cash payment that effectively lowers the borrower’s interest rate for a limited period, allowing borrowers to reduce their monthly payments during the early years of the mortgage. The party providing the buydown funds will normally make a lump-sum payment into an escrow account at closing. The borrower pays a monthly payment based on the reduced or “bought down” rate and the funds from the escrow account are used to make up the difference to the lender.
Although a party can agree to buy down the rate by any amount and for any length of time, the most common buydown agreement calls for the interest rate to be reduced by a certain number of whole percentage points (i.e., reduced from 5 percent to 3 percent) and then increase 1 percent per year until it reaches the undiscounted note rate.
Melgar: A buydown is a mortgage financing technique in which the buyer obtains a lower interest rate for the first few years of the mortgage. It is a way for a borrower to obtain a lower interest rate by paying extra cash at closing so their monthly payment is based on an interest rate that is typically 1 percent to 2 percent below the note rate. The first-year rate on a buydown is often referred to as the “start rate.”
For example, the interest rate on a 2-1 buydown would be 2 percent below the note rate for the first year and 1 percent below the note rate for the second. Then years three through 30 would be at the note rate.
How much does a buydown usually cost?
Idziak: The cost to temporarily buy down the interest rate will depend on the size of the mortgage loan and the amount and duration of the buydown. The calculation used to buy down the rate may also differ among lenders but is usually about equal to what the borrower saves in interest. As an example, using the average mortgage ($415,000) with a 30-year term, a 2-1 buydown would cost approximately $9,000 and a 3-2-1 buydown would cost around $17,000.
Cox: For a buyer who makes a down payment of 20 percent, the cost to fund the escrow or buydown account for a 2-1 buy down is about 2 percent of the purchase price or about 1.7 percent of their loan amount. The dollar amount required to fund the buydown account is a calculated amount needed to supplement the buyer’s discounted payment over the two-year period.
Who usually pays for a buydown?
Cox: The escrow or buydown account can be funded by the seller, the buyer, the lender or a third party, such as a Realtor. Getting the seller to accept a concession to fund the account is usually the most beneficial scenario for the buyer.
Melgar: A buydown can be paid by the buyer, seller, mortgage lender or builder. In my experience, buydowns are most often used in new home construction and the builder typically pays for it.
What is the benefit of a buydown?
Idziak: Home affordability concerns are at the forefront of many buyers’ minds in the current environment. The first few years of homeownership are often the most expensive, especially for first-time buyers. Furnishing a home and completing renovations or upgrades are often major expenses for buyers. A temporary buydown provided by the seller allows the borrower to have more money available during these years to handle such costs.
Borrowers often expect their incomes to increase in the future. Lower monthly payments during the first few years of a mortgage can allow a buyer time to adjust to what, for most, will be a higher monthly housing expense. For buyers who qualify for a mortgage but may be worried about their short-term financial picture, a temporary buydown may give them the confidence to take out a mortgage and purchase the home.
How does a buydown impact a loan qualification? Is the buyer qualified on the lower rate or the later rate?
Idziak: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and FHA require the borrower to qualify at the note rate. If the borrower needs a lower interest rate to qualify for the loan, the VA will allow the borrower to qualify based on the first year’s payment if there are “strong indications” the borrower’s income will increase to cover the yearly increases in loan payments. Such strong indications include confirmed future promotions or wage percentage increases guaranteed by labor contracts.
It’s important to note that under the federal Ability to Repay Rule, most lenders are required to make a reasonable and good faith determination that the borrower has the ability to repay the loan using the borrower’s monthly payment without considering the temporary buydown. This requirement helps prevent past abuses of using introductory or “teaser” rates to qualify a borrower who would not have qualified for the mortgage using the permanent interest rate.
What are the advantages of doing a buydown rather than making a bigger down payment?
Idziak: For borrowers who may not plan to be in the home more than a few years — or who expect rates to go down and to refinance in the near future — using a seller concession to purchase a temporary buydown can result in greater savings to the borrower compared to using funds to make a larger down payment or to buy points to permanently bring down the interest rate. As noted above, for borrowers who expect to have a higher income in the future, using their funds or seller concessions to concentrate the benefits in the first few years of the mortgage when money may be tightest can be a savvy financial planning tool.
Cox: Compared to a larger down payment or even paying discount points [which are equal to 1 percent of the loan amount] to permanently buy down the interest rate, the 2-1 buydown yields a much shorter break-even point. For example, at current interest rates, a larger down payment will only impact the monthly payment by about $5.40 for every $1,000 or about $54 a month for an extra $10,000 down payment. For a 2-1 buydown scenario in which the purchase price is $600,000 with 20 percent down and $10,000 is put toward the buydown, the buyer’s payment would be reduced by $550 a month during the first year and $285 a month the second year.
Melgar: The buydown will sometimes allow the purchaser to consider a larger home, especially for first-time home buyers who anticipate a growing family. This type of loan is also popular with buyers who know their income will increase over the next two to three years.
What are the disadvantages of doing a buydown rather than making a bigger down payment or paying discount points for the loan?
Idziak: Buyers who plan to own the home for a significant length of time may benefit more from a lower monthly payment over the life of the loan, as opposed to a temporary reduction in payments over the first few years of the loan. For such buyers, using those funds to buy points to permanently reduce the interest rate or toward a larger down payment may result in greater savings over the life of the loan. Additionally, borrowers putting less than 20 percent down on a conventional purchase are normally required to purchase mortgage insurance. The cost of such insurance over the life of the loan could outweigh any benefit a borrower would receive from using their funds to fund a temporary buydown.
When to lock in your mortgage rate
Cox: A disadvantage of the buydown is the homeowner’s payment will increase after the first and second year before stabilizing in the third year going forward, so eventually they will have to adjust their monthly budget for those larger payments.
Idziak: Most conventional or government loans have limits on so-called “interested party” contributions, which are costs normally paid by the purchaser but covered by another party to the transaction. Buydown funds provided to a borrower by another party to the transaction are included within these limits, so buyers should be aware that their lender may limit the amount of money a seller, developer, real estate agent or lender can contribute to fund a buydown.
Cox: The 2-1 buydown program is a phenomenal way for buyers to ease into their new mortgage payment. This program also is a great way for buyers to get into a home sooner and benefit from price appreciation immediately, rather than waiting to buy in hope that rates drop in the future. If the buyer were to sell, refinance or pay off the mortgage before the end of the second year, the remaining escrow or buydown funds are refunded to them or applied toward the payoff of their mortgage. | 2022-09-14T10:22:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How does mortgage rate buydown work? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/14/what-is-mortgage-rate-buydown/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/14/what-is-mortgage-rate-buydown/ |
Unaccountable
The high cost of settlements over police misconduct has led insurers to demand police departments overhaul tactics or forgo coverage
The aftermath of a crash that occurred as police chased this white minivan in St. Ann, Mo., in 2017. Another motorist, Brent Cox, suffered permanently disabling injuries when the fleeing vehicle struck his car. (Provided by Rana Law Group)
Brent Cox is seen at age 55 in 2017, the year he suffered life-changing injuries when his car was struck by the fleeing vehicle in a police pursuit in St. Ann, Mo. (Provided by Rana Law Group)
ST. ANN, Mo. — A patrol officer spotted a white minivan with an expired license plate, flipped on his lights and siren, and when the driver failed to stop, gave chase. The driver fled in rush-hour traffic at speeds of up to 90 mph, as other officers joined in the pursuit. Ten miles later, the van slammed into a green Toyota Camry, leaving its 55-year-old driver, Brent Cox, permanently disabled.
That 2017 police chase was at the time the latest in a long line of questionable vehicle pursuits by officers of the St. Ann Police Department. Eleven people had been injured in 19 crashes during high-speed pursuits over the two prior years. Social justice activists and reporters were scrutinizing the department, and Cox and others were suing.
Undeterred, St. Ann Police Chief Aaron Jimenez stood behind the high-octane pursuits and doubled down on the department’s decades-old motto: “St. Ann will chase you until the wheels fall off.”
Then, an otherwise silent stakeholder stepped in. The St. Louis Area Insurance Trust risk pool — which provided liability coverage to the city of St. Ann and the police department — threatened to cancel coverage if the department didn’t impose restrictions on its use of police chases. City officials shopped around for alternative coverage but soon learned that costs would nearly double if they did not agree to their insurer’s demands.
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Jimenez’s attitude swiftly shifted: In 2019, 18 months after the chase that left Cox permanently disabled, the chief and his 48-member department agreed to ban high-speed pursuits for traffic infractions and minor, nonviolent crimes.
“I didn’t really have a choice,” Jimenez said in an interview. “If I didn’t do it, the insurance rates were going to go way up. I was going to have to lose 10 officers to pay for it.”
Larger law enforcement agencies — like the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department or the New York Police Department — handle it in different ways, often by creating a special fund to finance settlements or by paying those costs from the county’s or city’s general fund. This insulates them from external demands by insurers.
In St. Ann, the impact has been profound.
St. Ann Police Chief Aaron Jimenez in St. Ann, Mo., in 2021. Jimenez had favored chasing all fleeing vehicles but curtailed the practice at the insistence of his department’s insurer because of pursuit-related damage and injury claims. (Whitney Curtis for The Washington Post)
Since the retooling, which took effect in January 2019, the number of police pursuits annually has increased slightly, but crashes during pursuits have dropped: from 25 in 2018 with eight injuries to 10 in 2021 with three injuries, according to data provided by the department. So far this year, the department says, there have been three crashes with no injuries.
The forced changes prompted Jimenez to equip his patrol cars with new technology to help nab motorists who try to outrun police. Sticky darts containing GPS trackers are shot from the front of patrol cars onto the backs of vehicles that speed away, so officers can fall back and catch up with them later.
While dozens of arrests have been made using the GPS technology, overall arrests in the city have fallen more than 30 percent since the change. Jimenez attributes that drop primarily to officers’ inability to chase motorists for minor infractions. “If you’re a proactive police department and you go out there and you search for a crime, your stats are higher because you’re fighting crime, you’re chasing more cars, you’re making more arrests,” he said.
John Chasnoff, a local activist who fought for years to get St. Ann to retool its chase policy, said he is dismayed that the catalyst for change was money — not the injuries to people including Cox.
“It’s an indictment on St. Ann police and their priorities that the voice of their insurers spoke louder than human lives,” Chasnoff said.
The insurer’s demands for St. Ann police also affected departments beyond this blue-collar town of about 13,000 people. The city is just one of a dozen in the St. Louis risk pool, which has required each city to overhaul its police pursuit policy.
There is no public data tracking how many police departments have made policy changes at the behest of their insurers. But the changes are widespread, affecting thousands of departments, according to interviews with more than two dozen insurance analysts, police reform experts and a review of hundreds of pages of insurance documents.
In Vallejo, Calif., the city’s insurance risk pool threatened in 2017 to end coverage because of mounting police use-of-force claims unless officials agreed to a higher deductible — a jump from $500,000 per claim to $2.5 million per claim. The city instead joined a high-risk insurance pool in California. Because of increased demand from troubled departments for its services, the California group has begun offering coverage nationwide. Vallejo officials did not respond to a request for comment.
Entire states are having to adjust to insurers’ demands. In New Mexico, the largest risk pool — which provides coverage for one-third of the state’s police officers — hired an instructor last year to travel the state and retrain officers in de-escalation skills after private insurance rates climbed by more than 60 percent. The risk pool that insures 30 of the state’s 33 sheriff departments also saw coverage shrink while rates shot up 50 percent over the past three years because of police use-of-force claims.
Across the country, allegations over police conduct are often settled by departments at taxpayers’ expense: A Post investigation in March documented more than $3.2 billion spent over the past decade to resolve nearly 40,000 claims at 25 of the nation’s largest police and sheriff’s departments.
Concerns about insuring troubled departments have been building for years.
In 2009, a local insurance risk pool warned the 60-officer Maywood Police Department in California that it would lose its coverage if it did not enact more than a dozen changes focused on reducing violent encounters with the public. When police failed to do so, the risk pool pulled its coverage, and the department disbanded.
“When the officers had to turn over their badges and radios for the final inspection the last day, it was the most emotional thing I’ve ever experienced in my law enforcement career,” said Frank Hauptmann, who was Maywood police chief at the time. “When we did our final salute, each officer had tears streaming down their faces.”
For some police departments, insurers are refusing even to provide initial coverage unless they change their policies on a variety of matters including body cameras and chokeholds, according to industry experts.
“I’ve been doing this for 40 years, and this represents a major shift,” said John Chino, a broker who secures insurance for cities and counties in six states. “They are asking lots of very detailed questions. ‘Do they use chokeholds? What does their de-escalation training look like?’ If they aren’t doing something on the list, they are required to get it if they want coverage.”
More claims, fewer insurers
Officer Colin Rumpsa of the St. Ann police speaks with a colleague during a traffic stop in Berkeley, Mo., in July 2021. The St. Ann force had to moderate its use of high-speed chases because of rising insurance costs. (Whitney Curtis for The Washington Post)
Tamika Palmer, second from left, prepares to address the media in Louisville on Aug. 4, 2022, in response to the announcement of federal civil rights charges against four current and former Louisville police officers for their roles in the fatal shooting of her daughter Breonna Taylor in 2020. (Amira Karaoud/Reuters)
These forced changes are taking place at police departments in neighboring cities and counties that work together to create insurance risk pools. Their collective buying power helps them secure lower rates.
Members pay a “contribution” to the pool to provide a first layer of coverage, but most pools also purchase additional coverage on the private market.
For police departments within these pools, the serious risks they may take can also drive up rates and deductibles for other members. Because of this, the pool may threaten to expel a city, county or township if its police department refuses to take steps to minimize risk.
“The members help police themselves,” said Alexander T. Brown, a lawyer who specializes in insurance settlements for civil rights plaintiffs. “It’s a joint self-insurance program, and they are motivated to keep the pools solvent because it’s the members’ own money.”
Working with insurers, cities and counties often will write checks to settle claims of police misconduct to avoid the additional costs of fighting the allegations in court. The increased scrutiny of police has led them to settle cases more quickly to avoid jurors who also may now be more likely to second-guess officers and their tactics.
“It’s been such a shift, and it’s happened so quickly,” said Izaak Schwaiger, an attorney who has settled dozens of civil rights lawsuits for plaintiffs against police. “The last time I went to a settlement conference, the city basically told me they were going to capitulate to what I demanded. That never used to happen before.”
Chino, the insurance broker who operates in six states, said settlement negotiations that once took years now take months. And the payouts have skyrocketed. “The settlement for Breonna Taylor was $12 [million]; that would have been $2 million just a few years ago,” he said.
As a result, the number of insurers willing to provide coverage for police departments with a history of large settlements is shrinking.
Ben Eggert, a lawyer who represents municipalities in claims and settlements, said that five or six years ago, brokers such as Chino orchestrated bidding wars between insurers for coverage. “There was tremendous competition,” he said. “The insurance broker could play the different insurance entities off one another.”
Now that the power has shifted to the insurer, some have wondered whether this actually could threaten public safety.
Steve Hebbe, the immediate-past president of the New Mexico Association of Chiefs of Police, said he believes it is a conflict of interest for insurers to be crafting department policies. Some of the riskiest calls to which patrol officers respond — domestic violence, threats of suicide or disorderly conduct — might be curtailed or eliminated by insurers, he said.
“Their goal is to have no injuries or accidents, but that isn’t realistic, and that isn’t policing,” Hebbe said. “We send officers to do dangerous things that other people don’t want to do. Their profits are hurt by the risky things we do.”
A tipping point in Springfield
Barbara Kenny and her husband, Chris Kenny, hold a photo of their child Stacy Kenny in Lane County, Ore., in October 2020. Stacy Kenny, who had schizophrenia, was fatally shot by Sgt. Rick Lewis of the Springfield, Ore., police during a traffic stop on March 31, 2019. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
In Springfield, Ore., complaints and settlements involving excessive force by police became so costly two years ago that the city’s insurance risk pool, Citycounty Insurance Services, was given oversight of overhauling the 82-member police department.
The tipping point came on March 31, 2019, when Springfield officers shot and killed Stacy Kenny, an unarmed 33-year-old motorist with schizophrenia who had been pulled over because she was exhibiting “weird” behavior, records show. (The Post previously reported on Kenny’s death).
A 911 recording captured the encounter that began with Kenny begging an emergency operator to explain why police had stopped her. Kenny then can be heard screaming. Officers smashed the windows of her red Nissan, used a Taser on her twice, punched her in the face more than a dozen times and tried to pull her out of her car by her hair, police and court records show.
But Kenny was anchored to the car by a locked seat belt. Her life ended when she tried to flee by driving away with one of the officers still inside the car. On the recording, there’s a burst of gunfire, then an officer says: “We are all okay. Bad guy down.”
Kenny had legally changed her gender but presented as male, so officers believed she was a man.
Her parents filed a wrongful death claim and sued the city. Barbara and Chris Kenny said that as they pressed for answers, they discovered serious deficiencies with the department’s process for reviewing violent police encounters. Officers involved in the fatal incident later testified in depositions that the department never conducted an internal investigation of the shooting.
“A human being died that night and all they did was issue a one-page crappy memo. We asked ourselves, ‘How do we prevent this from happening to someone else in the future?’ ” Barbara Kenny said. “It felt like we had the opportunity to make a difference because what happened was so egregious.”
The Kennys told city officials during settlement negotiations that any agreement would need to include a plan for systemic use-of-force reforms and anti-bias training that would help officers better deal with minorities and people with mental disabilities. They insisted that an external monitor — not a city employee — provide unbiased progress reports on the changes.
As the city and Citycounty Insurance Services negotiated the settlement with the Kennys in summer 2020, city officials learned that the cost of insuring police in the community of 64,000 residents was about to spike.
Misconduct and employment claims against Springfield police over the past five years totaled $8.5 million, of which the risk pool had paid at least $2 million, according to city records and court documents.
The city’s deductible would jump from $100,000 to $250,000 for each claim filed against the police department “due to several large police and jail claims in recent years,” according to city records.
The city’s insurance broker, Ron Cutter, looked elsewhere for coverage, but only Citycounty Insurance Services was willing to offer a policy, records show.
Cutter told city Risk Manager Ted Mugleston in an email that the city did not “have a ton of leverage to negotiate” a set of changes the risk pool was requiring for contract renewal, and Cutter hoped that did not give the police chief “any heartburn.” Mugleston declined interview requests. Cutter did not respond to requests for comment.
Weeks later, one of Springfield’s police officers was recorded on video laughing about a teenage protester being injured during a protest march, on July 29, 2020, according to a lawsuit filed by Civil Liberties Defense Center, a legal organization that defends activists in civil rights cases. The lawsuit alleges that police caused the injury.
“We finally did something!” officer Daniel Casarez can be heard saying on the video recording, as he and another officer laugh in the background at the protest, organized by Black Unity, a local police abolition group. “That stupid 12-year-old [inaudible] took it right in the f----in’ face … at least we f----n’ took a stand, just once.”
Later that night, counterprotesters swarmed in and hit the Black Unity protesters with their fists, a flashlight and a flagpole, city records and video show. Police failed to intervene that night, according to an independent review of the episode commissioned by the city.
“There has long been a cowboy culture in the department,” said Lauren Regan, an attorney with the Civil Liberties Defense Center that filed the lawsuit on behalf of Black Unity protesters. The lawsuit, which named former police chief Richard L. Lewis and 25 officers including Casarez, seeks numerous changes at the department, including establishment of a new hiring committee that will include people of color and civilians from the community.
Casarez declined to comment, and his attorneys did not respond to calls seeking comment. Police Chief Andrew Shearer, who took over the department last year, said he could not comment on pending litigation.
Police in Springfield, Ore., and Black Unity protesters in a confrontation in July 2020. Springfield’s police are among multiple U.S. police departments that have been pushed by their insurers to exercise greater restraint, including in the use of force. (Andy Nelson/AP)
In September 2020, with the approval of the Springfield City Council and the city manager, the insurance risk pool agreed to pay the Kennys $4.55 million — the largest police settlement in the history of Oregon.
The city also met the family’s other demands: In addition to de-escalation training and a new process for reviewing use-of-force incidents, the city agreed to create an awards program that recognizes officers who peacefully resolve potentially perilous encounters with civilians. The department also agreed to adopt a policy stating that officers “value and preserve human life” and “strive to use the minimum force necessary to accomplish their lawful objectives.”
The city appointed its insurer to monitor the changes, something the Kennys’ attorney, Dave Park, said he had never seen in his 40 years of litigating police civil rights cases.
To the Kennys, it made perfect sense.
“I couldn’t understand why the insurance company wasn’t mad as hell at the department,” said Barbara Kenny. “They were the ones who had to keep paying out. They seemed like a natural partner for us on reforms. If we made the department better, don’t you think the costs would go down?”
In June 2021, when Springfield officials took steps to renew the police department’s insurance coverage, Citycounty Insurance Services gave them an ultimatum.
“Should the City see police and jail claims with the same frequency and severity as experience[sic] during the last 10 years, we will either be dropped from coverage, or general liability claim costs are anticipated to increase an average $300,000 annually for the foreseeable future,” Mugleston wrote in a memo to city council members on June 7, 2021.
This summer, however, city council members were told that there would be no additional increase in Springfield’s deductibles for fiscal 2022-2023, records show.
Citycounty Insurance Services declined to be interviewed. In a statement, Dave Nelson, a deputy director with the risk pool, credited city officials, including Shearer, with “the hard work necessary to change the culture in the police department. The change in leadership has made a significant difference.”
Since assuming oversight of the overhauls, the insurance risk pool has required dozens of additional changes, including an updated cadet screening process to preemptively root out rogue officers. But accusations of misconduct persist.
Springfield Officer Brian Bragg, who is named in the Black Unity lawsuit, was accused in June of using excessive force.
At an abortion rights protest in a neighboring town, Bragg allegedly smashed a baton into a female protester’s sternum. Another officer was recorded on video telling her to leave to avoid being struck again. Shearer said he has ordered an internal affairs investigation of the matter. Bragg and his lawyer did not return calls seeking comment.
“There’s definitely a toxic warrior culture that has permeated SPD [Springfield Police Department] and been a driving factor there,” said Brittney de Alicante, a member of the Springfield Police Advisory Committee, which acts as a liaison between the community and the department. “When it’s that deeply embedded into your culture, it’s a really hard cycle to break.”
Shearer said there has been measurable improvement. A recent report from the chief to the city council shows that from 2020 to 2021, the number of use-of-force incidents dropped from 229 to 190. Shearer acknowledges, however, that more needs to done, and the insurance risk pool continues to identify problems that he said he is working to address. The more active role of insurers, he said, has also changed the nature of the job for police chiefs.
“Frankly, there’s a hammer there because it’s costing the city a lot of money,” Shearer said in an interview. “Most police chiefs, when they take their job, they really think on a much wider scale: ‘How can I create a community that is safe and reduce crime rates and build trust in our community?’ But to have the actual dollar figure of the insurance rates at the front of their mind? That’s a relatively new problem.”
‘You’re not out here’
St. Ann police Detective Daniel Rice, left, runs checks on a motorist as Officer Ben Freet provides backup during a traffic stop on Interstate 70 in Woodson Terrace, Mo., in July 2021. (Whitney Curtis for The Washington Post)
The St. Ann Police Department is one of few in Missouri to use StarChase, a system that fires an attachable GPS tracker from a police car to a fleeing vehicle, allowing officers to avoid a risky chase and find the vehicle later via the tracker. (Whitney Curtis for The Washington Post)
At dusk one day last summer, St. Ann Detective Daniel Rice pulled his car into a gravelly median along Interstate 70, which cuts through the city and is an ideal spot for catching speeding motorists.
Rice said some drivers think the cover of night will allow them to freely rocket down the highway with fraudulent plates and outstanding warrants. Because of the changes imposed by insurers, catching them now is harder, he said, something that he and other St. Ann officers resent.
“An insurance company should have nothing to do with a police department’s policy,” Rice said, adding that insurance representatives should spend time in the field with patrol officers. “You’re not out here, and you don’t know what’s really going on.”
In interviews, several officers said that on average, two motorists a week now successfully flee when officers try to pull them over. Word is out that St. Ann police don’t chase people as they used to.
“It builds their confidence, so they keep doing it over and over,” Officer Benjamin Freet said of drivers who refuse to stop.
How much the city has been forced to pay out over police pursuits since the policy revamp is unclear. St. Ann City Manager Matt Conley said he cannot determine the full cost because city officials neither handle nor track settlements. “I don’t keep any of the paperwork; the risk pool does, ” he said in an interview.
Because St. Louis Area Insurance Trust risk pool is a private entity, it does not have to disclose settlement costs, although its funding comes from taxpayers and its board of directors comprises city managers, including Conley. Officials with the pool did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.
“It may not be nefarious, but they are concealing a lot of information that should be public,” said John Rappaport, a law professor at the University of Chicago who has studied insurance risk pools.
Despite the drop in the number of crashes, Chief Jimenez said he still believes that police chases, even for minor traffic infractions, are justified. If people are fleeing from police for expired license tags, he said they usually have other legal problems — outstanding warrants, unregistered weapons or illegal drugs.
He thinks the mere fear of a chase by St. Ann police in the past kept criminals away.
“I’ve not been advertising that our policy has changed,” Jimenez said. “I have to follow the times and listen to the insurance company, [but] I think this will wreak havoc on our communities. I still wish we could use it.”
Since the overhaul, arrests have declined from about 900 to 600 annually. Major crimes reported have remained unchanged, records show.
Jimenez said he thinks that the pandemic has had an impact on the arrest numbers but that the drop in arrests is largely driven by the policy change.
“It’s because we’re not being able to chase them,” Jimenez said. “When someone is fleeing, 90 percent of the time it isn’t because of a traffic violation. When we stop them, we find guns, drugs, outstanding warrants.”
Police reform activists Elizabeth Vega and John Chasnoff are shown in St. Louis in July 2021. Both have contributed to efforts to impose restraints on the practices of the St. Ann Police Department. (Whitney Curtis for The Washington Post)
In St. Ann, the vehicle tracking system — called “StarChase” — allows officers to tag and track fleeing suspects without engaging in high-speed chases.
Officers fall back and, using the GPS coordinates, later catch up with suspects when they park. So far, St. Ann police officials say 58 arrests have been made using the technology, including one in June following a “road rage” incident. Officers let the suspect flee and later tracked her to a ditch where she had crashed her SUV, records show. The technology is not perfect — officers have to be close enough to hit the target, and weather and the surface of the fleeing vehicle can inhibit the dart’s ability to attach. But Freet and other officers say that overall, they like the technology.
“You should see the look on their face when we pull up,” Freet said of those who flee the police and are tracked down. “They think they’ve outrun us.”
The revamp forced one other change in St. Ann: the motto.
Police no longer claim to chase “until the wheels fall off,” Jimenez said.
“One of the things I’ve had to come to terms with is, since we changed our pursuits, our accidents are way down. We are doing a better job of keeping the public and our officers safe.”
Cox, the injured motorist whose case helped trigger the changes in St. Ann, said the entire ordeal with police felt like something from a bygone era. The high-speed pursuit that left him drifting in and out of a coma for about a week started when police began chasing a motorist with an expired license plate — one that was overdue by only three weeks.
“It was like something from the ’20s and ’30s where you chase the bad guy in the car through town,” said Cox, who is now 60 and settled with the city for an undisclosed amount this year. Cox said that because of the crash he was unable to continue working as an auto mechanic. He said he has metal plates in his back and left ankle and has permanent nerve damage, chronic problems with his digestive tract and persistent back pain.
“I’m lucky to be alive.”
Alice Crites and Julie Tate contributed to this report.
Editing by David Fallis and Sarah Childress. Copy editing by Gilbert Dunkley. Design and development by Jake Crump and Tara McCarty. Design editing by Christian Font. Photo editing by Robert Miller. Video production by Joy Sharon Yi. Video editing by Jayne Orenstein. Project editing by Courtney Kan.
Kimberly Kindy is a national investigative reporter for The Washington Post. In 2015, she was a lead reporter on the paper's Fatal Force project, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and George Polk award. In 2021, she was a lead reporter for a series that won a Gerald Loeb award. Twitter Twitter | 2022-09-14T10:22:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Misconduct settlements have led insurers to force police reform - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/police-misconduct-insurance-settlements-reform/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/police-misconduct-insurance-settlements-reform/ |
These Black women are obsessed with Korean TV dramas. Here’s why.
Years before most Americans ever heard of ‘Squid Game,’ many Black women had turned to Korean scripted television for escapism and comfort.
By Soo Youn
Illustration for GENDER-KDRAMA (Netflix; iStock/Washington Post illustration)
In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Charmaine Lewis, a Black mother of two in Tucson, followed a recommendation from her Vietnamese and Chinese American friends and watched “Crash Landing on You” on Netflix. The series, about the implausible love story of a North Korean soldier and a South Korean fashion mogul, started her on an “addiction."
She watched Korean dramas, obsessively, keeping a spreadsheet of the 175 titles she consumed, cooked Korean food and studied Korean. She’s planning a trip to South Korea.
For Lewis, 52, the Korean dramas were an escape from the unbearable news in 2020, as racial tensions flared across America, adding to her constant worries about her two sons. Scripted television, she said, was no better. “Either there are no Black people or we’re criminals.” The Korean dramas provided a road map for potential healing.
When a White student called her son a racial slur at school, she looked to the dramas for the type of recompense she wanted. “I wanted the boy’s parents to come to our house with their son and get down on their knees and bow and apologize,” she said, referring to a Korean ritual when a deep apology is called for.
Like Lewis, many Black women have turned to Korean scripted television for escapism and comfort, often years before most Americans had ever heard of “Squid Game” (the 2021 K-drama that became the most watched show in Netflix history), creating a passionate and influential fandom. Black K-drama evangelists have launched blogs, Facebook groups, Instagram clubs, podcasts and TikTok accounts dedicated to Korean dramas.
‘Squid Game’ is No. 1 on Netflix and South Koreans are using the survival drama to talk about inequality
When Michea Hayden was 13, she discovered “Secret Garden” starring Korean heartthrob Hyun Bin while surfing the internet. Since then, the now-24-year-old retail associate has watched hundreds of other K-dramas and visited South Korea.
“They literally sucked me in! Here I am, a young Black girl from Mississippi! There’s no Koreans here, especially the city I am from. It was very foreign to me but also so interesting that I had to dive deeper into it,” she said. “Getting into Korean culture was a way for me to see a different world and become more educated about different cultures as a Black woman.”
There’s no data on the exact demographics of the genre’s viewership, but hardcore fans say it is more than just the size of the Black female audience, but its influence.
“You can’t ask for a better cheerleader than a Black woman. From our politics to our hair-care products, we support and share passionately,” Portland, Ore.-based writer and podcast host Nina Perez, 48, said. She founded Project Fandom and Podcast Fandom to review pop culture, including K-dramas. The podcast is downloaded 10,000 to 12,000 times a month, but most listeners who live-tweet shows are Black women, Perez says.
Korean dramas, or K-dramas, are South Korean TV shows spanning romantic comedies, historical epics, thrillers, supernatural fantasies and often touch upon class, high jinks plot twists, fate, and corruption. Like K-pop, they’re key to the rising global popularity of Korean culture.
Though Korean cultural exports have long been popular in Japan, China, Southeast Asia and Latin America, they’ve experienced a slower crescendo in the United States. As they break out — “Squid Game” now boasts 14 Emmy nominations and six wins, including the first Asians to win lead male actor in a drama for Lee Jang-Jae and director for Hwang Dong-hyuk — experts credit the influence of Black and Latina women.
“People think that it’s Korean Americans who drive the mainstreaming of Korean culture in the U.S., but actually, it’s just as much Black women," said the author of the “Ask a Korean!” blog, who uses the pen name T.K. Park.
This influence isn’t new, points out Crystal S. Anderson, an affiliate professor of African and African American Studies at George Mason University. “In the 1970s, kung fu film got to the United States and was eagerly consumed by Black and Latino audiences … far before it got to mainstream America,” she said. “We see it with anime, we see it with Bollywood, we see it with K-dramas.”
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What’s helped boost K-dramas’s popularity, Anderson said, is access through streaming platforms. Decades ago, the shows were accessible only on VHS tapes, then DVDs from Korean grocery stores. Then pirated downloads entered the picture. In 2009, a start-up called DramaFever started streaming licensed Korean dramas and eventually other Asian content globally.
Digital access has also allowed fans to form their own networks. When Danielle Morris-Scott got hooked by the crime thriller “Stranger” in July 2020, the 36-year-old mail carrier was watching solo. She started the Facebook group Black and Obsessed With K Dramas in March 2021. Currently 140 members delve into Korean culture and language, some of whom plan to visit Korea next spring to see the cherry blossoms, locations from their favorite shows, and eat the local cuisine.
For some — even the fans themselves — their love for K-dramas may be surprising. When a reporter asked about the genre’s popularity among Black women on Twitter, hundreds replied.
Many cited familiar cultural themes: an emphasis on family, a respect for elders and the central role of food as an expression of love. There’s also the escapism of watching stories unfold through a non-Western lens through characters who aren’t White. But the overwhelming majority of women cited the joy of seeing love stories between people of color, devoid of the racial politics and baggage.
“Asian stories often get looked over, much like Black stories. Asian men in American society aren’t appreciated or seen as attractive, much like Black women. Yet here I am seeing super-attractive Korean leading men living their best life on-screen,” said Sandrine McCurdy, 45, a catering sales manager in San Antonio. She tracks the shows she’s seen on MyDramaList — 218 in the past three years.
Chrystal Starbird, 40, a scientist in North Carolina who has watched about 70 K-dramas and is learning Korean, noted, “A lot of times, K-dramas are about being unseen or the existence of beauty where many think there is none. As a Black woman living in America, I can relate. Even for those who fit the stereotypes on the surface, they and we are so, so much more.”
Franceska Williams, 28, a teacher in Chicago, got into K-dramas as a child getting mani-pedis with her mom. Intrigued by the shows playing on the TV in the background, she asked the salon owner to turn on the subtitles. She said she relates to the common trope of female leads who, if too “hard-working and independent, ‘they’ll never get married and settle down,’ but they prove everyone wrong.”
The chasteness of Korean dramas is also a major draw: There’s typically no on-screen nudity, and depictions of sex are rare — 16 episodes usually lead up to a kiss, often closemouthed. (Korean movies, on the other hand, can get racy). The slow burn of romance provides an enviable balm against Hollywood’s hypersexualization of Black women for some fans.
“I’ve always wondered why almost every Black woman I meet is as into K-dramas as I am,” said Zainab Barry, 24, a performance artist in New York City who grew up in Northern Virginia. As Black women, “we were either not even considered or hypersexualized.”
“There’s something so sweet about seeing a non-White couple being slow with their romance, seeing a relationship build without sex being a priority. Maybe we’re drawn to it because we see the romance we want to have but aren’t always given?”
The Korean entertainment industry didn’t anticipate the Black fandom, said Christine Hye-jin Ko, who co-directed the popular series “Law School” and “Forecasting Love and Weather.” She was surprised when she first became aware of their popularity with Black women when she discussed her shows on Clubhouse chats hosted by the social media club KDramatics.
Then, reflecting on her high school days in Vancouver and college at Duke University, Ko remembered a “cultural connection with my African American friends, akin to jung (a deep bond or connection), one of the core values that differentiates Korean culture,” she said. There is also the pervasive undercurrent of han (a deeply ingrained sense of sorrow, grief, or rage) that Koreans attribute to centuries of invasion, oppression and suffering that she said Black women may find relatable.
Still, South Korea is not a diverse country, making it all the more surprising that Korean dramas have developed an ardent Black fan base. In a society that struggles with colorism, impressions of Black people are largely informed by Hollywood or the U.S. military presence.
“Koreans in general aren’t as aware of the concepts of diversity — representation isn’t something that we’re educated about or equipped to discuss in any sort of meaningful manner. The media landscape is still quite homophobic, xenophobic, sexist and ageist,” said Ko, the Korean director who has worked on several popular dramas. “Our ability to understand why representation is important isn’t expanding as quickly as our audience is.”
The lack of literal representation hasn’t been a deterrence.
Nicci Gittens, a 30-year-old medical assistant in North Texas, may not see characters exactly like herself — a trans Black woman — but can still identify with K-dramas, she said. “Seeing how a relationship can form and build off of nonsexual desire was really beautiful to me.”
“That’s not how ‘American’ shows, or men in general tend to approach women, especially trans-identified. There is an innocence and excitement about having to wait 15 to 30 episodes, or even multiple seasons, just to see a kiss,” she said, adding that watching dramas has caused her to raise her dating standards. | 2022-09-14T10:22:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | These Black women are obsessed with Korean TV dramas. Here’s why. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/09/14/black-women-korean-tv-drama-k-drama/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/09/14/black-women-korean-tv-drama-k-drama/ |
The Cevallos brothers are immigrant bachelors who for decades have spent their days in their shared Manhattan apartment crafting advertising posters by hand
A poster created by brothers Miguel and Carlos Cevallos is displayed at La Bonbonniere, a diner in New York. (Bebeto Matthews/AP)
The hand-drawn posters kept catching Aviram Cohen’s eye as he walked around his neighborhood in Queens, N.Y.
They were colorful, nostalgic advertisements with a distinct style that hung outside several shops and restaurants. Cohen — who builds and installs exhibitions in museums and galleries — was eager to uncover who was behind the posters. It wasn’t easy.
“I found them by going from restaurant to restaurant until there was someone that had their phone number,” Cohen, 42, said, adding that he was hoping to commission a sign for his wife’s yoga and Pilates studio, 2nd Story Pilates+Yoga in Jackson Heights.
When the artists, Carlos and Miguel Cevallos, met him at his wife’s studio to discuss potential designs for a poster that day in 2018, Cohen was stunned to see “two charming brothers in suits show up,” he said.
The Cevallos brothers, it turned out, are immigrant bachelors in their 80s who for decades have spent their days in their shared Manhattan apartment crafting advertising posters by hand. They make a point to wear a suit and tie whenever they leave their Upper East Side home.
They had long been relying on word of mouth to attract new clients, and that was enough to keep them busy.
Then Cohen suggested they get on social media to preserve and archive their work. Perhaps it could get them a little new business, too.
“It should be documented so it doesn’t vanish,” Cohen said. “I admired their art and thought other people would also enjoy it.”
Cohen offered to create an Instagram account for the brothers, who were born in Ecuador and grew up in Colombia. They were on board with the idea.
The brothers didn’t realize that this meeting would lead to booming business — and then to their art emerging as a staple at popular restaurants, food trucks and bars across the five boroughs.
“It’s almost like a second act,” Cohen said of the brothers’ recent streak of success.
Their Instagram account has more than 27,000 followers, and new commissions pour in every week via their direct messages.
They’ve been featured in the New Yorker and also in Eater New York, which wrote that commissioning the brothers’ art is “something of a rite of passage for restaurant and bar owners” and described their work as “charming for its cheeky details, nostalgic lettering, and general lack of interest in perfection.”
A post shared by Cevallos Bros (@cevallos_bros)
After that initial meeting between Cohen and the Cevallos brothers, the men built a close bond. Cohen said he was keen to learn more about their history and shared love of art. The brothers speak limited English and corresponded with The Washington Post by email.
Throughout their childhood, “we were always making art and learning about artists,” said Carlos, 84, who spoke on behalf of himself and his brother.
The siblings, along with their older brother, Victor, opened a sign shop in Bogotá in 1966. Victor — who first earned attention in the early 1960s as he traveled across Central America sketching caricatures of guests in hotel lobbies — taught his younger brothers all he knew about art.
“We learned everything from Victor,” Carlos explained. “He inspired us to be artists.”
Along with making signs, “we had exhibitions everywhere,” he added.
After Victor moved to New York in 1969, his brothers eventually followed him. Carlos came first in 1974 and produced posters with Victor in a small art studio in Times Square, and later in Queens.
Miguel, 81, remained in Bogotá to look after their mother, who died at age 101. In 2005, he moved to New York to reunite with his brothers.
The three Cevallos siblings worked side by side, using acrylic paint and Sharpies to make posters for various businesses, mainly in the Corona and Jackson Heights neighborhoods of Queens. They also placed their artwork in exhibits across New York, including at El Museo del Barrio and MoMA PS1.
After Victor’s death in 2012, Miguel and Carlos carried on their brother’s legacy by continuing to make custom posters. Miguel outlines the letters and images, and Carlos is the colorist.
“This is how Victor and I work, so we continue like this,” Carlos said. “Miguel would watch and learn how Victor would make the letters and design the poster. Later he make his own style.”
For many years, business stayed steady, but as the hospitality industry suffered amid the pandemic, so, too, did the Cevallos brothers, whose regular clients could no longer afford to commission their work. That’s when the Instagram account became key.
Commission requests from trendy restaurants and bars — initially in New York, then globally — began arriving in their inbox, with businesses aiming to lure patrons back after the pandemic shutdown and also support local creators. The brothers, Cohen said, were delighted by the newfound attention.
“They had success exhibiting their artwork through the ’80s, and this is like a renaissance,” Cohen said.
Recently, New York establishments — such as La Bonbonniere, Van Leeuwen Ice Cream, Baz Bagel and Lucia Pizza of Avenue X — have commissioned posters. The brothers have also received inquiries from prospective clients across the United States, as well as internationally — from Spain, South Korea, Europe and beyond, they said.
Salvatore Carlino, who owns Lucia Pizza of Avenue X in Brooklyn, stumbled upon the Cevallos brothers’ artwork on Instagram, and “I just fell in love with the style,” he said. “To me, it screams New York signage.”
Carlino grew even more interested in having them create a poster for his restaurant, he said, once he learned about the men who made the art.
“There’s the allure of them being these two older gentlemen, and they’ve just been doing it for so many years,” he said. “It’s awesome.”
Happy David, who manages social media and partnerships for La Bonbonniere — a West Village diner — felt the same way about the brothers’ work.
“You can still see the brushstrokes behind it. It’s a person, it’s not graphic design,” said David, who also runs Casa Magazines’ Instagram account and commissioned the brothers to make a sign for the well-known newsstand. “It’s not perfect; it’s fun and homemade, and I think that’s what attracts me to their work.”
The brothers have also produced posters for barbershops, art suppliers, music stores and even law firms. They’ve done designs for custom-crafted pieces, and they make merchandise, such as T-shirts and sweatshirts.
The price of the posters varies widely depending on the nature of the client and project, and the time spent on each piece ranges considerably. Usually, they work on about six posters per week.
Cohen meets regularly with the brothers to sift through new commission requests and manage the account. His relationship with the Cevallos brothers is familial, Cohen said, adding that he doesn’t get paid for assisting them — and he doesn’t want to.
“We meet and we hang out. We go to museums, and we get lunch,” said Cohen, who described the brothers as “very old-fashioned, very modest and very dedicated to their family.”
The sibling duo — who, along with art, are passionate about opera — have no plans to part with their pens and paintbrushes anytime soon. They intend to make art indefinitely.
“Destiny is like this,” Carlos told the Associated Press. “Sometimes one finds success later in life.” | 2022-09-14T10:22:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Cevallos brothers find art success on Instagram in their 80s - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/09/14/cevallos-brothers-poster-nyc-restaurant/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/09/14/cevallos-brothers-poster-nyc-restaurant/ |
‘Florida Men’ are notorious. Here’s where the meme came from.
The practice of seeing Florida’s people, culture and history in caricature form is deeply rooted in the state’s colonial past
Perspective by Julio Capó Jr.
Tyler Gillespie
A person holds up a poster at an August rally in Tampa featuring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio. (Octavio Jones/Reuters)
Many people know the “Florida Man” meme through bizarre headlines, like the recent “Florida man crashes Walmart scooter into shelves, arrested for drunk driving after vodka found in basket.” While many of these headlines focus on the arrests of poor White people, the phrase has evolved into a catchall term for outlandish Floridians of all backgrounds. The meme has spawned a line of merchandise, a TV show, beer and a music festival.
Since the meme became ubiquitous in the early 2000s, “Florida Man” has been used as both a quick joke and a referendum on the state. But the broad appeal of seeing Florida’s people, culture and history in caricature form is deeply rooted in the state’s colonial past, one that has used a legend and myth to obscure the very real challenges the state and its people have faced.
Initially, imperial powers looked to Florida as a swampland ripe for the taking. Spain claimed dominion over Indigenous people living in Florida for most of the period between 1565 — the year of the first European settlement in North America at St. Augustine — and 1821.
Colonizers saw Florida as a land where anything was possible. Perhaps the most persistent example is the legend attached to Conquistador Juan Ponce de León and his purported search for the Fountain of Youth during the first Spanish expedition to Florida in 1513. The story seems to have been an embellishment by a political rival trying to make Ponce de León look foolish before the crown, casting him as someone capable of being duped by native tribes. In fact, there’s no evidence that Ponce de León’s name was even attached to the Fountain of Youth until after he died. It nonetheless became the dominant story about the colonizer’s time in Florida by the 17th century.
In reality, Florida proved to be more of a liability than a colonial prize. Plagued by pirates and privateers, hurricanes, runaway enslaved people and tribal conflicts, Spanish Florida became a colonial backwater. Indigenous peoples saw their numbers vastly diminished in this era. For example, while the Timucua of the northern part of Florida numbered somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 before European encounters, a mere 1,000 remained by 1700.
When the British occupied the Spanish-controlled city of Havana, Cuba, in 1762 as part of the Seven Years’ War, Spain chose to sacrifice Florida to Britain to regain its much more valuable Cuban land. But the British also had trouble attracting settlers to Florida and, preoccupied with the American Revolution, Britain ceded the land back to Spain by the war’s end in 1783.
The nascent United States looked to the region with great interest as it expanded its own territory. And in 1821, it acquired the land from Spain. Florida achieved statehood in 1845 and, less than two decades later, it became the third state to secede from the Union, joining the Confederacy in 1861. By then, of course, slavery had been firmly entrenched in the new state. In fact, enslaved people represented 44 percent of Florida’s slim population of 140,400 on the eve of the Civil War.
Myths and legends from colonial Spain and others persisted though. While unable to reverse age, the idea that Florida’s springs and temperate weather could cure disease and lethargy had become pervasive by the 1860s, even as the state housed more alligators than people. Hungry for more settlers and money, Floridians aggressively marketed their state as a place of unbridled wilderness largely untouched by civilization that had come to plague much of the industrial north. These claims tapped into contemporary fears that White men, in particular, had become overly feminized by professional jobs and lack of military engagement.
It worked, and people flocked to the state. In 1924, Florida amended its constitution to eliminate state inheritance and income tax, which further expedited the recruitment and arrival of new Floridians. From 1860 to 1930, the state’s population ballooned by more than 900 percent.
Fearing the loss of their residents to Florida, other states launched anti-Florida propaganda schemes. These ran the gamut from noting that Florida’s water was unsafe to drink or that meat was difficult to find to more sensational claims, such as that alligators and other bloodthirsty reptiles reigned supreme in this lawless land. In 1883, a New York newspaper quipped that the common exchange of “A Florida man has an alligator farm” should instead read: “A farm of alligators has a Florida man.”
Conversely, Florida’s marketing touted the state’s anti-Black origins. Tourist promoters reminded White people throughout the United States that Black subjugation reigned supreme in the Sunshine State. In the early 20th century, a common trope found in Florida postcards and other marketing tools regularly depicted Black people — often infants — as “gator bait” that could easily be killed or discarded.
Many Floridians leaned into the state’s growing national reputation and its distinct brand of frontier life. They told stories of Floridians behaving badly, much like today’s “Florida Man.” These included a story from 1883 about a Gainesville man who “accidentally” shot his wife three times after she told him she could no longer be with him, and the 1895 story about a knife fight at a butcher shop when someone cut the line in a small town east of Tallahassee.
Despite such sensational headlines, the state carried a magical luster for growth, transformation and prosperity. Incorporated in 1896, for example, Miami became the “Magic City” that, as if touched by a fairy’s magic wand, had blossomed overnight. Urban boosters attracted investors by touting the city as a “fairyland” where anything was possible. To give the illusion of old-world charm in an unfettered land, designers and architects ordered tiles stripped from villas in Cuba to place on their new roofs in Florida. They also imported exotic flora and fauna, such as flamingos, from the Caribbean to further brighten the city’s landscapes.
Considering some of Florida’s cities were established more like stage sets to appeal to outsiders, it should come as no surprise that the state became known worldwide as the home to kitschy sites, especially theme parks, which further strengthened its reputation for pleasure-seeking and the whimsical. Dozens of theme parks also popped up throughout Florida over the coming decades — from Cypress Gardens (1936) to Disney’s Magic Kingdom (1971) to the Holy Land Experience (2001). Today, Walt Disney is one of the state’s largest employers, pumping millions of dollars into its economy.
Changes in state law, however, helped make Florida synonymous with bad decision-making, allowing the historical tradition of anti-Florida media narratives to reemerge once again. Following the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s and the public push for transparency and accountability, most states opened their records with what became known as “Sunshine Laws” to provide public access to government records. But unlike other states that also balanced this accessibility with privacy measures, Florida made many arrest records and similar documents available almost immediately after they occurred. And so, its broad presumption of openness in public record laws paved the way for journalists, bloggers and anyone else to access public documents. Those reports have often turned into clickbait headlines.
The 2000 presidential election helped with this, too. With stories of hanging chads and recounts, a “because Florida” punchline became low-hanging fruit for comedians and internet commenters. In the mid-2000s, Fark.com began to track only-in-Florida news and contributed to the Florida Man meme.
The internet turned Florida Man into a Southern Gothic figure of indulgence, decadence and questionable decisions. In 2013, a magazine editor created the @_FloridaMan Twitter account, which received nearly 64,000 followers its first month. Soon after, sites like Twitter and Reddit encouraged people to participate Florida Man challenges by searching online for their birth dates along with “Florida Man” to help people find their “inner Florida Man.”
But the internet has changed a lot since the modern “Florida Man” came to live and lurk on the web. For example, the creator of the @_FloridaMan Twitter handle retired the account in 2019, later noting, “In 2013, we didn't think what happened on the Internet could affect real life.”
Perhaps people have become more sensitive to the plights at the center of these stories, such as housing insecurity, addiction or mental health issues. This especially stings considering that Florida ranks 49th in the nation in terms of access to mental health care.
Much like its colonial past, the actual problems in Florida are very real and not funny. Today, as before, the state remains a cultural and political battleground that demands we take it — and, most especially, its people — seriously and with care and respect. | 2022-09-14T10:23:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Where did the 'Florida Man' meme come from? Here's the history - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/09/14/florida-men-are-notorious-heres-where-meme-came/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/09/14/florida-men-are-notorious-heres-where-meme-came/ |
The 9th Circuit live-streams all of its arguments. Will that spread?
Many federal appeals courts have been live-streaming audio, at a minimum, during the pandemic. They may or may not continue.
Analysis by Christopher D. Kromphardt
The sun rises behind the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington in 2020. (Alex Brandon/AP)
In 2020, as Americans feared that any in-person meeting would spread the coronavirus, many federal courts began meeting online, live-streaming audio of oral arguments for the first time. Those included the Supreme Court, nine of the 13 federal appeals courts and more than a dozen district courts.
At least some in Congress took notice. Two House members sent the circuit courts letters asking whether they will continue live-streaming when the pandemic ends. In response, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts wrote that “all but one appellate court have indicated that they would consider continuing to live-stream oral arguments after the pandemic abates or have already decided to do so.”
That suggests that, for some federal appeals courts, live-streaming has brought benefits. One circuit’s judges, however, have embraced technological innovations for decades, including live-streaming and video-recording oral arguments: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. Its trajectory might offer lessons for other courts as they decide what to do this fall, potentially offering citizens insight into how these intermediate appellate courts — whose decisions are final in nearly all federal cases that are appealed — work.
Presidents can’t declassify documents with Green Lantern superpowers
The 9th Circuit’s path to live-streaming video
In a recent news release, the 9th Circuit, which covers most of the western United States, explained its status as a technological innovator. It began offering previously recorded oral arguments via a YouTube channel beginning in 2010; live-streaming some important cases beginning in 2012; and live-streaming video of all normal oral arguments beginning in January 2015. As far back as 1991, the 9th Circuit allowed media outlets to request the ability to bring still or video cameras into the courtroom for civil cases.
Research finds that state courts learn from each others’ experiences with technological innovations. In the federal judiciary, willingness to cite opinions from other courts of appeals — which are not precedents that other appellate courts are bound to follow — suggests they also learn from each other.
In a forthcoming article, my co-author and I find that 9th Circuit appellate judges used to be selective about what public image they presented. On the courts of appeals, panels of three judges hear oral arguments presented by attorneys. From 1991 to 2005, when a media outlet requested the ability to cover a case with video cameras, judges were more likely to reject these requests when a panel’s members disagreed with one another on law and policy.
All courts of appeals live-streamed during the pandemic, but not in the same ways
The 9th Circuit is notable for its size and the high rate at which the Supreme Court overturns its rulings. Nevertheless, other courts that try out greater transparency may, like the 9th, be willing to take a deeper plunge over time.
Even before the pandemic, different courts of appeals have taken different paths. Three had already experimented with live-streaming audio: the 2nd, 4th and D.C. circuits. As the pandemic has waned, one court of appeals, the 11th, has already stopped live-streaming.
Several courts of appeals turned to YouTube during the pandemic. According to data compiled by Fix the Court, almost every court of appeals has hosted audio live streams on YouTube, and five — the 4th, 5th, 7th, 9th, and D.C. circuits — still keep recordings on YouTube for later viewing. This is a major change from only a few courts of appeals having YouTube pages in March 2020.
Research shows benefits and risks of transparency
A basic argument in favor of transparency is that live-streaming oral arguments lets Americans better understand what happens in a courtroom. Live-streaming ought to increase the amount of information people have about courts. Citizens’ knowledge of facts about federal courts is low, although researchers disagree about the precise level. Even if citizens didn’t follow along with oral arguments themselves, journalists could on their behalf, offering better reporting on the legal content of cases. That would be especially useful to television journalists, who report less legal content than print reporters. Being able to use audio or video hosted online — and therefore letting the public hear judges or lawyers speaking, rather than journalists’ summaries of their discussions — could enable TV reporters to better inform their viewers.
Knowledgeable citizens are important for several reasons. More aware citizens should be more likely to notice if a court strays too far from public opinion. Federal judges don’t stand for reelection, but research shows that federal judges are responsive to pressure from Congress. Knowledgeable citizens can send a signal, through Congress, to a court that it is out of line.
The Supreme Court changed its doctrine on religious discrimination
Research also shows that citizens’ knowledge of federal courts and their attitudes are related. High-profile cases, such as those involving Hillary Clinton and Michael Flynn, can attract tens of thousands of streamers. This audience hears the facts of these cases and, more broadly, learns about the role and function of the court of appeals. A study of 18 national courts showed that the more someone is aware of a court, the more legitimate she considers the court to be. Knowledge and legitimacy become linked because when people pay attention to courts, they also see or hear things that portray judges as different from politicians. When audio is live-streamed, this effect could occur when a listener hears judges repeatedly referred to as “your honor.”
Some argue that listening to or watching judges at work might hurt their reputation for being above politics. When citizens see courts as political, they begin to see them as less legitimate.
That may be why, in our research, we found that panels of 9th Circuit appellate judges are less likely to allow cameras in the courtroom when their views on law and policy are far apart. Judges may at first have feared that their differences would be interpreted as political — a fear that seems to have dissipated.
It’s too soon to tell for sure how appellate judges’ views on transparency have changed. Based on how several courts of appeals now embrace YouTube, it seems likely some will keep their current transparent practices even after the national emergency ends. For those who do continue, and perhaps even embrace new innovations like live-streaming video, the downstream benefits of live-streaming could be significant for people’s understanding of federal courts.
Christopher D. Kromphardt, PhD, (@cdkromp) is an education support services manager in the University of Iowa Public Policy Center, whose research focuses on judicial behavior, public opinion and blended learning. | 2022-09-14T10:23:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Will federal appeals courts continue live-streaming their arguments post-pandemic? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/14/ninth-circuit-livestreams-all-its-arguments-will-that-spread/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/14/ninth-circuit-livestreams-all-its-arguments-will-that-spread/ |
Ukraine live briefing: E.U. moves on energy measures as Biden warns war ‘lo...
Russia continues to expand lessons in “patriotic” values, this research finds
Analysis by Eugenia Nazrullaeva
Anja Neundorf
Ksenia Northmore-Ball
Katerina Tertytchnaya
Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with participants of an open lesson on “Talking about important things,” attended by the student winners of Olympiads and competitions in the field of culture, art, science and sports at a museum and theater-educational complex in Kaliningrad, Russia, on Sept. 1. (Alexey Maishev/AFP/Getty Images)
In Russia, Sept. 1 is known as the “Day of Knowledge.” The day traditionally kicks off the start of the new school year, with festivities in schools and universities. After six months of war in Ukraine, however, this school year in Russia is not an ordinary one.
To garner support for President Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine, Russian authorities have passed new education laws, revised school textbooks and introduced teaching guides that help teachers deliver “patriotic” lessons. Russia’s new nationwide children’s and youth movement, dubbed the “New Pioneers,” has already started its work.
What explains the big changes to Russian education amid wartime? Studies show that education serves as a long-term insurance policy for autocracies. School subjects and activities teach young citizens to be loyal to the authorities — and this helps promote long-term social and political stability. While promoting patriotic education has always been a goal of Putin’s government, our own data suggest that educational reforms accelerated in the aftermath of Crimea’s annexation in 2014.
Is Russia’s wartime propaganda more powerful than family bonds?
Surveys we fielded with the Varieties of Democracy Institute show how country experts evaluate changes in the content and provision of education around the world from 1945 to 2021. Evidence from Russia suggests that as the government’s emphasis on patriotism grew in recent years, freedom of speech in the classroom declined. Teachers also found themselves under increased threat of being fired for political reasons. The invasion of Ukraine gave a renewed sense of urgency to educational rules that promote patriotism and clamp down on academic freedom.
Autocrats use education to create loyal citizens
The expansion of mass education in autocracies has gone hand-in-hand with efforts to create a national identity — especially in the aftermath of wars. Autocrats realize that schools help create generations who share their ruling values and principles and are loyal to the regime.
Even smaller-scale changes in school curricula, for instance, can help create pro-regime attitudes in authoritarian settings. For example, China’s textbook modifications, enacted from 2004 to 2010, helped boost students’ views of the government and made them more skeptical of free markets.
Since coming to power in Russia in the early 2000s, Putin has insisted that students learn patriotic values in schools. He has insisted that lessons in history, languages and the arts should inspire pride among Russia’s youth and strengthen their loyalty to the Motherland. Putin’s early efforts to bring about educational changes, however, had limited success.
Russia expanded ‘patriotic’ education after 2014
To investigate whether and how governments — including autocracies like Putin’s Russia — use education for political ends, from January to May 2022, we surveyed 760 country experts from around the world. Together with the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, we asked experts to answer a series of 21 new questions about the structure and content of education in over 100 countries, from 1945 to 2021.
Our data suggest that Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea coincided with renewed investments in patriotic education. According to the experts surveyed, patriotic symbols such as the Russian flag or the national anthem were more likely to be celebrated in the years following Crimea’s annexation, than in the decades preceding it.
In 2014, the Russian authorities also approved a new set of history textbooks. These featured a revised narrative of historical events, praised Putin’s achievements and Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
As emphasis on “patriotic” education grew, however, freedom of speech in Russian classrooms declined. Answers to two of our survey questions suggest that following the annexation of Crimea, opportunities for students to critically discuss what they were taught in history classes declined. After 2014, teachers also became more likely to be fired for publicly expressing political views that contradicted those of the authorities.
What happened after this year’s invasion of Ukraine?
Within days after Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, Russian authorities began to orchestrate a pro-war campaign at home. “Patriotic” lessons in schools were designed to justify the invasion and generate support for Putin.
In the first week of March, for example, Russian schools held an “All-Russia open lesson.” The Ministry of Education was unusually swift in distributing instructions on how teachers should present the invasion and address students’ questions.
Students returning to school this month, as young as 6 years old, are expected to attend new lessons on “patriotism,” labeled “Conversations about the important.” These weekly lessons will remind students that “a true patriot should be ready to defend the country“ and “to die for the Motherland.”
Russian authorities also introduced legislation to keep vaguely defined “foreign agents and influence“ out of schools. In recent months, teachers across the country faced prosecution for expressing anti-war views in and outside the classroom.
Propaganda efforts aren’t limited to the curriculum. Earlier in the summer, Putin approved the creation of a national children’s and youth movement, modeled after the Soviet Pioneers. Such movements were integral to Soviet efforts to generate loyalty among younger generations and stabilize Soviet rule. The resurgence of these types of youth-focused movements in contemporary Russia may reflect similar ends.
If successful, these efforts may generate support among children for nondemocratic values and Russia’s expansionist policies — and temper optimism about political change. That may be wishful thinking, as parents and school teachers across the country have already begun to show their resistance to the unfolding educational shifts.
Eugenia Nazrullaeva is a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Public Policy, London School of Economics.
Anja Neundorf (@AnjaNeundorf) is a professor of politics and research methods at the University of Glasgow and the primary investigator of the European Research Council-funded project “Democracy under Threat: How Education can Save it” (DEMED).
Ksenia Northmore-Ball is an assistant professor of comparative politics at Queen Mary University of London.
Katerina Tertytchnaya (@KTertytchnaya) is an assistant professor of comparative politics at University College London. | 2022-09-14T10:23:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Freedom of speech in Russian classrooms has declined - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/14/russia-patriotic-education-reform/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/14/russia-patriotic-education-reform/ |
The DARPA project could be a boon for U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts
A rendering of an as-yet-undesigned plane that defense officials say should weigh no more than 250 to 330 pounds, fly roughly 16 hours at a time and vertically take off and land from anywhere in the world that has roughly 320 square feet of clear space. (DARPA)
The military is looking to create a new unmanned plane that could take off and land almost anywhere in the world — a potentially major technological leap forward in government intelligence gathering.
The secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — or DARPA — announced last week that it is looking to build a tiny aircraft which could be used for reconnaissance missions and be remote-controlled, fly longer and vertically take off and land from tricky spaces, such as ship decks or on remote battlefields without airports.
The plane, which has yet to be designed, could let soldiers gather high-quality intelligence in a better way than the current crop of small intelligence aircraft allow, DARPA officials said. Service members, particularly in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, would be able to fly these unmanned planes longer and further without much crew or setup, and do so even on the most far-flung battlefields, all while gathering high-quality images.
Still, it’s going to face challenges becoming reality — particularly when it comes to landing unmanned planes on rocking boats in the ocean.
“That has been done on land,” said Steve Komadina, a program manager at DARPA in charge of the program. “But it hasn’t really been done on a ship.”
The U.S. military has a large arsenal of intelligence-gathering planes, but many come with drawbacks. Planes that can carry bulky sensors and camera equipment needed for high-level intelligence missions are often larger and need to be manned. Those that are unmanned often can’t fly further the eye can see and require an airstrip or large parts of a Navy deck with several people nearby to help the plane take off and land.
To solve that issue, DARPA aims to partner with defense contractors or commercial aircraft start-ups to create its X-Plane. DARPA officials are looking to build off the advances that commercial vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft companies have made in propulsion, low-weight batteries and low-cost manufacturing materials.
The initiative’s name is a mouthful, dubbed the advanced aircraft infrastructure-less launch and recovery X-Plane, or ANCILLARY.
Though little is known about how the end product will look, the agency said it should weigh no more than 250 to 330 pounds, fly roughly 16 hours at a time, be able to carry equipment up to 60 pounds and vertically take off and land from Navy decks or anywhere in the world that has roughly 320 square feet of clear space, Komadina said.
The aircraft could carry a small bomb if needed, he added, but “that’s not really in the plans right now.”
Next week, DARPA will invite companies to learn more about the initiative and submit project proposals. Officials estimate it will take three years to get a prototype, and another three years or so before the actual plane could be used on the battlefield.
But several challenges remain. It will be difficult to create an aircraft design that meets DARPA’s weight, flight-time and flying-range specifications. Creating a propulsion system that delivers enough energy to vertically take off and land the aircraft while also scaling down to cruise is difficult to master.
Cynthia Cook, a defense industry expert and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a national security think tank, said that she welcomes this DARPA program, because creating better-quality unmanned systems to gather intelligence on the battlefield prevents troops from undergoing dangerous missions.
“Unmanned systems doing these missions may mean that members of the military are less at risk,” she said. | 2022-09-14T10:24:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | DARPA's tiny, unmanned plane could take off and land almost anywhere - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/14/darpa-ancillary-vertical-takeoff-plane/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/14/darpa-ancillary-vertical-takeoff-plane/ |
Key infrastructure nominee to testify before Senate committee
Shailen Bhatt was chosen to lead the Federal Highway Administration, overseeing investments in roads and bridges
The Department of Transportation headquarters in Washington. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
The Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee will consider the Biden administration’s pick to fill the long-vacant top job at the Federal Highway Administration on Wednesday, weighing a nominee who will play a key role in overseeing the infrastructure law and fixing the nation’s roads and bridges.
Biden has selected Shailen Bhatt, a former head of the Colorado and Delaware transportation departments who also served at the U.S. Transportation Department during the Obama administration.
Bhatt will probably get a warm reception from Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), the committee’s chairman, who has called him an “outstanding choice.” But Bhatt is expected to face questions from committee Republicans, led by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), about whether the administration’s focus on the environment and racial justice goals matches provisions in the infrastructure law designed to give states flexibility to build roads as they see fit.
About a third of last year’s $1 trillion federal infrastructure package is dedicated to roads, giving the agency an outsize role in the implementation of the law. The Federal Highway Administration has a budget of about $70 billion this year.
Still, almost all federal highway funding is passed to state officials, who can decide how to spend it as long as they follow broad requirements in federal law. Transportation Department officials are seeking to boost projects that promote alternatives to driving, bring down carbon emissions and create economic opportunities in overlooked communities, but have limited ability to influence state actions.
A guidance memo signed by the acting head of the Highway Administration last winter drew pushback from some state transportation leaders and congressional Republicans. They argued that even though the memo had no legal force, it could discourage officials from undertaking lawful projects that state officials determined were most suitable for their states.
Bhatt has influential backers who have praised his work in the transportation industry, both in government and the private sector. Jim Tymon, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, urged the Senate to confirm him.
“Shailen Bhatt has been a tireless transportation advocate for decades, especially in the areas of safety and technology, and he makes an excellent choice by the Biden administration to lead FHWA,” Tymon said when Bhatt was nominated in July.
Other agencies at the Transportation Department also are without Senate-confirmed leaders, including the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. | 2022-09-14T10:24:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Shailen Bhatt, Federal Highway Administration nominee, to testify at Senate committee - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/09/14/federal-highway-administration-shailen-bhatt/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/09/14/federal-highway-administration-shailen-bhatt/ |
Long stretches of sitting at our desks or in front of the television can increase your health risks even if you exercise regularly, new research shows
Sitting all day may erase many of the benefits of a daily workout, new study shows. (Jamal Jordan for The Washington Post)
Are you an active couch potato? Take this 2-question quiz to find out.
Did you work out for 30 minutes today?
Did you spend the rest of the day staring at your computer and then settle in front of the television at night?
The study, which involved more than 3,700 men and women in Finland, found that many dutifully exercised for a half-hour, but then sat, almost nonstop, for another 10, 11 or even 12 hours a day. These were the study’s active couch potatoes, and their blood sugar, cholesterol and body fat all were elevated.
The results tell us that a single 30-minute, daily workout “might not be enough” to alleviate the downsides of prolonged sitting, said Vahid Farrahi, a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Oulu and lead author of the new study.
The World Health Organization and other experts advise us to work out moderately for a minimum of 30 minutes most days of the week. A brisk walk counts as moderate exercise.
Substantial scientific evidence shows this half-hour of exertion buoys our health, spirits and life span. The problem is how we spend the remaining 23 ½ hours a day.
“It’s only in the last five years or so that we’ve begun to understand that physical activity isn’t the whole story,” said Raija Korpelainen, a professor of health exercise at the University of Oulu in Finland and co-author of the new study.
In the past, most research examined sitting and exercise separately, and tended to ignore or downplay light activities such as ambling to the mailbox or fetching another cup of coffee.
So, for the new study, which was published in July in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, Korpelainen and her co-authors turned to a large trove of data about almost every child born in Northern Finland decades ago. As they grew, researchers tracked their lives and health and, after the group became adults, asked 3,702 of them to wear a scientific-grade activity tracker for at least a week.
The researchers could see, in six-second increments, whether someone was sitting, lightly strolling or formally exercising throughout the day. Because the trackers were measuring movement, standing counted as inactivity, like sitting. With that data, they characterized people, rather bluntly, by how they moved.
Another group likewise worked out for 30 minutes and sat for long hours. But, in between, they rose often and strolled about. Compared with the active couch potatoes, they spent about 40 percent more time — nearly an extra 90 minutes each day — in what the researchers call “light activity.”
The other groups were all better off and to about the same extent, with relatively improved blood sugar control and cholesterol levels and about 8 percent less body fat than the active couch potatoes, even when the researchers controlled for income, smoking, sleep habits and other factors.
Exercise boosts the brain — and mental health | 2022-09-14T10:24:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Are you an active couch potato: How sitting all day can erase a workout - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/09/14/meet-active-couch-potato-how-sitting-all-day-can-erase-workout/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/09/14/meet-active-couch-potato-how-sitting-all-day-can-erase-workout/ |
Ryan Reynolds attends the world premiere of “The Adam Project” at Alice Tully Hall on Monday, Feb. 28, 2022, in New York. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
These days, snippets from celebrities’ most intimate moments are almost inescapable — from Kourtney Kardashian airing her firstborn’s birth, to Ashley Benson snapping away during a dentist appointment, to Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly licking each other’s tongues.
But Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney — actors, besties and co-owners of a Welsh soccer club — might’ve taken it a notch further by recently filming much of their colonoscopies and anesthesia-infused recoveries to shed light on colorectal cancer screenings.
“I’ve been on camera a lot,” Reynolds said in the video released Tuesday, with the caveat that it was the first time the camera had been focused on such a, well, intimate place.
It started with a gamble, the actors said. Last year, the two self-proclaimed competitive friends made a bet: if McElhenney, who created and stars in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” could learn to speak Welsh, Reynolds would publicly broadcast his colonoscopy.
Despite Reynolds’s confidence in his wager, it turns out McElhenney did learn the notoriously difficult language — or at least enough phrases to send Reynolds to the hospital with a film crew.
Shown on his way to the procedure room, the “Deadpool” star said he wouldn’t normally undergo a medical procedure on camera. But the decision to have his colonoscopy recorded came down to raising awareness “about something that will most definitely save lives,” Reynolds, 45, said in the clip, which was made in partnership with the Colorectal Cancer Alliance and Lead From Behind, a colon cancer awareness organization.
“The procedure itself doesn’t take long. We’re talking about 30 minutes, something like that,” a doctor told the actor as he was wheeled into the procedure room. “It’s stunningly effective.”
During a colonoscopy, a physician snakes a flexible tube with a tiny camera in its tip through the rectum and into the colon to get a close-up look at the organ’s interior. It sounds daunting, but it’s usually painless — and most patients are sedated through it all. (For those left wondering: This part wasn’t shown in Reynolds’s video.)
The procedure is used to check for abnormalities in the colon, such as swelling, irritation or tumors. But it’s also the main preventive measure to screen for colorectal cancer — the third-most common cancer diagnosed in the United States, according to the American Cancer Society, which recommends that most people be screened every 10 years starting at age 45.
At last, an easier way to prepare for a colonoscopy
In Reynolds’s case, the doctor found an “extremely subtle polyp,” or clump of cells, on the right side of his colon. The doctor removed it, “interrupting the natural history … of a process that could have ended up developing it to cancer and causing all sorts of problems.”
“That’s why people need to do this,” the physician added. “They really need to do this. This saves lives. Pure and simple.”
Even though Reynolds lost the bet, McElhenney, who’s also 45, agreed to undergo a colonoscopy as well. His doctor removed three polyps — all while the actor was in a blitzed, post-sedation state and struggling to eat the graham crackers, which he called “biscuits,” that the nurse provided.
“Getting in on time is the key,” McElhenney’s physician said, adding that colon cancer is a “100 percent preventable disease” if people have the recommended colonoscopies.
National task force finalizes recommendation for earlier colorectal cancer screening
Before Reynolds and McElhenney, there was journalist Katie Couric and the massive spike in colonoscopies after she got the procedure done on air in 2000.
“Well, that didn’t seem so bad,” Reynolds shrugged as the clip ended. | 2022-09-14T11:31:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ryan Reynolds posts video about his colonoscopy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/14/ryan-reynolds-rob-mcelhenney-colonoscopy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/14/ryan-reynolds-rob-mcelhenney-colonoscopy/ |
The Philmont Scout Ranch in Colfax County, N.M., in 2001. (Ira Dreyfuss/AP)
Tom Condon, a former Hartford Courant columnist and editorial writer, writes online about Connecticut urban and regional affairs for the CT Mirror.
Many of these camps are almost pristine, ecologically valuable parcels, with waterfront and forested land. While local governments and nonprofits are trying to save some of the camps, others are being sold and converted to other uses, including a gated community, a water park, a gravel mine and an off-road driving facility.
The federal government needs to step in. This is the moment when these lands will be saved or lost.
BSA campgrounds were being sold even before the sexual-abuse scandal sent the organization into Chapter 11. The BSA has been losing membership for decades, from more than 4 million in the 1970s to less than 800,000 today.
The decline has left the Boy Scouts with more properties than they need. My own Boy Scout camp, Camp Wakenah, on an exquisite 32-acre lakefront site in rural Connecticut, was sold two decades ago and is now a multimillion-dollar residence that offers, among other amenities, an elevator to the wine cellar. Some might view that as an upgrade from a dirt path to the outhouse, I do not.
The BSA bankruptcy and looming settlement only hastened the pace of camp divestment. In July, New York magazine called it “The Great Boy Scouts Land Sell-Off.”
Evidence in the bankruptcy case indicated that local councils own as many as 2,000 camps worth $8 billion to $10 billion, an attorney representing 12,000 claimants told the Associated Press in June. The councils control 35,000 acres in New York State alone, a larger footprint than that of Disney World in Florida, New York magazine noted.
Keeping Scout properties as open space can be a challenge. Consider the Deer Lake Scout Reservation, in Killingworth, Conn., not far from my old camp. A year ago, the BSA’s Connecticut Yankee Council announced it was selling the wooded, 255-acre site.
The Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit that has preserved thousands of acres in the state, appraised the property and bid $2.4 million. A real estate developer nearly doubled that amount, offering $4.6 million.
But then, this summer, a nonprofit called Pathfinders, which for years had been running summer camping programs at Deer Lake under a lease arrangement with the Boy Scouts, stretched itself to the limit and came up with $4.75 million in contributions and loans to top the developer’s bid. The closing is scheduled for Thursday.
The nonprofit plans to maintain its camping program and keep the property, popular with hikers and birders, as open space.
Deer Lake is the kind of property that should be kept undeveloped. It’s heavily forested, with a mile-long lake and exotic rock formations. It is part of a broader greenway that includes a 17,000-acre state forest.
Small fragments of forests — topographical measles — aren’t of much environmental help, but large deep forests are. The benefits from deep woods include helping to clean air and water, store carbon in plants and soil, foster biodiversity and protect communities from flooding.
The Agriculture Department reports that the United States loses approximately 6,000 acres of open space — including “forests, grasslands, and other natural areas” — every day. Deer Lake nearly fell into that category.
It shouldn’t take a nonprofit’s last-minute rescue to save Boy Scout campgrounds from development when they come onto the market. There is plenty of precedent for government involvement in land preservation.
When Deer Lake appeared on the verge of being sold to a developer, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) began looking into the use of money from the National Park Service’s Land and Water Conservation Fund to aid with the purchase of Deer Lake and other BSA properties on the market nationwide. That might be a useful strategy, but the Inflation Reduction Act’s funding for conservation and efforts to combat climate change seems especially suitable for this purpose.
No matter how it’s accomplished, many of these Boy Scouts properties should be saved, for ecological, recreational and aesthetic reasons — and, who knows, maybe one day they’ll be needed to serve as campgrounds again. Once they’re gone, it’s pretty much an elevator to the wine cellar. | 2022-09-14T11:31:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Buying Boy Scouts camps a great and green opportunity for government - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/14/boy-scouts-land-sale-government-conservation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/14/boy-scouts-land-sale-government-conservation/ |
For most Christians, God’s hand on America is a comfort, not a weapon
Voters wait in line to enter a polling location at North Christian Church in Cheyenne, Wyo., on Aug. 16. (David Williams/Bloomberg)
I grew up attending a small country church where, every Sunday morning, the 75 or so regular attendees heard Bible-based sermons with a heavy emphasis on the danger of veering from the straight and narrow and landing in eternal damnation in a fiery hell. It was fun.
Occasionally woven into the dogma were reminders of the Christian underpinnings of the United States — complete with spiritually based quotes from the Founding Fathers asking God’s guidance and blessings on the new nation. In the 1960s and early ’70s, such teachings were markedly apolitical. There were no rantings or ravings declaring one political party good or evil. There was simply a comforting belief that we lived in a nation formed and guided by God, and no one need lift a finger to ensure that situation. It simply was.
But in the wake of Roe v. Wade and other perceived attacks on that Old-Time Religion by an increasingly liberal world, Christianity had by the 1980s become politically weaponized, with “Christian soldiers” mostly aligning with the GOP. That war rages today.
Looking back, politicizing conservative Christianity was a mistake, even if well-intentioned. It’s natural for Christianity to exist in a state of tension within an inclusive democracy. Consider Jesus’ Great Commission to “go and make disciples of all nations,” which includes, of course, this nation. By scripture, Christians are not encouraged to just live and let live. But our Constitution says otherwise.
Walking that tightrope is a challenge. For instance, Christians often struggle with how much to be involved with, or live apart from, the world. As parents, do you run for school board or try in other ways to influence the public school system? Or do you retreat within your walls and home-school your children? Either choice is ripe for criticism. But at the end of the day, the Christian belief that this short life is a mere prelude to the eternal one makes spending so much effort on influencing our temporal governments seem odd.
What will not change is the sincere belief held by millions of Christians (and others) that the United States has a special spiritual purpose. Such a purpose as carried out by Black churches and ministers during the civil rights era of the 1950s and ’60s is regarded as crucial to the movement’s success. But when defined today as “Christian nationalism,” church involvement in political affairs is said to be dangerous. For many White Republicans, who are typically identified as the movement’s drivers, the recent focus on Christian nationalism is the latest way to call their very existence a threat, close on the heels of accusations of racism, fascism and being “MAGA Republicans,” defined in changing ways but always negatively, by President Biden.
Consider an onslaught of similar headlines in recent weeks: the Daily Beast, Aug. 14, “I’m a Cradle Catholic. I Don’t Want Christian Nationalism in My Church”; Rolling Stone, Sept. 1, “Meet the Apostle of Right-Wing Christian Nationalism”; The Post, Sept. 1, “Americans are growing more accepting of Christian nationalism”; PBS, Sept. 7, “Former Trump adviser Michael Flynn ‘at the center’ of new movement based on conspiracies and Christian nationalism.”
Gathering no moss, Rolling Stone followed up last week with video that showed the Pennsylvania GOP’s candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, praying a week before the incursion at the U.S. Capitol that national leaders would “on the sixth of January … rise up with boldness,” along with other supplications deemed troubling. The self-identification of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) as a Christian nationalist also bothers critics. But what is asked in prayer or otherwise invoked of heaven should never disturb anyone. God often answers, “No.”
An individual’s personal belief system, whether based on religion or other guiding principles, informs their political actions. That will never change. But because Christianity is and will long be the predominant religion in the United States, it is important that Christians constantly remind themselves not to impose their beliefs on others by weight of law or strength of numbers. The deal we made long ago for the freedom to worship as we see fit was to guarantee that same right to people of all religions — or no religion at all.
But whether in times of war or natural disaster, from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to the disturbing Capitol incursion of Jan. 6, 2021, the belief that God has his hand on our nation is a reassuring thought for millions of Americans — not a weapon to incite “violent and undemocratic strains,” as the authors of an analysis in The Post suggested.
When discussing Christian nationalism, nuance is, as usual, in short supply. It’s one thing to hold the misguided belief that Christianity should have a government-sanctioned presence in society. It’s quite another to be comforted by the thought that the United States plays a special role in God’s plan. As for the latter, believers should reassure themselves that God’s will for America will be fulfilled — with no legislative assistance required. | 2022-09-14T11:31:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Most Christians believe in a special purpose for America - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/14/christian-nationalism-religious-politicization/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/14/christian-nationalism-religious-politicization/ |
Climate disaster isn’t a game. When will the U.S. stop playing?
By Ricia Anne Chansky Sancinito
Mario Lopez enters a Hurricane Heist simulator on Feb. 16, 2018, in Universal City, Calif. (Noel Vasquez/Getty Images)
Ricia Anne Chansky Sancinito is a professor at the University of Puerto Rico, a senior climate justice fellow at the Humanities Action Lab and co-editor of “Mi María: Surviving the Storm, Voices from Puerto Rico.”
A friend recently texted me a photo of an arcade “game” she and her son happened upon while taking a break from their back-to-school shopping: Hurricane Simulator.
Its description promises that players can “step inside and get blown away, without the worry of physical danger.” It lets people “feel winds up to 75 mph” while a 42-inch LCD screen shows “animations of physical destruction.” People can experience a storm safe from “the danger of flying debris, rising tides, horizontal rain.” Its promoters promise the simulator is “all for fun,” which equals “a big profit for operators!”
The friend who sent the photo is from Puerto Rico, a survivor of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria, which made landfall five years ago this month. As is her son. As am I.
It’s strange for us to imagine the person who wants to step inside a Hurricane Simulator and watch animations of destruction. It’s hard to fathom a communal trauma — one shared by the 3.3 million people who lived in Puerto Rico when Maria struck — functioning as amusement. But I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that the game exists — and is a moneymaker.
That a company would package disaster as entertainment makes sense when we think of the widespread efficacy of climate change deniers, who have underplayed the impact corporations have on the environment, largely by divorcing disaster from its very human costs.
The latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was described by António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, as a “code red for humanity.” Why is such a declaration, about such an enormous crisis, not enough to impel more people to act?
George Marshall, co-founder of Climate Outreach and author of “Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change,” argues that although the science has long been clear, scholarship isn’t enough to persuade people to take it seriously — because scientific data “does not galvanize our emotional brain into action.”
Paul Slovic, president of Decision Research, has suggested it’s difficult to motivate people because many can’t conceive of how climate change will affect their lives. “The question is often ‘Do I feel vulnerable?’ ” he told Time in 2018. “For the most part, we don’t, and that shapes our behavior.”
Seen this way, the Hurricane Simulator is an apt metaphor for the separation between abstract notions about climate disasters and their tangible real-life outcomes. The “game” is a “unique attraction,” a seemingly harmless thrill — so much easier to step inside a box than to confront the true stories of hardship, courage and survival like those I’ve recorded over the past five years. For instance:
Carlos Bonilla Rodríguez, a farmer in San Sebastián, watched from a neighbor’s house as Hurricane Maria peeled back the roof of his home. “When everything was taken by the wind … and I knew we had nothing,” Carlos said, “the only thing to do was cry.” Although this was the second time Carlos’s home had been destroyed — the first was during Hurricane Georges in September 1998 — he received no government aid. As he put it: “not even a nail.”
Belle Marie Torres Velázquez, the only doctor on the island municipality of Culebra, was forced to deliver a premature baby in a supply closet because almost two months after the hurricane, there was still no electricity, and the closet was the only space close enough to hook into a generator. “This baby was coming under very poor conditions — with no access to special equipment, no transportation and no possible communication with an obstetrician,” she recalled, adding: “All those same feelings of desperation are inside me still.”
The Hurricane Simulator isn’t the problem. The game is a symptom and reflection of a larger crisis, built by individuals, corporations and governments that have not faced up to a global emergency caused by human degradation of the environment.
In contested spaces like Puerto Rico, this is an emergency with consequences compounded by existing inequities, systemic racism, colonial practices and predatory maneuvers such as “disaster capitalism,” which enriches private profiteers at the expense of the rest of us.
As Puerto Rico prepares for the height of the 2022 storm season, our recently privatized electric grid frequently crashes, leaving many without power. Thousands of homes haven’t been rebuilt. Medical care is extremely difficult to access. And schools, roads and health-care facilities remain in a state of deterioration. What happens if we find ourselves in the path of another Category 5 hurricane?
This is not a simulation. It’s not a drill. But for the many stakeholders who find climate issues too removed from their own experiences to worry about, or too inconvenient to worry about when there are corporate profit margins to consider, this global crisis will remain merely a game — until it’s far too late for any of us to win. | 2022-09-14T11:32:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | 5 years after Hurricane Maria, we treat climate reality as a game - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/14/hurricane-maria-puerto-rico-fifth-anniversary/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/14/hurricane-maria-puerto-rico-fifth-anniversary/ |
Can this sport outmatch China in the Pacific? The West is betting on it.
Lachlan Lam of Papua New Guinea celebrates scoring a try during the Men's International Test Match between Papua New Guinea and Fiji at Campbelltown Sports Stadium on June 25 in Sydney. ( Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)
In the intense battle between the United States and China for influence in the Pacific, the West is preparing to deploy a brutal new weapon.
The high-velocity, full-contact sport, featuring dazzling bursts of speed interspersed with what look like brief wrestling matches between players, is something that China cannot match. Enormously popular in Australia, particularly in the eastern states of Queensland and New South Wales, it’s even more beloved in the island nations of the Pacific. Nearly half the players in the Australian league now come from nations such as Samoa, Tonga and Fiji. And in Papua New Guinea (PNG), rugby — precisely, rugby league football — is the official national sport, a status it enjoys nowhere else in the world.
Hence the idea: Why not allow a rugby team from the Pacific to join the Australian league? A New Zealand team already belongs, so opening the doors to a team from PNG — or a PNG-based team made up of players from the many island nations — makes eminent sense.
In a meeting last week with her PNG counterpart, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong acknowledged PNG’s desire to have a club in Australia’s National Rugby League (NRL). “I think we want something very similar,” she said of the two nations. “We want a region in which sovereignty is respected, and I know you want a team in the NRL.”
The reference to sovereignty is a nod to China’s increasing push for influence in the South Pacific — a push that Australia contends will cost the Pacific island nations their independence. In that endeavor, not everything has gone China’s way. In May, 10 Pacific nations rejected a Chinese proposal for a multi-nation security pact. But elsewhere, Beijing has had success in both the Solomon Islands, which signed a security agreement in April, and Kiribati, which withdrew from the Pacific Islands Forum, the main diplomatic body for the region, in what at least one politician called a bid to please China.
In the effort to counteract Chinese sway, the idea of exercising a little rugby diplomacy seems only logical. Sporting and other cultural ties, after all, have long been a tool of “soft power” diplomacy, reaching back centuries to the first traders who crossed oceans to bring their goods and culture to distant lands. One purpose of the ancient Olympic games, in fact, was to spread Hellenistic culture throughout the Mediterranean region.
Bringing a PNG sports team into the Aussie league could have a significant effect. An Australian colony until 1975, the island fell in love with rugby after it was introduced by Australian miners in the 1930s. The country’s representative in Australia, High Commissioner John Kali, was a rugby league player in his youth and knows his nation’s enthusiasm for the game. It has “a massive following,” he told me in a Sydney radio interview, describing a typical PNG crowd during the contest known as State of Origin, a three-game series that pits a team from Queensland (wearing maroon) against one from New South Wales (“the blues”). “In the villages, you have one television set, and there are thousands of people surrounding that one set,” he said. “Everyone is jostling for position, and they’ve got their own colours — maroons and blues — and they have a bit of a jostle here and there ... it’s just the spirit and feeling of getting together as a community.”
Papua New Guinea is building a case to place before the game’s Australian administrators. Andrew Hill, the bid’s lead consultant, hopes to have a club running by 2025, ready to field both male and female teams in the Australian competition of 2027 or 2028. “It would be a brave person to think that a Pacifica team, led by a Pacifica country like PNG, would not be a good thing for rugby league,” he told me.
Hill and his organization — the PNG NRL Bid 2025 — have one fresh advantage. Recently elected Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is firmly behind the drive. In an interview last week, Albanese told me he raised the issue with the sport’s Australian administrators and thought it important for “good relations in our region.”
An enthusiast for the game, Albanese supports the South Sydney Rabbitohs, a team saved from bankruptcy by the Australian actor Russell Crowe. Attending a Souths game was an early priority for Albanese following his victory in May.
I asked him the obvious question: What if he encouraged a PNG team and they went on to beat Souths? He laughed. “That would be okay by me, that’s sport,” he said. “And it wouldn’t be the first loss I’ve seen Souths have.”
A Souths defeat greeted with a laugh? It may be a measure of the role a footy team could play in blunting Chinese ambitions in the Pacific, and giving the West the upper hand.
Opinion|The future of tennis (finally) appears
Opinion|Pickleball raises our social capital. That’s what America needs.
Opinion|Pickleball has an exclusionary side | 2022-09-14T11:32:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Rugby just might be the way to counteract China in the Pacific - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/14/rugby-china-influence-pacific-island-nations/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/14/rugby-china-influence-pacific-island-nations/ |
Post Politics Now Biden headed to Detroit to highlight investment in electric vehicles
The latest: A blow to McCarthy in New Hampshire’s 1st District
The latest: In Delaware, McKee prevails in competitive Democratic gubernatorial primary
The latest: Russia spent millions on secret global political campaign, U.S. intelligence finds
On our radar: A surge of federal hate-crime prosecutions this year
President Biden delivers remarks during a celebration of the passage of the Inflation Reduction on the South Lawn of the White House on Tuesday. (Elizbeth Frantz for The Washington Post)
Today, President Biden is headed to Detroit to tour the North American International Auto Show and tout his administration’s investments in electric vehicles, including funding to build a network of chargers across the country that was included in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that he signed last year. The trip is part of stepped-up travel in advance of the midterms to highlight his party’s agenda.
On Tuesday, voters in three states — New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Delaware — went to the polls, marking the end of this year’s nominating process. A closely watched GOP Senate primary in New Hampshire has yet to be called by the Associated Press, but early Wednesday, state Senate President Chuck Morse conceded the race to retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc.
8:45 a.m. Eastern time: Biden departs the White House en route to Detroit. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief reporters aboard Air Force One. Listen live here.
11:15 a.m. Eastern: Biden tours the auto show in Detroit.
Noon Eastern: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) holds a weekly news conference. Watch live here.
1:45 p.m. Eastern: Biden delivers remarks on electric vehicles in Detroit. Watch live here.
3:10 p.m. Eastern: Biden attends a Democratic National Committee reception in Detroit.
President Biden is headed to Detroit on Wednesday to tour the North American International Auto Show and tout his administration’s investments in electric vehicles, including funding to build a network of chargers across the country that was included in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law he signed last year.
In his remarks, Biden will announce the first allocation of $900 million to build chargers, the White House said. The infrastructure law includes $7.5 billion to build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle chargers, according to a White House fact sheet previewing the event.
The Associated Press has yet to declare a victor in New Hampshire’s Republican Senate primary, but early Wednesday, state Senate President Chuck Morse conceded the race to retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc, saying the party needs to focus on defeating Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) in November.
Hassan, meanwhile, is already on the attack against Bolduc.
In a statement early Wednesday, Hassan said the general election campaign would be “a clear contrast between my record of delivering for the people of New Hampshire and Don Bolduc’s radical, backward-looking agenda.”
The result in New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District on Tuesday was a blow to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
The Post’s Colby Itkowitz and David Weigel report that Karoline Leavitt, an ex-member of the Trump White House press team who ran as an “America first” insurgent against the Washington establishment, defeated Matt Mowers, a former Trump aide backed by McCarthy, according to the Associated Press.
Leavitt, who has emphasized her false claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, will face Rep. Chris Pappas (D) in a race seen as a key battlefront in the fight for control of the House.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the House Republican Conference chair, supported Leavitt, her former staffer. At 25, Leavitt would be the youngest woman ever elected to Congress if she wins in the fall.
New Hampshire was one of three states where voters went to the polls on Tuesday, marking the end of this year’s nominating process, along with Rhode Island and Delaware. The primaries allowed voters a final 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.
In Rhode Island on Tuesday, Gov. Dan McKee (D), who replaced Gina Raimondo after she was appointed to Biden’s Cabinet to lead the Commerce Department, defeated business executive Helena Foulkes in a competitive Democratic primary.
McKee had been dogged by a scandal over a $5 million contract awarded to a political adviser’s consulting firm, which became the subject of an FBI probe, The Post’s Colby Itkowitz and David Weigel report. Foulkes received a late assist from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who came to the state to campaign for her Sunday.
The Post’s Missy Ryan reports that Moscow planned to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more as part of its covert campaign to weaken democratic systems and promote global political forces seen as aligned with Kremlin interests, according to the review, which the Biden administration commissioned this summer. Per Missy:
His counterprotest didn’t last long, reports The Post’s David Nakamura. Moving toward the sidewalk, investigators say, he was attacked by Saadah Masoud — a founding member of Within Our Lifetime, a Palestinian activist group — who punched him and dragged him across the pavement, causing a concussion.
Per Dave: | 2022-09-14T11:36:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Biden headed to Detroit to tout investments in electric vehicles - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/14/biden-detroit-electric-vehicles/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/14/biden-detroit-electric-vehicles/ |
A welcome cooling to the hot D.C.-area housing market
Buyers will find more options, less competition and more opportunities for negotiating with sellers, and sellers will still find eager buyers
Perspective by Lisa Sturtevant
Houses in the North College Park, Md., neighborhood. As the leaves turn and the weather cools so has the D.C. area housing market. (Evy Mages/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST)
After more than two years of hot housing market conditions in the D.C. region, there is a noticeable cooling trend. As we head into fall, home sales have slowed, and the pace of price growth has come down substantially. Instead of price wars and homes being bought sight-unseen, buyers now have more choices — and a little more leverage. So what will the Washington-area housing market look like this fall?
Higher mortgage rates increase cost of buying a home
Since the beginning of the year, mortgage rates have shot up by more than two percentage points. Higher rates are causing some prospective buyers to pause their home search, and rate increases have priced other buyers out of the market altogether.
Last August, the median price of a home sold in the D.C. region was $485,000. A year later, the median price was up by 5.7 percent to $512,750, but because of rising mortgage rates, the typical monthly payment rose by more than 40 percent. A family now has to earn nearly $115,000 to qualify for a mortgage on the median-priced home in the region. A year ago, the qualifying income for a typical mortgage was around $82,000.
Higher mortgage rates have had a bigger impact on buyers with more modest incomes, who are also disproportionately affected by persistently high inflation. In the Washington area, the higher-priced segment of the housing market has been relatively resilient, with homes priced at $1 million or above accounting for a larger share of home sales in 2022 than they did last year. Some of that increase is due to general price growth in the market, but the higher-priced segment of the market also has not been as sensitive to mortgage rate increases.
Home sales have slowed, but buyers are still looking
Through the first eight months of 2022, the number of home sales in the Washington area is down 17.3 percent compared with a year ago. Home sales activity has been down year-over-year for several months, which reflects cooler buyer demand. The year-over-year decline in sales is also due to the historically busy 2021 housing market.
And while buyers are not making an offer, they are still looking, at least from afar. Data on showings — the number of homes real estate agents are opening up to allow prospective buyers to view — indicate that buyer traffic was down in July compared with last year. However, the numbers of agent and public views of properties throughout the region were up 9.3 percent and 7 percent, respectively, in August 2022 compared with August 2021.
Buyers are back in close-in communities
When the pandemic began in the spring of 2020, there was a lot of uncertainty and frankly, fear, about living close to other people, commuting on public transportation, and otherwise doing the things that people do in more urban areas. As people were working from home and students were learning remotely, the pandemic fueled a surge in home buyer interest in homes at the fringes of the region. For example, home sales surged by about 20 percent in Spotsylvania and Stafford counties in 2020. And in Frederick County, Md., the number of home sales rose by 24 percent. At the same time, sales were basically flat in Arlington County and the District of Columbia.
In 2022, there has been a gradual return of buyers to the District and closer-in suburban markets. The share of home sales in the region’s exurban jurisdictions accounted for more than 33 percent of regional sales activity in 2020, but that share has fallen back to 32 percent this year. The share of sales in the District of Columbia, Arlington and Alexandria increased, accounting for 15.1 percent of sales in 2022, up from 13.6 percent in 2020.
What’s ahead for prospective buyers and sellers
Buyers will find that the changing housing market conditions offer some leverage they haven’t had in years. As home sales have cooled, the inventory available for sale across the Washington area has been expanding, providing buyers more choices.
Buyers will face less competition and will have more time to make decisions. They are able to ask for — and get — a home inspection, a home appraisal, and even a home sale contingency, concessions that were unheard of a year ago.
As mortgage rates fluctuate, it may be tempting for some buyers to try to “time” rates. Instead of timing rates, buyers looking for a mortgage should be shopping around because there is a lot of variability in rates and terms across different lenders.
For sellers, the cooling market does not mean they will not be able to find a buyer. However, would-be sellers do need to adjust their price expectations. There is evidence that sellers are already making adjustments, as more than 40 percent of all properties on the market at the end of August in the Washington area have dropped in price.
The frenetic pace of the housing market over the past two years was not sustainable. Cooler conditions in the Washington-area housing market should be a relief for prospective home buyers who will find more options, less competition, and more opportunities for negotiating with sellers. Sellers who price their properties to reflect the market will still find eager buyers. And everyone in the residential real estate industry can take a breath as the market settles into its new normal.
Lisa Sturtevant is the chief economist at Bright MLS, the area’s multiple listing service. | 2022-09-14T11:53:28Z | www.washingtonpost.com | A welcome cooling to the hot D.C.-area housing market - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/14/dc-area-housing-market/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/14/dc-area-housing-market/ |
This week’s unexpected rise in US inflation is an opportunity to revisit an old debate, which is often a useful exercise. This current bout of inflation has its roots in mistaken assumptions made a decade ago.
After the 2008-2009 recession, the recovery in the labor market was notoriously slow. This was commonly blamed on the demand side; monetary and fiscal policy could have done more, it was said, to stimulate recovery. A less popular view — but one that looks correct in retrospect — is that both the demand and supply sides were at fault.
In particular, there were problems in the labor market: The US had a human capital deficit, with a lot of people simply not keen on returning to full-time, gainful employment in a prompt manner. The labor market recovery was so slow because both sides of the market were inadequate.
Fast forward to the pandemic and early 2021. It was the conventional wisdom that inflation would be very difficult to create, because demand is usually deficient and supply can respond to any surge in spending, thereby offsetting inflationary pressures. That was the consensus formed after the Great Recession, and it turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Now the US is living with its consequences, namely high inflation with a possible recession to follow.
The evidence is piling up that the US has been suffering from a deficit of human capital. For instance, a recent report showed that US life expectancy first stalled and then has been falling. In other words, current Americans — or at least some subset of them — are having trouble just staying alive.
And if a subset of current Americans is having trouble staying alive, then isn’t it plausible that, earlier in life, they had trouble finding and keeping work? That doesn’t follow as a matter of logic, but the two human capital deficits seem part of a broadly common social trend. If someone died in 2021 of opioid addiction, that same person may have been making some less-than-perfect employment decisions a decade earlier.
It doesn’t matter whether you blame the individual, as old-fashioned morality might do, or blame larger social forces, as is currently more fashionable. A subset of the US population seems off the track of making consistently good decisions.
A more controversial extension of this point would suggest that many Americans have been off the track of making good political decisions as well. You could make this charge of both the left and the right (and no, by citing both sides I am not suggesting there is moral equivalence).
Another trend is that many people are marrying later in life, or not marrying at all, especially in the lower socioeconomic strata. That’s not necessarily bad. Still, an era characterized by fussiness in marriage may also be characterized by fussiness in choice of job. And marriage itself may be a spur for getting a job, especially for men. Again, individual choices — and not just insufficient demand — seem to have been a significant reason that labor markets were so slow to recover in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
It is also instructive to look at what is called “quiet quitting.” The US economy is close to full employment, in part due to an extreme overstimulation of demand. Even so, the human capital problems and labor market malfunctions haven’t gone away — they’ve just been pushed into other facets of the workplace experience. According to a recent Gallup poll, at least 50% of the US workforce are “quiet quitters.” Meanwhile, labor productivity is down dramatically, and though the measure is imprecise, it is hardly a good sign.
Many commentators are quite willing to entertain the hypothesis that there are significant problems with human capital in the US. But when discussion turns to the slow labor-market recovery following the Great Recession, all the blame is put on a weak monetary and fiscal response. Part of the reason they make this argument, of course, is that they want to preserve the case for the necessity of a vigorous response. It is past time to redress this intellectual imbalance and admit just how widespread the problems are with human capital — not just now but a decade ago.
• How Inflation Can Be Both 0% and 8.5% at the Same Time: Justin Fox | 2022-09-14T11:53:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Inflation? The Workforce Is the Bigger Problem - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/inflation-the-workforce-is-the-bigger-problem/2022/09/14/b490c336-3420-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/inflation-the-workforce-is-the-bigger-problem/2022/09/14/b490c336-3420-11ed-a0d6-415299bfebd5_story.html |
Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. (iStock)
U.S. News & World Report released its 2023 college rankings on Monday, and the results were not especially surprising. Princeton University was No. 1, again; MIT was No. 2, as opposed to tying for No. 2 last year with Harvard University, which dropped to No. 3 for 2023, in a tie with Stanford University (which had been No. 5 last year) and Yale University (No. 5 last year). Etc.
As my Post colleague Nick Anderson wrote, the release of the rankings comes with new complaints about the methodology, as well as a growing number of competitors that evaluate schools with different criteria than U.S. News. The 2023 list came out just a few months after U.S. News knocked Columbia University out of its No. 2 ranking among national universities after the accuracy of its data came into question.
U.S. News famously uses as part of its calculations the results of a survey of higher education leaders asked about their views of schools’ reputations. Anderson reported that the response rate now is 34 percent. A full 20 percent of a school’s “reputation” factors into its ranking.
The magazine uses as a tool for its ranking something called the Carnegie Classifications, the country’s leading framework for describing the work and impact that institutions of higher education have in comparison to each other.
Now the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Council on Education are working on revising the Carnegie Classifications, and will include a new category that measures how well institutions impact student social and economic opportunity. That could affect U.S. News in future years — and help those interested in higher education better understand the country’s thousands of colleges and universities.
This piece explains what the Classifications are and how they will change. It was written by Timothy F.C. Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education.
By Timothy F.C. Knowles and Ted Mitchell
Millions of Americans, from current and prospective students to proud alumni and business leaders, are no doubt diving into the new U.S. News “Best Colleges” 2023 rankings released on Monday. Unfortunately, they are looking at their institutions and higher education overall through the wrong lens.
These types of college ranking systems oversimplify and distort the value of a higher education degree, placing a premium on perceived prestige and reputation at the expense of students, institutions, and our society.
There are nearly 4,000 institutions of higher education nationwide — community colleges and liberal arts colleges, large national research universities and comprehensive public regional universities, faith-based and minority-serving institutions. They all have unique missions and they all have the potential to improve a student’s life prospects just as much as the top-ranked schools in the U.S. News rankings.
There is a better way to view the diverse landscape of American higher education and the colleges and universities that serve our students and our nation.
Our organizations, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Council on Education, are working together to reimagine the Carnegie Classifications, which were first released in 1973 and are the leading framework for describing — not ranking — all institutions so that their work and impact can be understood in comparison to each other.
The current Carnegie Classifications organize institutions based on the numbers and types of degrees institutions confer, providing a snapshot of the higher-education landscape that is released every three years. The result is that institutions are grouped in categories such as doctoral universities with very high research activity, baccalaureate colleges with an arts and sciences focus, associate’s colleges with various focuses on transfer students and technical training, and special focus institutions such as those concentrating on health professions.
U.S. News uses the Carnegie Classifications as the baseline organization for its rankings. But not only do we disagree with the overall methodology they and other rankings employ, we aim to update and reinvigorate the Classifications, including by producing a category that measures how well institutions impact student social and economic opportunity. When that happens, U.S. News will no longer be able to use the same old tools as a basis for their rankings.
Too many students, parents, policymakers, and the general public view higher education through a narrow prism, in no small part due to the way U.S. News and other rankings celebrate prestige and selectivity. But the “top-ranked” institutions serve just a small fraction of the 25.5 million students currently attending U.S. colleges and universities over the course of the academic year. For instance, only about 1.4 million students attend U.S. News’ 50 top-ranked public and private universities.
U.S. News changed the way it ranked colleges in 2018. It’s still ridiculous.
By contrast, more than 7 million students attend community colleges and more than 11 million attend regional public universities, federal data shows. Those and other institutions that serve the widest array of students have the greatest opportunity to positively impact their future economic potential and therefore the social and economic well-being of our country. They may not be considered “elite” by the type of measures U.S. News and other rankings use, but they are doing elite work every day on behalf of their students, and we can and should learn from them.
By reinventing the Carnegie Classifications, we are working to shift the focus of how the public views and receives information about higher education. Rather than concentrating on measures of elitism like selectivity, reputation, and alumni giving, we will recognize and celebrate institutions that do the best job on measures such as economic and social mobility and other essential student outcomes.
We won’t be issuing a ranked list, but we will evaluate institutions on things that really matter to our nation and its public good, as well as students and their families — things like increasing access to college, retaining and graduating students, and supporting job attainment and debt management. We want to change the national conversation about higher education and its value to redefine what constitutes an “elite” college or university in broader, more meaningful ways.
The new Carnegie Classifications will examine the extent to which all of our colleges and universities address their public purpose in several ways. In doing so, we will reflect and address institutions’ diverse missions and ways of serving the public good. We will still have classifications that categorize institutions by the types of degrees they offer, whether it is a doctoral institution focused on research or a baccalaureate college focusing on the arts and sciences. But too many institutions strive to gain Research 1 “status,” even when it isn’t the right fit with their missions.
U.S. News currently uses the basic Classification to help decide how to create its separate rankings — national universities, regional colleges, ETC.). Though U.S. News now has a social mobility factor, the new Classification will likely be more sophisticated. These and other changes could force U.S. News to rethink its use of the Classifications, which could impact the results.
This next iteration of the Carnegie Classifications, under construction now and due out in 2024, will recognize the wide range of schools that do a great job spurring student success and encourage a wider range of institutional excellence. Our essential goal is to help ensure that U.S. postsecondary education remains an engine of economic opportunity for all and that the American postsecondary sector remains the envy of the world.
U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said it well earlier this year when we announced our collaboration around the Carnegie Classifications: “Colleges and universities need to reimagine themselves around inclusivity and student success, not selectivity and reputation,” he said, adding that he hopes the announcement of the new Classifications “will be the beginning of a new competition among colleges — one that rewards colleges doing the most for upward mobility.”
That’s our hope, too. | 2022-09-14T11:53:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why U.S. News may have to rethink college rankings - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/14/usnews-rethink-famous-college-rankings/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/14/usnews-rethink-famous-college-rankings/ |
Royal driving lesson: Saudi prince was schooled by Queen Elizabeth II
Queen Elizabeth II and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia prior a state banquet at Buckingham Palace in London on Oct. 30, 2007. (John Stillwell/AP)
Fans of “The Crown” or the 2006 film “The Queen” know that Queen Elizabeth II was an accomplished driver. She was a truck mechanic during World War II and drove Land Rovers at her Balmoral estate all her life.
But in 1998, when then-Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia visited Balmoral Castle, that was not common knowledge, leading to an awkward incident involving Abdullah and the queen.
The story comes from Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, a British diplomat who first told the tale in his 2012 memoir. Cowper-Coles did not witness the incident, he said, but he heard about it from two very reliable sources: the two heads of state themselves.
It was a time of change for both royal houses. Princess Diana had died the previous year, and the British royal family’s cold reaction had made it less popular with the public than ever before. In Saudi Arabia, King Fahd had a severe stroke in 1995, leaving Abdullah the de facto ruler. (He wouldn’t officially become king until 2005.)
In September 1998, the queen invited Abdullah to Balmoral for lunch. Afterward, he was invited on a tour of the 50,000-acre estate.
“Prompted by his Foreign Minister, the urbane Prince Saud, an initially hesitant Abdullah had agreed,” Cowper-Coles wrote. “The royal Land Rovers were drawn up in front of the castle.”
The prince was instructed to take the passenger’s seat — on the left side in the United Kingdom. Then, “to his surprise,” the queen got into the driver’s seat on the right, turned the ignition and started driving them away.
Anyone might be surprised to see a head of state driving herself around, and a 72-year-old one at that. But in Saudi Arabia at the time, all women, royal or not, were banned from driving.
The queen — again, an experienced driver who knew the Balmoral estate well — began speeding the Land Rover through the narrow mountain roads of the Scottish highlands, “talking all the time.” Through his interpreter, Cowper-Coles wrote, a very nervous Abdullah “implored the Queen to slow down and concentrate on the road ahead.”
Five years later, in 2003, Cowper-Coles was named Her Majesty’s Ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Before he took his post, he was given a private audience with the queen, where she relayed this story to him, finding it humorous. A few months later, when he had his first meeting with Abdullah, Cowper-Coles told him he “brought greetings from HM the Queen, who had shared with me fond memories of their drive through the Highlands.”
Abdullah broke into a broad grin, recounting his nervousness. Prince Saud, also at the meeting, summed it up like this: “I suspect, ambassador, that Her Majesty steers the ship of state more steadily than she drives a Land Rover.”
“You’re not supposed to repeat what the queen says in private conversation,” Cowper-Coles wrote, but this story was “too funny not to repeat.”
The Saudi ban on women driving was lifted in 2018, three years after King Abdullah’s death and after years of protests and arrests of female activists. | 2022-09-14T11:54:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Queen Elizabeth scared Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah by taking the wheel - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/09/14/queen-elizabeth-king-abdullah/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/09/14/queen-elizabeth-king-abdullah/ |
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