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Bees at the entrance to a hive in Ashton, Md. (Photos by Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
Bees have been around for about 120 million years, though, says Brenda Kiessling, a retired physician and an Eastern Apicultural Society of North America-certified master beekeeper living in Vienna, Va. They have proven themselves capable of adjusting to changing conditions. “They have survived on their own and they have had to adapt,” says Kiessling, who has been caring for honeybees since the early 1970s. “They’ve lived through ice ages, rainstorms. Somehow they have survived.”
Kiessling has been following these guidelines with the bees she keeps at Sandy Spring Gardens in Ashton, Md., for the past three years. But first, she spent nearly a decade reading and researching, including by listening to several of Seeley’s lectures on the practice.
“If you let an animal live naturally, it is able to use its full toolbox and set of skills to survive and reproduce,” says Seeley, who has been studying honeybees in the wild in the Arnot Forest outside of Ithaca, N.Y. “But when you take any kind of animal and you force it to live in a different way, those tools aren’t allowed to function very well.”
Marissa Hermanson is a freelance writer in Richmond. | 2022-09-21T11:34:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Could 'Darwinian beekeeping' help save honeybee colonies? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2022/09/21/darwinian-beekeeping-thomas-seeley/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2022/09/21/darwinian-beekeeping-thomas-seeley/ |
Historically, when the federal government enforces the 15th Amendment, it means more competitive races in the South. Today, those involve Black candidates.
Perspective by Robert Greene II
Robert Greene II is assistant professor of history at Claflin University, and the book reviews editor for the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians.
Clockwise from top left: Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.). (Ben Gray/AP); Cheri Beasley, Democratic Senate candidate in North Carolina. (Allison Lee Isley for The Washington Post); Herschel Walker, GOP Senate candidate in Georgia. (Megan Varner/Getty Images); State Rep. Krystle Matthews, Democratic Senate candidate in South Carolina. (Jeffrey Collins/AP); Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.). (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
In North Carolina, Democrat Cheri Beasley aims to become the state’s first Black U.S. senator. And in Georgia and South Carolina, both major party candidates for Senate are Black. Sen. Tim Scott (R) faces Democratic challenger state Rep. Krystle Matthews in South Carolina, while Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D) and Republican Herschel Walker will square off in Georgia in a race that could determine control of the Senate.
Alarmed by the threat posed by this expansion of democracy, White Southerners seeking to preserve the region’s racist caste system responded with a variety of tactics. They introduced “colorblind” rules and tests that limited the Black franchise without technically violating the 15th Amendment, administered discriminatory fees for accessing polling places, stuffed ballot boxes and used violence to shatter this brief moment of biracial democracy, ripping the right to vote away from almost all Black Southerners for close to a century.
In 1971, Ebony magazine said that: “Perhaps in no facet of life in The South Today have blacks forced as significant a change as in politics.” And Southern politicians knew it. In 1970, Democrat John C. West of South Carolina ran on a platform that acknowledged the gains of the civil rights movement. His victory over Republican Albert Watson, a protege of fellow Democrat-turned-Republican Strom Thurmond, showed that running an explicitly racist campaign in the South would no longer work. In neighboring Georgia, newly elected Gov. Jimmy Carter confirmed in his 1971 inaugural address that he would work for both Black and White Georgians, declaring “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.”
The loyalty of Southern Black voters to Democrats since the New Deal may be best exemplified by a July poll from 11Alive, an Atlanta news station, which showed Warnock securing 85 percent of the Black vote to Walker’s 5 percent. Warnock and Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor, have hinged significant parts of their campaign strategy on turning out Black voters across Georgia, including some who sat out previous races.
These, and other laws designed to crack down on purported “voter fraud” are a product of the way the Supreme Court has weakened the Voting Rights Act over the last decade in cases like Shelby County v. Holder and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. These rulings, and the laws that have been passed in their wake, increase the risk that for the third time in American history, the federal government’s unwillingness to enforce the 15th Amendment could weaken two party competition, Black political influence and democracy itself — not only in the South but throughout the nation. | 2022-09-21T11:34:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Black voters may play an outsize role in key Southern Senate races - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/09/21/black-voters-will-play-an-outsize-role-key-southern-senate-races/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/09/21/black-voters-will-play-an-outsize-role-key-southern-senate-races/ |
The proof is in the numbers: 988 will save lives
By Hannah Wesolowski
The 988 suicide and crisis lifeline emergency telephone number is displayed on a bookmark at an event in Casper, Wyo., on Aug. 14. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration estimated that contact volume to 988 will more than double in its first year. The latest data since the July 16 transition shows the number of contacts to 988 via call, text and chat in August 2022 increased 45 percent over August 2021 — an increase of 152,000 contacts. That is 152,000 more people getting help when they need it most.
This significant increase in contacts has occurred even before there has been any wide-scale public awareness campaign to promote 988, so the number of contacts will likely continue to grow.
Fortunately, in the lead-up to 988’s availability, call centers and state leaders rose to the challenge to meet the increased need. The average answer time across calls, texts and chats are decreasing, and answer rates are increasing, with 20 states answering more than 90 percent of in-state calls in August compared to just seven in January.
988’s success thus far gives us a historic opportunity to reimagine how we respond to people in a mental health crisis, and it couldn’t be more timely. The United States is in the midst of a mental health emergency. American adults are experiencing a threefold increase in symptoms of anxiety and depression compared to 2019. One American dies by suicide every 11 minutes. | 2022-09-21T11:34:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The 988 suicide help line is saving lives - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/988-suicide-help-line-success/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/988-suicide-help-line-success/ |
Remember the baby formula shortage? It’s not over.
(Video: Washington Post staff illustration; images by iStock/Getty Images)
Remember the baby formula crisis?
Public attention has largely moved on, but the U.S. supply shortage isn’t over — and the scarcity continues to distress parents and doctors struggling to feed vulnerable infants.
In Memphis, Mark Corkins heads the pediatric gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition practice at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. Earlier in the shortage, which began in earnest after a recall this past spring, Corkins treated children who had been hospitalized because they didn’t have enough of the specialty formulas they needed. When these children were fed other formulas and had negative reactions, they became so dehydrated that they required fluids and nutrients delivered through IVs.
Corkins said he still sees periodic shortages of specialty formulas, which has made caring for patients undergoing intestinal rehabilitation particularly hard. Those children require strict diet management. And “just when you get them adjusted to one formula,” he wrote in an email, “you have to switch again.”
Formula might once have been a necessity Americans could take for granted — akin to a utility such as water or electricity. But people’s struggles this year to find a reliable supply are a reminder of a disturbing truth: In a breakdown as broad as the formula shortage has been, even when government and businesses step up to help, individual Americans end up fending for themselves and the babies in their care.
As with many other products, the supply of baby formula was disrupted by the covid-19 pandemic. But in 2021, two babies died and two others fell illafter drinking formula made in Abbott Nutrition’s Sturgis, Mich., plant. (The FDA later investigated the deaths of seven other children who drank formula produced at the Sturgis plant.) At the urging of the Food and Drug Administration, Abbott in February issued a major recall.
The company temporarily shuttered the factory after an inspection identified slovenly practices by employees, poorly maintained equipment and pooling water. (In this, as in other cases, Abbott maintains that no one has established a direct link between its factories and the cronobacter bacteria that sickened the children.) As existing formula was pulled from circulation and Abbott lost the capacity to manufacture more, the stocks on store shelves began to dwindle.
Given that the factory produced about 20 percent of the formula made in the United States, the recall and shutdown were catastrophic for families. The situation was even worse for those who relied on the specialty formulas manufactured only in the Sturgis plant.
By the week ended July 17, according to the Chicago-based market research firm IRI, stores were stocking just 68.69 percent of their usual powdered formula inventory. By the week ended Sept. 11, thanks to a combination of government and industry efforts to get more formula on shelves, that figure rose to 81.55 percent of normal — progress, but not yet a full recovery to the 90.76 percent stock level in February.
Behind those figures are untold numbers of exhausted, worried families.
Mindy Samantha Case, a pediatric and neonatal intensive care unit nurse, volunteered to help moderate the NOVA Baby Formula Finding Network — a Facebook group serving families in Northern Virginia and surrounding areas — when it was founded in May. The group has more than 2,800 members who seek and post real-time reports of which formulas are in stock at local stores.
Need peaked earlier in the summer, Case told me, but the group continues to see a consistent stream of new members, as well as regular waves of requests for help finding specific brands.
“I’ve had the luxury of having the time, the money, the resources” to get involved in the sourcing effort, Case said. “But some people don’t, and it’s just really sad and unfortunate that no one else is helping; … 2,800 moms can’t change the state of the country.”
Among the families under greatest strain are those who participate in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), who are typically limited to buying formula from specific brands — in many states, those manufactured by Abbott — and in specific quantities.
Although the U.S. Agriculture Department moved quickly in February to give WIC recipients more purchasing flexibility, they are still getting squeezed by the natural impulse of other parents to overbuy formula when they can find it, according to Brian Dittmeier, senior public policy director for the National WIC Association.
There have been efforts to make recompense to families, though even these require additional effort by tired parents. In May, Abbott’s CEO used an op-ed in The Washington Post to announce a $5 million fund to help families whose children were hospitalized because they couldn’t get the specialty formula they needed. Families would be eligible for up to $4,500 per patient — but it was on them to track down the fund and apply.
When I asked this month how much money Abbott had paid out, company representative John Koval said “applications and uptake have been slow but steady.” If any money from its fund doesn’t go directly to patients, Koval told me, the remainder will be donated to “an organization that supports childhood nutrition and health.”
That’s a perfect metaphor for the challenges of a disaster such as the formula shortage: Even when a systemic collapse captures public attention, it is individuals who are left to bear the consequences — and to continue shouldering the load when the headlines, and the outrage, move on.
This is the first of three columns exploring the nation’s response to the baby formula shortage. Up next: What government and the private sector did right.
Opinion|Princesses in sexual and reproductive peril? They’re just like us. | 2022-09-21T11:34:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Is the baby formula shortage still happening? Yes. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/baby-formula-shortage-abbott-not-over/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/baby-formula-shortage-abbott-not-over/ |
DeSantis’s migrant stunt might be a scandal. But so is our border crisis.
Undocumented migrants are loaded into a van as they are processed by the Border Patrol after crossing the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, Tex., on Aug. 26. (Eric Gay/AP)
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s decision to send migrants to Martha’s Vineyard is surely a stunt and might be a scandal. But the chaos along the border that impelled him to do it is a scandal, too.
To be clear, Florida officials were in the wrong if, as reports suggest, they misled migrants regarding the nature of the trip. But DeSantis’s (R) tactics — as well as those of Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has also been shipping migrants to other parts of the country — has refocused public attention on our ongoing immigration crisis and the failure of the Biden administration to adequately address it.
The numbers are astonishing. More than 2 million people have been apprehended so far this fiscal year trying to enter the country illegally, a record.
More than 1 million have been released into the country to pursue asylum claims, adding to the already stupendous number of such cases pending before immigration courts. Only 10 U.S. cities have a population larger than that.
No one thinks these cases can be heard in anything approaching a reasonable time period. This means that we have de facto admitted these people to live and work here for an indefinite amount of time.
That might satisfy the appearance of legality, but it flagrantly defies the law’s substance. The United States has a legal immigration system that details who has the right to work and live here. Asylum was meant to be a way for people from war-torn countries or those with claims of persecution to sidestep that process. It was not intended as a way to provide entry to millions of people from poorly governed, economically stagnant nations.
Yet that is what the Biden administration is doing at unprecedented levels. People who come from Mexico and Central America can improve their lives dramatically by gaining entrance to America’s golden door. If what’s going on now is allowed to continue, expect millions more people to line up on the border for years to come.
Of course, that’s what some people want. They say the United States needs more workers and that effectively unlimited immigration will provide them. Perhaps they are right. But it is clear that many Americans don’t agree. That’s why efforts to legalize this massive flow have stumbled in Congress for 20 years.
Indeed, flouting majority opinion by stretching the law beyond its intended purpose is neither good politics nor good policy. Using asylum laws to circumvent the political process makes it more difficult to legalize substantial immigration. Moreover, it increases the appeal of former president Donald Trump, who made immigration one of his main calling cards when he entered politics. The recent Swedish election shows that ignoring real public concerns about immigration drives ordinary voters to extreme politicians who pledge to deal with those issues. Biden’s current policy strengthens Trump and the ultra-MAGA politicians the president claims to oppose.
Sending migrants to Democratic areas, however unseemly it may be, has pushed the issue into the consciousness of the voters who enable these policies. The small number of migrants who have been bused to New York City and Washington, D.C., are a mere fraction of what poorer communities along the border have had to assimilate in the past few months. If those migrants are overwhelming those city’s governments, border communities have a message: Welcome to the party. Maybe now we can talk about real solutions.
The Biden administration could end the migrant crisis if it wanted to. It could enforce the law. It could expand the number of immigration judges exponentially so that asylum cases can be heard expeditiously. And it could treat migrants the same way we would treat people affected by a natural disaster, by setting up temporary centers that are large enough to handle them. Don’t allow migrants to work until they have been granted asylum status.
This approach would probably get Republican approval, in exchange for immigration priorities they want. Finish the wall. Expand the number of Border Patrol personnel. Define asylum narrowly so that it doesn’t become a back door to mass legal immigration. There’s a deal to be had if Democrats genuinely want to compromise.
The reason we have the crisis — and the reason DeSantis resorted to his stunt — is that Democrats don’t want a true compromise. A small but vocal minority in their base no longer supports serious limits on immigration, and Biden’s policies are making it a reality. Meanwhile, the reasonable Democratic majority refuses to cross the powerful interest group.
The midterms might give them the incentive they need to do so. The Martha’s Vineyard contretemps pushed mass illegal immigration into mainstream American view. A GOP victory, especially one concentrated on the southern border, will thus be a mandate for changing Biden’s policy. That would be good for the country. | 2022-09-21T11:35:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Migrant stunt by DeSantis points to a larger crisis at the border - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/migrant-crisis-desantis-biden-solutions/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/migrant-crisis-desantis-biden-solutions/ |
Migration’s ‘root cause’ is Latin American socialist dictatorship
Editorial writer and columnist
Migrants near San Antonio's Migrant Resource Center, Sept. 19. (Jordan Vonderhaar/Getty Images)
LEKNICA, Poland — The woman busing tables at a restaurant in this town just across the Neisse River from Germany seemed different from the other people working there. She appeared to speak very little Polish or German. Guessing she spoke English, and might even be a fellow American, I asked where she was from.
“Cuba,” was the surprising answer.
Out poured the story of suffering that had compelled her to seek a way, any way, off the island, and its grinding shortages of food, medicine and other basics. Even life in an off-the-beaten-path Central European village, where most other foreigners are day-trippers shopping for discount Polish goods or en route to a nearby national park, is far preferable.
The worst part, she told me, was the loneliness. Her mood had improved recently, however, when two more Cubans joined her workplace.
As my vacation-time encounter suggests, the exodus from failed left-wing Latin American regimes has global repercussions; of 6 million-plus who have fled Venezuela in recent years, 80 percent have ended up in the Caribbean or other Latin American countries such as Colombia, Peru and Chile, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Inevitably, though, many people seeking relief from poverty and oppression go to the wealthiest and freest nation in their own hemisphere: the United States. Right now, escapees from Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua make up a rapidly growing share of the influx at the border between the United States and Mexico.
The latest Customs and Border Protection data show that 55,333 people from those three countries crossed in August, a 175 percent increase over August 2021. Hence, the predominantly Venezuelan origins of the 50 migrants Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) steered to Martha’s Vineyard last week.
Migration from Central America and Mexico declined 43 percent over the past 12 months, but the flow from Cuba — nearly 200,000 — represents the biggest one-year surge since the island’s 1959 revolution.
And that’s saying something, since that 63-year history includes two dramatic boatlifts — in 1980 and 1994 — which brought 125,000 and 35,000 Cubans, respectively. Even more staggering, the Cuban migrants today often spend thousands of dollars each to pay for the trip, an odyssey by sea, air, land or a combination of all three, with brutal conditions and violent threats along the way.
Like the 1980 and 1994 boatlift crises, the present one may be in part tacitly encouraged by the Havana regime, which, like its allies in Managua and Caracas, is closely aligned with Russia.
It is in these governments’ interest to export dissent and stir political trouble for President Biden — as the boatlifts did for his Democratic predecessors Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
Notably, the exodus from Cuba accelerated after its ally Nicaragua ended its visa requirement for Cubans, making it far easier for the latter to reach the Central American isthmus — and continue on to the border.
Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela do not take their citizens back if deported from the United States, which renders the Biden administration all but powerless to deter the flow.
All of the above should inform the debate about “root causes” of migration, which, like so many of its predecessors, the Biden administration has promised to address. There is a related argument over the United States’ own culpability in the plight of people living under the three left-wing regimes. Washington has sanctioned each one for gross human rights violations, the most recent being Cuba’s nightmarish crackdown on protests that broke out in July 2021 and a similar round-up of dissidents by President Daniel Ortega’s regime in Nicaragua.
Even when the United States targets them to limit collateral damage, these measures can affect ordinary people and not just the regimes; obviously, too, millions have left non-communist countries in Latin America for a better life in the United States.
What is nevertheless undeniable is the historic debacle represented by the departure of over 6 million from Venezuela, whose population peaked at 30 million in 2015, when the main phase of the exodus began. That is a fifth of the entire country.
For Cuba, 200,000 emigrants in a year represents nearly 2 percent of its 11.3 million population. In Nicaragua, the 200,000 who have left since Ortega’s crackdown began four years ago, mostly for the United States and next-door Costa Rica, amount to 3 percent of a 6.6 million population.
U.S. sanctions, under which — for example — this country was still Cuba’s second-largest supplier of food imports in 2020, cannot possibly account for so many people “voting with their feet” against the systems they live under. The foreseeable failure of subjecting the economy to top-down control and denying people basic freedoms can.
The exodus is thus a tremendous compliment to the United States and other democratic capitalist countries. We should appreciate it. Meanwhile, it imposes duties: to treat migrants humanely and incorporate as many of them as we lawfully and realistically can; and to oppose more effectively the despotism that is the root cause of their desperation. | 2022-09-21T11:35:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Migration’s ‘root cause’ is Latin American socialist dictatorship - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/migration-cuba-nicaragua-venezuela-dictatorship/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/migration-cuba-nicaragua-venezuela-dictatorship/ |
Emmanuel Guillen Lozano
The Kremlin, Moscow. (Emmanuel Guillén Lozano)
The war in Ukraine has been going on for months now. Every day, images of horror slide across all forms of media. Those are vitally important images that need to keep being published. We all need to be made aware of the despicable nature of war. I can’t think of a good argument to quell any of them. Fatigued? Well, that’s nothing compared with what the people in the line of fire experience every single day.
Of course, far from the front lines, life will, and does, carry on. But daily life is rarely cause for a news story. We just don’t see much of it. In Moscow, for example, people continue to live their lives. And photographer Emmanuel Guillén Lozano spent some time there recently documenting what would on any other day be pretty unremarkable, Lozano’s artistry notwithstanding. Yet because of the war, along with myriad other bits of friction coming from Russia toward the rest of the world, including the United States, these photos carry an extra weight. It doesn’t hurt that Lozano also has an excellent eye for detail.
As you’ll see below, the seemingly calm scenes of everyday life (yes, made by an outsider) belie anxiousness and tension that exist underneath the surface for many Russians.
Here’s Lozano in his own words:
After watching the war unfold from afar, I decided to try my luck this summer and get a visa to visit Moscow and St. Petersburg. Despite a lot of contradictory information and difficulties with the Russian Consulate, I obtained the necessary documents and traveled through Serbia, where the surprised agents at the Belgrade airport told me I was the only non-Russian passenger on the flight.
This ended up being an omen for the rest of the trip, since during the weeks I spent there, I didn’t see any other apparent foreigners. As soon as I landed and took a taxi to my hotel, I started seeing Z’s (a symbol for the war effort) painted on passing cars and on the entrances of some businesses, but besides that — and the palpable absence of tourists — everything looks like nothing is happening. Public squares teem with cultural and political events, bars are busy, and typical scenes of daily life make it clear that attempts to resist and protest the war were very quickly left behind.
The control of the narrative is enforced not only by the authorities but also by the common citizen. On a train from Pushkin to St. Petersburg, a friend pointed out to me the interaction between a group of young men and a lady in our carriage. The teenagers were listening to loud music — “I did not ask for this war, and I do not support this war,” my friend translated the lyrics for me. The lady strongly demanded that the young people stop the music, saying she did not want to hear such a thing. Russians policing other Russians was something I witnessed several times during my trip.
On another occasion, at a bar, a young student was talking to me about how he had recently moved to Moscow from a smaller town near Yekaterinburg because he was fed up with how closed-minded people can be in the less-urban areas of Russia; the support for the war, even of people close to him, was the final straw that made him leave his hometown.
He told me: “You have to understand one thing: All Russians love their country, their motherland, but not everyone loves the government nor the decisions they’ve made. The Russian government is not the Russian people.” We were in the middle of that conversation when an older gentleman approached us and spoke to him firmly in Russian. He said the man told him, “You shouldn’t be talking to a foreigner about these things.” After that, he got visibly uncomfortable, looked around and said, “Well, maybe it’s not that different here than in my town after all.”
Other stories I constantly heard took place in the metro services of both Moscow and St. Petersburg, where some people who had attended the first protests were suddenly arrested weeks later during their daily commute after being identified by facial recognition technology in the stations’ security cameras. In the Moscow metro, I witnessed twice what has become a common occurrence: officers randomly checking people’s phones to look at their conversations.
Those who use terms other than “special military operation” to refer to the invasion are arrested on the spot. That explained why almost everyone I kept in touch with via Instagram and Telegram deleted our conversations once they ended, and why none of the antiwar people I met were willing to have their portraits taken, even anonymously. All of them were eager to share their feelings and thoughts with me, but no one felt safe going any further.
On the other hand, people who are in favor of Russia’s military action in Ukraine feel completely comfortable talking about it, proudly wearing hats and T-shirts with the characteristic Z’s on them and willing to talk to strangers and foreigners like myself about how Russia had no choice but to attack — to stop what they call a genocide of Russian-speaking people in Ukraine and to prevent an imminent attack by Ukraine against Russia.
Being a foreigner was a particularly strange experience in this context. Wherever I went, the first thing I had to acknowledge was that I don’t speak Russian. Often all the people in the room would go completely silent as soon as they heard me speak English. Almost every single time they’d first ask, “Where are you from?” Once I responded that I was from Mexico, they’d ask in shock — acutely aware of their country’s current pariah status — “And what are you doing here now?”
In the best of cases, more than one person would approach and start a conversation with me, and no matter what the initial topic was, they would always ask me anxiously what I thought of “the situation” in Ukraine, to which I responded cautiously, without using the words “war” or “invasion” until I was absolutely sure that we shared similar views. It was clear that one has to be extra careful nowadays; most people prefer not to talk about the war at work, at school or with their relatives. Like in the Stalin era, Russians are turning each other in to the authorities, facing fines and the possibility of jail time.
After more than 15,000 people were arrested in the antiwar protests, many of those who opposed the invasion felt that even if they decided to take a stand, it wouldn’t make any difference. A lot of anti-regime Russians left the country as soon as they could to places like Turkey and Georgia, among other countries. Most of the people I met knew someone who had left with no intention of returning.
Those who can’t afford to leave or have decided to stay are faced with the decision of cutting off contact with their relatives or friends who support the war or resigning themselves to the idea that they will not be able to change their minds and simply avoiding the subject of the war in their conversations.
While their family members and acquaintances continue to watch the state’s propaganda, the younger generations of Russians are using VPNs on their phones to access Western apps that were banned by the government. They look for alternative sources of information and follow Telegram channels that spread the type of news that the Kremlin has tagged as “fake.” They continue to see with horror the pain that their country is inflicting on a sovereign nation, a nation of people they consider their brothers and sisters. There is a palpable feeling of hopelessness in the air as daily life carries on as usual, mainly because it’s become clear that if there is anything or anyone that can stop the war, it will not come from within Russia.
You can see more of Lozano’s work on his website, here. | 2022-09-21T11:35:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Emmanuel Guillén Lozano's photos of daily life in Russia show tension of war - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/09/21/photos-daily-life-russia-belie-tension-country-war/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/09/21/photos-daily-life-russia-belie-tension-country-war/ |
The government is (mostly) paying heed to a key cybersecurity commission
Welcome to The Cybersecurity 202! Don’t forget to send tips to tim.starks@washpost.com.
Below: Senators publish a report on the U.S. counterintelligence center’s challenges, and there’s another major crypto hack. First:
Cyberspace Solarium Commission recommendations are among top agenda items left for Congress this year
An influential cybersecurity commission — whose recommendations two years ago led to the establishment of a White House cyber czar — says in a report out today that 48 of its 82 proposals have seen implementation or are nearing completion, with significant progress on another 22.
And there's been momentum compared with last year, according to the update by the congressionally created Cyberspace Solarium Commission:
More than 58 percent of recommendations are implemented or nearly implemented with another 27 percent on track.
In 2021, more than 35 percent were implemented or nearing implementation and nearly 44 percent were on track.
Some of the commission’s recommendations remain among the top cybersecurity agenda items that Congress could take action on between now and the end of the year, such as legislative language to identify U.S. computer systems where a cyberattack could do massive damage, then strengthen protections for them.
But they’re not the only major outstanding legislative proposals for Congress before year’s end, with one of the pending bills being a proposal to update protections of federal agencies. And some of the commission’s recommendations, today’s report concedes, are unlikely to see action anytime in the near future. (Others require action from the executive branch.)
Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who co-chaired the commission and chairs the follow-up organization dedicated to tracking and continuing work, told me recently that one of his 2022 priorities included establishing a Bureau of Cyber Statistics to collect data on incidents that could help policymakers assess risks. Another would fuse and share threat information between federal agencies and owners of operators of critical infrastructure.
Many commission recommendations would likely hitch a ride on the annual defense policy bill if they’re to become law at all this year. That bill has regularly become law for 61 years straight, and that’s how a great many commission recommendations have recently advanced.
That legislation, known as the National Defense Authorization Act, is home to some other major cybersecurity proposals and is due for Senate floor action in October after the House passed its version in July. The two chambers would have to negotiate a final version of the bill after Senate passage.
A tally, and some prospects
The commission draws its name from Project Solarium, a Cold War-era project led by President Dwight D. Eisenhower that itself is named after a room in the White House.
In addition to tallying progress on the commission’s recommendations, CSC 2.0, the nonprofit successor to the commission that released today’s report, has tracked progress on follow-up recommendations — bringing the total to 116. It’s also continued studying things like cybersecurity in the water sector.
“Since the publication of the first annual assessment in August 2021, Congress and the administration have made substantial progress bolstering U.S. cyber defenses by organizing and resourcing the U.S. government, cooperating with partners and allies, and enhancing collaboration with the private sector,” the report reads. “But the work is not done.”
Some of the report’s assessments might be a little optimistic. It labels the proposal on identifying and protecting ultra-vital infrastructure as “on track,” and while there have been signs of progress, industry opposition has been mounting.
But legislation that became law earlier this year that requires critical infrastructure owners to report major cyber incidents to the federal government shows how industry is willing to embrace cybersecurity legislation, King said.
“One of the things that's happening — and it's happening faster than I expected, frankly — is that the private sector is catching on that this is no joke,” King said. “Things that they perhaps didn't really relish a few years ago, like mandatory reporting, I think they're now understanding that this is really necessary.”
The commission recognizes that some of its ideas are doomed for now, such as a recommendation to consolidate cybersecurity oversight in Congress. Existing committee leaders tend not to like giving up their turf to newly created panels.
Elsewhere in Congress
It has, nonetheless, been a very fruitful session of Congress for cyber legislation, and that remains true regardless of what happens the rest of the year.
Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Chairman Gary Peters (D-Mich.) has played a major role in that. But he told me in a written statement that he still wants to see action on a bill that would update an agency security law known as the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA); legislation that would update a program that governs security of cloud products for the federal government, known as the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP); and a measure to strengthen satellite cybersecurity.
“This has been one of the most productive Congresses for cybersecurity in history,” Peters said.
On the House side, Homeland Security Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and cybersecurity subcommittee chairwoman Yvette D. Clarke (D-N.Y.) also have accomplished some of their biggest cybersecurity priorities this session, such as getting more grants to state and local governments, spokesperson Adam Comis told me.
Remaining House Homeland Security Democratic priorities include legislation to strengthen the cybersecurity workforce for systems that control industrial processes such as in the manufacturing sector, and a bill to authorize into law a cybersecurity competition the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency hosts annually.
In the meantime, I’m moderating a panel with the leaders of CSC 2.0 this morning; you can watch it here.
DHS turned down a proposal to track online harassment of election officials
In the spring, the nonprofit Center for Internet Security submitted the proposal, which sought to monitor the internet for postings of election workers’ personal information online, boost the funding for a program allowing election officials to report misinformation and add a service to track foreign disinformation, CNN’s Sean Lyngaas reports. But some of the plans stalled or were rejected after DHS officials had legal concerns and saw backlash to its Disinformation Governance Board, which DHS eventually terminated.
Florida and Colorado election officials asked officials from DHS and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to approve the plan on “doxing” — when personal information about someone is posted on the internet — “before these efforts of intimidation worsen in the lead up” to this year's midterm elections. The request came as election officials have faced a rise in violent threats after former president Donald Trump and his allies falsely claimed that the 2020 election was tainted.
CISA Director Jen Easterly responded to the letter after CNN asked CISA about it. “I very much share your concerns about threats to our nation’s election officials,” Easterly wrote in the letter dated Sept. 16. “We are committed to working with you and our partners to identify mechanisms to help address this real and concerning risk.”
Some parts of the proposal aren’t being implemented, however. “While the anti-doxing and foreign influence parts of the proposal remain stalled, work on the online ‘portal’ for election officials to flag misinformation to social media platforms predated the proposal and continues today,” people familiar with it told Lyngaas. CIS spokesperson Jason Forget declined to comment to CNN.
U.S. counterintelligence agency faces challenges, Senate Intelligence Committee says
A report by the committee warned that a top counterintelligence agency’s work is being hampered by bureaucracy and funding issues, the Associated Press’s Nomaan Merchant reports. The warning comes as U.S. officials continue to warn that Chinese spies are trying to steal information from U.S. industry and government officials.
“The Senate Intelligence Committee report released Tuesday says the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, which is supposed to coordinate efforts by the U.S. government, doesn’t have a clear mission and is limited in its authority,” Merchant writes. “NCSC cannot fund or mandate programs for many government agencies or private companies that hold secrets prized by foreign spy services.”
Hackers stole $160 million from cryptocurrency firm
An executive at cryptocurrency firm Wintermute said the company remains solvent after the hack and is asking for the hacker to get in touch, the Record’s Alexander Martin reports. It’s the latest major hack in the cryptocurrency space, where hackers have stolen record sums from the burgeoning industry.
“Wintermute is a ‘market maker’ for cryptocurrency platforms, an organization that holds a large inventory of a particular asset to keep the market liquid by ensuring that traders have someone to buy and sell with,” Martin writes. It’s not clear who was responsible for the hack.
As Israel reins in its cyberarms industry, an ex-intel officer is building a new empire (Haaretz)
Pro-Ukraine hacktivists claim to have hacked notorious Russian mercenary group (Motherboard)
New York to install surveillance cameras in every subway car by 2025 (NBC News)
Commerce lacks intelligence resources to keep U.S. tech from fueling Chinese cyberthreat, experts warn (CyberScoop)
Hackers accessed data on some American Airlines customers (Associated Press)
The RH-ISAC hosts its cyber intelligence summit today in Plano, Tex.
Your newsletter host moderates a discussion with Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), the co-chairs of Cyberspace Solarium Commission 2.0, at a Foundation for Defense of Democracies event today at 8:30 a.m.
The House Homeland Security Committee holds a hearing on the resilience and preparedness of the water sector today at 10 a.m.
Emily Goldman, the director of the U.S. Cyber Command/National Security Agency Combined Action Group, speaks at a Carnegie Endowment event today at 10 a.m.
Principal deputy national cyber adviser Kemba Walden speaks at Crowdstrike’s Fal.Con conference today at 11:30 a.m.
The Senate Intelligence Committee holds a hearing on the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, and protecting U.S. innovation today at 2:30 p.m.
Today’s second @washingtonpost TikTok explains why a Texas sheriff is investigating Florida’s governor https://t.co/2lybrcjlly pic.twitter.com/Beqbadz8XB | 2022-09-21T11:35:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The government is (mostly) paying heed to a key cybersecurity commission - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/government-is-mostly-paying-heed-key-cybersecurity-commission/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/government-is-mostly-paying-heed-key-cybersecurity-commission/ |
Live updates:Russia-Ukraine war live updates: Putin calls up reservists amid losses and ...
One way is to see whether people feel safe going about their daily lives, the Everyday Peace Indicators project finds
Analysis by Pamina Firchow
Roger Mac Ginty
A woman waves a peace sign at the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin on Feb. 27 during a rally protesting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Markus Schreiber/AP)
Sept. 21 is the U.N. International Day of Peace, but how does the world measure peace, exactly? In the dictionary, you’ll find the word “peace” nestled between “pea” and “peach.” The formal definition will refer to peace as the absence of violence. In other words, it’s a negative definition — explaining what peace is not, rather than what it is.
Our research on peace takes on a renewed urgency given the war in Ukraine and the uptick in the number of violent conflicts over the past decade. A number of countries — Lebanon, Colombia, Sudan and Myanmar, to name a few — appear extremely fragile and at increased risk of major violence. In times of war, or facing the threat of war, it seems sensible to think seriously about peace and how we might identify and measure it.
Wars between nations can be incredibly costly mass casualty events. While countless academic and legal studies have attempted to define peace, they often focus on the peace treaties that follow wars between nations. A peace in the conflict in Ukraine, for instance, will require political leaders in Moscow and Kyiv to reach agreement. A successful “peace” in this case would be if a cease-fire or peace accord was sustained for a long period, or if Moscow and Kyiv somehow normalized relations. Most ways of measuring peace concentrate on this type of expert-led indicator that looks at the whole country as the unit of measurement — and tends to view peace as the absence of violence.
Peace matters even more at the local level
Of course, these top-down ways of measuring peace don’t capture the full picture. Away from the diplomatic discussions, families and communities in cities and villages have to get on with their lives and make the best of the peace their national leaders have made. It is here in the everyday where peace becomes sustainable.
Whether in Colombia, South Sudan or Northern Ireland, peace is forged and lived locally. Peace, at this very granular level, might take the form of a former combatant being able to take a job in the civilian world, or a family being able to shop in stores that were formerly in “enemy” territory.
Tracking this everyday peace, or the ways that people navigate their lives in societies coming out of violent conflict, provides evidence of how people actually engage with and forge peace. This data provides valuable information on what happens in a country after the ink dries on the signed peace agreements approved by leaders. In this view, peace is not just an elite-level peace accord — it’s also the daily reality of being able to go about your business. At the most fundamental level, peace is about getting the kids to school, food on the table and being able to pursue work, educational and cultural opportunities. All of these activities, or their absence, provide evidence of the extent to which peace has taken root at the local level, but the extent to which they are important depends on a place’s location, history of violence, culture and stage of conflict.
We look for the signs of “everyday peace”
A number of initiatives have sought to capture signs of this everyday peace as a way of complementing the top-down evidence that we might get from monitoring a cease-fire or the extent to which governments have implemented peace accord provisions.
Will Israel further normalize relations with its Arab neighbors?
We created and now co-lead one such initiative — Everyday Peace Indicators. This project takes the novel approach of asking people in conflict-affected localities what peace means to them. So rather than rely on outside “experts” who arrive with premade definitions of peace, and ideas about how to implement it, the Everyday Peace Indicators team asks people what peace means to them in their own lives and how they identify it. In doing so, we have developed a systematic method to produce a database of quantitative and qualitative measures of everyday peace in villages and neighborhoods around the world.
We found, for instance, that many people see peace not in terms of the deals made by political leaders, but in terms of their family and immediate locality. In countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Colombia and Sri Lanka, our project hears from people who define peace in many different ways — including how safe they feel walking alone at night, whether a specific road in the neighborhood has been repaired or how sincere their leaders are in resolving their grievances.
In Afghanistan in 2016, for instance, some people saw peace in terms of the number of TV and radio antennas on rooftops or the presence of female vaccinators — both of which signaled that the Taliban was not present to object. In Colombia, certain people noted routine and regular trash collection as a sign of peace, as this meant the municipal authorities were functional. And our most recent work in Sri Lanka has shown how many people connect peace closely with the type of public services they can access easily and efficiently, such as being able to take something as simple as a blood test at a local hospital.
Can local priorities inform peace processes?
Most importantly for international organizations interested in building peace, our research shows us that peace can mean many things — and that these things are often different from what international policies and programs actually target. Although there is a tendency to try to find key themes at a national or international level, communities within the same region or even the same district can have vastly different perspectives and priorities about peace. This matters because a policy or program that is helpful in one community may be counterproductive in another, especially in a complex war-torn context.
The Everyday Peace Indicators project has shown us the value in taking a step back from universal, template approaches to peace. Our conclusions may be useful to organizations like the U.S. Agency for International Development and other groups that have shown interest in localization.
Ultimately, building peace is messy and often looks very different across different contexts, but our research shows that everyday people can offer ideas and ways of thinking about and building sustainable peace.
Pamina Firchow (@pfirchow) is associate professor of Conflict Resolution and Coexistence at the Heller School for Social Policy at Brandeis University. She is the author of the award-winning book Reclaiming Everyday Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and is executive director and co-founder of the Everyday Peace Indicators NGO.
Roger Mac Ginty (@rogermacginty) is professor at the School of Government and International Affairs, and director of the Durham Global Security Institute, both at Durham University. His latest book is Everyday Peace: How so called ordinary people can disrupt violent conflict (Oxford University Press, 2021). He is co-founder of Everyday Peace Indicators. | 2022-09-21T11:35:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What is peace, exactly? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/international-day-of-peace-2022/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/international-day-of-peace-2022/ |
Tom Brady throws a pass during the Buccaneers’ victory Sunday at New Orleans. (Gerald Herbert/AP)
Two games into Tom Brady’s post-retirement season, there is indeed a lot of stuff going on, to paraphrase the Tampa Bay star.
The seven-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback has a modest 402 passing yards. On Sunday, his frustration showed when he smashed a tablet on the sideline. But the Buccaneers, led by their defense, are 2-0 after winning in New Orleans to end a six-game regular season losing streak against the Saints.
“This is an emotional game,” Brady said during his postgame news conference. “I think a little better execution helps all the way around. The defense played great again. … [It’s] a team we really struggle with, so it feels good to win.”
Or as he said, perhaps more succinctly, in a video posted to social media: “The ugly ones count, too. And sorry for breaking that tablet. I think that’s going to be another Twitter meme or something like that.”
Microsoft endorsement not happening..pic.twitter.com/gSeqlyqqEu
It has been an eventful year for Brady. He announced his retirement in February. He announced his un-retirement a little less than six weeks later, prompting Los Angeles Rams Coach Sean McVay to say at the annual league meeting, “I was thinking, ‘[Shoot], man, can we get this guy the hell out of the league?’ ”
Brady lost his coach when Bruce Arians stepped down and Todd Bowles succeeded him. He lined up a 10-year deal with Fox, reportedly worth $375 million, to move to the broadcasting booth once his playing career is done. He was a central figure in the NFL punishing the Miami Dolphins and their owner, Stephen Ross, for tampering.
Brady turned 45 in August and took an 11-day hiatus from training camp, explaining following his return: “I’m 45 years old, man. There’s a lot of [stuff] going on.” There have been recent reports about the state of his marriage to model Gisele Bündchen. Brady said last week that he accepts the scrutiny of his private life, calling it “a natural thing I’ve been dealing with for a long time.” And Bowles confirmed to reporters Monday that Brady is taking Wednesdays off from practice throughout the season as planned maintenance days.
No one should question Brady’s commitment to football — not even as it relates to his time away from training camp. The New England Patriots were so successful for so long in large part because Brady and Coach Bill Belichick are identically ruthless competitors; it was amazing not that they ultimately parted but that they were able to coexist for two decades. Brady also is winning the post-Patriots portion of his career, having immediately added another Super Bowl victory with the Buccaneers.
No one should be particularly surprised, either, if Brady secures an eighth career Super Bowl triumph this season before heading to Fox. He led the league in passing attempts, completions, passing yards and touchdown passes last season, after all, at 44.
Next comes a meeting with fellow quarterback legend Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers Sunday in Tampa. The Buccaneers could be without wide receiver Mike Evans, whom the NFL suspended for one game Monday for his role in Sunday’s scuffle with Saints cornerback Marshon Lattimore. Wideouts Chris Godwin and Julio Jones were injured and on the inactive list for the win over the Saints. The Buccaneers reportedly were making arrangements Tuesday to sign free agent wide receiver Cole Beasley to their practice squad.
Evans and Lattimore definitely not besties pic.twitter.com/PvCHpizfK2
Brady has not said this bonus season is his final on-field hurrah. But he already has retired once, and now he has fulfilled his long-stated goal of playing until he’s 45. The Fox job awaits. He can’t play forever, no matter how he has made it seem.
When Brady’s longtime rival, Peyton Manning, no longer could play at an elite level, the decline occurred rapidly. In Manning’s next-to-last NFL season, 2014 with the Denver Broncos, he threw for 4,727 yards and 39 touchdowns and had a passer rating of 101.5. In his final season, 2015, he threw for 2,249 yards and nine touchdowns (with 17 interceptions) and had a passer rating of 67.9. The Broncos’ defense carried Manning to a Super Bowl title.
Brady hasn’t had a career-altering physical issue like Manning’s neck injury. He has basically ended all debate about the greatest quarterback in history. Yet he plays on.
And, as always, it is captivating to watch.
They have beaten the defending Super Bowl champs (the Rams) and last season’s top AFC playoff seed (the Titans) by a combined 72-17. The Bills look unstoppable.
They held on against the Chargers and now face the reeling Colts.
The defense is leading the way. The Bucs have allowed 13 points over two games but now meet the Packers and Chiefs in consecutive games.
Jalen Hurts threw the ball well. He ran the ball well. And the Eagles had no problems Monday night with the Vikings, with assistance from Kirk Cousins.
Now that was the version of Tua Tagovailoa the Dolphins thought they were getting when they drafted him.
Herbert’s problematic rib injury
The Justin Herbert situation bears watching not only this week but as the season progresses.
The Los Angeles Chargers have an interesting decision to make about their third-year franchise quarterback as they prepare for Sunday’s game at home against the improved Jacksonville Jaguars. Herbert missed one play after absorbing a hard hit and suffering a rib injury during Thursday night’s loss at Kansas City. He returned and threw a dart of a fourth-down pass to set up a late touchdown.
Coach Brandon Staley announced Friday that Herbert had suffered a fracture of his rib cartilage, calling the quarterback’s status day-to-day. The Chargers have a capable backup, Chase Daniel, to play this weekend if Herbert is sidelined. But even beyond that, such a rib injury could be bothersome to Herbert in a season of raised expectations after the Chargers just missed the AFC playoffs last season.
Those ribs will hurt for awhile. Total pain. Will make practice difficult next week. Extra days off will really help. May need an injection pregame next week.
— Rich Gannon (@RichGannon12) September 16, 2022
“Those ribs will hurt for a while,” former NFL quarterback Rich Gannon wrote last week on Twitter. “Total pain. Will make practice difficult next week. Extra days off will really help. May need an injection pregame next week.”
Staley seems to have dialed back his fourth-down aggressiveness a bit. Against the Chiefs, the Chargers converted all four of their fourth-down attempts. But they kicked a field goal on fourth and two from the Kansas City 13-yard line. They punted on fourth and two from the Kansas City 47-yard line and again on fourth and two from the Kansas City 48-yard-line.
It didn’t pay off against the Chiefs. But with the Chargers’ upgrades on defense, Staley’s more measured approach could serve them well — provided Herbert is healthy and able to throw the ball effectively. The Chargers are not a playoff team without him at something close to full capacity.
Davante Adams? Hello? Are you there? He had two catches for 12 yards in the overtime loss to the Cardinals.
They are 0-1-1 and have been outscored 44-3 in all but the fourth quarters of their two games.
The offense managed only three field goals in the defeat to the Broncos. Maybe Davis Mills isn’t the answer at quarterback, after all.
They tried but failed to rally from a 28-3 deficit in the loss to the Rams. That only works when they’re the team that’s ahead.
They’re 0-2, and the losing streak, dating from last season, is at nine games. Matt Rhule shouldn’t take any calls from David Tepper.
‘No update or timeline’ on Commanders investigation
The NFL said last week there was no change to Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder’s status as the league awaits the findings of the investigation being conducted by attorney Mary Jo White.
Once White’s investigation is complete, the league said, Commissioner Roger Goodell will discuss the situation with Snyder.
“There is no update or timeline at this point, in terms of her findings,” Jeff Miller, the NFL’s executive vice president of communications, public affairs and policy, said during a conference call with reporters. “But as soon as she is done, I am sure that we’ll be talking about that. The commissioner said it. I think this remains the status quo, then he’ll have a discussion with Dan at the appropriate time. And, again, those findings haven’t been made to us yet. Her work continues.”
In July 2021, following an investigation of the Commanders’ workplace overseen by attorney Beth Wilkinson, the NFL announced that the team had been fined $10 million and that Snyder’s wife, Tanya, the franchise’s co-CEO, would oversee the daily operations for an unspecified period. | 2022-09-21T11:36:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NFL power rankings, Tom Brady's post-retirement season, Justin Herbert's injury - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/tom-brady-nfl-rankings/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/tom-brady-nfl-rankings/ |
PARIS — France’s last competitive soccer games before the World Cup should be a chance for coach Didier Deschamps to test his best team.
Benzema’s minor thigh injury has led to Olivier Giroud’s recall and Giroud has a chance both to close in on Thierry Henry's national scoring record of 51 goals and stake his claim for a place in the World Cup squad. | 2022-09-21T11:36:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tensions in France squad ahead of Nations League matches - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/soccer/tensions-in-france-squad-ahead-of-nations-league-matches/2022/09/21/5d6fce82-399b-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/soccer/tensions-in-france-squad-ahead-of-nations-league-matches/2022/09/21/5d6fce82-399b-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html |
Democrats want to include Sen. Joe Manchin’s proposal in legislation to avoid a shutdown. Republicans don’t.
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) speaks during a news conference on Tuesday at the Capitol. Lawmakers are negotiating over proposals to keep the government funded after the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Congress is trying to stay on track to avoid a government shutdown after next week, but a new fight has emerged over legislation to expedite environmental permitting for energy projects.
The federal government’s fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, and without a new law to fund the government, it would have to shut down. Senate Democrats are pushing to include the permitting language in a stopgap bill that would fund operations temporarily until mid-December.
Democrats and Republicans alike agree in principle about the need to reform the environmental review process. And both are loath to shutter the government on the eve of a hotly contested midterm election. But policy disagreements and past partisan squabbles now threaten to throw talks on a continuing resolution — a bill to sustain government funding at current levels — off course.
When Democrats in August passed the Inflation Reduction Act, their landmark health-care, climate change and tax policy law, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) struck a deal with moderate Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) to pass permitting reform this year.
That deal surprised Republicans, who were hoping Manchin would not vote to approve President Biden’s ambitious spending bill. Bitter feelings after the law’s passage remain, and they’ve seeped into budget negotiations.
Schumer in a news conference Tuesday reaffirmed his plan to link the permitting bill to a government funding effort. Manchin held his own news conference and warned that Republican opposition to the bill could cause a government shutdown.
“We’re going to vote and it’s going to be in the [legislation], okay?” Manchin said. “And if [Republicans] are willing to say, ‘We’re gonna close down the government,’ because of a personal attack on me, or basically not looking at the good of the country, this is what makes people sick about politics.”
Republicans countered that they couldn’t support a proposal they have yet to see, though a draft of the legislation leaked in August, and it has not substantially changed, according to a person familiar with the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the talks.
“What I’ve been saying to Joe, and I just said it to him again on the floor two minutes ago, is the best way to help move this is (a) to show it to people, and (b) be open to ideas and ways to improve it,” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “So it remains to be seen if they’re going to do either of those. The less they do that, the less likely it ends up passing.”
The standoff does not guarantee a shutdown: Democrats could eventually opt to pass legislation to fund the government without the permitting changes. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has also suggested that her chamber could attach the permitting measures to other less controversial legislation, amid complaints from liberal caucus members concerned about the effects of fossil fuel production on the climate crisis.
Both chambers are also ironing out details for aid to Ukraine and money for victims of natural disasters, including Hurricane Fiona in Puerto Rico, Western wildfires and floods in Kentucky. Lawmakers in both parties say those provisions are not likely to hold up the continuing resolution.
Manchin is set to release the text of his permitting proposal on Wednesday. Early summaries showed it would shorten environmental review periods for energy project construction and require the president to designate 25 energy projects of “strategic national importance.” It would also require agencies to expedite approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 303-mile system awaiting final approval that is popular in Manchin’s home state.
Republicans have long sought to reform federal permitting processes, though typically in a more sweeping manner, which critics say would declaw environmental regulatory agencies. But some Republicans are still irate with Manchin for supporting Democrats’ health-care, climate change and tax law, and they aren’t inclined to help Schumer and Biden use the government funding legislation to keep the agreement they reached with Manchin to win his vote last month.
The two-week scramble that saved Democrats’ climate agenda
“This is not the time for Republicans to be rallying around Democrats,” Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) told The Post on Tuesday. “We’re not excited about renewing all of our wonderful relationships with [Manchin].”
A government shutdown could prove catastrophic, both for the economy and for either party’s electoral prospects in November. If funding runs out, crucial federal services — such as anti-poverty food assistance and customer service functions at the Social Security Administration and Internal Revenue Service — would close completely or face immense strain. Some of the federal government’s 2.1 million employees would also have their paychecks deferred.
Both parties are staring down polling data that shows control of both chambers of Congress is essentially a toss-up. Any government shutdown this close to the elections would lead to vicious mudslinging in the campaign’s final furlong.
In the evenly divided Senate, Democrats need 10 Republicans to vote for the funding legislation to defeat a filibuster, a number that GOP senators have said this week may be hard to come by if Manchin’s permitting proposal remains attached.
Potentially setting up additional conflict, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) introduced competing permitting legislation last week. Her proposal would strike the Environmental Protection Agency’s mandate to review the ecological impacts of newly authorized federal energy projects and would allow states to lease federal lands within their borders for energy production. Like Manchin’s, it also requires expedited approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline.
Manchin derided Capito’s approach as a “messaging bill” meant to stir up opposition to his approach. But 47 of the 50 GOP Senators have signed on as co-sponsors, making it unclear if Democrats could find 10 Republicans who would support Manchin’s policy instead.
“If there are 10 Democrats willing to vote for Sen. Capito’s bill, that would be a good outcome,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) told The Post.
“I don’t want to shut the government down, and I want to do permitting reform,” said Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.), “but I want it to be real permitting reform.” | 2022-09-21T11:36:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Manchin, Republicans clash over federal energy projects - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/09/21/congress-permitting-reform-government-shutdown/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/09/21/congress-permitting-reform-government-shutdown/ |
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that your posture can affect the time it takes for the drug to be absorbed
Aaron Steckelberg
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have found whether you’re standing upright or leaning, as well as which side you’re leaning to, could affect how fast the contents of a pill are absorbed into your body.
The bottom line: leaning to your right side after swallowing a pill could speed absorption by about 13 minutes, compared to staying upright. Leaning to the left would be a mistake — it could slow absorption by more than an hour.
TAKING PILL
Top of
SITTING UPRIGHT
Standing or sitting up straight is “still an excellent way” to take a pill, said Rajat Mittal, a Johns Hopkins engineer and the senior author of the study. But, if you’re lying down after taking a pill, turning to your right side could significantly speed up the rate at which the drug is going to be absorbed by your body, Mittal said.
The model simulated a pill’s journey through the stomach to the intestine.
[When swallowing pills is difficult and how to do it better]
A person’s posture affected the rate of dissolution of the pills in the simulations for two reasons: the inherent shape of the stomach and gravity. For most humans, with rare exceptions, the stomach hooks to the right as it connects to the intestine, and any food or liquid in the stomach isn’t absorbed until it reaches the intestines. The researchers found that when gravity works with the natural pathway from the stomach to the intestines, the pill traveled at a faster rate toward the intestines, and absorption.
The study doesn’t mean you should lean to the right or lie down every time you take a pill. Some drugs, particularly those that cause gastrointestinal side effects, come with instructions to stay upright after taking them. And drug manufacturers typically assume you’re upright when you swallow a pill.
In the real world, the study eventually could help doctors better prescribe drugs to patients with disabilities or who are bedridden and can’t stand or sit upright after taking a pill.
The model also found a person’s posture can have “as big of an impact” on digestion as gastroparesis, a condition that impedes the normal function of the stomach’s muscles to push food through the digestive tract, Mittal said.
Werner Weitschies, a professor at the University of Greifswald’s Center of Drug Absorption and Transport, called the study “the most advanced paper” that simulates the process of the gastrointestinal system. The research will help academics, like himself, to continue to examine the dissolution of pills in the human body but it’s too early for people to draw conclusions for everyday life because the actual process is “very complex,” Weitschies said.
“In terms of computational science, it’s a huge step forward,” he said. But, “one should be careful about what conclusions can be drawn at the moment from running such a computation with one model.”
To Mittal, every kind of model — in the lab or based on animals or humans — has its limitations. In real life, the stomach mixes and grinds food and liquid; at any given point, there could be a different amount of food or gases that could impede or slow down a pill.
[Certain foods and beverages can interact with drugs]
In the Johns Hopkins study, the researchers assumed the stomach contained just one liquid — water, juice or milk, for example — instead of a mixture of food and stomach acid. Mittal said it’s the same assumption the drug companies make in their tests.
“Ultimately, it is very difficult to really explore all of the different combinations of foods that people might have eaten when they’ve taken a pill,” Mittal said.
The simulation also assumed one standardized version of the stomach — stomach shapes can vary, especially by age — and the test used one specific type of pill, a solid pill of salicylic acid, which had a higher density than the fluid in the model, making it so the pill could sink. In the future, Mittal said he plans to test other shapes and sizes of pills, such as capsules or tablets.
There’s still a long way to go in developing computational models such as the simulated stomach Johns Hopkins built, but Jae “Mike” Lee, a lead author on the study who’s now a pharmaceutical scientist at the Food and Drug Administration, said the “ultimate goal” is to create simulations that can be used to test various conditions and more — which would otherwise be expensive or difficult to test in real life.
For now, Mittal said, there’s one clear takeaway from the research: “The key is posture matters.” | 2022-09-21T11:36:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How to take a pill: Our posture affects how we digest pills, study says - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/interactive/2022/how-to-take-a-pill/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/interactive/2022/how-to-take-a-pill/ |
Everything you need to know about the Presidents Cup
Justin Thomas hits from the 13th tee at Quail Hollow during a practice round. (Chris Carlson/AP)
After a nearly three-year hiatus caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the Presidents Cup match-play golf event begins Thursday in Charlotte, and while it lacks the pedigree (and competitiveness) of the better-known Ryder Cup, it’s still worth checking out. Here’s what you need to know.
What is the Presidents Cup schedule?
Where is this year’s Presidents Cup being played? | 2022-09-21T12:25:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Presidents Cup 2022 teams, players, format and schedule - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/presidents-cup-format-teams-tv-schedule/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/presidents-cup-format-teams-tv-schedule/ |
Medical experts say the drugs may allow Robert Lewis Dear Jr. to stand trial after he was found mentally incompetent
Robert Lewis Dear Jr., who is charged in the fatal shootings of three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic, appears in court in Colorado Springs on Dec. 9, 2015. (Andy Cross/Denver Post/AP)
In November 2015, a gunman drove up to a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood and opened fire before storming into the facility and continuing to shoot. Three people were killed and nine were injured. Robert Lewis Dear Jr., the man charged in the attack, allegedly muttered “no more baby parts” while being taken into custody.
Dear, a self-proclaimed “warrior for the babies,” was charged with 179 crimes, including murder and attempted murder. But nearly seven years after the massacre, Dear — who suffers from a form of delusional disorder — has been repeatedly deemed incompetent to stand trial.
On Monday, however, U.S. District Judge Robert E. Blackburn issued an order that prosecutors say may break the impasse, ruling that the government can force Dear, 64, to take antipsychotic medication that experts said is likely to make him competent to stand federal trial. Competence is measured by a defendant’s ability to understand the consequences of the proceedings and assist in the defense.
Since his earliest court appearances, Dear has frequently interrupted court proceedings with outbursts, declaring at one hearing: “There is no trial.” Because of his mental state, and determinations that he was incompetent to stand trial, Colorado’s murder case against Dear stalled. But in 2019, Dear was indicted on 68 federal charges, many for alleged violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, meant to protect people seeking and providing services at reproductive health facilities.
As in the state case, an evaluation of Dear determined that he was not fit to stand federal trial, and Blackburn last September ordered Dear into a mental facility where he could be monitored. Medical experts subsequently determined that Dear’s competence could not be restored without medication, prosecutors said. But Dear has so far refused to take the medication, according to the judge’s most recent order.
Dear has opposed the action. During an August hearing, according to the Associated Press, he said: “This is my brain at stake. They want to turn me into a zombie.” His defense team has also argued that the medication could worsen his blood pressure and cholesterol, the AP reported. His attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment for The Washington Post early Wednesday.
On Monday, Blackburn sided with the prosecution, finding that Dear’s health is likely to not be negatively affected by the medication and that prosecutors had a “important interest” in seeing the case move forward. He said the medication should be administered “involuntarily and forcibly if necessary.”
Courts have the authority to order involuntary medication under the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court precedent Sell v. United States, which established the “Sell test” for courts to consider whether a defendant deemed incompetent to stand trial should be forcibly medicated. The prosecution must have an important interest in moving forward with the case; the involuntary medication must significantly further those interests; it must be necessary to further those interests; and it must be determined the medication won’t adversely affect the defendant’s health.
Where the law has failed “is that courts have taken a very expansive view of what qualifies as serious crime,” McMahon said, adding that few of the cases she has studied involved physical violence, much less homicide.
The effect, she said, leaves people with mental illness stuck in jail, waiting for the process to play out — some, for as long as the sentences they face. “Then all of a sudden you have individuals who go through the whole process, they go to trial, and then even if they’re convicted, they’re just released,” having already served their time, she said, adding that some are not even convicted.
But McMahon said that Dear’s case, which involves murder allegations, is different.
“This is the kind of case where I think … we need to be able to prosecute in order to get some kind of resolution,” she said. | 2022-09-21T12:30:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Judge orders shooting defendant Robert Dear to be forcibly medicated - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/21/robert-dear-involuntary-medication-order/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/21/robert-dear-involuntary-medication-order/ |
By Lauren Tierney
Five years after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, killing thousands and triggering one of the largest blackouts in U.S. history, the island is now recovering after extreme rainfall and winds from Hurricane Fiona.
72-hour precipitation amount
72 hour precipitation
Path of Maria
Path of Fiona
As Fiona moved just south of Puerto Rico, the southeast part of the island saw the most rainfall of the storm, with some areas getting at least 20 inches and a few spots receiving more than 25 inches. North of Ponce, the island’s second-largest city, a gauge recorded more than 32 inches. The storm’s core has pulled northwest away from the island, although a few downpours linger.
Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico five years ago. Recovery in many ways had just begun.
During Maria, Puerto Rico saw much more rainfall. Most of the island experienced major deluges. Some of the heaviest precipitation was concentrated in the mountainous areas in the island’s center, where it is most susceptible to landslides. Maria was also a faster moving storm, dropping a massive amount of rain in a 48 hour period.
Maria’s deluge on Puerto Rico
Fiona was a Category 1 storm with 85 mph winds when it made landfall at Punta Tocon, in the southwest of the island after the center of the storm cut a path below the island. After passing Puerto Rico, the hurricane strengthened to a Category 3, its maximum sustained wind speeds increasing to 115 mph, the National Hurricane Center said early Tuesday.
Five years ago today, Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico.
Two days ago, Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico.
This animation shows each storm via GOES ABI infrared imagery starting about 10 hours prior to landfall.
Non-comprehensive list of ways to help: https://t.co/LMR4zguB2f pic.twitter.com/ypJGcn7r6h
In 2017 Maria slammed ashore near Yabucoa as a Category 4 hurricane with 155 mph winds, with the center of the storm completely crossing through the island. It was the first Category 4 storm to directly strike the island since 1932.
Puerto Rico’s battered infrastructure — which was still being rebuilt after Maria — could make recovery from Fiona more difficult.
Satellite images from NASA.
Tim Meko contributed to this report. | 2022-09-21T12:30:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How Hurricane Fiona was very different from Hurricane Maria - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/09/21/how-fiona-maria-compare-wind-rain/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/09/21/how-fiona-maria-compare-wind-rain/ |
The Dearie hearing was worse than a trainwreck for Trump
Attorneys Chris Kise, center, and James Trusty, right, arrive for a hearing concerning former president Donald Trump and classified documents, at the U.S. Courthouse in Brooklyn on Tuesday. (Sarah Yenesel/EPA-EFE-Shutterstock)
For those flabbergasted and dismayed by Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s absurd ruling granting former president Donald Trump a special master’s review of the sensitive documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago, Tuesday’s hearing before the special master himself, Judge Raymond J. Dearie, came as a breath of fresh air — and a reminder that not every judge is an unabashed partisan.
As a preliminary matter, Dearie made clear that this was a civil case in which Trump had the burden to show he had some claim to get back documents seized under a properly served search warrant. That was already an improvement over Cannon, who seemed never to consider that vital prerequisite to any further ruling.
It did not take much longer for Dearie to get to the nub of the matter: Because there is apparent evidence in the affidavit for the Mar-a-Lago search warrant that some of the documents are classified, Trump needs to officially challenge that, otherwise, Dearie said, “As far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of it.” (Trump’s lawyers had refused to say whether the former president had declassified any documents.)
That should have been blatantly obvious to Cannon, who seemed not to understand that federal judges are not in the business of contradicting classifications without some very good reason to do so; plus, Trump’s lawyers had not even been making the declassification argument before the judge’s ruling. Dearie, by contrast, understands separation of powers and the limited role of the judiciary. He went on: “How am I going to verify the classification? … What business is it of the court?” Dearie suggested that if Trump had nothing to offer, he might not even have to look at the documents.
When Trump’s counsel protested that he didn’t want to give away his litigation strategy by saying whether Trump declassified the documents at issue, Dearie said that was his choice. However, he also said his “view is [that] you can’t have your cake and eat it, too.”
Trump’s counsel tried to protest the no-nonsense schedule Dearie set out. Dearie was unimpressed, saying he intended to do his best to meet the deadlines he set out. Any rumors that the special master is “slow” making decisions were put to rest.
It was an immensely satisfying hearing for informed lawyers, reporters and onlookers who felt as though Cannon was gaslighting the country by entertaining Trump’s utterly groundless claims. For once, Trump did not get treated with kid gloves. Dearie affirmed that Trump is not entitled to special treatment because he was once president; this is how the rule of law is supposed to work.
As former federal prosecutor Harry Litman tweeted, “an actual real Judge showed up, to Team Trump’s chagrin,” which will probably also make it more difficult for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit “to adopt any of the cockamamie reasoning of Judge Cannon” on an appeal.
The hearing leaves several questions still open: First, the 11th Circuit might grant the government’s request for a stay, in effect depriving both Cannon and Dearie of further jurisdiction until it can rule. Second, it’s not clear whether Dearie will demand an affidavit from Trump on the declassification issue or simply rule that he has no authority to question the classification. Third, once Dearie decides that a batch of documents are classified, he might just send the whole thing back to Cannon with the determination that classified documents invariably defeat a claim to executive privilege in a criminal investigation (or, in any case, cannot be returned to Trump).
What we do know is that Dearie is no foot-dragger or ignoramus. If Trump was counting on either, he has badly miscalculated. Instead, Trump’s gambit only helped the government convey the seriousness of the investigation and the lack of any viable excuse for making off with sensitive documents. All in all, this was an unmitigated disaster for Trump — and an embarrassment for Cannon, whose ruling looks preposterous compared with a competent judge’s assessment.
But most of all, it was a strong day for the rule of law. And that, at a time the MAGA movement is seeking to unravel our democracy, is worth savoring. | 2022-09-21T12:56:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The Dearie special master hearing was worse than a trainwreck for Trump - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/dearie-special-master-hearing-trump-trainwreck/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/dearie-special-master-hearing-trump-trainwreck/ |
Headquarters for the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service, Venezuela's top intelligence agency, in Caracas, Venezuela. (Ariana Cubillos/AP)
Screams often spill out in the halls of El Helicoide, the headquarters of Venezuela’s intelligence service agency, investigators say. Inside the imposing, spiral-shaped building in the center of Caracas, they found detainees — who are often journalists, activists or government opponents — are routinely subjected to beatings, rape, electric shocks, mutilation, asphyxiation and other types of torture.
Tuesday’s report is the third to be released by the U.N. Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela (FFMV) since 2019, when it began assessing the country’s human rights violations. The previous documents delve into extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detentions and torture in Venezuela, as well as the justice system’s response to such violations. But by carrying out interviews with nearly 250 people, the FFMV says it has identified the chain of command that works to silence, discourage and quash opposition to the government.
Here’s why Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is still in power
Once inside the prison, detainees told investigators they were subjected to torture ranging from death threats against their families to forceful feedings of feces and vomit. Some recalled being put on “la señorita,” a device that lifts and distorts bodies before plunging them into a water tank. At other times, they were held naked inside a room with freezing temperatures, under bright lights and in isolation — a form of psychological abuse that distorts the senses, the report states. Detainees also frequently experienced sexual violence, investigators found.
Four Indigenous people killed in ‘clash’ with Venezuelan military over WiFi
“Our report highlights the need for further investigation of this region which is, paradoxically, an almost forgotten area of the country that at the same time generates large amounts of both licit and illicit wealth from minerals,” Patricia Tappatá Valdez, a member of the FFMV, said in a news release.
Venezuela tapped 1.5 million phone lines. It’s just the start, experts warn.
Venezuelan government entities, including SEBIN, DGCIM and the office of the president, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from The Post. However, when the first report published in 2020, the government — which hasn’t allowed the FFMV to enter Venezuela — denied its findings. The country’s ambassador to the United Nations, Jorge Valero, has insisted Venezuela is “a free, democratic, sovereign and independent nation where human rights are respected.”
Sequera, the political scientist, disagreed: “This isn’t a democracy with problems. The report demonstrates that a regime change isn’t just a democratic ideal, it’s essential. The truth is that in Venezuela, it can be any day that a citizen could be subjected to these crimes.”
The findings, Sequera said, put pressure on the international community to “deeply assess whether they’ll continue turning a blind eye to the crimes against humanity in Venezuela, or take a stand to protect the victims by taking actions against the regime.”
A woman’s TikTok video mocked Venezuelan politicians. She was arrested.
It’s those human rights violations, he added, that have played a major role in precipitating Venezuela’s immigration crisis — one that has forced nearly 7 million people to flee the nation since 2015, with many seeking asylum in the United States.
But the biggest tension, he added, falls on Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who has restored the diplomatic relations with Venezuela that were severed in 2019. Last week, Maduro said Petro asked him to serve as a guarantor in peace talks that will begin later this year between Colombia’s government and the National Liberation Army, the country’s largest leftist guerrilla group.
“The question for Petro would be: Can a person accused of crimes against humanity be a guarantor in peace treaty that’s so important for his government?” Sequera wondered. | 2022-09-21T12:56:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Venezuelan leaders selected targets for torture, UN report finds - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/21/venezuela-crimes-against-humanity-report-united-nations/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/21/venezuela-crimes-against-humanity-report-united-nations/ |
Richard Osman is perfectly at ease pretending to be a 78-year-old woman
The ‘Thursday Murder Club’ author talks about how he gets in character, where he hides his clues — and the murder story in his family history
“I have so much fun with them as a gang, they’re not going anywhere anytime soon,” author Richard Osman says of his Thursday Murder Club characters. “They seem to spread a lot of joy, and, you know, that’s in fairly short supply. So I’m happy to stick with them.” (Carsten Koall/Picture Alliance/Getty Images)
Here in England, Richard Osman was best known as a TV personality, the presenter of the British quiz shows “Pointless” and “House of Games.” With the publication of his debut crime novel in 2020, he became an international literary celebrity. “The Thursday Murder Club” and its follow-up, “The Man Who Died Twice,” follow a team of elderly sleuths as they solve cold cases from their comfortable retirement village in the English countryside. The wry, amiable thrillers — “cozy crime,” as they have been categorized — have sold millions of copies, becoming bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Osman and I met for a walk in the park near his home in London to discuss the third novel in the series, “The Bullet That Missed,” who inspires his characters — and the murder story in his own family history.
Q: This is your third novel after a long career in TV. Do you approach writing differently after the success of “The Thursday Murder Club?”
A: When you write the first novel, unless you’re a maniac, you assume it’s terrible and that you’re not a writer. All the way through you’re like: “Wow! This is what writing a book is like!” And when something needs to happen in the story you go, “Now, what would happen next if this were a novel?” When you come to write the second or third one, it’s just, “What happens next in my story?”
Review: "The Bullet That Missed"
Q: Do you read differently now that you write?
A: Yes, completely. I’m a huge crime-fiction fan, so I would only ever write what I read myself. But I’ve always read for entertainment purely, so I was never asking: “What is the author doing? What tricks are they playing?” Now, the key thing when I’m reading a crime novel is, “Where are you hiding the clues?”
Q: Where do you hide your clues?
A: I love stuff about the world around us, so I can usually hide clues in observations about the local shops, or I can hide them in jokes or comic discussions between people. But I don’t like extraneous information where you think, “That’s nothing to do with the story.”
Q: There’s something very recognizable about your characters. My mum says each one reminds her of a different one of her friends. Are they drawn from people you know?
A: I haven’t really based them on people. They’re really the four corners of my own brain, I think, in that I find each of them very easy to access. I mean, the main narrator, Joyce, is a 78-year-old woman, and I find it worryingly easy to get inside her head! Whenever I’m stuck I’ll write a Joyce chapter.
But I don’t like characters who are purely archetypes. I love it when someone comes in and you think, “Oh, they’re going to be the baddie,” and they might be the baddie, but they’re also something else. I like to think, “If an actor had this minor role would they be happy, even if they’re only in two scenes?”
Q: Did I hear that you’re leaving these characters behind and moving on to something else?
A: Oh, God, no! I’m writing the fourth book at the moment, and then I’m going to start a different series. But I’m not killing them off. I’m coming back to them. I have so much fun with them as a gang, they’re not going anywhere anytime soon. They seem to spread a lot of joy, and, you know, that’s in fairly short supply. So I’m happy to stick with them.
Q: Tell us about spreading joy.
A: There are writers I love and admire who do a different job and make extraordinary art, who add to the great canon of literature. But hopefully, if I’m anything, I’m an entertainer. I write the books that I would read, and I write them as well as I can, but my main job is to try to entertain people, not to move the history of literature in a particular direction. I’m here to give people a book that they can’t put down, and if they’re on a plane journey then the plane journey goes quicker, and if they’re on holiday they remember the holiday because they read the book. That’s sometimes looked down on a little bit, but it’s really hard to do!
I’d love to be a Cormac McCarthy or an Alice Munro, but I’m not. I do have a place though, and that is: “Would you like to be royally entertained?” Some laughter, some tears, a mystery — I try to do that as well as I possibly can.
Q: Your novels seem to have a very quiet political agenda about bridging divides: friendships that span generations, or class, or political affiliation. Is that deliberate?
A: They definitely have a political agenda, but it’s never worn on its sleeve. It comes from my heart. We’d better find some common ground fairly quickly or we’re in trouble. Also, you know, there is a lot of common ground in the world!
But also I think the novels’ popularity is what’s political about them. The fact that people from everywhere read them, and different generations read them, and people from different political persuasions read them, but the message is one of tolerance and love and understanding, and the empaths winning out over the sociopaths.
Q: Since you write about murder, what’s the story about your ancestors solving a murder in the 19th century?
A: I was on a program called “Who Do You Think You Are?” where you look over your ancestry. They have a whole team of people researching it, and then you turn up and you don’t know what they’ve found until they turn over a piece of paper. I could see that the production team knew they had something. I could tell from their faces: “Oh, we’ve got something good for you today!”
They turned over this story of my five-times-great-grandfather, Gabriel Gilliam, and his wife, Nancy, and his mother, Elizabeth. They lived right by the sea in Brighton in a fishing community with genuinely Dickensian levels of poverty, just at the time these great Regency villas were sprouting up all around them. Anyway, they were notified of some peculiarity — something not quite right — in a barn in Preston Park, two miles from the coast. So the three of them went down there and uncovered a body, which was then the subject of one of the most sensational murder trials of the century.
[Gabriel] was the chief witness in the trial. He even got accused of the murder by the guy who did it: “You found the body because you murdered her!” But of course, thankfully, he hadn’t. There was a huge public inquest, and a few months later the murderer was hanged. So it’s incredible that these three people from a fishing community in Brighton solved this extraordinary crime, and then two centuries later I’m writing a story about amateur detectives in their 70s solving crimes.
Q: Aren’t you tempted to work it into one of your novels?
A: I am tempted to turn it into a story because it’s fascinating. I like the idea of this town, Brighton, which had suddenly turned very rich, but which still had its poor fishing community, and still had a lot of lawlessness, and where justice was in the hands of the people. And I could name the characters after my ancestors. Because in the sort of family I come from, they all died in poverty, in the workhouse, forgotten by history. It would be lovely to have them not forgotten by history by writing something about them.
Dennis Duncan is a lecturer in English at University College London and the author of “Index, A History of the.” | 2022-09-21T13:04:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Interview with Richard Osman, author of the Thursday Murder Club series - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/09/21/richard-osman-thursday-murder/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/09/21/richard-osman-thursday-murder/ |
Inflation Is Best Explained by This Underrated Economic Theory
Where theories get tried out. (Photographer: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images North America)
Currently the most underrated theory in economics is the so-called Quantity Theory of Money. It has been out of fashion for a long time, and even Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has said that a strong money-price connection has not held for at least 40 years. Nonetheless, on closer examination the quantity theory does a reasonable job of explaining much of recent economic history.
In its simplest form, the quantity theory states that MV = PT. That is, the quantity of money multiplied by its velocity of circulation encapsulates all relevant transactions. (Money, velocity, prices and transactions are the respective terms in that equation.) More substantively, the quantity theory suggests that it is useful to think about the “M” in this equation — the money supply — as an active causal variable for macro policy.
Consider the recent spurt of 8% to 9% inflation in the US. The simple fact is that M2 — one broad measure of the money supply — went up about 40% between February 2020 and February 2022. In the quantity theory approach, that would be reason to expect additional inflation, and of course that is exactly what happened.
One reason the quantity theory fell out of favor is that the Fed increased bank reserves significantly following the financial crisis of 2008. By mid-2010, the Fed had increased reserves to the banking system by $1.2 trillion, in comparison with about $15 billion in the years just before the crisis. Yet inflation stayed below 2%, and during early parts of the crisis it fell.
On closer examination, that episode does not refute the quantity theory. The theory leaves room for the possibility that declines in velocity — which also can be called increases in the demand to hold money — can counteract increases in money supply. Along those lines, the Fed started paying interest on bank reserves, which led banks to hold most of the new surge in reserves. The Fed’s policy was thus more of a capitalization of the banking system than a truly expansionary monetary policy.
One obvious point is that, for all the Fed’s talk to the contrary, current monetary policy remains expansionary. If you look at interest rates, the recent Fed funds rate has been hovering in the range of about 2.5%. Many T-Bill rates are in the range of 3% to 4%. You can debate which is the appropriate measure of price inflation (core inflation? overall inflation? median inflation?), but under any sensible standards these interest rates are still negative in real terms. The Fed just isn’t doing that much to choke off borrowing.
A brighter sign is M2 growth, which was 5.3% year-over-year in July 2022. With 2% economic growth, that is consistent with inflation of a little more than 3%, assuming changes in monetary velocity do not intervene. Better yet, M2 growth rates have been falling consistently, from almost 14% in August 2021.
Some analysts stress that lowering the rate of inflation requires big changes in fiscal policy. That is usually true for bankrupt nations, which have to print money to pay the bills. But for solvent nations such as the US, this is not necessary.
I predict rates of price inflation will fall significantly over the next three to five years without a very dramatic change in the US’s overall fiscal position. If I am correct, it is worth noting, that will represent a triumph for the Quantity Theory of Money. | 2022-09-21T13:05:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Inflation Is Best Explained by This Underrated Economic Theory - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/inflation-is-best-explained-by-this-underrated-economic-theory/2022/09/21/89ac0e24-39a1-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/inflation-is-best-explained-by-this-underrated-economic-theory/2022/09/21/89ac0e24-39a1-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html |
‘Catherine Called Birdy’ is a sprightly critique of the patriarchy
Lena Dunham’s adaptation of the Newbery Medal-winning novel centers on a 13th-century teenage girl who just isn’t having it
Bella Ramsey in “Catherine Called Birdy.” (Alex Bailey/Prime Video)
In “Catherine Called Birdy,” Lena Dunham’s sprightly adaptation of Karen Cushman’s Newbery Medal-winning novel, Bella Ramsey plays the title character, an irrepressible 14-year-old girl living in medieval England and chafing against the era’s unenlightened habits and patriarchal strictures.
The patriarch in question is Lord Rollo, a dissolute aristocrat whose love of drink and impulsive acquisitiveness have led to hard times at Stonebridge Manor, the family pile. He sets out to marry off young Lady Catherine — nicknamed Birdy, after her favorite pets — unaware that his best-laid plans will be foiled at every turn by his headstrong, ungovernable daughter.
Similar to recent adaptations of “Persuasion” and “Emma,” Dunham imbues “Catherine Called Birdy” with lots of clever anachronisms, including a pop-tastic soundtrack, dominated by Misty Miller performing covers of songs like Supergrass’s “Alright” and Alicia Keys. She has assembled a nimble cast of players who are all in on the joke, including Andrew Scott as the perpetually tipsy but somehow un-hateable Lord Rollo; Billie Piper as his perpetually pregnant wife; Lesley Sharp as Birdy’s patient nursemaid Morwenna; and Joe Alwyn as the adored Uncle George, who has just returned from the Crusades, an epic battle Birdy longs to join.
Ramsey, most familiar to viewers from her role in “Game of Thrones,” is less appealing, but only because her character is as bratty as she is beguilingly cheeky. Following Cushman’s epistolary structure, “Catherine Called Birdy” unfolds as a series of diary entries, narrated in a self-satisfied tone that grates over time. Still, Dunham keeps the action brisk and the humor quotient high, as Birdy foils a succession of suitors, often by way of slapstick high jinks and general over-the-top japery.
As breezily self-confident as its eponymous heroine, “Catherine Called Birdy” crucially departs from the original text in the film’s final act, a paean to female independence and an adumbration of the change about to take place with the rise of the Renaissance. As Birdy has always known and some of us are still learning, the patriarchy is so 13th century.
PG-13. At area theaters. Contains some suggestive material and mature thematic elements. 108 minutes. | 2022-09-21T13:05:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | ‘Catherine Called Birdy’: Lena Dunham's Y.A. take on the patriarchy - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/09/21/catherine-called-birdy-movie-review/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2022/09/21/catherine-called-birdy-movie-review/ |
The nonprofit Save Our Allies alleges in a lawsuit that it paid multiple entities that pledged but failed to extract 200 people stranded in Pakistan
Afghans line up to board an evacuation flight at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Aug. 21, 2021. (Senior Airman Taylor Crul/AP)
A U.S. nonprofit that facilitates the rescue of Afghans from Taliban rule claims it was defrauded of hundreds of thousands of dollars by companies that promised but failed to relocate nearly 200 people awaiting help in Pakistan, according to a new lawsuit filed in federal court in South Florida.
The case underscores the challenging, unorthodox deals being brokered by private organizations that want to help American allies and their families left behind after the Biden administration’s hastily orchestrated evacuation of Afghanistan last year. Tens of thousands of Afghans are believed to qualify for a new life in the United States, either because they helped the U.S. government during the war or are related to someone who did. The U.S. government is processing a long backlog of Afghan visa applicants, many who fled to third countries such as Pakistan and Albania.
Evacuees who fled Afghanistan a year ago, expecting to resettle in the U.S., remain in Albania and in limbo
The companies are Ravenswood Group, an advising firm based in Florida; Sama Global Investment, an advising firm in Qatar; and City Gate Trading and Contracting Company, which oversees housing in Qatar. The other individuals are Gregory Gustin, the chief executive officer at Ravenswood, and Shahzada Khurram, who is listed as holding senior positions at Ravenswood and Sama Global.
The complaint alleges that Gustin told Save Our Allies he had a special relationship with the government of Qatar and that, coupled with Khurram’s background as a Pakistani-born businessman, they had the ability to obtain long-term visas in Qatar for refugees. The lawsuit alleges the two men made similar claims to other organizations assisting Afghan refugees, though it does not name those groups.
Save Our Allies, according to the complaint, entered into an agreement on Jan. 10 that stated that Sama Global would spearhead the effort to secure visas and transportation to Qatar, with Ravenswood and other companies possibly working as subcontractors. A copy of the agreement is contained in the lawsuit. It indicates that Nelson signed on behalf of Save Our Allies and Khurram signed for Sama Global. The project’s costs, the document says, were “not to exceed US $750,000” without prior approval.
Save Our Allies wired a total of about $590,000 to City Gate, Khurram and Ravenswood in six transactions between Jan. 18 and Feb. 14, according to the complaint. In a memo on Ravenswood letterhead dated Feb. 25, a document also contained in the lawsuit, Gustin allegedly wrote to Save Our Allies that the services the nonprofit wanted were worth about $10 million per planeload of refugees. It claims that his company already had spent $1.5 million on food, security, medical exams, visas and flights, and that the operation could proceed if Save Our Allies sent more money.
The lawsuit alleges that, to date, Save Our Allies has spent about $735,000, including the wire transfers to Ravenswood, Sama Global and City Gate, plus about $145,000 to third parties to feed and protect the Afghans as they languish in Pakistan.
Nick Palmisciano, a U.S. Army veteran and founding member of Save Our Allies, said in an interview that it costs the nonprofit about $50,000 per month to feed, house and provide security for the group of Afghans. Among the group, the lawsuit says, was a 12-year-old girl who died of leukemia in Pakistan in March. The complaint alleges that, for days, her family was told she would be able to travel soon for medical treatment.
Nick Palmisciano: I’m flying missions to save Afghan allies. Why isn’t the government helping?
Save Our Allies believed the information Nelson provided the group was authentic because he had participated in meetings with U.S. government officials previously, said another official with the nonprofit, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. Save Our Allies, the official said, eventually discovered inconsistencies in the paperwork for many of the Afghans whom Nelson recommended.
Khurram, reached by email, accused Save Our Allies of making “false statements.” He also said he never signed a contract with Save Our Allies, suggesting the nonprofit wanted to blame Khurram’s company because the nonprofit had accepted money from donors. | 2022-09-21T13:05:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Save Our Allies alleges it was defrauded attempting to rescue Afghans - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/21/save-our-allies-lawsuit-afghanistan/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/21/save-our-allies-lawsuit-afghanistan/ |
Mike Bloomberg pledges to boost clean energy in 15 more countries
Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Today we're wondering how to correctly pronounce the word “permitting.” On a related note, below, we have an update on legislation from Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) to reform the permitting process for energy projects. But first:
Exclusive: Mike Bloomberg pledges to accelerate clean energy transition in 15 more countries
Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg on Wednesday will pledge to accelerate the transition to clean energy in an additional 15 developing countries, according to details shared exclusively with The Climate 202 ahead of the official announcement.
The commitment comes less than two months before the COP27 climate talks in Egypt, where developing countries are expected to ask wealthy nations for long-overdue funding to help them cope with the ravages of climate change.
The details: The pledge will be unveiled during the United Nations Climate Action: Race to Zero and Resilience Forum in New York City, where world leaders are also gathered for the U.N. General Assembly, as part of a “Countdown to COP27.”
Bloomberg Philanthropies will develop programs and partnerships in 15 developing nations where “demand for power is projected to grow rapidly and there is abundant potential for renewable energy such as solar and wind,” according to a news release shared with The Climate 202.
The 15 nations are Botswana, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, Morocco, Mexico, the Philippines, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Thailand and Uganda.
According to data from BloombergNEF, the 15 countries account for nearly 27,637 megawatts of coal power plant capacity and have more than 8,046 megawatts of coal capacity under construction, planned, or permitted. However, in almost all of these markets, wind or solar is the cheapest source of new electricity generation.
Bloomberg Philanthropies has already sought to bolster clean energy in 17 countries and the European Union, including the 10 developing countries announced in May at the Sustainable Energy for All Forum in Kigali, Rwanda.
At the COP26 climate talks last year in Glasgow, Scotland, Bloomberg also pledged to help shutter or cancel one-quarter of the world's coal plant capacity.
“Since last year’s U.N. climate conference in Glasgow we’ve made important progress in the battle against climate change — but we’re still not moving nearly fast enough,” Bloomberg said in a statement.
“We all need to do more, and with COP27 just around the corner, this is a critical moment to turbocharge our efforts, build momentum for a successful conference, and set the course for faster progress in the months and years ahead,” he added.
Today's announcement does not include a dollar amount for the investment in the 15 countries. An amount will be disclosed after further discussions with partners in each country, said Antha Williams, who leads the environment program for Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Eleven of the 15 countries are in Africa, which is historically responsible for less than 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet is extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
As developing nations in Africa grow and expand energy access, whether they quickly transition to renewables or cling to coal and natural gas will have a major impact on humanity's efforts to halt Earth's warming.
Yet from 2015 to 2020, Africa only received about 4 percent of philanthropic funding for climate mitigation, according to data compiled by the ClimateWorks Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit group.
Saliem Fakir, executive director of the African Climate Foundation, a grant-making organization based in Cape Town, South Africa, applauded Bloomberg for prioritizing the continent.
“This sends a very positive signal that Africa is an important continent, and Africa's role in expanding clean energy infrastructure is linked not only to climate, but also to enabling Africans to access cheap and affordable energy,” Fakir said in an interview Tuesday.
‘Loss and damage’
At COP27 in November, developing countries are expected to plead with developed nations for money to address “loss and damage” — the unavoidable, irreversible harms caused by climate change.
Fakir said that while Bloomberg's funding is welcome, it is no substitute for money from industrialized nations. “Philanthropic funding is not on the scale that governments can provide,” he said.
Denmark on Tuesday pledged to direct about $13 million to vulnerable countries suffering from the effects of climate change — the first time in U.N. history that a wealthy member state has pledged to pay for loss and damage, The Washington Post's Sarah Kaplan reports.
In an impassioned speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres also called on countries to tax fossil fuel companies' windfall profits and use the revenue for loss and damage — a sign the issue is gaining traction before the summit in Egypt.
“Loss and damage are happening now, hurting people and economies now, and must be addressed now — starting at COP27,” Guterres said. “This is a fundamental question of climate justice, international solidarity and trust.”
Biden to skip U.N. roundtable on climate change this week
President Biden is not expected to attend a United Nations informal roundtable on climate change Wednesday afternoon in New York, Jennifer A. Dlouhy, Zahra Hirji and Erin X. Wong report for Bloomberg News.
John F. Kerry, Biden’s special envoy for climate, will instead attend the event during the U.N. General Assembly, an administration official said, since Biden is expected to host a Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria event at the same time.
Biden's expected absence has stoked concern that other Group of 7 leaders will also skip the session, which is meant to lay the groundwork for the negotiations at COP27 in two months. Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres on Tuesday warned that “climate action is being put on the back burner” as the world confronts the war in Ukraine and other crises.
Manchin to reveal permitting reform bill today, asks for GOP support
Text of a much-anticipated bill from Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) to overhaul the nation's permitting process for energy projects will be released today, The Post's Jacob Bogage reports.
During a news conference Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) reaffirmed his plan to attach the permitting measure to a stopgap bill that would fund government operations until later this year.
Manchin held his own briefing and warned that Republican opposition to the bill could cause a government shutdown.
“If [Republicans] are willing to say, ‘We’re going to close down the government,’ because of a personal attack on me, or basically not looking at the good of the country, this is what makes people sick about politics,” he said.
The permitting bill, which was part of a deal that Manchin made with Schumer to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, would need as many as 20 GOP votes to overcome opposition from Democrats, according to Manchin. However, Republicans are hesitant to commit to supporting a bill they have yet to see, with many instead backing a separate permitting proposal from Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.).
“This is not the time for Republicans to be rallying around Democrats,” Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) said in an interview Tuesday. “We’re not excited about renewing all of our wonderful relationships with [Manchin].”
Senate ends debate on Kigali Amendment, moves to final vote
The Senate on Tuesday voted 64-30 to invoke cloture on the Kigali Amendment to the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which would phase down hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs — the planet-warming gases used in air conditioning and refrigeration that are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide.
A final Senate vote on Kigali could occur as soon as Wednesday or Thursday. The treaty amendment, which will require the approval of a two-thirds supermajority of the chamber to become law, appears poised to attract broad bipartisan support, as The Climate 202 reported Monday.
“The Kigali Amendment will be one of the most significant bipartisan measures the Senate takes on all year,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer said on the Senate floor Tuesday. “And that's saying something because we've done a lot.”
Democrats call for more federal aid after Hurricane Fiona
As Puerto Rico assesses the extent of destruction caused by Hurricane Fiona, Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday called for more federal assistance to be sent to the island, Amy Wang reports for The Post.
“A year ago, I said that the Puerto Rican power grid was not where it needed to be,” Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (D-N.Y.), the first Puerto Rican woman elected to Congress, said at a news conference Tuesday. “And I warned that not even a Category 1 [storm] will lead to a collapse of the power grid. And here we are today.”
The event was originally scheduled to mark the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Maria, which killed more than 3,000 people on the island and left some residents without power for nearly a year. At the time, President Donald Trump faced sharp criticism for tossing rolls of paper towels into a crowd as he visited San Juan.
“The time of throwing paper towels and counting it as action is over,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).
Meanwhile, Puerto Rican Gov. Pedro Pierluisi (D) said Tuesday that President Biden had agreed to issue a major disaster declaration for the territory, making additional federal funds available for the territory’s storm response and recovery.
Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell also traveled to San Juan on Tuesday to coordinate the federal response with state and local officials and to meet with residents to gauge the island's most urgent needs. During a news conference, FEMA confirmed that four people had died in Puerto Rico during the storm and that 1.1 million people remained without power.
Rare September rains bring respite to drought-stricken inland California — Zach Rosenthal for The Post
U.S. senators want secondary sanctions on Russian oil — Patricia Zengerle for Reuters
Investors commit $7.1 trillion of assets in pursuit of 1.5°C climate goal — Alastair Marsh for Bloomberg News
Climate bill's passage could spark Hill staff exodus — Timothy Cama for E&E News
Is your child texting about wildlife? ⚠️📱
LOL: lots of lamprey
BRB: beavers really build
IMO: I miss owls
NSFW: not safe from weasels
GG: gigantic gar
FTW: for the whales
IRL: I respect lynx | 2022-09-21T13:06:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mike Bloomberg pledges to boost clean energy in 15 more countries - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/mike-bloomberg-pledges-boost-clean-energy-15-more-countries/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/mike-bloomberg-pledges-boost-clean-energy-15-more-countries/ |
Putin’s annexation plan is desperate and dangerous
Ukraine's national flag flies in a park in Kramatorsk, in the Donetsk region, on Monday. (Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images)
Russian President Vladimir Putin is running out of time and good options in his failing invasion of Ukraine. So, now he’s rushing to implement bad ones — starting with a move toward quick annexation of regions in Ukraine where his occupation army is facing mounting pressure.
To bolster his sagging fortunes, Putin also announced Wednesday morning a partial mobilization of the Russian military. He warned: “We of course will use all the means at our disposal. This is not a bluff.” But it will take months to train these forces, and they will further complicate the Russian army’s already chaotic command-and-control system.
For an increasingly desperate Putin, the chilling message seemed to be: “We’ll do whatever it takes to avoid defeat in Ukraine.”
Biden administration officials quickly condemned the Russian push for annexation. “If Russia purports to annex Ukrainian territory, the United States will never, never recognize it,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken. National security adviser Jake Sullivan called Russia’s moves “the act of a country that has suffered setbacks — militarily, diplomatically.”
Sen Angus King (I-Maine), a member of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services
Committees, noted the danger in Putin’s seeming desperation. “The paradox of this is that the better the Ukrainians do, the more dangerous Putin becomes,” he told me. “As Putin’s options narrow, he becomes more and more threatening.”
Putin’s gambit began Tuesday with announcements of planned referendums on secession by pro-Russian puppet leaders in Luhansk and Donetsk in the east and Kherson on the Black Sea coast. The “voting” will take place in these war zones between Friday and Tuesday, the would-be separatists announced.
Annexation appears to be an effort by Putin to create new political “facts on the ground” that might salvage his army’s disastrous military performance. But in addition to being a blatant violation of international law, the quickie referendums have an obvious problem: Ukrainian forces are advancing in all three regions, and Ukrainian partisan fighters are targeting pro-Russian collaborators with car bombs,improvised explosive devices (IEDs), poisonings and other lethal attacks.
Putin’s predicament is that he’s under growing international pressure to end his unprovoked and unsuccessful campaign against Ukraine. At a gathering last week in Uzbekistan, Chinese President Xi Jinping told Putin he had “questions and concerns” about the war, according to the Russian leader himself, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told him bluntly, “Today’s era is not an era of war.”
Putin said he told Modi, “We will do our best to stop this as soon as possible.” But how? Putin’s legitimacy is based in part on his image of strength. Yet his army is retreating ignominiously on the battlefield and appears to be in increasing disarray.
As Putin’s army retreats, you would think he faces an inescapable choice: He can reduce his goals in Ukraine or escalate his military threat against the West. With annexation, however, he appears to be attempting both simultaneously.
By annexing the regions, he could claim that he had achieved the goals of his “special military operation,” which was initially pitched as a defense of Russian speakers in the eastern region. The annexation would also give Putin a pretext for threatening retaliation against NATO if assaults continued on the supposed new territory of Russia.
U.S. officials are pondering how to deter the move before it’s too late. Washington could threaten to provide additional weapons to Ukraine if Russia goes forward, hoping to raise the cost to a level that Putin would find unacceptable. Or the United States and Europe could float an alternative diplomatic path, as a way to avoid an annexation move that could keep Europe at war for years to come.
Ukraine, for now, shows no interest in the sort of diplomatic process President Biden has said will be necessary to end the war. The Ukrainians want to press their advantage against the retreating Russians, regaining as much territory as they can before winter. There’s a kind of political-military “Catch-22” at work here: When the Ukrainians were retreating last summer, they didn’t want to negotiate from weakness. Now that they’re advancing, they see no reason to compromise from a position of strength.
A cornered Putin has other menacing options. He could increase efforts to kill President Volodymyr Zelensky and decapitate the government in Kyiv. Or he could escalate his pressure on the Ukrainian population by trying to destroy supplies of food, water and energy. His most dangerous move would be to radically expand the war with direct attacks on NATO forces or use of tactical nuclear weapons. U.S. officials see those risks as low, but rising.
As the world’s leaders gather in New York for the U.N. General Assembly, there’s a growing demand — from Johannesburg to New Delhi to Beijing — that Putin end his war. The Russian leader is choosing to respond with new provocations that could widen and prolong this crisis.
But it becomes clearer by the day that, however long this war lasts, Putin will not emerge as the winner. | 2022-09-21T13:13:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Putin’s annexation plan is desperate and dangerous - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/putin-russia-ukraine-annexation-dangerous/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/putin-russia-ukraine-annexation-dangerous/ |
5 THE SENTENCE (Harper Perennial, $18). By Louise Erdrich. As the pandemic rages, a bookseller is haunted by the ghost of her store’s most annoying customer.
7 THE SONG OF ACHILLES (Ecco, $17.99). By Madeline Miller. The legend of Achilles retold through the lens of his friend Patroclus.
10 UGLY LOVE (Atria, $16.99). By Colleen Hoover. A mutual attraction between two young adults leads to a casual relationship with no commitment, but emotions get in the way.
5 THE 2023 OLD FARMER’S ALMANAC (Old Farmer’s Almanac, $8.95). The classic reference guide forecasts culture, weather and trends.
10 ENTANGLED LIFE (Random House, $18). By Merlin Sheldrake. A biologist explains the importance of fungi to our bodies and the environment.
4 FIRE & BLOOD (Bantam, $9.99). By George R.R. Martin. A history of the Targaryen family.
5 MISTBORN: THE FINAL EMPIRE (Tor, $9.99). By Brandon Sanderson. A fugitive and a thief join forces to overthrow the oppressive Lord Ruler.
7 THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL (Bantam, $7.99). By Anne Frank. The diary of a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl as she hides from the Nazis in an attic during World War II.
9 THE SHINING (Anchor, $9.99). By Stephen King. A writer and his family decamp to an old hotel as caretakers and slowly discover supernatural threats.
10 SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE (Laurel Leaf, $7.99). By Kurt Vonnegut. The classic antiwar novel that centers on the firebombing of Dresden. | 2022-09-21T13:44:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Washington Post paperback bestsellers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/washington-post-paperback-bestsellers/2022/09/20/dd6715e0-3915-11ed-81fc-ab0dedb7af1e_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/washington-post-paperback-bestsellers/2022/09/20/dd6715e0-3915-11ed-81fc-ab0dedb7af1e_story.html |
City of Caterpillar reunited without having to rebuild its sound
The Virginia screamo heroes return with their first album in 20 years
City of Caterpillar is, from left, Brandon Evans, Kevin Longendyke, Ryan Parrish and Jeff Kane. (Reid Haithcock)
Has it really been 20 years between City of Caterpillar albums? Doesn’t feel like it. At least not to them. Maybe that’s because the resurgent Virginia quartet — whose sound falls somewhere between hardcore and post-rock, and whose reputation has grown into something between “cult” and “legendary” — have always been able to make time fly. Their most meticulous songs fold it like origami. Their most chaotic moments crumple it into a ball.
As for the band members themselves, the years have moved as fast as the music. From 2003 to 2016, “when the band didn’t exist, nobody put music aside to be an accountant,” says City of Caterpillar guitarist Jeff Kane. “All of us have been really heavily involved with music, so it doesn’t feel like we’re coming back to something. … It doesn’t feel like a big re-beginning.”
Ask Kane to flash back to City of Caterpillar’s actual beginnings back in 2000, though, and he remembers songwriting cram sessions with his bandmates — guitarist-vocalist Brandon Evans, bassist-vocalist Kevin Longendyke, drummer Ryan Parrish — writing detonative music under the influence of Born Against and Godspeed You! Black Emperor in the cramped bedroom of a Richmond rowhouse. Those songs eventually formed the band’s stormy self-titled 2002 debut, an album that helped popularize the sound of “screamo” after the band fell apart in 2003.
Then 13 years zipped past, and after reconvening in 2016 to play a friend’s birthday party, the foursome decided to keep at it. Their sophomore album, “Mystic Sisters,” is set to land later this month, essentially picking up their urgency where they left it, setting cloudy melodies to ornate rhythms, prioritizing mood over message. If the band has any kind of long-term mission, Kane says it’s “to create a feeling.”
One of those feelings might be a sense of inevitability, a sort of shared commitment to a particular style of hardcore that can only sound this very specific way. Kane describes the band as a precious sliver of common ground “where our musical interests overlap.”
“Ryan is into metal. Kevin is into ’60s garage stuff. Brandon is really into electronic music and techno. I like ’90s indie and punk — I’m stuck in 1996. But our overlapping musical interests are so specific, even if we called it something else, it’s going to end up sounding so much like City of Caterpillar, there’s no point in calling it something it’s not.”
Sept. 29 at 7:30 p.m. (doors open) at Black Cat, 1811 14th St. NW. blackcatdc.com $20. | 2022-09-21T13:44:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | City of Caterpillar reunited without having to rebuild its sound - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/09/21/city-of-caterpillar-interview/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/09/21/city-of-caterpillar-interview/ |
At Round House Theatre, a playwright explores the many layers of loss
With Natasha Gordon’s funeral-themed ‘Nine Night,’ the actor and writer became the first Black British woman to have a show produced in London’s West End
By Celia Wren
From left: Doug Brown, Kim James Bey, Avery Glymph, Joy DeMichelle, Katie deBuys, Kaitlyn Boyer and Lilian Oben in “Nine Night” at Round House Theatre. (Margot Schulman)
As befits a play named for a mourning ritual that is celebratory as well as sorrowful, the Round House Theatre production of British playwright and actor Natasha Gordon’s “Nine Night” is an upbeat occasion — it’s the work’s belated American premiere — with a bittersweet backstory. To begin with, a death in Gordon’s British Jamaican family spurred her work on the script, about a family in London observing a traditional Jamaican wake.
Her writing was also a response to frustration with her career. An acting veteran who has credits with the Royal Shakespeare Company and other companies, she found herself talking some years ago with a group of actress friends — predominantly women of color — who, like her, felt professionally unfulfilled as they neared or passed age 40. “We were always the secondary or third characters, or the support, but had never really been given an opportunity to hone our craft,” remembers Gordon, 46.
The group encouraged her to stretch creatively, and she embarked on what became her debut play. “Nine Night” proved such a critical and popular hit when it premiered at London’s National Theatre in 2018 that it transferred, becoming the first play by a Black British female playwright to be produced in the West End.
Round House originally scheduled the production for the 2021-2022 season, only to postpone it due to covid-19. New season, new prospects: In the lead-up to this month’s opening, Gordon spoke about the play from her home in London.
This interview, conducted over Zoom and email, has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Could you explain the funeral tradition that gives the play its title?
A: It’s about coming together to celebrate the deceased. Also, depending on how deeply connected you are to the tradition, there’s a sense that you are helping the deceased pass through to the other side. So there’s a process for the living of letting go, and allowing the spirit to go. It’s a very profound traditional ritual experience. Nobody really knows why it is nine nights specifically. It doesn’t have to be nine consecutive nights. It can be one.
Q: Tell me how the play came to be.
A: I had had a curiosity from funerals I had attended with Caribbean and British families. They were poles apart. I wanted to explore that. And then I had my own experience with a Nine Night when my grandmother passed away. As a family, we were celebrating this incredible deep-rooted tradition that helps us deal with, manifest, work through grief. But I didn’t know much about it. I was disappointed with myself that I didn’t know more about my own culture.
Q: Why didn’t you know more?
A: It is one of those things that is quite usual for immigrants: a process of assimilation that you either go with, or you don’t. My maternal grandparents [who immigrated to Britain from Jamaica, and with whom Gordon spent time while growing up] were proud of their British citizenship. They were taught Shakespeare and Wordsworth at school at the expense of their own African/Jamaican heritage. Their colonial education taught them to see Britain as the motherland. I feel — and it’s just a feeling — that when they arrived in Britain, in order to assimilate, they unconsciously pulled away from their African heritage. A sense of belonging/not belonging is something I’ve tussled with my whole life. Who receives me as British, and who receives me as Jamaican? There’s always that conflict.
Q: Has your own acting experience informed the play?
A: Having been in plays for 20-plus years does serve me as a writer. As an actor, you’re constantly asking your director: “What am I doing in this scene?” And asking yourself: “What is my function?” Scenes should be as active as possible, the dialogue propelling the story forward. As a performer, you really feel that moment when the stage is buzzing with energy. With “Nine Night,” the characters were always actively doing something to each other, and when they weren’t, that presented itself to me really clearly.
Q: Have you done any tinkering with the script for U.S. audiences?
A: No. With the director, Timothy Douglas, we’ve taken the approach that it’s a window into a Black Jamaican London British experience.
Timothy Douglas directs ‘King Hedley II’ at Arena Stage
Q: Do you think the play struck a chord because, for many of us, death is so taboo?
A: I think it struck a chord because people recognized a tradition well known, loved and respected. Within the Jamaican British community, there was a sense that they hadn’t seen, certainly not for a long time, something that wasn’t a watering down. Also, the similarities with traditions of other cultures — there was a fascination with that as well. We’ve got better during the pandemic, because we have to face death on a global scale, but it’s still difficult to talk about. It’s almost as if by talking about death, we’re inviting it into our lives. It’s so ridiculous, because we’re only going one way. I think there was an element of feeling [that the play’s treatment of death was] refreshing. And also anything where we can laugh alongside the recognition is always welcome, when it’s done sensitively and truthfully.
Q: Did you work hard to make sure there was humor?
A: Not at all. I sat down to write a play about grief. But it’s like anything with life: There’s always the two sides. We find ourselves laughing in the most awkward — and extreme — and bleak and dark situations. Because it’s also about survival.
Nine Night
Round House Theatre, 4545 East-West Hwy., Bethesda. 240-644-1100. roundhousetheatre.org. | 2022-09-21T13:44:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | At Round House Theatre, 'Nine Night' explores the many layers of loss - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/09/21/round-house-theatre-nine-night/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/09/21/round-house-theatre-nine-night/ |
Roger Federer hints at a farewell doubles pairing with Rafael Nadal
Roger Federer said his decision to retire because of injuries is final and one that he accepts. (Julian Finney/Getty Images/Laver Cup)
As he heads into the final few days of his storied playing career, Roger Federer hinted Wednesday that he may have a poignant surprise: a doubles pairing with Rafael Nadal, his longtime friend and rival, at this week’s Laver Cup.
The Swiss great will bow out in London, competing for Team Europe against Team World in the indoor hard court tournament intended to be tennis’s version of the Ryder Cup. The tournament features the sport’s Big Three — Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Federer — among other elite players in three-set matches and runs from Friday through Sunday at O2 Arena.
In his first news conference since announcing his retirement last week, Federer said that he will play a doubles match for Team Europe on Friday before withdrawing from the event and allowing Matteo Berrettini to replace him in singles play over the weekend.
Federer has not played competitively in 14 months and said: “I know my limitations. Obviously, I’m nervous going in because I haven’t played in so long. I hope it can be somewhat competitive.”
An on-court pairing with Nadal — the two have 42 Grand Slam singles titles between them — would be an ideal ending for him and seems to be a natural decision for Bjorn Borg, the Team Europe captain who will set the lineup.
“No doubt, I think it could be quite a unique situation, if it were to happen,” Federer said. “For as long as we battled together to having always this respect for one another, the families, our coaching teams, we always got along really well.
“For us as well to go through a career that we both have had and to come out on the other side and being able to have a nice relationship I think is maybe a great message as well to not just tennis but sports and maybe even beyond. For that reason I think it would be great. I don’t know if it’s going to happen, but I think it could be obviously a special moment.”
Federer made other media appearances in the lead-up to his final event and said he is firm in his decision to walk away because of injuries and multiple surgeries. He said he won’t un-retire, like Tom Brady, or “evolve” like Serena Williams. “No, no. I am definitely done,” Federer said in a “Today” show interview that aired Wednesday morning. “I know that, yeah.”
For so many years, Federer made the grace with which he played appear so effortless that anyone watching him might have thought they could play just as easily until faced with cruel reality. Finally, that reality found Federer, too.
“The last three years have been tough, to say the least,” he told BBC Breakfast. “I knew I was on very thin ice for the last year ever since I played Wimbledon. I tried to come back, but there was a limit to what I could do.
“And I stopped believing in it, to be honest.”
The end came gradually, with Federer playing through injuries and surgical rehab, and then it came suddenly, when a scan of his surgically repaired knee “was not what I was hoping for.” It left him with no choice but to retire, and his announcement came Thursday in a letter he posted with a video on social media.
“It’s been an emotional few weeks to go through those words to try to get them right, that they reflect how I’m feeling and thanking all the people who have helped along the way,” he told the BBC. “I always pushed my retirement thoughts away. I said, the more I think about it, the more I’m already halfway retired and this is not the way to go to work, you know, for me as a tennis player, so we’ll deal with it when it comes. And it did. And I dealt with it. I think writing those words was for me partially also like rehab, like going myself through all those words, feeling them.”
Federer said his immediate plan for the future involves a vacation and spending time with his wife and four children. Afterward, he’ll find his way forward and tennis will still be a part of that. He said he is interested in youth coaching and developing the next great generation of tennis players and promised: “I love this game and I want to stay involved in some shape or form. I won’t be a ghost or some stranger.”
For now, Federer leaves in amazement at what he accomplished in over 1,500 tour-level matches: 310 weeks as the world’s No. 1 player (including 237 weeks in a row), 103 Association of Tennis Professional singles titles and, of course, the 20 Grand Slam singles championships.
“I don’t think anybody grows up and thinks they’re going to win this much. You know, you’re happy with winning a Wimbledon title, which is already crazy, or becoming number one, being the best,” he told the BBC. “But then you don’t think how many weeks, this is only the media and the fans talking about breaking records.
“Before it was just, I hope to be on tour one day. Just to make it into the top 100 is a huge deal. Coming from a small country, we don’t have a base of so many players. I totally overachieved in my mind. It’s been an absolute dream that I’ve had for so long. And I know that, and that’s why I’m totally happy to step away as well.” | 2022-09-21T13:57:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Roger Federer hints at playing with Rafael Nadal at Laver Cup - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/roger-federer-rafael-nadal-laver-cup/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/roger-federer-rafael-nadal-laver-cup/ |
In this Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2022, photo taken by an individual not employed by the Associated Press and obtained by the AP outside Iran, tear gases are thrown by the police during a protest over the death of a young woman who had been detained for violating the country’s conservative dress code, in downtown Tehran, Iran. Iran faced international criticism on Tuesday over the death of a woman held by its morality police, which ignited three days of protests, including clashes with security forces in the capital and other unrest that claimed at least three lives. (AP Photo) (Uncredited/AP)
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The website of Iran’s Central Bank was briefly taken down on Wednesday as hackers claimed they had targeted the websites of several Iranian state agencies. | 2022-09-21T14:36:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Iran targeted by apparent cyberattack amid protests - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/iran-targeted-by-apparent-cyberattack-amid-protests/2022/09/21/e378b72e-39b3-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/iran-targeted-by-apparent-cyberattack-amid-protests/2022/09/21/e378b72e-39b3-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html |
WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 30: Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell speaks during a news conference October 30, 2019 in Washington, DC. The Fed announced that it will cut interest rates for the third time this year for quarter point. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) (Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images North America)
Up to now, and despite efforts to set matters straight, there’s been some ambiguity about this. In particular, Fed officials led by Chair Jerome Powell have said they hope to stifle inflation without pushing the economy into recession. A worthy goal, to be sure, and not impossible — but if it’s achieved, it will have been more through luck than skill. Getting high inflation under control almost always involves a temporary contraction of output together with higher unemployment. If the Fed is suspected of flinching at this possibility, its task will be harder. And in the end, output and employment would have to fall more.
No doubt, reading the true state of the economy under the current extraordinary conditions is difficult. It’s impossible to say how long supply disturbances will persist. The Fed can’t be precise about the respective contributions of, say, energy-price shocks on the one hand and undue fiscal stimulus on the other. Given all this, nobody should suppose that its job is straightforward.
Still, the central bank can’t afford to equivocate about the need to slow the economy. At 3.7%, the current rate of unemployment is lower than “full employment” ordinarily implies. The demand for workers is still outrunning the available supply, and wages are rising at more than 6% a year. To be sure, incomes aren’t going up as fast as prices. That’s fortunate: If they were, the Fed’s task would be even harder, because a spiral of rising wages and prices would entrench high inflation. Even so, wage growth will need to slow substantially for inflation to gradually settle back at the Fed’s 2% target.
That, in turn, is likely to require short-term interest rates that peak at well over 4% and, unfortunately, a somewhat higher rate of unemployment. The Fed surely understands all this. But it needs to show it understands — and won’t balk at the prospect. | 2022-09-21T14:36:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Fed Should Be Willing to Cause a Recession - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-fed-should-be-willing-to-cause-a-recession/2022/09/21/1f2ca902-39ae-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-fed-should-be-willing-to-cause-a-recession/2022/09/21/1f2ca902-39ae-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html |
What New ESG Approach ‘Double Materiality’ Means — and Why JPMorgan Is a Fan
Analysis by Frances Schwartzkopff | Bloomberg
A person is reflected in a window of a JPMorgan Chase & Co. bank branch across the street from the company’s headquarters in New York, U.S., on Monday, Sept. 21, 2020. JPMorgan CEO Dimon has made the case for a broader return, saying his firm has seen “alienation” among younger workers and that an extended stretch of working from home could bring long-term economic and social damage. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg (Bloomberg)
Should a business or an investment fund care only about making money, or should it also worry about the environment, social justice and good governance (ESG)? Can the two goals overlap? Do they already? These questions get at the heart of something called “double materiality.” While the concept has been built into new European regulations, it has yet to make significant inroads in the US -- even as Wall Street behemoths like JPMorgan Chase & Co. embrace the idea. At issue is what information should be mandatory to report, and who decides?
1. What is materiality?
At the basic level it’s an accounting principle, referring to something that may have an impact on -- be material to -- how a company performs. A material risk can threaten targets or goals -- something of keen interest to investors. In the context of ESG, this is known as single materiality and means mainly environmental, social and governance factors that may pose a threat or opportunity to a business and its bottom line. It doesn’t tell you anything about how “green” a company’s business practices are, but rather how vulnerable its earnings may be to ESG risks.
2. What’s ‘double materiality’?
That’s where greenness comes in. “Double materiality” adds the risks a company’s activities pose to the environment and society to those that it potentially faces internally. How any materiality should be applied in company financial reporting remains the subject of intense debate. For now, reports vary wildly, making it hard for investors to compare and make informed decisions.
3. Who’s writing guidelines?
The International Sustainability Standards Board, launched in 2021 at the United Nations COP26 climate summit, is trying to write a global rulebook for climate and sustainability reports. ISSB is under the auspices of the IFRS Foundation, which developed the accounting standards used today in more than 140 countries. (The US is a notable exception to the IFRS. It uses what’s called GAAP, or generally accepted accounting principles.) Meanwhile, the US-based Sustainability Accounting Standards Board has guidance for single materiality -- also referred to as “outside-in” -- that’s already used by hundreds of companies. Separately, the Global Reporting Initiative provides “inside-out” standards for reporting a company’s impact on people and the planet. Some companies use SASB, some GRI, some both and others one of the many other disclosure systems now available.
4. How’s that going?
The ISSB this year incorporated the SASB standards into its initial proposals, which would require companies to disclose the material impact of outside ESG risks on their business. It also has indicated an openness to double materiality; one official noted investors care about the wider impact a business has because of potential “knock-on consequences” to a company’s cash flow. That’s why the ISSB is working to coordinate its rulebook with the GRI, which is partly funded by governments. Some sustainability advocates and experts in accountancy have expressed concerns, however, that the “connectivity” between inside and outside risk could be lost if they aren’t incorporated into a single set of standards. The ISSB has said it planned to review the feedback as it seeks to complete its standards by the end of the year.
5. What’s happening in Europe?
Almost a decade ago, the European Union began requiring companies to report non-financial information in an attempt to make businesses more accountable for social and environmental issues. That was the first time disclosure requirements included the concept of double materiality. But wide gaps soon emerged in the quality and quantity of information. So a redrafted EU rulebook provides companies with more explicit requirements and forces many more businesses to comply. That so-called Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive goes into effect in 2023.
6. What about the US?
The US has largely focused on improving the quality of reports on single materiality, through the work of the SASB. For example, proposals this year from the Securities and Exchange Commission would also require listed companies to detail the costs from extreme weather events and capital investments intended to help reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. An SEC official said in May that the agency’s aim was “to achieve as much interoperability” as possible between what SEC could require and the ISSB’s baseline standards.
7. What’s the context?
Historically, corporate reporting has focused on the near-term and only lightly touched on environmental and social issues. But climate change and societal stresses related to the Covid-19 pandemic have made such issues harder to ignore. That’s led to demands for more information, since what may be a small issue for a firm may be a big problem for the communities in which it operates and may morph into a bigger challenge. Water availability is often named as one such issue. In the US, some Republican-led jurisdictions have started penalizing banks and asset managers that embrace ESG reporting at all, arguing that it goes too far in bringing progressive politics into investing decisions. At the other end of the debate, some climate change activists and other ESG advocates have criticized current efforts for not going far enough to cut greenhouse gas emissions or fight inequality.
8. Will there be a global benchmark with both forms of materiality?
It’s unclear, as there’s no agreement on whether and how to link inside and outside reporting requirements. For now, GRI reporting is voluntary. Eventually, ISSB rules, though also voluntary, will likely be used widely, like the existing international accounting standards. The EU operations of US firms such as McDonald’s Corp. and General Motors Co. will probably have to comply with European rules on double materiality to operate in the 27 EU countries. JPMorgan said in September it would start offering clients a data-analysis tool that covers double materiality. | 2022-09-21T14:37:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What New ESG Approach ‘Double Materiality’ Means — and Why JPMorgan Is a Fan - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-new-esg-approach-double-materiality-means--and-why-jpmorgan-is-a-fan/2022/09/21/777a5ea0-39af-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/what-new-esg-approach-double-materiality-means--and-why-jpmorgan-is-a-fan/2022/09/21/777a5ea0-39af-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html |
A new group, which includes two former NRA lobbyists, is betting on it
Perspective by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow
An attendee reaches for a semiautomatic rifle at the National Rifle Association annual meeting in Houston in May. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)
Abra Belke was home for the holidays in 2012 when she watched a speech that would soon become infamous. She woke up jet-lagged at her brother’s condo — she had flown into Montana from D.C. late the previous night — but she forced herself out of bed, went downstairs in her pajamas and turned on the television. She saw Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, standing at a lectern. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” he proclaimed, one week after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., had claimed the lives of 20 students and six educators. Sitting on the couch, Belke looked over at her brother’s fiancee and said, “Oh my God, I have to quit my job.”
For more than a year, Belke had been working as a lobbyist for the NRA. From an early age, guns had been a part of her life. She’d grown up in Butte, Mont., where her father was president of the local gun club. He’d given her a Chipmunk 22 LR Rifle, a youth-sized firearm, for her eighth birthday, and their primary father-daughter activity was to shoot targets at the range together. As was common for children in Montana, according to Belke, she was forbidden from touching guns in the house under normal circumstances — but was also taught how to shoot in response to a human or animal threat. “These are not toys,” her father would tell her. “The second you disrespect this firearm you will wind up dead.”
In her 20s, she spent several years working for Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg, then Montana’s sole representative in Congress, and a position at the NRA felt like a natural next step. Her job involved drafting riders for appropriations bills, attending happy hours and steakhouse fundraisers, and, above all, frequently communicating with her assigned lawmakers and their aides. Although she respected her colleagues in the organization’s lobbying arm — the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) — she was always a little uneasy with the bombast from LaPierre, who was based at NRA headquarters in Virginia, and the rhetoric of the organization’s ad agency at the time, Ackerman McQueen. Insiders drew a distinction between ILA and headquarters, but she knew that the general public did not.
In the wake of Sandy Hook, Belke found her employer increasingly hard to defend. “I remember watching the speech,” Belke, now 40, told me recently, “just, like, mouth on the floor, because it was so tone-deaf and stupid.” She recalls that she spoke with her boss at ILA — “I think I started the conversation with the phrase, ‘What the hell was that?’ ” — but agreed to stay on for a time. The NRA was, initially at least, participating in talks about the universal-background-checks bill proposed by Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), and Belke was hoping an agreement could be reached. Meanwhile, she was fielding voice-mail threats from people who held the NRA responsible for the massacre. To cope with the stress, she began keeping a bottle of bourbon at her desk and splashing it into her coffee. In April 2013, the NRA came out against the bill, which was then voted down in the Senate. The following month Belke gave notice, and that summer she went home to Montana. (When reached for comment, an NRA spokesperson wrote via email, “The NRA has a long-standing policy of not discussing personnel matters — past or present — in the public domain.”)
About seven years later, Belke was working as an attorney when she got an Instagram direct message from Amanda Carpenter, a conservative CNN commentator who was a longtime reader of Belke’s fashion blog and followed her on Instagram. Carpenter told Belke about a new organization called 97Percent. The name refers to a 2018 Quinnipiac University poll, which found that 97 percent of American voters — and the same percentage of gun owners — support universal background checks. The group, founded by entrepreneurs and philanthropists Adam and Staci Miller, promotes pragmatic gun-policy reforms — with a twist: Their principal goal is to engage gun owners in the conversation. In polls and focus groups, they say they have found that gun owners are more amenable to reforms than most Americans believe. To make real progress on the issue, they argue, gun owners must be at the table.
The organization had approached Carpenter, known as a moderate and a strong communicator, about joining the advisory board. She didn’t have time, but she thought of Belke, who had recently posted a series of Instagram videos answering questions about gun ownership. Belke was open to the idea and talked to executive director Matt Littman. “I said I’m interested in doing this, but I’m not going to do it by myself.” She didn’t want to be the “token gun owner” on the board. She invited John Goodwin, another former NRA lobbyist, to join as well.
Both are now members of the advisory board, which aims for a balance of Republicans and Democrats as well as gun owners and non-gun owners. It includes former U.S. representative Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), Republican strategist Mark McKinnon, Emmy-nominated actor Jason George, and Richard Aborn, former president of Handgun Control Inc. (now known as Brady). Members contribute in different ways, depending on their background. Belke is often enlisted to communicate with congressional staffers; George filmed a lighthearted video with tips for talking to your gun-loving relatives over the holidays. (“The mute button is your friend. … Listen to what they have to say.”)
This might be a good time to disclose my own position on the issue. Since Sandy Hook, sickened by the unrelenting slaughter haunting our country, I’ve felt compelled to do something to try to stem the bloodshed. Over the years, I’ve volunteered, on and off, with groups promoting stronger gun laws, including Moms Demand Action and Brady. (I am not currently affiliated with, nor do I speak for, any group.) Unlike Belke, I grew up in urban and suburban areas in the Northeast, guns were not a part of my childhood, and I am not fond of them.
When I learned about 97Percent, following the Buffalo and Uvalde, Tex., shootings in May, I was cautiously intrigued. At the time, the nation seemed to be at an unconscionable impasse. Arguably, the subsequent success of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which President Biden signed into law in June, shows that the organizing of recent years has at last paid off; among other provisions, the legislation enhanced background checks for gun buyers under 21, tightened the “boyfriend loophole” for domestic abusers and invested $250 million in community-based violence prevention programs. But given the scale of the crisis — in 2020, there were 45,222 gun-related deaths in the United States, including suicides and accidents, and firearms overtook car crashes as the leading cause of mortality for children and adolescents — these remedies are relatively limited. A bipartisan organization pushing for change, including multiple former NRA lobbyists no less, made me wonder: Could an effort to get gun owners to speak up — and vote — for gun policy reform on a broad scale succeed? Could it actually change the conversation? And, when it comes to strengthening gun restrictions, how far could a campaign guided by the preferences of gun owners really go?
In 2020, Adam and Staci Miller, a married couple based in Los Angeles, launched 1P.org (the P stands for “planet”), with a mission to tackle intractable problems. Adam was the founder and former CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand, a human resources and education software company, and Staci was a former McKinsey analyst. No issue seemed more intractable in the United States than gun violence. “When Newtown happened, we had a first-grader at the time,” Staci told me. “When Parkland happened, we had a high-schooler at the time. We really looked at each other and said, God forbid, if this touches our community, will we be able to say to our kids, ‘We did everything we could’?”
They began by setting up conversations with experts and veterans in the field of gun-violence prevention. One of them was Richard Aborn, who is now president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City. “I strongly suggested that the way to crack open the gun-control debate was to try and figure out some safe place for gun owners for gun control to voice their opinion,” he told me. He thought it was crucial to convey to gun owners that “there is perfect consistency between legally acquiring a firearm or firearms, and regulating the distribution of guns.”
Their next step was to find out where gun owners really stood. The Millers brought on two external firms to conduct focus groups and ethnographic interviews in purple states — New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio and Colorado — in addition to a national survey of more than 1,000 gun owners. They found that large majorities supported universal background checks, training requirements for a firearm purchase, and temporary removal of guns from individuals in crisis who pose a risk to themselves or others (red-flag laws).
But the research also found that gun owners who are receptive to regulations feel alienated by the current national conversation. They have a fundamentally different view than most gun-safety activists and pro-reform politicians who don’t own guns. Whereas someone like me sees guns as dangerous, gun owners typically see them as a way to keep safe. Whereas I associate guns exclusively with harm, gun owners see them as a tool that can be used for good or bad purposes. This helps explain a widespread conviction among gun owners: that policy should focus on “keeping guns out of the wrong hands,” not on bans of certain types of weapons or attempts to reduce the number of guns in the country. Another survey found that most gun owners believe that gun-reform advocates ultimately want to take their guns away. This belief makes them mistrustful and reluctant to speak out for any reforms at all — the “slippery slope” argument.
Based on this research, the Millers developed a vision for a new organization that would identify and expand areas of consensus among gun owners and gun-reform proponents. Their North Star is legislation that is both broadly popular and backed by evidence. Their empirical orientation also led them to recognize that, as Adam said, “There’s really three sets of gun violence.” One set is mass shootings, which prompted the Millers (and me) to get involved but account for a tiny fraction of all gun homicides; another is the community violence that is concentrated in racially segregated, high-poverty neighborhoods; finally, there are suicides, which make up the majority of gun deaths (54 percent in 2020). Each of these sets requires specially tailored responses.
The Millers incorporated the organization as 97Percent — going with the poll that has found the highest level of support for universal background checks — and officially launched in October 2020. They now have a staff of seven and 14 advisory board members, with the Millers providing most of the funding (a small portion comes from undisclosed foundations and individual donors). In the future, they are likely to start a 501(c)(4) to engage in more direct lobbying. So far, though, their purview has been mainly research and education. They are working with Michael Siegel, a professor of public health at Tufts University, to further gauge gun-owner opinion. Siegel has found that the majority of gun owners support four laws shown to be effective: universal background checks, prohibitions for those convicted of violent misdemeanors, permits for concealed carry, and permits for gun purchases and possession. He estimates that if all four were implemented, firearm homicides would decline by 35 percent.
Advisory board member and actor Jason George — known for his roles on the TV shows “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Station 19” — is not a gun owner, but he told me he is “a good shot.” (“I’m from Virginia, from a military town in Virginia. I speak purple.”) George thinks that most gun owners are responsible citizens who are appalled by the violence ravaging the nation, and that blaming them for tragedies precludes potentially fruitful dialogue. “Don’t demonize them,” he urges. At the same time, he believes in asking more of gun owners: “If you’re standing by and not saying anything,” he says, “you’re part of the problem.” Another advisory board member, Rep. Seth Moulton, an Iraq War veteran, told me, “I want to see gun owners become leaders in this conversation, not just occasional but reluctant participants. I think the people who understand guns have a lot of credibility here.” Indeed, if the message is coming from a fellow gun owner, it is easier to trust that the ultimate goal is not confiscation.
The leaders of 97Percent believe that the gun-owner perspective can inform the writing of legislation and make laws more effective. People who do not own guns often lack a sense of what legislation would mean for those who do, Abra Belke told me: “It has to be done with gun owners at the table because non-gun owners don’t understand what they’re asking of dealers, what they’re asking of sellers, what they’re asking of law enforcement. And how the process would need to happen to make sure that people complied and to make sure that compliance was meaningful.”
The organization also started a campaign to encourage safe use and storage, in partnership with the National African American Gun Association, a gun rights group. Douglas Jefferson, senior vice president of the association, told me his views are derived from his reading of African American history: “When you have an unresponsive government, what else is there to do but make sure that you exercise all your rights available?” He is wary of almost all gun restrictions because he thinks they have a discriminatory impact on Black Americans without addressing the roots of criminal behavior. But he is keen to encourage safe practices: “As responsible gun owners, we want to make sure that we’re not just seen as gun owners but we’re seen as good citizens who happen to own guns.”
To some gun-reform proponents, the idea of engaging gun owners in the fight for gun restrictions may sound naive or downright nonsensical. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik spoke for many Americans when he stipulated “what ought to be a basic concept of a liberal democracy: that nobody who lives in one has any need for a handgun” and described weapons such as AR-15s as “the kind of gun that should never be in the hands of anyone except soldiers.” If guns and gun ownership are the problem, how can pro-gun people be part of the solution?
The contemporary gun-control movement — rebranded as the “gun safety” or “gun violence prevention” movement — has struggled to reconcile the views expressed by Gopnik with a more pragmatic approach. Every social movement must navigate choices about how much to demand and how much to compromise, how to balance long-term goals and short-term gains. But the gun issue introduces several distinctive challenges. Guns are possibly unique in that they are seen by many as not only the problem but the solution; the more gun violence increases, the more some people will feel the need to arm themselves for self-defense. There is also reason to believe that calls for new gun laws lead to increases in gun sales. Both of these factors explain the well-documented trend of gun-sale surges after mass shootings. In the month after the Sandy Hook shooting and President Barack Obama’s call for new restrictions, about 2 million guns were sold, compared with 754,000 in the wake of 9/11. In short, while staking out a bold position on some issues — say, demanding a $15 minimum wage — can help move the political center, stronger demands for gun regulations seem to carry a particular risk of entrenching polarization and maybe even exacerbating the problem.
This dilemma has informed the strategy of the contemporary gun-safety movement. The antiabortion movement unabashedly pushed for the reversal of Roe v. Wade for decades — and, of course, recently succeeded. By contrast, mainstream gun-safety groups have not called for a wholesale gun ban or made a big issue of District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 Supreme Court ruling that established an individual right to gun ownership for the first time. This approach results from a mix of conviction and concession; some advocates sincerely believe in the right to self-defense, while others are bowing to political realism. Either way, they have generally taken a more incremental, moderate path — calling for “common sense” restrictions, recognizing that we will never eliminate guns but we can try to reduce the carnage associated with them. They have also long insisted that the vast majority of Americans want change, and that the NRA has essentially tricked politicians and the public into believing otherwise. “It’s really the gun lobby, not gun owners, that is interested in propping up the industry’s profits,” Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, told me.
As a result, 97Percent is arguably a natural extension of the movement more than a radical departure. When I asked mainstream gun-safety advocates about the group and the broader idea of engaging gun owners, most responded favorably. If anything, some were quick to point out that the idea is not entirely new. Gabrielle Giffords, the former congresswoman who now promotes gun reform, has always emphasized that she is a gun owner. The group she co-founded, Giffords, has a “Gun Owners for Safety” coalition, and Watts told me that Moms Demand Action has many members who are gun owners as well. Still, Watts believes that the newer organization can make a valuable contribution. “I think that groups like 97Percent that are focusing solely on organizing and talking to gun owners are important,” she said.
I heard a similar perspective from activists involved in March for Our Lives, the youth-led group formed by survivors of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. Matthew Hogenmiller, 20, joined the group as a high school sophomore in Austin. At school, he said, the fear of guns had always been pervasive. Then, the shooting in Parkland reinforced his feeling of helplessness. Joining March for Our Lives and organizing a successful protest in Austin gave him a sense of agency. He now works on staff as the digital acquisition manager. Living in Texas, he has spoken with many gun owners. The conversations typically begin as debates but end up arriving at points of consensus, especially regarding universal background checks. “Often,” he said, “the people that I would talk to are gun owners who bought a gun legally, went through a background check, did it all,” and didn’t realize that others can exploit loopholes in the system. He has come to believe that “gun owners have a part in this fight,” he said. “More often than not, responsible gun owners are the best advocates for gun safety.”
That does not mean that 97Percent has been universally embraced. For some activists, there is the feeling that gun owners are getting pats on the back for minimal gestures. Margot Bennett, executive director of the Los Angeles-based group Women Against Gun Violence, wrote in a blog post that when she sees 97Percent research on gun-owner attitudes, she rolls her eyes. “No matter what individual gun owners say about safe gun storage or closing the Charleston Loophole or prohibiting domestic abusers from owning guns, I only care about what they do,” she explained. “Do they vote for legislators and policymakers that will support gun regulations that will help keep our children, families, and communities safe? For the most part, they don’t.” When I spoke to Bennett, whom I met through my volunteering, she told me, “To pretend that this is not an issue of sides, to pretend that this is not a political issue, I think is a mistake.” Instead of expending energy on trying to accommodate gun owners, she would rather push to elect more lawmakers who will fight for more stringent regulations — even if it means voting to expand the Supreme Court and appointing justices who would reconsider Heller.
And even if the country managed to implement every law that the majority of gun owners support, the problem would hardly be solved. The 35 percent reduction in gun homicides that Siegel, the Tufts researcher, projects, would be fantastic — “a huge effect in public health terms,” he wrote in an email. There are also measures that sidestep gun restrictions altogether but could save a lot of lives, such as funding for local groups working to interrupt violence in their communities. But all of these steps would almost certainly leave us with a higher rate of gun deaths than peer countries with stronger laws and fewer guns.
In the end, I was left with this conclusion: A movement that defers to gun owners will not realize the dream of bringing gun violence down to the levels in Australia or Western Europe, but a movement without gun owners on board likely can’t accomplish much of anything, at least at the national scale. The bill that recently made it through Congress — the first significant gun violence prevention legislation to pass in nearly 30 years — illustrates this reality. The measure fell far short of what many gun-safety advocates sought, but it was still a major breakthrough. At a closed-door meeting before the vote, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) reportedly cited a survey showing strong support in gun-owning households for the bill’s provisions. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who played a leading role in shepherding the bill into law, wrote via email through a staff member, “Support from responsible gun owners was critical to getting enough Republicans to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, and they’ll remain key players in building the movement’s political power and notching more wins.”
It’s a strange moment in the history of this struggle. The recent Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen has called into question some of the gun-safety laws on the books in blue states, which are sure to be challenged by gun-rights groups in the months and years to come. At the same time, the recent bipartisan legislation — demonstrating that Republican lawmakers were more willing to engage than at any other point in this century — has the gun-safety movement feeling optimistic. “This fight has been ups and downs,” said Hogenmiller of March for Our Lives. “You see progress happening and then gun violence occurs. In those moments it’s incredibly disappointing. It’s difficult to pick up and continue to move.” But, he said, “lately I’ve felt more hopeful now than ever.” He added, “When it comes to gun violence, nearly any progress is good progress.”
During the recent negotiations for the bipartisan bill, Abra Belke was in frequent contact with legislative staffers. She told me that Republican staffers would call her and say, “This is what they want to do. Where are the pitfalls? How can we make it better?” With Democrats, the conversations are different. “I’ve become the person Democrat staff can reach out to and say, ‘I’m hearing this. AR-15s are used for hunting. Is that true?’ I can explain to them, yes, some people do hunt with AR-15s. There are some animals — feral hogs, varmints, coyotes — that are hunted with AR-15s. And they trust me to tell them the truth.” An aide to Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) told me that Belke was “one of the few experts who was really able to illuminate the complexities, both political and cultural, of gun ownership.” Belke thinks that both sides have learned from the post-Newtown failure and were more willing to listen and talk through stalemates. “And that was probably the most encouraging part of all of it to me,” she said.
In recent years, Belke has become less comfortable with the direction that gun culture has taken. She doesn’t like the fear-based rhetoric of the industry advertising or the attitudes she sees among some younger gun owners. “I go to the range and I see people shooting these incredibly tricked out AR-15s, and they’re not very good at it,” she said. She was also frustrated by the failure to prevent shootings in Buffalo and Highland Park; both New York and Illinois have red-flag laws, which have been shown to work but only if people know about them and put them to use. “You can’t pass a law and then walk away from it,” she said. “You see those little flaws in the system, and you have to be willing to address those flaws.”
If 97Percent succeeds on its own terms, perhaps Belke will be a kind of bellwether of the change underway in this country, agonizingly slow but perceptible, in the decade since Newtown. Then, she was working for the NRA, which contributed to scotching the proposed legislation; now, she is working with 97Percent and trying to engage in dialogue. The NRA opposed the new federal legislation, but this time, it passed anyway. Belke thinks at least some conservative lawmakers and ordinary gun owners have learned what the NRA has not: “We do have to be willing to have the discussions that we haven’t had in the past, and ‘no’ can’t be the only answer.”
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow is a journalist in Southern California. She is working on a book about the future of nuclear energy. | 2022-09-21T14:37:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Are Gun Owners the Future of the Gun-Control Movement? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/09/21/97percent-gun-owners-debate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/09/21/97percent-gun-owners-debate/ |
A report says that after Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Maria, the poor, disabled and non-English-speaking were less well served
Joshua Morges, 26, moves a construction sign on the front porch of his home in Naguabo, Puerto Rico, in 2018. For months, the sign was used to cover a window blown out by Hurricane Maria. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
The U.S. government’s emergency response to a pair of deadly hurricanes in 2017 may not have equitably served the most vulnerable populations, including people with disabilities, the less affluent and non-native English speakers, according to a report released Wednesday from an independent federal commission.
The study from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights focused on the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, which killed 68 people in Texas, and Hurricane Maria, which killed 2,975 in Puerto Rico. It marked the first time the agency attempted to assess how well the Federal Emergency Management Agency met its obligation to provide aid without discriminating on the basis of race, nationality, disability, English proficiency, economic status or other factors.
The panel found that FEMA’s efforts, while extensive after the storms caused widespread damage within weeks of each other, fell short in providing timely relief and forced survivors to contend with delays caused by unclear guidelines on how to access government aid.
The difficulties were often compounded for the less affluent, people with disabilities, and Black and Latino residents, who were more likely to live in lower-lying areas with greater flooding damage and had greater difficulty accessing electricity and the internet.
Why FEMA is denying aid to Black disaster survivors in the Deep South
In Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, the problems were magnified by other factors. Among them: FEMA did not have enough Spanish-speaking staff members, 55 percent of homeowners on the island did not own titles to their properties, and contractors hired with federal funds often failed to complete their work, the report found.
In a statement included in the report, Commissioner Debo P. Adegbile said the manner in which federal aid was distributed after the storms “may not have sufficiently accomplished FEMA’s mission and may have run afoul of the agency’s mission under the Stafford Act,” the 1988 law that authorizes the federal government’s intervention in natural disasters.
Adegbile said it was difficult to fully assess FEMA’s civil rights compliance given that the agency does not collect sufficient demographic data on how federal assistance is administered and distributed. But he added that “some of the barriers to aid and accessibility are the direct result of the lack of preparedness, staffing issues, data tracking failures, lack of transparency of the aid application process, language access issues, and the lack of collaboration with nongovernmental organizations and community partners.”
The report was released a day after Puerto Rico marked the fifth anniversary of Maria, with the island again facing flash flooding, property damage and widespread power outages after Hurricane Fiona dumped more than 30 inches of rain this past weekend.
The commission found that FEMA, which had positioned supplies in Texas ahead of Harvey, was not as well prepared in Puerto Rico, a disparity that FEMA said was due in part to geographical challenges and a lack of capabilities within the territory’s local government.
Even before Fiona, Puerto Rico's power grid was poised for failure
Some commissioners, however, questioned whether the island’s “second-class” status as a territory without congressional voting rights played a role. And the report also cited testimony from legal experts and housing advocates who said the federal government erected bureaucratic barriers that slowed aid to Puerto Rico, at a time when President Donald Trump was feuding with local leaders over whom to blame for delays in the emergency response on the island.
The report found that in the immediate aftermath of Maria, FEMA received more than 1.1 million applications for individual housing assistance in Puerto Rico and denied 60 percent of them. Many rejections were due to title documentation issues, but the commission noted that nothing in Puerto Rico’s laws requires homeowners to register their properties. In 2021, FEMA adopted new policies to make it easier for residents to prove ownership of their properties.
In Texas after Harvey, people with disabilities faced challenges including not having adequate accommodations after being forced into shelters; in many cases, those who vacated their homes remained in institutional settings rather than moving back, the commission found.
The report also cited testimony from advocates and housing experts who said government inspectors were more likely to reject relief claims in impoverished areas.
The commission recommended that FEMA streamline its application process for federal aid, hire more people who speak Spanish and other languages, focus its recovery efforts on the most vulnerable communities, improve coordination with other government agencies, and provide disability training to FEMA staff members.
They were still rebuilding, five years after Hurricane Maria. Then Fiona hit.
The Commission on Civil Rights is composed of four members appointed by the president and four by Congress, who serve six-year terms. Four of the current members are Democrats, including Chair Norma V. Cantú; three are Republicans; and one is an independent.
Some of the non-Democratic members challenged the commission’s findings.
Commissioner J. Christian Adams, a Republican, wrote that the report “puts the blame in the wrong place” by ascribing a racial motivation for the disparities. He argued that the real inequities in Puerto Rico were caused by its political status as a territory without full congressional representation.
“The report makes imaginary racial animus or phantom biases of the Trump administration into the cause of any failure or shortcoming,” Adams wrote. “In this, the report has failed.”
But Commissioner Michael Yaki, a Democrat, quoted Trump’s tweets and statements in his feud with Puerto Rican leaders as evidence that his administration was not fully engaged in the emergency response.
Yaki also faulted FEMA for “a very one-size-fits-all approach to disasters. Our nation, however, is too complex for a cookie cutter response. … For all the relief that FEMA does provide, it does leave people behind, people who are the most vulnerable, who have faced and continue to experience discrimination.” | 2022-09-21T14:37:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Poor, disabled, non-English speakers less-served by FEMA after Harvey, Maria - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/21/hurricane-fema-poor-disabled-immigrants/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/21/hurricane-fema-poor-disabled-immigrants/ |
No religious person can celebrate the GOP’s abuse of immigrants
Updated September 21, 2022 at 10:00 a.m. EDT|Published September 21, 2022 at 7:45 a.m. EDT
Paola Albarran, right, of Venezuela is reunited with her cousin, Houston resident Anali Fernandez at the Migrant Resource Center on Monday in San Antonio. (Jordan Vonderhaar/Getty Images)
You don’t need to be an expert in theology to know that a central tenet of the world’s major religions is to care for the sick, the weak and the vulnerable. Jews, who have been perpetual immigrants, hold dear to the Torah’s invocation: “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” (Lev. 19:33-34).
So too for Christians. When it came to the treatment of the stranger and other vulnerable people, Jesus told his disciples, “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.” (Matt. 25:40).
How did we get from there to a movement — dominated by people who declare the United States to be a Christian nation — that celebrates reports of government officials tricking immigrants into getting onto a plane and sending them hundreds of miles away as part of a partisan campaign of fear, demagoguery and xenophobia?
One could simply write off these Republicans and their leaders, such as Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, as hypocrites. But that does not quite get to the heart of the matter.
This insidious phenomenon is the result of white supremacy burrowing its way into Christian churches and political movements. Robert P. Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute, explained in a recent speech the fundamental flaw of this ideology: “that America was divinely ordained to be a Promised Land for European Christians, a kind of new Zion. A model for the rest of the world. And underneath that vision, its implied presupposition was that White people were superior to all other races because they were the bearers of ‘civilization’ and Christianity. This is the logic of white supremacy and domination.”
If one believes that construct, then the White southerners are perpetual victims, forced to endure the presence of Black and Brown people and subjected to indignity by secular elites. Sending invaders (read: non-White people) North, in their eyes, is simply score-settling.
Now, not all Christians or Americans of faith buy into this claptrap. The Church World Service, a group devoted to providing refugee services with representatives from 17 Christian denominations, put out a scathing statement after DeSantis sent 50 immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard. It denounced the “divisive and harmful actions” of moving migrants across the country without notice to local communities to allow them to prepare for the arrivals.
The statement went on to condemn “inflicting cruelty and harm on vulnerable people who are seeking safety by using them as political pawns.” It continued:
As a faith-based organization, we believe that all of humankind is created in the image of God (Gen 1:27), and all people should be treated with compassion as they seek protection. The history of anti-refugee, anti-family, anti-immigrant, anti-children actions and rhetoric by Governors Abbott and DeSantis have inflicted pain on the vulnerable, the least of these. Instead of playing into their unjust and unethical actions that do not represent our nation’s values, our national, state and local leaders should equip our communities with the resources they need to ensure new arrivals have access to food, clothing, shelter, legal orientation, medical care, dignified transportation and other case management services.” . . .
“The acts of Governor Abbott and Governor DeSantis in this case are morally atrocious, especially in light of our sacred scriptures in Matthew 25 that call on us to see the face of Christ in the migrant and all those fleeing persecution,” added Rev. Noel Andersen, director for Grassroots Organizing at CWS.
The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society has also denounced “the choice to treat people like packages.” A HIAS official pointed out, “The U.S. government has granted permission to every single person on these buses and planes to be in the United States and to seek asylum. After getting off the bus, many have no idea where they are. They have immediate emergency housing, health, and legal needs.”
The mainstream media have put a greater focus on whether laws might have been broken and what legal recourse these migrants might have. CNN reports “the migrants’ attorneys said that brochures given to their clients were ‘highly misleading’ and ‘used to entice (their) clients to travel under the guise that (resettlement) support was available to them. The brochure lists refugee services, including cash and housing assistance, clothing, transportation to job interviews, job training and assistance registering children for school, among other resources.”
But whether state or federal laws were broken or taxpayer money misused, these political stunts will be as much a stain on our nation as the previous administration’s child separation policy. If this were a foreign country, the media might treat this as a human rights violation, a repudiation of the obligation to attend to the needs of asylum seekers and an injury to the nation’s standing around the world. That might be a good place to start examining how self-described Christians rationalize the abuse of human beings. | 2022-09-21T14:38:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Religious people are rejoicing over abuse of migrants - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/desantis-migrants-white-christians-religion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/desantis-migrants-white-christians-religion/ |
Why it’s not critical race theory to say Hitler admired U.S. racism
By Kate Woodsome
Producer, writer, director
Nazi Party political rally. Sign in the back reads, "Don't buy from Jews." (National Archives and Records Administration)
Filmmaker Ken Burns says he and his co-directors Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein are storytellers, not polemicists. But who gets to write history — and when — is inherently controversial. Their new documentary, “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” examines how racist policies and practices in the United States informed the Nazis and added to the suffering of European Jews before and after World War II.
The film has a contemporary coda. It serves as a warning that the signs of fascism abound today, and that we would be lying to ourselves to deny the threat. I spoke with the filmmakers about their concerns. Our conversation has been abridged and edited for clarity.
Kate Woodsome: There were moments when I was watching the film and I would close my eyes, and the historical analysis felt like it was a contemporary news report, which was chilling. Was that the intent?
Ken Burns: I don’t think it was the intent. Every film we’ve worked on has sort of rhymed in the present. As we were working on this, we began to realize how much things were resonating with what’s going on now. The assault on the Capitol, the insurrection and other events in which we felt the institutions of our democracy were challenged enough that it was important for us to take this story and remind people what the consequences are of yielding to the various kind of nefarious aspects of the [authoritarian] playbook.
When Hitler came to power, he downplayed for a moment antisemitism and the platform of the Nazis and stepped up street warfare to give the German people a sense that civil war was imminent and that the causes of this were the communists and the socialists. He’s already in power because other conservatives think they can handle him. Those conservatives are worried that there is now what we would call a new progressive majority. And so they are doing everything to subvert the democratic process because they realize, in fact, in a democratic society, these things won’t hold. And so out of this comes the monstrous regime of Adolf Hitler, and one of the many horrific things — the most horrific — is the attempt to exterminate all of the 9 million Jews of Europe.
In the early 1900's, many White Protestant Americans who feared they would be replaced by immigrants embraced a pseudoscience called eugenics. (Video: Florentine Films)
Lynn Novick: We’ve been thinking a lot about authoritarianism and what are the warning signs. I don’t think when we started on the project that I fully grasped what these warning signs are and how it’s been happening while we’re living and we’re studying what Ken was just describing. Do we have free and fair elections? Do we have a peaceful transfer of power? Do we have a rule of law? Do we have a cult of personality? A leader who associates themself with the state? So if you criticize the leader, you’re criticizing your country. And if you criticize your country, you’re criticizing the leader, and this sort of messianic faith in that leader and this cult of personality. Populism and authoritarianism don’t have to go together, but when they do, that is doubling down on the threat that we all face. Then you have the demonization of somebody. And the calling into question whether the press is legitimate. The threats were there before, but it does feel to us that we’re living in a pretty different world and we have to understand it so we can name it. And then, hopefully, motivate ourselves to do something about it.
Woodsome: I lived overseas in an authoritarian country and seeing it happening here, I feel like I’m screaming, “The sky is falling!” So I’m relieved you’re using your platform to join the chorus.
Burns: You know, we’re still not polemicists — we really want to stress this. We’re still storytellers. But in order to set the table for what happened in the United States and in Europe at the time of our story, we had to deal with anti-immigrant sentiment and nativism with rampant antisemitism and obviously racism and a history of dispossessing native peoples of their land and murdering them and isolating them into reservations — something Hitler admired. To understand all of that stuff, that essentially required us to make the dismount of our film more contemporary.
In 1918, automobile pioneer Henry Ford bought a weekly newspaper to spread antisemitic propaganda that was translated into nine languages, including German. (Video: Florentine Films)
Woodsome: Every country tells lies about itself. What were some of the lies that you uncovered in making this?
Sarah Botstein: We open the film with the famous Emma Lazarus poem and then we play right after that a poem by the then-editor of the Atlantic magazine, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, basically saying we shouldn’t be a land of immigrants in a land of refuge. We should lock our borders and lean into our more xenophobic, nativist tendencies. For me, that’s the myth of, and the tension for, the whole film.
Burns: The lies part of it is difficult because it’s not binary, right? We are a nation of immigrants. We do do good things. We have aspects that are exceptional. We are a good people, as [historian] Nell Painter says. But these other things can also coexist. And the darker things that go unacknowledged can in a binary system appear to just be lies. But what they are is the inevitable complexity of human interaction.
Novick: We’re very much aware of just how contentious history is right now. But history has always been contentious. Who gets to tell the story, and who writes the words that describe what happened, or who points the camera where they point it, and how they choose to leave things out and put certain images forward — that is nothing new. We’re always in this conversation with the past.
Woodsome: Do you consider this film and its educational curriculum critical race theory?
Burns: No, we don’t subscribe to any of that stuff. We’re just storytellers. Telling a complicated story. I don’t know what critical race theory is. It’s essentially a graduate school legal concept of how to frame certain arguments that has been appropriated by people to use as a cudgel to to beat them up over these various things.
I made a comment about the [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis play in Martha’s Vineyard as being a kind of an authoritarian response, just as it was when Disney says we don’t agree with you, he punishes them. When a state employee doesn’t do what he says, he fires them. That’s the authoritarian thing. It’s not the democratic way that you handle it. But the right-wing media has said that I’ve equated what DeSantis did with the Holocaust, which is obscene. I mean, literally obscene to do that. But it is also classic authoritarian playbook to sort of lie about what somebody just said in order to make it so outrageous that then you can deny the complexity of what’s being presented.
Michelle L. Norris: What Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis don’t understand about America
Woodsome: One of the things that resonated with me was the articulation of how illogical the racist belief systems are, and that people are clinging to contradictory values and ideas.
Novick: That was so helpful because I found myself confused when it came to antisemitism and other forms of racism. The idea that you can be afraid or malign someone for being both a Bolshevik and a capitalist. Or being sexually weak and sexually attractive. Too virile.
[Historian] Danny Greene does such a beautiful job in the film of saying that you can hold these contradictory beliefs because it’s not actually about logic. It’s about a deeper emotional or maybe a different part of your brain that’s keying into reasons why you are scared of someone or don’t like them. It’s fear. And it’s othering.
Burns: That would be the reptilian part of the brain.
Botstein: When we talk to Timothy Snyder — he was describing that part of how these regimes dehumanize people and torture them is to make them naked before they kill them so they’re as animalistic as they can be. I find it very moving how even with all of that, the Jews are looking in the cameras and have incredible dignity and stand up and fight against this whenever and however they can. But this idea that you can other and dehumanize and perpetrate these crimes to your fellow humans is constantly devastating to learn about.
Writer Daniel Mendelsohn says the people in historical photos are no different from us. (Video: Florentine Films)
Woodsome: It’s human nature to look for threats. Fear helps us survive in some ways. But the difference is when the elite manipulate —
Novick: Weaponize.
Burns: That’s what it is. If you think about poor Blacks and poor Whites and poor Hispanics in the United States who have always been, by those elites, convincing the other groups that they’re the enemy. If you compare notes, you share so much more in common. People end up voting against their self-interest so much because they have not compared the notes of their shared humanity.
So the Confederate Army is still happening, right? The people who were made to fight the war were not the slave owners. You know, for the most part. They were people who did not really participate in the benefits of the plantation society. Their leaders went off flamboyantly and were the generals and lead it. But the people who did the — the ordinary soldiers — are still fighting that battle because nobody has told them that the enemy is not those poor Black people or the people who are interested in liberating them.
Woodsome: What is the intervention that we can do on an individual basis now?
Burns: Guy Stern says it in the last word of the film. By studying this, by telling these stories, you have one ability to avoid its recurrence. You have an opportunity to not polemicize this, not argue with people, but to say, here’s a story, this is what happened. Then people may or may not be changed at the edges or in their core or whatever it is. But … you cannot become what we are saying we despise.
Botstein: You have to be more active in a democracy. You have to push against the forces. I’ve gotten way more involved in my local school board election, my local politics, in my little village, the congressional race where I live. It’s shocking when you see how few people vote and how many people scream. Basic civics feels important.
Novick: We have to recognize why we’re vulnerable to all of this. I’m very concerned about rising inequality and that our democratic system, first of all, is imperfect, and second of all, has not delivered for most Americans a kind of security and quality of life, health care, education, security, safety. The things that people need from their community. To have the conversation more broadly about what is just and equitable in a society will, in some ways, tamp down on the fear, which is the driving thing right now. The fear is real because people don’t trust that there’s anything that’s going to take care of them.
Opinion|Lin-Manuel and Luis Miranda: How to get Puerto Rico help now | 2022-09-21T14:38:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Ken Burns's Holocaust documentary is not critical race theory - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/ken-burns-holocaust-documentary-critical-race-theory/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/ken-burns-holocaust-documentary-critical-race-theory/ |
House to vote on bill to prevent attempts to subvert presidential election results
Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), left, Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and Liz Cheney, (R-Wyo.) attend a hearing of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. (Andrew Harnik/AP)
The House is planning to vote Wednesday on an electoral reform bill that seeks to prevent presidents from trying to overturn election results through Congress, the first vote on such an effort since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob seeking to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral win.
The Presidential Election Reform Act, written by Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), explicitly cites the Capitol attack as a reason to amend the Electoral Count Act of 1887, “to prevent other future unlawful efforts to overturn Presidential elections and to ensure future peaceful transfers of Presidential power.”
President Donald Trump had falsely told his supporters that Vice President Mike Pence had the power to reject electoral votes already certified by the states. Pence did not do so — and has repeatedly emphasized that the Constitution provides the vice president with no such authority. But on Jan. 6, many in the pro-Trump mob that overran the Capitol began chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” on the misguided belief that Pence could have stopped Congress from certifying Biden’s victory.
The Presidential Election Reform Act would clearly reaffirm the vice president has no role in validating a presidential election beyond acting as a figurehead who oversees the counting process, barring that person from changing the results. It also would expand the threshold necessary for members of both chambers to object to a state’s results, as well as clarify the role governors play in the process. Finally, it would make clear that state legislatures can’t change election rules retroactively to alter the results.
Cheney and Lofgren are members of the bipartisan House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection and have delivered sober assessments of the risks of similar future attacks on American democracy and the peaceful transfer of power. The Jan. 6 committee’s next hearing is scheduled for Sept. 28.
In a joint op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Cheney and Lofgren said there remained more to come from the committee about the extent of Trump’s plans to overturn the 2020 presidential election, but they also had “an obligation to recommend legislation to make sure such an attack never happens again.” Trump, they pointed out, has continued to spread baseless claims of widespread election fraud, and pro-Trump candidates in state and local elections around the country have embraced those falsehoods.
“This raises the prospect of another effort to steal a presidential election, perhaps with another attempt to corrupt Congress’s proceeding to tally electoral votes,” Cheney and Lofgren wrote. “… Our proposal is intended to preserve the rule of law for all future presidential elections by ensuring that self-interested politicians cannot steal from the people the guarantee that our government derives its power from the consent of the governed.”
The bill advanced out of the House Rules Committee on Tuesday on a 9-3 vote. Republicans — 139 of whom refused to certify Biden’s win — oppose the measure. Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) have introduced legislation in the Senate, the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act, that differs from the House on the threshold for members of both chambers to object.
Marianna Sotomayor and Leigh Ann Caldwell contributed to this report. | 2022-09-21T14:38:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | House to vote on bill to prevent efforts to subvert presidential election results - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/house-election-jan-6-reform/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/house-election-jan-6-reform/ |
The survey data suggests that young married men may start opposing the Ukraine war
Analysis by Sam Greene
A billboard in Saint Petersburg has a slogan reading “Serving Russia is a real job.” (Olga Maltseva/AFP/Getty Images)
As President Vladimir Putin calls up some 300,000 reservists to bolster Russian lines in Ukraine, he is hoping to turn the tide against a Ukrainian counteroffensive that has sent Russian forces into a hasty retreat from the Kharkiv region. New data, however, suggests he should be worried about turning a different tide: that of public support for the war.
As problematic as the Russian military has been for Putin, insight from a recently released trove of data on Russians’ attitudes toward the war suggests that the draft could hit hardest precisely where support for the war is weakest: young men who have not openly opposed the war, but who have been equally reluctant to support it.
After Ukraine’s counteroffensive liberated in days territory that it took Russia months to occupy, Putin’s loudest critics were calling not for an end to the war, but for an escalation. Whether the Russian military can fight any harder is itself an open question. While Putin and his war remain outwardly popular, recent elections suggest that enthusiasm may be waning. Randomly sampled public opinion data released recently by the independent Levada Center polling agency, includes raw survey results from the first four months of the war. The data reveals surprising findings about who supports this war, who does not and who might be persuaded to change their mind.
Who supports the war
Ever since the war began in February, Levada Center surveys have consistently shown an overwhelming majority in support, beginning at 81 percent in March and falling only slightly to 76 percent in August. While researchers have raised questions about the validity of these surveys — including whether Russians are likely to tell the truth in wartime, and whether people might be hesitant to respond to surveys in Russia’s current, more repressive climate — the data and accompanying statistical analyses that Levada released recently suggest that polling numbers have been reasonably accurate.
With more than 3 in 4 Russians supporting the war, significant majorities of every social group and demographic category tell Levada that they fully or mostly approve of what the Russian government calls its ‘special military operation.’ Nonetheless, some categories are particularly fervent in their support, including older Russians and, unsurprisingly, people who voted for the ruling United Russia party.
Levada also asked people how the war made them feel emotionally in the early weeks, and the 51 percent of respondents who said that the war gave them a sense of pride were, also unsurprisingly, most likely of all to support it. Hope and happiness also tended to go hand in hand with support for the war. Indeed, of people who reported feeling just one of these positive emotions, 98 percent said they supported the war; that rose to fully 100 percent of the respondents who felt proud, hopeful and happy at the same time.
Who opposes the war
Just as older Russians have consistently been among the biggest proponents of the war, younger Russians have been among its most consistent opponents. Among respondents aged 18 to 24, ‘only’ 68 percent supported the war — still a large majority, but much less than the 81 percent among the total population, or the 88 percent among those aged 55 and older. The surveys also show that women are more likely to openly oppose the war than men.
Equally importantly, the data reveals a range of negative emotions closely connected with opposition to the war: anger, shame, depression, fear and shock. Indeed, 31 percent of respondents said that the war made them feel horror, fear or anxiety. Feeling just one of the negative emotions in the surveys increased opposition to the war from 4 percent to 21 percent. Of those who said they felt all four or more negative emotions, 74 percent opposed the war.
A close look at these data, then, gives us a clearer picture of who the war’s biggest opponents are: young, fearful women. Among women aged 39 or under who said the war made them feel fearful, 29 percent said they opposed the war. That should not be surprising, given the preponderance of young women among those arrested for taking part in antiwar protests, and the leadership role played by the Feminist Antiwar Resistance.
Who might be persuaded
For the resistance to the war to grow, young, fearful women will need to be joined by someone new — and the Levada data strongly suggest that the answer is young, married, unemotional men.
Going back to the data, 8 percent of respondents said in March that they had no particular emotional response to the war — a number that is likely to have increased as people have become accustomed to the conflict. Those 8 percent, however, were particularly likely to oppose the war itself. And young, married men were particularly likely to say they had no emotions about the war.
On the face of it, those young married men with no emotional response to the war were just as likely as anyone else to say they support the war — if they answered the question. But 26 percent of those men avoided the question altogether, a number 20 percentage points higher than for the survey as a whole. While there is not enough data to provide a precise estimate, statistical analysis shows that young, married, ‘unemotional’ men are significantly more likely than any other category to keep their opinions about the war to themselves — a pattern found among young men in other analyses of survey cooperation since the war began.
For Putin, then, asking young men to commit their lives to a flagging war effort is risky — not only because it might not bring benefits on the battlefield, but because it is likely to provoke many of those men into outright opposition to the war itself. For the war’s opponents, on the other hand, appealing to young married men looks like the clearest route to stymying Putin’s plans.
Samuel Greene is director of the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis and professor of Russian politics at King’s College London. He can also be found on Twitter and Substack. | 2022-09-21T14:38:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Putin just called up young men to the war. He’s taking a big risk. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/putin-just-called-up-young-men-war-hes-taking-big-risk/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/putin-just-called-up-young-men-war-hes-taking-big-risk/ |
“I pride myself on being consistent,” says Alex Call. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
ATLANTA — Before Monday night’s game between the Washington Nationals and Atlanta Braves, Alex Call walked back into the visitors’ dugout at Truist Park after hitting in the second round of batting practice. Most position players and relievers usually retreat to the clubhouse at this point, leaving coaches and a few starting pitchers to shag flyballs in the outfield.
But Call ran out to left field where he was scheduled to play, going at game speed for every ball hit near him. It’s what he does. Before a game against the Miami Marlins this past weekend, Call leaped at the center field wall and robbed catcher Tres Barrera of a batting practice home run.
“That’s where I get my work in, so I really take that time seriously because I want to be the best outfielder,” Call said. “And going after all the tough ones because you don’t really get a chance to get tough ones much besides in the game, right? So if I can get a few in practice, then I’m just gearing myself up to have much success in this situation. So that’s really important to me.”
Call, 27, is trying to make the most of his chance with the Nationals, who claimed him off waivers Aug. 7 after the Cleveland Guardians designated him for assignment. And recently, Manager Dave Martinez has kept him in the lineup while giving him looks in left and center field.
The extra outfield reps have become just one of the many parts of what Call describes as an “exhaustive” pregame routine. It starts at home with morning worship before Call turns to a virtual reality machine that has a program that allows him to study pitchers and see their release points before he gets to the field.
Once he gets to the ballpark, he’ll eat lunch, go to the weight room and then the batting cage before watching the opposing starting pitcher again (and the opponent’s relievers, too, if it’s the first game of the series). He’ll use arm bands and weighted balls to get his arm loose before batting practice. Finally, he’ll eat dinner and relax with his teammates. He also has a pregame playlist. If there’s anything he missed in his routine, he’ll make sure it gets done before game time.
At home games, Call swings in front of the dugout moments before first pitch. He uses different batting gloves for practice and games, so he uses those waning moments to break them in and establish a grip so he doesn’t waste time before his first at-bat.
Call started this routine this year; he’s had success with it and believes if he stays the course, the results will come. So he tries not to focus on day-to-day results because he believes it inhibits him from being the best version of himself.
“You give yourself the best chance to have success by diving deeper into those routines and focusing on that instead of the outcomes,” Call said. “I pride myself on being consistent. These last few games have been kind of funny, because I’ve had a really good stretch and then not as good of a stretch but that’s just the results. Try not to focus on those.”
Analysis: Why the rebuilding Nationals added outfielder Alex Call
As a waiver claim, Call’s play will be monitored as Washington decides where he fits into the future. Since joining the club on Aug. 14, Call is hitting .232 in 24 games. He went 3-for-23 in his first nine games. Then he showed flashes of potential, like a two-game stretch in early September where he had seven hits including four hits against the St. Louis Cardinals only to go 0-for-18 in his next five games.
But what intrigues the Nationals about Call is his ability to put the ball in play and not chase pitches outside of the zone. Call chases only 24.5 percent of pitches outside of the zone. And he makes contact on 83.7 percent of pitches in the zone, according to FanGraphs.
In the minors in 2019, he struck out 28.6 percent of the time because he couldn’t connect with high fastballs. So that offseason, he bought a Junior Hack Attack pitching machine so he could practice attacking high fastballs. His strikeout rate dropped to 14.4 the next season in the minors in 2021. He’s hitting .265 on fastballs this year, according to Baseball Savant, but has struggled with breaking balls and offspeed — he’s batting .154 and .167 respectively.
If he finds a way to improve those numbers against non-fastballs, he could be a versatile player for the Nationals at least for next year and possibly beyond. Martinez has raved about his energy, saying he plays “like his hair is on fire” and that’s made Call someone that interests him.
“He understands the game and he knows how to play the game, I like that. I just want to give him an opportunity,” Martinez said. “We’re looking for players that can do multiple things. Whether [Call] could play every day here or not, we’re trying to figure that out. But he’s a guy that could possibly do both — play three or four times a week, come off the bench. Play all three outfield positions … so he’s interesting to not only me, but this organization.” | 2022-09-21T14:39:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Alex Call, Nationals outfielder, has an exhaustive pregame routine - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/alex-call-nationals-routine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/alex-call-nationals-routine/ |
“You try to go to the next level in training, and I could feel it was getting difficult. ... Then, I guess, I was also getting more tired, because you have to put more effort into it to be able to sort of believe that it was going to turn around. You start getting too pessimistic. Then I also got a scan back, which wasn’t what I wanted it to be,” Federer explained. “At some point, you sit down and go, ‘OK, we are at an intersection here, at a crossroad, and you have to take a turn. Which way is it?’ I was not willing to go into the direction of: ‘Let’s risk it all.’ I’m not ready for that. I always said that was never my goal.” | 2022-09-21T14:39:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Roger Federer's goodbye will be in doubles, maybe with Nadal - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/tennis/roger-federers-goodbye-will-be-in-doubles-maybe-with-nadal/2022/09/21/00b34af2-39af-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/tennis/roger-federers-goodbye-will-be-in-doubles-maybe-with-nadal/2022/09/21/00b34af2-39af-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html |
The state has moved quickly to increase solar power, but has no way to store it for peak demand hours
By Erica Werner
A solar farm at the University of California at Merced. (Nathan Frandino/Reuters)
LOS ANGELES — As California suffered through an epic heat wave this month, state officials pleaded with residents to conserve electricity. Almost simultaneously, power grid operators were rejecting thousands of megawatts of solar and wind energy that could have provided a cushion to get through the crisis.
The explanation illustrates one of the paradoxes confronting California as it rushes to transition to a clean-energy economy: The state has built up so much renewable energy production in recent years that it can rarely use it all during peak production hours. But it also doesn’t have enough storage capacity to hang onto it for when it might be needed.
“It all comes down to this problem of it’s not how much energy we have, it’s the when and the where the energy is being produced,” said James Bushnell, an economics professor at the University of California at Davis. “Particularly the solar resources — it’s just in the wrong places and at the wrong times.”
Some solar power operators accept curtailment as the cost of doing business, because large plants can soak up more sun later in the day even if they’re overproducing during the sunnier hours. This can benefit consumers, who can see lower rates when solar is running, because it’s generally a cheaper energy source than fossil fuels. Defenders of the system say some inefficiency is to be expected as California embarks on the nation’s most ambitious transition to clean energy, and that eventually there should be enough battery storage to ensure excess power doesn’t go to waste.
But solar and wind generation in California is at this point far ahead of storage capacity, and in some cases isn’t sited near adequate transmission lines. Batteries and transmission lines can be costly to build and find space for, feeding skepticism from the fossil fuel industry about green energy.
The need to use not lose excess power was underscored during the record heat wave that broiled California for 10 straight days earlier this month, busting heat records as temperatures soared well past 100 degrees. Demand for energy spiked as residents hid indoors and jacked up their air conditioners.
State officials pleaded for conservation and issued daily alerts advising Californians to limit their power consumption from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. Officials urged residents to set their thermostats at 78 degrees during those hours and hold off on charging cars or using large appliances.
Despite these efforts, on Sept. 6, the state set a record for power consumption — and came perilously close to imposing targeted blackouts to safeguard the energy grid, something that hasn’t happened in two years. State officials say they avoided blackouts that evening only by blasting an urgently worded emergency text message to residents, who responded by quickly lowering their energy use.
By 5 p.m., with massive consumer demand straining the grid, officials had turned down more than 3,000 megawatts of solar power energy. Customer demand was soaring, but solar production declined as evening fell, and officials no longer had access to that overabundant solar power from earlier in the day. Nevertheless, officials managed to make it through the day without blackouts by turning to other energy sources and blast-texting residents.
Some experts noted that extreme heat waves caused by climate change will only become more frequent, while one of the chosen solutions to climate change — renewable energy, specifically solar — is not always there when we need it.
“The very technology that the state is relying on to reduce carbon emissions, solar power, drops exactly when electricity demand is at its peak,” said Kyle Meng, co-director of the climate and energy program at the University of California at Santa Barbara’s Environmental Markets Solutions Lab. “One of our main remedies for addressing climate change may also be making us more vulnerable to climate change’s impacts.”
“The irony is that the very technology we’re relying on to fight climate change is making us vulnerable exactly at those moments when climate impacts are at their worse.”
The practice of rejecting renewable energy generation is called “curtailment,” and it’s risen swiftly in California in recent years — before dropping off slightly last year — as the state pushes aggressively to add more renewables to its power mix, according to calculations by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In 2020, the California Independent System Operator curtailed some 1.5 million megawatt hours, or 5 percent of its total solar output, according to the EIA; last year the percentage stood closer to 4.2 percent.
Anne F. Gonzales, senior public information officer at the Independent System Operator, explained via email that “it helps to stabilize the grid to clear some of the oversupply off the system.” She added that during the heat wave, Californians were encouraged to precool their homes during the middle of the day — allowing them to benefit from cheap and abundant solar power during daylight hours and set thermostats higher later on.
Even so, grid operators had more solar power on their hands than they could use.
“People get concerned when there’s any curtailment of solar but the reality is we have too much renewables some of the time and not enough at other times,” said Bushnell, of U.C. Davis. “If we had enough storage capacity we could soak up that excess … that’s where everybody hopes this goes.”
Indeed, battery storage has been growing quickly in California, including an enormous facility in Northern California on the site of a former Pacific Gas and Electric power plant. Overall capacity doubled last year and is projected to keep growing rapidly, helped by tax credits included in the recent federal Inflation Reduction Act. Batteries kicked in during the heat wave, with state officials praising their performance.
Industry experts expect that the amount of available storage — or potentially other uses for excess energy — will eventually grow to the point where curtailment happens on a much smaller scale, or not at all. They note that California is undergoing a rapid energy transition, moving from heavy reliance on fossil fuels including coal just a decade ago, to a grid that is supposed to be comprised of 100 percent clean energy by 2045. The grid of the future is being built in real time, with inefficiencies and perverse incentives still being ironed out.
“I think of curtailment as a something that is a leading indicator for how you’re going to be adding more storage,” said Alex Morris, executive director of the California Energy Storage Alliance, an industry group. “In California you see increasing amounts of storage every year absorbing and positioning themselves to capture extra energy.”
Another possible solution to the oversupply of renewables would be a mass shifting of consumer demand, so that residents use power in the middle of the day instead of the afternoon or night, said Severin Borenstein, faculty director of the Energy Institute at Haas business school at the University of California at Berkeley. That’s been discussed by policymakers but would require cooperation from utilities to redesign rate structures.
In Texas, where wind energy is curtailed in massive quantities, many of the same questions have arisen around the practice. Some are asking how excess energy could be used on-site at wind or solar plants, obviating the need for transmission somewhere else. Bitcoin mining and mobile data labs have been put forward as possible candidates to soak up excess power. | 2022-09-21T14:39:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | California is awash in renewable energy — except when it’s most needed - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/09/21/california-is-awash-renewable-energy-except-when-its-most-needed/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/09/21/california-is-awash-renewable-energy-except-when-its-most-needed/ |
A man walks past a large banner reading 'The task will be executed' placed on the facade of a building in downtown Moscow, Russia. (Maxim Shipenkov/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “partial mobilization” of reservists as his country faces setbacks in its invasion of Ukraine. The move, announced in an address to his nation on Wednesday, marks Russia’s first military mobilization since World War II.
The order was swiftly condemned by U.S. and European officials and comes as the Kremlin faces a significant manpower problem and major setbacks as part of what it calls its “special military operation,” amid a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive around Kharkiv. Here’s what to know about Putin’s order and what it means for Russia and the war in Ukraine.
Partial mobilization is a term for when specific groups of people will be called up to serve in Russia’s armed forces. It is different from a general mobilization, which involves drafting from the general population, refocusing the entire economy and essentially setting the entire country on a warpath, hitting a pause on normalcy.
How many Russian reservists will be called up by Putin?
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Wednesday following Putin’s address that Russia would call as many as 300,000 reservists to military service. Russians have reportedly already begun to receive summons to appear for military service.
Shoigu said that the country’s “mobilization resource amounts to 25 million people and a little more than 1% of this number falls under partial mobilization” ordered by Putin.
If true, this is a significant increase: Russia is believed to have invaded Ukraine with around 150,000 troops in late February — so another 300,000 is more than double that. While it’s unclear how exactly the reservists would be deployed, Putin’s move comes after reports of heavy troop losses in Ukraine. It would be the first military mobilization in the history of modern Russia.
Outside estimates of number of reservists available to Russian military leaders vary. The Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based think tank that closely tracks the war, previously said Russia has over 2 million reservists, including former conscripts and contract soldiers. However, “few are actively trained or prepared for war,” ISW said. Only about 10 percent of them receive ongoing training after they complete their basic military service, it added.
Under Putin’s “partial mobilization,” several groups of people are entitled to avoid being called up: students, parents with four or more small children, people essential to crucial industry operations and care givers, among others.
How significant is Putin’s partial mobilization?
Rob Lee, a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program, characterized Wednesday’s announcement as “one of the most significant/riskiest political decisions Putin has ever made.”
In the short term, Lee wrote on Twitter, the partial mobilization of reservists and new measures to forcibly extend the contracts of volunteers currently serving in Ukraine “could be enough to prevent a collapse of Russian forces. Otherwise, Russia’s manpower issues could have become catastrophic this winter when many short-term volunteers likely would not sign another contract.”
“But the war will now increasingly be fought on the Russian side by people who do not want to be there,” Lee added, likely fueling a lack of morale and unit cohesion among Russian forces.
Reserves are essential components to many countries’ war efforts. For example, nearly half the U.S. service members deployed to both Afghanistan and Iraq over the past 20 years reportedly came from the National Guard and Reserves and took about 18 percent of the casualties.
Why would Russia need a partial mobilization?
Moscow is facing a significant manpower problem, despite recent recruitment efforts, including enlisting prisoners and sending volunteers to the front line with little training, analysts said. “[Vladimir] Putin likely hopes to improve Russian force generation capabilities by calling on the Russian people to volunteer for a war to ‘defend’ newly claimed Russian territory,” the Institute for the Study of War, a U.S. think tank that closely tracks the conflict, said of the annexation plans.
Shoigu said on Wednesday that Moscow has lost 5,937 soldiers in the war in Ukraine — the first official figure on sustained casualties Russia has given since the end of March, when its Defense Ministry claimed 1,351 soldiers had died. Shoigu’s speech, coming on the heels of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “partial mobilization” of Russian troops, highlights an apparent contradiction between the relatively low casualty count claimed by the Kremlin and its moves to call up reservists.
Western intelligence estimates the Russian death toll to be far higher. “There’s no perfect number,” CIA Director William J. Burns told the Aspen Security Forum in July. “I think the latest estimates from the U.S. intelligence community would be … something in the vicinity of 15,000 killed and maybe three times that wounded, so a quite significant set of losses.”
Colin Kahl, U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, said last month that “the Russians have probably taken 70 or 80,000 casualties in less than six months,” a number that includes soldiers who were killed and wounded in combat. “That number might be a little lower, a little higher, but I think that’s kind of in the ballpark, which is pretty remarkable considering that the Russians have achieved none of Vladimir Putin’s objectives at the beginning of the war,” Kahl said.
Who within Russia will be called up to serve?
According to Putin and Shoigu, the mobilization will affect Russians who served in the military and are now listed as reservists as well as those who have military occupations, which could include medical workers and various technical specialists. “Only citizens who are currently in the reserve and, above all, those who served in the Armed Forces, have certain military specialties and relevant experience, will be subject to conscription for military service,” Putin said Wednesday, adding that they will receive “additional military training.”
Russian law experts note that the 300,000 people cap announced by Shoigu can be revised up if necessary as the decree issued by the Kremlin is broad — likely on purpose, to allow for reinterpretation.
In a move likely to inflame tensions within Russian society, the head of the Russian parliament’s defense committee, Andrei Kartapolov said the geographic distribution of reservists would be based on population size, meaning that the most populated regions of the country, including the capital, Moscow, would have to send the highest number of soldiers. “Each [region] of the Russian Federation receives a distribution order based on its capabilities,” Kartapolov said Wednesday.
How long will soldiers have to serve under partial mobilization?
The Kremlin did not specify Wednesday how long reservists called up under the new partial mobilization would have to serve — and the presidential decree is light on details. “The decree does not give any details of mobilization and is formulated as broadly as possible, so the President leaves it at the discretion of the Defense Minister,” Pavel Chikov, a lawyer who leads the Agora International Human Rights Group, wrote on Telegram.
Putin’s decree also automatically prolongs existing soldiers’ contracts “until the end of the period of mobilization,” barring them from leaving the front lines indefinitely. This would potentially affect thousands of men who already signed short-term contracts as part of a nationwide recruitment campaign largely viewed as “shadow mobilization” that sought to replenish losses over the summer without officially acknowledging that the operation requires a wider effort.
How will the partial mobilization work?
Chikov, the human-rights lawyer, said the process will start with reservists receiving their mobilization orders. This has already started happening, according to those on the ground: Four people in different Russian cities told The Washington Post they have either received the summons or saw officers hand them to their colleagues or relatives. They requested anonymity to speak freely.
“These are men who have served in the army and have signed a contract to stay in the reserve,” Chikov said, adding that the next wave of orders will affect reservists falling into three categories depending on their age and rank.
According to Chikov, the Ministry of Defense will form quotas for mobilization for each of the 85 regions of Russia and officials there will be responsible for implementing the quotas. Last week, several regions backed a proposal from the head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, to “self-mobilize” by pledging to send volunteer units with 1,000 soldiers to war.
How did Russians react to the partial mobilization announcement?
Rumors of a military mobilization first spread in Russia in February and March — in the early stages of what the Kremlin continues to call its “special military operation” in Ukraine — and led to a mass exodus of Russians, who fled to nearby Turkey, Georgia and Armenia.
Following Putin’s address on Wednesday, Russian airfare aggregators reported that all direct flights from Moscow to the few visa-free destinations still available to Russians had sold out within minutes. Much of the discussion on Russian social media revolved around possible ways to flee the country.
Some Russians seeking to avoid being called up will find other countries’ borders shut to them: On Wednesday, the foreign minister of Latvia, a member of the European Union that shares a land border with Russia, said his country “will not issue humanitarian or other types of visas to those Russian citizens who avoid mobilization,” citing security concerns.
Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics also said Latvia will press forward with restrictions on border crossings for most Russian nationals with Schengen visas, which the country announced earlier this month along with fellow Baltic nations Estonia and Lithuania.
The European Union has already banned Russian flights from E.U. airspace and recently agreed to suspend a visa facilitation accord with Russia, making it more difficult and expensive for Russian tourists to get visas.
It’s not immediately clear whether Russia’s own border will be shut for all potentially eligible Russians or just to those who already received summons. The Kremlin on Wednesday afternoon declined to comment on that, only saying that “clarifications will be available later.”
Emily Rauhala, Beatriz Ríos and Rachel Pannett contributed to this report. | 2022-09-21T14:39:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What does Putin’s partial military mobilization mean for Russia and Ukraine? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/21/russia-partial-mobilization-putin-war-ukraine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/21/russia-partial-mobilization-putin-war-ukraine/ |
Hi Jules: How do you deal with friends or family who don’t understand the allure of being a content creator? I’m in the Midwest and my friend group doesn’t really participate in online culture at all — just sports and Netflix. I’m trying to become a full-time creator, and they talk to me as if I’m just trying to become famous at all costs. Is this just a part of growing up and moving onto the next chapter of my life?
— Mat
Mat: For younger generations, internet careers are embraced as a growing piece of the economy. For older generations, internet careers tend to remain ostracized because their cultural use of social media platforms is just different.
With that being said, your family probably just wants what’s best for you.
Have a question for Jules about life online? Submit it here.
On the other hand, your friends have different interests — which is fine. Because they consume other types of media, they may not understand the countless ways in which someone can show up as a creator online. Yes, many are entertainers, but many are also educators, reporters, etc.
My question to you is, do you know what type of creator you want to be?
Just saying you want to be a YouTuber, TikToker, podcaster or whatever it may be isn’t saying much. If you cannot dig deeper and present a concrete vision of what value you want to bring to the internet, I understand why your friends and family would look at your desire as a fame grab.
If you haven’t found what makes you tick, prioritize using your time online as a way to spark curiosity and exploration to uncover it. A wide range of traditional career titles can still be applied to many creators today — whether that be artists, researchers, real estate agents, financial advisers, you name it — they’re just digitizing their journey.
If or when you find that thing, don’t look at being a creator as all-encompassing or a means to an end. Look at being a creator as a way to make connections that eventually get you into your ideal spaces and industries. If that ends in being able to be a full-time creator, well, awesome.
In the meantime, bring yourself to compromise with your friends and family by having a part-time or full-time job that supports you financially while you build your portfolio of content on the side. Prove that there is a demand for what you create and that it leads to livable financial opportunity.
If your friends and family are still critical after you achieve those things — you’re simply coming into your own.
Loved ones tend to assume they understand all facets of you, but in reality, the only person who truly does is you. Some relationships are better off compartmentalized where they best suit your life. Luckily, the internet is bound to help you make new connections and friends within this path.
As long as you prove the viability of this decision to yourself, you do not need approval. | 2022-09-21T15:24:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ask Jules: I want to be a content creator. No one takes me seriously. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/09/21/ask-jules-terpak-content-creator-friends-family/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/09/21/ask-jules-terpak-content-creator-friends-family/ |
Family of Utah boy injured in fall sues Little League, bunk-bed maker
Easton Oliverson's photo was displayed on the scoreboard at Volunteer Stadium during the Opening Ceremonies of the Little League World Series Aug. 17. (Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press File)
The family of a Utah boy who suffered fractures of his skull and cheekbone when he fell roughly six feet from a bunk bed onto a hard floor two days before Little League World Series games began is suing Little League Baseball and the manufacturer of the bed.
Easton Oliverson, 12, of Saint George, Utah, also had bleeding on the brain from the Aug. 15 fall in a dormitory for players competing in the Williamsport, Pa., tournament. Since then, the outfielder/pitcher for the Snow Canyon Little League team from Santa Clara, Utah, has had multiple surgeries and has been treated for a staph infection, according to his family’s Instagram postings.
“He’s not doing well. The more recent development, after a third craniotomy, is seizures. It’s been a long road,” Ken Fulginiti, the attorney representing the family, told the Associated Press.
Fulginiti and Little League did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Oliverson returned home Monday, and his family wrote on Instagram that he is “resting and adjusting to his recovery away from the hospital. Please continue to keep Easton in your prayers. He is thrilled to be home, but understands that he still has a very long road ahead. It’s not going to be easy, but we have faith that his prayer army will continue to carry him through.”
Nancy and Jace Oliverson, the boy’s parents, are seeking at least $50,000 in damages on a count of negligence and at least another $50,000 on a count of strict liability, according to KSL.com, which obtained a copy of the lawsuit, filed Friday in Philadelphia County’s Court of Common Pleas.
The suit, which names Little League Baseball, Inc., and John Savoy & Son, doing business as Savoy Contract Furniture, alleges that Little League “failed to equip the upper bunks with rails to protect its occupants, causing Easton Oliverson to fall” and that the furniture company “sold dangerous and defective bunk beds,” Penn Live reported.
The lawsuit reportedly adds that the boy “has suffered in the past and will continue to suffer in the future, aches, pains, trauma, contusions, humiliation, embarrassment, suffering, disfigurement, and/or inconvenience.” It also reportedly states that he “will require in the future medical treatment for his injuries, which has caused his [family] to incur medical bills currently outstanding and owed, with the necessity of additional treatment and bills in the future.”
Kevin Fountain, senior director of communications at Little League International, told Penn Live that “It is Little League International’s policy not to comment on pending litigation.”
The Snow Canyon team became the first from Utah to advance to the Little League World Series. It was eliminated when it lost its first two games. | 2022-09-21T15:54:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Family of Easton Oliverson sues Little League after fall in Williamsport - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/little-league-world-series-lawsuit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/little-league-world-series-lawsuit/ |
Hokies, behind surging defense, seek redemption vs. WVU on short rest
Virginia Tech takes on West Virginia at 7:30 p.m. Eastern on Thursday (ESPN)
Virginia Tech linebacker Dax Hollifield (4), a fifth-year senior, has been an anchor for the ACC's top-ranked defense. (Matt Gentry/The Roanoke Times/AP)
The relatively muted celebration following Virginia Tech’s most recent victory had all but concluded late Saturday afternoon when Hokies first-year football coach Brent Pry and his staff turned their attention in earnest to the next opponent a bit earlier than usual.
With four days in between games, preparation for West Virginia took on elevated urgency not only because of the quick turnaround but also in light of a crack at redemption in a heated border rivalry and the buzz of a nationally televised night showdown in Blacksburg, Va.
Keeping players laser focused on the game plan while also allowing for rest and recovery on a short week has meant reducing the amount of practice time and in certain instances the intensity of drills.
“That’s the culture you create all the way back on Day One,” Pry said. “It’s us. It’s about when they come through the doors to this facility, what we expect, where the attention is. That’s the staff doing a great job, having our thoughts and our process being ingrained in these guys …
“There’s a task at hand in everything we do, and keeping those guys understanding it’s what we do Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday that will take care of Thursday, and I think they’re in a good place with that. We’ve had good preparation, and I credit that to the maturity of the football team.”
Heightened enthusiasm for what’s expected to be another raucous atmosphere at Lane Stadium on Thursday night comes in part from a swarming defense ranked first in the ACC (201 yards per game), more than 80 yards in front of second-place Miami after three games.
The Hokies also are in a three-way tie for first in scoring defense (12.3).
“I’d say the reason we’re playing so well is how we practice and how we go to work every day,” said Virginia Tech linebacker Dax Hollifield, a fifth-year senior. “We try to make practice simulate games Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. That’s where it shows up, I think, in how hard we work.”
In a 27-7 win against Wofford of the Football Championship Subdivision this past weekend, the Hokies did not surrender a point until 9:34 left in the fourth quarter and yielded 199 yards of total offense. They permitted the Terriers, who were 3 of 11 on third down, to cross midfield one time.
A 20-0 halftime lead allowed Pry to substitute liberally in the fourth quarter, providing valuable in-game experience to a host of reserves with one of the country’s most potent offenses next on the schedule.
West Virginia (1-2), coming off a 65-7 win against FCS Towson last weekend at Milan Puskar Stadium, enters the latest installment of the Black Diamond Trophy rivalry ranked third in the Big 12 in total offense (509.7) and fourth in scoring (46.0).
The lopsided margin against Wofford also afforded Pry an opening to relinquish some defensive play-calling duties in the later stages to first-year defensive coordinator Chris Marve, who was the defensive run game coordinator and linebackers coach at Florida State for the past two seasons.
“Chris called some of those series toward the end of the game,” Pry said. “I thought it was a great opportunity to do that. We talked about it ahead of time. Looking back I don’t know if it was really fair. We were rolling a bunch of guys in and giving some guys an opportunity to get better, and that’s where he got his play-calling in, so I think did him a disservice.”
Pry offered that assessment with a hint of sarcasm, but having Marve more involved with decisions on game days has been part of the plan since the head coach suggested before the start of the season there may come a time this year when he feels comfortable ceding defensive play-calling responsibilities all together.
Regardless of who’s in charge of the alignments, the defensive coaching staff has counted on seasoned starters such as Hollifield and redshirt senior defensive end TyJuan Garbutt, among others, to lead the charge in the front seven.
Pressuring the quarterback has been a major area of improvement from last year, when Virginia Tech recorded 25 sacks in 13 games. It already has nine this season, tied for second in the conference.
The back end has been stout as well behind safeties Chamarri Connor and Nasir Peoples and cornerback Armani Chatman, all redshirt seniors. Dorian Strong, the other starter at corner, is a junior.
Last year the defense stiffened in the second half against the Mountaineers, and Virginia Tech had possession on first-and-goal at the 3 late in the fourth quarter, trailing by six on the road. But the Hokies were unable to punch it in four straight times and turned the ball over on downs with 45 seconds left.
“There’s always going to be a bad taste because we lost the trophy,” Strong said. “The last staff did a good job of emphasizing how important that trophy was, and [assistant] coach J.C. Price has always emphasized how big that trophy is. He’s emphasized this has been a big-time rivalry for how long, so shoot, we’ve got to come out here, play hard to get our trophy back.”
Hokies, behind surging defense, seeks redemption vs. WVU on short rest | 2022-09-21T15:54:50Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Virginia Tech has little time to get ready for West Virginia - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/virginia-tech-west-virginia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/virginia-tech-west-virginia/ |
The Washington Post’s books section starts its new chapter, in print every Sunday and with a refurbished and revitalized presence online
(Zack Rosebrugh/Illustration for The Washington Post)
Welcome (back) to Book World.
Starting this week, we begin something new and revive something beloved. I’m thrilled to say that Book World returns in print after a long hiatus. In 2009, the print edition closed, and books coverage appeared in separate sections, Outlook and Style. We are now reuniting our books staff to produce enhanced online coverage all week and a print edition on Sundays.
This means much more than just the reunion of The Washington Post’s various reviews under one umbrella. The section’s rebirth brings with it a renewed and expanding sense of what our books coverage can and should be.
We will continue to stress books about politics, power and their effects on the lives of everyday people for The Post’s uniquely positioned, globally interested audience. We’ll have original arguments stemming from consideration of books about the forces fueling our tumultuous times, from disinformation and climate change to technological revolutions and reckonings with history. In fiction, we’ll showcase a diverse roster of strong and stylish critics, delve more often into the lives and minds of writers, and engage with the many arguments that are rooted in what and how we read. We’ll help you find (and decide on) everything: bestsellers, obscure gems, prize winners, disappointments and the rest, from here and around the world.
You’ll find us more often on social media, where we’ll ask you more frequently about what you’re reading and thinking. We’ll also keep an eye on older books — those that are newly relevant and those that are timelessly interesting or delightful — knowing that readers want to find great books from wherever and whenever they can.
Book World’s first editor was William McPherson, who was at the helm from 1972 until 1978. He became an acclaimed novelist and was among several Pulitzer Prize-winning critics Book World has nurtured. Others include Jonathan Yardley, who won his Pulitzer before coming to The Post, and Michael Dirda, who remains a vital contributor to our pages as we relaunch. The reviews of our invaluable critic Ron Charles will now run in print on Sundays, and his popular Book Club newsletter (sign up here if you haven’t already) will still go out by email every Friday morning.
Marie Arana, the last editor to oversee the stand-alone Book World section, is the author of several acclaimed books and a true literary ambassador: the first literary director of the Library of Congress and the former director of the National Book Festival, among other influential roles. I want to thank McPherson and Arana and the other editors whose work challenges us to aim high as we reimagine Book World for a new audience.
On the 25th anniversary of Book World, Yardley wrote that McPherson “understood that this section must be many things to many people.” And that remains true. Books encompass everything under the sun, and we will treat them with the broad curiosity that they (and their readers) deserve. We welcome your comments and suggestions as we embark on this new, and also storied, venture with you. You can reach us at bookworld@washpost.com. Thanks for reading.
— John Williams, books editor | 2022-09-21T16:07:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Reintroducing Book World - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/09/21/book-world-returns/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/09/21/book-world-returns/ |
Analysis by Golnar Motevalli | Bloomberg
The death of a young woman in police custody after she was detained for violating Iran’s strict dress code has sparked violent protests across the country. It’s the biggest popular challenge to religious rules imposed on women since the 1979 revolution. The case has focused anger on the so-called Guidance Patrol -- officers who target women they deem to be improperly dressed in public. These “morality police” units have long been highly unpopular, but the protests are the first major rebuke of their actions. That doesn’t mean the establishment is about to be swept aside. Iran’s security forces retain a strong grip on the country as they seek to protect the clerical establishment.
1. What provoked the protests?
The immediate trigger was the death in police custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, which was announced on Sept. 16. According to state media, she’d traveled from the western province of Kurdistan with family to Tehran, where a Guidance Patrol team detained her in a park claiming she was inappropriately dressed. Her brother’s pleas for just a warning were brushed aside and Amini was forced into a minivan and taken to a police station, according to an account in the reformist Shargh newspaper. After news of her death emerged, Iranian state TV released CCTV footage of Amini collapsing over a chair and onto the floor. Tehran’s police force said she suffered “heart failure.” Her family accused authorities of beating her and covering it up, saying she had no underlying health conditions.
2. How deep is the anger?
Large protests have been reported in cities across Iran. Celebrities, politicians and athletes condemned the police on social media, also criticizing the Guidance Patrols. Young women have removed and, in some cases, burned their head scarves to show solidarity with Amini. The unrest is tapping into broader frustration with Iran’s hardline rulers over the state of the heavily sanctioned economy, entrenched corruption and social restrictions. Footage of the protests on social media has shown demonstrators beating back security forces. None of the videos can be verified by Bloomberg.
3. What are protesters demanding?
They want laws imposing mandatory hejab (the term used in Islam to describe modest dress) for all females from the age of nine to be overturned, or for the code to be discretionary. The rules stipulate a “chador” -- a black cloak that envelopes the body from head to toe -- or long, loose-fitting overcoats and tightly tied head scarves. The laws came into effect after the 1979 revolution when exiled cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran, deposing the pro-Western Shah. They became immediately unpopular among the country’s educated middle class and divided female activists who had fought for the revolution. Over the years, women have gradually pushed the boundaries of what’s permissible. Loose shawls and robes, often open and worn with leggings, are common attire in most cities and similar to what Amini was wearing when she was detained.
4. Are these the first protests against hejab laws?
Opposition to the dress code has been a feature of the country’s tightly controlled civil society ever since the revolution, but dissent has grown louder since late 2017 when a number of women were photographed standing on public electrical cabinets and benches in Tehran, holding their head scarves aloft. They were all arrested and some were seen being aggressively pushed to the ground by police. In August, a woman named Sepideh Rashno was arrested and forced to make a confession on state TV after being filmed arguing with a religious, chador-clad individual who’d been harassing another young woman over her attire. Rashno’s face showed clear signs of bruises and swelling.
5. How have authorities responded?
The default response of Iran’s security forces is to break up unapproved gatherings, deeming them illegal. When participant numbers swell, riot police are normally deployed to disperse crowds using batons or by firing shotgun pellets and tear gas. Plainclothed, voluntary militias also attack protesters and often film them to help with later arrests. But with the Amini protests, it’s been a bit different. The head of Iran’s parliament (a hardliner and former police commander accused of beating protesters in the late 1990s) announced reforms to the Guidance Patrol laws and President Ebrahim Raisi promised Amini’s parents an investigation.
6. What were previous protests about?
The biggest domestic challenge to the government came in 2009 from the so-called Green Movement, sparked by allegations of fraud in the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Demonstrations focused largely on political issues and attracted millions of middle-class Iranians in Tehran. The state reacted swiftly to quash dissent, with dozens killed, hundreds arrested and web access significantly impeded. But protests continue to flare and be put down:
• IN MAY 2022, demonstrations erupted in southwest Iran after the collapse of a 10-story building, poorly constructed and commissioned by a government official, killed at least 40 people.
• IN JANUARY 2020, Iranian security forces mistakenly shot down a passenger jet, killing the 176 people on board, sparking protests. Public anger was fueled by the incompetence of the security establishment and efforts to hide the state’s culpability for days.
• IN NOVEMBER 2019, protests were sparked by a sharp and sudden increase in the price of gasoline ordered by the government, which subsidizes the fuel. Iranians were already being squeezed by US sanctions, imposed the year before by then-President Donald Trump. Security forces responded with deadly force.
• IN LATE 2017, Iranians took to the streets to express frustration with economic insecurity in protests that expanded to include opposition to the regime.
• In the oil-rich, southwestern province of Khuzestan, which has a large population of Arabs, a minority in mostly Persian Iran, protests against corruption and poverty are common, prompting a crackdown by security forces.
7. What’s the state of the opposition in Iran?
There is no legitimate, organized opposition inside Iran. People criticize the leadership privately, but such views are rarely reflected in the country’s tightly regulated media. The only political factions that can function are those that support the core values of the Islamic Republic. Secularists, communists and groups that promote religions other than Islam are effectively banned. Iranian politicians fall roughly into three categories: ultra-conservatives such as Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, moderate or pragmatic conservatives like former President Hassan Rouhani or Ali Larijani, and reformists like former President Mohammad Khatami. The reformists believe that the political system should be open to improvement, but their popularity and influence has declined since the US abandoned the 2015 nuclear deal four years ago and reimposed sanctions.
8. What protects the current system?
Khamenei has built a strong relationship with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the largest and most powerful wing of Iran’s military, which has helped fortify his position. Khamenei is the ultimate authority behind all major decisions of the state, including economic and foreign policy, and he’s also the de facto head of several large religious foundations that run some of the country’s biggest conglomerates and pension funds. It’s this consolidation of military power and economic influence that has helped the Islamic Republic, in its current manifestation, to maintain an iron grip on politics. All of Iran’s major state institutions, from the state broadcaster (which has a complete monopoly on broadcast services) to the judiciary, are managed by people close to the Supreme Leader or are politically aligned with him. Since last year’s election of Raisi, all levers of Iran’s state and government have been under the control of hardliners who fiercely defend the centrality of their Islamic ideology and the use of the Guidance Patrols has increased. | 2022-09-21T16:08:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why a Woman’s Death in Iran Has Ignited New Protests - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-a-womans-death-in-iran-has-ignited-new-protests/2022/09/21/f12808b0-39b9-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-a-womans-death-in-iran-has-ignited-new-protests/2022/09/21/f12808b0-39b9-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html |
Dozens of records smashed in Midwest during late September heat wave
Temperatures rose above the century mark, smashing records in the latest heat wave of a hot summer.
Forecast highs on Wednesday from the National Weather Service. Boxed values are records. (WeatherBell)
Dozens of high-temperature records were set in Midwestern cities on Monday and Tuesday — and several more records are set to fall over the next few days as the heat slowly relaxes in the Midwest and pushes deeper into the Southeast.
A sprawling zone of high pressure often referred to as a “heat dome,” formed over the Midwest, entrenching the region in days of persistent hot and dry conditions. Temperatures reached 100 degrees from Arkansas to Nebraska.
The science of heat domes and how drought and climate change make them worse
On Monday, temperatures in Wichita climbed to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, tying a record set in 1997. In Salina, Kansas, temperatures climbed to a midsummer-like 102, tying a record set all the way back in 1931.
In Joplin, Mo., the mercury climbed to 97 degrees on Monday, breaking the old record high temperature of 96 degrees set in 1952. In nearby Columbia, temperatures rose to 97 degrees, smashing the former record of 94 set in 2000.
Further west in Paducah, Ky., a daily high temperature of 97 on Monday tied a record set in 1954. More northward toward Rapid City, the temperature rose to an unseasonable 95 degrees, breaking the old record of 93 degrees, which was set in 1984.
The late September heat wave fueling these highs is the latest in what has been a warm summer in the United States, the Northern Hemisphere and worldwide. Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) indicates that meteorological summer — which runs from June 1 to Aug. 31 — tied for the fifth warmest worldwide in 143 years of records, and the Northern Hemisphere experienced its second-warmest summer on record. Overall, the United States saw its third-warmest summer in 128 years of record-keeping. Last year was the hottest summer on record, narrowly edging out the 1936 Dust Bowl Summer, according to NOAA.
The hottest record-breaking temperature of the day was set at Russell Airport in Russell, Kansas, where temperatures climbed to 103 degrees.
The heat wave continued in earnest on Tuesday, and record-breaking temperatures were reported across a much wider area.
With the heat pushing further into the Southeast, Nashville saw temperatures climb to 99 degrees, breaking a nearly century-old record of 97 degrees from 1925. In Topeka, the mercury reached the century mark, with a record daily high temperature of 100 degrees beating a 98-degree reading from 1944.
In Concordia, Kansas, a high of 102 degrees smashed the old daily record of 96, which was set all the way back in 1893. Temperatures in Lincoln, Neb., also rose past the 100-degree mark to 103, smashing the former daily record high of 96 degrees set in 2006.
Yes, it was hot! Numerous locations met or exceeded record high temperatures for September 20th. The hottest temperature at official observing stations occurred at Lincoln, with 103 degrees. The warmest unofficial temperature was 105 at Cedar Bluffs, NE. #newx #iawx pic.twitter.com/Dca0uAWyqX
— NWS Omaha (@NWSOmaha) September 21, 2022
Paducah saw its daily temperature rise to 100 degrees, the latest occurrence of a temperature at or above the century mark in the city’s recorded history. The same was true in Memphis.
As far west as Colorado Springs, temperatures climbed to 91 degrees, breaking the old daily high-temperature record of 90, which was set back in 1956. In Idaho Falls, the temperature rose to a comparatively mild 86 degrees Fahrenheit, breaking the old record of 83 set in 1966.
The heat will continue on Wednesday, with several daily high-temperature records set to be challenged or beaten from Texas to Kentucky. In Dallas, the temperature is forecast to rise to 99, tying a record from 2005, while Memphis’s forecast temperature of 102 is expected to smash a record of 98 degrees set in 2010.
As far east as the Appalachian Mountains, a record-high temperature of 86 degrees in Bryson City, Tenn. is expected to fall as temperatures are forecast to climb to 92.
High minimum temperature records could fall as well, meaning temperatures will stay unseasonably warm overnight. In St. Louis, the forecast low is a balmy 76 degrees, 1 degree warmer than the previous record high minimum temperature of 75, set back in 2017.
By Thursday, a cold front pushing through the Midwest will bring some much-needed relief from the heat, dropping temperatures down into the 50s and 60s in spots that had seen 100-degree readings days earlier. Coincidentally, the cool air will displacing the heat just as the fall equinox occurs at 9:03 p.m. Eastern that night.
However, the Southeast will hang on to summer a little longer. On Thursday, several records may fall in the Texas Gulf Coast and into the Carolinas, and by Friday several daily high-temperature records may be in jeopardy in Florida.
[5:45AM] THREAD:🚨🌡️Another triple digit heat index day expected across the TN Valley! 🌡️🚨
High temperatures expected to reach the mid to upper 90s today with heat indices of 97-104 degrees! pic.twitter.com/MQpA1dC2tq
Even if temperatures are not record-breaking everywhere, the abnormal heat scorching the Midwest and Southeast is certainly unseasonable, with temperatures generally climbing 10 to 20 degrees above their daily average.
In Lincoln, where temperatures rose to 103 degrees on Tuesday, the average daily temperature is 79 degrees, meaning Tuesday’s temperature rose 24 degrees above normal. In Memphis, where temperatures are set to climb to 102 degrees on Wednesday, the daily average temperature is 85 degrees. | 2022-09-21T16:08:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Dozens of heat records smashed in Midwest during late September heatwave - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/21/heatwave-midwest-temperature-records-climate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/21/heatwave-midwest-temperature-records-climate/ |
Former Minneapolis officer sentenced on manslaughter charge for Floyd’s death
By Holly Bailey
FILE - This image provided by the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office shows former Minneapolis police officer Thomas Lane, who previously pleaded guilty to a state charge of aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter in the killing of George Floyd (AP)
A former Minneapolis police officer who held George Floyd’s legs as he begged for breath beneath Derek Chauvin’s knee was sentenced to three years in prison on a state charge of aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter.
Thomas K. Lane is already serving a 2 ½ year federal sentence for violating Floyd’s civil rights during the fatal May 2020 arrest. He pled guilty in May to a state charge in Floyd’s death as part of a plea deal to avoid a second trial over Floyd’s killing.
As part of the plea deal, state prosecutors dropped a charge of aiding and abetting second-degree murder against Lane in the case and agreed to allow him to serve his state sentence at the same as his federal sentence.
Prosecutors had recommended three years in prison for Lane in the state case – a recommendation below Minnesota sentencing guidelines. On Wednesday, Hennepin County District Court Judge Peter A. Cahill, who has overseen the legal proceedings over the state charges related to Floyd’s death, formally agreed to the plea deal.
Lane, 39, appeared at the virtual hearing from the Federal Correction Institution Englewood, a low-security federal prison camp in Littleton, Colo., where he began serving his federal sentence on Aug. 30.
The former officer, who appeared on screen from a conference room and wore what appeared to be khaki jumpsuit, was given an opportunity to address the court before his sentencing, but like his July sentencing hearing in the federal case, he declined.
In an affidavit signed in May as part of the plea agreement, Lane admitted responsibility for his role in Floyd’s death. “I now make no claim that I am innocent,” the plea agreement, signed by Lane, reads.
Earl Gray, Lane’s attorney, said in a July interview that his client, whose wife recently gave birth to their first child, pleaded guilty to avoid the risk of a longer prison sentence because he “wanted to be a part of his child’s life.”
During the hearing, Cahill told Lane he agreed to a lower sentence because of his “lesser role in the offense” and his “acceptance of responsibility” in Floyd’s death. Cahill banned the former officer from owning firearms or ammunition for the rest of his life and said he must register as a “predatory offender, if required by law."
“I think it was a very wise decision for you to accept responsibility and move on with your life,” Cahill told Lane.
The former officer gave no visible reaction to Cahill’s statement, but after the judge adjourned the hearing and closed his camera, Lane called out to his attorney, even as the virtual hearing room remained open. “I’ve got to register as a predatory offender? What the f--- is that?” Lane said. “That’s what Chauvin has to do. So if I have a minimal role, why the f--- do I gotta do that? Jesus Christ."
Under Minnesota statute, an individual convicted of murder or aiding and abetting murder is required to register as a “predatory offender” in the state. It was not immediately clear if the statute applied to Lane, who was convicted of aiding and abetting manslaughter.
Gray told his client that he would “look into it.”
A court administrator interrupted to warn Lane and his attorney that the virtual hearing room was still live. Shortly after, proceedings ended.
Lane’s state sentencing is the latest development in the ongoing legal battle over Floyd’s death. His fatal arrest, captured on video by bystanders, sparked worldwide protests and spurred an American reckoning on race and policing that continues more than two years later.
Two other officers who were at the scene – J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao – are scheduled to face trial in Minneapolis next month on state charges of aiding and abetting second-degree murder and manslaughter in Floyd’s killing after they rejected plea deals in the case.
Like Lane, Kueng and Thao were convicted earlier this year of violating Floyd’s federal civil rights by failing to render medical aid as Floyd repeatedly complained of struggling to breathe while restrained facedown on a city street. He was detained for allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill.
Kueng and Thao were also convicted of failing to intervene with Chauvin, 46, who pressed his knees into Floyd’s neck and back for nearly 9 ½ minutes, even as Floyd stopped moving and officers could no longer detect the man’s pulse.
Kueng, 28, who was positioned atop Floyd’s back, was sentenced in July to 36 months in federal prison. Thao, 36, who held back increasingly frantic bystanders who sought to intervene, was sentenced to 42 months in prison.
State prosecutors sought to avoid yet another trial over Floyd’s death. In an Aug. 15 court hearing, prosecutors said they had each offered both Kueng and Thao a plea deal in which they would serve 36 months concurrent with their federal sentences in exchange for pleading guilty to one count of aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter.
But Kueng and Thao, who are appealing their federal convictions, told Cahill they would not accept the plea deals, even as a prosecutor pointed out the presumptive sentences they are facing. If convicted, both men face 150 months in prison for aiding and abetting second-degree murder and 48 months for aiding and abetting manslaughter, and prosecutors have said they will seek an even longer sentence because of Floyd’s suffering.
The hearing was at times contentious – with Cahill, at one point, ordering Thao to directly answer a prosecutor who asked if Thao understood the risks of rejecting a plea deal. Thao told the court that it would be “a lie and a sin” for him to plead guilty to his role in Floyd’s death.
The upcoming proceedings – scheduled to begin with jury selection on Oct. 24 – will be the third trial over Floyd’s killing. Chauvin, 46, pleaded guilty in December to violating Floyd’s civil rights and was sentenced in July to 20 years in federal prison. He is already serving a 22½-year state sentence for Floyd’s murder that he will serve concurrently.
Last month, Chauvin was transferred from a state prison outside the Twin Cities, where he had been held in solitary confinement, to the Federal Correctional Institution in Tucson, Ariz., a medium-security penitentiary where he is expected to remain largely in seclusion.
Members of Floyd’s family did not attend Lane’s sentencing. But Matthew Frank, an assistant Minnesota attorney general and one of the lead prosecutors in the case, read a lengthy written statement from the family that spoke of their continued pain over Floyd’s death and how the repeated trials and lack of “accountability” had only added to their anguish.
“My family never asked for this,” the statement said. “How many more times will me and my family give a victim impact statements?”
The statement added, “We want everyone here today to know we will never move on because there’s no such thing.” | 2022-09-21T16:08:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Thomas Lane sentenced on manslaughter charge for George Floyd’s death - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/21/thomas-lane-george-floyd/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/21/thomas-lane-george-floyd/ |
It’s too soon to judge Trump on missing documents and fake slates
Chris Kise, left, arrives with the rest of Donald Trump's legal team to attend a hearing at the U.S. Courthouse in New York on Tuesday. (Sarah Yenesel/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
My Post colleague Jonathan Capehart asked me this question on Friday’s edition of The Post’s “First Look.” Jonathan was referring to Donald Trump’s three statements in a long broadcast interview with me the day before when the former president said he had declassified everything he took to Mar-a-Lago, that he had done nothing wrong in connection with alternative slates of electors ahead of Jan. 6, and that therefore he would not be indicted.
Jonathan asked me whether I believed Trump on these three points.
I replied that I simply don’t know, because answering that question would require a deep dive into the former president’s intentions as to the declassification order and the slates. There are also a lot of facts not yet in evidence — who took what documents to Mar-a-Lago, when, by whose order, and did Trump have specific knowledge of what was there?
Lawyers who try criminal cases instinctively think twice before hazarding an opinion about whether crimes warranting an indictment have been committed. That’s the right instinct in the documents and slates cases. And, crucially, Trump also told me he hasn’t received a “target letter” from the Justice Department, which makes an indictment in either matter at least for the moment not imminent.
As to the slates of electors, Trump told me he had nothing to do with those. Of course, a question on whether to believe him is one that no one who is not deep inside the FBI investigation can possibly answer. The fabled “presumption of innocence” we rely on in courtrooms is a useful caution for journalists, including opinion journalists. Sometimes we not only don’t know, but also we can’t possibly know.
I’m open to any result. It’s why I’ve urged the Justice Department to move quickly to charge the president on the documents case (if they have a case,) and why the appointment of the special master made sense to me. If the special master, Judge Raymond Dearie — a long-serving and widely respected federal judge with seven years on the highly secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — finds all of the critical documents to be, in fact, classified and appropriately seized from Trump’s home, that’s a crucial new fact.
If the judge orders the return of some, most or all of the papers to the former president, that will factor into reasoned assessments of the wisdom of the Justice Department’s unprecedented search.
On the fake electors case, which is separate from the documents search, some on Trump’s side fear the criminalization of politics and a chilling effect on reasonable efforts in close races to ensure the counts were fair. From the left, activists fear scenarios where “election deniers” refuse to accept defeat.
I don’t. Stacey Abrams’s contention that she won the Georgia gubernatorial election of 2018 didn’t stop Brian Kemp from being sworn in. Far-out theories of what could happen should not unmoor our confidence in the United States’ tried-and-true election procedures.
There is no doubting the sincerity of those worried about democracy, but threats to the rights of the accused are surely still important, especially when the accused hasn’t been charged. It is of some consideration that the uncharged accused is a former president who racked up 74 million votes in the last election and is the leading GOP candidate for the 2024 nomination.
There is a vast array of crimes that pundits and posters assign to Trump. As was the responsible position during the long investigation of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, it is best to reserve judgment until investigations are completed.
Some crimes don’t require an intention to commit the crime. They are crimes of “strict liability,” such as selling liquor to a minor. In such cases, the intention of the criminal has no bearing on the crime.
But for the two categories of alleged crimes I questioned Trump about — the allegedly purloined documents and whether there was a criminal conspiracy to interfere with the election — they would both turn on what the president did and possibly what he intended to do. There is no need to rush to judgment ahead of an indictment, much less a trial. | 2022-09-21T16:09:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | It’s too soon to judge Trump on missing documents and fake slates - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/trump-documents-mar-a-lago/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/trump-documents-mar-a-lago/ |
The difference between DeSantis’s migrant flights and the Biden administration’s
Fox News host Sean Hannity in an undated still image from his TV show.
When Fox News host Sean Hannity took to the airwaves Tuesday night, you could be forgiven for thinking he had some tough words for an official like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) transporting migrants around the country.
“If I went down to the border and I put people in the back of my car, or I transported them to another state, would I not get arrested for human trafficking?” Hannity said. “Isn’t that against the law?”
Hannity, of course, wasn’t talking about the most high-profile recent example of that, which involved DeSantis. Instead he was talking, of course, about President Biden.
The dispute over DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) sending migrants to Democratic areas and whether those migrants were misled into participating has landed, predictably and perhaps inevitably, in whataboutism. In recent days, defenders of DeSantis and Abbott have increasingly cited a supposed incongruity in the criticisms: They note that the Biden administration also flies and transports migrants to other areas of the country.
And that’s true. But just as criticisms of the Biden administration’s supposed “ghost flights” have long been overblown, the comparison between the two situations mismatches in some key ways.
The whataboutism drumbeat has picked up in recent days.
“Republican governors flying illegal aliens to a liberal tourist destinations: Kidnapping!” summarized Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). “Democrats like Joe Biden flying illegal aliens at midnight to your community: Charity, compassion, a chance.”
“You can’t have it both ways,” Rep. Troy E. Nehls (R-Tex.) tweeted Tuesday.
“So, when Biden is flying these people all over the fruited plain in the middle of the night, I didn’t hear a peep out of those people,” DeSantis added earlier Tuesday, as his campaign repeatedly made the same argument on social media.
The criticism of the Biden administration flying migrants around the country has been building for some time. It was spurred on by a Republican candidate for New York governor releasing body-camera footage of a plane carrying more than 100 unaccompanied migrant children landing in Westchester County, N.Y., in August of last year. And it’s an attractive subject for a conservative media echosystem which often plays up border issues close to an election.
But the criticisms often skirt over the fact that these flights carry children — and that’s important. In fact, the government by law cannot hold unaccompanied minors in border facilities for more than 72 hours, and they must be cared for while they are transported to relatives, sponsors or shelters.
“Our legal responsibility is to care for unaccompanied children while they are on our watch, and that includes connecting them to vetted sponsors,” Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Jorge Silva told The Washington Post’s Fact Checker back in February.
That law isn’t new, meaning such flights occurred under the Trump administration too — without the backlash from Trump’s partisans. Reports from 2018 cited flights of migrant children to New York and other places. At one point in 2019, the Trump administration sought a private contractor who could transport 225,000 migrants across the country to temporary shelters, because of overcrowding at the border. A top ICE official clarified to Fox News at the time that such transports had already been taking place.
(Critics have also cited the early-morning hours of some of these landings under the Biden administration, suggesting that they were intended to avoid detection. But officials have explained that’s often done to avoid exposing the identities of the children involved or subjecting them to unwanted attention. And a CNN review found most headed to Jacksonville, Fla., didn’t land in the dead of the night.)
The numbers overall under Biden do appear to have increased, according to official data from the Department of Health and Human Services on where the children are released. That reflects the increased numbers of unaccompanied minors crossing the border and the easing of pandemic-era restrictions. Border facilities have been overflowing. But these kinds of flights happened before, because the federal government has to comply with the law.
And that’s another key distinction: It is indeed the federal government that is charged with enforcing immigration law. Congress has given some more authority to states and local officials over time, but federal law preempts state law.
A last key distinction is who is being flown, along with the how and why.
The federal government does sometimes transport adult detainees to other detention facilities, but the evidence indicates the ones that are the subject of GOP criticism — the migrants being released — are children. They are technically undocumented immigrants, but they are ones being transported under the legal process.
The buses and planes used by Republican governors, by contrast, convey people of all ages, and they are asylum seekers. The program is set up for people who have been processed by federal immigration officials and are awaiting their dates in court. DeSantis and Abbott have said that these migrants signed waivers, meaning their transportation was elective rather than required by law.
And if that’s all it turns out to be, there’s likely to be no legal trouble. Some migrants have said they were grateful to be transported to more welcoming places, but Democrats, immigrant advocates and some of the migrants themselves have suggested the migrants might have been misled into participating. That’s the stated reason most are objecting to the practice. It’s really the crux of the matter.
All of which reinforces that not all transportation of migrants is the same. Not that plenty of people involved will bother with the meddlesome details. | 2022-09-21T16:09:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The differences between DeSantis's flights and the Biden administration's 'ghost flights' for migrants - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/desantis-biden-migrant-flight-comparison/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/desantis-biden-migrant-flight-comparison/ |
A picture of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is displayed during a rally and news conference against the relocation of migrants to Martha's Vineyard, in Doral, Fla., Sept. 20, 2022. (Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
For much of the summer, Republican elected officials and the conservative media amplified immigration as a point of rhetorical focus. With midterms approaching quickly and gas prices dropping, the number of people being stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border was a useful way to hammer Democrats and President Biden.
And, for much of the summer, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) was the face of that rhetoric. His decision to transport newly arrived migrants from Texas to other states, including New York, was celebrated both as a triumph of political framing and, often, as a bit of trolling. From the beginning of July to the first week of September, Abbott was mentioned in the context of immigration an average of three times a day on Fox News.
Another governor perpetually hungry for the attention and applause of the right-wing ecosystem clearly noticed. So, last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) giddily took credit for an escalation of the tactic: picking up a group of migrants and plunking them down on the politically liberal island of Martha’s Vineyard. Take that, libs!
And, you know: take that, asylum seekers fleeing the dictatorial regime in Venezuela who arrived in the United States, who appear to have been legally allowed to remain in the country and who, despite offering no indication of planning to go to Florida, suddenly found themselves on a small island off the Massachusetts coast without access to any of the resources they’d been promised!
That aspect of DeSantis’s stunt, how it affected actual human beings, has often been glossed over in the coverage. He got his Fox News attention; the network mentioned him and migrants an average of almost nine times a day last week. But the effect on the migrants was often limited to isolated interviews or presentations from attorneys and advocates.
On Tuesday, though, several of those migrants filed suit against DeSantis and Florida for devising “a premeditated, fraudulent, and illegal scheme” aimed at leveraging their vulnerability to score a political win. It outlines how migrants were recruited, what they were promised and how those promises were left unfilled.
The lawsuit’s description of the ploy is clearly aimed at winning a judgment against DeSantis, but it comports with other news accounts. A woman identifying herself as “Perla” (of whom there are dozens in the San Antonio area, where these events took place) approached people outside a migrant shelter. They were offered McDonald’s gift cards in exchange for signing documents that were not fully translated into Spanish.
As recruiters worked to get enough migrants to fill two planes, those who agreed to be transported elsewhere were housed in local hotels “so that they could not discuss the arrangement and reveal Defendants’ inhumane scheme to any true Good Samaritans, and so that the class members would be less likely to leave or change their minds since they were being provided free housing while they waited,” the lawsuit says.
The migrants learned they were headed to Martha’s Vineyard once on the plane, the lawsuit states. They were given folders of material, including a brochure with misleading and inaccurate information about the resources available to them upon arrival. Those orchestrating the flights allegedly told the migrants that “if the individual Plaintiffs and other class members were willing to board airplanes to other states, they would receive employment, housing, educational opportunities, and other like assistance at their arrival.” That didn’t occur; in fact, there’s no indication that anyone in Massachusetts was informed that the migrants were en route.
Importantly, the lawsuit also indicates that the three individuals identified as plaintiffs had turned themselves in to authorities upon arriving in the United States. This comports with a common practice: Many migrants cross into the country and immediately try to make asylum claims, claims that have to be made on American soil. If the plaintiffs are seeking asylum from the Venezuelan regime, they are allowed to remain in the United States until their cases can be heard. (A question to the plaintiffs’ attorneys about possible claims did not receive a response by the time of publication.)
Since reports of the migrants’ arrival on Martha’s Vineyard first emerged, DeSantis and his allies have commonly justified the move as politically warranted, the transfer of “illegal immigrants” to “sanctuary” jurisdictions comporting with a funding measure passed as part of Florida’s annual budget this year. This is the defense broadly: Florida had money to move these immigrants to other places, and DeSantis did so.
It’s just that, again, the migrants appear to have had authorization to remain in the United States. And that they were being dispatched from Florida only indirectly. And that “sanctuary” jurisdictions don’t promise what DeSantis’s defenders claim. And that DeSantis himself admits that Florida doesn’t have much of an issue with being overwhelmed by newly arrived migrants.
As Politico reported on Tuesday, the item in the state budget authorizing the removal of migrants allocated $12 million to “facilitate the transport of unauthorized aliens from this state consistent with federal law.” But the flights originated not in Florida, but in Texas. The planes did stop in Crestview, Fla., for less than an hour on their way to Martha’s Vineyard, perhaps in an effort to fulfill the stipulation that they be removed from the state.
Why not simply take people from Florida? DeSantis answered that on Tuesday.
“The problem is, is we’re not seeing mass movements of them into Florida,” he said. “So you end up with a car with maybe two.”
That is a problem, indeed, if you are looking to get acclaim from Fox News for shuttling immigrants to blue states as a troll. He would later add that a third of those arriving in Texas planned to head to Florida — a claim that seems hard to substantiate — so “if you can do it at the source and divert to sanctuary jurisdictions, the chance they end up in Florida is much less.”
He and his allies have repeatedly invoked this idea that they are shuttling people to “sanctuary” locations, implying that cities or states that passed “sanctuary” measures had somehow volunteered to house and employ immigrants.
“They said they wanted this,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Monday. “They said they were a sanctuary jurisdiction.”
That’s not what “sanctuary” is generally understood to mean. (There is no concrete definition.) Sanctuary states and cities are ones in which law enforcement promises not to inform federal authorities if they learn that someone is in the country without documentation. There’s a very practical reason for this: If immigrants think talking to police will result in their deportation, they won’t talk to police. That makes solving crimes much more difficult.
Oh, also? Martha’s Vineyard doesn’t have a sanctuary statute.
Unlike cities in Texas, robust systems also don’t exist on the island to accommodate newly arrived migrants gracefully (though by most accounts residents scrambled to do so). This is an underappreciated aspect of the ploy: Places such as San Antonio have far more capacity for immigrants than do small islands off the Eastern Seaboard. Yes, those resources are being strained. But there’s a difference between a straining an existing system and having no system in place at all.
The available evidence suggests that DeSantis, certainly aware of the attention being granted Abbott, decided to deploy the funding at his disposal for moving migrants. Perhaps following a cue from a Fox News host, he signed off on a plan that the new lawsuit alleges involved misleading migrants to shuttle them from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard — with a stopover in Florida to make the whole thing kosher.
One of the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit is Yanet. According to the filing, she arrived in the United States with her husband and 11-year-old son after fleeing Venezuela two months ago. They were detained for six days and then released, with a required check-in with authorities scheduled for next month.
“Upon arrival in Martha’s Vineyard, Plaintiff Yanet Doe felt helpless, defrauded, and desperate,” the suit claims. “She started crying. She felt anxious and confused.”
But at least DeSantis got his media attention.
3:33 PMThe latest: Biden says U.S. determined to strengthen democracy at home and abroad | 2022-09-21T16:09:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Claims that DeSantis’s migrant stunt was legitimate keep eroding - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/desantis-florida-migrants/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/desantis-florida-migrants/ |
BARCELONA, Spain — Spain granted personhood status Wednesday to what environmentalists call Europe’s largest salt-water lagoon, which has suffered massive die-offs of marine life as it degrades due to coastal development and local farming. The new law came after a citizen-led push to provide better protection for the threatened ecosystem. | 2022-09-21T16:09:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Spain gives personhood status to Mar Menor salt-water lagoon - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/spain-gives-personhood-status-to-mar-menor-salt-water-lagoon/2022/09/21/f0a8e934-39c5-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/spain-gives-personhood-status-to-mar-menor-salt-water-lagoon/2022/09/21/f0a8e934-39c5-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html |
Anger is spreading across the country after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the “morality police”
Kareem Fahim
The protests started small, outside the Tehran hospital where a 22-year old Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini died last week after being detained by the “morality police” for an untold violation of the country’s harsh strictures on women’s dress. By Tuesday, the protests were racing across the country, in a burst of grief, anger and defiance. Many were led by women, who burned their headscarves, cut their hair and chanted, “Death to the dictator.”
The ferocity of the protests is fueled by outrage over many things at once: the allegations Amini was beaten in custody before she collapsed and fell into a coma; the priorities of Iran’s government, led by ultraconservative President Ebrahim Raisi, who has strictly enforced dress codes and empowered the hated morality police at a time of widespread economic suffering; and the anguish of Amini’s family, ethnic Kurds from a rural area of Iran, whose expressions of pain and shock have resonated across the country.
Amini did not have any health problems that would explain her death, said her family, who could not fathom how she attracted the interest of the police. “Even a 60-year-old woman wasn’t covered up as much as Mahsa,” said her father, Amjad Amini, in an interview with an Iranian news outlet.
Rights groups say at least seven people have been killed in the demonstrations, the largest in Iran since protests erupted in 2019 over the cutting of fuel subsidies. In those protests, like the ones now shaking the country, the authorities responded by cutting internet service and resorting in some cases to the use of deadly force, including live ammunition.
The Kurdish region
Two videos from the Kurdish cities of Abdanan and Kamyayan show moments from the protests that broke out in Iran on Sept. 17. (Video: Top: Rudaw TV via AP; Bottom: Twitter)
Videos show protesters, some speaking Kurdish, taking to the streets in Kamyaran and Abdanan, near Iran’s border with Iraq. Many of the protests have been concentrated in the west, the poor, predominantly Kurdish region Amini’s family hails from. The Kurds — who speak their own language, have a distinct cultural identity and are mostly Sunni Muslims in a majority Shiite country — have complained for decades of neglect by the central government.
The conservative areas
Protests, some violent, spread to Iran's religious cities of Qom and Mashhad in videos posted online on Sept. 20. (Video: Twitter)
Large demonstrations also erupted in two Iranian cities that are considered holy by Shiite Muslims and draw tens of millions of pilgrims every year. “Cannons, tanks and rockets, the clerics have to get lost” protesters chanted in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city and the site of the revered Imam Reza shrine. They gathered on Ahmadabad Street, a major thoroughfare, where a fire could be seen in the distance. In a video from Qom, a center of religious scholarship, protesters march through the street, whistling, and some throw rocks. “Hit him,” someone shouts, as the crowd surges forward.
The capital
Protests took place across Tehran, including at Vali-e Asr Square on Sept. 19 and Amirkabir University of Technology on Sept. 18. (Video: Twitter)
Protests quickly reached the capital, with one video showing demonstrators gathering in Vali-e Asr, a major square in downtown Tehran. “Dishonorable, dishonorable,” they yell, as they are sprayed with water cannons mounted on an armored police vehicle. Another video from central Tehran shows students at the Amirkabir University of Technology chanting, “Death to the dictator” — a reference to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Anger has been building at universities in recent months over the government’s increasingly strict enforcement of hijab rules. Students who protest risk being arrested or placed on a blacklist that threatens their academic advancement.
The north and south
Videos posted online Sept. 20 show women protesting in the Iranian cities of Kerman in the south and Sari in the north. (Video: Twitter)
Protests have spread well beyond the capital and Iran’s traditionally restive areas. In a video from Kerman, in southeastern Iran, a young woman sitting on a utility box, surrounded by a cheering crowd, is seen removing her headscarf and cutting off her own hair. “An Iranian will die but will not accept oppression,” the crowd chants. In Sari, near the Caspian Sea, a woman dances around a small bonfire, then throws her headscarf into the flames.
A video posted online on Sept. 20 shows protests turning violent in the Iranian city of Rasht, located north of Tehran. (Video: Twitter)
Another video from Rasht, also on the Caspian, shows a crowd of young men crowded around a police officer, who is wielding what appears to be a kind of stun gun. Within seconds, the crowd attacks, pushing the officer to the ground and beating him. As shots ring out, the demonstrators flee. | 2022-09-21T16:34:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Social videos show Iran protests spreading after death of Mahsa Amini - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/21/iran-protests-mahsa-amini-hijab/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/21/iran-protests-mahsa-amini-hijab/ |
The exploding king: Why Queen Elizabeth’s coffin was lined with lead
The public files past Queen Elizabeth II's flag-draped coffin in Westminster Hall on Saturday. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Queen Elizabeth II’s winding final journey from Westminster Abbey to Wellington Arch to Windsor Castle on Monday weighed heavily on the eight soldiers who bore her coffin — in part because it was lined with lead.
As a material in coffins, “lead helps keep out moisture and preserve the body for longer and prevent smells and toxins from a dead body escaping,” said Julie Anne Taddeo, a research professor of history at the University of Maryland. “Her coffin was on display for many days and made a long journey to its final resting place.”
“You could actually feel him sliding off the shoulders,” Perkins said. “If we had have dropped him ... I don’t know what it would have been, very embarrassing, but we didn’t.” | 2022-09-21T16:34:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why Queen Elizabeth’s coffin was lined with lead - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/21/queen-elizabeth-coffin-lead-burial/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/21/queen-elizabeth-coffin-lead-burial/ |
Putin’s nuclear threats show weakness. The West must not be intimidated.
Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech in Moscow on Sept. 20. (Sputnik/Grigory Sysoev/Pool/Reuters)
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s truculent speech on Wednesday was his latest gambit to change the course of a conflict that is trending inevitably toward his country’s defeat. He announced a limited military mobilization and the imminent annexation of four partially occupied Ukrainian provinces (Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk) through sham referendums. To cap it all off, he issued veiled nuclear threats: “If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. This is not a bluff.”
This was a version of the address Putin was widely expected to deliver on May 9, the Russian holiday commemorating victory in World War II, minus a declaration of war or general mobilization. He held off, no doubt because he was afraid of the political risks of expanding the draft, and he was still convinced that his army could grind down the Ukrainians.
Then came the U.S. delivery of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), which transformed the battlefield this summer. The weapons system allowed the Ukrainians to interrupt the rain of Russian artillery and bring the Russian offensive to a standstill. In recent weeks, the Ukrainians have gone on the attack, liberating at least 3,500 square miles of land, inflicting heavy losses on the Russian army, and threatening Russian supply lines in the east. Putin is more isolated than ever internationally, with would-be allies such as Turkey, India and China refusing to back his invasion. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is demanding that Putin return all occupied land, including Crimea, to “its rightful owners.”
With defeat looming, Putin is trotting out a new strategy: He will annex Ukrainian territory and then threaten to use nuclear weapons if the Ukrainians and their allies in the West don’t let him get away with it. If the West were to give in to his nuclear blackmail, what would stop him from announcing tomorrow that Kyiv is also Russian territory (which he clearly believes)? Or Tallinn? Or Tbilisi? Or even Warsaw or Helsinki? We cannot live in a world where an evil dictator can redraw international borders at will with threats of nuclear annihilation. And we don’t have to.
Before we panic over Putin’s reckless threats, let’s remember that we have nearly as many nuclear weapons as Russia and that this is hardly the first time that Putin has threatened to go nuclear. At the very beginning of the war, on Feb. 24, he said that any country that interfered with his invasion would suffer consequences “such as you have never seen in your entire history.” Well, the West has supplied Ukraine with weapons that have killed or wounded at least 70,000 Russian soldiers, and Putin still has not made any nuclear move. Nor has he gone nuclear over Ukrainian attacks on Crimea, which he annexed in 2014. He is not suicidal or crazy.
While Putin’s use of nuclear weapons against NATO is unthinkable, the use of tactical nuclear warheads in Ukraine is, sadly, slightly more realistic. But that’s not stopping the Ukrainians, who are the ones in the crosshairs, and it should not stop us. President Biden needs to deter Putin by signaling that the response to any nuclear attack would be devastating. It would not even require a nuclear response; NATO air forces could probably destroy the Russian army in Ukraine with conventional munitions.
Putin’s announcement that he will mobilize another 300,000 or so troops for the war is more credible than his threats of nuclear attacks — but no more likely to enable a Russian victory. Russia has had a great deal of trouble training, equipping and supplying the forces it has already sent into Ukraine (numbering some 150,000). Imagine how much harder it will be to mobilize even more troops when equipment inventories must be severely depleted, and the army has lost many of the officers and noncommissioned officers it will need to train and lead fresh forces.
Probably the most significant part of Putin’s speech was his decision to issue what the U.S. military would call a “stop-loss” order preventing already serving soldiers from leaving the army after their terms of service expire. That Putin felt this was necessary is an indicator that few Russians are eager to fight. Indeed, the imbalance of motivation — with, as Anne Applebaum wrote for the Atlantic, Ukrainian soldiers “fighting for their country’s existence” while Russian soldiers are “fighting for their salary”— is one of Ukraine’s chief advantages. Telling Russian troops that they have to stay on the frontlines, in essence, until they are killed or wounded will only further damage their already-low morale.
Putin’s actions are the sign of a desperate dictator who knows his reckless military gambit is in danger of defeat. He knows, too, that Russian rulers of the past — Czar Nicholas II with World War I, Nikita Khrushchev with the Cuban missile crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev with Afghanistan — have not survived defeat, and he must fear the consequences for his own criminal rule. We must take Putin’s threats seriously, but we cannot allow him to bluff or intimidate us into backing off our support for Ukraine’s freedom fighters. Now, more than ever, it is necessary for Ukrainian forces to have all the equipment they need to take back lost territory before Russia can bring greater resources to bear.
Opinion|Putin’s nuclear threats show weakness. The West must not be intimidated.
Opinion|Chris Murphy’s warning: A GOP House would defund the Ukraine struggle
Opinion|The U.N. is getting Ukraine surprisingly right | 2022-09-21T17:00:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Putin’s nuclear threats show weakness. The West must not be intimidated. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/putin-nuclear-bluff-not-intimidate-west/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/putin-nuclear-bluff-not-intimidate-west/ |
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Artist didn’t want this masterpiece to see the light of day
Adolph Menzel’s gorgeous interior was one of five paintings of dark, empty rooms that were private experiments
All five were painted at speed and with remarkably free brushwork. Menzel was attentive to effects of different light sources — lamps, moonlight and, in this case, late sun filtered through patterned curtains. Being concerned more with light than with precise descriptions of material objects, they convey a feeling of transience (light is always changing). And because they describe empty interiors, their atmosphere also evokes the poetry of inner life, as in the paintings of Denmark’s Vilhelm Hammershoi or America’s Edward Hopper.
Menzel moved to Ritterstrasse, in the area of Berlin now known as Kreuzberg, in 1847. He painted “The Artist’s Sitting Room in Ritterstrasse” four years later. It remained unpublished and basically unknown until 15 years after his death.
The Artist's Sitting Room in Ritterstrasse, 1851
Adolph Menzel (b. 1815). At the Metropolitan Museum of Art. | 2022-09-21T17:39:21Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Perspective | Adolph Menzel's 'Sitting Room' was never intended to be shown in public - Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2022/adolph-menzel-sitting-room/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2022/adolph-menzel-sitting-room/ |
The hurricane has grown to Category 4 and is on a path to wallop the Canadian Maritime provinces this weekend
Fiona is zeroing in on Canada. (WeatherBell)
Hurricane Fiona intensified into a powerhouse Category 4 during the predawn hours Wednesday, a day after it became the first major hurricane of the 2022 Atlantic season. It battered Puerto Rico over the weekend with catastrophic, flooding rains and strong to damaging winds, severing power to the entire territory before hitting the Dominican Republic and sideswiping Turks and Caicos.
Now the system is set to pass close to Bermuda as a high-end storm before charging at the Canadian Maritimes, lashing Nova Scotia with winds potentially gusting upward of 100 mph. By then it may no longer be tropical, but it could be just as strong as a high-end Category 1 or low-end Category 2 hurricane.
It comes amid a sudden awakening of tropical storm activity in the Atlantic. Tropical Storm Gaston developed west of the Azores on Tuesday, and two other tropical waves in the eastern Atlantic are of interest.
The most concerning disturbance, however, is just east of the Windward Islands. That one is set to cross the Lesser Antilles, reaching the Caribbean later this week and entering an extremely favorable environment for intensification. The odds of a hurricane entering the Gulf of Mexico are increasing, and people along the Gulf Coast, including in the United States, should pay close attention.
At least four killed in Puerto Rico during Hurricane Fiona, FEMA says
The sudden uptick in Atlantic tropical activity comes just a week after the climatological peak of hurricane season, meaning it’s right on schedule. August was the first since 1997 not to feature a single named storm developing anywhere across the basin, but next week may reinforce the adage that it takes only one storm for a quiet season to turn catastrophic.
As of midmorning Wednesday, Fiona was a Category 4 hurricane with winds in the eyewall sustained at up to 130 mph. It was moving due north at 8 mph about 700 miles southwest of Bermuda. The British overseas territory has been placed under a tropical storm warning and a hurricane watch, the latter in case the projected track of Fiona swings closer to the island.
On a recent reconnaissance flight, a Hurricane Hunter aircraft encountered winds of 144 mph at 8,530 feet altitude in the eyewall. That’s supportive of surface winds around 130 mph.
Infrared satellite revealed a mature eye and cloud-top temperatures of minus-112 degrees Fahrenheit, which indicates clouds towering about 50,000 feet tall. It appeared Fiona may be fending off a bit of dry air from the north and west.
The Hurricane Hunters also found a roughly 14- or 15-degree spike in air temperature within the eye. That’s a sign of intensity. Air rises in the eyewall and subsides in the eye, sinking, warming, drying up and hollowing out a void of cloud cover. That’s why the strongest hurricanes’ eyes are often the hottest and sometimes feature sunshine.
Transition into Canadian superstorm
Fiona is set to pass west of Bermuda on Thursday night or Friday morning. The island will probably see tropical storm conditions, or winds of 39 mph or greater, along with heavy downpours in the outer rain bands. Afterward, it will continue north while being tugged back to the west by an approaching mid-latitude low-pressure system.
As Fiona approaches the Canadian Maritimes, it will begin to tap into jet stream energy, converting into an “extratropical,” or nontropical, low. It’s unclear whether Fiona will still retain tropical characteristics as it barrels into Canada early Saturday. Regardless, wind gusts of 100 mph or more are likely.
Exacerbating the winds will be a “pressure dipole,” or the juxtaposition of an intense high-pressure system south of Greenland. The proximity of two extreme systems — one a storm with low pressure and the other a dome of warm, high pressure — will amplify the winds because of the extreme pressure gradient, or change in air pressure with distance.
Euro Model is in with a record-breaking (if it happens) 935mb Fiona superstorm into eastern Nova Scotia - Western Newfoundland Sat morning. With this intensity and the strong high to its NE, the waves in the North Atlantic will be mountains! pic.twitter.com/F1sYbWQfhp
There are signs that Fiona could obliterate minimum air pressure records for September and potentially for all months on record in Nova Scotia. The lowest air pressure recorded there was 950.5 millibars. (Typical sea level air pressure is around 1,015 millibars; any deficit represents “missing” air that has a vacuum-like effect, which results in strong winds.) Models are suggesting Fiona might have an air pressure around 930 millibars. Superstorm Sandy in 2012 was around 940 millibars when it crashed into New Jersey.
In addition to extreme winds, a storm surge of 5 to 8 feet would be possible, along with offshore waves 80 feet high. Extremely dangerous conditions will result for mariners.
Also in the Atlantic is newly minted Tropical Storm Gaston. It’s 775 miles west of the Azores and has winds of 65 mph.
On satellite imagery, Gaston’s convection, or thunderstorm and downpour activity, was not as robust as it was 24 hours ago. It also may be beginning to acquire nontropical characteristics; the arcing band of thunderstorms east of the center is suggestive of a cold front taking shape. Truly tropical systems don’t have fronts.
The storm will slowly meander northeast over the coming days, potentially bringing gale-force winds to the Azores this weekend before weakening and drifting westward.
A developing gulf, Caribbean threat
There are three other areas to watch in the Atlantic. One is over the east central Atlantic and has a low-to-medium chance of development in the long range, but near-term strengthening is unlikely at present. There’s another tropical wave over Senegal that could begin to develop as soon as it moves offshore of the African coastline in the coming days.
Then there’s a third system nearing the Windward Islands. That’s the one that could be a big problem.
In the coming days, it will slip through the Lesser Antilles with some wind and rain, but shear — or a disruptive change of wind speed and/or direction with height — will preclude its further development through the end of this week. That shear stems from outflow, or high-altitude exhaust, exiting Fiona well to the north.
But by Sunday or Monday, the shear will relax. The system, dubbed 98L, will find itself in an extremely favorable environment characterized by bathlike seawater nearing 90 degrees. That means the Caribbean is replete with untapped “oceanic heat content,” or fuel to support an intense cyclone. Shear will be weak, and high pressure aloft will help fan exhaust air away from 98L. That evacuation of “spent” air will make it easier for the fledgling storm to inhale warm, humid air in contact with the ocean from below. That will foster intensification.
From there, it’s impossible to know exactly when the storm will begin to curve north. Cuba or the Yucatán Peninsula could be in play, or the storm could whir directly into the Gulf of Mexico.
One thing’s for certain: Putting a developing storm in the Caribbean with low shear and toasty water temperatures in September is like lighting fireworks inside a tent. You don’t know exactly which way the firework will go, but once the fuse is lit, something’s going to get hit. | 2022-09-21T17:39:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tropical trouble: Fiona to hit Canada as new U.S. threat grows - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/21/atlantic-gulf-fiona-hurricane-canada/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/21/atlantic-gulf-fiona-hurricane-canada/ |
Iran’s Raisi attacks U.S. ‘hegemony’ and ‘militarism’
Iranian president, in U.N. speech, repeated his insistence that no accord is possible in stalled nuclear talks without U.S. ‘guarantees’
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi speaks Wednesday at the 77th session of the U.N. General Assembly. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, speaking Wednesday to the U.N. General Assembly, sought to position his country at the center of what he called a growing international movement against unilateral powers, such as the United States, that “equate militarism with security.”
“America has pursued their interests at the expense of other countries,” Raisi said, and “cannot accept the fact that certain countries have the right to stand on their own two feet.” He hailed what he said was the arrival of “a new world order” to replace U.S. “hegemony.”
Appearing before the international body for the first time in person since his election in June 2021, Raisi struck many familiar notes, calling Israel “an occupying, savage power” that should be replaced through a free referendum among all “Palestinians, Muslims, Christians and Jews” in “all of the Palestinian territory from the mountainous region to the sea.”
His appearance came as anti-government demonstrations continued in several Iranian cities after a woman arrested for improperly covering her hair died in police custody last week. Human rights groups said at least seven people have been killed in the protests, in which some women have burned their obligatory head coverings.
Without mentioning the protests, Raisi said Iran “rejects the double standards” of some governments on human rights. In particular, he mentioned Canada’s discovery of the graves of Native children who died in government-mandated schools after being removed from their families, and children who were “locked up in cages” by the United States after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
Raisi repeated Tehran’s demands that the United States produce “guarantees” that it will not again withdraw from a nuclear deal, as President Donald Trump did from the 2015 agreement that lifted U.S. sanctions in return for restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program and international verification of its compliance.
That demand has become a principle sticking point in the failure of Iran and world powers to negotiate a new agreement after nearly a year and a half of talks. The Biden administration, which came to office pledging to renew the accord, has said it has no power to bind the actions of a successor president.
Although Iran lived up to its commitments under the earlier deal — which also included Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China — it still “paid the price” for U.S. withdrawal when Trump reimposed harsh sanctions against it, he said. Since then, Iran has expanded its nuclear program in violation of many of the agreement’s restrictions, leaving it within weeks of the ability to assemble enough fissile material to build a nuclear weapon, according to U.S. officials.
“Iran is not seeking to obtain and build nuclear weapons,” Raisi said. He called U.S. sanctions a “weapon of mass destruction.”
“The issue of guarantees is not just for something that may happen,” Raisi said, but is “based on lived experience. … Can we truly trust, without guarantees and assurances, that they will this time live up to their commitment?”
In any case, he said, Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy failed, because Iran has “found our path independent of any agreement and we will continue on that path.”
Raisi’s hard-line government has worked to strengthen ties to regional governments and to Russia and China, solidifying expanding trade and diplomatic relationships and gaining full membership this month in the Russian-dominated Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Iran has sought to circumvent U.S. sanctions by exporting much of its oil to China and selling weapons to Russia — including what Ukraine and the United States have said are weaponized drones being used by Russian forces in Ukraine.
“Good, neighborly relations, progress in economic and trade relations have been brought to the forefront of Iran’s foreign policy,” he said. While he made no direct reference to the war in Ukraine, he said that “war is not the solution to crises; dialogue, negotiation and conversation are the true solution.”
Holding up a picture of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Raisi called his killing in a January 2020 U.S. drone strike a “savage, illegal, immoral crime” for which “the proper pursuit of justice … will not be abandoned.” The Biden administration last month indicted an Iranian national with alleged IRGC ties for allegedly funding a plot to assassinate former Trump national security adviser John Bolton in retaliation for the killing.
Iran, Raisi said, will pursue “through a fair tribunal … to bring to justice those who martyred our beloved general, Qasem Soleimani.” | 2022-09-21T17:39:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Iran’s Raisi attacks U.S. “hegemony” and “militarism” - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/21/raisi-un-condemn-us-israel/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/21/raisi-un-condemn-us-israel/ |
Robert Sarver, shown in 2019, has started the process of selling the Phoenix Suns. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)
Amid mounting pressure from NBA players, sponsors and local government officials and following his one-year suspension for using racist and misogynistic language, Robert Sarver announced Wednesday his plans to sell the Phoenix Suns and the WNBA’s Mercury.
In a statement, the 60-year-old real estate developer said that he didn’t want to be a “distraction” and that he “wants what’s best” for the organizations.
“As a man of faith, I believe in atonement and the path to forgiveness. I expected that the commissioner’s one-year suspension would provide the time for me to focus, make amends and remove my personal controversy from the teams that I and so many fans love,” Sarver said. “But in our current unforgiving climate, it has become painfully clear that that is no longer possible — that whatever good I have done, or could still do, is outweighed by things I have said in the past. For those reasons, I am beginning the process of seeking buyers for the Suns and Mercury.”
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver suspended Sarver for one year and fined him $10 million last week following the conclusion of a lengthy workplace conduct investigation launched in the wake of a November 2021 ESPN.com article.
Investigators from the Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz law firm documented a laundry list of workplace misconduct violations in a 43-page report, including Sarver using the n-word on at least five occasions, countless examples of sexist behavior and multiple incidents in which Sarver exposed himself to employees.
Prominent NBA stars like LeBron James and Chris Paul, as well as National Basketball Players Association executive director Tamika Tremaglio, decried Sarver’s behavior, and PayPal said it wouldn’t renew its contract as the Suns’ jersey sponsor if Sarver remained with the team, which he has owned since 2004. Jahm Najafi, a minority owner of the Suns, also publicly called for Sarver’s resignation, while Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego and city council members issued a statement saying they were “appalled” by his behavior and planned to conduct their own investigation.
Sarver led a group that purchased the Suns for roughly $400 million in 2004. A recent Forbes estimate pegged the franchise’s worth at more than $1.8 billion. | 2022-09-21T17:40:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Robert Sarver starts process of selling Phoenix Suns, Phoenix Mercury - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/robert-sarver-selling-phoenix-suns/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/robert-sarver-selling-phoenix-suns/ |
Xbox wants Japan, but so far it’s an unrequited love
The Microsoft console maker is adding PlayStation mainstay titles to Game Pass, says it learned from mistakes
(Washington Post illustration; iStock; XBox)
U.S. video game console maker Xbox has never made its mark on Japan in terms of sales, but after two decades and several missteps, it has no plans to give up.
Last week, Xbox shared news on upcoming games at the Tokyo Game Show, and said that more Asian titles would be added to its subscription service Game Pass over the next year. It announced that “Deathloop,” which was a timed PlayStation exclusive, is available for Xbox as of Sept. 20.
The presentation was part of Xbox’s broader strategy to woo Asian audiences, and capture market share from Japan, a country that has traditionally shied away from its consoles. In 20 years, Xbox sold a total of 2.3 million consoles in Japan, according to Weekly Famitsu magazine.
“We’ve been on this journey for a long time and we’re not letting up,” Sarah Bond, Xbox corporate vice president of game creator experience and ecosystem, said in an interview with The Washington Post after returning from Tokyo.
Bond said Xbox is betting the company’s investment in a slate of Asian titles will pay off and show Xbox is more than just Halo and Forza. Typically, Asian players have preferred to buy PlayStation and Nintendo devices, where they can find more Japanese role-playing games and narrative-based games.
Discord is now on Xbox. Its setup takes more than a few steps.
“We’re invested in both the depth and breadth of titles that are on our platform, and that’s exactly how reputations are built,” Bond said. “We see that game creators are more willing to take risks because of Game Pass because they actually know that they’re going to be more able to find an audience. Someone will fall in love with something that isn’t necessarily that big, brand name, but is a really, really delightful player experience.”
Bond said there are over 250 developers in Japan building over 150 games to date, including titles like “Tetris Effect: Connected” and “Craftopia.” Those titles will get to live on the Xbox platform, even if many are not exclusives. During the Tokyo Game Show, Xbox announced that preexisting PlayStation mainstay titles like “Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony Anniversary Edition” and “Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch” are now available on Game Pass. It has plans to bring “Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes” and several Persona titles to Game Pass over the next year.
“While Xbox Series devices are not predicted to sell anywhere near the level of Sony’s PS5 over the coming years, Microsoft is now more competitive than it has been for at least a decade [in Japan],” said Piers Harding-Rolls, an analyst at Ampere Analysis. “That shows that Microsoft’s approach to the market is paying dividends.”
Microsoft noted its current generation of consoles is selling better than previous generations, though it did not share specify sales numbers.
Bond said the company had reflected upon its past blunders, such as launching the Xbox One console in Japan nearly a year later than other markets.
“When we were talking about launching the Xbox One, there’s a lot of things about that launch that we know we didn’t get right,” Bond said. “It’s taken us a long time for us to learn from our mistakes and really apply that and begin to build out both our hardware, our product lineup, and our creator relationships.”
For the Xbox Series X and S console launch in 2020, the company launched the new consoles in Japan simultaneously with other parts of the world. The Xbox Series X generation is the best-selling one to date, according to Microsoft. Harding-Rolls’s market research firm, Ampere Analysis, found Xbox sold fewer than 100,000 consoles in Japan last year, compared to Sony and Nintendo selling over 6.7 million.
The biggest competition for PlayStation Plus isn't Game Pass
Harding-Rolls said Microsoft’s small improvements on a tiny market share trailed badly behind Japanese consoles and mobile devices.
“There is only so much Microsoft can achieve with its console product strategy in Japan, and underlines why it is seeking to reach gamers across all devices with its cloud gaming strategy,” he said.
Bond said Microsoft’s investment into growing its audience in Japan and beyond would take time.
“A hardware generation is a long time to build all that engineering,” she said. “It’s a five-to-seven year process to bring that forward. Building relationships takes a long time. And building a true AAA game can — we’ve seen it take up to six years to build an AAA game.”
In June, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer acknowledged that Japanese developers don’t always come to Xbox and the company has been working on adding more games from the country, such as the upcoming Persona titles and an unannounced game that Metal Gear series creator Hideo Kojima is overseeing. Persona game developer Atlus did not respond to a request for comment.
Bond was tight-lipped about her meeting with Spencer and Kojima last week, simply saying, “We’re working with creators in Japan to create really special things for people who play on Xbox, and we’re gonna keep doing that.”
Xbox’s current business model involves selling its hardware at a loss, and last year in the Epic Games v. Apple trial, corporate vice president of gaming Lori Wright testified that the company had never turned a profit selling consoles and instead, focuses on selling software and subscriptions. Bond confirmed the model remains the same, even as more game titles get added to Game Pass.
“The way that our business works is that we build a console and then we subsidize the console so it’s an affordable price point for the consumer,” Bond said. “Then consumers make purchases on the console, they buy games, they buy subscriptions, and then as a result of that, we make revenue and margin on that.”
The tech giant has an eye on most of Asia, and not just Japan. Last May, Xbox announced it was launching the PC-version of its subscription service in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Microsoft’s acquisitions of other studios has aided its Asian ambitions. Bond noted that “Deathloop’s” eventual arrival on Xbox made sense, as the game is made by Bethesda, which was bought by Xbox last year for $7.5 billion. In the same deal, the company also acquired Bethesda’s Tango Gameworks, the Tokyo-based studio behind “Ghostwire: Tokyo.”
From 2020: It's time to ditch the console wars narrative
Despite the audience differentiation between PlayStation and Xbox, there’s still a fair amount of overlap in titles offered on the two platforms. Earlier this month, PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan said Microsoft’s promise to keep Call of Duty on the platform for at least three years was “inadequate on many levels,” as first reported by GamesIndustry.biz. Sony did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bond said the way Xbox thought about expanding to other markets was by considering how there are over 3 billion gamers, yet only several hundred million consoles. Its approach is to stop focusing on consoles.
“What we’re really focused on is making it possible for any of the 3 billion gamers to play any game on any device,” Bond said, when asked if the age-old console wars between Xbox and PlayStation continued. “It could be a console, it could be a PC, it could be a phone, it could be a tablet, it could be another type of handheld.” | 2022-09-21T17:41:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Xbox tries to woo PlayStation gamers at Tokyo Game Show - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/09/21/xbox-japan-tokyo-game-show/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/09/21/xbox-japan-tokyo-game-show/ |
Transcript: America’s Infrastructure Investment
MS. CALDWELL: Hello. Welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Leigh Anne Caldwell, an anchor here at Washington Post Live and also coauthor of the Early 202 newsletter.
Today we are talking about America's infrastructure needs, and we are speaking with Andy Berke, the Biden administration's point person for broadband, who works with the Commerce Department. Andy, thanks so much for joining us.
And to all of our viewers, feel free to tweet at us if you have any questions for Andy regarding broadband and the country's infrastructure.
Andy, I wanted to start first just very generally. What are America's needs as far as broadband is concerned?
MR. BERKE: Well, we have a huge number of needs across the country, and it's easy, especially when you're in Washington, D.C., Leigh Ann, to think, oh, well, listen, everybody has access to this because many people who are watching this are obviously doing that through the Web.
So, for us, one of the biggest things to understand is how critical this is to modern life, and that much like roads and electricity and water, this is now everyday infrastructure.
We know that millions of Americans go without it, that there are infrastructure needs that have to be dealt with to make it a reality for people, and then, finally, the affordability piece is really important so that people can access it. And then they have the skills and the device to use it.
MS. CALDWELL: Who are the people who don't have access and who needs this access either through government assistance or through just the lines being run to where they live and work?
MR. BERKE: Well, there's some big categories of people. You have a number of people in rural America. I've been in 31 states in the last seven and a half months, so seen it firsthand. You've got people who live in the inner city. They've been‑‑their connections are often slow. The networks have not been invested in. And then you've got a number of people across the country who just can't afford it because they don't have the income. Of course, you have the Affordable Connectivity Program, which gives a $30 voucher to people so that they can access it. That's been a huge piece of the administration's policy so that we can make this dream of everybody having access a reality.
MS. CALDWELL: Just in the last couple months, the administration has announced big investments in broadband and infrastructure, a lot of it coming from the bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed Congress. You know, there's $45 billion for high‑speed internet, $65 billion for overall broadband. Can you talk about the differences in these programs and what all this money specifically is going to be used for?
MR. BERKE: Yeah. So you have, actually, in the bipartisan infrastructure law, $65 billion for broadband. $14 billion of that goes to the Federal Communications Commission for the Affordable Connectivity Program. That's that $30 voucher, and as you may remember a few months ago, the president and the vice president had all the different major service providers at the White House to announce that they would give a $30 product to people, and so that $30 voucher essentially makes internet free for that group of people who make 200 percent of poverty or less.
Then you have $2 billion that's gone to the United States Department of Agriculture. That is really specifically for rural broadband, and $48 billion is at the Department of Commerce, where I am. 42.5 of that goes to the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program. That's really mostly‑‑not all but mostly about connectivity, not just in rural America but across the country. There's a billion dollars for Middle Mile that's really the fiber that runs down the middle of highways or major arteries so that people can then build out to the last mile to the houses and businesses, $3 billion for tribal work. I've been in a number of different tribal lands over the course of the last few months. Talk about people who have really been left out, and the administration knows that and is doing something about it. And then $2.75 billion for digital equity, that's really devices and affordability and skills all over the country.
And, if you think about this, it's the connection, it's the devices, it's the skills, it's the affordability. All these pieces are being tackled at once, again, to make this seem a lot more like infrastructure that everybody has real access to.
MS. CALDWELL: Are the broadband companies‑‑how cooperative are they, and are they being paid, given subsidies to do this, and are they doing it effectively? Because, ultimately, this is a business for them.
MR. BERKE: It is. It is a business for many of them. Now, there are all kinds of different players in this. You've got the major companies that people think of that you might get your internet services through. There are also cooperatives. There are municipal networks like we had in Chattanooga, Tennessee. There are mom‑and‑pops who run small internet service providers. So there's an entire range, and especially, as you get out in rural America, you see all kinds of different options for people. Some of them might be really robust, and some of them might be small. And it's also the fact that some of them are incredibly expensive.
So, in fact, what you'll see is often the worse your service, the more money that you pay. So you could be in rural America. You could be getting basically dial‑up speed, and it's really common for people to be paying $150, $200, $250 a month for what is essentially dial‑up speed.
So we know that this is a problem, and right now we're at the point where states are planning how to use that $42.5 billion of funding to build out all across the country, and we got to make sure that we use that efficiently and effectively. And that's something Secretary Raimondo is emphasizing to us every day.
MS. CALDWELL: The $30 voucher every month for people who make 200 percent of poverty or less, how many people have signed up for it, and how‑‑you know, is there‑‑how much of a percentage of people who are eligible for it still need to sign up and don't know about it?
MR. BERKE: Yeah. Well, we had an event earlier this year with the president‑‑with the vice president where she announced a million new sign‑ups for that. This is something that the administration has really been pushing.
When I'm out on the road talking to mayors, one of the things I tell almost everybody is you need to have a sign‑up day across your community to get people to sign up because, yes, there are millions more who qualify, and we've got to get the word out so that people have access to this.
MS. CALDWELL: The Obama administration, this was also a huge goal of theirs: internet for everyone. Why didn't that happen?
MR. BERKE: Well, the biggest change between now and then is, first of all, the president really has this on the front of his agenda, and the second piece is, amazingly in Washington, D.C., we've had a bipartisan infrastructure law that put $65 billion into this. You know, if you add up all the digital equity funds together over the last 20 years, that number would be zero. We have $2.75 billion in the bipartisan infrastructure law. So there's been really a reckoning around this issue.
A big piece of that, of course, is the pandemic where people just kind of understood how fundamental this is to American life, and so we really need to understand that this is the moment for us to transform our country when it comes to infrastructure in the internet world.
MS. CALDWELL: Is this the last thing that the government needs to do? Do you think that after this tranche of money that 100 percent of people in this country who want to be connected will be connected?
MR. BERKE: This is not the last thing that we need to do. We're certainly going to connect every person. That's part of the work, but that doesn't mean that everybody is going to have access, because we still have issues of skills and affordability and devices. And so this digital equity work, which is that‑‑those are the three pieces of digital equity‑‑that's going to have to continue both at the state, federal, and local level.
MS. CALDWELL: And there's also a racial divide here. You mentioned tribal lands, but also Black and Hispanics are also much less likely to be connected to the internet or have access. So are you prioritizing those communities?
MR. BERKE: Absolutely. So we have outreach that goes specifically to those communities. I've spent a fair amount of my time working in this area, and there's a tendency to think this is a rural issue. It is an American issue that goes everywhere, and if you listen to the president, the vice president, we're talking about it so soon. We're going to be talking about connecting minority community grants. This comes from a previous appropriations bill. But we're thinking about every American and having meaningful access.
For example, the speed that we're looking at is 100 download speed, 20 upload speed. There are plenty of people in the middle of American cities who don't have access to that kind of speed, and they have to be brought along as well.
MS. CALDWELL: Mm‑hmm. And, you know, you, as you mentioned, were mayor of Chattanooga. This was a big priority for yours when you were a mayor. Why?
MR. BERKE: The internet is really just a tool, but it's a tool that leads to economic prosperity and to high quality of life.
So, if you think about today, the internet is how we get our jobs. The internet is how we connect to family member and people we love. The internet is how we get our entertainment. And without all those pieces together, your quality of life isn't going to be the same.
And so, Chattanooga, we had the first fiber network that connected to every home and business for 600 square miles. We were the first Gig City, then the first 10 Gig City. Just a few weeks ago, Chattanooga announced it would be the first Gig--and for people who are not as internet savvy, you might get a 50 connection across your network today. One gig is 1,000, 10 gig is 10,000, and 25 gig is 25,000. So that's the kind of speed you're talking about that some Americans have access to, as other Americans might have access to 8 and 12.
And then it quickly became apparent that we also needed to have this affordability component, the skills component, and the devices component. And one of the last things I did when I was mayor that I'm incredibly proud of is that we became the first community in the country to have free high‑speed internet for every family with a child on free or reduced lunch.
MS. CALDWELL: Did that change quality of life in Chattanooga? Did it change, you know, prosperity there?
MR. BERKE: Well, in 2020, Forbes said we'd be the number one place for new jobs in America. Now, 2020 obviously didn't turn out like any of us planned, but the point is that I've seen this firsthand. And Chattanooga also had one of the highest wage growths in the country while I was mayor, and so this is‑‑this is essential and part of the story. And President Biden has been clear that this is part of the American recovery, especially as we come back from covid.
MS. CALDWELL: Globally, looking globally, China has called for, quote, "a fair and equitable internet based on global competition." So is the United States able to compete with China, and what do you make of that description of what they say they want around the world?
MR. BERKE: Well, I think that our goal is to ensure that we are at the head of the pack when it comes to global competition. This is something that the president has been talking about, especially as it relates to China. Obviously, there's been a huge amount of work done to ensure that we continue to be a global leader, and every American having access to the internet is part of that.
This is not a quick project. It's an infrastructure project, right? Those don't happen overnight, but over the course of the next few years, what you're going to see is the build‑out happening all over the country which helps these communities have greater economic development and prosperity.
MR. BERKE: Republicans have‑‑you know, they say that if they take back the House of Representatives, they are going to really investigate the Biden administration on issues of, quote, "big tech." Censorship, they have a long list of complaints regarding big tech. So what is‑‑what is your response, and how does the Biden administration plan to address that?
MR. BERKE: Yeah. So, first of all, the most important thing is that goes beyond where I am and with the work that we're doing.
What we're really talking about is much more on the infrastructure side, on the skills side, and the big tech piece that you're chatting about, which I think both parties are investigating right now trying to figure out what to do, that really is beyond my purview.
MS. CALDWELL: So inflation remains stubbornly high. Does that have any sort of impact on ensuring that this access to broadband internet continues?
MR. BERKE: Absolutely, inflation matters because we have $42.5 billion to build out the infrastructure. There are two things that are really important about that. Number one is we have to use this efficiently and effectively, and so as you build out more, obviously, we're going to be worried about the pricing of things like fiber and, of course, of the workforce. So there are two things that‑‑two work streams that are part of what we're doing.
And earlier last month, you saw Secretary Raimondo out talking about this and opening a new Corning plant in Arizona. That's part of our work to make sure that the pricing is available, that things like fiber are built in America, because as you do more of this work, obviously, we're worried about the prices both from inflation and from the amount of material that we need.
And the second is there's a workforce issue. We know that we need 100,000 new workers in this area, that these jobs are going to be generated, and so we have another stream of work that's all about ensuring that Americans are ready for this work, and that there's going to be digging up of, you know, the roads. There's going to be climbing towers. There's going to be slicing fiber, all kinds of work. And we need to have the workforce that's prepared for that.
MS. CALDWELL: And do you have the workforce, and how do you train them and recruit them?
MR. BERKE: Well, we're working on it. So there are more‑‑there are more people needed. So we're in constant contact with the state, with states around the country. Part of their plans has to be how do they build this workforce that they need because obviously‑‑I was in Louisiana a few weeks ago with Governor Bel Edwards. He's saying not only do we want to be out in front in building, but we want Louisianans to build the networks that happen here. And so, you know, they need certifications. We need to be in community colleges across the country and vocational schools and ensuring that there are people who are prepared to build this.
MS. CALDWELL: Where do you see this in 10 years? Where will the country be on this issue? Where does it need to be?
MR. BERKE: We need to make sure that every American has access, meet the president's goal, which is that every American has access. We need to make sure that we are, as we said earlier, regularly thinking about the work of affordability and skills and devices as not just side work but central to making sure that every American can prosper.
We need to ensure that we have a‑‑use these dollars to invest in a way that is as future‑proof as possible, so that as the amount of connectivity and speeds and reliability that people need grows, that the networks can grow with it. And so 10 years from now, we can't be having this discussion anymore. We won't be because of the work that we're doing, and I think then using this work to build on the equity issues will really help our country grow.
MS. CALDWELL: Great. Andy, I'm about out of time, but one quick question. You were, of course, mayor of Chattanooga. You're now in the Biden administration. How long do you plan to stay in this job, and where do you see yourself next?
MR. BERKE: Well, I'm enjoying the work that I'm doing, and to try to do some of this on a larger scale is nice.
Obviously being mayor is a good job. I enjoyed that, but it's really satisfying to see and be part of an initiative that really harkens back to rural electrification and some of the biggest ideas that people have ever had in this country.
MS. CALDWELL: Andy Berke with the Commerce Department, thank you so much for joining us today. We are out of time.
And stay with us. Next, we will be joined by Michael Powell, the president and CEO of The Internet & Television Association.
MS. LABOTT: Hello. I'm Elise Labott from American University, and today we're talking about the recent infrastructure bill, the digital divide, and the importance of geospatial technology and data.
Now, modernizing our infrastructure requires a real understanding of each project's location and its relationship to its environmental and human‑made systems, and to discuss how we get that understanding and how technology, location, intelligence, and spatial data ensures infrastructure is developed with resiliency, sustainability, and equity, I'm joined by Jack Dangermond, founder and president of Esri.
Welcome, Jack.
MR. DANGERMOND: Thanks very much, Elise.
MS. LABOTT: So this infrastructure bill is set to address many challenges across industries. So, from your perspective, what are some of the highest priorities, and how do we use technology to make sure that that helps us understand it a little bit better and helps us advance?
MR. DANGERMOND: Yeah. My sense of this bill is it's going to be enormously impacting. I mean, these thousands of projects are going to have little footprints on the planet that actually‑‑in our country specifically that actually impact the future, and we need to do this. We need to go all in with respect to investing on creating a carbon‑negative future. I mean, we have to pull carbon out of the atmosphere because right now it's just‑‑you know, we're going in the wrong direction. So these‑‑this effort means‑‑these little dots on a map as I think about them are going to be directed by environmental factors, by social factors, by economic factors, so that they can get the maximum value out of their‑‑out of the investments this country is making.
So geospatial is best thought of by normal people as maps. These maps are digital these days. They're measuring virtually everything on our planet, and by combining them in various ways, we can understand where‑‑I mean, that's the big question‑‑where the investments should be made, and more importantly, what is the impact of each of these investments?
I get excited about that because it really brings together geography. You know, geography is the science of our world. It brings it together in a way that's very applicable. These computer maps can overlay information and let it be understandable to people. Where is my money going? Where should we not locate? What should we do? And the integration of those maps in kind of digital models of our world is very powerful.
So I'm excited about this, these investments, but I'm also excited by the fact that at all levels of government‑‑local government, state government, national government‑‑there's kind of a new awareness to this kind of information guiding, guiding where our investments should be made and where they shouldn't be made.
MS. LABOTT: Well, it's really interesting because your recent User Conference, the theme of it was mapping common ground, and it seems to be that if you're using all the best designs, science, critical thinking, and then laying over that spatial technology and intelligence, that really has a way of kind of finding some kind of common ground for how we approach these problems.
MR. DANGERMOND: Yeah. If you lay on top of maps, all the various interests for a common geography, what you find is there's very little conflict, but people often argue about these little conflicts, such that you'd think everything is going bad. It's not actually. Finding common grounds is very valuable to use the geospatial approach.
And this is being seen now by all levels of government. Last week our White House released a new climate portal, which brought all the scientific information from our federal government together and made it available through Web services to state and local governments so that they could pick the right locations, actually ask for grants for funding infrastructure in the best ways.
So I am so excited about that particular project because it means that we're leveraging in a kind of all‑government approach to be able to create a better future.
MS. LABOTT: So the infrastructure bill singles out resilience, sustainability, and equity. Some of these areas can feel a little bit overwhelming, as critical criteria for action and funding, and one of the clear investment priorities was ensuring equitable access for broadband across the country in both urban and rural areas, narrowing that digital divide.
We saw this during the pandemic when school children were being forced to study at home, that issue of fairness really coming up. So talk to me about the role of mapping and spatial analytics in helping us understand and closing this digital divide.
MR. DANGERMOND: You know, we can map out communities, demographic communities‑‑income, ethnicity‑‑all kinds of characteristics about the people, and what they become are layers in assessments.
We can also map out accessibility, for example, to schools or to health clinics or to public transit. These all become geographic factors that can be screened and used to direct and make better intelligent decisions.
So geography is a kind of framework or a language to allow people to make holistic, both decisions and allocations but also evaluations. We can understand the impact of a particular decision or not, and certainly, broadband is one of the big ones that's being funded, you know, breaking down the digital divide. But all these other factors also have to be considered. Some of our communities and users across the country are using this as a regular screening methodology or evaluation criteria for every decision that's made in public, local governments that exist. A good example is the city of San Antonio in Texas, but there's lots of others.
MS. LABOTT: Yeah. Clearly, technology and intelligence on location and geography can help us identify areas of the greatest need for modern infrastructure but also create that common ground between government, business, and society, and our reliance on this technology and data is only going to grow.
Jack Dangermond, president and founder of Esri, thank you so much for joining us.
MR. DANGERMOND: Thank you very much, Elise.
MS. LABOTT: We'll send it back now to The Washington Post.
MS. CALDWELL: Hello again. I'm Leigh Ann Caldwell, anchor at Washington Post and coauthor of the Early 202 newsletter.
Now we are continuing our conversation with Michael Powell. He is president and CEO of the NCTA, The Internet & Broadband Trade Association. Michael, thanks so much for joining us today.
MR. POWELL: It's a real pleasure to be with you, Leigh Ann. Thank you for having me.
MS. CALDWELL: Of course.
And, again, reminder to our viewers, if you have any questions, feel free to tweet at us at @PostLive.
Michael, I want to start. We just heard from Andy Berke in the Biden administration who talked about the Biden administration's goals for connecting every single American to the internet. What challenges remain to be able to do that?
MR. POWELL: Yeah. Well, I'd start out by saying it's a worthy goal. I would say we have a historical opportunity to reach that goal, and so we all should be focused on that.
I think it's very important to emphasize that money alone is not the challenge. This is a country of 3.8 million square miles with desert, mountain, and forest alike. It's a very, very challenging project, a complex one, and the execution risks are significant, not only in the macroeconomic environment that I heard described, inflation, risks of recessions, shortages in labor and chips, but just the complexity of the distribution of the money, ensuring that it's invested where it's needed most, and that we protect against the kind of waste, fraud, and abuse that large programs like this often attract. So we have a lot of work ahead of us as a community over the next five years.
MS. CALDWELL: Yeah. You laid it out like it's a very, very big task. So is the amount of money that the Congress appropriated in the bipartisan infrastructure bill, that $65 billion, is that enough?
MR. POWELL: It's hard to say. I think it's enough. I think we should also be willing to ask ourselves occasionally is it too much.
It's an enormous amount of money going through a wide range of different programs through a lot of different regulatory agencies and organs of government, and, you know, it's plenty of money if it's used efficiently, effectively for the stated purpose of getting those online who currently have no access.
What I have known in my career is that because the gap in rural America is largely because of economic infeasibility, there are always mighty efforts to shift the money to markets where there's a better return, better return for whether it's a city broadband project or a private one, and then a lot of times in the past, we end up spending a lot of money, it goes toward areas where there's already broadband. And we're overbuilding instead of investing in the economically challenged spaces that need the money most.
So I think if we're disciplined, it's the right amount of money. If we don't execute properly, I think we would regret it.
MS. CALDWELL: And does the government and did they put in the guardrails to ensure that discipline, or is it up to the broadband companies to kind of do the right thing, which might cost them a little bit more money to ensure that there is connectivity in these more difficult areas that tend to be more rural, as you said?
MR. POWELL: To be clear, everybody has a significant responsibility, government and the private sector, but, you know, this is an unusual program. It's an enormous amount of money in which the federal jurisdiction is setting the application process and the rules, but the distribution decisions are going to be made by 50 different states with varying levels of experience and sophistication, through various kinds of regulatory agencies with their own objectives and their own communities.
So, you know, it's going to be a challenge where there's going to have to be a permanently iterative conversation between companies on the ground trying to get the work done with both their state and local government partners as well as making sure the federal government as the overall overseer is well aware of where problems are cropping up and where they're not and whether they can enforce the guardrails that Congress insisted on to be good stewards of the money.
As I mentioned earlier, one perfect example of that is making sure that money goes to the unserved communities first. In 2008, we did a surge of broadband funding as well, and later the GAO wrote critically about how much of the money ended up in places where broadband already existed. And we need to guarantee that that doesn't happen again.
So we all have a lot of work to do. I think we're working cooperatively. I think there's a lot of reason for optimism.
MS. CALDWELL: Yeah. You know, can you go into a little bit more about that? In the first few months of this, are there good signs that this cooperation can extend deep into this program, and how long do you expect it to take?
MR. POWELL: Yeah, I think there are a lot of good signs for cooperation. You know, I can speak for my companies, and I think it would be equally true for most of the ISP community, including telephone companies, wireless companies. We're all in, meaning everybody wants to participate. Everybody is going to make application for funds to try to build in these communities.
Almost every one of our companies have announced rural expansion plans. All of our companies have affordability programs for low‑income communities that will be combined with what the government is doing on affordability.
So, yeah, I think we have a lot of signs of optimism. We feel really good working with the FCC on the mapping project, which is the essential predicate to the distribution of the money, ultimately, in 2023. That map will be evergreen, meaning it will be continuously iterative and needing to be improved.
We're working cooperatively with the FCC. I do not envy the task they have before them, but we're being as effective as we can, helping them get the data they need, and helping find the errors in the mapping that will be essential to proper distribution.
You know, you asked how long will it take. I suppose that's anyone's guess, but I am willing to say this. I think we are always in danger of being overly optimistic about the time frames. You hear a lot of people say, "Oh, in three years, we'll be here." I really do think this is probably a decade‑long project.
You know, the money doesn't even start‑‑the maps don't even get formally done until the spring of 2023. This is a very complex undertaking in pretty remote areas, and I think it's just going to be a long, stable, steady slog. I think we can do it, but if we start wringing our hands after two or three years that it's failed, I think we can lose our nerve and our will to continue on that course and get the job done.
MS. CALDWELL: You've been in this industry a very long time. President Obama had the same goal is to connect everyone to the internet. What fell short there, and why will this time be different?
MR. POWELL: Yeah. Well, I heard your earlier guest. I think the biggest difference is President Obama didn't have the benefit of a bipartisan Congress that came together to issue this kind of money. I mean, this is unprecedented by an order of magnitude. The money that President Obama had access to in the wake of the 2008 collapse was a pittance compared to what we have today. So, number one, just the order of magnitude of resources we have available are dramatically higher.
I think the second problem, which I mentioned in passing a minute ago, is those programs were not well disciplined. A lot of the money went to the wrong places. Again, there were lots of postmortems written about several of those programs and how an enormous amount of money went to areas that already had broadband, and when you do that, guess what? The areas that we must say were focused on serving ended up on the wrong end of the stick again.
So I do think there were errors in oversight and administration in those prior programs or a comfort level, which I believe there shouldn't have been, with letting money go to more economically viable regions where the private market was already attracting building and investment. So that's the mistake we can't make a second time.
MS. CALDWELL: I want to turn a little bit to covid. The pandemic made us all realize how reliant we are on the internet. What lessons did the industry learn during that time?
MR. POWELL: Gosh, we learned‑‑we learned a lot. Number one, we learned expect the unexpected. You know, I don't think anybody had in their use case two years before the pandemic that you would get a 60 percent surge in internet traffic as a consequence of a rapidly spreading virus that would force Americans to all go home and conduct their lives from the internet.
I think the beauty of broadband investments is that it is a massive tool of general applicability that can be called on by our society, by our citizens, and by our government as a tool in a toolkit to address both known and unknown challenges to the society.
So, number one, I think we learned that it's essential, that it's critical, that it's an important tool for response to difficult times, and that we need to treat it with that level of seriousness and commitment to get as many Americans online as possible.
The second thing I think we learned, Leigh Ann, is that, boy, I don't think we could have designed a greater pressure test for the network, and it passed with flying colors, for all practical purposes.
The network held up to a capacity surge that far exceeded the standard model. You know, this is a testament to industries who built in the capacity for that kind of spike, the engineering necessary to deal with those unanticipated loads and the rapid responses of crews on the ground to expanding capacity in response to the challenge. So, number one, I think as Americans, we should feel confident that we have a pretty robust and resilient infrastructure that could stand up to that kind of unanticipated change.
And then I think the last point I would make is you couldn't have done that on the fly. The reason that came through so successfully was a decade or more, really 20 years of steady high investment in that infrastructure, to the tune in our industry of almost $30 billion annually, to make sure that we're deploying the best we can deploy at any moment in time.
You know, just the year before, cable companies had completed the project to provide gig service to 80 percent of the country, over 90 percent of our footprint, and so a lot of Americans had that to rely on as a consequence of investment decisions that were really launched, you know, 10 years ago. So it always pays to be building for a future far in advance and continuing to incent investment now for a time and a problem that you can't foresee.
MS. CALDWELL: So did the pandemic catapult any technological advances that you might not have seen or experienced except because of the pandemic?
MR. POWELL: Well, in some ways. It's a good question. I would say more than unknown technologies, I think it accelerated a commitment to more advanced technologies.
So, in our industry, we made an announcement four years ago that we were driving toward delivering 10 gigabit‑per‑second service‑‑"10G," we call it‑‑you know, by sometime in the 2025, 2026 timeframe, and we're well on our path to delivering that kind of capacity for America. And I think the pandemic merely put a punctuation mark on those plans and caused us to recommit them‑‑recommit to them and accelerate our efforts in that regard.
I would compliment my fellow infrastructure builders in the wireless industry. We've heard a lot about 5G and advanced wireless networks that are also accelerating to delivery world‑class‑‑first, best in class, world‑class wireless and wired networks for the United States of America, and I think the pandemic was a good test but also a great challenge and a great illumination of the path forward that we're all on and excited to be pursuing.
MS. CALDWELL: Is that's what's necessary? Should there be another pandemic or another major disruption in our lives, or what lessons were learned? Are there any plans happening now to prepare for the next possible thing?
MR. POWELL: Yeah. Without real clear specifics, all of our companies also had to learn a lot about operating under hardship, right, operating when your call centers aren't able to be in the building and present. You know, there's a lot of stories that are untold about us being able to change the business to bring call centers, hundreds and thousands of call center employees into their homes, change the technology to respond to problems, rapid‑response engineering teams that could go up and quickly add capacity to a pole or to split a node, major operation centers that were monitoring surges in demand and making adjustments. All that's part of the life of broadband that I think when put under stress is important.
When I look at the world today, I see a lot of existential danger. You know, we still have the risk of disease. We have climate change risk. We have geopolitical risk with the Russians and the Chinese. We have a lot of tough problems that we're staring at as a world and a country, and I'm pretty confident broadband is going to have to be one of the tools in our kit for addressing those challenges in ways we probably can't clearly imagine now, but I'm 100 percent we'll be the better for having world‑class capability to bring to bear on the problem.
MS. CALDWELL: On the flip side of that, if you think broadband is the answer, what about, you know, warfare these days could cut broadband service? How are the‑‑how is the industry dealing with those sorts of threats where there is‑‑people aren't able to access it because of some rogue actors or natural disaster?
MR. POWELL: Absolutely. You know, I think if you were in a board meeting of our companies, you know, second only to this commitment to build to the unserved is the growing and never‑ending concerns about cybersecurity, cyberthreat, and network danger.
I serve on a number of boards, including, for example, the Mayo Clinic which has a massive medical infrastructure. We worry about this technologically every day.
I do think that we've been involved as partners with the government in hardening those networks and monitoring them for illicit activity and trying to be alert to the geopolitical threats as well as criminal threats that we encounter almost every minute of every hour of every day.
So, you know, we're very proud of our record over the course of the last 10 or 20 years as a network to protecting consumers from attacks on the reliability of the network or cyberthreats that cause harm to consumers, but this is the kind of thing you have to be ever vigilant about. You can never rest, and I think those risks have only increased for our country.
When you say that infrastructure is critical, it means it's critical, meaning the loss of it would also be pretty devastating, and we also need to remember broadband doesn't work without electricity. If the underlying grid were to fail, the electrical systems were to be inoperable, then you'd have a big vertical stack problem of everything that depends on that.
Natural disasters, similarly, I think we have a good record. Our teams are generally well prepared to work with FEMA in the face of hurricanes and storms, to move into a community and get networks restored as quickly as possible, and those capabilities continue to develop.
MS. CALDWELL: So are we too reliant on broadband?
MR. POWELL: I don't know. Are we too reliant on cars? Are we too reliant on any technology? No. But I think your question, not to‑‑I shouldn't dismiss fliply because I think we should be‑‑we should be focused on redundancy too.
MR. POWELL: You know, I'm an old soldier. I come from a family of military people. You know, there's never a Plan A. There's Plan B and C, you know. I can say as a private citizen, I depend very heavily on my broadband, but do I have paper copies of my family's affairs somewhere in a safe? Yes, I do. Do I every now and then think about what it would mean if I couldn't access my bank online or renew some important rental agreement? Every now and then, I do think about that, and I think both citizens and I think industries need to be very thoughtful about how would they respond if suddenly they were faced with that. That's a societal risk that technology always presents, but we seem to historically find our way through it.
MS. CALDWELL: Michael Powell, we are out of time. Thank you so much for this very honest and candid conversation. I really enjoyed it.
MR. POWELL: My pleasure.
MS. CALDWELL: And thank you for watching, listening. To get more programs from Washington Post Live, you can go to WashingtonPostLive.com. You can also rewatch this program and find the transcripts. Thanks for joining us. | 2022-09-21T17:41:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transcript: America’s Infrastructure Investment - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/09/21/transcript-americas-infrastructure-investment/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/09/21/transcript-americas-infrastructure-investment/ |
18-year-old arrested in Fairfax homicide, police say
Maj. Ed O’Carroll of the Fairfax County Police Department announces the arrest of Kevin Alexander Lemus, 18, in connection with the shooting death of Darlin Ariel Diaz Flores, 19. (Omari Daniels/The Washington Post)
A man was arrested and charged in connection with a recent fatal shooting in the Woodlawn area, Fairfax County police announced Wednesday.
Kevin Alexander Lemus, 18, was charged with second-degree murder and use of a firearm in the killing of 19-year-old Darlin Ariel Diaz Flores, police said.
Police said that Lemus was arrested Tuesday night around 7 p.m., in the 7200 block of John Paul Drive.
Police said the incident on Sept. 18 began when Diaz Flores was standing outside of a friend’s apartment in the 8400 block of Graves Street. Diaz Flores and a group of friends had just returned from a social gathering in Maryland and were waiting outside of the apartment from a ride home, police said.
Police said Lemus passed Diaz Flores and his friends, and Diaz Flores and Lemus exchanged words. The argument escalated, and Diaz Flores was shot in the upper body, police said.
He was taken to a hospital, where he died.
“This murder was senseless,” said Maj. Ed O’Carroll of the Fairfax County Police Department, adding that Lemus “confessed to being the trigger puller.”
Police said they have not located the firearm used in the shooting, and they declined to detail a motive.
No attorney was listed for Lemus in online court records. | 2022-09-21T18:09:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 18-year-old arrested in in Fairfax homicide, police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/21/arrest-woodlawn-homicide-fairfax/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/21/arrest-woodlawn-homicide-fairfax/ |
Josh Sargent, seen here in a 2019 Concacaf Nations League match vs. Cuba in Washington, has scored six goals in 10 league appearances for England's Norwich City this season. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
COLOGNE, Germany — Josh Sargent rejoined the U.S. national soccer team this week on a torrential scoring tear with his English club, posting the type of gaudy numbers and carrying the accompanying confidence that surely belong on a World Cup roster.
Before reporting to training camp in this historic riverside city, the 22-year-old forward notched six goals in his past seven appearances for Norwich City, an English second-division side poised to return to the Premier League next spring.
He has surged into a share for second place in the league’s scoring race and become a favorite at Carrow Road, where the yellow-clothed Canaries have been kicking about since 1935.
Six goals barely a month into the English Championship season is four more than he scored all of last season in the Premier League — a parched campaign that resulted in no U.S. invitations for more than a year.
“It’s been a fight,” he said Wednesday, “but glad to be back.”
No one saw this coming. Sargent was coming off a 2021-22 campaign — his first in England after four with Werder Bremen in Germany — in which he scored twice in league play and four times in 29 appearances overall before missing the few weeks with an ankle injury. Last among 20 clubs with a 5-26-7 record, Norwich City was relegated.
Poor form impacts national team status. It’s almost unavoidable. Sargent was Berhalter’s first-choice striker when World Cup qualifying began last fall, but after three goal-less appearances for the United States and worsening travails with Norwich City, he disappeared from the roster.
Sargent said watching qualifiers from afar was “upsetting, of course … wanting to be out there but still happy with how everything was turning out for the team.”
Sargent remained in the player pool, but for practical purposes, his World Cup outlook was grim. Ricardo Pepi stepped into the lead role in the qualifiers before Jesús Ferreira seized the job.
Jordan Pefok and Haji Wright were in the mix. This summer, fans began clamoring for FC Cincinnati’s Brandon Vazquez, one of MLS’s top scorers. Sargent, meantime, had plummeted on the depth chart.
“It was just a frustrating time and I was trying to think about the situation I was in Norwich and not so much about the national team,” he said. “If I start performing better, if the team starts performing better, I’ll get the chances with the national team eventually. It was very important for me coming into this season to get off to a good start to kind of put myself back in that [U.S.] picture.”
Four games into the season, the goals began to flow. He scored against Huddersfield Town, then twice against Millwall and once against Sunderland. After a one-game pause, Coventry City and West Bromwich Albion failed to stop him. In that stretch, Norwich (6-2-2) went 6-0-1 to jump into second place behind Sheffield United.
Sargent’s surge overlapped with Berhalter’s plans for his last pre-World Cup camp involving European-based players — a nine-day convention featuring friendlies against Japan on Friday in Düsseldorf and Saudi Arabia on Tuesday in Murcia, Spain.
In announcing the roster last week, Berhalter said Sargent is in “great form” and earned another chance to make a case for a place on the World Cup squad.
Sargent’s performances in the friendlies will not make or break his chances; Berhalter said he will continue monitoring players and evaluating the team’s needs before announced 26 players Nov. 9 for the tournament in Qatar, which will start Nov. 20. But strong showings — and goals — will bolster his case.
Berhalter plans to select three strikers. Barring injury, Ferreira is a lock. Pepi, Sargent and Pefok seem to be fighting for the other two slots. Only Pepi and Sargent were invited to this camp. Pepi is trying to follow Sargent’s lead and regain his scoring form with Dutch club Groningen after a forgettable season with Augsburg in Germany.
Sargent attributes his resurgence, in part, to playing more often in his natural position at the point of the attack. Last season, he often found himself in an uncomfortable role on the wing.
He had played a bit on the flank at Werder Bremen, but the central role suited him best. When Norwich City asked him to play on the wing last season, he was not in a position to say no.
“I was getting playing time in the best league in the world, so I wasn’t going to complain too much,” Sargent. “I feel most free and feel most confident when I play striker.”
Norwich City’s top striker is Finland’s Teemu Pukki, but an early-season injury opened the door to Sargent, who responded with four goals in three games.
“When I got that opportunity, I knew I had to take it,” he said. “Just thinking, you know, ‘Do I still have my touch? I don’t know. I haven’t played there in a while.’ So it felt amazing to score that first game.”
Despite his fine form, Sargent returned to the wing when Pukki recovered, though with greater flexibility.
“Even if I’m playing on the wing now, there’s an understanding between me and the coach [Dean Smith] and the team that I’ll be playing a little bit more as a second striker and tucking more on the inside.”
The goal-scoring has continued.
“I haven’t really had a season like this in terms of getting a lot of scoring chances, getting minutes at striker,” said Sargent, a native of O’Fallon, Mo., a St. Louis suburb. “Confidence is at an all-time high at the moment — just trying to keep that momentum going as long as possible and keep scoring goals.” | 2022-09-21T18:18:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Josh Sargent makes his case for USMNT World Cup roster spot - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/josh-sargent-usmnt-world-cup-roster-spot/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/josh-sargent-usmnt-world-cup-roster-spot/ |
How to stay powered up on the road
Keeping electronics charged while traveling can be an exercise in frustration. (iStock)
Having your devices run out of power is one of the most frustrating things that can happen when you’re traveling. But keeping your phone and computer charged while you’re on the road is harder than ever these days.
At least, that’s how travelers such as Sharon Terera see it.
“It’s being cut off from the rest of the universe unexpectedly — and for hours at a time,” says Terera, a human resources manager and frequent traveler from Limpopo, South Africa. “After that, you quickly learn how to navigate the blackouts and circumvent the lack of power.”
Terera never goes anywhere without two extra power banks, just in case she loses access to electricity. And if you think that’s extreme, you should talk to other travelers. Between power outages, strange plugs and batteries that seem to register “low” all the time, travelers are constantly looking for their next charge.
I confidently packed my “universal” power adapter on a recent trip abroad, thinking it would work everywhere. But I happened to be in South Africa, which uses a three-pronged Type M outlet. (It’s one of four outlet types found in the country.) I had to rush to the nearest drugstore to find an adapter, almost running out of battery on my cellphone.
That wasn’t my only problem. Halfway through my visit, the power went out for several hours one morning. And again in the afternoon. It turns out that my neighborhood was having a rolling blackout as the summer heat stressed out South Africa’s power grid.
Having the power go out is a common problem in the United States, too. Between 2000 and 2021, according to an analysis by Climate Central, about 83 percent of reported major outages in the United States were attributed to weather-related events. In fact, this country has one of the highest incidences of power outages in the developed world.
So how can you find the right power adapters? And how can you avoid outages, such as rolling blackouts? As Americans start to travel again after a peak-pandemic break, they’re finding unexpected answers.
Find the right adapter
Too often, plugs are an afterthought, even for experienced travelers. That’s a mistake. There are more than a dozen commonly used electrical outlets in the world. Even if your adapter fits the socket, there are different plug configurations that may or may not support your adapter. And even if it does, there’s no guarantee that it will allow you to plug in your adapter without it falling out of the wall. (For example, I recently used a nightstand to wedge my Apple adapter into a universal adapter.)
Alison Watta, a frequent traveler who publishes Exploration Solo, a blog for solo travelers, knows what that’s like. If her adapters don’t work, she heads to the closest electronics store. Watta recommends taking your U.S. plug with you, particularly if you’re in a non-English-speaking country.
“Most people working in an electronic store will be able to help you find the right adapter, but having the cord helps if there’s a language barrier,” she says.
For frequent travelers, a universal power adapter is worth considering. The latest adapters are impressively versatile. The OneWorld ($49.99), for instance, fits most of the major plug types and has a USB-C port, plus three additional USB-A ports. It also complies with the new BS8546 safety standard, making it less likely to damage your devices when there’s a surge.
One of my favorite power plug strategies comes from Tom Harriman, a lawyer from Clarksville, Md. When he can’t find the right adapter, he asks his hotel concierge to borrow one from the lost and found. “They’ll usually lend you one — or give you one,” he says.
Pack a power bank
Experienced travelers often travel with portable batteries called power banks to supplement the batteries on their phones and computers.
“It’s particularly helpful when you’re using GPS navigation or other apps that drain power when you’re not on a network,” says Ron Scharman, chief executive of FlyWithWine, a specialty luggage manufacturing company. “By midday, you can be out of power if you don’t have a backup.”
The newest power banks are compact and fast. The Satechi Quatro wireless power bank ($99.99) looks like a phone and supplies power-hungry travelers with 10,000 milliampere hours (mAh) worth of power. (That’s enough to charge the average smartphone about 1.5 times, give or take.) It features a wireless charger, a built-in Apple Watch charger, USB-C power delivery and a USB-A port, which allow you to recharge multiple devices at once. If you want something smaller, try AquaVault’s ChargeCard ($60), a credit-card-size battery with fast charging technology and 2,300 mAh of power.
Power banks won’t fix everything. When the power went out in Cape Town, South Africa, during the rolling blackouts, a power bank only gave me one or two extra hours of work time. It didn’t bring back the WiFi, which meant I had to use valuable cellphone data.
But it’s better to have a power bank than not, and it’s definitely worth the extra bulk. A cellphone charger can mean being able to make a necessary purchase with a contactless tap-to-pay system or reach a loved one in an emergency.
Be proactive about power
Look for hotels that have committed to ensuring you have ample power during your stay. For example, Sheraton Hotels & Resorts has revamped some of its hotels to include built-in wireless chargers and outlets in rooms and community areas. The most forward-looking hotels have charging stations on nightstands and desks, so you never have to get on your hands and knees to look for the nearest outlet.
You can also buy smart luggage with chargers. Ateet Ahuja, a travel agent who specializes in destination weddings, likes Away luggage, because some of its models have chargers built into them. “It’s a popular brand with professionals in the travel industry for good reason,” he says.
Lastly, monitor your electronics. “I always keep my devices charged,” says Michal Jonca, community manager for PhotoAiD, a passport photo website. Doing so is especially important for digital nomads such as Jonca, whose livelihood is reliant on connectivity. | 2022-09-21T18:27:17Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Tips for keeping your electronics charged while traveling - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/09/21/travel-computer-phone-charged/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/09/21/travel-computer-phone-charged/ |
Alexander J. Drueke and Andy Tai Huynh, both of Alabama, are among those released as part of a larger prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine
A Ukrainian soldier sets up a national flag on the border between the Kharkiv and Donetsk areas of Ukraine on Sept. 20. (Yevgen Honcharenko/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Two U.S. military veterans who had been held captive in northeastern Ukraine by Russian-backed separatists have been released with the assistance of Saudi Arabia, the government in Riyadh and the family of one of the veterans said Wednesday.
Alexander J. Drueke and Andy Tai Huynh, both of Alabama, are among a group of at least hundreds of Westerners who have traveled to Ukraine to fight against the Russian invasion. Drueke served in the U.S. Army while Huynh is a Marine Corps veteran.
Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia called the families of the veterans on Wednesday morning to notify them, said Dianna Shaw, Drueke’s aunt. Drueke’s mother spoke to him for about 10 minutes, and said he appeared to be in good condition. He was expected to receive a medical screening later in the day.
“He sounded clear-headed, with clear speech,” Shaw said. “He sounded like himself.”
Shaw expressed amazement with how the release had come about, even as they awaited additional details.
“I never dreamed that it was a possibility that the Saudi government would be able to do something like this,” she said. “But any port in a storm.” | 2022-09-21T18:44:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | U.S. veterans Alex Drueke, Andy Huynh freed in Russia-Ukraine prisoner swap - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/21/us-veterans-alexander-drueke-andy-huynh-russia-ukriane/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/21/us-veterans-alexander-drueke-andy-huynh-russia-ukriane/ |
President-elect Donald Trump and his children Eric, Ivanka and Donald Jr. arrive for a news conference Jan. 11, 2017, at Trump Tower in New York. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)
We can trace the starting point to Feb. 27, 2019. On that day, Michael Cohen, a former attorney for President Donald Trump, appeared on Capitol Hill to answer questions about, among other things, how Trump’s private business was run. Cohen had unique insight into the question, having served as Trump’s right hand for years.
One of the things Cohen alleged was that the company had regularly inflated the valuations of its properties. Within days, regulators in New York state, where the Trump Organization is headquartered, had subpoenaed records from the company. Eventually, it became clear that New York Attorney General Letitia James was investigating a possible pattern of inflation — an investigation that resulted in the announcement on Wednesday of a broad lawsuit targeting Trump, three of his children and the company itself.
Compressing the timeline into one paragraph, though, downplays how much time passed. It’s been more than 900 days since Cohen offered testimony in that packed room at the Capitol. Since then, the Capitol was overrun by violent Trump supporters, and packed rooms fell dramatically out of fashion thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. Or, put another way: If it takes another 900 days to resolve the lawsuit — certainly a duration well within the realm of possibility — it would come at some point in the spring of 2025.
Or, potentially, a year into a second Donald Trump presidency.
Politics are, of course, inextricable from the newly announced lawsuit. In part that’s because Trump is always so assiduous about dragging all of his external problems into the context of an overarching power structure eager to attack him. In part it’s because James, a Democrat, pledged to dig into Trump’s behavior when campaigning for her current position back in 2018.
That’s not to say that the allegations presented by her office on Wednesday are a political hit job (as Trump quickly took to Truth Social to claim). The filing, which runs into the hundreds of pages, suggests substantial grounds for a lawsuit. Asked by a Washington Post reporter whether Trump defenders were justified in claiming that the inflated metrics were simply standard business practices, James said they were not.
“This conduct cannot be brushed aside and dismissed as some sort of good-faith mistake,” James said during a news conference. “The statements of financial condition were greatly exaggerated, grossly inflated, objectively false — and therefore fraudulent and illegal.”
But this doesn’t extricate politics from the lawsuit’s existence. It may simply be that Trump’s elevation in national politics drew the spotlight to years of activity — even as it gave politicians like James and the members of Congress who questioned Cohen in 2019 fertile soil for their own ambitions.
The response to the suit will itself fall heavily along political lines. There’s a well-worn pattern by now, seven years after Trump first announced his candidacy in 2015: Some new investigation or question emerges about Trump’s behavior that, for any other person, would present a huge legal, political or ethical dilemma. His critics get enthusiastic and start poring over the details. Then, slowly, the situation resolves in a way that leaves Trump, his business and his political position mostly undamaged.
To some degree, this is precisely because Trump does such a good job of contextualizing probes as biased, inoculating his supporters against the allegations. It is also partly because many of these investigations have worst-case outcomes for Trump that could, in fact, be quite damaging — but the likelihood of those scenarios is slowly withered by legal machinations that grind the process down into dust or by agreements that end with Trump handing over some chunk of cash or shuttering some ancillary component of his empire. (Asked whether a settlement is possible here, James acknowledged that it is.)
This isn’t to say the probes lack merit; just as there are robust indicators of malfeasance in the new lawsuit, there have been many such indicators in years past. It’s simply to say that each new investigation of Trump is treated as existential by his opponents, even when so many have proven not to be. They are also presented as existential by Trump because that’s an effective mechanism for assuring that they end up somewhere far less damaging.
Also noteworthy is that James is targeting Trump’s old occupation, not his new one. He used to be a real estate salesman. Now he’s a right-wing rhetoric salesman, and lawsuits like James’s are good for business.
There has been some rumbling in recent weeks that Trump’s new business — maintaining an ideological grip on the Republican Party — has stumbled. An NBC News poll released over the weekend showed a dip in the number of Republicans who chose Trump over the party, a shift that some attributed to the damage Trump incurred from the Justice Department probe into the documents he had at Mar-a-Lago. But another NBC News poll conducted a few weeks after the search of that property (the value of which, James would like to point out, the Trump Organization appears to have wildly overinflated) found that his grip on the party had strengthened.
The reality is that Trump’s favorability among Republicans has been fairly steady over the past two years. When he was in office, he was viewed more positively by Republicans on net than he is now. But in weekly polling from YouGov conducted in 2002, his average net favorability within his party is plus-67 — Republicans are 67 points more likely to say they view him favorably than they are to say they view him unfavorably. In the past three weeks, since Mar-a-Lago, the average net favorability has been plus-65 points.
He’s about where he was in 2017.
It is possible that the new lawsuit in New York will hobble Trump’s business before November 2024. It’s certainly possible that, for those in Trump’s orbit who are cited in the suit, the long-term damage could be significant. And it’s also possible that Trump could soon face a federal indictment that makes things like the New York lawsuit pale as a personal threat.
The safest assumption, though, is that this lawsuit will quickly move to the background, with regular reports about new legal challenges and filings, that it will remain unresolved at least through the middle of 2024. That, by the time it’s resolved, we’ll already have a good sense of what the next chapter looks like for Trump.
By mid-2024, after all, we’ll have a better sense of how Trump’s new business endeavor is faring. Has his effort to control the GOP led to his earning the party’s presidential nomination once again? Or was his grip finally loosened as Republican voters opted for someone who wasn’t trailed by a parade of attorneys clutching microphones and paperwork?
Every new legal challenge to Trump is inherently remarkable simply because the breadth and nature of his activity, legal or not, were so unusual for an American president. The suit announced on Wednesday targets that old universe of influence; Trump is already leveraging it to the benefit of his new one. His fate is almost certainly more heavily dependent on the success or failure of his new enterprise: Make America Great Again, Inc.
Noted: GOP House candidate did not deploy to Afghanistan as he claimed, AP reports
5:15 PMThis just in: N.H. GOP candidate says abortion distracts ‘from the really important issues’
4:49 PMThe latest: E. Jean Carroll plans to sue Trump using new N.Y. sexual assault law | 2022-09-21T18:49:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trump’s fate will likely be determined not by a lawsuit but by voters - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/trump-legal-challenges-republicans/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/trump-legal-challenges-republicans/ |
The state attorney general filed a petition to the Court on Wednesday, after two lower courts split on decisions about social media laws
The Supreme Court building in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
The Florida’s attorney general on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to decide whether states have the right to regulate how social media companies moderate content on their services, a move that sends one of the most controversial debates of the internet age to the country’s highest court.
In the petition, the state asks the court to determine whether the First Amendment prohibits a state from requiring that platforms host certain communications and also whether the states can require companies to provide an explanation to users when they remove their posts. The petition sets up the most serious test to date of assertions that Silicon Valley companies are unlawfully censoring conservative viewpoints.
The petition is a response to a decision by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this year that major provisions of a Florida social media law violated the Constitution’s First Amendment. The law would bar companies from banning politicians from their services.
The Florida attorney general incorporated in the petition a recent conservative victory in the 5th Circuit of Appeals, which upheld a Texas law that bars companies from removing posts based on a person’s political ideology. The Florida petition says the circuit courts’ decisions are in conflict, and the Supreme Court must resolve those differences. | 2022-09-21T18:49:06Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Florida brings battle over social media regulation to the Supreme Court - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/21/florida-social-media-supreme-court-scotus/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/21/florida-social-media-supreme-court-scotus/ |
Analysis by Timothy L. O'Brien | Bloomberg
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - AUGUST 10: People walk by Trump Tower in Manhattan on August 10, 2022 in New York City. According to a recent report, the FBI was looking for nuclear-related documents aming other things when they searched Mar-a-Lago. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) (Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America)
New York State Attorney General Letitia James on Wednesday accused former President Donald Trump, his three eldest children and their company, the Trump Organization, of financial fraud, contending they misled investors and falsely inflated the value of their assets by billions of dollars over more than a decade.
Trump, a wildly insecure man, has spent most of his 76 years inflating his wealth, achievements and abilities, but James’s civil lawsuit, more than 280 pages long, is the first time his carnivalesque business practices have exposed him to existential legal consequences. James’s suit won’t land the Trumps in prison — only criminal convictions could do that — but it seeks to bar the Trumps from running a business in New York State and may unravel the Trump Organization.
And the Trump Organization, based in a Fifth Avenue office tower bearing the family name, is a tangible reminder of the fortune that Trump inherited from his father and used to vault himself into the public consciousness and ultimately the White House. Trump, despite his celebrity, long felt overshadowed by his father, Fred, who carved a lucrative real estate portfolio out of modest Brooklyn and Queens properties and cozy ties to New York’s political machinery. Trump brought the family business into Manhattan and the spotlight. Now — for the second time in his career — he has put the family’s business legacy on the precipice. Trash-canning the New York remnants of what his father started about a century ago will weigh on Trump, regardless of whatever he says about it.“Claiming money you do not have does not amount to the art of the deal — it is the art of the steal,” James said at a press conference. “No one — no one — is above the law.”
The Trumps have characterized James’s investigation as a political vendetta. An appellate court judge already disagreed with that assessment last spring and allowed the attorney general’s prosecution to proceed.A civil case holds advantages for James. She won’t have to prove to a jury that Trump intended to break the law — the high bar prosecutors must overcome in a criminal case. Trump and his son Eric also refused to answer questions posed by James’s prosecutors during depositions. The Trumps chose to invoke the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination hundreds of times, which can be used against them in a civil jury trial (something James couldn’t do in a criminal case).
Still, James must prove crimes were committed. Her team has relied extensively on “Statements of Financial Condition” that Trump submitted to lenders (and journalists like me) as evidence of inflated asset valuations. The statements were unaudited, and Trump’s own accountants declined to certify them as complying with generally accepted accounting principles. Journalists may have been swayed by the statements, but whether banks were induced to make loans based on them alone is another matter.
Banks are meant to be savvy lenders and conduct due diligence that goes beyond merely relying on the claims of borrowers. Did the financial statements alone persuade banks to do business with Trump? Probably not. Trump unsuccessfully sued me for libel in 2006 after claiming a biography I wrote, “TrumpNation,” misrepresented his wealth and business career. Although Trump told me in 2004 and 2005 that his net worth was anywhere from $1.7 billion to $6 billion (and suggested it might even be $9.5 billion), my sources at the time told me his wealth was closer to $150 million to $250 million. When Trump litigated the point with me, my lawyers produced a Deutsche Bank AG assessment of his finances that pegged his wealth at $788 million in 2005. Whatever Trump might have been peddling to Deutsche Bank in a financial statement didn’t convince the bank at the time that he was a billionaire.
Being a sloppy and mendacious grifter is grotesque, of course. But convincing a jury that rolling that way also amounted to criminal behavior is a thornier affair. On the other hand, the fact that Trump and his children simply set out to mislead their lenders — even if they weren’t successful— might put them at odds with the law and a jury. We’ll have to see. James said she has also uncovered federal crimes and has referred those to the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and the Internal Revenue Service.
In the meantime, Trump may choose to simply settle James’s case, pay $250 million in allegedly ill-gotten gains she wants disgorged and give up the business ghost in New York rather than wage yet another legal battle.
He is facing intense scrutiny from the Justice Department about his handling of state secrets he took with him to Palm Beach, Florida, after leaving the White House. Federal investigators may choose to indict him on charges of committing a variety of possible crimes exposed during the Jan. 6 committee hearings. A state prosecutor in Georgia is probing whether he engaged in electoral fraud there in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. A criminal fraud inquiry in Manhattan has resulted in the indictment of the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer and has also put the company in the cross hairs there.
That’s a lot to contend with, even for a former president who relishes trench warfare.
Timothy L. O’Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.” | 2022-09-21T19:11:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trump and His Spurious Business Face a Reckoning - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/trump-and-hisspurious-business-facea-reckoning/2022/09/21/38d2f5fe-39dc-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/trump-and-hisspurious-business-facea-reckoning/2022/09/21/38d2f5fe-39dc-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html |
America is under attack — by Texas
A gun advocate in Austin, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
“Don’t mess with Texas” has long been the motto of the state’s considerable population of insecure men, desperate to proclaim their toughness to anyone who will listen. But right now, it’s Texas that’s messing with America. In fact, the nation is under attack from our second-largest state, in ways that have deep and troubling implications.
Texas is the locus of some of the most repugnant culture war extremism anywhere in the country, driven from below by right-wing activists and above by the state government. For instance, earlier this year the state began subjecting families of trans kids to invasive investigations, and a new PEN America report shows that Texas is the site of more school book bans than any other state.
But what happens inside Texas is one thing. Even more disturbing is the way Texas Republicans are so eager to reach beyond their state’s borders to bring their reactionary conservatism to the whole country.
Here are some recent developments:
Last year, Texas passed a law that would bar big social media companies from “censoring” or banning users based on their “viewpoint." That obvious First Amendment violation would effectively make it impossible for platforms to exclude, say, Nazis or those engaged in hate speech and harassment campaigns. The law was just upheld by a three-judge panel, all Republican appointees, of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. The decision was written by Judge Andrew Stephen Oldham, previously general counsel to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
A judge in Texas just declared that a federal law forbidding those under felony indictment from purchasing guns before their cases are resolved is unconstitutional. This follows a case last month in which another Texas judge ruled that the Constitution requires allowing 18-year-olds to purchase guns.
Yet another Texas federal judge ruled that requiring insurance plans to cover medication to prevent HIV infections violates the “religious freedom” of employers. This same Texas judge tried to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act in 2018 (that was overruled by the Supreme Court).
Ken Paxton, an extravagantly odious figure whose career as a right-wing troll is only occasionally interrupted by his duties as Texas’ attorney general, led a group of Republican AGs filed an amicus brief in the case involving Donald Trump’s hoarding of government documents. What interest do Texas and the other states have in the outcome of this case? None. Their absurd brief mostly asserts that Trump should prevail because President Biden is a jerk, citing Biden’s policies on immigration and covid as proof.
Abbott continues to bus immigrants to blue states and cities, including dropping them off at the official residence of the vice president, because take that, Kamala!
That’s just from the last week or so. Going back a little further, it was Texas that filed a deranged lawsuit trying to overturn the 2020 election. The Supreme Court’s decision to allow Texas’ abortion vigilante law to stand was a clear sign it would soon overturn Roe v. Wade. The state is also in the vanguard of voter suppression and gerrymandering.
In fact, Texas Republicans are such committed opponents of popular rule that their party’s platform advocates for an in-state electoral college for statewide elections. That would leverage their gerrymandering of legislative districts into a system enabling them to win and hold executive power even when most voters choose their opponents.
That’s more about the future than the present, since no Democrat has won a statewide election there in years. But as every Texas Republican knows and fears, it will happen before long. The state is steadily if slowly trending toward blue, due to a number of factors including its growing Latino population. To illustrate, Mitt Romney won there in 2012 by 16 points. Four years later, Donald Trump won by nine points. And in 2020, Trump prevailed by just 5 ½ points.
All this shows how Texas is in some ways a political microcosm of the United States. It features Republicans whose ability to attract majority support keeps diminishing, and in response, rather than trying to attract moderates, they run further to the right, seeking out the most divisive culture war fights they can create.
As part of that effort, the state’s Republicans have made it their project not only to change the way life is lived in their own state, but to do everything in their power — with the assistance of some well-placed judges — to make the rest of the country’s laws follow suit. And they’re making a whole lot of progress, whether the rest of us like it or not. | 2022-09-21T19:12:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | America is under attack - by Texas - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/america-under-attack-texas/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/america-under-attack-texas/ |
Bret Baier on air at Fox News in Washington, D.C., in September. (Leigh Vogel/Getty Images)
Fox News sometimes has trouble reckoning with the MAGA beast it has so carefully nurtured. When then-host Megyn Kelly pressed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in an August 2015 debate, for example, the resulting uproar cleaved the network. Daytime anchor Shepard Smith, who told the truth about Trump, left the network after clashing with anti-anti-Trump cheerleader Tucker Carlson.
Now there’s the case of “uncomfortable” Bret Baier, the top night news anchor at Fox News.
Two days after Election Day in 2020, Baier sent an email to colleagues expressing concern about the network’s early and decisive call to put Arizona’s 11 electoral college votes in the column of Democratic candidate Joe Biden. “This situation is getting uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable. I keep having to defend this on air,” wrote Baier to Fox News President and Executive Editor Jay Wallace, according to “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” a newly released book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.
The Fox News Decision Desk, wrote Baier, was “holding on for pride.” He also wrote, according to Baker and Glasser, that the Trump campaign was “pissed” about the situation. “It’s hurting us. The sooner we pull it — even if it gives us major egg — and we put it back in his column the better we are in my opinion.” As the book notes, Arizona was never in Trump’s column: Fox News and the Associated Press (AP) were just outliers in calling the state for Biden as early as election night.
As this blog explained at the time, it was no coincidence that Fox News and AP pulled the trigger on Arizona around the same time. The two organizations had entered into a partnership with the University of Chicago to generate data to drive election calls, though both outlets maintain independent decision desks. The system, they say, is an upgrade over exit polling. Other big-time election-night players rely on a separate data stream — and prominent outlets waited more than a week to call Arizona for Biden, days after they’d called the entire race for him.
The Fox News Decision Desk is one of the few remaining oases of credibility in the organization. It’s headed by Arnon Mishkin, an elections nerd who’s been on the beat for Fox News since the late 1990s; its work achieved glorious virality on election night 2012 when it called Ohio for incumbent President Barack Obama, prompting a famous on-air meltdown from pundit Karl Rove.
The pushback identified in Baier’s email was real. Mishkin himself apparently acknowledged as much on election night, when he appeared on air to defend the already-controversial call. “We made the correct call, and that’s why we made the correct call when we made it. I’m sorry,” said Mishkin.
In response to the Baker-Glasser revelations, Baier released this statement via a Fox News spokesperson:
That’s a whole lot of defense. Why not just release the email, Bret? (The Erik Wemple Blog asked Baier for the document but hasn’t heard back.) Fox News issued this statement: “Fox News made an election night call of historic magnitude and was first to do so. We stood by the call in the days that followed, it was proven correct, and other news organizations eventually joined us.”
That’s 100 percent accurate, though we can’t allow the network to leave the impression that it acted courageously throughout this episode. As Baker and Glasser note, Wallace overruled Mishkin on calling Nevada for Biden on Friday, Nov. 6. Doing so would have made Fox News the first network to declare that Biden had won the contest. A couple of months later, Fox News announced personnel changes in which two key staffers — Bill Sammon and Chris Stirewalt — left the organization. Sammon was “summarily fired,” according to the book (at the time, a network spokesperson confirmed his retirement); Stirewalt later wrote that he, too, was fired, though the network called it part of a “restructuring.”
The attempt by Trump world to contest and overturn the 2020 election assumed many guises, the most despicable of which include the Jan. 6 insurrection, legal attempts to overturn legitimately cast ballots and the innovation of “fake electors.” Merely pressuring Fox News to rescind its Arizona call, by comparison, was an innocuous exercise.
And one that a guy like Baier, you might suppose, would have the gumption to resist without sending a whiny email up the chain of command. Consider that this is a nationally prominent media figure, on the so-called news side of Fox News, with an annual salary of $12 million, according to Brian Stelter’s book “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth.” We regret that this handsomely paid star felt “uncomfortable” in his job during the pivotal days following the 2020 election.
Journalism, though, is often “uncomfortable.” It’s “uncomfortable” to come face to face with someone you’ve been covering critically for months. It’s “uncomfortable” to slam your wife’s boss. It’s “uncomfortable” to cover wars, natural disasters and mass shootings.
Here’s what should be even more “uncomfortable”: revising the considered elections decisions of your colleagues to appease your core viewership. | 2022-09-21T19:12:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Bret Baier complained about Fox News's calling Arizona for Biden - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/baier-fox-arizona-trump-book/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/baier-fox-arizona-trump-book/ |
Banned books are visible at the Central Library, a branch of the Brooklyn Public Library system, in New York City on July 7. (Ted Shaffrey/AP)
New ideas simply just scare some people, who then go too far. In 213 B.C. China, Emperor Qin Shi Huang hosted the first recorded book burning. He also had 460 Confucian scholars buried alive. Later came Adolf Hitler. Under his deranged and genocidal rule in Nazi Germany, publicly attended bonfires were fueled with the works of Jewish, liberal and leftist writers, including Karl Marx, all for being “un-German.” Tuck that thought into your mental file for the next time former president Donald Trump declares the media the enemy of the United States.
It’s all about context, though, isn’t it? Of course, elementary schoolchildren aren’t going to be exposed to such a book. But, plainly, a 16-year old doesn’t need the same level of protection. Some banned books defy reason, such as “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which includes racial language and is often criticized for presenting a “white savior” in the iconic character of Atticus Finch, the erudite lawyer who defends a Black man falsely accused of rape.
In less-controversial categories of books lately banned, we find writers such as Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Perhaps the censors worry that students might recognize their own times in Orwell’s “1984” and begin to question their parents’ thinking. Having read a lot of Huxley, I can’t imagine what he’s done wrong. Another banned book in some parts is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” (Why? Because every sentence is perfect?) And don’t forget about Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” which is frowned upon by those still living in the 19th century because she treats racism realistically. And yet some wonder why critical race theory has come along so fast.
Twas ever thus, I suppose. That said, many parents are understandably concerned about what passes for “literature” these days. I understand wanting to protect a child’s innocence. I also want them to grow up in their own measured time. These issues are complicated, to be sure. But banning books is never a solution. | 2022-09-21T19:12:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Why is book banning on the rise? A fear of new ideas - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/book-banning-comeback-america/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/book-banning-comeback-america/ |
People participate in a protest against Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi on Wednesday outside the United Nations in New York. (Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
When she was detained at the entrance to a metro station in Tehran on Sept. 13, Mahsa Amini, 22 years old, was visiting with her family from Kurdistan province. Her brother appealed to the so-called guidance patrols to leave her alone, family members said. But the morality police arrested her for allegedly contravening the republic’s strict Islamic dress code for women, including the requirement to wear a headscarf known as the hijab and loose-fitting clothes. Three days later, while still in detention, Ms. Amini died.
The authorities said she died of a heart attack. But activists believe she may have been beaten, and a photo of her in the hospital, intubated, which circulated widely on social media, shows her bleeding from the ear and with bruises around the eyes — signs she suffered head injuries.
Her plight provoked rage in Iran. Street protests broke out in Kurdistan province, where she was buried on Saturday. In the past five days, seven people have been killed, at least three of them shot by security forces. On Monday, university students in Tehran demonstrated in the city center. The Associated Press reported they chanted “Death to the Dictator” and denounced the police and the regime. Witnesses saw torched trash bins and rocks strewn across some downtown intersections as the smell of tear gas hovered in the air, and police closed roads and mobile internet service was cut off. By Tuesday, demonstrations were reported around the country, led by women burning their hijabs in protest.
The anger over Ms. Amini’s death was amplified by the wide and rapid dissemination of the photo and video of her, showing once again the power of social media to accelerate dissent. In 2009 in Tehran, the killing of Neda Agha Soltan, 27, cut down by a bullet and bleeding to death during a street protest, was seen on a grainy video that galvanized more anger and unrest. Ever since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the regime has used coercion, intimidation, truncheons and tear gas to snuff out protest and smother free expression. But the latest demonstrations suggest Iranians are losing their fear.
Women in Iran have long despised the hijab law and the arbitrary enforcement of it in the form of harassment and intimidation by the morality police. They have good reason to be furious; the obligatory dress code robs them of free choice about their appearance in public and subjects them to a constant and capricious scrutiny by tyrannical enforcement squads.
The protests come at a delicate time for Iran’s theocracy. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is reportedly gravely ill; Iran’s nuclear agreement with the West hangs by a thread; Iran is fighting several cyber-skirmishes with adversaries, including Israel. Hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi decided to repeat a despicable and long-standing canard of Iranian leaders, expressing doubts about the Holocaust on the eve of attending the United Nations General Assembly session in New York.
Iran’s rulers are out of touch with a society that yearns for more — and deserves better. | 2022-09-21T19:12:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Mahsa Amini's death highlights the tyranny of Iran's hijab enforcers - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/mahsa-amini-death-iran-hijab-enforcers/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/mahsa-amini-death-iran-hijab-enforcers/ |
5 takeaways from the New York A.G.’s sweeping lawsuit against Trump
On Sept. 21, New York Attorney General Letitia James accused former president Donald Trump of fraudulent asset valuations to obtain economic benefits. (Video: The Washington Post)
The first shoe has dropped in the growing post-presidential legal woes of former president Donald Trump, with New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) filing a major lawsuit against Trump, his business and his family on Wednesday.
The lawsuit accuses Trump, the Trump organization and three of his children — Trump Jr., Eric and Ivanka Trump — of business fraud and misrepresenting their finances for personal gain. It also names Trump’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, who recently pleaded guilty to tax crimes, and Trump Organization controller Jeffrey McConney. It seeks to recover $250 million and severely restrict the defendants from conducting business in the state moving forward.
With James telegraphing an intense focus on Trump in the lead-up, and reportedly rebuffing an offer to settle the case recently, this lawsuit has been expected. It also comes as the former president faces potential criminal scrutiny from the federal government, the Manhattan district attorney and prosecutors in Fulton County, Ga., for a variety of issues — including his finances, the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, and his retention of sensitive government documents at his residence in Florida.
Trump lawyer Alina Habba responded Tuesday: “Today’s filing is neither focused on the facts nor the law — rather, it is solely focused on advancing the attorney general’s political agenda. It is abundantly clear that the Attorney General’s Office has exceeded its statutory authority by prying into transactions where absolutely no wrongdoing has taken place.” In a string of social media posts, Trump called the suit “Another Witch Hunt.”
Below are some takeaways from the lawsuit.
1. The alleged inflations of asset values
Thanks to a host of reports by newspapers including The Washington Post, as well as the previous indictment of Weisselberg, we already knew some of the details about Trump’s properties, and how their values might have been inflated, laid out in James’s lawsuit.
Among the key examples: Claiming his triplex apartment at Trump Tower was 30,000 square feet when other documents stated it was only about 11,000 square feet; claiming other buildings had more floors and square footage than they did; claiming more residential lots than he was zoned for on his golf course; and listing values far beyond what appraisers had.
But the lawsuit provides even more specifics.
In one instance, it says Trump claimed money held by Vornado Partnership Interests as his — even though he owned only a 30 percent partnership stake and had no ownership interest. The lawsuit says this increased Trump’s claimed liquid assets by between $14 million and $93 million, depending on the year, thereby “often constituting a considerable portion of Mr. Trump’s reported liquidity.”
At another point, it accuses Trump of seeking to “unduly influence” a lender appraisal in 2015 for 40 Wall Street in New York. The appraised value more than doubled from just three years before: in 2012 it had come in at $220 million, but the 2015 version came in at $540 million. Trump had sought to refinance the loan through Capital One but was rejected, ultimately turning to Ladder Capital Finance, which employed Weisselberg’s son Jack as a director.
2. The potential crimes
James’s office can only sue Trump in civil court, but her office has coordinated with the Manhattan district attorney. And a major question is what the civil probe might reveal that could be used in criminal probes brought there or elsewhere.
In addition to referring the matter to the IRS and the Justice Department, James’s lawsuit highlights a number of state criminal laws she says Trump violated.
New York Executive Law § 63 (12), which makes it a crime to “engage in repeated fraudulent or illegal acts or otherwise demonstrate persistent fraud or illegality in the carrying on, conducting or transaction of business.”
New York Penal Law § 175.10, which involves falsifying business records.
New York Penal Law § 175.45, which involves issuing a false financial statement.
New York Penal Law § 176.05, which deals with insurance fraud.
James declined to say at her news conference Wednesday whether she expected Trump to be charged criminally, saying merely that others would make that determination.
3. Explaining the disclaimer
A big question in all of this whether Trump’s allegedly false “Statements of Financial Condition,” containing purportedly inflated figures, might have broken the law and were held up as actual financial statements. The documents came with disclaimers that assured they were not the full picture of his finances.
But James’s lawsuit says that while that disclaimer could insulate the accountants involved, it doesn’t absolve Trump.
“While the accountants gave notice in the reports that they did not audit or review the Statements to verify the accuracy or completeness of the information provided by Mr. Trump or the Trump Organization, they confirmed that their clients were responsible for preparing the Statements in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States,” the suit says.
It adds that such disclaimers “do not give license to Mr. Trump or the Trump Organization to submit to their accountants fraudulent and misleading asset valuations for inclusion in the Statements.”
Elsewhere in the lawsuit, the attorney general’s office says the disclaimers were adjusted after McConney was questioned in the investigation in 2020. It says that after McConney was asked about the claim in the disclaimer that the valuations were reached in consultation with “outside professionals,” the language was changed to downplay the role of those “outside professionals.”
“The Trump Organization’s abrupt removal of any specific references to consultation with outside professionals in connection with specific valuations is a tacit admission that such references in prior years were inaccurate and misleading,” the lawsuit says.
4. Where the $250 million figure comes from
James’s lawsuit alleges that the overvaluations of Trump’s properties and other financial tricks allowed him to profit because they helped him secure favorable interest rates and other benefits.
She seeks to recover $250 million that she says the defendants illegally obtained. Of that, she says $100 million represents the net gain Trump made from selling the Old Post Office property in Washington, D.C., earlier this year, after using inaccurate statements to get favorable interest rates from Deutsche Bank to fund the construction of his hotel.
The other $150 million comes from favorable interest rates received from banks for other properties.
“All of those benefits were derived from the improper, repeated, and persistent use of fraudulent and misleading financial statements …” the lawsuit says.
5. A Mar-a-Lago documents connection?
The lawsuit also repeatedly suggests a coverup by Trump and those around him, noting instances in which his those involved sought to cut down on written correspondence and long email chains.
It also makes a reference to what had — until recently — been the biggest news involving Trump: the seizure of government documents from Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
The lawsuit floats the idea that the search might have turned up documents that Trump’s team should have shared with the New York Attorney General’s office. It notes that the district court has said “the seized materials include … correspondence related to taxes, and accounting information.”
“Documents concerning taxes and accounting information would appear to be responsive to OAG’s subpoenas, but no such documents for Mr. Trump were produced by counsel for Mr. Trump despite a representation by that counsel that: I ‘diligently searched each and every room of Respondent’s private residence located at Mar-a-Lago, including all desks, drawers, nightstands, dressers, closets, etc. I was unable to locate any documents responsive to the Subpoena that have not already been produced to the OAG by the Trump Organization.’ ”
That, notably, is a similar representation to one that a Trump representative made to the Justice Department in June, saying that all documents marked classified had been turned over. It doesn’t appear that was true. | 2022-09-21T19:12:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trump sued by New York A.G.: Key takeaways from the civil suit - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/trump-new-york-lawsuit-takeaways/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/trump-new-york-lawsuit-takeaways/ |
Bruce Anderson was the Capitals’ organist for 22 seasons. (Ben Sumner/The Washington Post)
Bruce Anderson had seen his playing time diminish in recent years, but the longtime Washington Capitals organist was looking forward to his 23rd consecutive season entertaining fans when he received a call Tuesday informing him his services would no longer be needed.
“I’m not bitter,” Anderson, 67, said in a phone interview. “I’m just sad. It was a great experience. They decided to move in a different direction, and that’s fine with me.”
Commanders’ new marching band leaves some former members feeling cast aside
Anderson, who shared the news on Twitter and Facebook, said he was “blown away” by the response from fans, most of whom expressed disappointment with the decision. A Capitals spokesman confirmed the team will not feature live organ music this season.
“We are continuously finding ways to transform the in-game experience, including having professionally recorded organ songs and prompts,” the spokesman said in a statement. “We thank Bruce for his contributions to the organization and wish him the very best.”
Hockey and organ music have gone hand in hand for much of the NHL’s history, with the Chicago Blackhawks introducing a live organist at Chicago Stadium in 1929. The Capitals employed an organist at Capital Centre when the franchise debuted in 1974, and Ted Leonsis was adamant about keeping the tradition alive after he bought the team in 1999.
“[Washington Sports & Entertainment President Susan O’Malley] doesn’t think we need an organ,” Leonsis said at the time. “I think we need an organ.”
In the market for a new instrument later that year, a group from the Capitals visited the Jordan Kitt’s Music store in College Park, where Anderson was working as the director of education. Anderson demonstrated the organ for the team and was invited to play it in the arena during a preseason game.
“I’ve been there ever since,” he said.
Over his 22 seasons, Anderson prided himself on his ability to mix traditional hockey songs and team chants, including “Let’s Go Caps,” with classic rock, pop and other more contemporary music. When the Capitals hosted the World Series champion Washington Nationals for a game in 2019, Anderson quickly learned “Calma,” Pedro Capó's reggaeton hit that served as the team’s unofficial clubhouse anthem during their title run.
Keep Calma and party on @Max_Scherzer pic.twitter.com/bjVBAGy1eC
— NBC Sports Capitals (@NBCSCapitals) November 4, 2019
In recent seasons, Anderson has played less and less during games. The Capitals hired a new director of game presentation before last season, which led to more changes, including organ music being discontinued after Washington goals.
“I don’t know if it’s a trend or not, but some of the arenas I think they want it to be more techno and EDM,” said Anderson, who added that he enjoyed working with the Capitals’ in-game DJ. “The only time I would get to play would be under Papa John’s and Chick-fil-A announcements. A lot of the creativity got sapped out of it.”
But Anderson, who owns the Lutherville Music School in Maryland, never thought about quitting — not while Capitals captain Alex Ovechkin was still playing, anyway.
“I was perfectly happy to do it, even in a diminished role,” he said. “I love seeing the games and I’ve seen Ovi through his whole career. I was hoping to retire when Ovi retired, and at least on my own terms. But they’re just not using the live organ.”
Anderson said working the 2015 Winter Classic at Nationals Park and the 2018 Stanley Cup finals are among the highlights of his tenure with the team. He also remembers fondly the time legendary play-by-play man Mike “Doc” Emrick acknowledged his handiwork during Game 4 of the Stanley Cup finals at Capital One Arena.
“You know, they go to the trouble to play organ music,” Emrick said as Anderson played before a faceoff. “I just like to hear it once in a while.”
Here's Mike Emrick staying silent so everyone at home can hear @Bruce_CapsOrgan, then making a point to say he just likes hearing organ music once in a while: pic.twitter.com/qpwiu9l7iv
— Organist Alert (@organistalert) June 5, 2018
In the coming months, Anderson, who lives near Baltimore, plans to do something he did exactly once over the past 22 seasons: go to a Capitals game solely as a fan.
“All the staff there, especially the game production staff that I deal with a lot, are good friends of mine,” he said, “so I definitely want to come down and see them in action.” | 2022-09-21T19:13:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Capitals organist Bruce Anderson let go after 22 seasons - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/capitals-discontinue-live-organ-music/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/capitals-discontinue-live-organ-music/ |
Have your cake and eat it, too? Here’s what the law says.
Former president Donald Trump at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, on Saturday. (Gaelen Morse/Reuters)
“My view is you can’t have your cake and eat it, too.”
— Judge and special master Raymond J. Dearie on whether the Trump team needs to disclose what (if any) documents recovered at Mar-a-Lago had been declassified and when
This is actually a fascinating legal area! Indeed, cake-having doctrine dates to the code of Hammurabi: “If someone shall seek to take a flat cake of pounded barley belonging to another man, his arms shall be cut off and he shall be flung into the water among the birds of prey.”
Likewise, the Old Testament contains a tale concerning the having and eating of cake, in which two women arguing over possession of a cake (one wishes to have it, the other, to eat it) bring it before King Solomon to settle the dispute. Solomon seizes a sword and cuts the cake in half, giving half to each woman, and utters the following proverb, “Wow! This worked out flawlessly! Let’s try it with a baby!”
The New Testament offers fewer observations on cake, except that Jesus dodges the question entirely by just multiplying any grain products that are in front of him that could be the subject of dispute.
Plato contemplated the question of having cake in his famous metaphor of the cake, coming to the conclusion that although many people thought they were having cake, some people were only having cake in their minds. Chaos ensued. This marked the beginning of the end of Athenian democracy.
Roman cake law, meanwhile, said that anyone was entitled to cake if he or she had the appropriate state-issued coin and approached the cake using the proper forms and roads.
Cake-having was clearly circumscribed in medieval Europe: “The Serf may have no Cake, for he is a Villein and lowest of the Low, and any Cake that appertaineth unto him belongeth of Right unto his Lord. His Lord may have and enjoy even unto eight Cakes, with a ninth to be partaken of upon days of Feasting.”
Throughout most of the Renaissance, cake law continued remarkably unaltered, although the stealing of small cakes was regarded as a tort.
All this changed with the French Revolution, sparked by Marie Antoinette’s suggestion that the peasantry ought to eat cake while not having cake. This threw the populace into disarray, and the Declaration of Rights of the Man and of the Citizen was issued to resolve the cake dispute. As an indirect result, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin proposed an innovative device for cake slicing that was used to great effect.
And U.S. cake jurisprudence is founded on Marbury v. Madison, when the Supreme Court ruled that the judiciary had the first right to look at cake and decide whether it wants to have it or eat it before the executive branch gets a bite. All domestic cake law evolved from there, expanding to cover a whole range of confections.
So, former president Donald Trump’s decision to take a bunch of classified documents with him to Mar-a-Lago after leaving office and then insist that he declassified them with his mind, but maybe did not, depending upon who is asking, seemed, at first, like a novel case: No president had ever tried this before! Maybe a new rule was needed.
But actually, when you slice into it, it turns out: It’s cake. And when it comes to having and eating that, the rule is clear. | 2022-09-21T19:45:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Is Trump's special master right about cake? Here's what the law says. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/trump-special-master-dearie-cake-satire/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/trump-special-master-dearie-cake-satire/ |
The phrase “Stop killing black women” appeared alongside a photo of Moyonna Tillman after she was fatally shot in front of her mom’s Maryland home
Moyonna Tillman was found shot several times in her mother’s front yard about a year ago. (Courtesy of Moyonna Tillman's family)
Nearly a year after Moyonna Tillman was found shot and dying in her mother’s front yard, her relatives still question whether they could have done anything to save her.
“Every day,” uncle Robert Taylor said.
He twice had met the man police accused of killing her — her boyfriend. One of those times occurred a few months before his niece’s death when Taylor and his wife were on vacation and happened to end up in the same state the couple were visiting. Taylor let the two spend the night in his family’s hotel room, and he took them to dinner that night and made them breakfast in the morning.
“What did we miss?” he said on a recent night. “Did we miss signs or something?”
His sister, Ashleigh Taylor, joined us as we talked that night and reminded her brother that nothing was missed.
“There weren’t any glaring signs,” she said. “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. We have all respectively dug into the backs of our minds to think, ‘Did she ever do anything? Did she ever say anything?’ And there was nothing.”
The questions that yank at her instead, she said, are: “What do you do when there are no signs? Could it have been avoided? And how?”
“I am angry,” she said. “We’re angry, because there was so much more to this life that she could have lived.”
Tillman’s family called her “Yonnie” and in their memories of her, she is in constant motion. They describe her using words such as “go-getter,” “motivator” and “entrepreneur.” She was 8 when she started making candles and selling them during her father’s flag football games. She named her enterprise “Enjoy the Moment.”
“You can’t stress yourself out about things you cannot control,” she would say. “Just relax and enjoy the moment.”
At 24, Tillman was still selling candles, had plans to launch other businesses and had started to break into modeling. She aspired to work as a model in Los Angeles.
But on Sept 24., 2021, those plans came to a stop when gunshots were fired in front of her mother’s home in Prince George’s County. Police found Tillman shot several times. She was taken to a hospital but could not be saved.
Soon after, detectives obtained an arrest warrant for her 25-year-old boyfriend, James Darnell Kirkland. Days later, Kirkland returned to Tillman’s mother’s house and police say he fatally shot himself.
“It knocked us off our feet when the police said they were looking at her death as domestic violence,” Robert Taylor said. He described his niece as a caretaker, in ways that were visible and unseen. “Our mother is elderly, and Yonnie was the one who kept her light going. And what we found out from talking with the police was she was part of an organization that was supporting mothers who lost their kids to gun violence. We didn’t know Yonnie was doing that behind the scenes.”
Can a grandmother working with Harvard save girls from domestic violence?
In the months that followed Tillman’s death, her family members reeled and grieved. They also got to work. They started talking about how they might honor her and make sure that how she died wasn’t the end of her story.
On Sunday, a year after Tillman’s death, the family plans to announce that it has created a foundation in her name. The Moyonna C. Tillman Foundation will focus on mental health and domestic violence.
“We didn’t want her memory to be reduced to domestic violence,” Ashleigh Taylor said. “She was so much more than that. We didn’t want her to be just another statistic.”
The family plans to use the foundation to contribute to research, provide scholarships and offer support to domestic violence survivors. They hope to eventually run it out of dedicated building space, but for now, they are concentrating on raising funds and gathering ideas on how they can best use the foundation to help others.
She’s spent years tracking the killings of Black women and girls. Now, she’s planning a D.C. march.
The killing of Black women in the United States has been called “an unspoken epidemic” by advocates who have been pushing to bring more attention to the issue. In a previous column, I told you about Rosalind Page, a nurse and a Black mother of four daughters, who started tracking the killings of Black women and girls years ago. She found that too often their lives were being told through news briefs and their deaths being undercounted by federal agencies. By her count, 1,472 Black women and girls’ lives ended violently in 2021, an increase from the year before, which was an increase from the year before that.
Tillman was one of those deaths. Her face appeared on the Twitter page Black Femicide — America. That page and others are filled with the names and photos of women and girls who have been killed across the country.
Three hashtags that appear above Tillman’s photo: #StopKillingBlackWomen, #StopKillingBlackGirls and #domesticviolence.
9-24-2021--Detectives Obtain Arrest Warrant for Man in Domestic-Related Homicide in Clinton https://t.co/IvnjdA2Piq #blackfemicideUSA #domesticviolence #every6hours #nametheproblem #StopKillingBlackWomen #StopKillingBlackGirls
Moyonna Tillman, 24 pic.twitter.com/GoOuxeh97l
— Black Femicide - America (@blackfemicideUS) September 29, 2021
Robert Taylor said one action the family is considering taking through the foundation would lead them back to Tillman’s high school. They hope to have discussions with students about domestic violence.
Taylor also has two daughters. He said after his niece’s death that he had uncomfortable but needed conversations with them.
He realized he would rather ask questions now than after it was too late. | 2022-09-21T19:58:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | After the murder of an aspiring model, a family vows to help others - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/21/moyonna-tillman-domestic-violence-stop-killing-black-women/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/21/moyonna-tillman-domestic-violence-stop-killing-black-women/ |
Give King Charles III a break
King Charles III and Princess Anne follow the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II during funeral proceedings at Westminster Abbey on Monday. (Andreea Alexandru/AP)
Monica Hesse’s gratuitous trashing in her Sept. 16 Style column of British King Charles III was in bad taste, especially as Britain and the world remember the life of his mother, Elizabeth II. Those of us living in 1997 remember well the tragic death of Princess Diana, a year after her divorce from Charles. Over the many years since her death, we have learned more than we needed to know about the details (at times lewd) attending Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles’s long affair during Charles and Diana’s marriage.
Charles never exactly got a pass to marry the then-divorced Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. But he earned his chops as Prince of Wales, learned much through his mother’s example and was one of her greatest assets. The new British monarchy will endure many challenges in the years ahead, but it’s a reasonable bet that Charles will turn out to be a fine king. Give the guy a break.
Richard W. Stinson, Bethesda | 2022-09-21T20:20:34Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Give King Charles III a break - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/give-king-charles-iii-break/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/give-king-charles-iii-break/ |
A moment with the queen
Queen Elizabeth II waves from the balcony of the White House on July 7, 1976, as she stands with President Gerald Ford and first lady Betty Ford. (J. Walter Green/AP)
In July 1976, Queen Elizabeth II came to Washington for a state dinner with President Gerald Ford. I was 18 and had just moved to D.C. four months earlier from a small town in rural Pennsylvania. I was working at a flower shop/plant store on Pennsylvania Avenue just a block from the White House, which gave me a front-row seat for a lot of exciting things happening right down the street. Pretty awesome for a young, wet-behind-the-ears girl from a small town.
Walking down Pennsylvania Avenue one day looking to get some lunch, I saw a small crowd gathered in front of Blair House, the president’s guesthouse for visiting dignitaries. Curious, I walked toward the crowd and got to the front of the sidewalk barrier. My timing was good, because within a few minutes the queen came out and walked to a waiting limousine. Even though it was 46 years ago, I still have those images in my mind’s eye. She was wearing a bright green dress with a pattern of white shapes and white gloves and carried a purse. As the limo drove away, she waved to us from the window. I remember pinching myself and thinking wow, I sure live in a pretty cool place. Sure not in Kansas anymore.
Vicki Lindsay, McLean | 2022-09-21T20:20:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | A moment with the queen - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/moment-with-queen/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/moment-with-queen/ |
We all own this problem
Larkin Stallings, left, of Martha's Vineyard Community Services, warmly says goodbye on Sept. 16 as dozens of undocumented immigrants are transported off Martha's Vineyard. (Dominic Chavez for The Washington Post)
I enjoyed Michele L. Norris’s Sept. 18 Sunday Opinion column on the flights of immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, “Here is what DeSantis and Abbott don’t understand about America.” If Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) goal with this stunt was to get attention, he succeeded. Initial reactions from those of us in “sanctuary” states and cities are to revile against inhumane acts of using innocent people as political pawns and determine whether laws were broken.
We must also recognize that illegal immigration into this country is not borne equally by all states. We here in Massachusetts pride ourselves in welcoming immigrants, but we don’t share a land border with another country, as Texas does with its 1,250-mile border with Mexico.
The federal government is responsible for controlling border security, but it has achieved little success over the decades. Republicans favor stronger security measures (such as a wall), and Democrats focus on a path to citizenship for those here without legal status. Both perspectives must be considered as part of a viable solution.
The federal government needs to acknowledge this problem. Vice President Harris recently made the claim on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that our “border is secure.” No one believes this. Any solution will require compromise, but we first need to acknowledge that we — all of us — own this problem.
David B. Weden, Dover, Mass. | 2022-09-21T20:20:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | We all own this problem - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/we-all-own-this-problem/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/we-all-own-this-problem/ |
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) speaks with reporters following the Senate Democrats weekly policy lunch on Tuesday at the Capitol in Washington. (Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters)
The treaty — known as the Kigali Amendment to the 1987 Montreal Protocol — compels countries to phase out the use of the potent hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which are hundreds to thousands of times as powerful as carbon dioxide in speeding up climate change.
The United States became the 137th country to ratify the Kigali amendment — and negotiators said the move would encourage the remaining nations to follow suit. The earlier Montreal Protocol clamped down on ozone production.
U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John F. Kerry, who was in the Rwandan capital of Kigali when the amendment was negotiated, said the Senate vote “was a decade in the making and a profound victory for the climate and the American economy.”
The treaty, which had to win support of at least two-thirds of the Senate, brought together an unusual coalition of supporters including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers as well as the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that ratifying the Kigali Amendment and adopting the Inflation Reduction Act was “the strongest one-two punch against climate change any Congress has ever taken.”
He said the treaty would “reduce global temperatures by about half a degree Celsius by the end of this century, a little talked about fact with very significant impact.”
He called it a “win-win in our fight against climate change.”
Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, said that the ratification showed President Biden’s “continuing climate leadership, and his appreciation of the need for speed to slow warming in the near-term, avoid climate tipping points and slow the self-reinforcing feedbacks.”
The Senate, with Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) as the lead sponsor, had passed the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act, which authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to carry out most of the regulations that would be required under ratification. Kennedy’s state is home to Mexichem Fluor and Honeywell plants that make the chemicals.
“The Senate is signaling that Kigali counts for the jobs it will create; for global competitive advantage it creates; the additional exports that will result and it counts for U.S. technology preeminence,” Steve Yurek, president of the Air Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute said in a statement. He said that U.S. manufacturers already supply 75 percent of the world’s air conditioning equipment and that global demand was “exploding.”
Still, many senators opposed the treaty. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said that domestic legislation was already adequate. “We did it here, we did it right. We don’t need to get entangled in another United Nations treaty,” he said.
Barrasso also complained that “this treaty is especially bad because it doubles down on the practice of treating China as a developing country." Like all other developing countries, under the treaty China gets a grace period before it must reduce HFCs.
Other Republicans have opposed the treaty. Three senators —James M. Inhofe (Okla.), Mike Lee (Utah) and Rand Paul (Ky.) — joined Barrasso in placing holds on the Kigali Amendment in an effort to block a vote, according to two individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the holds were not public.
But Dan Lashof, director of the World Resources Institute, said U.S. manufacturers have been “innovators so this just strengthens the U.S. role in promoting solutions and will strengthen the U.S. economy as well as being a big win for the climate.” | 2022-09-21T20:42:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Senate passes Kigali amendment to curb hydrofluorocarbons - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/09/21/kigali-amendment-senate-super-pollutants-climate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/09/21/kigali-amendment-senate-super-pollutants-climate/ |
Montgomery adds safety rules for school sporting events after football fight
Students will also have to show a student ID or a copy of their school schedule to prove they are enrolled at one of the schools competing. Students who don’t attend one of the two schools playing will have to be accompanied by an adult chaperone. | 2022-09-21T20:42:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Montgomery adds rules for school sporting events after football fight - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/21/montgomery-county-schools-sports-rules-football-fight/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/21/montgomery-county-schools-sports-rules-football-fight/ |
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday. (Gavriil Grigorov/Sputnik/Kremlin Pool/AP)
Though Russian President Vladimir Putin has often asserted that his “special military operation” in Ukraine was proceeding as planned, the facts on the ground have said otherwise for months. The most dramatic recent evidence is the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the northeastern part of the country, in which Kyiv’s forces recaptured more than 3,000 square kilometers this month as many of the Kremlin’s troops broke and ran. So Mr. Putin — albeit without admitting it — has switched tactics. In an extraordinary televised address Wednesday, he announced a partial mobilization that would call up 300,000 reservists and forcibly extended the contracts of those already in Ukraine — as well as harsh new penalties for anyone who refuses to fight. He set the stage for annexing occupied areas of Ukraine, which would recast those regions as sovereign territory that Moscow is bound to defend. Most ominously, he said that, to counter threats to its “territorial integrity,” Russia “will certainly use all the means at our disposal” — an obvious allusion to its nuclear arsenal — adding, “This is not a bluff.”
President Biden and the leaders of other nations supporting Ukraine must take all of this seriously even as they take none of it at face value. Yes, Mr. Putin appears to be raising the stakes; but at the same time, he implied that Russia was scaling back its war aims — from the erstwhile (and absurd) “denazification” of all Ukraine to the mere protection of purportedly traditional Russian lands in the southeastern Donbas region. Indeed, Mr. Putin sought to recast his aggressive war as a reactive one. “The territorial integrity of our motherland, our independence and freedom will be defended,” he said. These are the hypocritical, backpedaling words of a dictator who badly miscalculated by seeking to destroy Ukraine’s territorial integrity and who finds himself in need of a new rationale for war. As his battlefield losses mount, Mr. Putin is taxing the patience both of Russian hard-liners who had supported his war and of major non-Western countries that had indulged it. The latter category includes China and India, whose respective leaders signaled their unhappiness with Mr. Putin at a recent multinational conference in Uzbekistan. Another attendee at that meeting, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said there must be peace and a return of Ukrainian territory — including Crimea, seized in 2014. As for Russia’s people, thousands of them responded to Mr. Putin’s new plan by flocking to the Finnish border, lining up for one-way air tickets out and, in several cities, protesting.
The serious part is indeed the call for military reinforcements and the nuclear saber-rattling. It would be negligent to assume that Mr. Putin will not use the former to perpetuate combat as long as he can — or the latter to compensate for the ineptitude of his conventional forces if it comes to that. Cornered, he might be more dangerous. Yet, in practical terms, neither more troops nor nuclear weapons can be brought to bear effectively immediately. The only thing worse than failing to prepare for Mr. Putin to carry out his threats would be to be cowed by them.
There was no sign of that in Mr. Biden’s remarks to the United Nations, in which he decried Mr. Putin’s “irresponsible” language and pledged: “We will stand in solidarity to Russia’s aggression.” That was and is the winning policy, as Mr. Putin’s desperate words and deeds backhandedly — but unmistakably — confirm. | 2022-09-21T20:43:56Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Putin's Ukraine threats shouldn't stop the West's resistance - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/putin-ukraine-threats-response/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/putin-ukraine-threats-response/ |
Transcript: Chasing Cancer: Care Beyond Medicine
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Paige Winfield Cunningham, editor of the Health 202 newsletter here at The Post.
Today we have two segments on cancer care, and first, I'm joined by Dr. Worta McCaskill‑Stevens, chief of Community Oncology and Prevention Trials Research Group at the National Cancer Institute.
Dr. McCaskill‑Stevens, welcome to Washington Post Live.
DR. McCASKILL‑STEVENS: Good afternoon. I am delighted to be here.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: And remember we always want to hear from you, our audience. You can share your thoughts and questions on Washington Post Live by tweeting @PostLive, and we'll try to fold those into our conversation.
Dr. McCaskill‑Stevens, your title is a bit of a mouthful. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do at NCI?
DR. McCASKILL‑STEVENS: Thank you very much. Well, the Community Oncology research program is the community‑based clinical trials network. I am a medical oncologist by training and focused my initial interest on breast cancer.
Now I'm leading in the community‑based clinical trials network, which was designed to really make sure that the clinical trials are accessible in the communities where individuals live. So, in our program, we have a broad research portfolio that includes treatment but was originally designed to bring the treatment oncologists into the prevention arena. We now do screening, but we, importantly, also do symptom management. So we look at the adverse effects of chemotherapy. There is other treatments as well as symptoms of the cancer itself.
So, in a nutshell, that's what we do. We have a huge reach throughout the country. We have over a thousand sites and over 4,000 physicians, and if you include the expanded network of nurses and all the advanced practitioners, we have 9,000 individuals who help to make access to individuals in their own communities for cancer research.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: We know clinical trials are so crucial to advancing cancer care and yet so many challenges with trials, and I'd love for you to spell out what you see as some of the biggest challenges in terms of recruiting and conducting these trials.
I was reading a little bit before this interview, and I was reading that there are sort of this problem of repeat patients who will enroll sort of consecutively in trials and actually was reminded of someone I knew in college who did this very thing. Can you talk a little bit about that challenge and other challenges?
DR. McCASKILL‑STEVENS: Well, I think that the challenge and I think those whose clinical trial it is, our goal is to make sure that the patient has access, that the patient has been given enough information to make a choice. I think that's the best that we can do.
I think, importantly, it's making sure that it's in an environment in which the patient doesn't have to worry about transportation to traveling too far and most importantly that there's trust. So we select institutions that tell us what their catchment area is. We ask many questions of them. Who do you treat? What connections do you have in the community?
And, as I said in the introduction, the oncology team is rapidly expanding. It takes the team to do this, not just the health care team that are oncologists by training, but also the relationship with the primary care physicians. Particularly, patients who are not that knowledgeable about cancer treatment, they will go to their primary care physicians and ask, "Well, Dr. McCaskill‑Stevens has asked me to participate in a clinical trial. What do you think about that?" So it's very important that we engage the important stakeholders.
Trials are becoming increasingly complex. We are diving into precision medicine to make our treatment more tailored to the individual, to the individual's cancer. So the nature of clinical trials that we had three decades ago is really changing. We're asking more specimens so that we can do all the‑‑to employ all the advanced technologies that we have, the molecular characterizers that are so individual.
So I think one of the challenges is making sure that that information is out there, but most importantly that the information is given, that the environments are culturally sensitive and welcoming to the individuals who are being asked to participate in clinical trials.
We know that there have been barriers in terms of trust, and I like to think of them as the historical trust issues, but some of the more current ones that I think lingered from the past‑‑but I think we have‑‑because we have such a diverse community in the U.S. now, I think there's sort of a new wave of trust.
And let me be specific about that. You know, we've talked about Tuskegee, and there are many other events locally throughout the country that led to mistrust. But I think also we need to keep in mind that with new populations coming in, individuals who live in countries where there was no screening, no cancer registries, or not even the training disciplines to treat cancer, that that's a different level. So we have to speak to them on the level from which they're coming and make sure that throughout what we do for screening, for treatment, for survivorship, that it's tailored to these individuals and what they're accustomed to and how we can work to make their outcomes better as well.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: Well, all this sounds good and reasonable, but, you know, how big of a problem is it in terms of not being able to recruit enough people for clinical trials? I was reading that a large number of clinical trials seem to be delayed or never get off the ground because it's just hard to find the right sorts of people to enroll and then persuade them to enroll.
DR. McCASKILL‑STEVENS: Well, I think that the NCI's effort to get patients in clinical trials and putting them in the communities where accessible actually have been quite successful.
We have‑‑in 2013, 2014, there were lots of discussions and modifications and revamping to make sure the trials are conducted more quickly, that they end successfully, and over the last couple decades, both in the treatment arena as well as in the Division of Cancer Prevention, for prevention and other types of trials, I think some of those barriers have been broken down.
The funding, the regulatory issues that one has to go through to ensure that the patients were safe‑‑one of the things, I think, that has helped us is having a central IRB for review of the trials, that when you had every institution having to do its own approval, that was really a burden. And that's one of the examples that has helped us to expedite that.
I think also that the discussions about cancer are more prevalent in the media, and I think that we have tools now, translation tools, for example, that we're doing so that local sites as well as the CRP can help, the central review panel can help us in making sure that the languages are appropriate and also, importantly, that the trial's problems come from the communities. That's one of the things that we ask. We are delighted when an institution can bring to the table something that is from a specific population that's a research gap, and we can bring in all the expertise that we have to design those trials to be more user friendly and feasible and wanted in those populations.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: I know another challenge, of course, is the failure rate of clinical trials. I read somewhere that it's about 80 to 90 percent failure rate, and I'm wondering, is that sort of an unavoidable part of research? Is there a way to improve the success rate?
DR. McCASKILL‑STEVENS: Well, remember you do the trial to answer a research question. Not all the trials are going to be positive. I'd also add that sometimes when the trial doesn't have a positive or what we call a "negative trial" that we learn from them. We always say that, you know, you learn‑‑more questions should emanate from a trial than necessarily that you're answering.
But I do think that with the advanced technology, we're able to dig a lot deeper in terms of answering the questions and, more importantly, identifying the next step that's going to take us there.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: There's a lot of talk these days about the need for diverse representation in clinical trials, and, you know, it's sort of obvious why you would want equal representation between males and females because of the obvious biological differences.
But it seems less clear why, say, the color of someone's skin would affect the outcome in a trial. Can you talk to us about how you look at that and why you see that as important?
DR. McCASKILL‑STEVENS: Well, I think that the first step is to think about the fact that everyone should have access to good care, and the driver for what's done in practice in the real world outside of‑‑you know, just across the country has really brought‑‑has been‑‑emerges from the information from clinical trials.
But we know that there are different rates and incidence rates among populations, and even when the incidence rates are more equal in terms of incidence, there are differences in mortality. So it's really critical to have participation, representation from those individuals who are dying and have a higher risk of mortality in our cancers, and we know that among racial and ethnic population, this is, in fact, the case. They have a much higher burden of cancers in their outcomes in terms of mortality. We also know that there are barriers and that there are the social factors, the lower incomes, the discrimination, the racism that they function‑‑that they function under.
And it's also important to know that we know that in the past, we've had many institutions that have served racial and ethnic populations within their communities. Many of them‑‑many of them were known as the safety net hospitals where they could come in, regardless of their income or their insurance status, and many of those hospitals are no longer functioning. So it's really critical that we get them in.
I mean, we want our outcomes to be generalizable to racial and ethnic populations, regardless of whether you're rural or you're in an urban area or ages. You know, we know that there's age discrimination or age‑‑lower representation at clinical trials.
And we learn so much over time. You know, we've learned that the adolescents and young adults, 15 to 39‑‑you know, we've learned so much in the pediatric population, but many of our trials have been very successful, and they've had great outcomes. But there are disparities.
For example, in Hispanic children, they're 20 percent more likely to develop leukemia than in non‑Hispanic Whites. So there are many questions that emerge, and so having the diversity of race, ethnicity, geographic representation is critical to make sure that their quality outcomes in cancer are obtained.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: Those are all helpful points. Just to press into that topic a little bit deeper, you mentioned precision medicine and the targeting of cancers looking at, you know, very‑‑at someone's genetic makeup, and I guess I'm wondering sort of in light of that, how helpful are these broad racial categories? Because there's great‑‑there's large genetic diversity even among these broad racial categories. So I'm just wondering how useful those categories are sort of when you're talking about this need to fold in more diversity in clinical trials.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: Yes. Thank you. That's an excellent question.
As you know, we now use the Office of Business Management‑‑OMB criteria, and they are what we have now. They are restrictive, but we are working very hard to disaggregate them.
And you're absolutely correct. If you look at the Hispanic population, it's going to be important to know whether this is a population of South America, whether this is Puerto Rico, whether these are immigrants who have come in, you know, decades ago or they're newly ones.
And, similarly, within the African American population, where we have‑‑by this category, if you're from South Africa, it's African American or Black, but if you just put Black, we don't know whether you immigrated from the Caribbean area or you're from South Africa or any of the other African countries that will allow you to categorize yourself. It's self‑reported.
So our method of addressing that is coming up with tools that have expanded the opportunity for individuals to self‑report, to learn about their country of origin, to learn where they were born, and what their languages are that were spoken or whether they are first‑generation populations.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: I want to ask you about recent comments by President Biden who was talking about his Cancer Moonshot earlier this month and talking about his goal of cutting cancer deaths in half in the next 25 years. Do you see this as an attainable goal given what you know about the development in cancer treatments and the rate of that?
DR. McCASKILL‑STEVENS: I hope this is an obtainable goal. I think there is a lot of evidence, as you know, in the past years, some prompted by covid and a greater awareness of some of the things that have happened throughout the country and lives lost. I think there's a greater tension on disparities. I think a combination of advanced technology, open‑‑more open discussions about it, I think that it's something we can work toward. I'm hoping that we get to 25 percent. It's going to take a big team and not just oncologists but, of course, policy, industry, the FDA, all of the agencies that have to work together to make this possible.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: I know a lot of your professional focus has been on breast cancer, including as director of STAR, which is short for the study of tamoxifen and some other drug that I'm having trouble pronouncing.
DR. McCASKILL‑STEVENS: Raloxifene.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: Can you tell us about that study and what its findings were?
DR. McCASKILL‑STEVENS: Well, this is a very large study that built upon a study before it, which looked at tamoxifen versus placebo in women who were at high risk of developing cancer. So then there was another drug that showed promise in this area. So we compared those two drugs, and now both of those drugs are FDA‑approved for reducing the incidence of breast cancer. So that's very important.
You know, we had some challenges. We worked very hard to provide to minority women information that was applicable to them. For example, one of the things that was a driver into these trials was a reduction in the contralateral breast cancer. So we know that if you have breast cancer in one breast, you are at risk of developing it in the other breast, and so the drug tamoxifen had demonstrated that ability.
So, when I would go to talk to diverse communities or specific African American communities, I presented data that we analyzed to show that they got the same benefit. We were clear about the adverse events and making sure that they understood that, you know, many populations with growing incidence rates of obesity and more chronic diseases and we know that there are extra burdens of those disease in racial and ethnic populations, but thinking about the risk and benefit, you know, if you're going to reduce a risk of breast cancer with an agent that had some side effects that may impact your chronic disease, we were very clear about that. But I think the outcomes and the availability of reducing risk for women was a significant finding in that study.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: There's always this debate over the origin of cancer, right, the generic side of it and then the behavioral side of it, and I just wanted to dive into that briefly in the time we have left.
I know, of course, as you know, that there are genetic markers for some of the most common types of breast cancer, but are there prevention efforts that women can take to try to reduce their risk as well?
DR. McCASKILL‑STEVENS: Absolutely. And I'll speak specifically about breast cancer. We know that there are some associations with obesity. As a matter of fact, if you look across the board, we know that 40 percent of the cancers that do exist are probably modifiable by changing of lifestyle and other issues, of course, inactivity, your family history, of course, which you can't change. But what you can do is be knowledgeable about it. And I encourage families to talk about their family histories and research it.
We now know that breast cancer is not just one disease. So there are subtypes, and there are different risk factors for them. But, certainly, things reducing, you know, weight loss, increasing activity, and also advocates for making sure that the facilities in which one can do these types of things are available in the specific communities, that's really important.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: Well, we're going to continue following this vitally important topic. Dr. Worta McCaskill‑Stevens, thank you so much for joining us here at Washington Post Live.
DR. McCASKILL‑STEVENS: Thank you.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: And thanks to all of you for joining us here today. Please stay with us for the next segment of this conversation where we'll be speaking with best‑selling author and motivational speaker, Joan Lunden.
MS. ORZECHOWSKI: Greetings to our online audience. My name is Martha Orzechowski, and I'm a part of the AstraZeneca US team.
I'm thrilled to be here today as part of our YOUR Cancer program, which celebrates and supports individuals working to redefine cancer care. As we've just heard, patient navigation and resources beyond the medicine are important tools for advancing health equity in the cancer space.
Today we're going to explore this topic further with Dr. Linda Burhansstipanov, a public health researcher, educator, and president of the Native American Cancer Initiative. In addition to her current role, Linda is also a member of the leadership at the Academy of Oncology Nurse and Patient Navigators, and Linda has served on multiple federal advisory boards.
Dr. Burhansstipanov, thank you so much for being here, and welcome.
DR. BURHANSSTIPANOV: Thank you very much for including our community in your efforts.
MS. ORZECHOWSKI: Of course.
Linda, we know that patient navigation can be a key to patients reporting better outcomes and improved quality of life. So can you tell me a little bit more about the role of the patient navigator and how they interact with a patient's larger health care team?
DR. BURHANSSTIPANOV: Yeah. Patient navigators really need to be part of the entire oncology team. They really understand how to talk with the community. Navigators typically come from the community, same community as the patients, and so they're familiar with how complex issues are phrased. They make things easier to understand so that people can make informed choices about what's happening to them and their health and moving forward in a good way.
They definitely are invaluable for overcoming barriers to care. They find effective strategies for getting people into care in a more timely manner.
MS. ORZECHOWSKI: Thank you. That's very helpful.
We know that recent advances in precision medicine are helping transform patient outcomes all across the cancer community, but unfortunately, disparities still remain. Can you help us understand how patient navigation can help close some of those gaps, especially for people of color and other marginalized communities?
DR. BURHANSSTIPANOV: Yeah. The navigators can make certain that the Western medical concepts are understandable to the patients, and they can ask better questions and have more control over what is happening to them during their entire experience. And this is very, very difficult because so many clinical trials are using new types of precision medicine and new types of treatments that are proving so effective, but if we don't understand what they are, we're not going to say we want to take part.
And the navigator provides that liaison in a culturally respectful manner so that people can make an informed choice about what they can do for their treatments.
MS. ORZECHOWSKI: Thank you for bringing that to light. I think that's incredibly helpful.
A second part to that question is we know how important in the precision medicine landscape genetic testing can be. So tell me a little bit more about how your patient navigators are supporting patients' understanding of genetic testing.
DR. BURHANSSTIPANOV: Yeah. We've been running a program called Genetic Education for Native Americans, or GENA, since 1996, and it provides genetic information in culturally respectful manners as well as a lot of hands‑on activities that are fun and silly but help people understand, for example, pharmacogenetics and understand what tailored medicines or targeted therapies actually refer to.
Our community has actually been very positive. They want to take part, but if they take part, they want to make certain they can afford the treatments or the medications when they are available to the public.
We are from‑‑we get most of our health care from Indian Health Service, and it is the most underfunded federal program anywhere. And so we need to make certain that we can get access to the same quality medicines, as do all other people.
MS. ORZECHOWSKI: Thank you. Thank you so much, and I know we're almost at time, and there's still so much work left to do and so much to talk about. Any closing thoughts you'd like to leave us with today, Dr. Burhansstipanov?
DR. BURHANSSTIPANOV: Basically, that what we found through our research is that Native patient navigators‑‑we refer to them as Native sisters and Native brothers‑‑have really been essential in improving access to high‑quality care and resulting in higher quality of life for the Indigenous patient as well as higher quantity in years of life. They really are important.
MS. ORZECHOWSKI: Well, I couldn't agree more. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and your experiences today.
If you'd like to learn more about AstraZeneca's commitment in this space, please visit YOURCancer.org.
A big thank‑you to The Washington Post for hosting this timely forum, and thank you again to you, Dr. Burhansstipanov, for your time and the incredible work and commitment of you and your organizations for your patients.
And now I'll turn it back over to The Washington Post.
DR. BURHANSSTIPANOV: Thank you, Martha.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: Welcome back to Washington Post Live. For those of you just joining us, I'm Paige Winfield Cunningham, an editor here at The Post, and I'm now joined by journalists, best‑selling author, and motivational speaker Joan Lunden.
Joan, welcome.
MS. LUNDEN: Hi, Paige.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: For our viewers, please tweet us @PostLive your questions, and we'll try to get those asked.
Joan, you were‑‑as was mentioned already, you were diagnosed with stage 2 triple‑negative breast cancer eight years ago, and you wrote a book about your experience entitled "Had I Known." What is that in reference to? What do you wish you had known?
MS. LUNDEN: You know, I didn't know of any family history. We never lived close to any of my relatives on my mom's or my dad's side. So, you know, you don't overhear that conversation between two aunts like‑‑because those are back in the days where they wouldn't even tell the family, let alone friends or the public, that they had breast cancer. You know, the big C, I was kind of whispered about, you know, back in the day, and a lot of people just don't know that they actually have a family history. And it's really important that everyone asks the questions and finds that out.
But I don't really think I had any family history, but had I known that less than 15 percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer ever had a family history, I wouldn't have been walking around feeling, you know, like, you know, "I know the statistics. One in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer at sometime during their life." I just didn't think I'd be the one in eight because I didn't have it in my family. Boy, was I wrong.
And I hear from women all the time on my social media: "I don't have it in my family. I eat healthy. I'm a runner. I take good care of myself. I can't believe I was diagnosed with breast cancer." So I thought it was important to get that out there.
Had I known anything about dense breast tissue, which I knew nothing about, I wouldn't have known that I was also‑‑that I also had that and I was also at risk because of it.
So, on June 5th, 2014, that was the day that I was to go for my annual mammogram, but about a year and a half before that, I had‑‑I had been sent by a health program I was working on to interview Dr. Susan Love, and she's like, you know, one of the leading experts in breast cancer. She wrote the book, "The Breast Book," and the interview was about mammograms. So, at some point in the interview, Dr. Love, who is a very‑‑she's a force to be contended with. She looked at me and said, "You do get your annual mammograms, right, Joan?" and I said, "Yeah, but, you know, I'm one of those women who they always call back in for more pictures," and you always‑‑you freak out, and you say, "Oh, my God, did you see something bad?" But they always say the same thing, "No, no, no. It's just hard to see anything because your breasts are so dense."
Well, with that, Dr. Love said, "Wait a minute. If you have really dense breasts, then you need more than a mammogram. You need an ultrasound. Nobody has told you that?" "Nope. No one has ever told me that." I didn't know it was a thing to ask about.
So that day, because I went on that interview‑‑I could have walked out that day. I took the 3D mammogram, you know, the best of the best, and it was clean. I could have just walked out of that radiology lab thinking that I was good to go another year, another clean mammo. Thank goodness, I walked across the hall, and I had that ancillary test, the ultrasound, in which they found a tumor, one‑‑a little bit larger one and another small one nearby.
And after the biopsy, I met with my breast cancer surgeon, who‑‑I'm going to admit something‑‑who said‑‑she looked‑‑she was looking at the biopsy report that got handed to her, as I was sitting across from her, and I could tell by her face like this isn't going to be good news. And she said, you know, "Unfortunately, you have triple negative." I knew so little about breast cancer at the time. I thought, "Ah, well, at least I'm negative to three things," and she then proceeded to tell me, "No, no, no. You don't have the receptors for estrogen positive or down the list, the three major breast cancers, for which we have targeted treatment. So you're going to have to undergo months and months and months of chemotherapy in addition to radiation and surgery."
At that moment, I, all of a sudden, realized that it was going to be a much tougher road, and admittedly, the first question was "Are you telling me I'm going to lose my hair?" And she said, "Yes," and up to that minute, I thought, "Oh, you know, I'll put a baseball cap on and some sunglasses and just kind of scoot in and out. No one will know."
And I immediately went home and called Robin Roberts because, you know, I knew she had been through the same thing, and I'm thinking about what's the venue that you go on and talk about something that's this serious. And she said, "You got to get out in front of it immediately because as soon as it's found out, the tabloids will have you dead, like in weeks." [Laughs]
So I went on the next day, and it's hard to even call a friend, like a good friend, and have those‑‑say those words, "I have to tell you I have cancer." Like a lump forms in your throat, and, I mean, it was really hard going on the air to an audience that, you know, I had known and loved for years and years and go public with it.
But I‑‑and I‑‑you know, I'll tell you something, Paige. My dad was a cancer surgeon. I always thought I'd grow up to be a doctor. I always thought I'd be maybe like really follow in his footsteps, but when I was just 13 and he was 51, he was flying back in our private plane from a cancer convention, American Cancer Society, speaking, and they crashed. And he was killed, and I think at that moment, I became even more‑‑just more embraced, this idea that I needed to carry on his legacy.
But I went to work in a hospital, summer before college, and, Paige, I found out real quick that scalpels and stitches and shots, they were not going to be part of my future. So I always had that little bit of regret, I think, that I didn't carry on his legacy, even though I happily went into journalism, and, you know, you don't need a scalpel sometimes to help people look for their best health and take care of themselves. Just being a disseminator of medical information, health information can help them. But I always had that little regret.
And, amazingly, Paige, that diagnosis, it kind of like dropped this gift in my lap, and within 24 hours, I said you have this unique opportunity right now to go out and learn as much as you can, share it, share the experience, take a camera in and, you know, video very appointment. Let people see what it looks like, what it's like. Share the information, and you're kind of going to be able to, like, pick up that baton and run with it and carry on your dad's legacy. And that was the best thing I ever did because, all of a sudden, I went from being a patient, you know, kind of the victim, to being a warrior advocate, breast cancer advocate and educator, and it made my whole breast cancer battle much more palatable, if that's the right word.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: Well, I want to hear more about your experience, but just going really, really quickly back to the issue about the density of the breast tissue‑‑
MS. LUNDEN: Yeah.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: ‑‑that's really fascinating. You point that out. I'm actually thinking this summer‑‑this last summer, I had a friend who was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she actually mentioned that very thing that the density of her breast tissue‑‑and I had never heard of that before. Do you have any insights into why that message doesn't seem to have gotten out there? Most women seem to be completely unaware that this is a factor in the screenings they should get.
MS. LUNDEN: I do because I came to realize that it was something that was important and that I didn't know about it. So did other women know about it? And when I really looked into it, I found that for decades, they have‑‑in every mammogram we've ever had, our density is checked. It's Box 1, 2, 3, 4, very fatty breasts, which a mammogram is great; kind of fatty breasts, which a mammogram is still‑‑you know, it's still good; mostly dense or very dense. And those two categories along with your family history and everything else will deem whether you really need to have an ancillary test. Why? This is why.
Very dense breast tissue shows up white on a mammogram, and cancer shows up white on a mammogram. So doctors have said to me that it's kind of like looking for a snowball in the middle of a snowstorm. So breast cancer can really be easily masked and hidden on a mammogram, and I didn't realize any of that until I just like, thank goodness, went on that story with Dr. Love.
And so that day, they couldn't see anything, but I clearly had, you know, a stage 2 triple‑negative tumor and a smaller ductal tumor about an inch away. And so because I had that ultrasound, it was found.
So then I started looking into, well how many women have this dense breast tissue. Almost 50 percent of all women have dense breast tissue. You know, when you're younger, it's dense, and then as you get older, it becomes more of a fatty breast, usually, like with a lot of women, and that's very easy to detect breast‑‑yeah, breast cancer in that fatty breast. But for all the rest of us that continue to have very dense breast tissue‑‑and by the way, you can't tell by, like, feeling your breast. A lumpy breast does not denote dense tissue. Only a mammogram can tell that.
Now, while we haven't been included in this information from radiologists, our referring physician has. So I asked my radiology lab. I said, "I want to have every single one of the tests, the reports, from the last 15 years, since I started coming here." They gave me all of them, the reports that went to the doctor, and every one of them at the bottom said, "This patient has very dense breast tissue, and an ancillary test is likely needed." Did that ever get to me? No. So why was this critical information being kept from the patient, the person, the payee on that mammogram?
So I then found out that there was a huge lobbying effort going on to try to get legislation passed federally that would make mandatory mammogram reporting, that would make it mandatory for women to be given that same report that doctors are given.
And I asked Dr. Love, "Why? Why do you think this is?" and the answer I got was that in Western medicine the breast cancer surgeon gets from the belly button up and the gynecologist gets from the belly button down. I said, "Well, that makes no sense because you don't go to a breast cancer surgeon until after you have breast cancer," and she said, "Yep. That's the problem." And I said, "Well, why don't the referring physicians tell us?" and she said, "I have to imagine it's because the field of gynecology has just gone through so many lawsuits due to problems that can occur in childbirth, and their insurance has gone through the roof. And now here they sit. They're reading it, but they know the insurance company isn't going to pay for it. And they don't want to get involved." So that's kind of the backstory of that.
But I went to Congress many times and, you know, knocked on senators' doors and said we‑‑we couldn't even get all of the female senators to sign on to this bill.
Now, in the meantime, there was an incredible grassroots organized‑‑it was called DenseBreast.com or‑‑AreYouDense. It was called AreYouDense.com, and by the way, you can go to AreYouDense.com and find out, you know, what the laws are in your area.
But the problem was‑‑is that some people lived in a state like mine, Connecticut, where that was the first state to mandate that women got that report, and it shouldn't be that if you live in a state without that, that you don't get that report. So we really fought hard for three, four years, and finally, that legislation, that federal legislation got passed so that no matter where you lived, they have to tell you whether or not you have dense breasts and whether an ancillary test is possibly needed.
I went and testified in front of the FDA, and they're the ones that will eventually, actually write the wording. But we need the wording to be the same, no matter what state you live in, and we need to know. So anyone watching right now, if you're a woman and you've started your mammograms‑‑and I hope that you will at 40 or even a‑‑you know, sometimes they do a baseline 35, but this idea of waiting, which, you know, unfortunately, American Cancer Society even like‑‑you know, they got their arm twisted and said, "All right, 45. Start at 45," women are getting breast cancer younger and younger and younger. And that's a whole other discussion as to what's in our food and our everything that's causing this to happen.
But I wouldn't wait. I mean, I hear from women in their 30s and 40s all the time, every day on my social media platforms that are being diagnosed.
So, once you go for that mammogram at 40 and then you'll go every single year, and you'll find out if you have very dense breasts. And then if you do, you'll have an ancillary test, and now we're finally getting around to the point where insurance companies are going to have to, you know‑‑they're really going to have to pay for that test, and it doesn't make any sense not to, Paige. If you don't pay for the test so that you catch breast cancer early, you're going to spend a lot more money taking care of the woman that's diagnosed in stage 3 or 4. It makes no sense not to let‑‑not to mention the humanity of not letting women find out early.
What's the statistic? Ninety‑five percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer today will‑‑if they're diagnosed in an early stage will live through it. So those are those words: "in the early stage." So, if you don't think you have any family history, don't think that you don't need to get a mammogram.
And I have to admit I went back. I found‑‑I looked at all my mammograms, and I realized, oh, my God, I went a year and didn't get it. I missed a year, and I'm a journalist. I'm asking the questions of the experts. So we can't‑‑we have to really, really be careful and take care of ourselves.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: Well, a helpful takeaway for all of our female viewers, and I'm two years away from 40, so for me as well.
MS. LUNDEN: Great.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: But I do‑‑I know that in your book, you talk about how you set out to learn everything about breast cancer that you could. How did you approach this learning process, and did it inform the treatment you pursued?
MS. LUNDEN: Very much so. Now, I come from‑‑I'm a lot older than you. So I come from an era, not to mention my dad was a doctor. I felt like I didn't want to go for a second opinion. Like, I don't want to, you know, insult the doctor, but fortunately, my three daughters in their 30s said, "Uh‑uh. You're going for a second opinion," and there the right was. Whenever you have something really big like a cancer diagnosis or a cardiovascular problem, whatever, you need to go for a second opinion and maybe even a third.
So the problem with the second opinion is sometimes you get it and it's really different. I went to‑‑I got my first opinion from someone who had just come from a huge breast cancer conference, and she said there's the standard of care, which is do surgery and then do ACT. And the way medicine is today‑‑remember this was in 2015‑‑'14‑‑everybody just kind of gets that treatment, but she said it's going to change. And, boy, has it. And she said the new thinking for triple negative‑‑and the clinical trials have been good‑‑is that we do chemo first, and she said‑‑and there‑‑and I also want to add another drug, carboplatin.
So, but we took ACT, turned it on its head, started with the Taxol and added carboplatin, which is a pretty aggressive approach, but I had a really aggressive cancer. Triple negative is a very fast‑growing kind of cancer. So we did that, and in the clinical trials, a lot of the women had a complete pathologic response, like it was gone.
So, after I finished that first round‑‑I think it was eight weeks‑‑we decided to do this‑‑I went back in for another ultrasound, and we couldn't see anything, and we're like, "Wow. Maybe it's actually all gone." So she did the surgery, which, of course, was a way smaller surgery. If I had done it in the beginning, I probably would have had, you know, a mastectomy, but because I had a 95 percent success with that first round, that tumor was shrunk down to practically nothing. And the smaller tumor was gone. So, consequently, I just had to have the surgery and didn't have to have any kind of reconstruction afterwards.
Then, of course, there was the big question. So it wasn't completely pathologic, so do we go on now with another round of AC? And AC is really the traditionally‑‑that best, you know, the best thing for getting rid of triple negative‑‑or I guess any breast cancer but certainly triple negative. And I decided you don't play games. You don't play Russian roulette when you have breast cancer. So I went ahead and had the rest of the rounds of AC.
It was tough. It was a year of chemo. I had two blood transfusions, and then finally, I had six weeks of radiation. But, you know‑‑and I was bald for a year, and it's not only bald. But I remember I was going on the TODAY Show, right when‑‑right in the beginning when People magazine was coming out, where I was bald on People magazine. And I looked in the mirror, and I washed my face that night, and as I wiped my face, I looked in the mirror, and I wiped off all my eyebrows and all my eyelashes, all in one fell swoop, like all gone. I called up my makeup artist and said, "You are really going to earn your money tomorrow," and like you‑‑this real cancer patient is looking back at you.
But I think that, you know, just going out and being the journalist that I am and asking a million questions and taking in that camera and asking all those questions so that everybody else could hear the answers and see what chemo looks like and see what radiation looks like and hear why they chose to have me be facing down during my radiation instead of facing up so that you don't have any scatter radiation, you know, against your chest wall or into your heart. You don't want to end up with another‑‑yet another problem.
So, you know, I'm delighted that a crummy diagnosis like breast cancer gave me an amazing opportunity to go out there and be an advocate for every other woman having to face this battle.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: Well, I appreciate how candid you've been in your story and insights have been fascinating. So, Joan Lunden, thank you so much for joining us today.
MS. LUNDEN: Oh, thank you.
MS. WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM: And thanks to all of you for joining us today. To find out what interviews we have coming up, please head to WashingtonPostLive.com to find out more about our upcoming programs.
I'm Page Winfield Cunningham, and again, thanks for watching. | 2022-09-21T20:45:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transcript: Chasing Cancer: Care Beyond Medicine - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/09/21/transcript-chasing-cancer-care-beyond-medicine/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2022/09/21/transcript-chasing-cancer-care-beyond-medicine/ |
At U.N. meeting, world leaders asked to focus on education crisis
Malala Yousafzai and other activists raise awareness at the United Nations of how much students have fallen behind during the pandemic.
Activist Malala Yousafzai speaks during the Transforming Education Summit at the United Nations headquarters in New York City on Monday. She urged world leaders to make education a priority. (Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters)
Activists at an education summit in New York City implored world leaders Monday to prioritize school systems and restore educational budgets cut when the coronavirus pandemic hit.
The summit, held at the United Nations (U.N.) General Assembly before the annual leaders’ meeting, called on the world’s nations to ensure that children everywhere don’t fall too far behind.
The percentage of 10-year-old children in poor and middle-income countries who cannot read a simple story increased to an estimated 70 percent — up 13 percentage points since before the pandemic shut down in-person schools, according to a report from two U.N. agencies and the World Bank.
Helping their youngest citizens learn to read and gain the other skills will require addressing problems that existed before the pandemic, dignitaries and students say. Countries will need to increase spending, change policies to increase access for girls and disabled students, and modernize instruction to stress critical thinking rather than memorization.
“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us to radically transform education,” U.N. Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohammed told reporters before the education summit at U.N. headquarters in New York.
A closing statement from the United Nations after the meeting said 130 countries had committed to “rebooting their education systems” and taking action to end the learning crisis. It was unclear how they would do this. Countries were asked to devote at least 20 percent of their national budgets to education.
When the pandemic closed schools around the world in spring 2020, many children stopped learning — some for months, others for longer. More than 800 million young people around the world lacked internet access at home, according to a study by the U.N. education agency and the International Telecommunication Union in December 2020.
In many places, money is the key ingredient for ending the crisis. On average, wealthy countries spend $8,000 a year per student, compared to upper-middle-income countries, such as some in Latin America, that invest $1,000 per year, according to a report from UNESCO, a U.N. agency that studies education, and Global Education Monitoring. Lower-income countries allot roughly $300 a year and some poor countries, just $50 a year per student.
As top dignitaries at the meeting urged individual countries to prioritize their youngest citizens, some of the youngest attendees voiced doubts about lasting changes. After all, the U.N. lacks authority to force countries to spend more on schooling. | 2022-09-21T21:08:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | At U.N. meeting, world leaders asked to focus on education crisis - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/09/21/un-meeting-education-crisis/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/09/21/un-meeting-education-crisis/ |
Two suspicious packages investigated, cleared in D.C.
U.S. Capitol Police briefly evacuated the Botanic Garden during one probe. A D.C. police spokesman said there was no indication the incidents were connected.
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Tuesday. Authorities investigated a suspicious package nearby but did not find anything dangerous. (Eric Lee/Bloomberg News)
Authorities on Wednesday afternoon investigated two suspicious packages — one at a building that contains Justice Department offices and another near the U.S. Capitol — but ultimately cleared both without finding anything dangerous.
One package was found on the 1400 block of New York Avenue NW. Photos circulating online showed firefighters outside a building that houses the Justice Department’s fraud section. D.C. police later said that they did not find hazardous material.
Another package was found near the southwest drive of the U.S. Capitol and Independence Avenue SW. U.S. Capitol Police evacuated the U.S. Botanic Garden and closed down the southwest drive of the Capitol Building and parts of Independence Avenue during their investigation. The agency announced before 5 p.m. Wednesday that there was “nothing dangerous” inside the package.
D.C. police spokesman Dustin Sternbeck said there was “no indication” the two incidents were related. | 2022-09-21T21:43:23Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Two suspicious packages investigated, cleared in D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/21/suspicious-packages-capitol-justice-cleared/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/21/suspicious-packages-capitol-justice-cleared/ |
PM Update: Some showers and storms ahead of strong Thursday cold front
A vibrant start to the day in Old Town Alexandria. (Lee M../Flickr)
We’re closing in on the final toasty moments of the year. Today’s highs in the mid- and upper 80s are nearly 10 degrees above normal as fall takes hold. It’s certainly not out of the question that this is as warm as it gets until next spring. We’ll stay mild ahead of a cold front that passes the area Thursday. After that, it will definitely feel the part of the new season.
Through tonight: Clouds will increase this evening and into the night. There’s a small chance that a few showers or storms will work in late at night, but they should fall apart on approach to the area, so don’t bet on it. Low temperatures will be mainly in the upper 60s and lower 70s.
Tomorrow (Thursday): A couple of showers and storms could be around during the morning and into early afternoon. One or two could be strong and any activity could dump locally heavy rain. High temperatures near 80 or perhaps as high as the mid-80s will come on the early side given a frontal passage in the midday to afternoon. Winds will turn feisty behind the front, blowing from the northwest around 10 to 20 mph, with some gusts in the 30-to-40-mph range. Temperatures will fall off before sunset on those winds.
Pollen update: Mold spores are moderate/high. Weed and tree pollen are both low/moderate. Grass pollen is low.
New England Hurricane: It’s been 84 years since the strongest hurricane to strike New England made landfall. The “Long Island Express” in 1938 picked up that name because it raced north as fast as 60 mph on its way to shore on Sept. 21. Many trees were blown down, 50,000 structures damaged or destroyed, and more than 600 people lost their lives.
On September 21st, 1938, the most powerful hurricane to ever strike New England made landfall. This is a timeline recalling the events of 1938 New England Hurricane as accurate and complete as known. *A Thread* pic.twitter.com/I2oFhRvlj6
— Michael Ferragamo (@FerragamoWx) September 21, 2022
Today marks the 84th anniversary of the Great New England Hurricane, which made landfall as a Category 3 storm on this date in 1938. pic.twitter.com/wWiEc6eZbL | 2022-09-21T21:43:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | PM Update: Some showers and storms ahead of strong Thursday cold front - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/09/21/dc-area-forecast-thursday-cold-front/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/09/21/dc-area-forecast-thursday-cold-front/ |
Police officers performing his duties on the streets of Manhattan. (AlessandroPhoto/iStockphoto)
I can tell you with some confidence that, as the conventional wisdom would suggest, crime is up in New York City. Compared to the same point in 2021, robberies are up 38 percent and burglary 32. Overall, violent crime is up 34 percent.
But the conventional wisdom is also that the city is plagued with shootings. As it turns out, there have been 13 percent fewer shooting incidents this year than last and 12 percent fewer people have been shot. In fact, the number of homicides in New York is down 13 percent, not up.
The situation is more complicated than it might seem. So how does that compare to the national picture? Well, it’s hard to say. New York, home to 3 percent of the country’s population, helpfully has a data portal documenting reported crimes (which, of course, is a subset of actual crimes) and putting them into context. But there are no similar real-time data nationally — or even in most places.
Some smaller cities do track reported crimes, but often on sites like CrimeMapping.com. (Here’s recent crime in Peoria, Ill., to choose a random example.) There’s little ability to compare numbers with past figures, meaning that it’s hard to know how much crime is rising or falling.
The federal government does track crime to some extent. In June, for example, the Wall Street Journal published a report that challenged the existing conventional wisdom. Republican politicians had eagerly decried rising crime in Democrat-led cities, which is most major cities. As it turns out, crime was up significantly in rural areas, too, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At least in 2020, the most recent year for which data was available. In that same month, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting system provided an update on crime during 2021, with a caveat: too few police departments had returned data for the national figures to be reliable. Even if it had been, we’d still be dealing with data in the middle of 2022 that was at least six months out of date. Hard to draw political inferences from that.
This week, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released a different set of figures for 2021: estimates of how often people were victims of violent crime and how often those crimes were reported to police. Those numbers (which, importantly, exclude homicide) indicate that violent crime was flat in 2021 — and down in 2020.
(On the graphs below, the shaded area indicate confidence intervals. Data for 2006 were not available.)
This, of course, is not what the political dialogue would suggest. But we have other data showing how that conversation is often inaccurate.
Polling regularly shows that Americans think crime is a bigger problem nationally than it is in their own areas. A poll conducted by YouGov in August, for example, showed that Americans were nearly 40 points more likely to say violent crime was a very or somewhat serious problem in the country overall than in their own communities.
On property crime, there was much less of a divergence. Democrats were about as likely to say that property crime is at least a somewhat serious problem near them as it is nationally.
In other words, perceptions of crime as a national issue often don’t match our direct experience. This is not a new observation, certainly, but it’s an important one. Without accurate data on crime and with a predilection for seeing crime as a problem even if that’s not the case near us, it’s easy to use the issue as a political cudgel. Which, of course, often happens.
It’s also easy to breezily dismiss concerns about crime as a political ploy, which also happens. Crime — some crime, anyway — is up in New York City relative to last year. That’s a real concern to New Yorkers, even if the concern is often driven by anecdotal incidents. For long-time New Yorkers, the city still feels pretty safe, given that murder is down 20 percent since 2010.
Many New Yorkers, it’s safe to assume, therefore likely agree that crime locally is not as bad as crime nationally. | 2022-09-21T21:47:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How bad is crime, anyway? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/how-bad-is-crime-anyway/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/how-bad-is-crime-anyway/ |
Robert Sarver said he will begin the process of selling his basketball franchises. (Ralph Freso/AP)
Let’s start here, at the pitiful spot where Robert Sarver has asked the world to view him. Where his legacy as a community stalwart lies in shambles, done in by a callous and unforgiving society.
The place he now finds himself, he says, outweighs his decades of good stewardship over men’s and women’s professional basketball in the Phoenix area. And the clamor from critics won’t even allow him the peace and quiet to work on himself and become a better man. Poor Robert. It’s tough out there for billionaires.
In Sarver’s mind, we live in a cold, cold world. And though he has apologized for his misogynistic and racist behavior during his time as the majority owner of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns and WNBA’s Mercury, his sorry can’t pierce what he imagines is the mob’s small, hollow heart. So on Wednesday, he announced that he has started the process of selling his stakes in the teams.
Humor Sarver for a minute and read through his statement, an indulgent missive intended to first drum up sympathy, and then color his decision as selfless and virtuous. But his words neither line up with reality nor are convincing to anyone other than those already inclined to commiserate with a rich, untouchable boss who treated female employees like verbal punching bags and loved repeating the n-word.
After the intense blowback from the public, which included several NBA superstars, Sarver has no choice but to leave. However, he’s nobody’s victim. He deserves no applause, no sympathy. Sarver may want time to heal and earn back trust, but he has failed to understand the most obvious concept: The forgiveness he says he genuinely seeks should not compel the public to forget.
Sarver isn’t selling his teams because society no longer forgives those who repent. He’s making the only choice available, driven to this dead end by his own misdeeds.
This is a man who lit a match to his house, and thought he could return to it in a year’s time while still covered in ash and soot. But the breadth of his actions demanded consequences — more than the league-imposed suspension for the 2022-23 season and $10 million fine.
“Words that I deeply regret now overshadow nearly two decades of building organizations that brought people together,” Sarver’s statement began. “As a man of faith, I believe in atonement and the path to forgiveness. I expected that the commissioner’s one-year suspension would provide the time for me to focus, make amends and remove my personal controversy from the teams that I and so many fans love.
“But in our current unforgiving climate, it has become painfully clear that that is no longer possible,” Sarver continued.
His pledge for personal improvement came only after being exposed. His remorse came only after being wrestled into submission. But crying ‘Uncle!’ and then muttering sorry are the actions of someone trying to rush the atonement process.
This shows no real commitment to make amends. Only the desire to get back what he’s lost.
Last month when disgraced football coach Jon Gruden appeared at the Little Rock Touchdown Club, he drew a breath and for a few seconds, expressed remorse for the scandalous emails that led to his forced resignation.
“But,” Gruden then emphasized, “I am a good person. I believe that. I go to church, I’ve been married for 31 years, I got three great boys, I still love football. I’ve made some mistakes, but I don’t think anybody in here hasn’t and I just ask for forgiveness, and hopefully, I get another shot.”
Jerry Brewer: Pro football’s turn toward inequity resonates eight decades later. Change will require intentional action.
Somehow, Gruden believes that by using his alter ego as a married man and churchgoer, he can escape his self-inflicted exile and get back into the game’s good graces.
Sarver, too, recycled the trope of a good, religious man who made one mistake. While he should ask his God to forgive him — to make him whole — the public doesn’t owe Sarver the same courtesy.
He certainly did not show mercy to the author of the article that led to his demise. Sarver may rail against an intolerant and bloodthirsty society, yet he showed his combative side last year before ESPN published its lengthy article that precipitated the NBA’s investigation. Going on the preemptive attack, Sarver complained that the story would be based on mostly “anonymous voices” and suggested it was inaccurate.
He tried to use his power and sway to suppress the truth. Then, following the NBA’s independent investigation that unearthed how deep the toxicity runs within Sarver’s organization, the initial statement from his counsel read as an exoneration.
The statement trumpeted that investigators did not find evidence Sarver’s behavior was based on racial or gender biases; a peculiar conclusion considering how Sarver said the n-word at least five times around coaches and players, though he had been advised that he should not do so, even if he was repeating someone else’s quotes.
The statement went on to read like an aspirational mission statement, as Sarver looked forward to his return as a kinder, gentler governor over the Suns and Mercury.
“This moment is an opportunity for me to demonstrate a capacity to learn and grow as we continue to build a working culture where every employee feels comfortable and valued,” Sarver said in the Sept. 13 statement.
However, over the last week, the uprising over his behavior and the punishment NBA Commissioner Adam Silver issued — essentially, making Sarver sit in timeout and taking his lunch money — never dulled. And forgiveness? At least the kind Sarver desired — the kind that would allow him to fulfill his comeback story — felt impossible amid that nagging feeling of injustice.
Sarver didn’t have his come to Jesus moment voluntarily. He was dragged there kicking and screaming. And he expected to find clemency there, at the spot where he exchanged his privilege for a dose of humility. But by pleading for a second chance, he was really fighting to keep his position of power. Sarver could very well mean it when he says he’s sorry, and he may make good on his pledge to emerge as a better man. Still, the forgiveness that he believes is his right does not come with the privilege of owning an NBA team. | 2022-09-21T21:52:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Suns owner Robert Sarver wanted forgiveness on his terms - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/suns-owner-robert-sarver/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/suns-owner-robert-sarver/ |
Aaron Judge closes in on the real home run record: Roger Maris’s.
Bonds, Sosa and McGwire have more home runs in a season that Maris. But those three played during the steroids era.
Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees has hit 60 home runs so far this season. That's one fewer than the record Roger Maris set in 1961. Three other players have hit more since then, but their careers are tainted by their connection to performance-enhancing drugs. (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
Aaron Judge, the 6-foot, 7-inch slugger for the New York Yankees, is closing in on Major League Baseball’s record for home runs in a single season. Judge has 60 homers with 15 games to play after Tuesday night’s games.
But wait, I can hear kids who love baseball asking, “Isn’t the record for most home runs hit in a single season 73? Set by Barry Bonds in 2001.” Judge is terrific, but he probably won’t hit 13 home runs in 15 games.
That’s true, but I think Judge is chasing the real record of 61 home runs set by another New York Yankee outfielder, Roger Maris, in 1961. Let me explain.
Only five players — Babe Ruth, Maris, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds — have hit 60 or more home runs in a single Major League Baseball (MLB) season. But Bonds, McGwire and Sosa cheated when they hit their marks.
Those three players took illegal performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) such as steroids to help them become stronger and hit the ball farther. McGwire admitted he took PEDs at times during his 16-year career.
Bonds and Sosa have never admitted they knowingly took PEDs. However, Bonds was one of 89 players named in the 2007 Mitchell Report, the results of an independent investigation about PED use in baseball. The New York Times reported in 2009 that Sosa was among 104 MLB players who tested positive in 2003 for PEDs.
Bonds (762 career home runs), Sosa (609) and McGwire (583) have Hall of Fame statistics, but none of them has been inducted because of the fact or widespread suspicion that they took PEDs during their careers.
Just as some people don’t like to talk to kids about the shameful parts of United States history such as slavery, segregation and the nation’s treatment of Native Americans, some baseball fans don’t like to discuss PEDs and how they affected the game and its records.
But I think it’s important to talk to kids about the good and the bad in American history and baseball history, so we can learn lessons from the past.
From around the late 1980s to the early 2000s, MLB did not do enough to prevent its players from taking PEDs. As a result, many players — not just Bonds, Sosa and McGwire — cheated by takings these drugs.
The leaders of MLB finally began testing for PEDs in 2003 and now punish players who test positive for illegal drugs. It is interesting that no player until Judge has hit 60 home runs since MLB began testing.
But what about the records set with the help of PEDs? Sorry, but it’s hard for me to accept that a “record” set by a cheater is a real record.
I think the real single-season home run record is Maris’s 61 in 1961, and I am rooting for Judge to beat it. | 2022-09-21T22:00:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Aaron Judge closes in on the real home run record: Roger Maris’s. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/09/21/aaron-judge-nears-real-home-run-record/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/09/21/aaron-judge-nears-real-home-run-record/ |
Hurricane Fiona leaves Puerto Rico with effects of ‘historic flooding’
The storm dumped more than 25 inches of rain on parts of the U.S. territory, leaving most without power several days later.
A collapsed home caused by the passage of Hurricane Fiona in the town of Naranjito, Puerto Rico, on Tuesday. The storm left the majority of residents without electricity three days later. (Thais Llorca/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
The storm has been blamed for causing at least four deaths in its path through the Caribbean, where winds and heavy rain in Puerto Rico left a majority of people on the U.S. territory without power or running water. Hundreds of thousands of people scraped mud out of their homes after what authorities described as “historic” flooding.
Power company officials initially said it would take a few days for electricity to be fully restored, but then appeared to backtrack late Tuesday night. Only 26 percent had power Wednesday morning, three days after it hit the island.
“We want to make it very clear that efforts to restore and re-energize continue and are being affected by severe flooding, impassable roads, downed trees, deteriorating equipment, and downed lines,” said Luma, the company that operates power transmission and distribution.
The hum of generators could be heard across the territory as people became increasingly exasperated. Some were still trying to recover from Hurricane Maria, which made landfall as a Category 4 storm five years ago, causing the deaths of nearly 3,000 people. Officials didn’t declare that service was back to normal until 11 months after Maria hit.
Parts of the island had received more than 25 inches of rain and more had fallen Tuesday.
By late Tuesday, authorities said they had restored power to nearly 380,000 of the island’s 1.47 million customers. Piped water service was initially knocked out for most of the island’s users, but 55 percent had service Wednesday morning.
In the Turks and Caicos Islands, officials reported minimal damage and no deaths despite the storm’s eye passing close to Grand Turk, the capital island.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Fiona was likely to approach Bermuda late Thursday or Friday and Canada’s Atlantic provinces Saturday. | 2022-09-21T22:00:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hurricane Fiona leaves Puerto Rico with effects of ‘historic flooding’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/09/21/hurricane-fiona-puerto-rico-damage/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/09/21/hurricane-fiona-puerto-rico-damage/ |
Jackson water crisis was ‘foreseeable,’ residents say in lawsuit
Jackson, Miss., Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba (D), right, with other officials at the city's water treatment facility on Sept. 2. (Rogelio V. Solis/Pool/AP)
A group of Jackson, Miss., residents this week filed for a class-action lawsuit accusing current and former city officials and contractors of neglecting Jackson’s water system for years, culminating in the crisis this summer that left more than 150,000 people without access to safe drinking water.
It is the first federal lawsuit seeking class-action status filed since severe floods caused Jackson’s already faltering main treatment plant to fail completely. Much of the predominantly Black city went days without water to drink, bathe or flush toilets. A boil-water notice was in effect for more than a month.
Echoing experts and advocates who have studied Jackson’s water issues, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit allege the crisis could have been prevented had officials taken action earlier to upgrade the city’s water system.
Even before the water supply failed in August, Jackson’s water was loaded with lead and other contaminants that made it hazardous to human health, the plaintiffs say.
“This public health crisis, decades in the making, was wholly foreseeable by Defendants’ actions,” the complaint states, “and has left Jackson residents in an untenable position — without access to clean, safe water in 2022 in a major United States city.”
The complaint lists four plaintiffs but says thousands of Jackson residents were exposed to contaminants or otherwise harmed by the city’s alleged failures. A judge must first find that many residents experienced the same issues — a process known as class certification — before the case can move forward as a class action.
The lawsuit names as defendants Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba (D), former mayor Tony Yarber and three former public works directors. It also names the industrial giant Siemens, which the city hired to provide water equipment and services, and Trilogy Engineering Services, which it hired to study corrosion in the water infrastructure.
A representative from Siemens said the company would not comment. Kishia Powell, who served as public works director from 2014 to 2016 before moving into a leadership role at the D.C. Water utility in Washington, declined to comment through a spokesperson. The other defendants did not respond to messages seeking to discuss the case or could not immediately be reached.
Lumumba has defended his administration’s handling of the water crisis, pushing back on criticism from the state’s Republican governor, Tate Reeves, that city officials bore responsibility for the recent failures. In a town hall last week, Lumumba said it was unfair for state officials to claim that the city had no plan for fixing the dilapidated infrastructure. The city has a plan, he said, but needs more support from the state and federal government to execute it.
“There’s a difference between not having a plan and not having mutual priority over its funding,” he said. “You have a city where our needs exceed our ability to pay for them.”
During the height of the crisis last month, he said the system “has been failing for decades” amid insufficient support from state and federal officials. “We’ve been going it alone for the better part of two years when it comes to the Jackson water crisis,” he said.
The lawsuit by the Jackson residents alleges officials ignored repeated warnings of elevated lead levels and other problems with the city’s water and in some cases took actions that made the situation worse. It says Trilogy made a faulty recommendation on how to address contamination and alleges Siemens installed more than 20,000 water meters that gave inaccurate readings.
The complaint also keys in on the stability of the public water system, noting that it had nearly collapsed in winter 2021 when pipes and water mains burst.
“Defendants were acutely aware of problems that would later contribute to the 2022 failure and potential solutions to them,” the lawsuit says. “But they did not fix the system.”
The plaintiffs say they have all suffered personal injuries. One, Raine Becker, said the lack of clean, reliable water has made it harder for her to work and care for her terminally ill son. It says numerous other residents of Jackson have probably also been harmed.
The lawsuit asks the court to order the city to repair and upgrade the system, establish a medical monitoring program and pay damages to the plaintiffs.
Jackson is already facing a separate lawsuit filed last year on behalf of hundreds of children who may have been exposed to toxic lead levels in drinking water. | 2022-09-21T22:09:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jackson water crisis was ‘foreseeable,’ residents say in lawsuit - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/21/jackson-mississippi-water-lawsuit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/21/jackson-mississippi-water-lawsuit/ |
DOJ slammed by senators over poor reporting on deaths in custody
The Department of Justice headquarters in D.C. (J. David Ake/AP)
Sen. Ron Johnson (Wis.), the top panel’s top Republican, added in his opening statement: “DOJ has displayed a continued disdain for the subcommittee’s investigatory work and congressional oversight generally. … The department’s lack of transparency is unacceptable.”
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released at the hearing “identified nearly 1,000 deaths that potentially should have been reported to DOJ but were not. Also, GAO found that 70 percent of the records provided by states were missing at least one element required.”
Henneberg explained that the Justice Department relies on states to provide information, but “the states have no leverage to compel … their local agencies to report the data. … It’s very concerning that there is the underreporting. And it was widespread across all the states.”
For example, the 2013 legislation penalizes states that don’t adequately report deaths, even though Henneberg said most “state governments cannot compel local governmental agencies to report to them.” Cutting state funding, she said, “as a penalty for incomplete reporting may actually lead to an unintended consequence of lowering the amount of funds available and necessary to improve statewide … reporting.” | 2022-09-21T22:13:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Senators slam DOJ for poor reporting on deaths in custody - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/doj-deaths-in-custody-gao-report-hearing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/21/doj-deaths-in-custody-gao-report-hearing/ |
Senators ask for review of Apple’s plan to use Chinese chips
An iPhone on display this month at Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)
Senators from both parties on Wednesday asked the nation’s top intelligence official to lead a review of the security threat posed by Apple’s reported plan to use memory chips from a major Chinese chipmaker for its new iPhone 14.
“We write to convey our extreme concern about the possibility that Apple Inc. will soon procure 3D NAND memory chips from the People’s Republic of China state-owned manufacturer Yangtze Memory Technologies Co.,” the lawmakers, led by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Senate Intelligence Committee vice chairman, wrote in a letter to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.
The letter urged Haines to consider the economic and national security consequences posed by the reported arrangement, including how the Chinese Communist Party supports YMTC as part of its plan to grow China’s domestic semiconductor industry.
Apple declined to comment on the lawmakers’ letter.
Apple’s plan to use YMTC memory chips was reported this month in the Korean press and by the Financial Times.
Apple said in an earlier statement that YMTC chips are not used in any of its products, and that it was “evaluating” whether to use YMTC chips for some iPhones sold in China. It also said all user data stored on such chips is “fully encrypted.”
Apple told the Financial Times and repeated to The Washington Post on Wednesday that it was not planning to use the chips in iPhones sold outside China.
The lawmakers fear that the phones will still find their way into the global market, said a Senate aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the record.
The senators also want Haines to look at what they said was YMTC’s role in aiding other Chinese firms, including the telecom equipment manufacturer Huawei, which is under strict U.S. export controls. And they want her to examine YMTC’s alleged links to the Chinese military.
If Apple proceeds, it “would introduce significant privacy and security vulnerabilities to the global digital supply chain that Apple helps shape,” said the letter, which was also signed by Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) and committee member Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.).
Last year, the Biden administration described YMTC as China’s “national champion memory chip producer.” According to the White House, YMTC has received about $24 billion in subsidies from Chinese government sources, which, the White House said, was essential to the firm’s rapid development.
The four senators and other colleagues urged Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in July to place YMTC on the department’s export blacklist on grounds that it was supplying companies under U.S. sanctions.
The lawmakers asked Haines to reply by Oct. 1. | 2022-09-21T22:14:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Top U.S. senators ask for review of Apple’s plan to use Chinese chips - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/21/apple-ymtc-chips-national-security/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/21/apple-ymtc-chips-national-security/ |
In Canada, interest in the monarchy remains mostly an elite thing
King Charles III greets Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at Buckingham Palace on Sept. 17. (Stefan Rousseau/Reuters)
At a Vancouver, B.C., supermarket the other day, I casually mentioned Queen Elizabeth II’s death to the middle-aged woman working the register.
“I thought she’d be around forever,” she replied, chirpily. “But I guess if Betty White can go, anyone can!”
Having been an active consumer of Canadian news over the previous few days, where round-the-clock coverage of the death of the queen was single-minded even by British standards (I noticed the BBC led with Ukraine stories the day after she died), I was a little jolted by this outburst of irreverence. Had she not read that editorial in the National Post about the “greatest queen of all time”?
But my cashier was a reminder of the divide over the monarchy that exists between ordinary Canadians and those of more privileged standing. For the former, news of the queen’s passing was a somewhat sad, but mostly trivial piece of celebrity news. A poll from Leger found 74 percent of Canadians felt her death had “minor” or “no impact” on them. For those in more elite positions, however, who tend to embrace more esoteric theories of Canadian culture and institutions, this was a moment of deep, almost transcendent importance, the passing of a woman who “sits at the very centre of Canadian and British democracy” as the CBC’s Aaron Wherry put it.
Such disproportionate royalism on the part of the thought-leader class has helped stifle a larger debate about the future of monarchy that Canada should really be having by now.
Justin Trudeau, probably Canada’s most sincerely monarchist prime minister since John Diefenbaker, wasted little time proclaiming the day of the queen’s funeral a national holiday for government workers, and most provincial premiers followed suit. While civil servants no doubt enjoyed this paid “opportunity for Canadians from coast to coast to coast to commemorate Her Majesty,” the prime minister’s sentimentality sent some Canadian parents scrambling for babysitters as public schools were closed with only a few days’ notice.
The funeral itself featured a large Canadian delegation, fulfilling the Canadian ambassador’s promise of a “prominent” presence befitting Canada’s apparent status as “one of the most senior countries in the Commonwealth.” The final list of attendees included Trudeau and four former prime ministers, three governors general, three Indigenous leaders and a smattering of celebrities, including, to the bewilderment of some, actress Sandra Oh.
Even bigshots not formally invited, including Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, flew themselves to London (“entirely at personal expense”) to wait in that epic lineup and get a glimpse of the monarch Kenney called “a bedrock of stability and continuity, a ceaselessly gracious and dignified presence in our lives.”
As a teenager, the first political issue I can recall having a strong opinion on was Canada’s constitutional link to the British monarchy: I was against it. The title “Queen of Canada,” which Ottawa awarded her in 1953 as part of the British empire’s transition into a Commonwealth, struck me as a patently dishonest colonial anachronism, to say nothing of the absurdity of enshrining hereditary birthright in our political system.
Unlike the current British prime minister, this was not an opinion I aged out of. Yet looking back, I underestimated not only the full scope of the Canadian public indifference and ignorance about our monarchical ties, but also the magnitude of the elite’s obsession with it.
Despite the fact that Canada lacks a republican movement of any power, with no explicitly anti-monarchy political parties (beyond those promoting Quebec nationalism) and basically no national figures known for outspokenness on the matter, newspapers still routinely thunder with rage about imagined plots to undermine “Canada’s Crown,” or insist, with great preemptive anxiety, that Canada’s link to the monarchy will never ever ever be cut. “Put such notions out of your mind. Do not go there. Forget about it,” the Globe and Mail editorial board scolded last week, as they often do.
Public opinion polls have shown for years a majority of Canadians support cutting ties to Buckingham Palace, but this is rarely conceded. At an Ottawa church ceremony for the queen featuring yet more former governor generals and prime ministers, former prime minister Brian Mulroney asserted that “in my judgment,” the “overwhelming majority of Canadians” support the royalist status quo. When basically the entirety of Canada’s political, media and academic establishment thinks this way, the rate of public literacy required for an intelligent debate on the crown — let alone interest in provoking it — cannot help but be low.
When Trudeau was asked whether he has any curiosity about joining the many other Commonwealth “realms” who have been making republican noises in recent days, he sniffed imperiously that “for me, it’s not a priority. It’s not even something that I consider discussing.”
But, of course, for people like him, Canada’s monarchy debate is very much a priority — so long as only one side is ever heard.
The final resting place: Queen Elizabeth II has been buried in her final resting place next to Prince Philip, her husband of more than 70 years, capping an elaborate state funeral, which was invested with all the pomp, circumstance and showmanship that the monarchy, military and state could put on display for a global broadcast audience of millions.
The state funeral: The funeral was full of pageantry and pathos, including a new national anthem, funeral ensembles with affectionate touches in honor of the queen, a personal note from King Charles III, appearances by the young heirs, Prince George and Princess Charlotte and the royal corgis. Here are some of the most memorable moments in photos and videos.
A new monarch: Queen Elizabeth II’s son, Charles, became King Charles III the moment his mother died. He may bring a markedly different personal vision of religion and spirituality to the role. Here’s what to know about him.
Opinion|In Canada, interest in the monarchy remains mostly an elite thing | 2022-09-21T22:14:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Canadians' interest in the monarchy is mostly among the elite - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/canadians-monarchy-elite/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/canadians-monarchy-elite/ |
By Matthew Bowman
Fans at the University of Oregon's Autzen Stadium in Eugene, Ore., during a game against Brigham Young University on Saturday. (Tom Hauck/Getty Images)
Matthew Bowman is an associate professor of history and religion and Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif.
How did we get to the point in which fans seated in the student section at the University of Oregon’s Autzen Stadium in Eugene chanted “F--- the Mormons” while their football team soundly defeated Brigham Young University on Saturday?
More precisely, how did we get to the point where the BYU graduate who captured the chant on video could tell a reporter that she was disappointed, though not necessarily surprised because “you don’t make fun of a lot of religions, but Mormons are free game”?
The next day, University of Oregon officials apologized, calling the chant “offensive and disgraceful.” But that those students did not seem to feel the same way struck me, both as a historian of religion in the United States and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The arc of the church’s history, from an object of fear and confusion in the 19th century, to hard-won respectability by the mid-20th century, to “free game” today, tells us a great deal about the church itself, but also about the place of religion in the United States.
Joseph Smith began telling his family that he was receiving revelations in the 1820s. After publishing the Book of Mormon in 1829, he claimed the mantle of a prophet and founded the church in 1830. Until his assassination at the hands of a mob in 1844, he led the church across the country and toward ever-more-countercultural practices and beliefs. The practice of polygamy is the best known of these, but the church also experimented with economic communalism for decades.
After Smith’s death, thousands of members of the LDS church fled west under the leadership of Brigham Young, eventually finding relative safety in the Utah territory in 1847. For decades afterward, the territory was casually theocratic, as church leaders selected the candidates in virtually every election.
But from the 1880s through the 1910s, through a combination of sustained prosecutions, confiscation of property and bad publicity, Congress beat much of the countercultural impulse out of the church. LDS leaders enacted a concerted, mostly successful effort to drive polygamists out of their church. They instructed members to embrace conventional U.S. politics. LDS businessmen reached out across the country, and LDS students enrolled at universities nationwide.
By the 1950s, the LDS church had attained such respectability that Ezra Taft Benson, one of the highest church leaders, could be named agriculture secretary in the Eisenhower administration and be featured, along with his wife and children, on Edward R. Murrow’s popular news show as an exemplary American family. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir (as it was then called) regularly toured the nation. All seemed well.
But by the 1980s, though, this assimilation and acceptance had begun to fade.
American evangelical Christians were storming back into politics, and alongside campaigns against abortion and no-fault divorce, some conservative religious leaders engaged in “anti-cult” efforts that targeted relatively small religious movements, including the LDS church. Baptist minister Ed Decker, a former Mormon, attracted attention in the 1980s with a book and film called the “God Makers,” presenting LDS history and beliefs in the most lurid light possible.
By the 1990s, this parodic version of the church entered mainstream U.S. culture in the work of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of the television show “South Park” and the Broadway musical the “Book of Mormon,” both of which lampoon LDS church members as ostensibly nice, but also terminally stupid and ridiculous.
So, what seemed in the 1950s to be the epitome of wholesome Americanness had become by the turn of the 21st century simultaneously naïve and stodgy. Many Democrats mocked Mitt Romney’s nomination as Republican candidate for the presidency in 2012 on just those grounds – he was a “Ken doll” of a candidate, his hair too perfect, his family too healthy, his life profoundly disconnected from gritty American reality.
By the early 21st century, the ideals the church had embraced in order to find acceptance in the United States made the church seem alien again, and particularly so to many progressives. And this might help explain the chant at the Oregon football game. (BYU fans reportedly heard the same chant last fall during a game against the University of Southern California.)
In the early 1980s, the LDS church joined the successful conservative fight against the Equal Rights Amendment. Later, the church became perhaps the most prominent opponent of the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage. More recently, Brigham Young University’s masters’ program in speech-language pathology was subjected to an accreditation review due to the university’s determination that treating transgender students in the program’s clinic was against the university’s religious mission.
And, of course, though a BYU investigation said it found no evidence to support the story, a Duke volleyball player’s claim that students shouted racial slurs at her during a recent game at BYU has shined light on the church’s troubled history with race.
Put bluntly, the LDS church has found itself, willingly or not, on the side of cultural issues decidedly not favored by most young people in the United States.
It is a grim irony that a church that tried so hard to gain respectability found the prize slipping away again almost as soon as it was achieved. | 2022-09-21T22:15:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | An obscene anti-Mormon chant marks a grim irony in the church’s history - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/oregon-football-obscene-chant-mormon-history/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/21/oregon-football-obscene-chant-mormon-history/ |
Riot police in Moscow detain a demonstrator during a protest of the partial military mobilization ordered Wednesday by President Vladimir Putin. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP)
Within hours of President Vladimir Putin’s speech declaring a partial military mobilization on Wednesday, men all over Russia — including some who had tried for months to ignore the messy war in Ukraine — suddenly found their lives thrown in chaos as they were summoned to duty.
Anxious relatives, meanwhile, began searching for ways to flee the country or otherwise avoid their loved ones being called for service. Flights to the few cities abroad still offering direct service to Russia — most destinations have been cut off by sanctions — were suddenly sold out.
Google search trends showed a spike in queries like “how to leave Russia” and even “how to break an arm at home,” raising speculation some Russians were thinking of resorting to self-harm to avoid the war.
“They’ve been chasing me since February, trying to offer me a contract,” one Moscow resident, who served in the army and has prior combat experience, said in an interview.
The man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely, said that unlike others who had received written summonses, he had received a personal call from the military enlistment office, which has had his number on hand for months. “I was ordered to undergo a [health] commission tomorrow morning,” he told The Washington Post. “So, I doubt I will be spared now.”
Military analysts said it was far from certain that the partial mobilization would be able to turn the flagging military campaign to Russia’s advantage quickly, if at all. But by Wednesday night, it was clear that the political backlash Putin feared — and that led him to resist a mobilization for months despite repeated battlefield setbacks — had begun.
In response to Putin’s decree, criticism of the war, which had been rising internationally and at home despite a severe Kremlin crackdown on dissent, suddenly burst into the open.
Relatively contained but significant protests erupted not only in the big cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also in Novosibirsk in remote Siberia. By Wednesday evening, more than 1,000 people had been arrested across the country, according to OVD-Info, an independent group monitoring protest activity in Russia — a remarkable number given that criticism of the war is potentially punishable by long prison sentences.
In the capital, hundreds chanted “Let our children live!” and “Send Putin to the trenches!” as they walked along Arbat Street. Videos on social media showed police officers arresting demonstrators and loading them onto police vans and buses, including a man showing “No to war!”
In St. Petersburg, police officers were seen beating protesters with batons and harshly breaking up crowds. At the small protest in Novosibirsk, a man was detained as he shouted at police officers, “I don’t want to die for Putin and you!”
An online petition against mobilization, initiated last spring, suddenly spiked to more than 292,000 signatures.
Putin’s decision to order the partial mobilization, in an effort to call up as many as 300,000 reservists, reflected his diminishing options in trying to reverse some awful defeats on the battlefield, including a lightning Ukrainian offensive that forced Russian troops to retreat from the northeast Kharkiv region.
In a nationwide address on Wednesday morning, he unfurled his latest tangled web of anti-Russian conspiracy theories about Nazis and NATO, and declared his support for staged referendums in the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, which many Western leaders have denounced as sham votes and an illegitimate pretense for annexing Ukraine’s sovereign territory.
While Putin stopped short of declaring a full mobilization, which would entail a national draft, the partial mobilization immediately began upending the lives of reservists.
In Murmansk in Russia’s Arctic north, an employee of Nornickel, a nickel plant, who fought in the Chechen war over a decade ago received a notice ordering him to show up at a local military commissariat.
Employees of Surgutneftegas, a Russian oil and gas company in Western Siberia, began receiving lists of people obliged to show up for a two-week “training session,” according to a relative of one of the employees and a letter leaked to a Russian Telegram channel Ostorozhno Novosti.
Some eligible men in Moscow told The Post they had received notices obliging them to show up for similar 15-day military training beginning as soon as Monday. Russian news outlet Mediazona reported similar accounts from residents in at least three other cities.
New casualty numbers reported Wednesday by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, showing that 5,937 Russians have died in Ukraine — a number that Western governments say is artificially low — did not do much to bolster popular support for the mobilization, nor did Shoigu’s assertions, made without evidence, of far higher death tolls on the Ukrainian side.
While Putin insisted in his speech that Russia was successfully clearing Nazis from eastern Ukraine and claimed widespread public support among residents in the Ukraine regions he hopes to annex (but still does not fully control militarily or politically), calls for protest were spreading on Russian social media.
Mobilization “means that thousands of Russian men — our fathers, brothers and husbands — will be thrown into the meat grinder of war. What will they die for? For Putin’s palace?” the Vesna protest movement said in a public call for demonstrations.
“The authorities at first said that only ‘professionals’ are fighting and that they would win. It turned out that they were not winning,” the group added. “So the war is no longer somewhere out there; it has come to our homes.”
While the demonstrations Wednesday could not compare to the tens of thousands of people that marched across Russian town squares against Putin’s reelection a decade ago, they were the biggest display of public discontent since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.
For many Russians, Putin’s speech Wednesday created an awful sense of deja vu. Beginning that first day of the invasion in February, rumors of imminent mobilization prompted a mass exodus of people fleeing to neighboring Armenia and Georgia or hopping on the last flights to Turkey, Dubai or Tel Aviv.
As their fears rematerialized, Russians in major cities fled to the borders once again, buying up all remaining flights to the few visa-free destinations still available to Russian passport holders.
Some of those who missed out on tickets flocked to land borders with Finland and Mongolia, forming long traffic jams at the checkpoints, according to footage posted online.
Online chatrooms sprung up offering live updates from the border crossings with people reporting whether guards had let them through.
“I have been expecting this since the end of February; I was trying to calm myself down hoping that this operation would be over, and I kept postponing this decision,” Anna, a Moscow resident and mother of two sons, one of whom is 24 years old, told The Post, adding that she decided to send her children to Armenia this week.
“Of course, there is some panic,” he said. “I am worried that it will get worse, although I don’t know how it can be worse, and that it may be too late to leave.” He added, “But we have some unfinished business here, and the only tickets I could find were already over $16,000, which I can’t afford.”
One Moscow millionaire who lives partly in Italy but had returned to Russia for a few days described growing disenchantment with Putin and fear for the future among business executives. The millionaire said he was afraid that he could be stranded in Moscow, even though he is not in the military reserve.
“There are no tickets, and it is getting more and more difficult to leave by road,” he said. “If there are additional restrictions due to the partial mobilization, it might not be possible to leave.”
The millionaire, who like others interviewed for this report spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal, said many in the business elite and intelligentsia saw the war as “a stupid mistake,” with few convinced by Putin’s argument that he is defending Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.
“The trust of business, of the cultural and academic elite in the regime, has disappeared. Everyone understands that all the words about the defense of the Russian-speaking population [in Ukraine] and the fight for our brothers bear no relation to reality,” he said. “Everyone sees this as a stupid mistake.”
Russian lawyers reported a flurry of calls from worried men, their mothers, and wives asking for legal strategies to avoid being called up.
Legislation hastily passed Tuesday by the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, sets harsh new punishments for those who attempt to evade the service, surrender or refuse to fight.
On Wednesday, a dark comic strip made rounds on Russian social media, describing the life trajectory of an ordinary Russian in 2022: you go to war or go to jail but then get sent to the front line anyway, given that prisons recently became a new recruitment base to help address the acute shortage of Russian forces.
Isabelle Khurshudyan in Kyiv, Ukraine, Catherine Belton in London, and Robyn Dixon and Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia, contributed to this report. | 2022-09-21T22:16:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Some Russians flee, others protest as Putin calls up reservists for war - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/21/putin-russia-mobilization-public-protest/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/21/putin-russia-mobilization-public-protest/ |
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky remotely addresses the U.N. General Assembly in New York City on Sept. 21. (Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky unveiled a plan to end the nearly seven-month war between Russia and Ukraine on Wednesday at the annual gathering of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly in New York.
The five-point plan urged world powers to punish Russia and surge military aid to Kyiv in an effort to force Moscow forces out of Ukraine, which Russia invaded Feb. 24.
“Russia wants war, it’s true, but Russia will not be able to stop the course of history,” Zelensky said.
The remarks were an implicit rebuke from non-Western and developing countries at the world body who called on Ukraine and Russia to immediately engage in a negotiated end to the conflict.
The remarks earned a rare standing ovation from global leaders in the U.N. General Assembly who earlier voted to allow Zelensky to address the world body remotely — a privilege denied other world leaders. The Russian delegate remained seated as well as delegations from other countries such as Namibia and the United Arab Emirates.
This is a developing report. | 2022-09-21T22:40:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ukraine President Zelensky addresses United Nations General Assembly - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/21/united-nations-zelensky/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/21/united-nations-zelensky/ |
A lawyer disappeared from a police academy. Her body was just found.
Diana Durán
Activists stage a sit-in in front of the attorney general's office in Quito, Ecuador, last week to protest the disappearance of criminal defense attorney María Belén Bernal, 34, from a police academy on the outskirts of the capital. (Rodrigo Buendia/AFP/Getty Images)
In the early morning of Sept. 11, a 34-year-old defense attorney walked into the police academy in Ecuador’s capital to meet her husband, a lieutenant who trained aspiring officers. She carried a burger she had picked up for him at a restaurant on the way.
It was the last time María Belén Bernal was seen alive.
On Wednesday, investigators searching for Bernal found human remains on the slope of an extinct volcano near the academy. President Guillermo Lasso confirmed that they were hers.
“With deep pain and indignation I regret to report that María Belén was found,” Lasso tweeted Wednesday afternoon. “Her femicide will not go unpunished and all those responsible will be brought to justice.”
Bernal’s husband, police Lt. Germán Cáceres, was questioned by authorities last week, released and then disappeared himself. A judge has ordered him to court Friday for a “formulation of charges.” Interpol has issued an alert seeking his whereabouts.
The discovery of the remains Wednesday morning at the Casitagua Volcano, 20 minutes from the police academy, was a shocking turn in a case that has gripped the South American nation, dominating local news coverage, prompting protests in multiple cities and fueling anger against rising violence against women.
Activists say the fact that Bernal disappeared from a police academy, and that the principle suspect is an officer responsible for training cadets, is particularly worrisome during what they describe as the deadliest year for women in Ecuador on record. At least 206 women have been killed since January for reasons associated with their gender, according to the Latin American Association for Alternative Development, up from 197 for all of 2021.
Mishell Medina, a spokeswoman for the Committee Against Violence, Disappearances and Femicides in Ecuador, said the outrage over Bernal’s case captures a growing frustration with a police force seen by many as corrupt and complicit in increasing crime.
“They no longer represent an order to protect, but rather an order to make people disappear,” Medina said. “They are policemen who hire hit men, policemen who rob, policemen who are involved in drug trafficking.”
Bernal is believed to have entered the police academy at about 1:30 a.m. Sept. 11, a Sunday. It was unclear why she was allowed to enter the academy as a civilian and at that hour.
A cadet would report hearing what sounded like a woman’s screams coming from Cáceres’s room, according to the cadet’s lawyer. An academy official would tell authorities he saw what appeared to be a red liquid on her husband’s hands, according to Gonzalo Realpe, the lawyer for cadet Joselyn Sánchez, and Jesús López Cedeño, a lawyer for Bernal’s family. Both attorneys said they had reviewed the case file.
No one stopped Cáceres from leaving or reentering the academy on the outskirts of Quito later that day.
“The responsibility lies with the state,” Bernal’s mother, Elizabeth Otavalo, 54, told The Washington Post this week, before her remains were found.
Edison Burbano, a lawyer representing Cáceres, cautioned that “until now, there are only a series of presumptions about the lieutenant.”
“It is positive that they have found the body because it mitigates the pain of the family,” he said. “If Mr. Cáceres has any responsibility, that must be defined according to the law.”
Ecuador’s prison riot: Drug cartels, overcrowded cells and a bloodbath
Cáceres turned in his cellphone to prosecutors during his questioning last week, Burbano said. He was held for eight hours. “Since then, I have no knowledge of his whereabouts,” the lawyer said. “We have not spoken.”
López Cedeño, the lawyer for Bernal’s family, said investigators searched Cáceres’s room and found red stains. They are awaiting DNA test results.
On Friday, prosecutors detained cadet Joselyn Sánchez.
Realpe, her attorney, said Cáceres and Sánchez were at a party together and “had a few drinks.” He acknowledged they exchanged messages that have since been deleted, but said they related to “their infatuation, their crush. Nothing to do with the crime of femicide.”
“It appears that my client was with the lieutenant when his wife arrived,” Realpe said. “He hides her in another bedroom to avoid problems and locks himself with his wife in his room.”
“My client heard the screaming and banging from being in the next room. But there were many others who heard the same thing.”
On Monday, Fausto Salinas, commander general of Ecuador’s police, said 12 members of the force had been suspended pending an investigation.
Interior Minister Patricio Carrillo said the case has brought “shame” to the country’s uniformed officers. He has replaced the police academy director with a woman, Col. Irany Ramírez.
Lasso has offered a $20,000 reward for information that helps locate Cáceres. He mentioned the case Wednesday before the U.N. General Assembly in New York.
“I want to take advantage of this forum to work together also to fight against gender violence,” he said. “In the case of Ecuador, the disappearance of a courageous woman, a lawyer, mother and daughter, should be a symbol of this challenge in the fight against violence against women.”
Otavalo, Bernal’s mother, said she never had reason to be concerned about her daughter’s relationship with her husband. Bernal and Cáceres began living together six years ago and married about four years ago. Bernal has a 12-year-old son from a previous relationship. The boy created a Twitter account last week and posted a photo of Cáceres.
“Good night everyone, help me find my mom,” the boy tweeted, “the last person who was with her was my stepfather German Cáceres.” As of Wednesday, it had been retweeted more than 12,900 times.
At about 2 p.m. Sept. 12, Bernal’s mother said, she received a call from Cáceres asking if she had seen her daughter. He said she had caught a taxi the night before beside a major highway in Quito.
“I asked him, ‘Did you take photos of the taxi?’ and he said no,” Otavalo said. “It’s a fast highway where taxis don’t pass by.”
Otavalo said she urged Cáceres to report her disappearance.
Indigenous protesters paralyzed Ecuador. Here’s why.
Burbano, Cáceres’s lawyer, said Cáceres visited his office on the morning of Sept. 13 and told him his wife was missing. According to Burbano, Cáceres told prosecutors he was with his wife, they fought, they left the police academy in her car and continued fighting.
To prevent the fight from escalating, Burbano said Cáceres told prosecutors, Cáceres stopped the car. Bernal decided to get out on a highway and take a taxi, Cáceres said. The lieutenant said he had not seen her again.
Burbano said he insisted that Cáceres turn in his phone and cooperate with authorities in their search for his wife.
After his questioning on Sept. 14, Cáceres rode away on his motorcycle, López Cedeño said. He has not been seen since.
Carrillo, the interior minister, vowed to apprehend Cáceres. Interpol last week issued a Blue Notice, a request for international help in collecting “information about a person’s identity, location or activities in relation to a crime.”
Prosecutor on his honeymoon is gunned down by hit men at beach
“We have search teams on the alleged perpetrator, and we are not going to let him go,” Carrillo said. “Under every stone, wherever he is in any part of the world, we are going to find him and we are going to submit him to the administration of justice.”
Otavalo has asked the prosecutor’s office to seek assistance from authorities from Colombia or another country to ensure the investigation is impartial.
Carrillo said the “crime was not planned.”
“He must have left a lot of clues,” he told Ecuavisa Noticias.
Lolo Miño, executive director of the Observatory of Rights and Justice of Ecuador, said she has never seen such indignation over a case of suspected gender violence. Bernal’s death is shocking not only because it happened at a police academy, she said, but because she was a criminal defense attorney.
“Even with that profile,” Miño said, “she could not escape the violence.” | 2022-09-21T22:44:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Body of María Belén Bernal found after disappearance stunned Ecuador - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/21/ecuador-maria-belen-bernal-missing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/21/ecuador-maria-belen-bernal-missing/ |
Carson Wentz walks off the field after failing to convert on third down in a Week 2 loss to the Detroit Lions. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
In 2016, Eagles traded up in the draft to select Wentz at No. 2. A year later, he was one of the NFL’s finest quarterbacks, an MVP contender leading his team to a championship before injuries cut his season short and his backup, Nick Foles, won Super Bowl LII MVP.
“It’s a different offense. It’s a different kind of everything,” Wentz said. “… I know our defense will be up for the task of stopping [Hurts] and that explosive offense that they have there.”
Commanders’ trade for Carson Wentz altered draft plans — for first round, at least
“I’m excited for it,” Wentz said. “But … you try not to make the game bigger than it needs to be. Every week is a big week. It’s hard to win in this league. And so I know once the first kickoff goes, it’ll be football again.”
After two years of a ‘wild ride,’ Carson Wentz prepares to face the Eagles | 2022-09-21T23:01:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carson Wentz prepares to face the revamped Eagles - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/carson-wentz-commanders-eagles/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/21/carson-wentz-commanders-eagles/ |
Marilyn Mosby blasts Maryland AG over handling of Adnan Syed case
The Baltimore City state’s attorney said in a statement that Attorney General Brian Frosh’s office had made a ‘willful decision’ to sit on evidence
Baltimore City State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby prepares to speak to reporters after a judge vacated the murder conviction of “Serial” podcast subject Adnan Syed. (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby issued a stinging retort aimed at Maryland’s attorney general on Wednesday, alleging his office had made the “willful decision” to withhold evidence in the case against Adnan Syed, whose conviction was vacated by a judge this week.
Mosby’s comment increases the rancor between her office and that of Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D) over the handling of Syed’s case, which drew widespread attention after it was featured on the hit true crime podcast “Serial” in 2014.
After Mosby’s office persuaded a judge to vacate Syed’s conviction, citing problems in how evidence was turned over to defense attorneys years ago, Frosh issued a statement disputing that evidence had been withheld from Syed’s legal team.
“Neither State’s Attorney Mosby nor anyone from her office bothered to consult with either the Assistant State’s Attorney who prosecuted the case or with anyone in my office regarding these alleged violations,” Frosh said in a statement.
Responding on Wednesday, Mosby (D) said Frosh’s office should “speak to his willful decision” to sit on evidence for seven years and evaluate any other errors.
“His inability to uphold this fundamental obligation denied Mr. Syed his right to a fair trial and now forces a family to relive an unimaginable nightmare because of his unconscionable misdeeds,” Mosby said. “As opposed to deflecting from his prosecutorial failure, I urge AG Frosh to ‘dig a little deeper’ and evaluate any other errors infringing on the rights of other Marylanders.”
Frosh’s office declined to comment on Mosby’s statement.
Syed was convicted in 2000 for the killing of his ex-girlfriend, 18-year-old Hae Min Lee, and sentenced to life in prison. State officials had long defended their handling of the case as Syed sought a new trial.
But the Baltimore City state’s attorney’s office recently said in a motion in circuit court that it wanted the conviction tossed and Syed released. The office said its own nearly year-long investigation into the case, which was conducted with Syed’s defense, had found new evidence of potential suspects, as well as materials that should have been handed over to defense attorneys that were not. Young Lee, Hae Min Lee’s brother, has said prosecutors’ motion to vacate the conviction left him feeling “betrayed.”
Mosby’s office now has 30 days to decide whether it will retry Syed or drop the case against him.
Mosby said in an interview with The Washington Post that she would drop the case if new DNA tests came back inconclusive. But she also did not commit to seeking a retrial if the tests pointed to Syed. In that instance, she said, she would “consider that option.”
Emily Davies contributed to this report. | 2022-09-21T23:23:27Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Marilyn Mosby blasts Maryland AG over handling of Adnan Syed case - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/21/mosby-blasts-frosh-syed-serial/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/21/mosby-blasts-frosh-syed-serial/ |
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