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Pharoah Sanders, piercing jazz saxophonist, dies at 81
“I’m a person who just starts playing anything I want to play,” he said, "and make it turn out to be maybe some beautiful music”
Jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders in 2014. (Gerald Herbert/AP)
Pharoah Sanders, a tenor saxophonist who performed with John Coltrane in the 1960s and was revered by many in the jazz world as an exemplar of a boldly expressive and experimental style known as free jazz, died Sept. 24 in Los Angeles. He was 81.
Luaka Bop, the label that released his 2021 album “Promises,” announced the death but did not specify a cause.
The saxophonist’s best-known work was his two-part “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” from the “Karma” album released in 1969. The combined track is nearly 33 minutes long and showcased Mr. Sanders’s signature approach: bold and piercing and infused with spiritual sentiments.
Along with saxophonists Coltrane and Albert Ayler, Marcus J. Moore wrote in the Nation, Mr. Sanders helped pioneer “a frenetic blend of spiritual jazz that, through shrieking horns and loose rhythmic structure, was meant to summon higher powers. The idea, it seemed, was to blow the sax so hard that the music reached God’s ears.”
Although his ventures in music could alienate some listeners and critics, Mr. Sanders drew a considerable and supportive audience over the decades as he remained a committed experimenter testing the boundaries of R&B, electric jazz and hard bop styles. He continued to record and perform prolifically and was revered as a master of freewheeling avant-garde improvisation.
He collaborated in recent years with Sam Shepherd, a British electronic music producer known professionally as Floating Points.
He was born Farrell Sanders on Oct. 13, 1940, in Little Rock, where his mother was a school-cafeteria cook and his father was a city employee. He played drums and clarinet in a church group, then moved saxophone in Little Rock clubs before moving to Oakland, Calif., after completing high school, and then to New York by the early 1960s, at times homeless as he struggles to find work.
He drew notice for the ferocity of his horn and settled into experimental groups fronted by Coltrane, Ayler, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra, the last of whom was said to have renamed him Pharoah after perhaps mishearing his given name. He established a solo career by the late 1960s, often using non-Western instruments, and also was featured on the 1971 album “Journey in Satchidananda,” by Coltrane’s widow Alice, a multi-instrumentalist and composer.
In interviews, he was seldom expansive about his art, preferring to let the music speak for itself. But he told the New Yorker in 2020 that he was, since childhood, drawn to all kinds of noise.
“I used to love hearing old car doors squeaking,” he said. “Sometimes, when I’m playing, I want to do something, but I feel like, if I did, it wouldn’t sound right. So I’m always trying to make something that might sound bad sound beautiful in some way. I’m a person who just starts playing anything I want to play, and make it turn out to be maybe some beautiful music.” | 2022-09-24T21:35:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Pharoah Sanders, piercing jazz saxophonist, dies at 81 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/24/pharoah-sanders-jazz-saxophonist-dead/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/09/24/pharoah-sanders-jazz-saxophonist-dead/ |
Jalon Daniels and the Kansas Jayhawks improved to 4-0 with a win over Duke on Saturday. (Jay Biggerstaff/Getty Images)
Clemson (winner)
Air Force (winner)
Boise State (loser)
The Kansas Jayhawks are 4-0 for the first time since 2009 after a 35-27 defeat of Duke, but that doesn’t really do justice to what’s happening in Lawrence.
This does: Kansas has four victories — in a season — for the first time since 2009.
The Jayhawks won this game in a similar manner to their victory at West Virginia, piling up yardage and daring an opponent to keep pace. Jalon Daniels rolled up 324 yards and four touchdowns through the air and another 83 yards and a touchdown on the ground as Kansas collected 528 total yards.
If this was a team that typically found itself in conference title contention, there would be a worthwhile conversation to have about how sustainable it is to give up 402.5 yards a game (Duke managed 463). But when you’ve struggled as long as the Jayhawks have, it’s an issue that can be dealt with at another time.
Nearly a month into the season, there isn’t much reason to doubt Kansas will be able to stay in most games thanks to its offense. And that means a cute story about a program that spent a decade-plus as a doormat has a real chance to zoom past merely becoming bowl-eligible and actually finishing in the top half of the Big 12.
Considering the standard the Tigers set throughout the Deshaun Watson and Trevor Lawrence years, it’s obvious enough that at the moment, Clemson isn’t quite at the level that earned it a pair of playoff titles.
And considering Saturday’s 51-45 double-overtime victory at Wake Forest, it’s also reasonable to conclude the Tigers are probably going to be just fine.
That might not be good enough to win a national title. It could very well be enough to secure an ACC championship. The No. 5 Tigers (4-0, 2-0 ACC) wasted an early two-touchdown lead, then erased three deficits in the second half and another in overtime to take down the No. 21 Demon Deacons (3-1, 0-1) on the road.
There was a lot to like about Clemson’s path to victory. It converted third downs (16 of 23). It got a stellar day from much-maligned quarterback DJ Uiagalelei (26 of 41, 371 yards, five touchdowns). It controlled possession, a wise approach given how little it could do to stop Wake QB Sam Hartman (337 yards, six touchdowns).
Yes, the defense still has a ways to go in the post-Brent Venables era. It also probably won’t face that stern of a test again before December. There’s still plenty of talent everywhere in Death Valley, and put on the spot, the Tigers showed off a lot of it in earning their 14th consecutive victory over the Demon Deacons.
At the least the home-field version of the Falcons, who smacked Nevada, 48-20, on Friday night is a winner. Air Force (3-1, 2-0 Mountain West) has surpassed 40 points in each of its three home games, but that doesn’t really touch on how unstoppable the Falcons have been in those games.
In its opener against Northern Iowa, Air Force scored on its first eight possessions before a couple garbage-time fumbles and a few kneel downs to end the game. The next week against Colorado, the Falcons produced points on seven of the 13 possessions that didn’t involve taking a knee, and two of the misfires were fumbles after drives of 65 and 75 yards, respectively.
Then came Friday’s showing, when Troy Calhoun’s team scored on all eight possessions that didn’t close out a half — a welcome bounce back from a 17-14 loss at Wyoming.
Given the state of the Mountain West, Air Force is in fine shape to contend for its first league title since 1998. And it certainly will pose a challenge for Navy, which heads west for the first game of this year’s Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy series next week.
First, an acknowledgment: Boise State hasn’t been Boise State — flirting with top-10 national finishes, a serious threat for giant-slaying, unquestioned titans of the Smurf Turf — for a little while now.
That said, what the Broncos have been since their last high-end bowl appearance (the 2014 Fiesta Bowl) is still quite strong. They averaged more than 10 wins a season from 2015-19, and went 5-2 in the pandemic-truncated 2020 season.
So when Boise State went 7-5 last year under first-year coach Andy Avalos, it was not an exaggeration to say it was the program’s worst season this century. But that may turn out to be a picnic compared to what the Broncos are this season.
They opened with a 34-17 loss at Oregon State that featured a wholly uncompetitive first half, then bounced back to bottle up New Mexico and Tennessee-Martin. Then came Friday’s step back, a 27-10 loss at Texas-El Paso that saw the Broncos muster just 177 total yards.
Some of that was on UTEP (2-3) converting third downs (8 of 15) and playing keep-away from Boise State. But the Broncos had only one play out of 53 go for more than 15 yards. That’s a problem.
Boise’s blue field was home to a lot of excellent offenses over the last two decades. This isn’t one of them, but it needs to get better if the Broncos are to avoid their first losing season since 1997. | 2022-09-24T21:53:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | College football winners and losers for Week 4 - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/24/college-football-winners-losers-week-4/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/24/college-football-winners-losers-week-4/ |
On an island that still relies heavily on imports, local foods will probably be in short supply in the wake of the storm
This view in the municipality of Maunabo on the southeastern coast of Puerto Rico shows the destruction of plantains. (Elvin Lebrón/Eastern Soil and Water Conservation District)
On Saturday morning, members of the Asociacion de Productores de Farinaceos del Este, a farmer association in Yabucoa, in the island’s eastern region, met at a local community center to discuss the state of their fields post-Fiona, which hit the island as a Category 1 hurricane on Sept. 18.
Ninety percent of the region’s major crop, plantains, has been lost due to the wind and torrential rains, said Antonio Sanchez, the association’s administrator. He estimates there are around 700 acres of plantains in the area, farmed by about a dozen growers.
“Most of the lowlands were flooded,” he said. “We had close to 18 inches of water in the valley.”
There’s an additional issue of underinsurance. Of Puerto Rico’s nearly 9,000 farms, most qualify as small farms that generate less than $10,000 in annual revenue, according to recent census data. And many of those small farmers, especially those with diversified crops, do not qualify for crop insurance, Sanchez said. They will be left with little to no income this season, said Karla Peña, who works as a program manager in Puerto Rico for the nonprofit Mercy Corps.
Antonio Rosa works for Cundeamor, a distributor in Guaynabo that works with a network of small and medium organic farms throughout the island, many of which are off the grid. Chef José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen in Ponce has purchased Rosa’s products this week to prevent crops from going to waste. Rosa said the south side of the island, which bore the brunt of the storm, has the largest plantain and banana farms. So its farmers stand to see the steepest losses — or gains — depending on how extensive their insurance is, he said.
“Most farmers know this is part of the risk they take when they grow food,” he said. “For some farmers this is a great opportunity to make lots of money as some of them insured their crop.”
“With inflation, local produce was some sort of relief for our people’s pockets, because it kept prices low,” he said. “But now, this storm will increase prices for whatever agricultural products are left until things return to normal again.”
More support is expected. President Biden said Thursday that the federal government aims to pay 100 percent of the costs of Puerto Rico’s recovery from Hurricane Fiona for the next month, including debris removal, shelter for those displaced, power and water restoration, as well as food.
“Farmers need business continuity support,” said Duamed Colón Carrión, president of Agro Tropical, a Puerto Rican agricultural company in Jayuya that specializes in cover crops. This support includes emergency working capital as well as aid to farm employees, most of whom have damage to their homes and psychological stress, he said.
“The most important thing is to attend the emergency,” said Coleman, the plantain farmer in Yabucoa. “But what about after that?” | 2022-09-24T23:02:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Hurricane Fiona destroyed many of Puerto Rico's agricultural crops - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/24/fiona-puerto-rico-farm-damage/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/09/24/fiona-puerto-rico-farm-damage/ |
The updated CIA museum, in Langley, Va. A model of Osama bin Laden's compound is in the foreground. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
The CIA Museum covers the intelligence agency’s long history — from spying on the Soviets to the Argo mission in Iran — but the latest addition is practically ripped from the headlines: a model of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s compound in Kabul used weeks earlier to plan the U.S. drone strike that killed the al-Qaeda leader.
The model is part of the newly renovated exhibition hall located deep inside CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Like the NSA’s Wall of Spies museum in Bethesda, Md., the CIA Museum isn’t open to the public. But it’s not exactly top secret either, welcoming CIA employees, official guests, foreign partners, potential recruits — and, early on a Saturday morning, a handful of carefully observed reporters with old-school notepads and pens (electronics are banned).
There are plenty of fun gadgets to see, like a polygraph machine in a briefcase and a communication device disguised as a tobacco pipe, used in the 1960s. When a user bit down on the pipe, sound traveled through their teeth and jawbone to the ear canal, allowing them to hear messages that no one around them could.
There’s a stack of red, green and yellow containers for a pneumatic tube system — like you might see at a bank drive-through — used for an interoffice message service before the advent of email. Different colors denoted different classification levels. There were “miles and miles” of tubes throughout CIA headquarters, according to Robert Byer, the director of the CIA Museum. The containers were also the perfect size for the transportation of a can of beer, or, with a little maneuvering, a sandwich, he added.
There’s an early example of the President’s Daily Brief, which used to be called the PICL (president’s intelligence checklist) or “pickle,” essentially a small spiral notepad, because that’s how President John F. Kennedy preferred to receive it. President Biden likes to have both hard copy and electronic tablet options for his daily briefing, Byer said, pointing to a leather bound binder and tablet case. Reagan apparently preferred briefing by VHS tape.
One display honors Soviet spies who helped the CIA, like Adolf Tolkachev, who shared weapons information that supposedly saved the U.S. government a billion dollars, earning him the nickname “The Billion Dollar Spy,” and Oleg Penkovskiy, who provided information during the Cuban missile crisis that prevented nuclear war. He got the unbeatable nickname “The Spy Who Saved the World.”
Byer said his favorite part of the museum covered the Hughes Glomar Explorer mission, which, in 1974, sought to secretly recover a sunken Soviet submarine at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean via a very big mechanical claw. The mission was only partially successful — part of the giant claw broke off and dropped a chunk of the sub — but when the L.A. Times learned of the mission and tried to confirm it, the now-ubiquitous “Glomar Response” was born, which starts, “The CIA can neither confirm nor deny...”
Other things museum officials can neither confirm or deny: How much the renovation cost, what the codes on the ceiling say, or even how they acquired some of the artifacts.
“That’s classified,” Byer said. He can neither confirm nor deny...
If you’re in the Washington area and want to snag one of those “official guest” invites, don’t bother asking your White House connection or that neighbor who works in intelligence. The museum is “operational,” Byer said, meaning if you don’t have a useful reason to see it, sorry, you can’t.
But many of the items displayed — the pigeon camera, the fake dead rat used for “dead drops” — can also be found across the river at the Spy Museum. | 2022-09-24T23:11:29Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The CIA renovated its museum. The public still can’t go see it. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/24/cia-museum-renovation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/24/cia-museum-renovation/ |
John Fetterman welcomed as ‘one of us’ at his first Philadelphia rally
John Fetterman speaks at his campaign rally while audience members hold signs, at Dorothy Emanuel Recreation Center, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 24, 2022.(Caroline Gutman for The Washington Post)
PHILADELPHIA — Ted Gardner sat on his front stoop watching hundreds of people across the street snake down the block and around a corner, marveling that he hadn’t seen a crowd like that since former first lady Michelle Obama campaigned in the same spot eight years ago for Gov. Tom Wolf (D).
This time, the people in line were waiting to see Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman, who on Saturday afternoon held a campaign rally in a predominantly-Black neighborhood in northwest Philadelphia, his first public visit to the city since launching his candidacy in February 2021.
Fetterman has centered much of his candidacy’s appeal on his ability to woo voters in more conservative parts of the state, where White working class voters have migrated to Republicans in recent years. As he’s worked to attract those voters, it has remained unclear whether Black voters — a critical voting bloc for any Democrat to win statewide in Pennsylvania — would turn out for Fetterman, particularly in vote-rich Philadelphia.
Gardner, 55, and his next door neighbor, Ronald Lamb, 52, who are both Black, have Fetterman for Senate signs in their windows.
“I like John Fetterman because he’s one of us,” Gardner said. “He stands for everything I stand for,” Lamb added.
Donna Bess, 56, who was standing on the stoop with Gardner and Lamb, pointed to a picture of Fetterman plastered on the side of a black truck selling campaign merchandise. “Look how he dress," she said, referring to his trademark oversized sweatshirts. “He’s one of us.”
During the Democratic primary, Fetterman’s challengers tried to convince Black voters that he was not one of them. They raised an incident from 2013 when Fetterman, then mayor of the predominantly-Black town of Braddock, a suburb of Pittsburgh, chased down an unarmed Black jogger, who he suspected may have just fired gunshots. Fetterman, who was armed with a shotgun, detained the man until police arrived. Fetterman has insisted he didn’t know the race of the person he pursued.
This month, a super PAC backing Fetterman’s rival, Republican Mehmet Oz, revisited the incident with a 30-second television ad intended to sow doubt with Black voters about the Democrat.
But, in interviews with a dozen Black leaders, strategists and voters in Philadelphia, no one brought up the nine-year-old story. Even state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, a Philadelphia Democrat, who raised the issue when he was running against Fetterman in the primary and demanded an apology, said he wasn’t interested in looking backward. He criticized Oz and his allies for bringing it up.
“He is just throwing out anything he can throw out,” Kenyatta, who is Black said. “He has no business being in a conversation about the Black community.”
“What frustrates me, you cannot tell me that you care abut gun crime in this community and then oppose all the things that would actually deal with crime,” Kenyatta said, referring to GOP opposition to gun control. "That’s not a message to Black people, that’s a message to scare White people about Black communities.
Earlier this week, Oz held a roundtable with Black Philadelphians and touted his “Plan to Fight for Black Communities," which includes support for criminal justice laws. Oz and his campaign have attacked Fetterman over his work to release people from prison who were wrongfully accused, as well as some nonviolent offenders. The Oz campaign has specifically pointed to Fetterman’s role in the commutation of two brothers serving a life sentence for a murder they maintained for nearly 30 years they didn’t commit. When they were paroled, Fetterman hired them to work on his campaign.
Those brothers, Lee and Dennis Horton, flanked Fetterman at his Philadelphia rally, which drew a crowd of 600 people, about evenly divided between Black and White people, to the gymnasium of a recreation center. Fetterman, still recovering from a near-fatal stroke in May, spoke for a little more than 12 minutes. He spent much of that time mocking Oz as out of touch with Pennsylvania, delivering a series of laugh lines to the friendly audience. He also touched on overhauling criminal justice laws, protecting abortion access, getting rid of the filibuster and raising the minimum wage as key issues.
The Horton brothers, who are Black, introduced Fetterman at the rally, sharing first how the Democrat was the first elected official to fight for them. Lee Horton said Fetterman told their sister: “I am going to fight to get your brothers out even if that means I lose every election after this.”
Fetterman, in his remarks, said he knew that this would be material for future opponents to use against him, but said, "I would never trade a title for my conscience.”
Fetterman is leading Oz in polls, although the race has tightened as both sides pour money into the race in the final weeks. Democrats see Fetterman as their best chance to flip a Senate seat, currently held by retiring Republican Sen. Patrick Toomey, as they defend other seats around the country. Republicans need to gain only one more seat in the 50-50 Senate to take the majority.
Despite not having campaigned in the city during the primary, Fetterman narrowly won Philadelphia, beating Kenyatta and Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.), who was the favorite of the Democratic establishment.
Several Black Democrats who attended the rally cited abortion and gun violence as issues motivating them to vote this year.
“Fetterman listens to women’s rights because if they take away women’s rights, what other rights are in store? Is it going to be voting rights? It’s already under attack,” said Verhonda Williams, 69, standing in the front of the line before the rally.
Other voters talked about Fetterman’s authenticity as driving their excitement about his candidacy. Dana Ancrum, 59, said she’s been listening to his ads and thinking, “he might just be the real thing.”
Asia Whittenberger, 23, and Alyvia Benson, 22, both doing a year with AmeriCorps, said they were excited to vote for Fetterman.
“I think for me, I know I’m a very young voter, but I’ve never been more confident in a politician in my life or someone running,” Whittenberger said.
After the rally, Denise Smith, 64, stood outside with her brother, John Holmes, 54, and reflected on what they’d just experienced inside.
“His energy, his swagger, his vibe and his experience of knowing what it takes,” Holmes said, when asked why he’d be supporting Fetterman. “I’ll 100 percent back him up.” | 2022-09-24T23:20:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Senate candidate John Fetterman was embraced by voters at his first Philly campaign rally - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/24/fetterman-senate-philadelphia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/24/fetterman-senate-philadelphia/ |
Saudi Arabia’s strength lies not only in its top position as the world’s biggest oil exporter, but also as the home of Islam's holiest site and its birthplace.
The prince’s efforts to shed the yoke of decades of ultraconservative Wahhabi control over every aspect of life are popular among young Saudis. From movie theaters and concerts, to women driving and curtailing the morality's police's authority, the face of Saudi Arabia is changing. The latter stands in stark contrast to the protests in rival Iran’s cities this week over the death of a woman in the custody of that country’s morality police. | 2022-09-24T23:24:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Saudi Arabia's triumphant week reclaims the West's embrace - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/saudi-arabias-triumphant-week-reclaims-the-wests-embrace/2022/09/24/10f7fcaa-3c57-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/saudi-arabias-triumphant-week-reclaims-the-wests-embrace/2022/09/24/10f7fcaa-3c57-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html |
FILE - New Orleans Pelicans guard CJ McCollum (3) receives a pass during the second half of Game 1 of the team’s NBA basketball first-round playoff series against the Phoenix Suns, April 17, 2022, in Phoenix. A person familiar with the situation says McCollum has agreed to a two-year, $64 million contract extension that runs through the 2025-2026 season. The person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the Pelicans have not announced the deal, which was first reported by ESPN. (AP Photo/Matt York, File (Matt York/AP) | 2022-09-25T00:58:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | AP source: Pelicans' McCollum agrees to 2-year extension - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nba/ap-source-pelicans-mccollum-agrees-to-2-year-extension/2022/09/24/dc7e5774-3c67-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nba/ap-source-pelicans-mccollum-agrees-to-2-year-extension/2022/09/24/dc7e5774-3c67-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html |
The 79-year-old artist is the first Black woman to win the prestigious Nasher Prize for Sculpture, a $100,000 award given by the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.
Senga Nengudi: “Studio performance with R.S.V.P.,” 1976. (Copyright Senga Nengudi/Photo by Ken Peterson/Courtesy of Sprüth Magers and Thomas Erben)
The Nasher Sculpture Center announced Wednesday that Senga Nengudi, an artist whose uncanny sculpture — incorporating nylon pantyhose and other found objects — has been displayed in such museums as the Museum of Modern Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art, is the 2023 recipient of the Nasher Prize. Nengudi is the first Black woman to receive the honor, which was established by the Dallas museum in 2015 as a way to “honor a living artist who elevates the understanding of sculpture and its possibilities.”
Previous recipients of the prize, which is unusual in its international scope and its focus on sculpture, include such artists as Michael Rakowitz, who is known for replicating looted Iraqi artifacts, and Doris Salcedo, who conducts interviews with survivors of violence that inspire haunting conceptual sculptures. The award comes with $100,000 and is followed by programming focused on the artist’s work, including gallery displays and lectures, leading up to a gala in April.
Doris Salcedo used 15,000 needles to represent pain of gun violence
Nengudi’s multidisciplinary practice — which includes sculpture, performance, dance, photography and film — challenges convention and takes art down from the ivory tower. In the name of art, the 79-year-old has facilitated a ritual dance under a Los Angeles highway overpass in “Ceremony for Freeway Fets” (1978). She has hung “fabric spirits” made of flag material from fire escapes in Harlem to capture what she has called the “inner souls” of the people she saw on the street. And most notably, she’s transformed worn pantyhose, sometimes filled with sand, into tactile, visceral meditations on the female body. (She once said she could fit an entire exhibition in her purse). Her work, which spans more than half a century, has intersected with the feminist and Black arts movements.
At a time when women’s rights are being actively restricted, Nengudi’s signature pantyhose sculptures stretch across museum walls with renewed boldness and resonance. They are suspended, elongated, twisted and knotted, taking an object that was created to reshape women’s bodies to comport with expectations and turning it on its head, gesturing to the saggy, bloated and bulging bits of the body that so many have been conditioned to scorn.
“In more recent years, the extraordinary creativity of the Black art community — which, in the ’70s and ’80s, was in many ways marginalized — is now being recognized. And so she occupies a critical place in the history of Black arts but also of art, period,” he said. “At a moment when the right of women to control their bodies has been taken away, she’s an artist whose exploration of female identity through works made with pantyhose speaks with great power and relevance.”
The idea for the Nengudi’s pantyhose works, known collectively as “R.S.V.P.,” came to her after she gave birth to her first child. “I was looking for material that kind of reflected the female body” she told curator Elissa Auther in an oral history for the Archives of American Art. “And then, finally, I found the pantyhose. Right after that, I went, ‘Wow,’ because the whole birthing experience — you’re expanding and then all of a sudden, after it’s over, you’re contracting, and your body kind of goes back into shape. I really wanted to somehow express that experience.”
In a statement announcing the award, National Gallery of Art curator Lynne Cooke — one of the Nasher Prize jurors — addressed part of what makes Nengudi’s work so impactful. “The fact that she makes work with these everyday means that had no history within sculpture and were of no great value is something that means a lot to younger artists as well as to a wider audience,” Cooke wrote.
Early in her career, Nengudi was attracted to what she called the “non-craft” of artists such as Paul Klee, and volunteered in experimental, Black-centric art education programs at Los Angeles’s Watts Towers — massive sculptures made of found objects. In the 1960s, she became so fascinated with Gutai — a radical Japanese art movement in which artists rolled in mud, half-naked, and painted canvases with their feet — that she moved to Japan. There, she came to appreciate the way Japanese aesthetics embraced simplicity and imperfection, and she studied Noh and Kabuki theater, which she praised for combining different artistic media.
When Nengudi eventually returned to Los Angeles, she founded Studio Z, a Black art collaborative, and worked alongside David Hammons and Maren Hassinger, who often partook in performance pieces in which Hassinger danced among Nengudi’s sculptures.
Based in Colorado Springs, Nengudi has been celebrated in retrospectives at such major museums as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Denver Art Museum. New York’s Dia Beacon is planning an exhibition of her work scheduled to open in February.
But museums and awards, which seek to commemorate and memorialize are, in some ways, antithetical to the spirit of Nengudi’s work — at least according to Nengudi. “An artist’s supposed greatest desire is the making of objects that will last lifetimes for posterity after all,” she has said. “This has never been a priority for me. My purpose is to create an experience that will vibrate with the connecting thread.” | 2022-09-25T02:14:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Senga Nengudi wins Nasher Prize for Sculpture - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/24/senga-nengudi-nasher-prize/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/24/senga-nengudi-nasher-prize/ |
In this photo released by United Launch Alliance, a classified satellite for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office is launched into orbit aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy rocket on Saturday, Sept. 24, 2022, at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California’s Santa Barbara County. It was the last launch of a Delta 4 from the West Coast. (United Launch Alliance via AP) (Uncredited/United Launch Alliance) | 2022-09-25T02:27:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | US spy satellite launched into orbit from California - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/us-spy-satellite-launched-into-orbit-from-california/2022/09/24/f13a0a34-3c74-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/us-spy-satellite-launched-into-orbit-from-california/2022/09/24/f13a0a34-3c74-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html |
OAKLAND, Calif. — Jacob deGrom got hit around and lasted a season-low four innings as New York squandered an early lead and lost to Oakland.
DENVER — Yu Darvish settled in after serving up a leadoff homer and equaled a career high with his 16th win as San Diego climbed into second place in the NL wild-card race by beating Colorado.
MINNEAPOLIS — Gary Sánchez drove in four runs, including a three-run homer in the fifth inning, and Minnesota snapped a five-game losing streak with a win against Los Angeles. | 2022-09-25T04:02:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Judge remains at 60 homers, but Yankees win again - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/judge-remains-at-60-homers-but-yankees-win-again/2022/09/24/53befa6e-3c7c-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/judge-remains-at-60-homers-but-yankees-win-again/2022/09/24/53befa6e-3c7c-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html |
The Wisk Autonomous electric aircraft which is a joint venture company between Boeing and Kitty Hawk is displayed during the Farnborough International Airshow 2022. (Photographer: John Keeble/Getty Images Europe)
For a project so ambitious, the announcement about the end of flying-car startup Kitty Hawk Corp. was surprisingly terse. A single post on the company’s LinkedIn page on Wednesday stated: “We have made the decision to wind down Kittyhawk. We’re still working on the details of what’s next.” | 2022-09-25T07:01:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Larry Page’s Flying Car Failure Is a Lesson For Us All - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/larry-pages-flying-car-failure-is-a-lesson-for-us-all/2022/09/25/6e1deea4-3c97-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/larry-pages-flying-car-failure-is-a-lesson-for-us-all/2022/09/25/6e1deea4-3c97-11ed-b8af-0a04e5dc3db6_story.html |
Former Rep. Denver Riggleman is set to publish his book Tuesday, just one day before the final public hearing of the Jan. 6 panel.
Then-candidate Denver Riggleman in Washington, Va., on Sept. 5, 2018. (Dayna Smith for The Washington Post)
A guide to the biggest moments from the Jan. 6 committee hearings
“You get a real aha moment when you see that the White House switchboard had connected to a rioter’s phone while it’s happening,” Riggleman told “60 Minutes.” “That’s a big, pretty big aha moment.” | 2022-09-25T10:44:02Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ex-staffer’s unauthorized book about Jan. 6 committee rankles members - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/25/ex-staffers-unauthorized-book-about-jan-6-committee-rankles-members/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/25/ex-staffers-unauthorized-book-about-jan-6-committee-rankles-members/ |
When Italians were tricked into debt peonage in the South
The deceitful saga preceded the ‘Reverse Freedom Rides’ and the ploy to send migrants to Martha’s Vineyard
By Brad Ricca
Settlers at Sunnyside, pictured in 1909. (National Archives)
In the early 1900s, a small travel agency in Greenville, Miss., began sending representatives to Italy. The dozen or so agents canvassed the arid farms and barber shops of the Abruzzo region, smiling as they passed out brochures reading, “Italians! Do not lose this great opportunity to buy tickets from me . . . for the steamer Manilla . . . for $45.30 with railroad fare paid.” The agents were selling passage to America, with the promise of jobs on arrival at a farm called Sunnyside.
But few of the Italians had the money to buy the ticket. The agents assured them they could pay it back over time. They added that every morning, the company that oversaw Sunnyside would hang a piece of fresh meat from their doorknob. For many Italians, struggling with bad land and an unstable economy, this opportunity for a new start was not only enticing, but potentially lifesaving.
The painful saga that followed – one of deceit and shattered dreams – would continue to have echoes in U.S. history, in the “Reverse Freedom Rides” orchestrated by Southern white segregationists in the 1960s and most recently in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) ploy to send migrants to Martha’s Vineyard.
But the Italians saw only opportunity when the agents from Mississippi produced an employment contract and asked them to sign. Many did. Though the brochures were written in Italian, the contracts were not. Most or all of those signing had no idea what the language meant.
The agents then handed the people a smaller piece of rolled-up paper and asked them not to mention the agreement to the officials at the Port of New Orleans. They were to memorize the words on the paper, stating that no one else had paid for their journey.
The voyage was long. On arrival, the Italians remembered their promise. After a final look, they threw the little scrolls into the sea and repeated their message.
They were then taken up the Mississippi River and onto a small steam train, which brought them to Sunnyside. It was sunny, as promised, and hotter than Italy. They were in Arkansas, alongside the Mississippi, on a peninsula jutting into Lake Chicot, which cut them off from the rest of the land.
When they got to their ramshackle cabins by the cotton fields, the version of the story they had been told in Italy began to unravel.
The Italian workers were technically paid for their labor. Families were credited $15 monthly for food. But it was the other side of the ledger that was more telling. The company, O.B. Crittenden & Co., would charge each family $6 for flour and $7 for their work mule, leaving only $2 a month for food. This did not include other expenses like medical care, rent and use of the cotton ginning equipment, not to mention the $45 debt each person was still paying off.
Workers had to do all their shopping at the company store, which accepted only the “monkey money” they were paid in, small round coins stamped with the Sunnyside seal. Since the company paid so little and operated on credit, the workers were left buried in debt – on which the company charged 10 percent interest. It was a carefully designed system of forced labor, 40 years after the official end of slavery.
The contract stipulated that workers could buy their way out of Sunnyside, but by controlling prices – and charging for everything, including access to the Catholic priest – the company made sure its workers could never escape their debt. Men on horseback patrolled the edges of the camp at night. A small cemetery began to fill.
Before and during the Civil War, Sunnyside used enslaved Black people to do its work. After the war ended, the land changed hands several times. One owner tried using enforced convict labor through a contract with the state. When that failed, O.B. Crittenden & Co. leased the land.
The Italian labor force grew from 40 families in 1900 to more than 160 families in 1907. Sunnyside’s overseer, LeRoy Percy — an attorney and politician who would later serve as a U.S. senator from Mississippi — bragged about his workforce. “The Italians,” he said, “were in every way superior . . . If the immigration of these people is encouraged, they will gradually take the place of the negro without their being any such violent change as to paralyze for a generation the prosperity of the country.”
For years, Sunnyside operated in secret. After a 1907 visit to the plantation, the Italian ambassador to the United States, Edmondo Mayor des Planche, became suspicious and requested a Justice Department investigation into debt peonage — the illegal practice of indenturing workers through debt – at Sunnyside. The department deployed Grace Quackenbos, a newly minted U.S. attorney from New York City and the first woman appointed to that role.
Quackenbos had earned her position by closing peonage sites across the South. Florida was an egregious offender; Quackenbos had infiltrated a remote turpentine camp in Jacksonville disguised as an old woman selling scissors. She found unbearable conditions and had the camp shut down.
Quackenbos’s investigation into Sunnyside enraged Percy, and a local newspaper urged the Yankee woman “with the funny-sounding name” to return to the North where she belonged. Undeterred, Quackenbos produced a comprehensive report with testimony, evidence and financials, proving that Sunnyside was engaging in peonage. She gave a personal account of her findings to President Theodore Roosevelt.
She was captured and enslaved 400 years ago. Now Angela symbolizes a brutal history.
Quackenbos didn’t know that Roosevelt had also received a letter from Percy, who had once been his hunting companion in the Southern forests. The government shelved the report and took no action on Sunnyside.
But Quackenbos had already made a difference. Newspapers turned on Percy with headlines such as “MILLIONAIRE HAS SLAVES ON FARM.” Italy stopped issuing visas to citizens wishing to work in the American South. The Sunnyside grift was over.
The only reminders left on Lake Chicot are a historical marker, an old cemetery and a Catholic church built in 1939 on the site of an 1866 church. The Altar Society publishes a popular cookbook complied by Libby Borgognoni of the Italian dishes that have remained in the area, passed down through generations, including pasta with chicken and tomato sauce and a chocolate pudding called budino al cioccolato.
Brad Ricca is an award-winning author of several books of nonfiction. | 2022-09-25T11:36:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Italians were tricked into debt peonage at Sunnyside, Arkansas - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/09/25/italians-sunnyside-debt-peonage/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/09/25/italians-sunnyside-debt-peonage/ |
What is forgotten in the U.S.-Philippines friendship
50 years after his father declared martial law, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was welcomed in New York.
Perspective by Adrian De Leon
Adrian De Leon is an assistant professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, writer and host for PBS Digital Studios and author of the forthcoming book, “Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America.”
President Biden meets with Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Thursday in New York. (Evan Vucci/AP)
On the eve of the 50th anniversary of his father’s brutal declaration of martial law, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., arrived in New York for the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly. As he and President Biden discussed strategy in the South China Sea, a contempt of court order against the younger Marcos — ruling that his family must pay $2 billion to survivors of his father’s 14 years of unilateral rule under martial law — remains unenforced. And as he delivered an invited address to the New York branch of the Asia Society, activists and victims of the elder Marcos regime’s human rights abuses are fighting the historical revisionism that led to the family’s resurgence into national politics.
A friendship and shared history between the two nations has often been the official framing of this binational relationship. On Aug. 5, ahead of the State Department’s official visit to the Philippines, it described the partnership as one between “friends, partners, and allies,” on the basis of “people-to-people” ties, exemplified by the large Filipino community in the United States. But such euphemisms have effectively covered up the brutal realities of what this relationship was founded upon: the colonization of the archipelago by the United States. This erasure continues to shape silences in the relationship, impeding fights for justice and redress across the Pacific.
In 1896, after more than 330 years of colonization by Spain, native people in the archipelago took up arms against their colonial rulers in what became known as the Philippine Revolution. In 1898, taking advantage of the rapid decline of the Spanish Empire, the United States offered military assistance to revolutionaries in Cuba and the Philippines, with promises to insurgents that it, an expanding world power, would recognize native-led independence movements.
This series of interventions led to the Spanish-American War between April 21 and Aug. 13, 1898, and the decisive American military victory that followed. However, instead of recognizing the newly-declared First Philippine Republic, the United States purchased Spain’s former island colonies in the Treaty of Paris for a total of $20 million. After this betrayal of trust, the leaders of the republic declared war against the United States, their former ally.
What followed was brutality that remains largely erased from American historical memory. During the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), an estimated 20,000 Filipino soldiers and 200,000 to 1 million civilians died before the United States declared the conflict over. Even then, from 1902 to the mid-1910s, revolutionary movements proliferated against the new occupying power. As historians have argued, the Philippine-American War may very well not have ended in 1902, but rather took on a new name: counterinsurgency.
In 1934, amid a wave of anti-Filipino racism on the U.S. West Coast, Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act, which capped migration from the Philippines into the continental United States at 50 people a year, even though the country was under U.S. rule.
In exchange, the Philippines would become a commonwealth, a provisionally self-governing nation for 10 years, before being granted full independence. The following year, in the presence of American and Filipino colleagues, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ratified the 1935 Constitution of the Philippine Commonwealth, modeled after the U.S. Constitution. During World War II, the Japanese occupied the Philippines in 1942, another violent period of colonization declared by an imperial power under the guise of liberation. After evacuating in March 1942, Gen. Douglas MacArthur — who had served as the military adviser to the Commonwealth of the Philippines — invaded the island of Leyte in October 1944. By January 1945, the United States occupied Manila once again, and reclaimed their Southeast Asian military and economic outpost.
These wartime aims previewed American-Philippine foreign relations in the immediate decades after the war. After World War II, on July 4, 1946, the United States granted independence to the Philippines. But the legacies of prior American involvement in the archipelago did not disappear. Various economic treaties guaranteed that, in exchange for American financial support for postwar redevelopment, the Philippines would allow U.S. companies and citizens rights to the islands’ natural resources, as well as free use of military zones on the archipelago. In effect, despite formal independence, the Philippines remained a neocolony of the United States.
U.S. colonial statecraft gave the juridical precedent for the seizure of power by the Marcoses. On Sept. 23, 1972, Ferdinand Marcos Sr. declared that the Philippines would be subject to martial law. He pointed to Article VII, Section 10 of the 1935 Constitution, which was still in effect. It granted the president — as commander in chief — discretionary powers to declare martial law as a preventive measure against “lawless violence, invasion, insurrection, or rebellion.” These provisions stem from the early American colonization of the Philippines, in which military occupation was at the heart of counterinsurgency.
Citing threats to his rule across the political spectrum, Marcos suspended habeas corpus and seized control of Congress, effectively granting himself authoritarian powers in perpetuity. In tandem with martial law, he declared his rule to be a new epoch in Philippine history, which he called the New Society.
The discretionary powers afforded to Marcos under martial law did not only pertain to governance, but also applied to all aspects of Philippine society. The regime swiftly suspended the free press, imprisoned Marcos’s political opponents and subjected Filipinos to curfews and strict surveillance. Those who were deemed dissidents were subjected to torture and abuse; an estimated 70,000 people were incarcerated and about 3,257 victims “disappeared” through extrajudicial killings.
By the 1980s, the Marcos regime’s hold on the Philippines began to wane. The president’s health began to decline, and his wife, Imelda Marcos, emerged as the new figurehead. In 1983, the regime’s popularity sharply dropped after the assassination of opposition leader Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. After several failed coups and impeachments, through mass mobilization, the People Power Revolution of 1986 ousted Marcos and his family from national politics.
As Manila’s citizens took to streets in support of his opponent, Corazon Aquino, the Marcoses fled the Philippines with the help of their country’s former colonial master, the United States.
Aboard a U.S. Air Force C-130, the Marcos family and their cronies fled the Philippines to Anderson Air Force Base in Guam, then found sanctuary in Honolulu, another U.S. outpost in the Pacific. The family took much of their stolen plunder (including jewelry, cash and rare artworks) with them, and their wealth is now estimated to be over $10 billion. Despite litigation, a federal commission to retrieve stolen wealth and a tax bill of $3.9 billion, most of the money has not been recovered.
Over the years, the United States and the Philippines maintained their mutually beneficial relationship as “partners.”
On Nov. 20, 2001, two months after the fall of the twin towers, President George W. Bush met with then-Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to fortify U.S. military interests in the Philippines. Citing a strong “people-to-people” relationship between Filipino Americans’ love for the United States and the Philippine people’s shared commitment to this trans-Pacific partnership, Arroyo declared: “Long live the Philippines, and long live the friendship between the United States and the Philippines.”
Former strongman president Rodrigo Duterte, who was publicly anti-American and expressed his disdain for President Barack Obama, found much in common with his admirer, President Donald Trump. In 2020, Duterte voiced his support for his American counterpart, declaring him to be a “good president [who] deserves to be reelected.”
And despite the election fraud and intimidation that facilitated Marcos Jr.’s ascension to the presidency — and wide protests calling out the lack of integrity in the electoral process — on May 11 Biden congratulated the new administration on the victory.
But we must remember that the basis of the U.S.-Philippine “special relationship” is the erasure of colonial history. That on the 50th anniversary of martial law, the United Nations, the Biden administration and the Asia Society have welcomed an ill-begotten president with open arms, signaling the strength of this historical amnesia — and the troubling future of Philippine politics and civic life.
The ongoing fight for justice across the Pacific — for the repressed legacies of the American campaign of extermination in the Philippines in the early 20th century, to the survivors of martial law under Ferdinand Marcos Sr., to the victims of extrajudicial killings under Duterte’s so-called “War on Drugs” — takes place on the battleground of historical memory. For the sake of redress and social justice, we must remember. | 2022-09-25T11:36:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What is forgotten in the U.S.-Philippines friendship - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/09/25/what-is-forgotten-us-philippines-friendship/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/09/25/what-is-forgotten-us-philippines-friendship/ |
Regret over college majors? It has little to do with the majors.
Regrets, I’ve had a few — as have, apparently, many of those who majored in languages, literature, history, art, religion and the like.
Earlier this month, The Post’s “Department of Data” published a striking article about higher education. According to a recent Federal Reserve survey, The Post reported, 37 percent of college graduates — nearly 2 in 5 — regret their chosen field of study, including nearly half of humanities and arts majors. (Engineers reported the lowest rates of regret, at 24 percent.)
This data, on its face, mirrors the dominant conversation around the value of college and the need for more students to shift to “practical” fields of study such as those under the STEM umbrella, or to transition to more vocational training.
But while the findings were eye-catching, the focus on choice of major was a major misdirection. After all, the difference between the highest and lowest rates of regret isn’t actually that large. And “vocational and technical training” was the third-most-regretted field of study.
Even if the “slacker baristas” who majored in “queer pet literature” (thanks, Sen. Ted Cruz) had instead learned to code, they still have a 1 in 3 chance of wishing they had done something else.
The truth is that in every field, what really underlies regret is debt.
Delve deeper into the Federal Reserve report and one quote stands out: “Perceptions of higher education are linked to whether individuals had to borrow for their education, and whether the returns on their education were sufficient for them to repay their student loans.”
It’s the bad return on investment — or an ROI lower than expected — that’s causing the deepest dissatisfaction.
The Federal Reserve report adds: “Student loan borrowers with outstanding debt were … twice as likely as those who repaid their debt to say that the costs of their education outweigh the benefits.”
Americans have long been sold the idea that college is a one-way ticket into the middle class — or the cost of admission for staying in it. But what if you pay the very expensive fare and don’t get to your promised destination?
Regret is the natural result.
When higher education becomes a financial albatross rather than a launchpad to success, of course its value might seem dubious. But this raises at least two types of questions. The practical: How do we solve for the high cost of college? And the philosophical: When it comes to education, how do we define “success” and “usefulness” in the first place? What is an education really for, and how do we decide which fields of study are “valuable”?
Debate on the first question has become especially heated since President Biden announced his plan last month to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student debt. Some opponents argue (with good reason) that loan forgiveness will work only if it is coupled with financial reforms to the higher education system, and that a more forward-looking policy targeting costs is needed to ensure that the number of borrowers doesn’t continue to grow. Suggestions range from the mild — doubling the Pell Grant maximum — to the aggressive: forcing colleges to help pay off defaulted student loans.
Others say loan forgiveness shouldn’t be granted at all. Which brings us to the second question about how to ameliorate regret — and back to the college-major conundrum.
Framing the Federal Reserve survey results as a “choose the right major” story reinforces the idea that ROI is the only thing that matters. Some may beg to differ.
In a democracy whose success depends on the discernment of its members, shouldn't the goal of higher education be something — well — higher than individual financial success?
“To prepare each citizen to choose wisely and to enable him to choose freely are paramount functions of the schools in a democracy,” Franklin D. Roosevelt said years before he signed the GI Bill and essentially reinvented American higher ed.
According to that ideal, students ought to be citizens, not just consumers. And while choosing the right major might help define a vocation, part of the process should be understanding that vocation within the context of the broader society.
A computer scientist might end up in a highly technical role. But the questions raised within the field — about ethics, creativity, our technological future — require more than technical know-how; they require the ability to think broadly and critically. Students of philosophy might not spend the rest of their lives immersed in ancient texts, but the practices of inquiry they absorb become applicable to an endless array of real-life circumstances.
A field of study can’t be judged simply by projected post-graduation income — the question of how it shapes the student is relevant, too. But these ideas will fall by the wayside as long as debt is a primary concern. And students will continue to regret their decisions, regardless of whether they major in econometrics or, well, English. | 2022-09-25T11:36:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Regret over college majors has little to do with the majors - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/25/college-major-regret-student-debt/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/25/college-major-regret-student-debt/ |
The GOP’s ‘Commitment’ is to total political warfare
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) outlines the GOP's "Commitment to America" in Monongahela, Pa., on Friday. (Barry Reeger/AP)
While they were trumpeting their “Commitment to America” on Friday, House Republicans might have told Americans more than they intended about what a GOP majority would mean and the forces it would answer to. But they also gave Democrats some tips about what’s coming their way.
Some of the awkward revelations during an event at a factory outside Pittsburgh came from friendly questioners, including a vaccine skeptic who won loud cheers. Even Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a hero to the Trumpist far right, thought it wise to take a pass on that one, saying, “I’m not against the vaccines.” He pivoted quickly to boilerplate conservative victimhood, declaring that “the left may control everything,” but not “we the people.”
Rep. Lisa C. McClain (R-Mich.) made you wonder why she serves in government at all. “What does government produce?” she asked. “Nothing.” I guess we can forget about roads, bridges, schools, universities, water systems, health research, national parks and airports, among other things.
And lest anyone miss the fact that no extremist would be left behind in a new Republican order, the festivities were graced with the presence of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) — of QAnon, Jewish space lasers and charges about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “gazpacho police” fame.
But her presence also explained why House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) is quite proud of his Commitment to America. It’s so short on specifics that everyone in his caucus could sign on, and it brushes aside anything that might hurt a Republican House candidate.
You have to squint to find the only reference to abortion. It’s beneath a subhead of a subhead and amounts to nine vague words: a pledge to “protect the lives of unborn children and their mothers.” Somehow, I don’t think that’s a promise of universal prenatal care.
McCarthy doesn’t mind that he looks like a copycat, modeling his “commitment” after the “Contract with America,” the 1994 document that presaged that year’s Republican landslide that made Newt Gingrich speaker. In fairness, both parties are devoted synonym hunters when it comes to replaying their greatest historical hits. Democrats have long searched for words at both ends of the phrase “New Deal.” (See: Harry S. Truman’s “Fair Deal,” John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” and Bill Clinton’s “New Covenant.”)
Despite its reputation, Gingrich’s Contract did not win him his majority. But it did create some discipline in the ranks, keeping his candidates on more or less the same page. That’s what McCarthy is trying to do with a tense and obstreperous GOP caucus.
He might also have done his opponents a favor by signaling where his party spots Democratic weak points. What became clear as McCarthy and his colleagues spoke on Friday is that the GOP plans to wrap three issues — fears about China, problems at the southern border and fentanyl deaths — into one scary package. The logic: The fentanyl precursors go from China to Mexican criminal groups. Fentanyl crosses an allegedly porous border. It kills Americans.
Democrats should take the fentanyl crisis very seriously, even if McCarthy and his friends conveniently evaded the explosion of synthetic opioid deaths during Donald Trump’s presidency, from 19,413 in 2016 to 56,516 in 2020. The fact that the GOP is demagoguing the issue doesn’t make it any less of a problem.
And the Commitment’s promise of a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” in the schools suggests that the GOP’s surveys show a persistence of parental frustration with the difficulties created for kids during the pandemic.
Lori McRoberts, a mother of three and a self-described “Mama Bear,” complained to McCarthy about covid-19 protocols in the schools during the pandemic that, among other things, required children to wear masks and sit in a line. “They sat like prisoners during lunch,” she said, and then moved on to the dangers of “Marxist-style programs targeting our children.”
“Mama Bear to Mama Bear, I hear you,” Rep. Julia Letlow (R-La.) reassured her. Out of nowhere, just to make sure he got the unrelated issue of how to handle transgender students on the table, McCarthy used the question to blurt out a promise that no doubt polls well. “We should ensure women only compete in women’s sports,” he said.
Still, Democrats should note that you don’t have to be worried about “Marxist-style programs” or who competes in sports to be alarmed by falling test scores.
Here’s another thing the Republicans made clear: If they take the majority, they plan to use their power to harass the Biden administration with one hearing after another. Jordan was positively gleeful in describing the long list of subjects the GOP would investigate, urging voters “to make a change in our government so that we can hold those people who’ve been coming after us, hold them accountable like we’re supposed to.”
If you don’t think our politics are partisan enough now, just wait for Jordan, McCarthy and their friends. They really do have a commitment — to making Washington a pitiless battlefield. | 2022-09-25T11:36:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The GOP’s ‘Commitment’ is to total political warfare - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/25/commitment-america-gop-midterms-dionne/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/25/commitment-america-gop-midterms-dionne/ |
Senator Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, holds a hearing on battery technology at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington on Sept. 22. (Shuran Huang for The Washington Post)
Senate Democrats are racing to figure out how to keep the government’s lights on, facing a Friday deadline to pass a spending bill funding federal operations. It should not be hard. No one wants a government shutdown with November’s midterm elections looming. But a fight has exploded over whether to tack onto the necessary spending bill what opponents call “the big oil side deal” — legislation designed to speed energy project permitting, consideration of which Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) demanded in return for his summertime vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats’ landmark climate and health-care bill.
There should be no controversy: Including Mr. Manchin’s bill would improve the package. This is true even — or especially — if one’s primary concern is climate change.
Mr. Manchin’s bill has stoked controversy because it contains a sweetheart provision that would benefit a West Virginia pipeline project that Mr. Manchin wants to get through. But, while unattractive, that is not even close to the legislation’s most consequential element; the fact that the bill would ease construction of power lines is.
The nation needs to build a lot of new infrastructure if it is to transition rapidly off greenhouse gas-heavy fossil fuels and onto renewables. Aside from more solar panels and wind turbines, perhaps the greatest need is transmission — big wires that transport large amounts of electricity from power plants to towns and cities. The sun does not shine and the wind does not blow everywhere at the same time. A grid packed with renewables will require transmission lines to zip electricity from the places where weather conditions are favorable to the places people live. Moreover, electricity will have to replace gasoline as the fuel for the nation’s cars and trucks, power heat pumps and water heaters in people’s homes, and run the stoves that will replace natural gas ranges, which means the nation will need more of it — and more wires to move it around the country.
Yet building things such as power lines is unreasonably difficult in the United States. Major transmission projects, even those expressly designed to move clean electricity, die after years in permitting purgatory. Princeton’s ZERO Lab, which models the effects of climate policies, found that if the United States failed to increase the pace at which it expands its transmission lines, 80 percent of the emissions reductions that could come from the Democrats’ new climate bill over the course of this decade would not occur. Even increasing the pace by 50 percent would leave 25 percent of the policy’s potential emissions cuts on the table. Failing to improve the speed at which the nation builds transmission lines would even boost natural gas consumption over this decade, which would be an ironic result given that opposition to Mr. Manchin’s bill reflects concerns about building a natural gas pipeline.
The Manchin legislation would enhance the federal government’s power to approve transmission lines it deems to be in the national interest, and it would make it easier to finance the new wires. It would also encourage more speed on the lengthy reviews that can stymie other needed development. Democrats should embrace the reform — not hold up government funding in a gratuitous squabble. | 2022-09-25T11:37:01Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Democrats should embrace Joe Manchin’s ‘big oil side deal’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/25/joe-manchin-big-oil-side-spending-deal-democrats/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/25/joe-manchin-big-oil-side-spending-deal-democrats/ |
The Ashburn Silver Line Metro station on March 26, 2021. (Benjamin C Tankersley for The Washington Post)
On Friday, the Washington area’s transit system unveiled a new Metrorail map that showed the 11.5-mile Silver Line extension to Dulles International Airport and points farther west. The map and, more to the point, the extension’s imminent opening are major milestones for the 46-year-old transit system, now the nation’s third busiest. They are also a symbolically important moment for the nation’s capital itself: At last, it will be served by a rail link to an international airport, as many major world cities have been for decades.
Sadly, that announcement came with a cold shower. For now, and maybe for a while, Metro might not have enough rail cars in service to run on the network, meaning the Silver Line extension, already years behind schedule, might be delayed again unless service elsewhere is slashed.
Metro’s short- and long-term troubles appear to multiply almost by the day. The rail car shortage arose last year when more than half of Metro’s fleet — 748 of its most modern cars from the 7000-series — was removed from service owing to a wheel-widening malfunction that caused a derailment. More than three quarters of them remain out of service, pending review by the system’s regulatory agency, the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission. Metro General Manager Randy Clarke made no effort to sugarcoat the problem. “We will not have enough rail cars to operate the network,” he said. “And that’s just on today’s frequency level — and the frequency that customers are looking for, and to deal with the crowding issues.”
That’s the immediate challenge today. The more dire challenge is projected as far as the eye can see. It concerns Metro’s ability to pay for the service its passengers expect, and that the region desperately needs if it is to return to economic good health. This is the looming issue regional leaders would rather ignore as long as possible, but cannot.
On that front, a benign tip of good news masked Metro’s approaching budgetary iceberg. In the fiscal year starting next July, as federal pandemic relief funds dry up, the projected deficit will be $185 million, officials said. That’s just one-third of the size originally feared, and it’s a manageable gap in the context of the agency’s operating budget that is more than $2 billion. However, Metro’s longer-term projections are grim. Operating deficits are projected to hit $738 million in the fiscal year starting in 2024, and swell to $924 million four years later.
Those are chilling numbers, and they ought to seize the attention of D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) and both candidates in this fall’s Maryland gubernatorial election, Democrat Wes Moore and Republican Dan Cox. They portend drastic service cuts as well as sharp fare increases unless Metro’s regional stakeholders intercede, which means substantially increased subsidies from the city and the two states.
Regional leaders will need to think beyond Metro’s current anemic ridership numbers, and face the reality that unless service improves and wait times are short, passenger counts might never rebound to pre-pandemic levels. Ignoring Metro today means ignoring the region’s prospects for years to come. | 2022-09-25T11:37:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Metro's Silver Line nears completion as budget woes loom - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/25/metro-sliver-line-budget-forecast/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/25/metro-sliver-line-budget-forecast/ |
This illustration depicts NASA's DART probe, foreground right, and the Italian Space Agency's LICIACube, bottom right, at the Didymos system before impact with the asteroid Dimorphos, left. DART is expected to zero in on the asteroid on Monday and is intended to slam it head-on. (Steve Gribben/Johns Hopkins APL/NASA)
Heart rates are spiking in the Washington suburbs, where scientists and engineers on Monday evening hope to witness a vending-machine-sized spacecraft that is 7 million miles from Earth crash into an asteroid.
If everything goes as planned, and the laws of gravity and motion don’t change at the last minute, this will happen at 7:14 p.m. Eastern time — or, to be precise: 7:14:23.
There’s nothing major at stake here, other than demonstrating a technology that someday might save civilization.
It’s important to note that the targeted asteroid isn’t a threat to Earth and has done nothing wrong to deserve this attention. But the space collision is a critical moment for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), NASA’s first test of “planetary defense.”
This mission is designed to show how a “kinetic impactor” could deflect a dangerous asteroid that might strike the Earth. There are a lot of space rocks out there that could interrupt our typically peaceful journey around the sun. The general strategy in planetary defense is to alter the orbits of asteroids so that, even if they come close to Earth, they’ll pass by harmlessly.
The DART team members are confident they’ll succeed, but they admit this is not a slam dunk. The spacecraft could miss. There will be no consolation for the scientists and engineers if they almost hit the target. This isn’t horseshoes or hand grenades: Close doesn’t count when you’re trying to change the course of an asteroid.
The asteroid is called Dimorphos. It is roughly 500 feet in diameter. No one knows precisely what it looks like. It’s just a fuzzy blob in telescopes. The first time Earthlings will get a good look at it will be less than an hour before impact.
Dimorphos orbits another, larger asteroid, named Didymos (Greek for “twin”), as both hurtle around the sun. Such “binary” asteroids are common.
The spacecraft was launched last November from California. The bigger asteroid serves essentially as the guide star of the mission. But only the smaller asteroid is being targeted. When the spacecraft gets close to big Didymos, it should see little Dimorphos swinging around from behind its companion. It’ll be a head-on collision.
Things will surely be tense in the Mission Operations room in Laurel. The Applied Physics Laboratory handles a lot of classified government research but sometimes does nifty space missions. Seven years ago it successfully flew NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft by Pluto and got the first close-up images of the dwarf planet.
This is how NASA plans to hit an asteroid
This mission is similar in that it’s fraught with difficulties and uncertainties. The spacecraft must make crucial last-second navigational decisions autonomously. Flying a spacecraft at high speed — about 14,000 miles per hour — into a relatively small asteroid is something no one has ever done before.
If the DART spacecraft misses the target, it will theoretically have a second chance for a smashup encounter with Dimorphos in another two years — but the engineers aren’t even thinking about taking a mulligan.
Previous space science missions by NASA and the Japanese space agency took samples of asteroids, but those were carefully choreographed rendezvous involving gradual approaches. DART envisions a high-speed crash. The scientists and engineers behind the mission say they won’t know if they’ll hit the asteroid until about 20 seconds before impact.
Mission engineers are making their last adjustments to the spacecraft’s trajectory, but the final approach, in the hours before the anticipated collision, will be automated. A camera on board the spacecraft will capture images of the smaller asteroid while simultaneously helping the vehicle zero in on the target.
The final images transmitted by the spacecraft’s camera will show a tiny white dot growing into something brighter, bigger and more asteroidal. Then, if all goes as hoped, Dimorphos will loom so large it fills the field of view.
The most worrisome asteroids with potentially global climate repercussions are the ones larger than 1 kilometer in diameter. They’re the easiest to spot. More than 95 percent of the estimated population of such killer rocks has been identified, said planetary scientist Nancy Chabot, DART’s coordination lead.
Fewer than half of the asteroids between 140 meters and 1 kilometer have been identified. That’s an ongoing effort. Rocks in that size range — and Dimorphos is one of them — could wipe out a major city with a direct hit. Chabot said early detection is key to planetary defense.
“This is something that you don’t do last-minute. This is something that you do years in advance,” she said.
NASA and its partners have a catalogue of 30,000 objects at this point, said the agency’s planetary defense officer, Lindley Johnson. Scientists can calculate their orbits for some decades into the future, but as the timeline gets longer, the orbital uncertainties increase.
No dangerous asteroid at the moment appears to be on track to slam into Earth, to the extent that these things can be calculated, Johnson said. But he’ll be watching Monday night’s asteroid redirection test closely.
“We’ve got to have such technology,” he said. “It would be prudent upon us to test that all out ahead of time, so we’re not trying to do it for the first time when we really need it to work.” | 2022-09-25T11:37:13Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NASA testing planetary defense by crashing spacecraft into an asteroid - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/09/25/nasa-asteroid-planetary-defense-test/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/09/25/nasa-asteroid-planetary-defense-test/ |
Kids as young as 4 work long hours at factories to help their families survive.
Afghan children work in a brick factory on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 17. Aid agencies say the number of children working in Afghanistan is growing since the economy collapsed after the Taliban takeover more than a year ago. (Ebrahim Noroozi/AP)
Nabila works 10 hours or more a day, doing the heavy, dirty labor of packing mud into molds and hauling wheelbarrows full of bricks. At 12 years old, she’s been working in brick factories half her life, and she’s probably the oldest of her co-workers.
The number of children put to work in Afghanistan is growing, fueled by the collapse of the economy after the Taliban took over the country and the world cut off financial aid just over a year ago.
A recent survey by Save the Children estimated that half of Afghanistan’s families have put children to work to keep food on the table after parents lost their jobs.
Nowhere is it clearer than in the many brick factories on the highway north of the capital, Kabul. Conditions in the furnaces are tough even for adults. But in almost all of them, children as young as 4 or 5 labor alongside their families from early in the morning until dark, even in the heat of summer.
Children do every step of the brickmaking process. They haul canisters of water, carry wooden brick molds full of mud to put in the sun to dry. They load and push wheelbarrows full of dried bricks to the kiln for firing, then push back wheelbarrows full of fired bricks. They pick through the smoldering charcoal in the kiln for pieces that can still be used, inhaling the soot and burning their fingers.
The kids work with determination and a sense of responsibility. When asked about toys or play, they smile and shrug. Only a few have been to school.
Nabila, the 12-year-old, has been working in brick factories since she was 5 or 6. Her family works part of the year at a kiln near Kabul, the other part at one outside Jalalabad, near the Pakistani border.
A few years ago, she got the opportunity to go to school a little in Jalalabad. She’d like to go back to school but can’t — her family needs her work to survive, she said with a soft smile.
The landscape around the factories is bleak. Families live in run-down mud houses next to furnaces. For most, a day’s meal is bread soaked in tea.
According to surveys by Save the Children, the percentage of families saying they had a child working outside the home grew from 18 percent to 22 percent from December to June. That would suggest more than 1 million children nationwide were working.
On a recent day at one of the kilns, a light rain started. At first the kids were cheerful, thinking it would be a refreshing drizzle in the heat. Then the wind kicked up. A blast of dust hit them, coating their faces. Some of the children couldn’t open their eyes, but they kept working. The rain turned into a downpour.
The kids were soaked. One boy had water and mud pouring off him but said he couldn’t take shelter without finishing his work. | 2022-09-25T12:19:53Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Many Afghan kids have to work to help their families survive - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/09/25/poor-afghan-kids-must-work/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/09/25/poor-afghan-kids-must-work/ |
The poor state of officers’ mental health has pushed many out of the profession. A handful of specialized treatment centers are trying to meet demand.
Harbor of Grace CEO Ken Beyer, center, speaks with Vice President Chuck Hart, left, a former police sergeant, and Director of Patient Services Robert Quick, a former police lieutenant. Harbor of Grace Enhanced Recovery Center, in Havre de Grace, Maryland, is one of only six treatment centers in the country approved by the Fraternal Order of Police, the world’s largest organization of law enforcement officers. (Katja Ridderbusch for KHN)
HAVRE DE GRACE, Md. — Ken Beyer can’t think of a day in the past few months when his phone didn’t flutter with calls, text messages and emails from a police department, a sheriff’s office or a fire station seeking help for an employee. A patrol officer threatening to kill himself with his service weapon before roll call. A veteran firefighter drowning in vodka until he collapses. A deputy overdosing on fentanyl in his squad car.
Specialized recovery facilities like Harbor of Grace focus on treating law enforcement officers, firefighters, emergency medical technicians and dispatchers — people who regularly encounter violence and death at work. In the past two years, Beyer said, the number of police officers admitted for treatment at his facility alone has more than tripled. “And we always have up to 20 cops in the queue,” he said. Other treatment centers for first responders reported a similar spike in patients.
Anger at police and policing practices soared after a Minneapolis officer murdered George Floyd in 2020, and it put additional strain on officers’ mental health, said Brian Lerner, a psychiatrist and the medical director at Harbor of Grace. “Officers feel disparaged by the public and often, they also feel unsupported by their agencies,” he said.
The poor state of many officers’ mental health, combined with low morale, has contributed to an exodus of police across the country that has left departments understaffed and the remaining officers overworked and exhausted. Atlanta, Seattle, Phoenix and Dallas have been hit particularly hard by officer shortages. “That’s creating enormous stress on the system,” Prohaska said. “It’s a perfect storm.”
Even before the most recent stressors, rates of burnout and depression were up among first responders. Rates of post-traumatic stress disorder are five times as high in police officers as in the civilian population. Some studies estimate that as many as 30% of police officers have a substance use problem. Alcohol dependence is at the top of the list. Last year alone, 138 law enforcement officers died by suicide — more than the 129 killed in the line of duty, according to the FBI. A recent report from the Ruderman Family Foundation suggests that police suicides are often undercounted because of stigma.
“We get all types, from all backgrounds and at all stages of brokenness,” said Beyer, 66, a former firefighter and EMT who overcame a problem with alcohol several decades ago. “All our patients and most of our staff know what it’s like to hold a dead or a dying child,” he said.
He said that almost every time he was involved in a critical incident — like a shooting or an accident with burned and disfigured bodies — “my supervisor ordered me to the bar afterwards.” One incident in particular has stuck in his memory — when a young boy shot himself in the head with a rifle. Washing down the horror with alcohol “was the culture back then,” he said.
His department pushed him to get help, and he entered Harbor of Grace in April 2021 for a 28-day treatment cycle. There, he learned to let go of his hardened veneer and his impulse to always be in control. He also saw many other cops struggle with that when they got to the center. “I witnessed grown men have a fit like a 6-year-old because a staff member wouldn’t let them use their cellphone.”
Close decided to return to work in law enforcement. He has become an advocate for peer-to-peer support in his agency and beyond. He said his own mental health journey has made him a better police officer, with more empathy and improved communication skills. | 2022-09-25T12:54:44Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Maryland recovery center treats burnout and stress among first responders - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/25/first-responder-mental-health-treatment/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/25/first-responder-mental-health-treatment/ |
Distinguished people of the week: Finally, some accountability for Trump.
Protesters hold a sign on Sept. 20 outside the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse, where special master Raymond J. Dearie held a hearing on classified documents recovered from Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort. (Alex Kent/Getty Images)
A group of judges this week helped ensure that the investigation into former president Donald Trump for spiriting away highly classified documents from the White House would continue unimpaired. In doing so, they helped restore some faith in our court system — and in democracy.
Former federal judge Raymond J. Dearie, whom the hapless Judge Aileen M. Cannon selected as the special master to review the classified documents, proved that Trump’s lawyers were mistaken to believe that he would serve as an ally to their aside. Instead, he moved quickly to put an end to Trump’s stalling and nonsense.
Dearie ordered Trump’s counsel to definitely say whether Trump’s team would claim before a judge that documents were “planted” by the FBI at his Mar-a-Lago resort, as Trump has claimed publicly but not in court. Coupled with his previous warning that he was likely to defer to the government if Trump did not make clear whether he declassified any documents, Dearie has systematically blown up Trump’s frivolous lawsuits to stop the investigation — and his public propaganda campaign. His attorneys have to decide if they will go along with Trump’s lies by affixing their names to them in a court filing. I suspect they will not.
Meanwhile, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, consisting of two judges appointed by Trump and one by Barack Obama, systematically dissected and discarded Cannon’s rulings concerning the classified documents. “We decide only the narrow question presented: whether the United States has established that it is entitled to a stay of the district court’s order, to the extent that it (1) requires the government to submit for the special master’s review the documents with classification markings and (2) enjoins the United States from using that subset of documents in a criminal investigation,” the panel held. “We conclude that it has.”
The panel found Cannon lacked equitable jurisdiction. Moreover, the panel wrote, “the district court concluded that Plaintiff did not show that the United States acted in callous disregard of his constitutional rights.”
That should have been the end of it, but the panel did not spare Cannon from finding Trump failed to meet every other prong of the test. The court continued: “Plaintiff has not even attempted to show that he has a need to know the information contained in the classified documents. Nor has he established that the current administration has waived that requirement for these documents.” In other words, the panel effectively said Cannon was acting without any legal or factual basis.
Likewise, “Plaintiff suggests that he may have declassified these documents when he was President. But the record contains no evidence that any of these records were declassified.” That’s legalese for: What in the world was Cannon thinking?
The panel also found the idea of “irreparable harm” to Trump, which Cannon essentially found on the basis of him simply being a former president, was absent. All citizens face potential damage to their reputations from criminal investigation; their remedy is in dismissal of charges or vindication at trial.
In contrast to Cannon, the 11th Circuit also found that the government would suffer irreparable harm from Cannon’s order barring the Justice Department from continuing to investigate potential crimes because “its national-security review is inextricably intertwined with its criminal investigation.” Cannon had no basis to disregard that.
If Cannon flipped the legal system on its head, the 11th Circuit turned it right-side up. It reaffirmed the notion that Trump is no different than any potential defendant — and that a court cannot facilitate his antics by making up conflicts of law and fact where there are none. Objective reality matters. The law matters.
Perhaps Trump’s lies and bogus explanations really won’t protect him in a court of law. Maybe he is going to be held accountable for his conduct. If so, these judges will have repaired some of the damage his lawlessness has done to our democracy. For that, we can say, well done. | 2022-09-25T13:03:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Finally, some judges who are willing to hold Trump accountable - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/25/judges-dearie-11th-circuit-trump-documents/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/25/judges-dearie-11th-circuit-trump-documents/ |
Do you think our schools are worse than ever? You’re wrong.
Pandemic was bad, but last half century shows steady improvement, particularly in math
A teacher speaks on the first day of class at Eleanor Roosevelt High School on Aug. 19 in Greenbelt, Md. (Michael A. McCoy for The Washington Post)
Pessimism about American public schools runs deep, particularly with the latest federal sampling tests showing a sharp drop in achievement among 9-year-olds because of the pandemic.
That does not mean, however, that readers are right when they tell me U.S. education has been getting worse for decades. Some people my age say that because we have warm, but only vague, memories of our days in school. The truth is that until covid-19 hit, our schools had been steadily improving for nearly a half century.
University of Buckingham professor M. Danish Shakeel and Harvard University professor Paul E. Peterson have just published their study of U.S. reading and math scores showing significant gains between 1971 and 2017. Math scores grew by nearly four years’ worth of learning and reading scores by nearly one year’s worth of learning during that period.
The two scholars, writing in the journal Education Next based on their recent 87-page article in Educational Psychology Review, also found Black, Hispanic and Asian students improved faster than their White classmates in elementary, middle and high school.
Some reports on American schools have left a different impression. Shakeel and Peterson cite books such as 1994’s “The Decline of Intelligence in America” by Seymour Itzkoff and 2008’s “The Dumbest Generation” by Mark Bauerlein. Those authors argued that American youth were failing to develop basic knowledge and skills because of electronic devices and other bad influences. Bauerlein told me the big problem is the lack of much improvement in high school, which cannot counteract the hours teens pile up on screens in leisure time.
Shakeel and Peterson suggest the rise of achievement during the half century they studied came from improved living standards as well as better schooling. While that was going on, research was revising our understanding of changes in how smart we are.
It was once thought, the two scholars said, that intelligence as measured by IQ tests was “a genetically determined constant that shifted only over the course of eons.” But in the mid-1980s, New Zealand political scientist James Flynn found IQ scores were increasing by three points per decade. Shakeel and Peterson said: “Though Flynn’s work was initially dismissed as an over-interpretation of limited information, his finding was replicated by many others.”
That growth in average intelligence was accompanied by a narrowing of achievement gaps between ethnic groups and income groups in the United States, they said. Over the half century studied, the gap between Black and White students in both reading and math was cut in half. The gains for Black children were largest in elementary school, persisted in middle school and occurred in diminished form through high school.
“It could be due to educationally beneficial changes in family income, parental education and family size within the Black community,” Shakeel and Peterson said. “Other factors may also be in play, such as school desegregation, civil rights laws, early interventions like Head Start and other preschool programs, and compensatory education for low-income students.”
The average performance differences between fourth- and eighth-grade students on the same test are roughly one standard deviation, a common term in statistical analysis. The scholars found elementary school reading scores for White students grew by 9 percent of a standard deviation each decade, compared with growth of 28 percent per decade for Asian students, 19 percent for Black students and 13 percent for Hispanic students.
The scholars said, “Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds also are progressing more quickly than their more advantaged peers in elementary and middle school.”
They said, “Our data consist of more than 7 million student test scores on 160 intertemporally linked math and reading tests administered to nationally representative samples of U.S. student cohorts born between 1954 and 2007.”
The term “intertemporally linked” means the tests were designed to be comparable over time by repeating some of the same questions in different decades, and other techniques. The tests included the U.S. government’s long-term check on school achievement, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and other exams that compare educational results in different countries.
How are America’s public schools really doing?
The scholars suggested that math scores improved more than reading during the half century they studied because of different rates of change in different kinds of intelligence. An analysis of 271 studies of IQ published by Austrian researchers Jakob Pietschnig and Martin Voracek in 2015 found that during the previous century, fluid reasoning, which involves math, grew more than crystallized knowledge, which involves reading. Better nutrition and less exposure to contagious diseases among mothers and babies the last 100 years may have given fluid reasoning a boost.
There are other possible connections between the condition of our planet and how we did in fourth grade. The learning loss during the pandemic, for instance, may be linked to factors that caused a world slowdown in intellectual growth during World War II, Shakeel and Peterson said. That huge conflict, they said, brought “both school closures and worldwide disruptions of economic and social progress.”
Overall, the last half century has been mostly good for schools, even if we’re not sure why. Shakeel, Peterson and the many other researchers on whom we depend must wait now to see how quickly we recover from the educational ravages of the coronavirus.
Unhappy with your college? Here’s how to find a better one. | 2022-09-25T13:07:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Despite recent declines, student performance improved over last half century - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/25/school-student-performance-pandemic/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/25/school-student-performance-pandemic/ |
In this photo taken by an individual not employed by the Associated Press and obtained by the AP outside Iran, protesters chant slogans during a protest over the death of a woman who was detained by the morality police, in downtown Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2022. (AP Photo) (Uncredited/AP) | 2022-09-25T13:08:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Iran summons UK and Norway ambassadors amid violent unrest - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/iran-summons-uk-and-norway-ambassadors-amid-violent-unrest/2022/09/25/a5cc94a8-3cc5-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/iran-summons-uk-and-norway-ambassadors-amid-violent-unrest/2022/09/25/a5cc94a8-3cc5-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
The idea of tackling the “root causes” of migration and asylum flows is the kind of high-minded notion likely to be dismissed by politicians such as Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, who brag that they are actually doing something about the immigrants showing up at the US-Mexico border while other officials just talk. Yet a look at the reasons why so many Venezuelans are seeking asylum shows that there are some pretty obvious steps the US could take that would reduce incentives to make the perilous journey.
Venezuela is subject to some fairly crippling economic sanctions first imposed under President Donald Trump and continued by Joe Biden. The sanctions are hardly the only cause of Venezuela’s economic misery, but they do contribute to it — indeed, that’s the whole point. If the US lifted the sanctions, the economic situation in Venezuela would improve and fewer people could come.
If the US doesn’t want to lift sanctions, then it has an obligation to do something for the people fleeing.
That doesn’t necessarily need to mean giving them permission to live and work in the US. After all, to get from there to here requires first passing through a number of countries, with Venezuela’s neighbor Colombia as the first stop. Republicans who think the arrival of Venezuelans at the border is an intolerable burden should consider how much more difficult the situation is for the authorities in Bogota, who are dealing with a much larger flow of people and have fewer resources. Where is the legislation appropriating a multibillion-dollar aid package for Colombia to resettle Venezuelan refugees as an alternative to them heading north to the US?
Back when Barack Obama was president, he attempted a significant diplomatic opening with Cuba that included easing of America’s longstanding embargo on that country. Near the end of his term, he followed up on that opening by rescinding the unusually generous treatment that people fleeing Cuba used to receive from the US government.
Agree or disagree with him, Obama was pursuing a coherent effort to bring to a belated end the Latin American Cold War. But Obama never achieved bipartisan buy-in for this idea, and under Trump the US reversed course — re-sanctioning Cuba, sanctioning Venezuela, and sanctioning Nicaragua.
Trump reversing Obama on trade while keeping his immigration restrictions in place has landed the US in a muddle that Biden has continued. If the US wants to return to the old approach of trying to crush leftist regimes economically, then it is obliged to care about the welfare of those fleeing these regimes. In particular, Republicans — who are the most vociferous in favor of sanctions and the most alarmed by irregular flows of migrants — have an obligation to figure out what they want to do.
Housing migrants elsewhere in Latin America is probably workable and has certain advantages in terms of transportation logistics and language compatibility. But if that’s the plan, the US should deliver real financial resources to help out.
Alternatively, a welcoming approach — even if limited to these particular groups of migrants for whom Republicans have traditionally expressed concern — could be a big win for the US. Cuban-American South Florida is a huge cultural and economic success story. Right now, Florida is one of 18 states that has an unemployment rate of below 3%. The Federal Reserve is raising interest rates in an effort to close the gap between the number of job vacancies and the number of unemployed people.
An alternative would be to fill at least some of the vacancies with people fleeing countries where — in part thanks to US policy — there are no jobs. That could even include transporting migrants out of El Paso and other border towns into blue cities with pro-immigrant politics and a need for more workers. But the goal should be to create a well-organized system to connect people with work, not to try to maximize inconvenience in order to generate headlines.
But they also ought to recognize the interconnection of different policy areas. If the domestic economy is overheated, immigrants can help with that. If the US wants to punish Venezuela with sanctions, it has an obligation to do something for Venezuelans fleeing despair. And welcoming more of them in a well-organized way is probably the best, most efficient option.
• Republicans’ Migrant Stunts Highlight a Policy Failure: The Editors
• When Immigration Hypocrisy Landed on Martha’s Vineyard: Tyler Cowen | 2022-09-25T14:39:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Republicans Have a Special Obligation to Venezuelan Migrants - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/republicans-have-a-special-obligation-tovenezuelan-migrants/2022/09/25/c8357a3e-3cd2-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/republicans-have-a-special-obligation-tovenezuelan-migrants/2022/09/25/c8357a3e-3cd2-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
In times like these I’m reminded of Robert Rubin. The former US Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration was unequivocal that a strong dollar was in the country’s best interests, and the government should be careful not to undermine trust in the currency. The UK’s plan to ignite growth with tax cuts and borrowings has knocked down the pound and sparked fears of capital flight.With a federal budget deficit of more than 3% of gross domestic product, no one would call the US fiscally conservative. But it increasingly looks like the cleanest of the dirty shirts among major economies. That’s reflected in the greenback. The Bloomberg Dollar Index that measures the currency against its major peers rose by the most since March 2020 at one point on Friday, extending its gain since the middle of last year to more than 17%. Other measures put the dollar at its strongest in two decades.
The benefit to holding dollars is that US markets are so much deeper and more liquid than any other. At $23 trillion, the US Treasury market is more than double the size of Japan’s government bond market. And even if you wanted to buy so-called JGBs, you probably couldn’t because the Bank of Japan owns the vast majority, so much so that there’s no JGB trading on some days. As for Europe, the UK, French, Italian and German bond markets are all smaller than $3 trillion.
All this doesn’t mean that a bad year for financial assets can’t get worse. What it does mean is that the US is likely to be the beneficiary of turmoil in markets elsewhere, as global investors seek refuge in dollars. That will cushion the downside in financial assets. As Rubin said, a strong dollar is always in America’s best interests. More from Bloomberg Opinion:
• A £45 Billion Tax Cut Isn’t Radical Enough: Therese Raphael | 2022-09-25T14:39:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Strong Dollar Is About to Pay Some Dividends - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-strong-dollar-is-about-to-pay-some-dividends/2022/09/25/c7f7f722-3cd2-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-strong-dollar-is-about-to-pay-some-dividends/2022/09/25/c7f7f722-3cd2-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
UNITED NATIONS — This year’s U.N. General Assembly meeting of world leaders came on the heels of another event that reverberated internationally — the death of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, followed by both an outpouring of tributes and sometimes bitter reflection on the colonialist empire that came to an end during her seven decades on the throne. | 2022-09-25T14:40:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 'An inspiration': Tributes to UK's late queen at UN meeting - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/an-inspiration-tributes-to-uks-late-queen-at-un-meeting/2022/09/25/d4cff02c-3cdb-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/an-inspiration-tributes-to-uks-late-queen-at-un-meeting/2022/09/25/d4cff02c-3cdb-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
How low can he go: Eliud Kipchoge tops own world record in Berlin
Kenya's Eliud Kipchoge lowered his world record in the marathon by 30 seconds. (Christoph Soeder/Associated Press)
Even Eliud Kipchoge looked amazed as crossed the finish line Sunday, smashing his world record in winning the Berlin Marathon for the fourth time.
Kipchoge, the 37-year-old runner from Kenya, captured the 15th of 17 official marathons he’s entered by finishing the race in 2 hours, 1 minute and 9 seconds. He lowered his world best time of 2:01:39, set four years ago in Berlin, and led from start to finish. Mark Korir of Kenya was second in 2:05:58 and Ethiopia’s Tadu Abate was third in 2:06:28.
Tigist Assefa of Ethiopia was the women’s winner in 2:15:37, the third-fastest time in history for somebody who had run ran one prior marathon; only Brigid Kosgei and Paula Radcliffe have gone faster. Kenya’s Rosemary Wanjiru was second in 2:18:00 and Ethiopia’s Tigist Abayechew took third in 2:18:03.
Keira D’Amato, the American record holder (2:19:12), finished sixth in 2:21:48, pausing to walk late in the race and briefly stopping. “Today wasn’t my best day ever, but it was the best I could do,” she said in a text message, according to Race Results Weekly.
Keira D'Amato represents the evolution of U.S. women's marathoning
The day, though, belonged to Kipchoge, the two-time Olympic gold medalist who set a 4:37-mile pace in Berlin. His performance again raises the question of whether he can run a sub two-hour marathon. He did so in 2019 in Vienna, becoming the first to accomplish the team, but the 1:59:40 time was not recognized as a record because he ran on a controlled course with professional pacesetters.
Kipchoge, who led from start to finish, found the pacing far from perfect for him, allowing him to run the second half in 61:18 after a blistering 59:51 over the first 13.1 miles.
“I was planning to go through it [the halfway mark] 60:50, 60:40,” Kipchoge said on the race broadcast. “My legs were running actually very fast. I thought, let me just try to run two hours flat, but all in all, I am happy with the performance. We went too fast [in the first half]. It takes energy from the muscles.”
Asked whether he might lower his record again, Kipchoge said he has “still more” in his legs, adding, “I hope the future is still great.”
Kipchoge holds course records in London and Tokyo, as well as Berlin, and has also won the Chicago Marathon, giving him four of the six World Marathon Majors. He hopes to win all six, leaving only New York and Boston to conquer, which he has said is on his bucket list.
“We believe in speaking with his group that New York is a nice option for him [in November] followed by Boston in the spring,” Mary Kate Shea, the professional athlete program manager for the Boston Marathon, told the Boston Globe in April. “We would be very excited if Eliud chose to top off his stellar career with racing Boston.”
His slowest marathon times — 2:08:44 and 2:08:38 — came in the Olympics, where there were no pacesetters.
Kipchoge, who also has the goal of winning the Olympic marathon three consecutive times, spoke of “limits” in a post-race Instagram message.
“Limits are there to be broken,” he posted, adding, “I can say that I am beyond happy today that the official world record is once again faster. Thank you to all the runners in the world that inspire me every day to push myself whereby I hope this result will inspire you to break your own limits. Whether that is your first run, a new personal best and anything in between. Believe that with the right heart and mind you can achieve greatness in all of life.”
A post shared by Eliud Kipchoge - EGH🇰🇪 (@kipchogeeliud) | 2022-09-25T15:31:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Eliud Kipchoge crushes his own world record in Berlin Marathon - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/25/eliud-kichoge-world-record-berlin-marathon/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/25/eliud-kichoge-world-record-berlin-marathon/ |
Mysteries, legal peril follow Fla. Gov. Ron DeSantis’s migrant flights
Asylum-seekers describe being deceived by a mysterious recruiter named Perla and a carefully crafted operation that had little concern for their safety and welfare
Venezuelan migrants stand outside St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Edgartown, Mass., after they were flown to Martha's Vineyard by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. (Ray Ewing/Vineyard Gazette/Reuters)
Like the others behind the restaurant on Sept. 8, he’d been kicked out of a shelter after three days. Immigration officials had warned them they couldn’t work legally yet. No one had any money to get to distant cities where friends or family might help.
That’s when a smiling blonde woman in a cowboy hat approached. Her name was Perla, she said. And she could fix all their troubles.
It was a pitch Perla had been making to other newly homeless migrants huddled on San Antonio’s streets. She drove a rented white SUV and promised food, jobs and transportation.
Jose trusted her. For the first time since coming to the U.S., he felt safe. “We thought she was a good person,” he told The Washington Post.
Nearly two weeks later, though, Jose is one of dozens of migrants who now question Perla’s efforts to entice them onto a flight that unexpectedly ended on the wealthy island of Martha’s Vineyard — a political operation engineered by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to gin up outrage over America’s border crisis.
Much remains unknown about the effort. While DeSantis has embraced his role in staging the flight, arguing that it protected Florida from “negative ramifications” of a border crossing surge, his office has been less clear about the purpose of nearly $1.6 million paid to a contractor, according to state records, and the role of state officials in developing the plan.
But Post interviews with several migrants directly recruited by Perla, as well as court documents and state records, paint a picture of a carefully orchestrated, taxpayer-funded operation with little apparent concern for the interests of the migrants caught in the middle. Florida officials began researching Texas’s migrant situation weeks before the flights, and a contractor with ties to the DeSantis administration later handled the efforts. Some migrants, meanwhile, say they were misled into signing documents after being lured into the trip with food and hotel stays.
“I don’t like the way they treated us,” said Jose, who made the journey to the border with two stuffed animals given to him as a gift by his 5-year old son, whom he left behind with relatives. “We’re human beings.”
DeSantis has reaped political benefits, grabbing center stage on an issue that once helped propel Donald Trump to the White House and putting Democrats on defense over the nation’s chaotic and overstressed immigration system. Republican leaders have embraced his tactics and begun fundraising off pledges to fly migrants to other blue-state enclaves.
But DeSantis also faces legal challenges, including an investigation by a Texas sheriff, who called it a “predatory” operation, a federal class-action lawsuit by the migrants alleging a “premeditated, fraudulent, and illegal scheme,” and a Democratic lawmaker’s state lawsuit challenging the governor’s use of a $12 million migrant relocation fund.
“It is opportunistic that activists would use illegal immigrants for political theater,” his office said in a statement. “Florida’s program gave them a fresh start in a sanctuary state.”
Days before the flight landed in Martha’s Vineyard, DeSantis had given not-so-subtle hints about his plans. Speaking to a room of major GOP donors at the Four Seasons hotel in Orlando, he mused about going to Texas to “help.” Border crossers might be rounded up and sent somewhere — possibly to the wealthy island of Martha’s Vineyard. “Who knows?” he teased.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has responded to the influx by dispatching thousands of migrants on buses to far flung, Democratic-rich locales. In August, Florida law enforcement officials traveled to the Texas border cities of Del Rio and Eagle Pass to meet with staff from two Texas agencies involved in the state’s migrant busing program.
Florida officials “reached out to better understand the mission, see how it is being carried out and learn more on efforts they may be able to replicate in their own state,” said Ericka Miller, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety.
In early September, it was packed as usual with new arrivals. Yerkyn Torres, 36, had left behind his wife and two children in Venezuela to spare them the arduous journey. A 40-year-old woman named Estrella had come from Peru with her 7-year-old daughter. “All I wanted was for my daughter to have a better life,” Estrella, who asked not to use her last name for fear of retribution from those involved in the migrant flights, said in Spanish. “That’s all I was thinking as I got her across that river.”
Jose had been a petrochemical engineering student in Venezuela but dropped out when he couldn’t afford the tuition. Then in December, he said a criminal gang stabbed him in front of his aunt’s candy shop, where he worked, allegedly because his family was linked to anti-government groups.
He described fording knee-deep mud in the jungles of the Darién Gap linking Colombia and Panama. He hiked past the corpses of migrants who died during the same journey, he said, and lost his phone in a river. Then he walked and hitchhiked through Central America and Mexico into the border city of Matamoros, across a bridge from Brownsville, Tex., where he surrendered to authorities and was detained for several days.
Like many other migrants, Jose lacked a plan when he was forced to leave the shelter after three days. Immigration officers had released him after an aunt’s friend in Philadelphia promised to take him in, but he had no money to get there. Immigration officers told him he had to check in with them on Sept. 28 in Philadelphia or face deportation.
Perla never gave migrants her last name. But according to the migrants, she was as persuasive as they were desperate. Speaking in English and Spanish, Jose said, she offered them a 90-day stay in a “sanctuary” city that welcomes migrants. She said they had steady jobs for 50 people in fields such as cleaning and carpentry.
“We had been living on the street for two days, and we were getting desperate,” Estrella said of her encounter with Perla.
When Jose met her outside the McDonald’s, he told her he needed to reach Philadelphia, where an aunt’s friend had offered to put him up.
“I can take you where you’re going,” he said Perla told him. “She was very nice. It looked like everything she was saying was true.”
She left and didn’t come back for two days. Then, on a Saturday afternoon, she returned and offered to take eight people to a hotel. Jose jumped at the chance.
The La Quinta was a respite. There were real beds, a swimming pool and a breakfast buffet. Perla brought them pizza and hamburgers at night. “I could shower, I could get dressed,” Jose said. He swam in the pool.
Perla offered migrants $10 McDonald’s gift cards if they signed waivers in which “an entire paragraph about liability and transport” and “language specifying that the journey would take place from Texas to Massachusetts” was not completely translated into Spanish, according to the class-action suit. Jose said the forms he signed were in English and that he couldn’t read them.
Perla told them she would return early the next day, Jose said. About 50 people would board buses to the airport and then take two chartered planes to Massachusetts. “I just wanted to get to Philadelphia,” he said.
The next morning, Sept. 14, they were taken to an airport. There was no security, and no X-ray machine. It was Jose’s first time on an airplane and he began to feel uneasy. He turned, searching for Perla.
“I saw that she was saying, ‘Ciao!’ ” he said. “I said, ‘You’re not coming with us?’ ” She said no, but others, someone of Cuban descent and Puerto Rican or Dominican descent, would guide them.
There was confusion about where they were going. One migrant asked if they could go to New York and was told they were headed to Washington, D.C., or another “sanctuary state,” according to the class-action suit. Perla told Jose they were headed to Massachusetts, he said.
First, though, the planes stopped in Crestview, Fla. The small Panhandle town is near the Destin, Fla., offices of Vertol Systems, a politically connected aviation company. Larry Keefe, DeSantis’s “public safety czar” who heads his immigration crackdown, previously represented Vertol in a dozen lawsuits, the Miami Herald found. Neither Keefe nor a Vertol executive immediately responded to requests for comment.
Under the “relocation program for unauthorized aliens,” the state Department of Transportation paid Vertol $615,000 on Sept. 8, and then another $950,000 on Sept. 19, public records show. The payments exceed the typical cost of a charter flight, experts said, but the governor’s office and the company have not responded to questions about how exactly the money was spent.
Some migrants worried they were being taken to a remote location. Would it be safe? Just a few minutes before landing, the pilot’s voice came over the loudspeaker: The destination was Martha’s Vineyard. “That was the first time we found out where we’d be going,” Torres said. Many had never heard of the island known as a summer sanctuary for the well-to-do.
The passengers were handed shiny red folders. Among the contents: a brochure titled “Massachusetts Refugee Benefits” imprinted with a proposed redesign of the state flag that a resident uploaded to the internet on a whim, according to The Boston Globe, and a rudimentary U.S. map with an arrow drawn from Central Texas to Martha’s Vineyard. “YOU ARE HERE... ESTA AQUI.”
There was also a “Welcome to Massachusetts” map that identified landmarks irrelevant to the migrants’ urgent needs, including Lucy Vincent Beach and the Featherstone Center for the Arts.
The planes landed around 3 p.m. “Unannounced, except at most, for the flights’ notification to the local air traffic controller,” according to the class-action suit.
When the migrants arrived, a black van was waiting for them outside, Jose said. It dropped the migrants off outside of the nonprofit Martha’s Vineyard Community Services. A woman who answered the door didn’t speak Spanish, and her look of surprise sent the group into a panic, Jose said. She had not been expecting them. They were not supposed to be there.
“People wanted to run away,” Jose said. But when they looked at the map in the red folder, he said, they realized, “we were surrounded by pure water.”
Torres started to think he had been tricked by the government into missing his upcoming immigration date in Texas. “I just want to start working so I can find a place to sleep,” he said in Spanish.
“If I tell you how I felt, I want to cry,” Jose said. “I felt destroyed inside, tricked, frightened. I didn’t know if they were going to put me in jail, if they’d deport me. I just wanted to get to Philadelphia.”
Migrants tried to reach Perla, but they said she didn’t pick up. So they tried the Venezuelan man who had been recruiting them alongside her. He forwarded a recorded voice message from Perla urging the migrants not to worry.
“They have to take charge of you,” she said. “Stay calm. They will take care of you. You have the numbers of the churches. Call the churches.”
Jose and other migrants were furious at the betrayal, but he said the people on Martha’s Vineyard quickly assuaged their fears. A man who spoke Spanish told them not to worry. “He said don’t despair. We didn’t expect you, but you’re here. We’re going to help you,” Jose recalled.
Lisa Belcastro, coordinator of a homeless shelter at a nearby church, began mobilizing dozens of volunteers. Local residents donated food, clothing and suitcases. Belcastro made sure there were enough beds. Belcastro wanted to make sure the group got a good night’s sleep, so she stayed overnight. Lights out at 10 p.m. “They aren’t just refugees or numbers,” she said. “They’re human beings that we care about.”
Shortly before midnight, a deputy press secretary for DeSantis, Jeremy Redfern tweeted a pic of former president Barack Obama’s home on Martha’s Vineyard: “7 bedrooms with 8 and a half bathrooms in a 6,892-square-foot house on nearly 30 acres. Plenty of space.”
At a news conference the next morning, DeSantis was put on the spot. “Gov. DeSantis, can you elaborate on reports of deploying dozens of migrants over to Martha’s Vineyard?” asked a television reporter, as the crowd cheered.
DeSantis owned up. “If you have folks that are inclined to think Florida is a good place, our message to them is we are not a sanctuary state,” he said. “And yes, we will help facilitate that transport for you to be able to go to greener pastures.”
Rachel Self, a Boston lawyer aiding the migrants, said they had been told “there was a surprise present for them” upon arrival. “This was obviously a sadistic lie,” she said.
Rev. Gavin Rogers of Travis Park Church in San Antonio said his staff was contacted by migrants last week who had been recruited by a woman calling herself “Perla” and sent to another La Quinta hotel. They were waiting for a flight to Delaware that was ultimately canceled, the Miami Herald reported, in a hotel room booked in Perla’s name. Rogers said a bus took some of the migrants back to the shelter. “Some reached out to us, and we did offer them a place to be,” Rogers said. “Some decided to go their own ways.” DeSantis’s office has not said whether the canceled Delaware flight was part of the state’s operation.
After two nights at the church shelter on Martha’s Vineyard, it was time to get on another bus. This one would take the migrants to a ferry on their way to a nearby military base. Many cried. Migrants filed out of the parish to hugs from volunteers and new cellphones. Donors had provided underwear, purple T-shirts and hats from the local high school and Boston Red Sox apparel. They cheered as each person boarded.
“Without these people here, I don’t know where we’d be,” Eliomar Aguero, 30, said. “Now, we just want to find jobs. But we are just so relieved to be here.”
On the base, Jose said he is meeting with lawyers and attending medical appointments. He said he is eager to learn English and pursue his immigration case. “We feel free,” he said.
But he is upset with DeSantis and the “remote control” team of Perla and other recruiters who he said tricked them into getting on the planes. The lawyers helped him switch his court case from Philadelphia to Boston. The friend who was going to take him in has moved away, so he is hoping to find a permanent place to live in Massachusetts.
“The fear I have is that these are political problems, you know,” he said. “We’re not objects so that they operate us this way.” | 2022-09-25T15:40:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mysteries, legal peril follow DeSantis's migrant flight - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/25/desantis-perla-migrant-flight-marthas-vineyard/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/25/desantis-perla-migrant-flight-marthas-vineyard/ |
Washington National Cathedral plans to use a $150 million funding campaign to repair its central tower, renovate its organ and enhance a growing digital ministry. (Win Mcnamee/Getty Images)
Washington National Cathedral marked its 115th birthday on Sunday with the announcement that $115 million has been raised to finish repairing damages caused by an earthquake 11 years ago and lay a firm financial foundation for its future.
Cathedral officials said the ongoing private funding campaign will be used to enhance the cathedral’s growing digital ministry, restore its 84-year-old organ and pay for the renovation of the former College of Preachers, a Gothic-style stone hall adjacent to the cathedral that has been closed since the 2008 recession. The building, which has been renamed the Virginia Mae Center in honor of a major benefactor, will host leadership seminars, educational programs centering on social and racial justice, and retreats for artists and musicians.
Earthquake damage to National Cathedral will take years to repair
The Very Rev. Randolph “Randy” Marshall Hollerith, the cathedral’s dean, said the five-year effort reached its preliminary goal after a low-profile campaign to identify committed donors began three years ago. The overall target is to raise $150 million.
Cathedral officials hope to raise the remainder over the next two years and direct some of those funds toward tackling the thorniest earthquake-related damage yet: the cathedral’s central tower, whose cracked pinnacles still wear a crown of heavy steel girders to bind them and lock them in place. That job alone is expected to take at least eight more years, cathedral officials said.
Hollerith said that in addition to underwriting capital repairs, the new funding will be used to support the cathedral’s continuing operations, which can cost as much as $50,000 a day.
“What we always think is that if we’re doing the work that we’re supposed to be doing, then the support and resources will be there,” said Hollerith, who arrived in 2016 with a reputation as a shrewd fundraiser. He said the cathedral operates on a $25 million annual budget and employs 86 people full-time.
Needing to raise ten of millions, Washington National Cathedral picks a fundraiser for its new dean
Hollerith acknowledged that the tempo of repairs has been slow since the August 2011 earthquake and inflicted $38 million in damages. But he said the pace also has been dictated by funding, as well as the exacting and complex nature of the work on one of the District’s highest buildings. Much of the stone restoration has been done by hand.
Hollerith said the cathedral, which has completed about $24 million in earthquake-related repairs to date, has avoided siphoning off capital funding from its continuing operations.
“It was important that we not take away money from the mission of this place in order to repair pinnacles at the top of this place. That work is important, but it shouldn’t detract from what we’re here for,” Hollerith said.
A cathedral like none other: Moon rock and Darth Vader blend into Gothic architecture
Washington National Cathedral’s latest fundraising campaign also highlights its dual mission as an Episcopal house of worship and as a monument in the nation’s capital. Hollerith said that, owing to its location, the cathedral strives to balance a religious ministry dedicated to engaging with important issues of the day and providing a welcoming spiritual home for people across the political spectrum. It serves as a prominent venue for ceremonial events that blend religious observance and affairs of state, such as presidents’ funerals or last week’s memorial service for Queen Elizabeth II. Before the pandemic, the cathedral drew about 250,000 tourists a year; its congregation numbers more than 1,500, while as many as 10,000 tune in on Sundays from afar.
“First and foremost, we are a church. We are an Episcopal church committed to the reconciling love of Jesus Christ,” Hollerith said. “That being said, we also happen to be a monument in the sense of being one of the most beautiful and grandest buildings in Washington, D.C. And so we live and stand on that first piece, that we’re a church: Worship, music, prayer is fundamental to who we are. Being a monument is part of our stewardship — taking care of this beautiful place.”
The idea that Washington should have a monumental church befitting the nation’s capital goes back to George Washington and the earliest days of its founding. But it became the life’s mission of Washington’s first Episcopal bishop, the Right Rev. Henry Yates Satterlee, at the end of the 19th century. Satterlee envisioned a structure that would “inspire combined religious and patriotic feelings,” according to a June 1907 story in The Washington Post, when the church’s design was unveiled.
The plans called for a cathedral — officially named the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, and designed in the 14th-century Gothic style — modeled after those in Europe. About 10,000 people, including President Theodore Roosevelt, attended the ceremonial laying of the cornerstone that September. At the time, church officials estimated its cost at $5 million or more.
On a tour last week, Hollerith wove past hard-hatted workers putting finishing touches on the Virginia Mae Center’s renovations, recalling how he became fond of the building’s “Harry Potter-style” mishmash of Gothic and Tudor architectural styles as a young priest studying there nearly 30 years ago.
“So when I came as dean and learned that the College had been closed, it was very special to me personally — not only as my role as dean, but personally — to see if we could get it back open again,” Hollerith said.
Cathedral officials said a $17 million gift from Virginia C. Mars and her four daughters — a family with ties to the Mars candy fortune — was the catalyst allowing work to proceed on the 1929 building, which will house the new Cathedral College of Faith and Culture.
Renovations to the four-story structure — five, if one includes its tower — included restoring a colorful painted ceiling in the entryway; adding an improved elevator; installing new glass in cloisters overlooking the garth, or small courtyard; modernizing its kitchen; expanding conference spaces and equipping them with videoconferencing technology; and creating private quarters for visiting artists or composers.
Next in line for an overhaul is the church’s long-suffering pipe organ. Installed in 1938 by Ernest M. Skinner and Son Organ Co., the electromechanical behemoth has suffered the effects of time and earthquake-induced water damage.
Thomas Sheehan, cathedral organist and its associate director of music, skittered his fingers across the keys Thursday to show why the machine needs work: Not all of its trumpets trumpet, and plenty of keys strike dead notes.
Among the organ’s 10,650 pipes, made of soft lead and varying in size from pencils to downspouts, are many that have gone missing, become droopy or bent over time. Others have been stopped up on purpose with cotton balls or whatever else came to hand in an emergency after air valves stuck open. The electromechanical machine, along with the computer that helps run it, has become so finicky that Sheehan avoids some tunes and composers altogether.
“I never, ever want to play anything that won’t come out the way I want it to sound,” he said, “so what I end up doing instead is constricting what I play.”
Fixing the organ will mean disassembling the thing and shipping it to Connecticut for repairs, he said.
And then there is the structure itself, with its towering walls of stone, its flying buttresses and its weird populace of gargoyles and grotesques watching the city from on high.
Joe Alonso, Washington National Cathedral’s head stonemason, said the earthquake’s violent energy traveled from the depths of the Earth to the very top of the cathedral, snapping the delicate stone pinnacles like whips. Some rotated or cracked, sending chunks of stone, including an angel, tumbling to the roof below.
Fixing the damage has been difficult, especially some 300 feet in the air, Alonso said. But he’s already thinking about the day, still years from now, when the tower is finished and the angel can be returned to its place.
“I can see that being the symbolic final piece: the fallen angel,” Alonso said.
But he said the money has to be there first. And that’s why the cathedral’s staff celebrated its 115th birthday by essentially asking for a gift — and expressing confidence its wishes would be answered.
“Although we’re fundamentally a Christian church and Episcopal church, great cathedrals like this have this wonderful ability to be places of encounter with the holy whether you’re Christian, whether you’re Jewish — whatever you are, agnostic, a seeker,” Hollerith said. “You know, it creates space for those encounters, and that’s very important to us, that we reflect the nation in that way.”
Indiana man arrested after Washington Monument vandalized with paint | 2022-09-25T16:11:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Washington National Cathedral announces $115 million in fundraising - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/09/25/washington-national-cathedral-dc-fundraising/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/09/25/washington-national-cathedral-dc-fundraising/ |
A deep dive into HBCUs, college rankings and exclusion
Students socialize between classes on the Yard at Howard University in Washington, D.C. (André Chung for The Washington Post)
In recent weeks, I have published two guest pieces about college rankings — one titled “Harvard flunks in this college ranking system” and the second titled “Why U.S. News may have to rethink how it creates college rankings.” Here is a new one that broadens the debate.
The first relates to what many consider to be flawed methodology used in the creation of the famous U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings (the latest version was released this month), which reward large endowments and resources most schools don’t have. The second piece explains how one of the tools U.S. News uses — something called the Carnegie Classifications, a framework for classifying institutions of higher education — is being changed to include how well institutions impact students’ social and economic opportunity.
The commentary below looks deeper into the origins of college rankings and how historically Black colleges and universities fare. It was written by Ethan Ris, an assistant professor of higher education administration at the University of Nevada at Reno, and a former fellow with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Academy of Education. He is the author of the new book “Other People’s Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform.”
By Ethan Ris
The U.S. News “Best Colleges” rankings dropped this month to great attention. Even those of us who find the whole spectacle gross still can’t help but peek at who made No. 1 this year — and of course at where our alma maters ended up. But here’s the thing about rankings: Even though their quantitative data gives them the veneer of objectivity, they are extraordinarily subjective. Before running the numbers, the rankers have to decide which metrics signify “quality.” These decisions affect the horse race at the top of the list, but they also determine who makes the list at all.
For that reason, I am far less interested in whether Princeton University got first place again this year (it did) than in where historically Black colleges and universities ended up. I want to see where land-grant institutions ranked, and religious colleges, and universities with a focus on preparing future teachers. I’ll give you a hint: nowhere near the top.
The point of rankings like this is to codify what counts as quality in American higher education. U.S. News certainly did not invent this game. As I describe in my new book, it dates to 1906. In that year, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, an agency devoted to higher education reform, published its annual “Accepted List” of high-quality colleges and universities that were eligible for its grants. When it did so, the foundation established blatant patterns of exclusion that are still with us in modern rankings.
There were zero public institutions among the 52 on the first Carnegie Accepted List. On the new U.S. News list, you need to scroll down to the No. 20 spot to find the first public university — in a nation where 73 percent of college students attend a public institution. In fact, there are only 12 public universities in the top 40, and half of those are campuses in the singular University of California system.
Since there were no public universities on the 1906 list, there were also no true land-grant institutions. In the new U.S. News rankings, no stand-alone land-grant school (i.e., one that is not also a state flagship university) appears until Purdue at No. 51. There were no religious colleges on the Carnegie Accepted List, because the foundation barred them from inclusion. This policy led dozens to drop their religious affiliations over the next decade, which is part of the reason that so few elite schools today are religious (a handful of Catholic institutions are the notable exceptions).
Things get grimmer with minority-serving institutions. There were no schools that enrolled significant numbers of Black students on the 1906 list, a trend that held until Fisk University made it into the rankings in 1921. Not surprisingly, no historically Black institutions appear on the U.S. News list until Howard University, at No. 89.
For other HBCUs, you need to look at the alternative “liberal arts colleges” list, where they rank alongside schools whose national importance they greatly overshadow. Spelman appears at No. 51 (tied with the 322-student Principia College), Morehouse at No. 124 (tied with the 482-student Randolph College), and Fisk and Tougaloo at No. 151, where they narrowly trail Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Ga. As for the 487 Hispanic-serving institutions across the United States, only a single non-UC school (Rutgers) appears on the top-100 universities list.
It is far too easy to look at this historical continuity and attribute it to an enduring lack of quality in certain types of colleges and universities. But the opposite is true: Historical exclusion, based on overt prejudice and elitism, is directly linked to the low status of vast swaths of American higher education today.
Amid nationwide enrollment drops, some HBCUs are growing. So are threats.
We long ago decided what counted as quality — wealth and Whiteness, above all — so we should not be surprised that so little has changed. And the annual Carnegie lists were hardly alone in perpetuating the pattern of exclusion. They were abetted by an elitist 1911 ranking of institutions by the federal Bureau of Education; the decades-long refusal of regional accreditation agencies to accredit minority-serving institutions; the inability of low-status institutions to gain access to the massive federal grants that followed World War II; and the revamped Carnegie Classification rankings that emerged in the early 1970s and still help steer the U.S. News ratings today.
Now, the leaders of the Carnegie Foundation and the American Council on Education say they are collaborating to revamp the classifications. Their new system will evaluate colleges and universities on measures well beyond research and graduate education, which currently drive much of the sorting. They intend to reward schools for virtuous work including “increasing access to college, retaining and graduating students, and supporting job attainment and debt management.”
It is refreshing to see the foundation that kicked off our national college rankings obsession promise to lead in a new direction. But I don’t think that the genie can be put back in the bottle. As the centerpiece of its reforms, Carnegie will soon release a new “Social and Economic Mobility Classification.” Will this lens — which will surely just augment traditional metrics, not replace them — change anything about the status hierarchy that has captivated us for over a century?
Furthermore, other groups have already tried to push alternative ranking systems. Most measure things like “economic mobility,” which reduce the purposes of college to an increased annual salary. They also deliberately skew their data to demote elite schools, giving the impression that low-income students would be vastly better off attending California State University at Dominguez Hills (No. 2 in Third Way’s Economic Mobility Index) than Princeton (No. 426).
It’s impossible to imagine U.S. News using these new frameworks to significantly shake up its top-100 list. And let’s be honest: Even for the metrics that Carnegie will now start recognizing — retaining students, graduating them debt-free and setting them up for good jobs — Princeton is still going to win.
Rankings are rooted in exclusion. For every winner, there are dozens of losers. Whether we decide to penalize colleges and universities for serving students of color, failing to bring in grant money, or preparing students for important but modestly paid jobs like teaching, we are making judgment calls about which schools deserve to thrive and which deserve to wither. That was the whole idea in 1906, overtly stated by reformers who wanted the excluded colleges to suffer “death from inanition.”
We are less direct today, but when we create ranking lists and obsess over them, we are making sure that American higher education will continue to be a zero-sum game. | 2022-09-25T17:42:20Z | www.washingtonpost.com | HBCUs, college rankings and exclusion - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/25/hbcus-college-rankings-exclusion/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/25/hbcus-college-rankings-exclusion/ |
Pharoah Sanders walked among us
The jazz icon’s music embodied a search for something greater. Maybe it’s closer than we think.
Pharoah Sanders at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 2014. (Gerald Herbert/AP)
It’s not like we expected him to materialize in a coil of stardust, but it still felt surprising to watch Pharoah Sanders take the bandstand late in life. I saw him perform twice — at Bohemian Caverns in 2011 and at Blues Alley a few years later — and each show began with a titan of American jazz plodding his way through the crowd, navigating a miniature maze of cocktail tables, his gait unforgettably heavy, his posture hunched, as if his world-changing music was something he carried around on his back. Then he’d find his place under the lights and start blowing bravura phrases through his saxophone until Earth’s gravity started to loosen.
Is that why people called his music “spiritual jazz?” Because it made us feel like we were being released from the physical world? Sanders — who died in Los Angeles on Saturday at 81 — often described his work as a search for something that couldn’t be found, a quest toward the unknowable that he’d committed himself to since joining John Coltrane’s side in 1965. When Coltrane died two years later, many were quick to nominate Sanders as his heir: “Pharoah has incredible power, and incredible tenderness soulfulness,” the critic Amiri Baraka (known as LeRoi Jones at the time) wrote in the Cricket magazine in 1968, “like a love of playing, of sound, that will spread your consciousness dazzled among his notes.”
Obituary: Pharoah Sanders, piercing jazz saxophonist, dies at 81
That’s high praise and solid advice. Embracing Sanders’s expressive range as a metaphor for expanding consciousness is a very good place to begin to understand how this music can make you feel as if you’re taller than a house, or as if you’re swimming in the ozone layer, or any other exemptions to the laws of physics that his recordings might so generously offer. Across a sensational run of albums from the late 1960s through the mid-’70s — “Tauhid,” “Karma,” “Journey in Satchidananda” with Alice Coltrane just for starters — Sanders used his horn to lay all kinds of brayed melodies and ecstatic squeals on God’s doorstep.
But ultimately, his search for transcendence may have simply been a pursuit of contentment. The vocal refrain of his signature composition, “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” has always suggested as much, envisioning “peace and happiness for every man” — one of those sweeping, cosmic, utopian ideas that may only manifest through the mundane. “I listen to things that maybe some guys don’t,” Sanders told the New Yorker in 2020 when asked about his current influences. “I listen to the waves of the water. Train coming down. Or I listen to an airplane taking off … I’ve always been like that, especially when I was small. I used to love hearing old car doors squeaking.”
Maybe higher planes aren’t higher. Maybe they’re small and all around us. You don’t have to squint your ears too hard to hear the implication in last year’s “Promises,” a collaboration album with British producer Floating Points that allowed Sanders to play some of the most delicate phrases of his life. If anything, the intimate melancholy of “Promises” suggests that transcendence is something we can only ever yearn for. That’s why we listen, then, now and tomorrow. | 2022-09-25T17:42:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Phaorah Sanders, legendary jazz saxophonist, walked among us - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/09/25/pharoah-sanders-dies-appreciation/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/09/25/pharoah-sanders-dies-appreciation/ |
This image released by Warner Bros. Entertainment shows Harry Styles, left, and Florence Pugh in a scene from “Don’t Worry Darling.” (Warner Bros. Entertainment via AP) (Uncredited/Warner Bros. Entertainment)
Last week’s top film, Gina Prince-Bythewood's African epic “The Woman King," starring Viola Davis, slid to second place with $11.1 million in its second weekend of release. That was a modest 42% dip for the Sony Pictures release, a sign of resiliency for the acclaimed action drama.
Third place went to a familiar box-office force. The Walt Disney Co.’ rerelease of James Cameron's “Avatar" grossed $10 million domestically and $20.5 million internationally, 13 years after its initial run in theaters. Cameron’s remastered “Avatar,” playing in 1,860 theaters, was again especially popular in 3-D, which accounted for a whopping 93% of its domestic sales. A prelude to the upcoming December release of the long-awaited sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water,” the rerelease further pads the all-time worldwide box office record for “Avatar,” which now surpasses $2.85 billion. | 2022-09-25T17:42:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | 'Don't Worry Darling' shrugs off drama, opening with $19.2M - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/dont-worry-darling-shrugs-off-drama-opening-with-192m/2022/09/25/578f720a-3cf3-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/dont-worry-darling-shrugs-off-drama-opening-with-192m/2022/09/25/578f720a-3cf3-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
Ukraine live briefing: Protesters scuffle with Russian police as draft infl...
Russian recruits sit inside a bus near a military recruitment center in Krasnodar on Sunday. Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday ordered a partial mobilization of reservists to beef up his forces in Ukraine. (AP)
As top Russian officials on Sunday warned of problems in Moscow’s rushed mobilization of men to fight in Ukraine, Russia launched new attacks on Odessa, where three Iranian kamikaze drones hit an administration building, and on the Zaporizhzhia region, which was struck by multiple Russian missiles overnight.
Russia’s mobilization drive, and the Kremlin’s staging of illegal “referendums” over five days in four occupied regions of Ukraine, mark a sharp escalation by President Vladimir Putin in his effort to hold the line in the war against Ukraine in response to multiple Russian military failures, including a major retreat in Kharkiv region earlier this month.
Scuffles broke out Sunday in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, where screaming women struggled with police, trying to prevent them from dragging male protesters to police vans, in rare signs of dissent that underscored the dangers of regional unrest over the mobilization.
Earlier Sunday in Dagestan, an impoverished southern region that has borne a disproportionate share of military casualties in Ukraine, furious residents blocked a highway protesting mobilization after 110 men from Endirey village were drafted, including some who had recently returned from the war, independent local media reported.
The staging of referendums, amid warnings from Russian officials that Moscow could use nuclear weapons to defend illegally annexed regions, appears designed to shake Ukraine’s resolve and to undermine Western military support for Kyiv.
But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” said Putin’s actions have instead underscored that the Russian army “is not able to fight with Ukraine anymore. … We have become even more united now than ever.”
As armed soldiers accompanied officials house-to-house observing people filling in ballots, the referendums have met none of the basic criteria for democratic voting, and they are illegal under international law.
Putin is expected to address both houses of parliament Friday, state media reported, where he will likely endorse the annexation of the regions after the expected official announcement that the regions voted in favor of joining Russia. Russia has a long history of flawed and fraudulent elections, but the Kremlin will not be satisfied with anything less than a massive “yes” vote, according to analysts.
Putin, Zelensky said, will say: “Now it’s Russia. It’s our territory. Look, we conducted referenda. Now, it’s the West who attacks Russia. Now, the West attacks our territories.”
Yet even Moscow’s close ally Serbia rejected the referendums, when its foreign minister, Nikola Selakovic, told journalists that they violated the principles of territorial integrity, sovereignty and the inviolability of borders, according to Serbian cable network Nova.rs on Sunday and Russian state-owned RIA Novosti.
Ukrainian officials said no one was injured in Sunday’s drone strikes on Odessa, but video images of a large explosion in the city center underscored the potential of the Iranian drones to cause destruction and terror in civilian areas and to keep Ukraine off balance.
Russian state media reported that a Ukrainian strike on a hotel in Kherson killed a pro-Kremlin former Ukrainian lawmaker, Oleksiy Zhuravko.
Moscow, meanwhile, continued to have problems of its own, with new protests on Sunday over a mobilization effort so poorly handled that it has triggered widespread anger and controversy, even among Russian officials and top propagandists.
There were dozens of reports of men being conscripted despite being elderly, sick, disabled, unfit or exempt from military service, for example, because they were caring for a disabled family member or were students or IT workers.
The alarm over mobilization underscored its potential for opposition within the large segment of the Russian population that passively supports the war — although the Kremlin may be banking on anger waning after the initial shock and fear that has followed the announcement.
Alexei, a 36-year-old Russian who was exempted from conscription because of heart problems, said Sunday in a phone interview that he had fled to Astana, Kazakhstan, because he could be called up despite being earlier exempted from military service for medical reasons.
“There are already so many examples of old and unfit men and students receiving summons,” he said. “What is going on with this mobilization is a total disaster. I don’t want to sacrifice my life for someone absolutely crazy and I am not ashamed that I am fleeing now.
“It’s not that I am a coward or anything, but nobody is attacking my motherland. On the contrary, my motherland is an aggressor and I don’t want to be part of this aggression and obviously I do not want to die,” he said. He said his life was falling to pieces, “but at least I won’t go to war.”
He is one of thousands of young men who have flocked to Russia’s borders in recent days to escape mobilization.
Earlier in the city of Yakutsk, in eastern Siberia, several hundred women rallied against mobilization, chanting, “No to war,” several local media outlets and activist groups reported, posting videos. Police broke up the rally and arrested participants, they reported.
Valentina Matviyenko, a close Putin ally who is the speaker of the upper house of parliament, the Federation Council, warned Sunday that partial mobilization must be handled “without a single mistake.”
The problems in mobilization reflect the rush by Russian regional leaders to satisfy the Kremlin’s demand for new draftees in the space of several days, with scant regard for quality. Matviyenko, in comments on social media, complained of “unacceptable” cases of people being mobilized who clearly should not have been.
The governor of Belgorod, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said he had received many complaints, including 75 cases of men wrongly mobilized that were overturned after his intervention.
Prominent Kremlin propagandist Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of RT and one of the loudest cheerleaders of the war, published an astonishing Twitter thread listing cases of people wrongly mobilized, including a 63-year-old with diabetes and cerebral ischemia who was found fit to serve, a 35-year-old with a spinal fracture and artificial vertebrate, along with students and lone carers of disabled people. Simonyan earlier tweeted that the process was so poor, it was as if Kyiv had carried it out.
Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the State Duma, or lower house of parliament, also acknowledged the problems in comments Sunday on Telegram, calling on people to report violations to authorities.
Russia’s initial “partial mobilization” was supposed to be limited to men in the military reserves with military experience. A different picture has emerged since, however, with many of those called up having never previously served.
The sense of panic deepened when two independent Russian media outlets reported that new travel restrictions would come in Wednesday barring men of military age from leaving without permission from military enlistment offices. Several Russian regions have already restricted reservists from leaving.
As officials went into damage control mode, two regional leaders announced that planeloads of men who had been erroneously conscripted were returning home.
Russian journalist and publisher Sergey Parkhomenko dipped into a neighborhood chat group in his previous Moscow suburb, which usually discusses “nothing more serious than the search for a good manicure, the disappearance of a French bulldog puppy or the need to pay to repair a lock on a yard gate.”
“And I see people arguing about mobilization, about the war and about whether men are willing to die for something they absolutely don’t need to, killing people who did them no harm,” he said in a post on Facebook, arguing that Kremlin propaganda efforts seemed to have “collapsed in one day” as people suddenly felt the impact of the war on their lives.
Andrei Turchak, the head of Putin’s United Russia party, portrayed the referendum results as a foregone conclusion. “There’s just a little bit [of time] left, and the Kherson region will return to the big Russian family,” he said in a visit to occupied Kherson on Sunday. “As we have always said, Russia is here.”
He said after the final day of the referendums on Tuesday, “we will formalize de jure what de facto exists today and we will live as one big friendly Russian, Kherson, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporozhye family,” he said, referring to the occupied regions including Zaporizhzhia. | 2022-09-25T18:21:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Russian mobilization blasted as as staged referendums continue - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/25/russia-ukraine-mobilization-referendums/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/25/russia-ukraine-mobilization-referendums/ |
Harrison, 62, was well known in the D.C. area boxing scene, having trained his son, the renowned local fighter Dusty Hernandez-Harrison.
Martin Weil
Buddy Harrison, left, and his son, Dusty Hernandez-Harrison, in April 2018 in Washington. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
Buddy Harrison, a boxing trainer best known for coaching his welterweight son Dusty Hernandez-Harrison, was fatally shot Saturday morning in Southeast Washington, according to D.C. police and a spokesman for an upcoming boxing event.
Harrison, 62, was attacked around 11:40 a.m. in the 2700 block of 30th Street SE, police said. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.
Police identified the shooting victim as Arthur Harrison Jr. But he was widely known as Buddy, and a spokesman for the upcoming boxing event, Beltway Battles, confirmed that Buddy Harrison was the victim.
On Friday, Harrison posted a picture on social media of him and his son, who is scheduled to make his return to the ring at an event in Washington next Saturday.
‘Beltway Battles’ series strives to give boxing in D.C. a fighting chance again
“I laced his gloves at two years old,” Harrison wrote in the post. “I am still lacing his gloves at 28 years old. I thank Jesus for the opportunity to do so.”
The picture now carries hundreds of tributes to Harrison.
Police described the suspects Saturday as three men dressed in black carrying handguns. Homicide detectives said they were also searching for a white Kia Optima sedan with the Ohio license plate of JAU 3816 in connection with the shooting.
Harrison ran the Old School Boxing Gym in Hillcrest Heights, Md. A tribute posted to the gym’s Instagram page described him as “father, servant, coach, mentor, comedian and a role model.”
“Please keep the Harrison family and the Hernandez family in your prayers, and keep the Old School family in your prayers,” the post read. “I think if Buddy were here he would say to make sure you’re at your gym Monday, pray for those lost ones out there who don’t know the Lord, and to love everyone.”
Dusty Hernandez-Harrison, who is undefeated as a professional after 35 bouts, had been inactive since his last fight in 2020. But he was scheduled to make a comeback at the 4,200-seat Entertainment & Sports Arena in Southeast Washington, as a part of a fight series he has been involved in as a promoter. The spokesman for the event said no decision had been made about whether Hernandez-Harrison would still take part.
The father and son had been estranged for a while but had reconciled in 2019 after another long spell out of the ring for Hernandez-Harrison.
District boxer Dusty Hernandez-Harrison continues on comeback trail despite uncertain future
Buddy Harrison was himself a former boxer and spent time in prison for armed robbery, according to a profile in James Madison University’s Second Chance Project. He founded the gym soon after his son was born. | 2022-09-25T18:21:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Boxing trainer Buddy Harrison fatally shot in Southeast D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/25/buddy-harrison-boxing-trainer-killed/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/25/buddy-harrison-boxing-trainer-killed/ |
In Port aux Basques, Newfoundland. more than 200 homes were damaged, and 20 were wrecked or swept into the ocean by the powerful storm, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. (John Morris/Reuters)
TORONTO — One day after post-tropical storm Fiona wrought havoc on eastern Canada, the full extent of the destruction is beginning to set in.
The storm — one of the strongest ever to hit Canada — pummeled coastal towns on Saturday morning, sweeping away homes and roofs, uprooting trees, flooding roadways, downing power lines and clogging streets with debris. Two people were pulled into the ocean, police said, one of whom is still missing; the other was rescued.
The hurricane-force winds, which peaked at about 100 mph in some regions, left more than 500,000 Canadian homes with no electricity, hundreds of thousands of which are still without power.
As of Sunday morning, more than 254,000 Nova Scotia Power customers had no electricity, nor did roughly 16,3000 customers in New Brunswick, 82,000 in Prince Edward Island and 3,600 in Newfoundland.
In the hardest-hit regions, the outages could last for several days. The storm hit Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, Quebec and New Brunswick.
“There are likely going to be multiple-day outages for many of our customers, but we’ll continue to work as hard as we can to make sure we safely restore power,” Peter Gregg, Nova Scotia Power’s president and chief executive, said in video briefing Saturday evening.
In Port aux Basques, a tiny town at the southwestern tip of Newfoundland with a population of about 4,000, the damage was devastating.
“We have over 200 residents that were evacuated from their homes,” Jolene Garland, a spokeswoman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, said in a phone interview with The Washington Post on Sunday.
Ian strengthening on perilous path toward Florida
More than 200 homes were damaged, she added, and 20 were wrecked or swept into the ocean by the powerful storm.
Police haveopened an investigation into a missing person, after one woman disappeared when her home was struck by a towering wave. The search was initially stalled on Saturday because of safety concerns, Garland said, but a rescue effort is now underway.
Terry Osmond, who has lived in Port aux Basques all his life, said he’d “never seen anything like this.”
As the full picture became sharper on Sunday morning, things in his hometown are “not good,” said Osmond, 62. With such widespread wreckage, he said, “I don’t know how they’re going to start the cleanup.”
Residents are searching rubble for items swept away by the storm, while emergency crews clear debris and block off dangerous zones.
“The magnitude of this storm and what has happened in our community is very, very large,” said Port aux Basques Mayor Brian Button in a Facebook Live briefing, adding that the sewage system has been compromised in some areas, and water access is limited. “This could be months.”
Recovery efforts have begun across eastern Canada, and military personnel have been deployed to assist with damage assessment, cleanup and restoration of transportation.
“Our government is standing ready to support provinces with any necessary resources,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a news conference, during which he announced that the federal government will match any Canadian Red Cross donations made over the next 30 days. Trudeau canceled a trip to Japan due to the storm.
“The focus now is really on assessing damage and seeing what assistance is needed,” said Dan Bedell, communications director for the Red Cross, covering the Atlantic region.
About 175 displaced people in Nova Scotia stayed overnight in Red Cross shelters, according to Bedell.
“There are a number of places where homes and apartment buildings have sustained significant enough damage that people can’t safely stay there,” he said.
“It’s one storm that has had impact in five provinces, which is pretty substantial,” Bedell said, adding that eastern Quebec was also heavily affected. “We don’t know yet what the needs are, but we know there will be a lot of need.”
Cape Breton, one of the most affected regions in Nova Scotia, is reeling.
“We’re all seeing the aftermath of it. It is devastating,” said Shayna Strong, a Cape Breton resident. A large tree collapsed onto her home about 5 a.m. Saturday, and “we’ve lost all of our fencing.”
As the storm was unfolding, “everything was creaking and howling, and air was blowing into the house,” she recalled. “Things were seeping in, because the wind was just so fierce.”
Fortunately, though, “the sun is shining today,” Strong said.
Fiona — which is the lowest-pressure land-falling storm on record in Canada, according to the Canadian Hurricane Center — had weakened considerably by Sunday, and is moving north at 21 mph. All warnings associated with the post-tropical storm have been lifted. | 2022-09-25T19:14:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Eastern Canada hit hard by Fiona - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/25/fiona-storm-canada-nova-scotia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/25/fiona-storm-canada-nova-scotia/ |
MEXICO CITY — The Mexican army’s role in the disappearance of 43 college students, its participation in covering up the facts and its alleged links to organized crime are now at the center of a case that has shaken the nation. The government’s Truth Commission declared the incident a “state crime” in August. | 2022-09-25T19:14:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | EXPLAINER: Mexican army's role in students' disappearance - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/explainer-mexican-armys-role-in-students-disappearance/2022/09/25/3f8fa6a6-3cfe-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/explainer-mexican-armys-role-in-students-disappearance/2022/09/25/3f8fa6a6-3cfe-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
The House GOP’s vague ‘commitment’ reveals problems ahead
By Karen Tumulty
Deputy editorial page editor and columnist |
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) introduces the House GOP's "Commitment to America" in Monongahela, Pa., on Friday. In the background is Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.). (Pam Panchak/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via AP)
Conventional wisdom about midterm elections has it that they are a referendum on the incumbent president and the party in power. But this year’s decision for voters is shaping up to be more complicated than that.
Between former president Donald Trump’s continued domination of the news and the backlash against the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the right to abortion, Americans are — rightly — focusing on the question of what the opposition party stands for and what Republicans would do if they again found themselves controlling one or both houses of Congress.
As a result, what once appeared to be a banner year for the GOP is more of a dogfight. The party is still expected to take back the House, which would require picking up only five additional seats. But their year-ago predictions of flipping as many as 60 districts have vanished. And the outcome in the Senate, where Republicans need a net pickup of only one seat, is anyone’s guess.
The new electoral pressure on Republicans explains why the House’s speaker-in-waiting, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), and 30 of his colleagues went to Monongahela, Pa., on Friday to unveil what they touted as their “Commitment to America.”
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“We want to roll it out to you, the entire country, to know exactly what we will do if you would trust us and give us the ability to take a new direction for this country,” McCarthy told a friendly audience at a manufacturing plant. “What the commitment is, is a plan.”
A plan? A set of policy specifics? Hardly. It was not even close to what Republicans had hoped would sound like an echo of the storied 1994 “Contract With America,” which was not only a set of campaign promises but also a blueprint for governing.
The Pittsburgh-area event was a telling indication of the difficulties that lie ahead for McCarthy if he is given the gavel he has so long coveted — and, with it, the responsibility to actually govern at the head of a fractious, fragile majority in which the most extreme members are determined to call the shots. The hard-right Freedom Caucus has indicated that its support for McCarthy will hinge on rules changes that would curb the speaker’s power and make it easier to oust him.
With genuine unity beyond their grasp, what the House Republicans have come up with is a one-page list of slogans, such as “curb wasteful government spending” and “fight inflation and lower the cost of living.” There are also a few nuggets thrown in — “defend fairness by ensuring that only women can compete in women’s sports” — to rev up the base.
Their most urgent priority, which McCarthy has vowed the GOP will tackle on its “very first day,” is to “repeal 87,000 IRS agents” — a reference to, and false characterization of, the recently passed $80 billion in badly needed funding for the beleaguered Internal Revenue Service, which would beef up taxpayer services and enforcement of the tax code.
Abortion was mentioned, vaguely, as a promise to “protect the lives of unborn children and their mothers.” But the “commitment” does not answer how, because Republican members themselves are deeply divided on the issue of whether and at what point in pregnancy a federal ban should apply.
Compare this with the “Contract With America,” which was signed by more than 300 Republican candidates and laid out 10 poll-tested pieces of ambitious legislation that a House GOP majority would pass in its first 100 days. Among them: tax cuts and constitutional amendments to balance the budget and impose 12-year term limits on members of Congress.
While it is debatable whether the contract played much of a role in giving the Republicans a landslide and control of the House for the first time in four decades — and although little of it became law — it was invaluable in setting the course for their early days. That was a time when it briefly appeared their speaker, Newt Gingrich, had transformed the power dynamic of Washington. Bill Clinton was sidelined to the point where he felt compelled to declare that he was still “relevant.”
President Biden, on the other hand, is a central figure in Republican plans — and not in a good way. A GOP majority with subpoena power is certain to go into overdrive on investigations, probing everything from his son Hunter’s business dealings to the administration’s border policies to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. On the day the FBI made its search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, McCarthy tweeted: “Attorney General Garland: preserve your documents and clear your calendar.”
McCarthy, for all his challenges, knows there is at least one situation in which House Republicans will stand together, and that is when they are on the attack. It’s a “commitment” they can be counted on to keep. | 2022-09-25T20:19:03Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The House GOP’s vague ‘Commitment to America’ reveals problems ahead - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/25/house-gop-commitment-to-america-mccarthy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/25/house-gop-commitment-to-america-mccarthy/ |
Post Malone hospitalized with ‘stabbing pain,’ cancels concert
Post Malone performs in Rio de Janeiro on Sept. 4. (Mauro Pimentel/AFP/Getty Images)
A week after falling through an onstage hole while performing, Post Malone canceled a Saturday night concert in Boston, saying he was at a hospital struggling with his breathing and a “stabbing pain.”
It was the second hospital visit in about a week for the 27-year-old rapper, whose full name is Austin Richard Post. After the accident at St. Louis’s Enterprise Center on Sept. 17, he was treated for bruised ribs, according to an Instagram post from his manager. Malone said on Twitter afterward that “everything’s good.”
Behold ‘Mullet Boy,’ the 8-year-old whose hairdo made him a national champ
But he awoke Saturday to “cracking sounds” on the right side of his body, he said.
“I’m having a very difficult time breathing and there’s like a stabbing pain whenever I breathe or move,” Malone wrote in social media posts about a half hour before the concert was to start. “We’re in the hospital now, but with this pain, I can’t do the show tonight.”
Tickets will be valid for a rescheduled concert that is in the works, he said, apologizing for being unable to perform Saturday. The venue, TD Garden, had announced minutes earlier that the concert was canceled “due to unforeseen circumstances” and fans should keep their tickets for a new date.
Malone has been on the road since Sept. 10 for his 33-city Twelve Carat Tour, promoting his fourth album, “Twelve Carat Toothache.” He was one week and five stops in when he had the onstage accident in St. Louis.
Video footage of the incident showed the artist reaching to grab fans’ hands while performing “Circles.” He turned and walked to the center of the stage, then stepped into an open area and fell, appearing to catch himself with his upper body. He rolled out of the opening and laid on his back. The music stopped.
Medics helped Malone offstage, but he later returned and continued the show.
In a video shared on Twitter the next day, the rapper said the opening in the stage is meant to allow instruments to be lowered. He said falling through it “winded me pretty good, got me pretty good,” adding that he had been given painkillers at the hospital.
Malone thanked fans for their support and vowed to continue the tour.
In his Saturday post announcing the cancellation of the Boston show, he said he felt “terrible, but I promise I’m going to make this up to you.” | 2022-09-25T20:32:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Post Malone hospitalized with ‘stabbing pain,’ cancels concert - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/09/25/post-malone-hospitalized-with-stabbing-pain-cancels-concert/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/09/25/post-malone-hospitalized-with-stabbing-pain-cancels-concert/ |
Rihanna will headline the Super Bowl LVII show in February. (Francois Mori/Associated Press File)
Rihanna, who said in 2019 that she turned down the chance to perform in the Super Bowl halftime show because of how Colin Kaepernick had been treated, will headline the Super Bowl LVII halftime show in February, the NFL announced Sunday.
After rumors that talks to sign the singer were progressing, Rihanna made the announcement on Instagram with a simple image of her hand holding an NFL football against a stark white background. Shortly afterward, the NFL made it official in an announcement along with Apple Music and Roc Nation, the entertainment company founded by Jay-Z.
The Super Bowl will be held Feb. 12, 2023, at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz.
Rihanna confirmed to Vogue in 2019 she had turned down the chance to appear on the global stage offered by the game.
“Absolutely,” she said. “I couldn’t dare do that. For what? Who gains from that? Not my people. I just couldn’t be a sellout. I couldn’t be an enabler. There’s things within that organization that I do not agree with at all, and I was not about to go and be of service to them in any way.”
“We are thrilled to welcome Rihanna to the Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show stage,” Seth Dudowsky, the NFL’s head of music said in the announcement. “Rihanna is a once in a generation artist who has been a cultural force throughout her career. We look forward to collaborating with Rihanna, Roc Nation and Apple Music to bring fans another historic Halftime Show performance.”
Apple’s Oliver Schusser echoed that. “Rihanna is an incredible recording artist who is a favorite for many millions of Apple Music customers around the world. We’re excited to partner with Rihanna, Roc Nation and the NFL to bring music and sports fans a momentous show — what an incredible artist for the inaugural Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show.”
NFL Sunday primer: Tua Tagovailoa re-enters game after evaluation for head injury | 2022-09-25T20:45:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Rihanna to headline Super Bowl LVII halftime show - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/25/rihanna-headline-super-bowl-lvii-halftime-show/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/25/rihanna-headline-super-bowl-lvii-halftime-show/ |
Sabres 4, Capitals 3 (OT)
Anthony Mantha had the first goal of the preseason for the Capitals. (Luis M. Alvarez/AP)
After dressing a young lineup as they evaluate their prospects during the early stages of training camp, the Washington Capitals opened their six-game preseason schedule Sunday afternoon with a 4-3 overtime loss to the Buffalo Sabres at Capital One Arena.
Buffalo’s Vinnie Hinostroza scored the winner 1:15 into the extra frame. Anthony Mantha, Conor Sheary and Joe Snively scored for the Capitals, whose next preseason game is 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Philadelphia Flyers.
Here are four takeaways from the opener:
Mantha will need to make an impact
Given the absence of Nicklas Backstrom (hip) and Tom Wilson (knee), Washington will rely on other offensive weapons to start the season. Mantha has yet to break out since Washington acquired him from Detroit at the 2021 trade deadline, and he’ll be under the microscope this year. He had nine goals and 14 assists last season, when he was limited to 37 games by shoulder surgery, then went goalless with four assists in six postseason games.
Mantha practiced with captain Alex Ovechkin and Evgeny Kuznetsov on Saturday but also has skated on a line with Dylan Strome and Connor McMichael during camp. Mantha scored Sunday’s first goal with a power-play one-timer from the right circle 4:05 in to give the Capitals the lead.
Zach Fucale remains a solid option in goal
Behind Darcy Kuemper and Charlie Lindgren on the Capitals’ goaltending depth chart sits Fucale. The 27-year-old, who again is expected to play the majority of the season with the American Hockey League’s Hershey Bears, went 1-1-1 in four games (three starts) for the Capitals last season. He pitched a 21-save shutout in his NHL debut, a 2-0 win over Detroit in November.
Fucale looked sharp early Sunday. He stopped all 11 shots he saw in the first period, making a few dazzling saves. After stopping 15 of 17 shots, Fucale was replaced by Hunter Shepard (nine saves on 11 shots) with 9:56 left in the second period. Fucale’s first hiccup came at 4:25 of the second when Dylan Cozens tied the score at 1 on the power play. His second came with 10:44 left in the period, when Tyson Kozak scored on an odd-man rush.
“Couple things I can definitely work on on those goals, but overall I think it’s a good start to the season, to training camp and all that,” Fucale said. “It’s important for me to continue to show that I can play, and that’s what I work for every day. The depth is very important throughout the season.”
One year older, Hendrix Lapierre has room to grow
Lapierre was a pleasant surprise early last season. His impressive 2021-22 training camp earned him six games of NHL action, including Washington’s season opener against the New York Rangers. He initially beat out McMichael, the Capitals’ 2019 first-round pick, as the third-line center amid Backstrom’s absence.
Lapierre’s stint in the NHL didn’t last long — he was returned to the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League — but the 2020 first-round pick provided hope for the future. This year, he remains a long shot to make the season-opening roster, but the 20-year-old is set to play his first full pro season with Hershey.
Lapierre impressed his Capitals coaches and teammates during last season’s stint and would be just a phone call away in Hershey.
“He was phenomenal as a super young guy, and I thought he played really well,” defenseman John Carlson said. “Sometimes it can be difficult for a guy like that because he may be the easiest to move around. ... With a little extra motivation and a year to fix a few things that he wanted to get better at, I would expect huge things from him.”
Lapierre skated 14:37 on Sunday and had two shots on goal.
Barry Svrluga: Nicklas Backstrom needs to know he doesn’t owe anything to anyone
Joe Snively has a shot to be the 13th forward
Snively had a great 2021-22 season, notching 15 goals and 23 assists in 35 games for Hershey and spending time with Washington when injuries struck. With the Capitals, he had four goals and three games in 12 games before being sidelined with a wrist injury. He opted for surgery in March.
Snively, a Herndon native who grew up playing youth hockey at the Capitals’ practice facility, signed a two-year, $1.6 million contract later that month. His goal Sunday came on his only shot on goal; he skated 17:22, appearing on the power play and penalty kill.
This season, Snively could have a shot to be the Capitals’ 13th forward. The 26-year-old, who is 5-foot-9 and 176 pounds, has offensive upside with his skating skills and quick hands. He is likely to compete with two much bigger players, Brett Leason and Aliaksei Protas, for that role. | 2022-09-25T22:16:57Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Capitals lose to Sabres in preseason opener - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/25/capitals-sabres-preseason-anthony-mantha-zach-fucale/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/25/capitals-sabres-preseason-anthony-mantha-zach-fucale/ |
Elton John reacts as President Biden announces that he will be presented with the National Humanities Medal during an event at the White House on Sept. 25. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
When Donald Trump asked one of his favorite musicians, Elton John, to perform at his 2017 inauguration, the knighted singer politely declined in an email:
“Thank you so much for the extremely kind invitation to play at your inauguration,” John wrote. “I have given it at lot of thought, and as a British National I don’t feel that it’s appropriate for me to play at the inauguration of an American President. Please accept my apologies.”
Friday night, Sir Elton offered a different statement in the form of the ebullient six-song, solo piano concert he played to a crowd of 2,000 people on the South Lawn of the White House at the invitation of President Biden and first lady Jill Biden.
“I don’t know what to say. What a dump!” said John, laughing, in a sparkling black blazer as he peered through red-tinted glasses at the floodlit columns of the South Portico towering above him, playing under a glass-paneled tent, while members of the Marine Corps band fanned out along the steps to the Truman Balcony in red dress uniforms. “I’ve played in some places before that have been beautiful, but this is probably the icing on the cake.”
Tears and joy were more the order of the day than politics at an event the Bidens said they intended to be a concert for the American people called “A Night When Hope and History Rhyme.” The evening ended with the president surprising John with the National Humanities Medal, to which the singer welled up with tears, but that felt like a capstone to the larger message of celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Elton John AIDS Foundation and the bipartisan unity needed to bring an end to the disease by 2030 — as John and the United Nations have said is the goal.
The last time John played the White House was at a 1998 state dinner during the Clinton administration honoring British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
According to a video feed of the event and interviews with those in attendance (media access was restricted), John appeared genuinely thrilled as he played beneath a glass-paneled tent, with the audience surrounding all sides of his stage. He plowed through several greatest hits: “Your Song,” “Tiny Dancer,” “Rocket Man,” “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” “Crocodile Rock,” and “I’m Still Standing.”
Teachers, first responders, and LGBTQ activists made up the largest portion of the crowd, and had all been allowed to bring plus ones. They were the ones John thanked first, well before he acknowledged the Bidens: “They’re the heroes to me.”
Other guests included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, and Attorney General Merrick Garland — not to mention actress Anna Kendrick and John’s dear friend, Billie Jean King. To those who recognized her, Ruby Bridges, the civil rights advocate who became one of the first Black children to integrate New Orleans’s all-White public school system when she was six years old, might have been the most impressive luminary there.
Charlotte Clymer, a D.C.-based writer and LGBTQ activist who was pleasantly surprised to get the invite, found herself overcome with emotion. “I wouldn’t even say bipartisan, it felt more nonpartisan,” she told The Washington Post. “Everyone was there because they cared about folks with HIV and AIDS. And of course, they wanted to see Elton John perform.” The White House had focused on inviting members of vulnerable communities, and Clymer said the crowd felt notably diverse — racially diverse, politically diverse, even gender diverse. For once, she added, “I was not the only trans person at one of these events, which was nice to see.”
As appealing as the narrative is of Dark Brandon sub-tweeting his predecessor by feting his favorite musician, this was not an event instigated by John as a form of high-level trolling. The conversation had started with an invitation to a “History Talks” symposium on Saturday at Constitution Hall, featuring the likes of Serena Williams and former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, sponsored by the History Channel and A&E, which also sponsored the concert. But that set date was also the day of John’s concert in the District at Nationals Park, “so it evolved into the opportunity to perform the night before on the South Lawn of the White House. And, you know, what a spectacularly beautiful setting,” David Furnish, John’s husband and manager, said on Sunday.
“Elton loved the idea and the whole evening was pitched to us as a nonpartisan event even though President Biden is in the White House,” Furnish continued, “but a nonpartisan event which was really to talk about common humanity, healing through unity, philanthropy.”
In the past, though, John did have a friendly relationship with Trump. He played at the former president’s third wedding, and Trump had even gone around telling people he’d secured John for the inauguration. Despite John asking him not to, Trump frequently used “Tiny Dancer” at his rallies. He also gave the nickname “Rocket Man” to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Instead, at this concert, John acknowledged a different Republican, former first lady Laura Bush, who had come with daughter Jenna Bush and her children, saying that the Bush administration’s creation of the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, “was the most incredible thing,” adding, “We never would have got this far without the President Bush administration giving us that money.” He even gave a shout-out to Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) as a supporter in the fight against AIDS, who, said John, “to his credit has always come through.”
As John came up with his set list, Furnish said, there was only one song he wanted to make sure to sing: “Crocodile Rock.” Years ago, when he and Biden, the vice president at the time, were on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” the same night, Biden told him that, as a single father, he used to drive his two sons around and sing that song in the car. Later on, said Furnish, he and John went to visit President Barack Obama in the White House during the time when, unbeknown to them, Biden’s son Beau was terminally ill with brain cancer and unconscious in the hospital.
Biden had asked John to meet with his staff, “which I thought really said so much about him,” said Furnish. As Furnish remembers being told, Biden went to the hospital and told the unconscious Beau that Elton John had come by the White House that day and he sung “Crocodile Rock” to him. “He didn’t come back to consciousness. But we’d been told that he smiled and it definitely, you know, triggered something,” says Furnish. “So we knew that was a song with a real journey that had been on a real journey for the president. And so it was important for Elton that it was included in the set.”
Before he launched into “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” John also acknowledged Jeanne White-Ginder, the mother of Ryan White, who had died of AIDS-related complications in 1990 and in his short life had become a symbol of the cruelty endured by the epidemic’s victims. The White family was John’s entry into becoming an AIDS activist. He’d met them, “and I got to love them and look at them and they faced such terrible hostility,” he said from the stage. “And yet when Ryan was dying in the hospital in Indianapolis, the last week of his life where I went and tried to help Jeanne do menial things, there was no hatred. There’s no hatred. There was just forgiveness.”
“It was a very heartwarming experience to see somebody that gives so much of themselves and wants no attention whatsoever,” White-Ginder told The Post on Sunday, recalling those days. Six months after White’s death, John checked into rehab for cocaine and alcohol addiction and got sober. Onstage Friday he said the family “saved my life.
The moment when Biden gave John the National Humanities Medal was a complete surprise not just to John, but also to Furnish, who as his manager usually knows everything. John had said he was completely “flabbergasted,” and burst into tears during his citation.
“Elton had absolutely no idea he was getting the medal. It’s very rare to see Elton rendered speechless on anything, and when that came out, he was completely gobsmacked,” said Furnish. “And just everyone felt the love.” | 2022-09-25T23:17:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | At Elton John’s White House concert, tears and a trip down memory lane - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/09/25/elton-john-white-house-biden/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/09/25/elton-john-white-house-biden/ |
Man fatally shot in Prince George’s, police say
A man was fatally shot Sunday afternoon in Suitland in Prince George’s County, Prince George’s police said.
Officers responded to reports of a shooting at around 12 p.m. outside a convenience store in the 4600 block of Silver Hill Road and discovered an adult male with gunshot wounds, police spokesperson Unique Jones said. The man was transported to hospital where he was pronounced dead. Police did not immediately release his name.
An investigation is ongoing and no suspects have been identified. No other details were immediately available, Jones said. | 2022-09-25T23:35:08Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man fatally shot in Prince George’s, police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/25/man-fatally-shot-prince-georges-police-say/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/25/man-fatally-shot-prince-georges-police-say/ |
That includes one of Arun Plus’s biggest partners. Last year, the firm signed a $1 billion(1)deal with Foxconn to develop and manufacture EVs in Thailand, with their factory to be completed by 2024. Although it’s the world’s largest contract maker of electronics, and a key global supplier of iPhones, PCs and networking equipment, the Taiwanese company has yet to become a player in the EV-assembly business. It currently provides components and partially-completed modules for use in vehicles produced by automotive clients such as Tesla Inc.
• Why the iPhone Is Missing From Foxconn’s Asian Tour: Tim Culpan
• The Holes in America’s China-Style EV Policy: Anjani Trivedi
• Clean Tech Comes Back Around: Elements by Liam Denning
(1) Total investment is expected to be in the range of $1 billion to $2 billion | 2022-09-25T23:48:12Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Detroit of Asia Now Wants a Shot at EVs - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-detroit-of-asia-now-wants-a-shot-at-evs/2022/09/25/9768a2ec-3d26-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-detroit-of-asia-now-wants-a-shot-at-evs/2022/09/25/9768a2ec-3d26-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
Analysis by Gearoid Reidy and Ruth Pollard | Bloomberg
Demonstrators hold placards during a protest against the planned state funeral for slain former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo, Japan, on Saturday, Sept. 17, 2022. Prime Minister Fumio Kishidas disapproval rating has shot up amid public opposition to the upcoming state funeral of former premier Abe. (Bloomberg)
State funerals are, admittedly, an uncommon sight in Japan. Only a handful have taken place in the postwar period, and only once for a prime minister — that of Shigeru Yoshida, the man who began to rebuild Japan after World War II. Other officials, such as the great Cold War-era prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone have been given ceremonies one level below, with costs split between the ruling party and the government.
The idea behind Tuesday’s state funeral was to give Abe a greater send-off in a mark of respect to his status as the longest-serving prime minister in history, his international renown and in recognition of the tragic circumstances of his death. Instead, it has instead stirred an unedifying debate that embarrasses Japan on the world stage.
While majorities backed the idea of the funeral in polls shortly after Abe was killed, latest surveys show around 60% now oppose it. Opponents have lodged complaints over everything from the cost to the legal basis for holding the ceremony. Emotions have run so high that one man set himself on fire in protest.
But at its simplest, opposition to the funeral is explained by partisanship — a chance for Abe’s political opponents to score points on the former prime minister in death, having failed to take him down in life.
For a man who won three straight elections and whose death inspired national days of mourning in places as far afield as India and Brazil, it seems odd that an event to mark his passing should trigger such hatred in his home country. Other nations see little issue with marking even divisive leaders; the UK taxpayer spent £3.6 million to send off Margaret Thatcher, who was so unpopular in some parts that her passing triggered street parties.
Abe had a singular ability to drive his critics around the bend. In life, he was unfairly accused of everything from attempting to remilitarize Japan to being single-handedly responsible for widening the gap between rich and poor. For all the talk of Japan’s supposedly compliant press, the latter half of his term in office was dominated by media stirrings of cronyism allegations.
But the incumbent is nonetheless right to go ahead with this event. Japan should be proud of Abe’s achievements on the world stage — or at least recognize that he boosted the country’s standing. He is likely the only Japanese leader of the 21st century that many outside the country could name; he looms large over policies that helped lend new life to a country that teetered on the economic edge, and made Japan a key foreign policy player in Asia and beyond.
Concerns about expense are difficult to take in good faith. Foreign relations, like any friendships, have intangible costs and benefits. It’s indisputably a good thing for Japan’s standing on the world stage to be hosting foreign dignitaries in a celebration of the life of one of the country’s greatest diplomats. A one-time use of the state jet is estimated at around 200 million yen ($1.4 million), yet few complain that Japan’s Emperor attended the funeral of another hereditary, non-elected head of state when the Queen’s own farewell was held. If there are issues with money being spent, it should be on the police protection that failed to do its job in Nara last July.
Abe was no saint; few who get to the top of the political world are. Yet concerns over his supposed “nationalistic” tendencies were always overblown. At the heart of democracy is an appreciation that political opponents are worthy of respect even if we disagree on policy. Should they achieve a mandate for power, as Abe did longer than anyone, even one’s opponents have earned a right to rule. Even Abe’s staunchest detractors must accept that he loved his country, and worked for it throughout his entire career right up until the very day he was gunned down.
It may not be fair that Abe is granted this honor while others are not; yet there was nothing fair about Abe’s death. Now’s not the time for scoring political points and settling old grievances; it’s a moment to recognize a great leader’s achievements — or at the very least, allow others to do so.
• What the World Got Wrong About Shinzo Abe: Gearoid Reidy
• Abe’s Biggest Legacy Is Military, Not Economic: James Stavridis
• Lay Japan’s War Debates to Rest Along With Abe: Gearoid Reidy
Ruth Pollard is a Bloomberg Opinion editor. Previously she was South and Southeast Asia government team leader at Bloomberg News and Middle East correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. | 2022-09-25T23:48:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Shinzo Abe’s Funeral Furor Is Japan’s Most Unedifying Debate - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/shinzo-abes-funeral-furor-is-japans-most-unedifying-debate/2022/09/25/67bbfa3e-3d22-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/shinzo-abes-funeral-furor-is-japans-most-unedifying-debate/2022/09/25/67bbfa3e-3d22-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
Quarterback Tua Tagovailoa said his scary tumble during Sunday's game against the Bills was because of a back injury, not a neck injury. (Megan Briggs/Getty Images)
Here's what happened.pic.twitter.com/b3xsr7Eesf
Tagovailoa was back in the lineup for the Dolphins’ opening possession of the third quarter. He played the rest of the game as the Dolphins won, 21-19, to improve to 3-0.
“Now, Tua, he went out with a lower back. … He kind of got bent back pretty significantly on a quarterback sneak earlier,” McDaniel said during his postgame news conference. “I was kind of with everyone else. When he hit his head on the ground, I assumed it was a head injury. But his legs got wobbly because his lower back was completely loose. And as he described it, he said his lower back was like Gumby or something.”
Tua: Felt like I hyperextended my back or something. My back kind of locked up on me.
The NFL’s concussion protocols outline a step-by-step process for evaluating a player suspected to have suffered a head injury. A player can return to a game if cleared by the team physician and an unaffiliated neurotrauma consultant following several tests. | 2022-09-25T23:48:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | NFL, NFLPA to review if concussion protocols followed with Tua Tagovailoa - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/25/nfl-review-if-concussion-protocols-were-followed-with-tua-tagovailoa/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/25/nfl-review-if-concussion-protocols-were-followed-with-tua-tagovailoa/ |
A man was fatally shot in Northeast Washington early Saturday, D.C. police said.
Police responded to reports of a shooting around 1 a.m. Saturday in the 2300 block of 15th Street NE, according to a police report. The block is near the Brentwood Recreation Center and several duplex homes.
Officers found an adult male with an apparent gunshot wound, police said. The man was transported to a hospital and pronounced dead after lifesaving efforts failed.
Police identified the man as David Scott, 32, of Northeast Washington. An investigation is ongoing. | 2022-09-26T00:27:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Man fatally shot in Northeast Washington, police say - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/25/man-fatally-shot-northeast-washington-police-say/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/25/man-fatally-shot-northeast-washington-police-say/ |
Jalen Hurts had three touchdown passes Sunday. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)
In Philadelphia’s 24-8 win over the Washington Commanders on Sunday, Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts showed he was just as capable of getting “freaky” — as he likes to say — through the air as he is with his legs.
The early-season MVP favorite passed for 340 yards and three touchdowns in front of a predominantly green-clad crowd as the Eagles left no doubt at FedEx Field.
“The work we put in in the offseason is supposed to show in times like this,” Hurts said. “The trust that we have in one another and being on the same page, [and] to see it pan out now is great. But we know there’s more to it and it’s just the beginning.”
The Eagles’ passing effectiveness came in stark contrast to what they managed last season, when in Hurts’s first full season as a starter they made their bones by running the ball. But Philadelphia exceeded 300 passing yards Sunday for the second straight game. With the Commanders intent on stopping Philadelphia’s potent ground game, Hurts dominated Washington through the air.
“That’s what good teams do, too: They don’t win the same way every week,” Eagles Coach Nick Sirianni said. “Last year, a lot of the time we put the game on the back of our offensive line, and today it was on Jalen.”
The Eagles found their footing late in the first quarter, when Hurts found wideout DeVonta Smith for a 45-yard gain to set up a field goal and a 3-0 lead. After the defense forced a Carson Wentz fumble on Washington’s ensuing drive, Hurts and tight end Dallas Goedert connected for a 23-yard touchdown.
Leading 10-0, the Eagles continued the aerial onslaught later in the second quarter with a 64-yard drive that consisted of five passing plays and just one rushing attempt. Hurts punctuated the drive with a nine-yard touchdown pass to A.J. Brown with 2:56 remaining in the half.
“Jalen has really taken some major steps this season as a passer,” Eagles center Jason Kelce said. “If we had struggled to run the ball like this last season, I don’t know if he would have been able to seamlessly shift gears and make those passes. He’s just so confident and in command this season.”
With 1:57 left in the half and his team holding a 17-point advantage, Hurts orchestrated an 88-yard touchdown drive. After finding Smith for a 44-yard gain that moved the Eagles into the red zone, Hurts targeted him again for a two-yard touchdown pass on the half’s final play.
“That’s who I am,” Hurts said. “I try not to get too high or too low regardless of the situation and just make it work. Sometimes we kind of get caught up in, ‘Well, this is the perfect look for this.’ [But we should] just make the play work.”
After passing for 299 yards in the first half, Hurts was held to 41 in the second.
“We just have to execute,” he said. “There are a handful of plays in the second half where it can go the entire way if we just hit it.”
Smith finished with 169 yards on eight receptions, and Brown added five catches for 85 yards. Washington held Philadelphia to a season-low 72 yards on the ground, but that wasn’t close to enough to be competitive.
“I know they have their eyes on me, and they expect me to lead them,” Hurts said. “I just want to do my job to the best of my abilities.” | 2022-09-26T00:40:54Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Jalen Hurts dominates Commanders with three touchdown passes - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/25/jalen-hurts-eagles-commanders-passing/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/25/jalen-hurts-eagles-commanders-passing/ |
Pushing any and all drama aside, United States keeps the Presidents Cup
The United States is the Presidents Cup champion again. (Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images)
CHARLOTTE — The Presidents Cup spent Sunday avoiding ending up as a cataclysm. It even spent a loud day at Quail Hollow presenting flickers of “Wait, could this thing really turn . . .?” The U.S. team won, 17½-12½, against an International team hamstrung by poaching from the LIV Golf circuit, but the margin wound up shy of the neighborhood of infinity — not so bad after a Friday night when the Americans led 8-2 and the forecast looked yucky.
“This team is no joke,” said Trevor Immelman, the captain of the International team and the 2008 Masters champion, “and I’m sick and tired of it being spoken of as a joke. We love this event, and we love our team, and we can’t wait” for Montreal. That’s the next edition of this series, planned for 2024, that pits the Americans against the best golfers from all of the other countries outside Europe.
Immelman, of South Africa, saw it as a chance to “just lay a couple more bricks in this house that we’re trying to build,” a house set amid a chronic American storm that has the United States ahead 12-1-1 lifetime and on a nine-event winning streak. He spoke of his “warriors” who inched within 12-8 shortly after 4 p.m. and pronounced himself proud especially “considering [that] when I was made captain, there was no such thing as a pandemic. There were a few other things that weren’t around as well.”
One of those things would be LIV Golf, the Saudi Arabian circuit that has used riches from mankind’s marriage to oil to snare a bunch of players from a bunch of countries, leaving Immelman without British Open champion Cameron Smith of Australia, No. 3 in the world, and two-time PGA Tour winner Joaquin Niemann of Chile, No. 21 in the world, among others.
U.S. captain Davis Love III had 11 of the world’s top 20 players — Immelman had two — but the home team did not offer haughtiness. “They did everything we asked them to do,” Love said, “and they were unbelievably prepared.”
None of the possible lopsidedness dented the verve of Charlotte, which will turn out if you ask it to. For an event that seemed a whisper from afar on a busy sports landscape, it was much louder up close. Droves walked the course, about 40,000 in all, even on a Sunday when it went up against various other diversions — such as the Godzilla of all U.S. sports, the NFL, which showed in person 12 miles up the road. The fans turned out in their U.S. gear, from the singlet with suspenders to the U.S. flags tucked into caps to the U.S. bandanna to the understated U.S. flag on the red cap to the overstated U.S. flags festooned on a red shirt to all else.
“It was the biggest one ever,” said Love, the 1997 PGA Championship champion, “so there were a lot of big reasons to have pressure, but being the big, big, big favorite carries a little weight.” When Xander Schauffele closed it out around 5:23 p.m. with a six-foot putt he studied for a good while and then beat Corey Conners of Canada, 1 up, well, Schauffele said, “What you saw was a big sigh of relief.”
His teammates went out to fete and greet him and, not long after that, he smoked a cigar from the interview dais.
The results of Sunday’s 12 singles matches started coming in just after 3:30 when Jordan Spieth, the monster of the U.S. team at 5-0 (with Max Homa next at 4-0), finished his 4-and-3 win over Cameron Davis of Australia. That upped the U.S. lead to 12-7.
When South Korea’s Sungjae Im finished an impressive 1-up win that dropped Justin Thomas’s record to 4-1, it stood 12-8 with 10 matches to finish even as the whole thing still tilted Yank-ward, and Immelman did wind up saying, “I don’t know about you guys, but at some point this afternoon I thought there was a chance.”
There wasn’t a whole lot of one, but the Presidents Cup joined the barrage of sporting events decided decisively but not emphatically, rather than joining the ones decided bad memorably. There were moments of something approaching near-intrigue, such as when Im theatrically shushed the crowd after winning a hole or when Hideki Matsuyama’s bid to win his all-square match from off the green on No. 18 struck the flagstick and came to a rest one foot off. (The Japanese star’s match with Sam Burns ended in a tie.)
“I played not shying away from the moment,” said Colombia’s Sebastián Muñoz, whose 2-and-1 win over top-ranked Scottie Scheffler brought the score to 13½-9½ before Tony Finau and Schauffele got going again. At 4:50 p.m., Finau drained a 15-foot putt that clinched a 3-and-1 win over Canada’s Taylor Pendrith, bringing the U.S. total to 14½, and about a half-hour later Schauffele beat Conners to clinch matters altogether.
Then it was time for Spieth, a three-time major winner by 23 who is still just 29, to remind how he got his first singles win in an international competition and to wonder if this kind of thing might bring further confidence. “I’m really excited about the week that was this week,” he said. “I think I played some of my best golf of the year, which was really cool.”
LIV's Greg Norman finds friendly faces, harsh criticism on Capitol Hill trip
On the other side, the team spoke of “the shield,” its logo, and how it had bonded around that as it brought together seven nationalities among 12 players — and how this seemed a tad less of a bummer than 2021 in Melbourne, Australia, where the U.S. rallied on the final day to win a 16-14 donnybrook. Instead, this team had bid for something the other way around, zooming from that 8-2 deficit after Friday to an 11-7 one after Saturday. “A big difference I’ve felt in the last couple years,” said Adam Scott of Australia, the 2013 Masters champion, “is what’s going on in our team room.” He concluded, “I think good things are really starting to happen in that environment.” He added, “A cup is coming our way soon.”
That would seem less about Scott, 42, than about the young lads who got some seasoning here, including the 27-year-old Davis. “I kind of say this week is sort of the benchmark in terms of high-pressure situations” and “something we haven’t quite experienced,” he said. “I think a lot of these younger guys are trying to get as many experiences as we can and this was just a massive steppingstone.” | 2022-09-26T01:19:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | United States wins Presidents Cup for ninth straight time - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/25/2022-presidents-cup-united-states-beats-internationals-again/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/25/2022-presidents-cup-united-states-beats-internationals-again/ |
Looking plenty fatigued, Spirit drops penultimate match at Kansas City
Current 3, Spirit 0
Spirit interim coach Albertin Montoya saw his team struggle vs. playoff-bound Kansas City. (U.S. Soccer Federation)
The Kansas City Current knew a win Sunday would clinch the second-year franchise’s first playoff appearance — and played like it. A tired Washington Spirit squad was overwhelmed by the Current’s aggression and intensity during a 3-0 loss in Kansas City, Kan.
From the outset, it was clear the Current (10-5-6) intended to apply constant pressure on both ends. The Spirit (3-8-10) was constantly under duress in the first half, turning the ball over in dangerous areas.
“Kansas City did a really good job of switching the point of attack. We just weren’t organized enough. We were a little late to everything,” Spirit forward Ashley Hatch said. “They were just really organized, and we weren’t.”
In the 18th minute, Kate Del Fava sent a cross to the outside of the box that was settled and then rocketed into the top right corner by midfielder Lo’eau LaBonta, beating goalkeeper Aubrey Kingsbury.
Even with the lead, the Current remained persistent. In the 38th minute, the Current tacked on a second goal. Following a failed clearance on a corner kick, Alexis Loera sent in a second cross that was tapped past Kingsbury at the near post by Cece Kizer.
Only three minutes later, the Current broke through again. Kristen Hamilton, sprinting down the wing, sent in a left-footed cross that Claire Lavogez slotted past a lunging Kingsbury.
“Their offensive interchange is really incredible. They have incredible players as individuals, but the way they play together is very difficult,” Spirit midfielder Andi Sullivan said. “But I don’t think it was anything that we couldn’t have dealt with. I think we were just very flat in our mentality, and it’s very hard to get anything done when that’s the case, no matter what your organization.”
After a scoreless second half ended, the Current had put nine shots on target compared with just three by the Spirit. Kingsbury made six saves.
“I think we’re going to give our players a couple of days out — because they need it. Trust me. They play their hearts out and they’re trying to do their best, but just physically … it was a lot to ask of them today,” Spirit interim coach Albertin Montoya said. “I know maybe every team is like this at this point in time of the season. But Kansas City had a week off, and [the] reality is it makes a difference.”
The Spirit, the defending NWSL champion that was eliminated from playoff contention Sept. 17, closes its season against the Houston Dash at 7 p.m. Saturday at Audi Field.
“We’re just going to get home, recover, get a few training sessions under our belt, get organized and go again,” Hatch said. “That’s kind of how it goes in this league — you got to regroup and go again.” | 2022-09-26T02:20:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Washington Spirit can't keep up with playoff-bound Kansas City Current - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/25/washington-spirit-kansas-city-current-nwsl/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/25/washington-spirit-kansas-city-current-nwsl/ |
Dear Carolyn: My wife and I have been watching “The Affair” on Showtime recently — in retrospect, maybe not a couples show, but I thought we were secure enough to go ahead. She has since repeatedly asked me if I’m having an affair. To which I say “no” because I am not and never have.
But she doesn’t seem to believe me, and I don’t know how to disprove a negative. I get why she’s scared. I’d be crushed if she had cheated on me. But what do I tell her to ease her mind?
Anonymous: Ha. Past the first few episodes, it was such an intense, multi-season argument for not having an affair that I could argue it’s a great couples show. The first few episodes made it seem like a terrible idea, too, come to think of it.
Butanyway.
First and worstmost, anyone who is utterly fixated on the possibility of being cheated on hints at two possible histories (though obviously not certainties): being a cheater, or having been cheated on without ever having done the work to recover from it.
So that’s where my mind goes first. It’s worth a think. Or even a talk if you can get there without being accusatory.
Second and more useful: When you’ve gotten through the, “Are you having an affair?” “What? No! I’m not having an affair,” conversation, and that is not enough to put the issue to rest, it’s important not to keep having and re-having the conversation. Instead, push it forward, unequivocally:
“You asked, and I have answered. It’s hurtful that you asked, but I understand — trust is hard. Counting on other people when you know you can’t know everything about them? It’s scary. I know I can’t prove you’re not cheating on me, either. So, what do we do now? What do you think you need, what will be enough, to get past this?”
If that doesn’t clear the path, then you’re going to need harder thinking about life with someone who can’t be persuaded of your decency, which I hope you won’t have to do.
Dear Carolyn: My wife comes from a family of seven. Often when all seven siblings get together with their mother, the mother wants a new “family shot” taken for her mantelpiece. She means just her and her kids. I and one other spouse are asked to stay out of the picture. Is this rude of her or am I being sensitive? And should I express how it makes me feel or just vamoose?
— Vamoosed
Vamoosed: I don’t know what else is going on in the family, but a person can love the sons- or daughters-in-law and be the head of a loving and inclusive family and still want a photo that includes only the family of origin. So, no, I don’t see it as rude on its face, as long as there’s a full-family version, too.
There are certainly rude ways to get the just-us photo, which could be what’s irking you, and there are certainly families who are rude to all plus-ones (typically at their own eventual expense).
If you’re comfortable in their company, then you and the other outlaw can pose for your own shot together, for comic relief. | 2022-09-26T04:22:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Carolyn Hax: They watched ‘The Affair,’ then the accusations began - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/09/26/carolyn-hax-the-affair-accusations/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/09/26/carolyn-hax-the-affair-accusations/ |
Dear Miss Manners: My wife has become friendly with my friend’s fiancee over the past two years or so, but when she asked my wife to be in her wedding party, the request came as a bit of a surprise. My wife said yes, and has been regretting it ever since.
Behind all this are dozens of planning emails that require delicate opinions and compromises, adding further stress to my wife’' normal day-to-day work responsibilities and social schedule.
At this point, we understand that she’s committed, and we’re trying to keep a positive mind-set about everything. But looking back, given the opportunity to say “thanks, but no thanks,” she would have.
“Thank you, I feel highly honored. But please tell me what this would involve.” Followed, if necessary, by, “I’m afraid I won’t be able to manage all that. But I’ll be your most enthusiastic guest.”
For obscure reasons, it is actually considered better to do so — but it is not always easy. | 2022-09-26T04:22:47Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Miss Manners: How do you say no to being in a wedding party? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/09/26/miss-manners-bridesmaid-too-much/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/09/26/miss-manners-bridesmaid-too-much/ |
If Companies Really Want to Do Some Good, They Should Unbundle ‘ESG’ and ‘DEI’
The business world is in thrall to six letters — or, more accurately, to two groups of three letters — ESG and DEI. These stand, respectively, for “environmental, social and governance” and “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Taken together, they constitute the ruling business ideology of our age.
Both ESG and DEI have generated massive industries. Investment giants, notably BlackRock Inc., State Street Corp. and Vanguard Group Inc., claim that more than a third of their assets, or $35 trillion, are monitored through one ESG lens or other. Every Fortune 100 company and most Fortune 500 companies have adopted DEI programs. Walmart has committed $100 million to its Center for Racial Equity. Many human resource departments are evangelists for DEI in part because it turns an unglamorous activity (paying salaries and the rest) into a crusade for social justice.
But do these letters really fit together logically? Or are they muddlings of buzzwords that are either ineffective or even counterproductive? The evidence increasingly suggests the latter. Both ESG and DEI bundle together different things that range from the admirable to the questionable. This bundling not only risks setting conflicting, fuzzy or even questionable goals for companies. It also distracts from the mission that initially set the buzzwords afloat — preventing the world from overheating in the first case and tapping a wider range of talent in the second.
Few people would disagree that companies need to play a role in tackling global warming either through voluntary action or compulsory legislation. But adding “G” and “S” to the formula is counterproductive. Elon Musk is cavalier about corporate governance, but Tesla is one of the world’s most effective green champions. Closing coal mines in Appalachia is good for the planet but leaves in its wake a trail of hollowed-out towns and human wreckage. Corporate social responsibility surely means something different for a start-up where everyone is working 60 hours a week in order to survive than for an established company in a mature market.
The apostles of ESG are as guilty of overselling their product as they are of intellectual sloppiness. The ghastly phrase “win-win” that is endemic in the industry obscures the huge costs of adjusting to climate change. But is it “win-win” for investors when, according to an analysis by Morningstar, “sustainable” funds charge on average annual fees that are almost 50% higher those of traditional funds? And is it win-win for the planet when companies can game the system by selling a polluting plant to another company that is happy to be judged as a “sin” stock?
ESG advocates claim that ESG portfolios provide superior risk-adjusted returns to traditional portfolios, returns that reflect the superior business performance of ESG companies. But a 2021 literature review of more than 1,100 peer reviewed studies and 27 published meta-analyses determined that the risk-adjusted financial performance of ESG investing was indistinguishable from conventional investing. Another study of American mutual funds between 2010 and 2018 found that companies in ESG investment portfolios violated more labor laws, paid more fines and had higher carbon emissions than those in non-ESG portfolios sold by the same institution.
ESG didn’t even provide a reliable template for how to deal with an obvious evil such as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Stephen Bainbridge of UCLA Law School points out that European corporations with major operations in Russia prior to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine typically had higher ESG ratings than those who were not operating in Russia. Unrealistic expectations invite a backlash just as certainly as contradictory aims entail strategic confusion.
DEI is a little better than ESG in that it bundles two obviously admirable things (diversity and inclusion) with one much more questionable one (equity). Diversity is a good thing from both a business and a social point of view because it discovers new sources of talent while at the same time strengthening the links between companies and the wider society. Inclusion is a logical extension of diversity: Employees will work better if they feel welcomed, and companies need to work harder to welcome people who are new to the corporate world. The problem with the formula lies with the all-important word “equity.”
When it comes to equality, liberal capitalism is built on two great principles: procedural justice (equality of treatment before the law) and equality of opportunity. Liberal capitalists celebrate the fact that Jeff Bezos is filthy rich for a mixture of first principles (people should be free to exercise their talents) and utilitarianism (Amazon.com Inc. improves the general welfare by providing better services at better prices). But “equity” tries to substitute “fairness” for “equality of opportunity.” Advocates of “equity” argue that different ethnic groups should start off with roughly the same resources. But others go further: Advocates of social justice argue that high degrees of inequality of result are inherently unfair while some supporters of critical race theory argue that capitalism is inherently unjust. “In order to truly be antiracist,” says Ibram X. Kendi, a leading guru of the social justice movement, “you also have to truly be anti-capitalist.”
This emphasis on “equity” drives the DEI formula in an increasingly radical direction. The Coca-Cola Co. had to apologize for including on its company training platform an external LinkedIn presentation on confronting racism that urged viewers, “Try to be less white.” (“To be less white is to be less oppressive” might indeed ring oddly from a fizzy-drink maker whose products have fueled the epidemic of diabetes in Black America.) Bank of America Corp. supported a “Racial Equity 21-Day Challenge” for its employees which argued that the United States is a system of “white supremacy.” Walmart Inc. has told workers that they are guilty of “internalized racial superiority.” Lockheed Martin has prodded executives to deconstruct their “white male privilege.” Alan Jope, the CEO of Unilever, has talked about “the immutable laws of intersectionality,” blind to the idea’s origins in the most radical corners of academia.
The DEI industry also suffers from the same problem as the ESG industry: overselling its products. The industry blithely argues that diversity produces higher levels of creativity and innovation, through a sort of multicultural magic. It forgets to add that getting the best out of diversity requires good management. Roy Chua of Harvard Business School has demonstrated that getting people from different cultural backgrounds to cooperate is fraught with difficulties, ranging from “intercultural anxiety” to outright conflict. Chua notes that what he calls “ambient cultural disharmony” can be more marked in people who regard themselves as open-minded than in more conservative types who expect problems. David Livermore, the author of “Driven by Difference: How Great Companies Fuel Innovation Through Diversity,” points out that diverse teams have a higher variance in their performance than homogenous teams: They are more likely to produce creative ideas but they are also more likely to fail completely. Celebration of diversity needs to be linked to hard work and clear thinking.
The result of this combination of social justice radicalism and overpromising is that DEI programs are ineffective, or worse. Studies of anti-bias training dating back to the 1930s show that at best such training produces short-term benefits that quickly dissipate, multicultural sugar rushes as it were, and at worse they are counterproductive. Anti-bias training frequently activates stereotypes (try not thinking about elephants). Diversity training that vilifies whites produces resentment among whites, particularly when compared with diversity training that celebrates color blindness. The clunking machinery of DEI — the training videos, workshops and roleplaying exercises — also offends workers’ sense of autonomy and self-respect. “Tomorrow, I have to go to a diversity-training workshop,” Livermore heard one man say to another in the gym. “Oh God!” came the reply. “That’s right up there with getting a root canal.”
Weaponizing the Backlash
Having been protected from criticism by their aura of righteousness, both DEI and particularly ESG are finally being subjected to searching criticism. An excellent special report in The Economist, by Henry Tricks, argues that ESG “risks setting conflicting goals for firms, fleecing savers and distracting from the vital task of tackling climate change. It is an unholy mess that needs to be ruthlessly streamlined.” Even some supporters of the idea argue that it may be time for a new label. Some firms, including Netflix Inc., have laid off DEI bureaucrats and activists. Vivek Ramaswamy, a former pharmaceutical entrepreneur, has not only written a book denouncing the ESG-DEI nexus, “Woke, Inc.: Inside the Social Justice Scam,” but also put his money where his mouth is by founding Strive Asset Management, an investment firm which promises to restore “the primacy of excellence over politics.”
Predictably, some politicians are weaponizing the backlash. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida and a leading contender for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2024, wants to be the Teddy Roosevelt of our age, taking on the malefactors of great wokeness. So far, he has passed the Stop W.O.K.E. (the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) Act, which attempts to prohibit companies from promoting critical race theory, clashed with Disney over its diversity policy, and criticized ESG funds for their poor returns. Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who has unearthed innumerable eye-catching examples of diversity policies, wants conservatives to send a clear message to companies: “declare neutrality in the culture wars or we will make you pay a price in the marketplace.” If the GOP retakes the majority in the upcoming midterm elections, it reportedly plans to investigate the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for its increasing ESG advocacy.
The problem with the charge of “wokery” is that it suffers from the same problem as ESG and DEI — bundling lots of different things together, this time in the cause of vilification rather than promotion. Woke warriors are wrong to argue, or imply, that western capitalism is uniquely responsible for slavery or colonialism or a combination of the two. Both slavery and colonialism have been endemic in pre-modern societies. The world’s greatest capitalist powers — first Britain and then America — were responsible for abolishing the slave trade and the practice of slavery. At the same time, they are right to argue that slavery and colonialism have left a terrible and enduring legacy behind them. The average African-American family only has an eighth of the wealth of the average White American family. Some of America’s biggest companies, such as Aetna Inc., Bank of America and Wachovia (now part of Wells Fargo & Co.), profited from slavery. Conservatives, in particular, need to make sure that, in their irritation with the most outlandish forms of “wokery” such as no-platforming gender-critical feminists, they don’t end up turning a blind eye to structural injustices.
The best way to avoid a counterproductive impasse is to engage in a general unbundling. Advocates of ESG need to focus on tackling global warming. The best way to do this is to engage in collective action via carbon taxes rather than corporate agitation. Advocates of DEI need to concentrate on promoting historically disadvantaged groups — particularly the descendants of slaves in the United States — rather than engaging in militant cultural re-education. The best way to do this is to build ladders of opportunity that try to make a reality of the idea of equality of opportunity. Both the environment and diversity are far too important to become victims of the culture wars between a bloated ESG-DEI bureaucracy, on the one hand, and anti-woke crusaders, on the other.
• Larry Page’s Flying Car Failure Is a Lesson for Us All: Parmy Olson
• Millenials and Gen Z Are Fed Up with ESG: Tanja Hester
• Buyout Barons Need to Keep Diversity in the Spreadsheet: Chris Hughes | 2022-09-26T05:54:09Z | www.washingtonpost.com | If Companies Really Want to Do Some Good, They Should Unbundle ‘ESG’ and ‘DEI’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/if-companies-really-want-to-do-some-good-they-should-unbundle-esg-and-dei/2022/09/26/f1fab2fe-3d58-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/if-companies-really-want-to-do-some-good-they-should-unbundle-esg-and-dei/2022/09/26/f1fab2fe-3d58-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
The UK’s Cryptic £40 Billion Bailout for Energy Traders
The £40 billion ($43 billion) plan announced in the first days of Liz Truss’s government to bolster energy traders remains a black box. Who benefits, at what cost and under what conditions is a mystery the Treasury and the Bank of England have yet to explain — with three weeks to go until the fund is formally launched. The Energy Markets Financing Scheme isn’t getting much attention because it’s been overshadowed by the energy bailouts for households and businesses, which may end costing as much as £160 billion over the next two years. It’s also far more technical than the easily understood freeze on energy bills for families, further discouraging attention.But it deserves close scrutiny. Properly designed, it’s the right policy, and may end costing a fraction of the £40 billion headline amount. But if badly implemented, it could end channeling billions of taxpayer money to speculators.
To understand the scheme devised by Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng, one has to delve into the bowels of the energy market. There, utilities hedge, or lock in, the price of the electricity they charge. By selling forward, they can have taken a position that loses money if prices rise. When that occurs, exchanges such as the Intercontinental Exchange and the European Energy Exchange, demand payments – or margin calls – to cover potential losses. Ultimately when the forward contracts mature, the utilities are fine: losses in financial markets are matched by equal gains from their actual sales. But as they wait for the contracts to mature — as long as several months, or even two years — they need cash to face the margin calls. Lots of cash.With gas and electricity prices in Europe gyrating wildly, at times as much as 25% in a single day, the margin calls can be brutal. For example, when Wien Energie, a municipal utility in Vienna, asked the Austrian government for a bailout, it disclosed it had faced a margin call of 1.75 billion euros ($1.7 billion) in a single day.Ultimately, the size of the margin calls may overwhelm a company. The new scheme is “a backstop source of additional liquidity to energy firms in otherwise sound financial health to meet extraordinary variation margin calls,” the UK Treasury said.Who are those energy companies? That’s the key question the UK Treasury hasn’t answered. When the scheme was announced in early September, it said it would help companies that “have a UK presence” and “play a significant role in UK electricity and gas markets.” On Friday, it tweaked its aim, saying it will help “those making a material contribution to the liquidity of UK energy markets.” Pressed on the matter, the Treasury said it was still working on “the eligibility criteria.”The key word in the new statement is “liquidity.” Because the biggest liquidity providers in British and continental European energy markets aren’t the utilities that sell electricity to households and businesses, but big banks, commodity traders and hedge funds.Until now, most European governments have focused on providing liquidity for margin calls to utilities. The British scheme, however, could open the public wallet to many others, including banks in the City of London like Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, hedge fund speculators in Mayfair and commodity traders like Vitol Group and Glencore Plc. London should follow the Europeans’ narrow focus: limit help to firms that produce – or consume – electricity and natural gas. The support should be tied to physical flows of energy and actual fixed assets, like gas-fired plants, wind farms or nuclear power stations located in the UK, rather than simply to liquidity provision. It should focus on companies that pay most of their taxes in the UK, too, leaving to others to help outfits incorporated in low-tax jurisdictions or tax havens.
And, of course, strings should be attached: the loans should be pricy, and companies should disclose their trading books, not just of their hedging activity, but also any speculative ones; perhaps even limits on bonuses. The details, aggregated to avoid disclosing proprietary data, should become public. The collapse of many UK energy retailers last year showed that the government allowed a regulatory environment in which “heads I win, tails you lose” was common. Many of those failed companies more closely resembled trading outfits than utilities.The UK Treasury has promised it will convene an advisory committee as part of a “robust assessment process.” That’s welcome. But speed is critical – the scheme goes live in just three weeks. And everything, from the criteria, to the conditions, to the membership of the advisory panel remains undecided.
To sum up, we now have a 135-word statement to explain a £40 billion policy. That’s simply not good enough. | 2022-09-26T05:54:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The UK’s Cryptic £40 Billion Bailout for Energy Traders - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-uks-cryptic-40-billion-bailout-for-energy-traders/2022/09/26/f174be74-3d58-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/the-uks-cryptic-40-billion-bailout-for-energy-traders/2022/09/26/f174be74-3d58-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 23: Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on September 23, 2022 in New York City. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped more than 400 points as recession fears grow. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) (Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America)
This is what happened in markets last week. The “expected” turbulence, related in large part to three continuing paradigm shifts, was turbocharged by two less-anticipated factors, whose duration will play an important role in determining the orderly functioning of markets.
• Predictable injections of central bank liquidity and floored interest rates have been replaced by a generalized global tightening of monetary policy.
• Economic growth is slowing significantly as the three most systemically important regions of the global economy lose momentum at the same time.
• The nature of globalization is shifting from the presumption of ever closer economic and financial integration to greater fragmentation in part because of persistent geopolitical tensions.
Last week’s market developments, including the eye-popping price moves in fixed income and foreign exchange, went beyond investors and traders having to deal with these three inconvenient paradigm shifts. Two additional factors made the week particularly unsettling.
After being seduced by the notion of “transitory” inflation and falling asleep at the policy wheel, the Fed is playing massive catch-up to counter high and damaging inflation. But having fallen so far behind, it is now forced to aggressively raise rates into a slowing domestic and global economy. With that, the once wide-open window for a soft landing has been replaced by the uncomfortably high probability of the central bank tipping the US into a recession, with the resulting damage extending well beyond the domestic economy.
In the UK, the new government of Prime Minister Liz Truss has opted not just for structural reforms and energy price stabilization but also for unfunded tax cuts of a magnitude not seen for 50 years. Concerned about the implications for inflation and borrowing needs, the markets drove the value of the pound down to a level last seen in 1985. They also delivered the largest-ever surge in borrowing costs as measured by the yield on five-year government bonds.
Both these developments are inherently destabilizing, economically and financially. And both are difficult to reverse in the short term.
The second additional factor relates to the flows of funds and the implications for market liquidity.
According to data compiled by Bank of America, some $30 billion flowed out of equity and bond retail funds and into cash. This and other indicators, such as the record surge in option-related protection against equity declines, points to the possibility of large asset reallocations that have strained the orderly functioning of markets.
The greater the strains on market functioning, the more traders and investors worry about not being able to reposition their portfolios as desired. And the more they are unable to do what they wish to get done, the greater the risk of contagion. This is particularly the case in fixed income, where so many bonds now reside on the balance sheets of central banks.
As detailed in previous Bloomberg Opinion columns, I was already expecting increased volatility and price declines as markets navigated through the big three paradigm shifts. Last week’s developments point to the risk of more front-loaded instability that complicates an already bumpy journey to new economic and financial equilibria — one that makes behavioral investing mistakes more likely.
• Think of Powell as Volcker’s Wannabe Second Coming: John Authers
• Fed Must Show It’s Willing to Cause a Recession: Editorial | 2022-09-26T05:54:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why Investors Are Facing Even More Market Instability - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-investors-are-facing-even-more-market-instability/2022/09/26/f1b86ed0-3d58-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-investors-are-facing-even-more-market-instability/2022/09/26/f1b86ed0-3d58-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
A typhoon was nearing. One farmer’s video captured what was at stake.
Regine Cabato
Residents of San Miguel hand out food as they wade through a street flooded by Super Typhoon Noru in the Philippines. (Aaron Favila/AP)
MANILA — The skies were still clear when the farmer went to take a final look at his crops.
A massive tropical cyclone was hours away from making landfall in the northern Philippines, and Nueva Ecija, known as the “rice granary” of the country, was right in the center of its path. Officials warned that more than a million hectares of farmland could be flattened, devastating the poor, rural communities that have increasingly shouldered the brunt of the country’s natural disasters.
Looking at the paddy field he had labored in for months, Felix Pangibitan picked up his phone and clicked record.
I'm crying my heart out watching this, a video from one of the hardworking farmer here on my province😭😭😭
Oh God..please keep us safe🙏🏻#KardingPH pic.twitter.com/tEHCKwBecG
— shaney˚₊·—̳͟͞͞♥🦋 (@shannyqt) September 25, 2022
“I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, in the coming days. What a waste — the rice is nice,” he said into the camera, standing in front of the field with other farmers. “I took a video now because I don’t know if these will still be standing tomorrow.”
“By God’s mercy, maybe the storm will pass,” Pangibitan added, sighing. “Hopefully, hopefully.”
Shared on Facebook, Pangibitan’s video struck a chord with people in the Philippines as they braced for Super Typhoon Noru on Sunday evening, drawing millions of views on social media and local television channels. He tapped into the feelings of anxiety and helplessness that had spread across the country as Noru, also known locally as Karding, evolved rapidly from a tropical storm into a Category 5 typhoon, prompting more than 70,000 people to evacuate.
At the same time, observers said, the farmer from Nueva Ecija seemed to capture what — and who — was most at stake in these typhoons, which have battered the Philippines with growing frequency and severity over recent years.
Even before climate change started to drive wetter, stronger typhoons into the Philippines, the country’s 10 million agricultural workers were among the most vulnerable to weather disasters. The agricultural sector has had the highest poverty rate of any sector since 2006, government figures show, with at least 2.4 million people living below the poverty line. From 2000 to 2019, the sector suffered 63 percent of the damage caused by extreme weather events, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority.
Typhoon Rai, also known as Super Typhoon Odette, caused $550 million worth of damage when it hit the Philippines last December. More than a third of that damage was incurred in agriculture, with some 420,000 hectares of farmland wiped out over a matter of days, according to the relief organization Oxfam. Nearly 390,000 farmers and fishermen were “left with nothing,” reported Lot Felizco, the country director of Oxfam Pilipinas.
In 2018, Typhoon Ompong caused more than $35 million in agricultural damage, one-fifth of that in Nueva Ecija, a township of 2.3 million people and Pangibitan’s home.
Philippines on high alert as ‘explosive’ Super Typhoon Noru makes landfall
Noru barreled through central Luzon, where Manila is located, with sustained winds of up to 150 mph from Sunday night to early Monday. It left dozens of neighborhoods underwater and cut off power lines in at least 12 municipalities, officials said in a news briefing, but it stopped short of causing the widespread loss of life that was initially feared. Four people died while conducting rescue operations in Bulacan province, north of Manila, officials said.
The worst is probably over, experts say, as Noru makes it way out of the Philippines and toward Vietnam, where it’s expected to make a second landfall. The scale of damage to infrastructure and agriculture in the Philippines is still being calculated, though early reports are grim. On Polillo Island, on the eastern coast, more than 300 hectares of rice and “100 percent” of banana crops have been destroyed, local officials said.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. serves in a secondary capacity as agriculture minister and has been criticized since Sunday for his response to Noru — the first weather disaster to hit the Philippines since he took office in June.
On Sunday evening, as evacuations were underway, he posted a video blog on social media recapping his recent trip to the United States, where he attended the U.N. General Assembly and met with President Biden.
“Our trip to New York was a success!” he tweeted.
Activists and political opponents criticized the video as insensitive and out of touch. Late Sunday night, the hashtag #NasaanAngPangulo — which translates to “Where is the president?” — was trending on Twitter.
Marcos said Monday that he preferred to leave the response to Noru primarily in the hands of local and state officials. “I will not land in any place,” he told reporters. “From my experience, when you’re with the local government, especially after a typhoon, they have a lot of work. … I might just disturb them.”
As Marcos embarked on an aerial inspection of Luzon on Monday morning, Pangibitan headed back out into his paddy field. The rows of rice stalks that had been standing upright a day earlier were bent over like they had been trampled by a huge crowd. A tree that had been felled by the wind blocked a dirt path heading deeper into the field.
“Wherever you look, it’s flat …” the farmer said, his voice trailing off as he walked along the side of the field, surrounded by puddles.
“My poor rice. How can I say it’s a good morning?”
Jhesset Enano reported from the Palawan Islands. Rebecca Tan reported from Singapore. | 2022-09-26T06:24:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Super Typhoon Noru devastates farmers in climate-vulnerable Philippines - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/26/philippines-noru-karding-typhoon-climate/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/26/philippines-noru-karding-typhoon-climate/ |
Giorgia Meloni’s triumph as the first woman to lead a winning party in the macho world of Italian politics is not a moment to celebrate, for she has brought the far right into the European mainstream, precisely a century after her Fascist forebear Benito Mussolini seized power.
It could take until the middle of next month to know the exact composition of the new Italian government. But polls on Sunday night crowned Meloni a clear winner. Italy’s new government is set to be a coalition led by Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, joined by the anti-immigrant League and Putin sympathizer Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.
What’s also certain is she has fractured an entente in European politics bringing a party with its roots in neo-fascism into power for the first time since World War II — at the helm of a founding country of the EU at that. Following the ascent of Sweden’s far-right Democrats this month as kingmakers in their governing coalition, the question is where could the next domino fall?
The far-right Vox, Spain’s third-largest political party, entered a regional government for the first time in March, and Meloni said last week she hoped her success will pave the way for it to gain greater power. In Portugal, the right-wing Chega (Enough) party took 12 seats in January elections this year, up from just 1 seat in 2019.
Divisive leaders are gaining traction amid the challenges posed by immigration, rising poverty, falling birthrates, the climate emergency, deindustrialization and youth unemployment. It would unite discontent in southern Europe with the EU’s eastern flank.
Meloni, who has been the head of the umbrella group European Conservatives and Reformists Party since 2020, has supported Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orban and voted against a motion in the European Parliament declaring Hungary to be an “electoral autocracy.”
Broadly, her victory also risks having a destabilizing effect on the heart of Europe: France.
In Paris, Emmanuel Macron lost his parliamentary majority earlier this year. Bringing extreme politics into the mainstream lends itself to Marine Le Pen and her national front, and also Jean-Luc Melenchon’s extreme-left party Nupes (Nouvelle Union Populaire Ecologique et Sociale). French far-right politician Eric Zemmour seized on Meloni’s win to claim her strategy of “uniting” parties on the right could be a winning one for France, too.
For one, the nation’s well-established institutions have historically provided ballast against political extremism, from the mafia attacks of the 1980s and 1990s to the rise of Berlusconi. Daniele Franco, current finance minister, Fabio Pannetta, who sits on the executive board of the European Central Bank, and Domenico Siniscalco, a former finance minister who has been vice chairman of Morgan Stanley International for more than a decade are all on the roster of potential candidates for finance minister under Meloni being considered by the Qurinial Palace, according to insiders. (President Sergio Mattarella has to approve the composition of the coalition).
Meloni is facing what is often called the “glass cliff”: When a woman finally gets significant power, it’s at a time of serious crisis when the risk of failure is the highest. For one, Meloni faces a worsening economy. Growth is forecast to slow to 0.4% from 3.3% in 2022, according to average of estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Her government will have limited room for maneuver because as it has to hit targets agreed with Brussels to get the full 260-billion euros of disbursements in post-pandemic funding flowing into Italy’s economy.
She’ll also be juggling unreliable political bedfellows and an electorate that has kicked out one government after another over the past 20 years. Meloni will lead Italy’s 68th government since 1946. In reporting up and down the country this week, from Rome, through Florence and Bologna to Milan, I repeatedly heard the same phrase in support of Meloni: “all the other politicians have failed us, so we may as well give her a go.”
The reasons for the long odds on a long-lasting government are already there. Her far-right coalition partners, Matteo Salvini of the League and Berlusconi, have yet to present a united front even on the campaign trail. A weak showing by Salvini’s League, which polls indicate received about 9% of votes collapsing from 30% in 2018, may strengthen Meloni’s hand and reduce the chance of coalition instability.
It doesn’t help Meloni that she has an untested team made up mostly of family and friends, including her brother-in-law. Her win has also come on the lowest voter turnout for an Italian election since World War II.
While Meloni has promised tax cuts — which could be a hard sell in Brussels considering the nation’s 150% debt ratio — she has made clear she wants to focus on cultural issues. Her campaign has focused on slamming migration, what she calls the LGBTQ+ lobby and defense of what she calls the “natural family.”Meloni has also borrowed from the extremists and nativists — from Orban to Tucker Carlson — who accuse George Soros of promoting the “ethnic substitution” of (white) Italians.
But with the economic outlook worsening, Meloni’s message may have limited reach at home. The greater risk is how far abroad she can spread it.
• Orban Wants No Mixed-Race Europe. Ready, CPAC?: Andreas Kluth
• ECB Hawks, Beware of What You Wish For: Marcus Ashworth | 2022-09-26T07:25:33Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Meloni’s Influence Could Be Greater in Europe Than at Home - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/melonis-influence-could-be-greater-in-europe-than-at-home/2022/09/26/2805a266-3d66-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/melonis-influence-could-be-greater-in-europe-than-at-home/2022/09/26/2805a266-3d66-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
By David McHugh, Justin Spike, Karel Janicek and Veselin Toshkov | AP
A worker cooks burgers at Zing Burger store in Budapest, Hungary, Monday, Sept. 12, 2022. Richard Kovacs, a business development manager for the Hungarian burger chain, said some of the chain’s 15 stores have seen a 750% increase in electricity bills since the beginning of the year – leading to additional monthly costs of up to 1.5 million Hungarian forints ($3,840) per store. (AP Photo/Anna Szilagyi) (Uncredited/AP) | 2022-09-26T07:25:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Lights out, ovens off: Europe preps for winter energy crisis - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/lights-out-ovens-off-europe-preps-for-winter-energy-crisis/2022/09/26/7293bff8-3d65-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/lights-out-ovens-off-europe-preps-for-winter-energy-crisis/2022/09/26/7293bff8-3d65-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
Protesters rally in Tokyo on Aug. 31 against the state funeral for former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated on July 8. (Kimimasa Mayama/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
TOKYO — For nearly two decades, public discussion of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s ties with the Unification Church was taboo in Japan. Now, the organization’s decades-long influence in Japanese politics is at the forefront of a political outcry.
Dignitaries are gathering in Tokyo this week to commemorate Japan’s longest-serving prime minister. But the event has put a spotlight on the scandal ensnaring the ruling party over its links with the church and use of taxpayer money for the state funeral of a leader who was popular abroad but divisive at home.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has apologized for his party’s cozy relationship with the church and vowed to sever relations. He reshuffled his cabinet, removing leaders with the strongest links to the group, and surveyed members to identify their relationships with the organization.
How Abe and Japan became vital to Moon’s Unification Church
The group became a reliable partner for the LDP in rallying against communism and left-wing protests through the 1960s. In the 1980s, conservative politicians began receiving endorsements, donations and grass roots support from the group, Suzuki said.
Watching Japan reckon with a rare shooting, through an American prism
Over those decades, Japan became the key profit center for the Unification Church and its offshoots, largely through door-to-door “spiritual sales” that often targeted grieving elderly people, according to several academic studies, government investigators and historians.
Who is Shinzo Abe, the former Japanese leader killed in a gun attack?
Yamagami’s story of grief and financial turmoil has drawn some sympathizers. Thousands have signed a petition advocating for a reduced sentence, and people have donated over $7,000 in cash, clothing, books and other items to Yamagami, according to Japanese news outlet Jiji Press.
His story is not unique, said Hiroshi Yamaguchi, a lawyer with the National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales, a Tokyo-based advocacy group. From 1987 to 2021, there were nearly 35,000 cases brought by defendants claiming about $863 million in damages from the Unification Church, according to the advocacy group’s website.
What are Japan’s gun laws? Abe killing shocks nation where shootings are rare.
“I really felt that it was a matter of time before something like this happened,” Yamaguchi said. “I have seen countless tragedies and difficulties faced by children of parents who are part of the Unification Church … I can easily imagine that Yamagami must have suffered in a similar manner.”
Marc Fisher in Washington contributed to this report. | 2022-09-26T07:26:40Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Japan weighs Unification Church’s influence amid Shinzo Abe memorial - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/26/japan-unification-church-shinzo-abe-assassination/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/26/japan-unification-church-shinzo-abe-assassination/ |
Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Sept. 23. (David Dee Delgado/Reuters)
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the conversation with Ukraine over the supply of U.S. weapons to aid the country’s war efforts is “ongoing,” including a request from Kyiv for Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, as the long-range missiles are commonly known.
“It’s not just having the weapons in hand, you’ve got to know how to use them, and that requires training,” he said.
U.S.-supplied HIMARS changing the calculus on Ukraine’s front lines
Blinken’s interview aired Sunday, the same day that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine had received sophisticated ground-based air defense systems from the United States. Kyiv had long requested the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System, known as NASAMS. The transfer was approved by Washington late last month and was part of an aid package announced in July.
A defense official said at the time that they would help Ukraine transition away from a Soviet type of air defense system to a modern system used by NATO.
The most advanced U.S.-provided system so far, the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, commonly known as HIMARS, has changed the battle on Ukraine’s front lines. It has the longest range of Ukraine’s ground weapons, nearly 50 miles, allowing Kyiv’s military to precisely strike Russian targets without endangering its own civilians in occupied territories.
Ukrainian officials lobbied for the HIMARS weapons system for two months before the transfer was approved — only on the grounds that Kyiv would not use it to launch cross-border attacks into Russia.
The ATACMS is a tactical missile with an even longer range than those currently being fired from HIMARS launchers — some 180 miles, according to manufacturer Lockheed Martin, giving Ukraine the technical capability to strike deep into Russia.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said earlier this month that supplying longer-range weapons would cross a “red line,” drawing the United States into the conflict.
Colin Kahl, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, said last month that Ukraine didn’t require ATACMS to strike targets “that are directly relevant to the current fight.”
Isabelle Khurshudyan contributed to this report. | 2022-09-26T08:35:15Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Blinken says talks with Ukraine over supplying weapons ‘ongoing’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/26/blinken-ukraine-weapons-60-minutes-nasams/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/26/blinken-ukraine-weapons-60-minutes-nasams/ |
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — The Miami Dolphins’ defense stopped Josh Allen and the Bills at the goal line late, then held again after punter Thomas Morstead bizarrely kicked the ball off a teammate and out of bounds for a safety in a 21-19 win over Buffalo.
TAMPA, Fla. — Aaron Rodgers threw for 255 yards and two touchdowns, and the Green Bay Packers withstood a late rally led by Tom Brady to hold off the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for a 14-12 victory.
NEW YORK — Tennessee and North Carolina State broke into the top 10 of The Associated Press college football poll, and Florida State is back in the rankings for the first time in four years.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Luis Castillo, fresh off signing a rich contract with Seattle, got chased as the Kansas City Royals erupted for 11 runs in the sixth inning and a wild, 13-12 win that cost the Mariners a chance to move up in the AL wild-card standings.
MIAMI — Don Mattingly will not be back as manager of the Miami Marlins next season, announcing that he and team officials have decided a new voice is needed to lead the club going forward.
ROGERS, Ark. — Atthaya Thitikul of Thailand closed with a 3-under 68 and birdied the second playoff hole to beat Danielle Kang and win the Walmart NW Arkansas Championship.
FORT WORTH, Texas — Tyler Reddick opened the round of 12 in NASCAR’s playoff with a victory at Texas, winning a week after being one of the first four Cup drivers knocked out of title contention. | 2022-09-26T08:57:32Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Weekend Sports In Brief - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/weekend-sports-in-brief/2022/09/26/b89778e4-3d6c-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/weekend-sports-in-brief/2022/09/26/b89778e4-3d6c-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
Biden and Trump appear to be nudging each other into a rare face-off between a sitting president and the predecessor he unseated
Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the final presidential debate of 2020, on the campus of Belmont University in Nashville. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
President Biden was at a Democratic reception in Maryland a few weeks ago when his rhetoric turned toward an increasingly frequent topic — “what Trump is doing and the Trumpers are doing.” An audience member called out, “Lock him up!,” and Biden went on to cite “the new polls showing me beating Trump by six or eight points.”
The country seems to be barreling toward a rematch that few voters actually want, but that two presidents — one current, one former — cannot stop talking about. Biden and Trump both say they are planning to make their decisions in the coming months, but with a lingering codependency between them, they each appear to be nudging the other into what would be a rare faceoff between the same two candidates four years apart.
Some 56 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said they want the party to nominate “someone other than Biden” in 2024, and 35 percent want him to run for a second term. Among those under age 40, a resounding 75 percent want the party to pick someone other than Biden, despite his recent action on climate change and student loan forgiveness, two issues thought to appeal to younger voters.
“I don’t think Biden has done a bad job by any means,” said Adam Kane, a 48-year-old museum director from Peacham, Vt., adding that he likes and respects Biden. “But it’s just time for some fresh leadership. He’s just too old, is what it comes down to. It’s time to pass the torch to the next generation.”
Biden, 79, will be celebrating his 80th birthday this November and is already the nation’s oldest president. Trump turned 76 in June.
Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are divided over Trump, with 47 percent saying the party should nominate him and 46 percent preferring someone else. It is a stronger showing than Biden’s, but it also reflects a marked drop in support from when Trump was in office; a 2019 Post-ABC poll found 67 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners wanted the party to nominate Trump for a second term.
If they were to run against each other, registered voters were split almost down the middle, with 48 percent supporting Trump and 46 percent supporting Biden, the Post-ABC poll showed, within the margin of error. In 2020, Biden won the national popular vote by 4.5 percentage points.
“Trump is too much, and Biden is too little,” said Howard Walker, a 54-year-old Democrat from New York. He voted for Biden in 2020, thinks Trump has turned the Republican Party into a cult and says a Trump victory in 2024 would mean the end of democracy. But he no longer views Biden as the best candidate.
“Sometimes he’s there, sometimes he’s not,” Walker said. “Sometimes he tells long grandma stories that go nowhere, which is what old people too. And that’s okay, but that’s not what we need in a president.”
Many Republican voters, similarly, say they would support Trump if that were their only option, but they are yearning for a new leader.
“It would be best if someone else is running,” said Karin Cabell, a 58-year-old Republican from Hazelton, Pa. “It would be nice to just have fresh blood on both sides.”
Biden and Trump, though, are in a sense each other’s nemesis, and both may have trouble walking away from a rematch.
Trump views Biden as having unfairly taken the presidency from him, creating elaborate explanations for why he lost that have no basis in reality. Biden views Trump as an existential threat to the country’s founding principles, and sees himself as uniquely positioned to prevent Trump from regaining power. Unseating Trump in 2020 remains one of Biden’s proudest accomplishments.
“Why would I not run against Donald Trump if he’s the nominee?” he asked in an ABC News interview in December.
The White House has recently seen an advantage in returning to a familiar foil, particularly heading into the midterm elections, and Biden has increasingly had Trump on his mind, or at least on his lips. “The only reason I ran is because Donald Trump was running,” he said at a June 10 fundraiser in Los Angeles.
At a Maryland fundraiser in late August, Biden called Trump’s “extreme MAGA philosophy” something that is “almost like semi-fascism.” It was a line that aides said later was unplanned, but unsurprising given Biden’s views. He also said “Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans have made their choice: to go backwards, full of anger, violence, hate, and division.”
Biden's rhetoric signals newly aggressive tack
Biden has been road-testing several phrases to brand the Republicans who follow Trump. He has called them “The Trumpies” and “ultra-MAGA” and “MAGA Republicans,” and he has declared that “this is not your father’s Republican Party.” He says there are still mainstream Republicans he can work with, but “there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.”
Biden has sharpened his focus on Trump and escalated his rhetorical attacks, to the point that his central political message is now the importance of keeping Trump and his followers from power.
“Folks, you can’t be pro-insurrection and pro-democracy. Not a joke. I’m being deadly earnest now. You can’t be pro-insurrection and pro-democracy,” he said in Maryland. “You can’t support law enforcement and call the mob that attacked the police on January 6th in the United States Capitol ‘patriots.’ ”
During remarks on Friday, he warned, “It’s become a litmus test in their party to pledge loyalty to Donald Trump by buying into the ‘big lie’.”
Similarly, Trump, in his recent rallies, can mention Biden nearly two dozen times in a single event, asserting that Biden is doing a much worse job as president than he did and boasting that he would easily win a rematch.
“A poll just came out. Did you see it?” he said at a Sept. 17 rally in Ohio. “I’m 18 points up on Biden. Who the hell wouldn’t be? Who wouldn’t be?”
Behind the soundtrack of Trump's Ohio rally
He criticized Biden over gas prices — both for allowing them to rise in the first place and for using petroleum reserves to lower them. And he insisted the reduced prices would not last (“Right after the election, it’s going to double up and go higher than anybody ever believed”).
“Trump was right on everything,” Trump continued. “And I believe I was. I was right on everything. Including Afghanistan and Ukraine. The Biden administration is outrageous.”
He also responded to Biden’s Sept. 1 speech in Philadelphia, where the president warned that Trump was seeking to tear apart the fabric of democracy, saying those remarks amounted to “the most vicious, hateful, and divisive speech ever delivered by an American president.”
He said Biden was in effect branding Trump supporters as “enemies of the state.” He added, “He’s an enemy of the state, you want to know the truth. The enemy of the state is him and the group that control him, which is circling around him: ‘Do this, do that, Joe, you’re going to do this, Joe.’ ”
One factor complicating Trump’s potential presidential run is the growing series of investigations and lawsuits against him, which appear to be picking up steam. Some analysts believe his legal troubles will make it harder for him to run, since he will need to devote time and resources to his legal defense. Others argue that Trump is even more likely to seek the White House now, as a form of protection against the legal challenges.
Trump faces growing legal trouble ahead of 2024
The United States has a rich history of presidential rematches, dating as far back as John Adams, who defeated Thomas Jefferson in 1796 only to lose to him four years later. But there are few direct parallels to what could transpire between Biden and Trump in 2024.
It is highly unusual for a sitting president to be unseated, then run against his successor. Most defeated presidents — George H.W. Bush was the last one — head into a quiet retirement from politics. In this, as in so much else, Trump is an anomaly, choosing instead to barnstorm the country to claim falsely that he was cheated.
The closest parallel to a potential Biden-Trump rerun may be the 1892 race between Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison. Cleveland served one term as president before being unseated by Harrison, then he tried to get his old job back, and ultimately succeeded.
Their second campaign focused largely on the same issue that had dominated the first, such as tariff rates, and it hardly electrified the nation. “No one showed much interest in the result,” historian Henry Adams wrote.
“The 1892 election was one of the quieter ones in American history,” said Troy Senik, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and author of “A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland.” “Because Cleveland spent much of it plagued by gout and Harrison was preoccupied with the health of his wife, who was fighting an ultimately fatal case of tuberculosis.”
Despite lively political cartoons — some referring to an out-of-wedlock child that Cleveland had allegedly fathered — the candidates lacked the mutual loathing of Biden and Trump. “Between the two candidates themselves, there didn’t appear to be animosity,” said Charles Hyde, president and CEO of the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site.
In fact, when Harrison was sworn into office in 1889, photos show the recently ousted Cleveland holding an umbrella over he head as the new president took the oath of office. A few years later — after Harrison defeated Cleveland, and Cleveland in turn defeated Harrison — some encouraged Harrison to run yet again in 1896, for a third head-to-head match.
“Harrison gave it some brief consideration, and then dispelled any notion he’d run again,” Hyde said. “After he lost the election of 1892, he said he felt like a man released from prison.” | 2022-09-26T09:18:49Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The Biden-Trump rematch, in many ways, has already begun - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/26/biden-trump-rematch/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/26/biden-trump-rematch/ |
Iman makes the case for fashion’s humanity
The pioneering icon is defending her image, and that of other Black models, from the forgetful fog of history
Supermodel Iman, an executive producer of the new "Supreme Models" documentary series on YouTube, at Apotheke NoMad in New York on Sept. 15. (Erik Carter/FTWP/hair by Nicole Newland; makeup by Keita Moore; styling by Jason Rembert)
NEW YORK — From the beginning, modeling was always meant to be a business proposition, not a flight of fancy or a personal indulgence. And so, fashion was a remarkable, lucrative ride for the woman who came to be known simply as Iman: the model whose swan’s neck made a world-weary editor swoon, the Black woman who dominated a runway with a walk that was more grace than va-va-voom, the refugee who arrived in New York from 7,000 miles away — an African woman wrapped in the sexist, racist and absurdist cliches that this country still attaches to the multitudes from the continent, the Middle East or our southern border.
“I was a refugee. I had family to take care of,” Iman recalls. “Get me the damn advertising. And that’s what I got. At my height, I was one of the top models with the most advertising campaigns. That’s what I wanted. That’s where my head was. I didn’t care if I had Vogue.” But, of course, she had Vogue covers, too. Virtually every international iteration. “It allowed me to not only take care of myself, but to take care of my parents, take care of my brothers, make sure they got a good education.”
Iman Abdulmajid hadn’t been a young girl who dreamed about high heels, fanciful clothes and cover shoots for glossy magazines, but rather one who envisioned a life in politics or international relations, which would have had her following in the footsteps of her father, who recently died and who was a diplomat. Instead, world events intervened, a roving photographer took her picture and made up a silly (but troublesome) story, and in 1975 the doors of the fashion industry swung wide to welcome a Black woman who decision-makers deemed enticingly exotic even as those same doors cracked open only grudgingly for Black girls from down the block or around the corner.
For years, Iman, 67, encapsulated the gnarly complexity of identity, diversity and representation. The fashion industry — and the wider culture — continues to sort through these issues with only modest success. Sometimes, it has seemed as though the forward trajectory of the past has stalled or simply been forgotten and we find ourselves celebrating the same victory over and over again.
In 1994, Iman launched a cosmetics brand with a color palette that catered to customers with skin tones in the many shades of almond, coffee and chocolate that the big firms ignored. In 2007, she took her style aesthetic, one influenced by her global travels, to shopping television and online. She involved herself in philanthropy in her birthplace of Somalia, as well as in the United States. And for the past decade, she has championed diversity in a fashion industry that had become more homogenous since her heyday in the 1980s. She did these things before Rihanna launched her Fenty line of cosmetics, before Kim Kardashian and her siblings built an aesthetic empire rooted in Black culture and before a host of celebrities and corporations began posting black squares on social media. Iman wasn’t necessarily the first in all the arenas in which she played, but she was foundational.
From the archives: A beauty's mark
Her history is part of the larger story of Black models which is the subject of “Supreme Models,” a six-part documentary series on YouTube based on Marcellas Reynolds’s 2019 book. Premiering Monday, the documentary puts the history of Black models — Karen Alexander, Veronica Webb, Joan Smalls, among many — on the record. They are as influential as the writers, musicians or actors who shape our understanding of who we are, but their impact is often overlooked.
“Fashion is important,” Reynolds says simply.
“Iman was the great ambassador for Africa, especially back then when we didn’t really see African people except in a National Geographic way,” he says. “And here was Iman, with her beautiful, accented English and speaking five languages. She opened the door for every African model who followed.”
Iman helped the culture shift its attitudes about beauty. She nudged it along. She signed on to “Supreme Models” as an executive producer to help ensure that people remember that Black beauty is political, powerful and ever-present.
“My image is my currency,” Iman says. “I have to protect that.”
As a working model, she defended her image from unflattering photography, the assault of age, and a fashion industry dominated by a Eurocentric point-of-view that often didn’t know how to fully celebrate her skin, her hair, her Africanness. “When that young girl is going to pick up that magazine, she’s going to see me. And I cannot be seen like however they want to see me, however they want to highlight me. I’ve got to get a hold of this, of my brown skin, of who I am. My dignity. My grace. That has to be shown so that young girls can see it.”
“That’s where representation matters,” she says.
Now, she’s defending her image, and that of other Black models, from forgetfulness, from the fog of history.
Iman arrives at The Mark hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for a late-afternoon meeting. She walks toward a booth in a softly lit corner of the restaurant, dressed in black trousers from the Frankie Shop, a green blouse from her Iman Global Chic collection and a Sergio Hudson blazer. When first asked about her attire, she seems surprised by the question, but quickly reels off the credits. But she wanted to be sure. So two days later, unsolicited, she emails confirmations. She is supportive of young Black designers such as Hudson. But she also has her limits.
“LaQuan (Smith) says, ‘I have to dress you.’ I said, ‘You know, I’m 67.’ So he said, ‘But you can show a little bit of skin.’ I said, ‘I can, but I should not.’ Dear God!”
Anyone expecting to see a spindly stilt of a woman would be both disappointed and pleasantly surprised. Iman is of a different generation of models, whose stature and physique more closely approximated that of mere civilians. She is, of course, thin. But she does not look breakable. She is tall. But she does not tower over those around her. More than anything, she has a notable presence — a head high, back straight, sure-footedness. And she is beautiful. Not quirky or eccentric or jolie laide, which is how no small number of today’s working models might be described. She is beautiful in the way that the word was used back before it was expanded to be more inclusive and democratic and nonjudgmental.
Her appearance is what made photographer Peter Beard, who was White, stop her on the street in Nairobi where she was a student and ask if he could take her picture. Her appearance is also what riled some African Americans after Beard declared Iman the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen and the fashion industry went gaga.
“I got it from both sides. I got it from both White and Black,” Iman recalls. White people exoticized her. Beard claimed he’d discovered her out in the African bush. “I always say, ‘I’m not a mango.’ ”
And some Black Americans were incensed that the industry had gone all the way to Kenya in search of a model of color instead of hiring those right in front of them. “It was an uncomfortable time,” recalls her friend Bethann Hardison, one of the fashion industry’s most outspoken advocates for diversity. “It was offensive to people who were American, Blacks that were here, from Chicago. That was offensive that they were making so much of this girl who was supposedly found in the bush. She came in on a very tough ride.”
At least one Black editor was convinced that the fashion industry embraced Iman simply because her narrow nose and fine lips aligned with a Eurocentric idea of beauty, which made her more palatable to White consumers. “African Americans were asking a legitimate question: ‘Why do we need African models when we have enough here. Why not give this group a chance?’ So it’s very legitimate,” Iman says. She was angry, however, when her features were described as White. “I have no White in me. I am pure Somali.”
This last point is important not simply as a statement of fact but as a matter of identity, as a way of maintaining a sense of herself after having to give up so much of her life’s foundation when she was still a child. She and her four siblings went from privilege to deprivation.
In the 1960s, her parents were involved in Somalia’s fight for independence and eventually her father became a diplomat stationed in Saudi Arabia. Because of restrictions on girls’ education there, Iman was sent to boarding school in Egypt.
In 1969, there was a coup in Somalia; the embassies closed; and the family returned home. In 1972, as government officials were being jailed and even executed, the family fled the country in the middle of the night, Iman recalls. She was 16 when they drove to the Kenyan border, crossed into the country on foot, and became refugees.
“I went from an ambassador’s daughter with chauffeur driven cars to: You’re on your own,” Iman says.
She was helped by the same kinds of nonprofit, nongovernmental agencies that continue to resettle those fleeing civil wars and uprisings. They helped her enroll at the University of Nairobi with her tuition paid for one year. “Organizations on the ground like that were the ones who made my life and my trajectory possible.”
With a knowledge of Italian, which she’d been taught in school — a vestige of Italy’s colonialist history in Somalia — she worked at the bureau of tourism translating brochures and fielding questions from Italian visitors.
The rest of her story has become a part of fashion lore. Beard saw her on the street and asked to take her picture. She reluctantly agreed but only after asking to be paid for her time. She set her fee at $8,000, which was the cost of her tuition. “Before I got into that situation, becoming a refugee, my mom always said, ‘Know your position as a woman. Know what you can walk away from,’ ” Iman says. “ ‘Don’t compromise yourself.’ ”
Fashion’s Racial Reckoning
The right people in fashion’s hierarchy saw the photographs. She flew to New York and signed on with Wilhelmina Models. Fame. Money. A starring role in the history of an industry that shapes our ideas about beauty, human value and identity.
“I was the little Black, gay boy on the south side of Chicago. In my grandmother’s house, there was Ebony and Jet. And in my mother’s house, there was Essence. Since going outside was a war zone for me, reading them transported me,” says Reynolds, 55. “I never met my father and there was an issue of Ebony with Iman on the cover with her first husband Spencer Haywood and her oldest daughter who was a little girl then. I was transfixed by the little girl. And I remember thinking, ‘This must be what it’s like to have a father.’ I held on to that issue of Ebony. I put it under my mattress. Other little boys are putting Playboy under there; I’m putting an issue of Ebony with a nuclear Black family on the cover.”
“Fashion is intrinsic to our humanity,” Reynolds says.
The book was a marathon. The documentary was a sprint.
“It took eight years for me to sell ‘Supreme Models.’ White men would tell me to my face that a book about Black women wouldn’t sell. I’m so surprised this documentary happened so soon after the book came out,” Reynolds says. “I think that’s a testament to where we are now. It’s the zeitgeist. We’re interested in Black stories.”
“Supreme Models" is a six-part documentary series on YouTube premiering on Sept. 26. (Video: Youtube Originals, Photo: Youtube Originals/Youtube Originals)
The documentary comes in the wake of the protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd. The first of three episodes previewed opens with an overview of the industry and the challenges facing Black women. Another is dedicated to the decisive moment in 1973 when Black models dominated the runway at a groundbreaking show at Versailles. Woven throughout are the origin stories of veterans such as Iman and Karen Alexander who worked regularly for Ralph Lauren, as well as younger Black women who have expanded the definition of diversity to include plus-size figures and the wearing of the hijab.
“Supreme Models” arrives as the fashion industry is once again looking inward and assessing how successfully it’s reflecting the culture. In fact, activists are litigating the same old offenses once again. Iman retired in 1989. Within 10 years, the industry had essentially barred Black models from the runways and magazines. Iman’s attention was focused on building her cosmetics brand; while she wasn’t looking, the runways had become increasingly less diverse.
“Once she learned what was going on she could become very infuriated,” recalls Hardison, a former model and talent agent. “She would start saying the models needed a union. … She’d say boycott. Once it was brought to her attention she became a real factor.”
Iman named would-be offenders. “I said, I think it was the BBC or the CNN, I said, ‘Listen, every woman I know, Black or White, covets the Celine bag.’ And I said, ‘I have never bought one and I will never buy one. As much as I’m responsible for my wallet, [designer Phoebe Philo] is also responsible for what she wants to do on her runway.’ ”
The Black Lives Matter Movement Hits a Different Kind of Wall
The Black Lives Matter movement has accelerated this chapter of change. A quick look at virtually any fashion magazine offers proof of a more diverse array of models — although as always, the industry is infatuated with a “look” and right now that means dark-skinned women. Perhaps the Black Lives Matter movement has solidified change so that it won’t slip away. Perhaps it will force more diversity in boardrooms and back offices.
During the 2020 summer of protests, Iman drove into the city from her home in Upstate New York to join protesters in Brooklyn. In that moment, she was not the financially secure entrepreneur who is first-name famous. She was Iman Abdulmajid who understood what it was like to be othered, to be viewed with suspicion, to be different. She was the former refugee who became an American citizen in 1977 but who refuses to lose her Somali accent with its rolling r’s because it’s one of the last vestiges of her heritage, just like her last name.
She never changed it even when she married David Bowie, né David Jones, in 1992. She didn’t change it after the September 11 terrorist attacks when getting to her home not far from Ground Zero required showing her identification and a surname like Abdulmajid gave people pause.
Iman is the model. Abdulmajid is everything else. And she, too, is fiercely protected. | 2022-09-26T10:15:26Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Iman makes the case for fashion’s humanity - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/26/iman-documentary-supreme-models/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/26/iman-documentary-supreme-models/ |
Jennifer Eller, a transgender woman and teacher, filed a discrimination lawsuit against Prince George's County public schools, claiming school officials did not take sufficient action when she was repeatedly harassed and threatened. (Family photo)
A transgender teacher in Maryland settled a harassment and discrimination lawsuit with officials in Prince George’s County schools, in an agreement that her lawyers said includes improvements in policies, procedures and training to protect transgender students and staff.
Jennifer Eller, who left the school system in 2017, also received financial compensation, according to her attorneys, who said they could not disclose the sum under the agreement. She said in an interview that she was “overwhelmed” after nearly four years of litigation and incidents of harassment going back more than a decade.
“The most important part of all of this for me is that there can be protections in place for trans adults and trans youth,” Eller said. “We live in a time when there’s so much legislation and argument and fear around transgender people. To have policies and procedures in place that help create a welcoming environment — there is nothing can match the relief and joy I feel knowing that these things are in place.”
Eller’s settlement comes as LGBTQ people have been under attack by governors and legislators around the country. In Virginia, the administration of Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) recently instructed schools to no longer allow students to use bathrooms and locker rooms in line with their gender identity. New state guidance says students should use school facilities and participate in sports according to the sex they were assigned at birth. It was a major setback for transgender students, but it is unclear if the move was legal, and some school systems have vowed to resist it.
In Maryland, the settlement came ahead of a trial that had been slated to begin Sept. 28. A settlement order, signed by U.S. District Judge Theodore D. Chuang, dismissed the case Sept. 19 after attorneys for Eller and the Prince George’s school system advised the court that they had reached an agreement.
The Prince George’s County school system did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Eller, 45, had reported harassment starting in 2011, when she came out to her principal and began living more openly as a woman while teaching English at Kenmoor Middle School in Landover. Students called her a pedophile, her complaint alleged, and an administrator told her to avoid skirts or dresses because it would make other people uncomfortable. A human resources representative called a note from her therapist about her transition “garbage” and insisted she appear as male, the filing said.
Twice she transferred to new schools.
At Friendly High School, Eller taught English classes, including AP English, and was the faculty sponsor for the National Honor Society and the Gay-Straight Alliance. She was regularly targeted for her gender identity, the complaint said, with students calling her “mister” or “he/she” or “it” or asking about her genitals.
In August 2012, a Friendly student and his friends encountered her in a parking lot and threatened to rape Eller and make her “their girlfriend,” the document said. Eller said she reported the threat but it appeared to go nowhere. The student denied it, and Eller was told there was nothing the administration could do, the complaint alleged.
When she filed formal complaints after four years, she alleges, school officials retaliated.
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission determined her claims had merit, finding reasonable cause to believe she had been treated unlawfully and retaliated against, according to her attorneys.
Her lawyers filed a federal suit in Maryland in December 2018, alleging that the Prince George’s school system, with roughly 130,000 students, violated constitutional protections and federal, state and county laws by discriminating against Eller on the basis of sex and transgender status. Eller was represented pro bono by a team of lawyers at Lambda Legal and Arnold & Porter.
‘This is about who I am’: Transgender teacher harassed at Md. schools, lawsuit alleges
Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, one of her attorneys, said that when the case was filed, protections for transgender students and staff employees in Prince George’s lagged behind other school systems in the region, including the District and Montgomery County. Now, he said, Prince George’s is on more equal footing — and as one of the nation’s largest school systems, it stands to affect decisions by other districts nationally, he said.
“We hope that this case can illustrate that these types of situations are not tolerable and are not lawful,” he said.
Eller, who lives in Northern Virginia and is pursuing a master’s degree in divinity studies, pointed out that transgender youth are at greater risk for suicide and other self-harm.
“To have in place school policies that affirm how a child understands who they are in their innermost being, that’s a policy that will help save lives,” Eller said. “That’s a policy that will help keep people safe.”
The two sides have been involved in conversations and consultations about improving and expanding policies and administrative procedures in Prince George’s schools over the past two years, said Gonzalez-Pagan. Three policies and five administrative procedures have been changed and adopted during that time, including at least one that was created anew, he said. All are considered part of the settlement.
“It doesn’t stop bad actors from existing, but it certainly provides the tools to address those situations and to allow for people to be heard and be seen by the school administration,” he said.
Especially important to Eller is an administrative procedure, adopted last year, that lays out what it means to be transgender, with a glossary of terms, and provides information about school records, pronoun use, confidentiality, school facilities, dress codes, athletic participation and other issues. It covers students and staff members.
Prince George’s County has agreed to maintain and enforce the new and revised policies and practices, along with using inclusive training protocols called SafeSchools and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Welcoming Schools, lawyers said.
“If these policies had been in place when I started my process,” Eller reflected, “I would have known what my protections were and what I can expect from folks. And that’s not to say everybody’s perfect or that everyone would follow it. But I think that it would have been different. I think it would have been a healthier environment for me.” | 2022-09-26T10:15:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Transgender teacher and Prince George’s schools settle harassment case - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/26/transgender-teacher-prince-georges-settlement/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/26/transgender-teacher-prince-georges-settlement/ |
An offshoot of the extremist movement called Negative48 is thronging Trump political events, causing tensions with the former president’s team.
Michael Brian Protzman, also know as Negative48 and the leader of a QAnon splinter group, talks with supporters before a rally for former president Donald Trump in Wilmington, N.C., on Sept. 23. (Madeline Gray for The Washington Post)
WILMINGTON, N.C. — Julie McDaniel can’t say for sure who started it. It might even have been her.
McDaniel was in the front section at a Trump rally earlier this month in Youngstown, Ohio, when the former president started wrapping up his speech by playing an instrumental score embraced by followers of the QAnon online conspiracy theory. She felt moved to raise her right hand and point to the sky — to God, she said. Soon everyone around her was doing it, too.
“It was spontaneous, it was it was like the domino effect,” said McDaniel, who also attended Friday’s rally here in Wilmington, N.C., coming from her home in the Chicago area. She objected to news coverage that condemned the gesture, with some comparing it to a Nazi salute. “It was an amazing, amazing moment, when you have the unity that everybody is there, and not only in this small group that was on the floor, but other people were doing it,” she said.
The group on the floor was an offshoot of the QAnon community called Negative48, a name that they say stands for the opposite of evil. They’ve become a fixture at Trump’s rallies this year. Numbering about 100, they can be spotted by their lanyards sporting as many as 16 commemorative buttons from each rally they have attended. Or see them wrap their arms around each other to sway to Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds” blasting over the loudspeakers. Or lining up to take selfies in front of the stage with their leader, a man in American flag pants named Michael Brian Protzman.
The FBI has warned that extremist movements such as QAnon — which loosely revolves around the baseless belief that the world is secretly run by Satan-worshipping child sex traffickers — is likely to motivate some people to criminal and violent acts. The ideology has already been implicated in multiple crimes, including several people arrested in the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and a recent murder in Michigan.
“Some people call QAnon a cult, but I like to spell it cult with a Q, Q-U-L-T, because it’s hard to find people that are on our same page,” said group member Kelly Heath from Georgia. “It’s a strange story. You’re not going to hear about it every day. It’s like saying that God’s coming, the world is changing, and we need it to change. There’s bad people that run the world, and they do bad things to kids, and it’s ugly.” Heath said the group included members who were themselves victims of sexual abuse as children.
As long as there have been Trump rallies, there have been roadies who follow him from city to city. Some have called themselves the “Front Row Joes,” like Saundra Kiczenski, who Trump called up to the stage in Anchorage in July because he liked her shirt covered with his face. Friday’s rally in Wilmington, N.C. was her 69th. Richard Snowden said the Wilmington rally would probably be his last, capping 80 events in 28 states across seven years. During his speech that night, Trump called out a few women from North Carolina who he said had been to 92 rallies, earning them a special invitation to Mar-a-Lago.
The Front Row Joes brought no agenda besides their undying love for Trump. The arrival of the QAnon group, however, has led to a silent standoff with Trump’s team, raising concerns that they could disrupt events, alienate other fans, distract from the former president’s message or generate bad publicity. The crew of crowd-control staff — male and female body builders in tight, silky green polos and black pants — keeps a close watch on the Negative48 group, telling them they can’t block the aisles with their dancing and, in Wilmington on Friday, working to head off another scene of index fingers pointing to the sky.
How a QAnon song became a soundtrack at Trump rallies
The Trump team’s tensions with Negative48 come even as the ex-president has more and more explicitly courted support from QAnon followers with social media posts that adopt the movement’s slogans and imagery.
“Together we are standing up against some of the most menacing forces, entrenched interests and vicious opponents our people have ever, ever seen,” Trump said in his speech on Friday. “Despite great outside dangers from other countries, our biggest threat remains the sick, sinister and evil people from within our own country.”
QAnon followers search for hidden meaning in cryptic messages from a supposed military leader with the code name “Q” and in Trump’s own pronouncements. The Negative48 spinoff focuses on deciphering meaning using a takeoff of gematria, an ancient Hebrew tradition of assigning numeric values to letters. (Forty-eight, the group says, is the value of the word “evil.”)
One man with the group who didn’t identify himself illustrated how it worked using the name of this newspaper. “The Washington Post?” he said. “W is 23 in the alphabet. P is 16. Thirty-nine. Angel 39. Which angel? Lucifer was an angel.”
The group made headlines last year when members gathered in Dallas expecting to see the resurrection of John F. Kennedy Jr. In January, they decided to start attending every Trump rally in 2022. Protzman, their leader, said he wasn’t available for an interview and declined to set another time to talk. Other members were mysterious about their reasons or goals for coming to Trump rallies.
“We learned gematria from Michael in Dallas,” said Melissa Cole, who was at the rally in Wilmington with two 13-year-olds and a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel in a stroller. “We have traveled around together, some of us go home, some of us go back and forth, but collectively we’re all learning together from him … We’re standing for the 2020 election, it was stolen from us.”
While the Negative48 group has become a prominent feature of recent Trump rallies, they clearly don’t represent the whole crowd. Many others interviewed in Wilmington were Carolinas residents, local Republican activists and Trump supporters attending an in-person rally for the first time.
But it would be equally inaccurate to describe the Negative48 group as total outliers. Other attendees who weren’t part of the group came wearing QAnon slogans or eager to discuss their belief, or at least curiosity, in the movement’s theories.
“Biden is a fraud, he’s an actor,” said a woman in an “I TQLD YOU SO” T-shirt who declined to give her name. “He died in 2019.”
“You know Joe Biden’s not the president,” she said. “That’s someone playing Joe Biden. It is. I know you want to laugh. I’m not joking.”
Lisa: “You’ve heard of Agenda 2030?”
Kip: “Do you do any research?”
Lisa: “You know about the Georgia Guidestones?”
Kip: “You gotta do some research, brother.”
Elsewhere at the rally, Eileen McDermott said she’d only started to explore gematria, but she believed there were coded messages in Trump’s speeches, executive orders and musical selections. She said her devotion to Trump became a strain on her relationship with her daughters, but eventually they accepted that if they wanted to have a relationship with her they had to let her be her.
“I think Donald Trump wants people to use their brains to think, and I think he wants us to figure out what he’s saying,” she said. “It’s all going to be exposed, it’s just a matter of time.”
When an ad came over the loudspeaker for Trump’s official presidential photo album that sells for $75, McDermott proudly noted that she bought two copies: one to let guests leaf through and one to keep stored away in mint condition. She said she spent $2,000 to fly from Southern California just for Friday’s rally.
Arriving early, she went to a nearby beach to watch the sunset and she noticed a glow in the eastern sky — almost like there was a second sun. McDermott said she isn’t sure about that one yet, she needs to do more research. | 2022-09-26T10:19:48Z | www.washingtonpost.com | How a QAnon splinter group became a feature of Trump rallies - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/26/trump-qanon-rallies-negative48/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/26/trump-qanon-rallies-negative48/ |
Fifty years on, Arbus’s photographs look very different in this ingenious gallery exhibition.
Diane Arbus, Triplets in their bedroom, N.J., 1963 (The Estate of Diane Arbus)
NEW YORK — People have been getting Diane Arbus wrong for so long and in so many ways that you could devote a lifetime to analyzing what all the false projections reveal — not about Arbus, but about her critics.
It is now 50 years since the Museum of Modern Art staged the posthumous retrospective that established the Arbus legend. In re-creating the retrospective at its West 20th Street gallery in New York’s Chelsea, David Zwirner (collaborating with Fraenkel Gallery) has the cultural event of this fall on its hands.
Before Arbus took her own life in 1971, she made photographic portraits of society women, crying babies, nudists, people with developmental disabilities and people wearing masks, as well as sex workers, twins, individuals with dwarfism, teenage couples and cross-dressers. Or, as her brother, the poet Howard Nemerov, put it, “freaks, professional transvestites, strong men, tattooed men, the children of the very rich.” (The show’s promotional image fits that last category: It’s Arbus’s brilliant photograph of journalist Anderson Cooper as a baby, his sleeping face uncannily resembling a death mask.)
The 1972-1973 Arbus show, then the most highly attended one-person show in MoMA’s history, operated like a depth charge — initially in the rarefied world of art photography (a disputed category in those days) and then in the culture at large. Few people had heard of Arbus while she was alive. Then suddenly, within a year of her death at 48, everyone knew her, everyone had a strong opinion and — perhaps most notably — no one doubted that photography could be art. “People went through that exhibition as though they were in line for Communion,” John Szarkowski, a MoMA photography curator who championed her work, once commented.
The Zwirner display is ingenious. It enacts the problem (a surfeit of commentary, a fire hose of controversy) and then magically sheds it. As you walk into the gallery, you behold a wall covered with excerpts from writings about Arbus:
“Arbus’s work shows people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as horrible, repulsive, but it does not arouse any compassionate feelings.”
“Her subjects are all flesh, they have very few resources — they don’t have a lot of mind.”
“[Arbus] shows us people, so locked into their physical and mental limitations, that their movements are meaningless charades. They are losers almost to a man.”
“In photographing dwarfs you don’t get majesty and beauty. You get dwarfs.”
And so on. The show coincides with the publication of an almost 500-page book, “Diane Arbus: Documents,” that reprints more than 50 years of Arbus criticism by everyone from Hilton Kramer, Hilton Als and Robert Hughes to Susan Sontag, Germaine Greer and Janet Malcolm.
But the wall of text is like a curtain, or the meniscus on a body of water. You cross the threshold into the show like a masked snorkeler on a blustery day who puts his head under. Suddenly, you’re in a new element, a different universe. It’s quiet. You’re on your own. There’s no text in sight, not even a title. It’s just you and Arbus’s photographs, her gallery of characters — the same 113 pictures that made up her MoMA retrospective 50 years ago.
Seeing the exhibition in 2022 underscores the extravagance of many of the reactions to Arbus. It also offers a great chance to dispense with the silliness.
The debate Arbus has generated for 50 years always revolves around the question of “freaks.” The problem has generally come in the form of two questions: Why was she attracted to these subjects? And did she somehow betray or traduce them, hold them in contempt or unjustifiably exploit them?
This is all, it can seem, that anyone wants to ask of her work.
Arbus’s subjects were not as wide-ranging as the subjects of, say, Walker Evans or Robert Frank. Her work is focused in a way that makes it clear she is trying to tell you something. But her images of the institutionalized, the physically abnormal, the socially irregular and the otherwise marginalized make up only part of her oeuvre. It’s crucial for any understanding of her work that they be seen alongside all her other pictures.
The other pictures, which show men and women of elevated or unremarkable social status and babies and children (who were too young to have any meaningful status), are just as important as her photographs of so-called freaks. They all relate. And as the feelings evoked by each image are inevitably displaced onto the others, they add up to an idea that deepens as her photographs accumulate.
The idea is simple. It is, in short, that we are like monkeys at a tea party. All of us. What’s more, we are in denial. We finesse and accessorize our self-image, but those very accessories (in Arbus’s world they may be leopard-skin pillbox hats, strings of pearls, Halloween masks, tight jeans, tattoos, tidy bourgeois interiors, boaters, bow ties or even brazen, dare-you-to-object nakedness) are continually giving away the game.
Bob Dylan once mockingly sang that a leopard-skin pillbox hat “balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine.” But to Arbus, who began as a fashion photographer, the various forms our denial takes were not contemptible. They were strange, riveting, poignant.
Arbus was as averse to sentimentality as she was free from disgust or contempt. Her insight was not in itself original. Nonetheless it deepened in her hands in unique ways. That she was a photographer and not a painter or sculptor was crucial to her expression of the “we’re-all-monkeys-at-a-tea-party” idea.
For decades, we’ve been drilled in all the ways in which the camera lies. But cameras also reveal a lot of facts. You can point them at subjects that interest you, but they remain disinterested. The reason we dislike about nine out of every 10 photographs we see of ourselves is not because those nine are false, but because they reveal things we don’t like to acknowledge.
Precisely because the camera, with its special evidential authority, can make us look ridiculous, we say it is cruel. We are on guard against the professional photographer’s power, which we imagine as a sort of rolling, unspoken negative assessment (“You don’t realize how ridiculous you look”). We hope only that, taking pity, the photographer will conspire with us to overturn the camera’s (as we see it) negative bias.
But Arbus accepted the camera’s tendency to reveal what is really there. She found the phenomenon interesting. She didn’t try to leverage it into a rhetoric of cruelty, nor did she try to transform it into a self-congratulatory orgy of empathy, much less a “celebration” of people’s “identities.” She saw too much internal division, in herself and in others, to believe in “identity.”
Susan Sontag, who set the agenda for all the wrongheaded ways of thinking about Arbus in a 1973 essay for the New York Review of Books, didn’t like this absence of advertised empathy. Arbus used her camera, Sontag wrote, as a “kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed.”
But this is tendentious. Passports don’t “annihilate” boundaries; they just permit you to cross them. You can say Arbus exploited a “passport” to amorality if you like. But what artist isn’t interested in the gaps between our instincts and inhibitions, between our private selves and the selves we present in public? Arbus was simply one of the first to recognize the camera’s unique way of revealing them.
According to Sontag, Arbus created “a world where everyone is an alien, hopelessly alienated.” But this, too, is off-base. Look to the photographs. Arbus captured expressions of exuberance, delight in companionship, parental tenderness, self-love, piercing intelligence, ironic fatigue, suavity, bathos, aggression, perplexity and various expressions of curiosity about (or boredom with) the process of having one’s photograph taken.
To Arbus, it was all engrossing. And what made it poignant was the impossibility, finally, of being the people she photographed, of entering their minds, which she clearly yearned to do. Arbus was a complicated person. Depressive, restless and sexually adventurous, she craved intense experiences. But it was her complexity that allowed her to see and capture the complexity and unknowability of her subjects.
Her success had its moral effect, which is obvious to anyone who sees her pictures today. Arbus’s cross-dressers and nudists, her people with Down syndrome and Halloween celebrants, no longer look like “freaks.” They look like what they are: fellow human beings. We can look at the subjects them with as much honesty as we can muster when we look at ourselves. And we needn’t pity them any more than we pity ourselves.
Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited Through Oct. 22 at David Zwirner’s 537 West 20th St. gallery, New York. davidzwirner.com/exhibitions. | 2022-09-26T10:28:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Diane Arbus was accused of exploiting ‘freaks.’ We misunderstood her art. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/26/diane-arbus-exhibit-zwirner/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/26/diane-arbus-exhibit-zwirner/ |
She got arrested for slapping her allegedly unfaithful husband. (Charges were quickly dropped.) Her fans always have her back.
Michelle Branch performs at 9:30 Club on Sept. 19. The singer-songwriter has been on a brief tour to support her new album “The Trouble With Fever.” (Farrah Skeiky for The Washington Post)
After one of the worst nights of her life last month, part of which she spent in jail, Michelle Branch did something that generally makes a bad situation worse: She went on the internet. And then read the comments.
Branch, 39, the pop-rock singer-songwriter who was part of the “TRL” class of the early aughts, has kept her private life relatively quiet until August, when she tweeted that her husband, Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney, 42, cheated on her with his band’s manager while she was home with their 6-month-old daughter. That night, police were called to the couple’s Nashville house and Branch was arrested and charged with domestic assault after she admitted to slapping Carney “one or two times” in the face. The case was dismissed shortly after; Branch filed for divorce, but proceedings were paused and they are in the process of a possible reconciliation.
First, Branch would like to clarify that she’s “horribly embarrassed” by what happened. “Violence is never the answer,” she said in an interview this month; the incident occurred just before the September release of Branch’s first new album in five years, “The Trouble With Fever,” resulting in a suddenly very personal press tour. “I do not condone violence. That’s the biggest thing I want to say.”
But also, Branch was taken aback by the online reaction — in what may be a Twitter first, the comments actually helped. “I was reading the funniest tweets about like, ‘Oh, I would have done much worse,’ ” she said. “I think my favorite thing was someone was making ‘Free Michelle’ T-shirts with my mug shot on it and saying how they saw me wearing the ‘Free Winona’ shirt in 2001. … I was like, ‘Wow, the internet does not disappoint.’ ”
A sampling of what was out there:
“Legally what @michellebranch did was wrong. But I will ride at dawn to protect her.”
“I will go to war for Michelle Branch.”
“‘Everywhere’ by Michelle Branch was the first song I learned on guitar, and I will defend her until my dying day.”
“Who in their right minds would cheat on angel MICHELLE BRANCH.”
One tweet in particular captured the underlying reason for the intense support:
“I suspect those hurting the pop stars who personally sculpted the emotional dimensions of millennials are unprepared for the Ride or Die with Nothing to Lose power they are unleashing.”
It’s true — millennial adoration of Michelle Branch is fierce and unapologetic, and the opening notes of her hits such as “Everywhere,” “All You Wanted” and “Are You Happy Now?” (the yearning soundtracks to countless teenage crushes and heartbreaks) will cause certain people from the ages of 26 to 40 to go feral. The acoustic guitar combined with Branch’s crystal clear vocals instantly transport a significant portion of the population back to the simpler times of watching MTV after school, dramatic AIM away messages and piling friends into a car fresh off getting a driver’s license and cranking up the radio.
Early 2000s nostalgia fuels our culture — just look at the most recent Super Bowl halftime show — and Branch is a perfect vehicle for it. She rocketed to fame as a teen musical savant who co-wrote her entire 2001 major-label debut album, the multiplatinum “The Spirit Room,” followed by the smash “Hotel Paper” two years later. She’s well-aware of the importance those albums have for a particular age demographic. On a brief cross-country tour that concludes Tuesday in Los Angeles, she’s the opposite of an artist who hates playing the hits that made them famous.
“I will never get tired of the way that an audience reacts when I play the first few notes of ‘Everywhere,’ ” she said. “That will never get old to me. I love those songs.”
And after everything that happened in the past month, and surviving the last 2 1/2 years of the pandemic as a mother of three, she was eager to be in an emotional yet friendly space. “It felt good to see that people were so supportive,” she said. “I feel like people are going to show up to the shows so ready to sing along. And that will just be extremely cathartic.”
Branch’s tour stopped in Washington last week at the 9:3o Club, and as expected, the venue was packed with fans in their 20s and 30s, scream-singing their old favorites at eardrum-shattering levels, a 90-minute escape into the glorious nostalgia of youth.
“They were just the quintessential songs of high school — a tiny bit angsty but also super catchy,” said Alyssa Green, 36.
“We were in late elementary school, early middle school, and I feel like those were critical times where you just remember everything,” said Rebecca Bailey, 30.
“Her voice is so unique,” Marissa Bricker, 27, added. “It’s not overproduced, it’s simple. When you do hear it, it takes you back to your roots.”
Michael Cadoch, host of the Planet 2000’s podcast, devoted an episode to “The Spirit Room” last fall after receiving many requests from listeners. He theorized one reason Branch still stands out is that she arrived amid the spate of young female pop stars — Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, Mandy Moore — who seemed “prepackaged.” Branch, who wrote her own music and taught herself to play guitar growing up in Sedona, Ariz., seemed truly authentic and artistic.
“I didn’t feel like there was any ‘This is what she has to wear, this is what she has to do,’ ” Cadoch said. “It was the first time I had seen a female singer like that.”
At 9:30 Club, every person interviewed had seen the news of Branch’s personal life upheaval, and it changed none of their feelings toward her. Branch didn’t allude to it at all, and kept her between-song banter casual (“It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a room with sweaty strangers … I’m never going to take it for granted”). She smiled at the explosive reaction to her older hits, including the wrenching “Goodbye to You” and a slow jam version of her Grammy-winning collaboration with Santana, “The Game of Love.”
“You hear those songs over and over and it’s cemented in this era of life … that time is very important to people, and she’s associated with that,” Cadoch said. “She wrote those songs — she still does — and we’ve got to protect her.”
One new track that got the biggest cheer at the concert was “I’m a Man,” which includes the line, “I’m so tired of being told by everybody / That I can’t make decisions ’bout my own damn body.” There was rampant speculation that she wrote the song in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning Roe v. Wade, but she actually penned it in 2020.
“It’s crazy how we haven’t made much progress in the grand scheme of things,” said Branch, recalling that after she had her third emergency C-section earlier this year, her doctor advised her not to have more children. But when she asked about getting her tubes tied, she found out her Catholic hospital didn’t allow the procedure.
“I know that there are so many people who have story after story after story, and it’s to me the most shocking that we’re here in 2022 and this is happening,” Branch said. “As a writer, I think when I was younger, I would have maybe shied away from hitting some of those topics. But as I’ve gotten older, you can’t afford not to anymore.”
One complication of “The Trouble With Fever” is that Carney co-produced the entire album with Branch when they were isolating during the pandemic — Branch had to play most of the instruments as they recorded in their garage-turned-home studio. With Carney as her creative partner for seven years, she can’t talk about the album without talking about him.
“In a perfect world, you know, I wouldn’t be in this situation. And in a perfect world, I’m hopeful that we can figure out a way to move forward and stay together. How I feel changes by the hour,” Branch said. (She and Carney have two children together; she also has a 17-year-old with her ex-husband, musician Teddy Landau.) “But I will say that the relationship I have with Patrick creatively is so important to me. And our drama of what’s going on in our marriage doesn’t overshadow our work.”
A major theme of the record is self-examination, as Branch reflected on her younger days. After back-to-back hits with her first two albums, her success continued with a country album in 2006 made with her friend and singer-songwriter Jessica Harp as the duo the Wreckers. After the duo split, Branch got stuck in record-label limbo and didn’t release her next album until 2017.
As she looks back, Branch wishes she could tell herself to try to soak everything in, even during the whirlwind of sudden fame. And that no matter what the industry dictates, the best way to maintain a career and connection to the audience is to stay yourself.
“When I was coming up, people were so quick to try to kind of pit people against each other as a competition, especially young women singer-songwriters,” she said. “If I could tell anybody younger: Do what makes you uniquely you. And there’s room for everybody.” | 2022-09-26T10:28:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Michelle Branch is sorry for getting arrested. Her fans always have her back. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/26/michelle-branch-interview-arrest/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/09/26/michelle-branch-interview-arrest/ |
Militaries around the world are fighting a new enemy: wildfires, floods and extreme heat.
A Slovenian Army helicopter carries water with a bambi bucket to the wildfire near Debni Vrh in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on Aug. 18. (Špela Škulj for The Washington Post)
KOSTANJEVICA NA KRASU, Slovenia — The wildfire was exploding across Slovenia’s dry mountainsides, burning up pine trees and blotting out both the sun and the ground. Lieutenant Colonel Aleš Ogrinc needed to call on all his military training as he steered his combat helicopter toward the flames to drop a payload of water.
In his 30-year career, he had deployed to Bosnia and Kosovo. This time the enemy was Slovenia’s largest-ever blaze, during the hottest European summer on record.
“You have different motivations,” Ogrinc said. “If you’re in Afghanistan or Iraq, that’s a common goal, but here you are fighting for your home, for your country.”
European militaries are fighting fires this summer that are burning with ever greater scope and intensity, battling record blazes across a continent that is also seized by war in Ukraine and the need to defend against an increasingly dangerous Kremlin. From the high cliffs of Portugal to the stony mountains of Greece, militaries have been the wildfire responders of last resort, bringing air resources and logistical capabilities that far outmuscle their civilian counterparts.
“In this situation with Ukraine and wildfires, we are in a dilemma how to balance,” Major General Robert Glavaš, the commander of Slovenia’s military forces, said in an interview. “At one point you need to decide what is important, this or that.”
The challenge is also increasing in the United States, where National Guard members devoted more than 172,000 personnel days to fighting fires last year, compared to 18,000 in 2019, according to U.S. Army figures.
Slovenian leaders say they need to prepare their military for a future in which there are more intense wildfires. They want to make it easier for the armed forces to get involved in disaster deployments. And they want to invest in military equipment that can also be used for firefighting.
Slovenia’s defense spending is among the lowest in the NATO security alliance, at 1.22 percent of gross domestic product annually. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Slovenian policymakers pledged to reach the NATO guideline, 2 percent, by 2030. They say they need to be ready for wildfires and to increase conventional combat preparedness at the same time.
“There will be these disasters of fires or floods. It will be more and more common,” Defense Minister Marjan Šarec said in an interview. “We must spend our money for everything that is needed. Because safety has no price.”
“It’s not a dilemma of cannons or butter,” said Šarec, who has also been a volunteer firefighter. “As a serious country we must do both.”
But military leaders say the dual-headed challenge can sometimes be significant, and even contradictory.
“Our training is going on in a military way. Exercises. How to use military equipment, how to fight, how to protect. How to defend,” said Glavaš, the head of Slovenia’s military command. “When you stop this training and you go to civilian tasks you need to focus your mind from fighting to something else. It’s very hard sometimes.”
He said that fighting fires “definitely” had an impact on combat readiness.
So far this year, wildfires have consumed almost 3,000 square miles of territory in the 27 nations that make up the European Union — far outpacing the previous maximum of 2,300 square miles as of Sept. 17. Europe began collecting wildfire data in 2006.
This year’s wildfires are nearly three times bigger than the average between 2006 and 2021. For weeks from June through August, heat domes settled across Europe, snapping temperature records, causing droughts and turning the continent’s forests into kindling.
The fire in Slovenia started July 17 in the mountains that push up against the village of Kostanjevica na Krasu, a settlement of about 300 people who live around a few winding streets. The town is perched in the Karst region, which borders Italy. The area is forbidding. Its dry rocky soil makes farming a challenge. The wind blows so fiercely that locals must weigh down their clay-tiled roofs with rocks to keep them from tumbling away. And locals know not to stray too far from established trails because fighting in World War I was so fierce that the hills there are still peppered with unexploded ordinance.
“It was obvious it was going to be a hard summer, fire-wise, but we were not prepared for this,” said Boris Budal, the deputy commander of the fire brigade in nearby Sezana, which helped battle back the flames. “This outgrew our capabilities.”
This year the pine forests were dry and the underbrush was unkempt, perfect fuel for a fire that quickly gusted out of control. At night, the wind whipped the fire in one direction. Once the sun rose, the air started going another way, helping to spread it across the mountainsides. Immature pine cones heated up and popped open with flames. And on the ground, the leftover munitions kept exploding, making it impossible for firefighters to enter the forests by foot.
The fire needed to be fought from the sky — so the military was called in to supplement civilian firefighting aircraft with helicopters and heat-imaging drones. In the end, seven nations deployed their militaries to help Slovenia, including three that border Ukraine and have been nervous about the war spilling over their borders. Slovakia sent a Black Hawk military helicopter. Romania sent three air force planes. Hungary sent two combat helicopters with a crew of 13 people.
A helicopter crew “just departed to #sLOVEnia to help our allies and close friends to fight huge #wildfires #StrongerTogether #WeAreNato,” Slovakian Defense Minister Jaro Nad tweeted at the time.
“The whole cooperation with the military was larger than ever before,” said Budal, who has been a firefighter for 40 years.
No one died in the fire, but it consumed 15 square miles of forest in Italy and Slovenia. On the Slovenian side, it was triple the size of the previous record.
“A neighbor called me to say, ‘The fire is approaching the village, you should come right away. But I can’t guarantee your house will still be there,’ ” said Marjana Lavrič, a local journalist who lives in Brestovica pri Komnu, a valley village just over a mile from the Italian border. From the garden where she grows grapes, lavender and rosemary, the charred trees are less a hundred yards up steep, rocky hills.
She said that even after the immediate threat of the fire had passed, it was still possible to see the trees smoldering as she watched from her house, a 19th-century former seminary, at night. Weeks later, among the charred trees, plants had already begun to sprout, including spindly green stalks of wild asparagus.
Residents said they appreciated the help from the military — even if some of them said they were skeptical of military spending more broadly.
“We really thought the village was going to burn down,” said Maja Visenjak Limon, a freelance translator who lives in Hudi Log, a settlement of a few houses at the summit of a steep, switchback road, which was completely enveloped by flames. “I was told they were going to try to wet around the house with the water they had left.”
She and her husband were told to evacuate three times. Each time, they thought they might never see their home again. They could see a military helicopter making runs out their back windows. But in the end, they — and their possessions — survived.
“A lot of people say, ‘Do we really need a military force? It can’t be big enough to do any damage,’ ” Visenjak Limon said. “People were saying, at last they’re finally doing something.”
“Climate change poses a serious risk to countries in the alliance, and we need to use our collective power to address that risk,” said Erin Sikorsky, a former top U.S. intelligence official focused on climate change who is now the director of the Center for Climate and Security, a Washington-based research center. “I think that does create some debate or tension between countries in NATO as they work it out.”
This summer, Sikorsky started keeping a record on Twitter of countries that deployed their militaries to fight fires, floods or other climate-related natural disasters. Her list, so far, is 49 emergencies long, from Argentina to Pakistan to Bulgaria to Jackson, Miss.
“You’re seeing it more and more in all different parts of the world,” Sikorsky said.
Some experts warn that if militaries are increasingly getting pulled into natural disasters, they need to do more planning.
“It’s really a question of organization. Are we going to use the military as a backup? Some people think that’s wise,” said Alice Hill, who worked on climate change and resilience on the Obama-era National Security Council and is now at the Council on Foreign Relations. “If you’re using that as a backup, what happens if those needs grow exponentially, as they are doing?”
Nejc Trušnovec contributed to this report. | 2022-09-26T10:29:00Z | www.washingtonpost.com | As wildfires grow, militaries are torn between combat, climate change - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/26/europe-military-wildfires-warming-slovenia/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/26/europe-military-wildfires-warming-slovenia/ |
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) at a news conference in Tallahassee Fla., on Sunday as the state braces for what is now Hurricane Ian. (Alicia Devine/Tallahassee Democrat/AP )
The National Hurricane Center upgraded Ian to a hurricane early Monday, as the storm intensifies and heads toward the coast of Florida this week, on its way to becoming the first significant hurricane to hit the state since 2018.
But first, it is expected to slam western Cuba as a “major” hurricane on Monday night — bringing with it “significant wind and storm surge impacts,” according to the agency’s latest advisory.
Major hurricanes are Category 3 or above and pack sustained winds of more than 111 mph.
Florida is under a state of emergency, which Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) expanded from two dozen counties to the entire state Saturday afternoon, warning that residents could see power outages, fuel disruptions and flooding.
“It really is important to stress the degree of uncertainty that still exists,” DeSantis said at a briefing Sunday.
He warned that the storm could make landfall across hundreds of miles in West and Central Florida, depending on how it develops. “I would also say to other Floridians, even if you’re not necessarily right in the eye of the path of the storm, there’s going to be pretty broad impacts throughout the state,” DeSantis said.
Some areas of the state are heeding that advice. Officials in many parts of the Tampa Bay region have announced that schools would begin shutting down Monday and stay closed through at least Thursday, because some school buildings would be converted into emergency shelters if evacuation orders are issued.
A tropical storm warning — a forecast for the possibility of sustained wind speeds of 39 to 73 mph within 36 hours — was issued by the National Hurricane Center on Sunday night for the lower Florida Keys, from Seven Mile Bridge southward to Key West. It was still in effect Monday morning, as well as for three provinces on Cuba’s northern shore and for the Dry Tortugas National Park off the coast of Florida.
Experts also are predicting that the storm’s effects could stretch into Georgia and across the East Coast.
The storm’s track and intensity remain uncertain as it approaches the U.S. mainland. Computer models are divided on whether Ian will come ashore along Florida’s west coast on Wednesday into Thursday, or chart a course nearer to the Panhandle on Thursday into Friday.
At 5 a.m. Monday, Ian was centered about 90 miles southwest of Grand Cayman and was churning to the northwest at 14 mph. Its peak winds were 75 mph, and it was expected to strengthen more rapidly on Monday and Tuesday. The storm will be moving over exceptionally warm waters, which are expected to fuel its intensification.
North Florida, the Florida Panhandle and portions of the Southeast may be hit with heavy rainfall on Thursday, Friday and into Saturday, the hurricane center said.
Ian is predicted to peak as a 130 mph Category 4 hurricane west of the Florida Straits on Tuesday, which would make it the strongest September hurricane to pass through the Gulf of Mexico since Rita in 2005.
President Biden approved an emergency declaration Saturday for Florida, authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate disaster-relief efforts and provided more federal funding.
The Florida National Guard has activated 2,500 troops, DeSantis said, adding: “If there’s a need for more, then we can do more.” He warned on Sunday for residents of the state to “expect heavy rains, strong winds, flash flooding, storm surge and even isolated tornadoes.”
Western Cuba faces 6 to 10 inches of rain and locally as much as 16 inches, potentially triggering flash flooding and mudslides through Thursday, according to the National Hurricane Center. Heavy rainfall is also forecast over the Cayman Islands, where 3 to 6 inches — and a maximum of 8 inches — are possible.
Ian is the sixth named storm to form this month, coming on the heels of a record-quiet August, during which not a single named storm formed.
Annabelle Timsit, Jason Samenow and Tim Craig contributed to this report. | 2022-09-26T10:29:07Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Ian strengthens to hurricane as it churns toward Cuba, Florida - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/26/hurricane-ian-florida/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/26/hurricane-ian-florida/ |
Over three years, a high-profile investigation team found little fraud, sapped government resources and deepened suspicions
Yvonne Wingett Sanchez
Contractors working for Cyber Ninjas, a firm hired by Arizona Republican lawmakers to review the 2020 vote in Maricopa County, examine and recount ballots on May 3, 2021, in Phoenix. Although that review confirmed Biden's win, Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) launched his own probe. (Courtney Pedroza for The Washington Post)
PHOENIX — Republicans across the country have embraced an aggressive tactic this year as they seek to tout baseless claims that voter fraud is a serious threat: arming state agencies with more power and resources to investigate election crimes.
Virginia’s Republican attorney general earlier this month announced a new election integrity unit staffed with more than 20 attorneys and investigators “to increase transparency and strengthen confidence in our state elections.” Georgia legislators recently empowered the statewide police agency to launch election probes. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) last month described the arrests of 20 people for alleged illegal voting as the “opening salvo” of a new elections police force.
But a Washington Post examination of an earlier endeavor in Arizona to systematically ferret out voter fraud found it has turned up few cases — and that rather than bolster confidence in elections, the absence of massive fraud has just fueled more bogus theories and distrust.
After investigating thousands of complaints in the last three years, a special unit in the Arizona attorney general’s office to crack down on illegal voting and other election-related crimes has prosecuted just 20 cases in a state of more than 4 million voters. The total represents a slight increase from the 16 cases brought by the office in a previous six-year period, according to court filings and hundreds of pages of public records.
Some Republicans who have falsely claimed voter fraud is rampant now say the limited number of prosecutions shows that the unit is not doing its job. Leading supporters of former president Donald Trump in Arizona, including the Republican nominees for governor, attorney general and secretary of state, are pushing to allocate even more resources to rooting out election crimes.
Arizona’s experience shows the damaging consequences that can result when public officials use their power to reinforce false claims that voter fraud is a significant issue in American elections. Rather than reassure citizens about the strength of the Arizona voting systems, the state’s election crimes unit deepened suspicions among many of those who deny President Biden won and sapped government resources, The Post’s review found.
“We’ve invented the smoke in order to say there’s a fire,” said Rusty Bowers, the Republican leader of the Arizona House, who fought attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
Katie Conner, a spokesperson for Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R), said the election integrity unit has “a number of ongoing criminal cases” and is fulfilling its mission by closing out thousands of election-related complaints.
“As a prosecutorial agency,” Conner said, “we deal in facts and evidence.”
But Republicans who have questioned the outcome of the 2020 elections say they expected more from the unit.
“It does make you wonder why aren’t they doing anything,” said State Sen. Kelly Townsend (R), who helped create the unit but is now skeptical of it. “Except for a handful of individuals, but that’s nothing new.”
Unit’s creation followed Democratic wins
Arizona launched its election integrity unit several months after the 2018 midterm election brought top-to-bottom wins for Democrats. In the marquee U.S. Senate race, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema beat Trump-endorsed Republican Martha McSally after a protracted vote count. Trump declared ballots had appeared “out of the wilderness” for Sinema, an unsubstantiated claim that took hold among his supporters.
The next year, Republicans created an election integrity team in the attorney general’s office, similar to a program run by the Texas attorney general. The unit was allocated $530,000 for a full-time criminal prosecutor, civil attorney, special agent and administration assistant, though public records show other employees in the attorney general’s office are pulled in to investigate election complaints at times.
Elections officials argued that Arizona’s voting systems were secure. Democrats cast the unit as a response to their electoral success.
The unit also helps uphold Arizona election laws that critics say limit voter participation. In what Brnovich hailed as “the most important election integrity case decided by the Supreme Court in years,” the office defended state laws allowing counties to require voters to cast ballots in their assigned precincts and banning most people from gathering and submitting the ballots of non-relatives.
To lead the unit, Brnovich chose Jennifer Wright, a lawyer whose 2011 bid for Phoenix mayor was backed by tea party activists. From 2010 to 2014, Wright co-chaired Verify the Vote Arizona and worked closely with True the Vote, a Texas-based organization that has made uncorroborated claims of rampant election fraud around the country.
“We’ve all been made aware that there are forces at work to steal power from the people by manipulating the vote,” Wright said in a 2012 video to help True the Vote recruit volunteers to monitor polls on Election Day. “Remember upwards to 20 percent [of poll watchers] are going to find issues that, absent their presence, could have resulted in a fraudulent vote being cast.”
Wright is in charge of reviewing complaints referred to the election integrity unit and deciding which ones to forward to the criminal division, records show.
Wright frequently reposts Twitter comments by far-right voices and tweets attacks on coronavirus vaccines, abortion and various Democrats, including Sinema and Biden. Her account is labeled “personal account” but includes public announcements about the election integrity unit.
Wright did not respond to requests for an interview with The Post. Conner, the office spokesperson, said all attorneys in the election integrity unit enforce the law “regardless of their personal beliefs.”
“Their First Amendment rights do not end when they work for a government agency,” she said.
After the 2020 election, allegations of fraud again churned through Arizona. Biden’s win in sprawling Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, helped him become the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the state since 1996.
In an interview days after the election, Brnovich rejected the idea that fraud had marred the results. “If indeed there was some great conspiracy, it apparently didn’t work,” he said, noting down-ballot victories by some Republicans.
But within several weeks, the unit was swamped with more than 2,000 complaints, Wright said at a legislative hearing. “The unit is fully investigating these allegations, and intends to prosecute every substantiated allegation, but criminal investigations take time,” she told lawmakers.
Many of those complaints were unsubstantiated. For example, the unit examined a flood of reports that ballots marked with Sharpie markers were miscounted or disregarded. Brnovich’s office quickly determined that didn’t happen, and those voters were not disenfranchised.
Of the 20 cases the unit has prosecuted, none changed the outcome of an election. Some had no bearing on vote counts at all, involving crimes like videotaping inside a polling place, making illegal campaign donations and forging signatures to qualify as a candidate. One case was thrown out by a judge. One defendant was ruled mentally incompetent.
The cases also illustrate how fraud is often rooted in mistakes or confusion, not secret plots.
Melinda Sue Baird, 57, who lives in the Phoenix area, was one of those who got caught in the unit’s net. Baird said that in the weeks before her mother’s death in October 2020, the 87-year-old woman, a C-SPAN enthusiast, told everyone from family members to hospice workers that voting was her final wish.
Baird took her mother’s ballot home. “I wept over it and cried over it,” she said. Baird had helped fill out the ballot, which is legal, but instead of indicating that she assisted her mother and signing her own name, she forged her mother’s signature. Last year, Baird plead guilty to “presenting a false instrument” and was sentenced to 100 hours of community service and a $1,000 fine.
“I didn’t even hire an attorney because I was so ashamed and wanted to accept responsibility for the mistake I made,” she said.
Baird’s husband, Mark Baird, is as angry as she is contrite. He argued that Brnovich should be arresting the 11 Trump supporters who falsely signed electoral college certificates in December 2020 even though Biden won the state. “If you’re going to go after her, then he should be going after a slate of people that knowingly tried to subvert a free and fair election and signed their name to it,” he said.
In an interview with an Arizona radio station in January, Brnovich referred questions about the fake Trump electors to the Department of Justice.
In one of the six cases involving felons, Victor Manuel Aguirre, 47, said he registered during a voting rights drive at the Pima County Jail, where he was being held, according to a transcript of his sentencing last month. Aguirre was told that if he wasn’t eligible because of his felony record, his registration would be discarded, according to his lawyer, Anne Elsberry. Under Arizona law, a person convicted of two or more felonies must petition the court for restoration of their civil rights.
At the hearing, the unit’s lead criminal prosecutor, Todd Lawson, acknowledged problems with the state’s “gatekeeper functions” to keep felons off the voting rolls. Pima County Superior Court Judge Javier Chon-Lopez sentenced Aguirre to the minimum term of six months.
“It appears that he was doing a lot better in his life,” the judge said. “He appears to be genuine in his belief that if he wasn’t qualified to vote that somebody would cancel his application.”
Like the people with felony convictions recently arrested again on illegal voting charges in Florida, Aguirre received a voting card in the mail and figured he was eligible, Elsberry said in an interview.
“This was the first time he every voted in his life,” Elsberry said. “He’s very confused about why he got into trouble.”
Though the number of election fraud cases is small, some Republicans say the unit fulfills an important public service. State Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita (R) said the prosecutions “show the public that any instance of fraud is wrong.” Leslie Hoffman, a Republican who until recently helped oversee Yavapai County elections, said the unit is worthwhile because those with complaints “felt like they had a place to go.”
A hyper-focus on the state’s most populous county
As the unit investigated individual cases, Brnovich also directed it to scrutinize claims that voting irregularities tainted President Biden’s close margin of victory in Maricopa County.
Republican lawmakers had commissioned a review of Maricopa County by Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based firm that had never audited an election before and was led by a “stop the steal” proponent. In September 2021, that review confirmed Biden’s win, but days later, the attorney general launched his own probe.
By then, Brnovich was running in a Republican U.S. Senate primary in which Trump’s support was viewed as pivotal. “Hopefully he’s going to do what everybody knows has to be done.” Trump had warned at a Phoenix rally.
A top GOP prosecutor said Trump lost. Running for Senate, he has a new message.
Investigators interviewed current and former elections officials and blitzed Maricopa County with requests for information. In a sign the former president’s allies were paying attention, one of Wright’s letters to Maricopa, which asked for an extensive list of documents, was highlighted by Trump’s Save America political committee.
Maricopa officials grew frustrated. “My team has, in less than two weeks, gone through every claim made,” wrote Stephen Richer, the Republican county recorder, in October. “They are all meritless.”
Investigators with the unit also interacted with people promoting false and disputed claims of election fraud. For example, records show Wright requested voting data from Maricopa in March based on “pilot studies” on suspicious ballot signatures done by V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, an engineer hired by Cyber Ninjas and the Senate for a ballot analysis. Ayyadurai has made a series of discredited claims, including that Michigan voting machines switched votes from Trump to Biden. Ayyadurai did not respond to request for comment.
That request won praise from Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, an election denier, who wrote on Telegram, “Assistant attorney general Jennifer Wright gets muscular.” Maricopa officials said trained county employees had verified the signatures on all mail ballots.
Amid mounting pressure from Trump and his supporters, Brnovich released an April “interim report,” an unusual step in law enforcement that exacerbated concerns about Maricopa’s voting systems. The report said there were “questions” about the 2020 vote and that the system had “serious vulnerabilities” that demanded lawmakers’ attention. “Our office has left no stone unturned in the aftermath of the 2020 election,” Brnovich wrote, adding that he was limited in what he could reveal about “specific criminal and civil investigations.”
The next day, four months before the Republican primary, Brnovich went on Stephen K. Bannon’s War Room podcast, which is popular among right-wing election deniers. He implied that the investigation would turn up much more.
“This is the proverbial kind of shot across the bow,” Brnovich told the former Trump adviser. “And I hope people understand that I know how important this is. And maybe it’s not as fast sometimes as people like. But it’s more important to get it right than fast.''
Maricopa officials blasted the interim report. In an interview, Bill Gates, Republican chairman of the Maricopa Board of Supervisors, accused the unit of operating in bad faith.
“The attorney general used a thoroughly discredited report as a basis to subject the county to months of harassment, and people living in fear of being indicted,” he said. “It’s been an abuse of public resources.”
The county estimates that its employees have spent about 3,000 hours responding to the attorney general’s inquiry and that it has paid about $420,000 in legal fees. Despite that intense scrutiny, only two Maricopa County residents have been charged by the attorney general’s office with illegally voting in the 2020 election.
“They have not prosecuted any more cases than the office would have done without it,” said Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D), a gubernatorial candidate who has been at odds with Brnovich over election procedures, “and instead have wasted countless taxpayer dollars, time, and desperately needed resources that could have gone towards elections administration instead of chasing down conspiracy theories that had already been debunked.”
Conner, the spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, said the report was intended to flag areas for improvement. “If people don’t like what [the election integrity unit] is doing, they need to reach out to lawmakers.”
But by assigning investigators to dig into even the most far-fetched complaints, the attorney general’s office seems to have emboldened some election deniers — and legitimized claims strongly disputed by county officials.
Heather Honey of Verity Vote, a citizens watchdog group that scrutinizes elections for irregularities, boasted that its complaint about Maricopa’s handling of early ballots in 2020 was echoed in the attorney general’s report.
“We actually met with the attorney general’s investigators,” Honey said in a May interview with Cleta Mitchell, one of the key lawyers involved with Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. “And we said, ‘Hey, you know, this is what we found.’”
The election integrity unit has also met “several times” with representatives of the leading election conspiracy group, True the Vote, records show.
The attorney general’s office has told the group it is interested in its findings related to the “2000 Mules” film, which purports to use cellphone geolocation data to prove “mules” illegally gathered ballots in Arizona and other states. The movie has been widely discredited, in part because the data is imprecise.
Yet the attorney general’s office told True the Vote leaders twice in June that it was “willing to provide for your flights and hotel accommodations.”
Neither the attorney general’s office or True the Vote responded to questions about the proposed meeting. A True the Vote spokesman said it achieved its goal “to support fair election processes.”
The efforts by the attorney general’s office did not satisfy Trump, who endorsed Brnovich’s rival, venture capitalist Blake Masters. Masters “knows that the ‘Crime of the Century’ took place, he will expose it,” Trump said in June.
One day before the primary election, Brnovich said his office had spent “hundreds of hours” reviewing allegations that 282 dead people voted and confirmed only one. “Our agents investigated all individuals that Cyber Ninjas reported as dead, and many were very surprised to learn they were allegedly deceased,” he wrote. It was a long-awaited debunking by the state’s top prosecutor of one baseless but persistent claim about the 2020 election.
The next day, Brnovich lost the primary to Masters.
“It would have been much easier for General Brnovich to say there was widespread fraud or that the election was stolen,” Conner said. “He has integrity, and that’s why he didn’t make claims he didn’t believe in even though it may have cost him the Senate race.”
The attorney general has about four months left in office, but it is unclear where the investigation goes from here. Conner declined to answer when a final report would be issued.
Reinhard reported from Washington. Andrew Ba Tran and Alice Crites contributed to this report. | 2022-09-26T10:29:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Arizona election integrity unit found little fraud, exacerbated suspicions - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/09/26/arizona-election-integrity-unit/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/09/26/arizona-election-integrity-unit/ |
Conservatives have turned against academic freedom again. Here’s why.
The right thinks campuses are hopeless and has resorted to repression as the answer
Perspective by John K. Wilson
John K. Wilson was a 2019-20 fellow at University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, and is a contributing author at AcademeBlog.org. He is the author of nine books, including the forthcoming work, "The Attack on Academia."
President Donald Trump greets Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, the fastest growing organization of campus chapters in America, during a panel discussion in Washington in 2018. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
For the past two years, a wave of Republican legislation has sought to restrict the teaching of critical race theory. While K-12 schools receive much of the ire and repression from conservatives, PEN America reports that 39 percent of these “gag rule” bills introduced this year targeted higher education.
Ellen Schrecker, the leading historian of how the McCarthy era affected higher education, has called these bills “worse than McCarthyism” for their attempts to control college teaching. Although this legislation attacking colleges is unprecedented, the distrust on the right toward academic freedom — and universities — isn’t new.
For decades, conservatives charged that free speech on campus allowed leftist academics to run amok, preaching ideas antithetical to American values. Then, for a brief time beginning in the late 1980s, conservatives embraced free speech on campus as a way to ensure that right-of-center voices would be heard. Today, however, many on the right have begun to see universities as hopeless, and are resurrecting the older approach of limiting what they see as dangerous ideas on campuses.
William F. Buckley, perhaps the leading conservative intellectual of the last half of the 20th century, first made his mark by attacking academia in 1951’s “God and Man at Yale.” Buckley’s book appeared at the height of McCarthyism, and the subtitle told the story, complete with scare quotes: “The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom.’ ” Buckley called for conservative trustees, donors and politicians to purge professors who doubted God or, worse, questioned capitalism.
The campus revolts of the 1960s resulted in more conservative suspicions about academic freedom, with Ronald Reagan running for governor of California in 1966 promising to “clean up the mess at Berkeley,” and denouncing student invitations to have activist Stokely Carmichael and liberal Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) speak on campus. In a 1967 speech, Gov. Reagan denounced “so-called ‘free-speech advocates’ ” and the “activities of the Vietnam Day Committee,” bemoaning how “all this has been allowed to go on in the name of academic freedom.”
And these ideas and suspicions didn’t disappear with the end of the tumultuous 1960s on campuses. As late as 1985, the right-wing group Accuracy in Academia asked students to “monitor” and report on their biased professors. Even within the academy conservatives raised alarm bells about too much campus free speech. In 1987, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) formed to represent conservative faculty in America. Its first chairman, Herbert London, warned, “Academic freedom has become a refuge for radicals.”
But even as London was issuing this warning, the rhetoric of the right was beginning to change as terms like “speech codes” and “political correctness” entered the public discourse in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “Free speech” on campus became the watchword for conservatives fighting what they saw as leftist repression. Books in the 1990s such as Dinesh D’Souza’s “Illiberal Education,” Roger Kimball’s “Tenured Radicals” and Charles Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate’s “The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses” all charged that universities suppressed conservative speech, helping to establish campus free speech as a prime concern of the right.
Plenty of leftists on campus were being censored from the right, even though their stories got far less media coverage. But by the 1990s, the majority of conservative commentators were criticizing campuses for censorship rather than calling for it themselves.
Perhaps the best example of the conservative reversal in the 1990s and 2000s came from the NAS — which became a champion of free speech. In 2002, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the organization issued a strong statement arguing that “the intellectual freedoms fundamental to the academic enterprise must be safeguarded with particular vigilance in periods of stress” while critiquing liberals whom the NAS accused of failing to protect campus free speech over the previous decade: “Where, one wonders, have the newfound defenders of academic freedom been all this time?”
Yet, over the ensuing two decades, conservatives again began to sour on free speech on campus. They perceived liberal and leftist academics as corrupt influences and began to embrace the repressive solutions that their predecessors had demanded in the 1950s and 1960s.
Again, the NAS embodied the shift. In a Sept. 6 post titled “Defund Gender Studies,” the group’s director of research, David Randall, announced a radical change in the NAS position on academic freedom. The NAS would no longer oppose “legislatures’ attempts to defund gender studies, and similar pseudo-disciplines.” The group had no illusions about legislative intrusion into the academy. It admitted that such moves might be inappropriate or even illegal, and “would set a dangerous precedent.” But such action was necessary, “to address the corruption of the university and the peril to the republic.” Because “universities already embrace unprecedented intolerance and export it wholesale to the world,” it justified state legislatures defunding any campus department that seeks “policy change.”
Older conservatives within academia have also lost hope after a lifetime bemoaning how colleges are getting worse. John M. Ellis, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, recounted 50 years of frustration in his 2020 book, “The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done.” Ellis declared that “campuses are now miserable caricatures of what they once were” and called for repression as the answer. He demanded “the removal of radical activists who politicize classrooms” and urged state legislatures to “investigate and then cancel funding for departments that are found to be hopelessly corrupted.”
According to Ellis, “when colleges and universities have so willfully ignored the purposes for which their independence was granted, and have corrupted themselves beyond their ability to self-repair, only outside intervention can restore them to the purpose for which they were created.” This message, that colleges are evil beyond self-repair, inspires conservatives to advocate taking them over or burning them down entirely.
A new generation of conservatives goes even further, seeing colleges as an enemy to be fought against rather than an institution needing change. They see academic freedom as a useless hindrance. Charlie Kirk, the 28-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, the fastest growing organization of campus chapters in America, argued in “The College Scam,” that conservatives should abandon and defund higher education entirely. Turning Point USA has even created a “Professor Watchlist” of radical leftists that it calls for purging from academia.
These conservative critiques expose how, in 2022, neither side in the campus speech wars wants to protect the other’s ideas. Even so, as they engage in this spiraling battle, the structure of higher education has changed radically in the past few decades. A campus culture once dominated by tenured professors has been replaced by hordes of vulnerable adjunct instructors, and vast armies of administrators (often with no education about or attachment to academic freedom) increasingly control campuses with the goal of squelching controversy. The left and the right both regard a principled devotion to academic freedom protecting all views as a dangerous conceit when faced with vile enemies, and these administrators agree with both sides seeking to eliminate offensive speech. Although campuses continue to pay lip service to academic freedom, it is increasingly a concept with more enemies than devout defenders.
As conservatives return to the rhetoric of their repressive roots denouncing academic freedom, the big question may be whether they will even face opposition.
This essay is the fifth in the Freedom to Learn series sponsored by PEN America, providing historical context for controversies surrounding free expression in education today. | 2022-09-26T10:29:25Z | www.washingtonpost.com | The conservative drive to repress free speech on college campuses - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/09/26/conservatives-repress-free-speech-campuses/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/09/26/conservatives-repress-free-speech-campuses/ |
Four decades of smoldering discontent among Iranian women is erupting
At its core, the uprising is about decades of patriarchal oppression — and it could be a turning point
Perspective by Kelly J. Shannon
Kelly J. Shannon is an associate professor of history at Florida Atlantic University, author of "U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women's Human Rights," and is currently writing a book on U.S. relations with Iran from 1905-1953.
People protest in downtown Tehran on Wednesday. (Obtained by the Associated Press)
Woman. Life. Freedom. Those are the words being chanted by the thousands of anti-government protesters taking to the streets across Iran in response to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. The young woman died while in the custody of the Gasht-e Ershad — the country’s “morality police” — who detained Amini for violating Iran’s hijab law, which mandates veiling for women and modest Islamic dress. Despite the government’s insistence that Amini died of a preexisting heart condition, Iranians widely believe that the morality police beat her to death.
While Amini’s death was the spark that ignited the protests, the roots of unrest stretch back decades. At its heart, the current uprising is about the Islamic Republic’s four decades of patriarchal oppression and violence against women, as well as the determined resistance of Iranian women to that oppression.
While Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s government, which ruled Iran from 1941 to 1979, was repressive, women in Iran made significant gains during his rule. They had access to higher education, careers, the right to vote and hold office (admittedly a dubious right in an undemocratic country), equal pay laws, health care and reproductive rights, and a cabinet-level position dedicated to women’s issues — only the second such position in the world. Women could choose how they dressed. Because of women’s activism, Iran’s 1967 Family Protection Law — and a subsequent 1975 amendment — was one of the most liberal such laws in the Islamic world. It mandated more equitable marriage, divorce and inheritance rights for women and largely eliminated polygamy.
Although many women participated in the uprising that toppled the shah’s regime, controlling and subordinating women was at the top of the new Islamic Republic’s agenda from the moment of its inception in 1979. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the fundamentalist Shiite cleric who was the symbolic leader of the revolution, saw women’s equality as incompatible with the strict Islamic society he sought to create.
On March 6, 1979, just weeks after the shah fled the country and two days before International Women’s Day, Khomeini declared that he wished to overturn the Family Protection Law and that all women must wear the chador, Iran’s traditional form of Islamic veil that covers a woman’s hair and body. In response, tens of thousands of Iranian women marched in protest across the country for three days. Because Khomeini still shared political power with pro-democracy liberals like Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, the protests caused him to temporarily back down and rescind the declarations.
But in 1980, after Khomeini consolidated power, he once again ordered compulsory veiling and fired all female judges. Female protesters again took to the streets, but they could not stop Khomeini’s agenda. The Islamic Republic officially enshrined compulsory veiling into law in 1983, along with other restrictions on women’s rights.
The 1980s brought harsh repression for Iranian women, and there was little organized resistance during these years. The Islamic Republic surveilled its people and meted out brutal punishment for anyone who did not conform to its strict codes of behavior. Iran’s morality police — an earlier iteration of today’s Gasht-e Ershad — stopped and arrested women (and sometimes men) on the street for “improper” dress, and raided people’s homes to root out illegal alcohol, Western contraband and “un-Islamic” behaviors. The government forced women out of certain jobs, segregated universities by sex and banned female students from majoring in certain subjects such as veterinary science and geology. It repealed the shah’s family law, thus depriving women of most rights in marriage, divorce and child custody. It lowered the minimum age of marriage for girls, first to 13 and then to 9 (it raised the age to 13 again in 2002), and encouraged polygamy. Women also lacked freedom of movement and required a male guardian’s permission to leave the country.
Iranians who opposed the Khomeini government and had the resources fled the country, forming a global diaspora that included Iranian feminists who fought for women’s rights while in exile.
Even worse, the Islamic Republic systematically used violence against women. In 1980, as Khomeini consolidated power, the government began executing large numbers of its citizens for dubious crimes. This included women who refused to veil or resisted the regime in other ways. The government accused them of prostitution or “waging war on God.” Female political prisoners were denied due process and were often tortured or sexually assaulted. Many of them died by stoning — a particularly brutal form of execution not historically practiced in Iran.
Iranian women began fighting back in earnest in the 1990s. In what became known as the “pink revolution,” women, especially in urban areas, collectively began pushing the boundaries of the hijab law by wearing makeup, colorful headscarves and long coats instead of chadors, and intentionally allowing their hair to peek out from under their scarves. Given the large number of women who resisted Islamic dress, the morality police could not arrest everyone.
Emboldened by their success, Iranian women began organizing in other ways. In 2006, they held a peaceful protest calling for the repeal of discriminatory laws against women. Out of that protest, Iranian feminists formed the grass-roots One Million Signatures for the Repeal of Discriminatory Laws campaign, also known as Change for Equality. This activism occurred despite harassment from authorities during the presidency of hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who cracked down on violations of the veiling law, and during whose presidency the current iteration of the morality police was created.
The activists behind Change for Equality played a key role in the mass 2009 protests after the suspicious reelection of Ahmadinejad. Women rose up in force, and images of young, stylish women protesting in makeup, sunglasses and blue jeans with headscarves perched far back on their heads dominated international news. The uprising ultimately ended with a violent crackdown by the government, which included security forces shooting and killing a young woman, Neda Agha Soltan, whose death was captured on a cellphone camera.
Over the last decade, women’s organized resistance to veiling has only grown. Young women filmed or photographed themselves removing their headscarves in public. They posted videos online of women being harassed in public by morality police or other citizens for wearing “improper” hijab as a way to shame the harassers. They used social media to decry compulsory veiling and created the civil disobedience campaign My Stealthy Freedom, where women posted photos of themselves bareheaded on social media. The government responded with arrests and long prison sentences.
Iran’s current president, Ebrahim Raisi, is an extremist who has cracked down on dissent since taking office in 2021 — with a special focus on veiling in response to women’s organized resistance to the practice. His government has been using facial recognition technology to arrest and punish young women appearing in the anti-hijab videos posted to social media. Earlier this year, a young woman was detained and beaten for appearing in one of those videos and was forced to appear on TV to apologize for her behavior.
Amini’s detention and death demonstrate the government’s sense that it can act with impunity in its oppression of women. The outpouring of anger across Iran, therefore, probably came as a surprise to Iran’s leaders.
Already Iran is resorting to its standard repressive tactics to quell the uprisings — restricting access to the internet and cellular service, and even opening fire on protesters. At least 30 people have died in the protests.
But angry women aren’t backing down. They’re publicly burning their headscarves and cutting off their hair. Unlike in 1979, large numbers of men are protesting alongside them, and the protests are only growing as the government responds violently.
Unlike recent protests about lack of drinking water or economic troubles, this protest is about a central tenet of the Islamic Republic’s identity — its subordination of women. As a result, the protesters are openly calling for the end of the Islamic Republic and its theocratic rule. Iran’s government claims that the protests are the work of the country’s enemies, but, in fact, they are the result of smoldering discontent that dates back 40 years and poses a powerful threat to the regime.
Iran may manage to crush this protest movement as it has done to others, but if that happens, it will only add to Iranians’ pent-up fury. Or perhaps the killing of Mahsa Amini may prove to be the turning point in Iranian women’s long struggle for freedom. We may just be witnessing the beginning of a revolution. Woman. Life. Freedom. | 2022-09-26T10:29:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Iranian women are rising up against decades of oppression and violence - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/09/26/iranian-women-uprising-against-oppression-history/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/09/26/iranian-women-uprising-against-oppression-history/ |
Cleveland’s Black voters want tough oversight of cops. Will police allow it?
Cleveland has struggled with oversight of its police department for more than a century. Its latest effort is a civilian oversight board, voted in by city residents in a referendum last year. (Sarah Rice/For The Washington Post)
CLEVELAND — The voters of Cleveland sent a clear message last November: They wanted more accountability imposed on one of the only police departments in the nation to have twice been investigated by the Department of Justice for civil rights violations.
Voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot initiative to create one of the most powerful civilian police oversight boards in the country, able to override a broad swath of decisions by the police chief and fire officers as its members see fit. The only mayoral candidate to support the initiative, political newcomer Justin Bibb, swept to victory, too, as voters on Cleveland’s mostly Black East Side turned out in droves to support Bibb and the ballot initiative.
But even before voters went to the polls, the police patrolman’s union pledged to sue to block the commission, a position that it has not backed down from and one that echoes its four-year blockade of an earlier move by the city to take control of the department.
The conflict has left unanswered a central question of whether, after more than 100 years of efforts to change the Cleveland’s police department, the city’s mostly Black and Brown residents have any control over how they are policed or if that power still resides in its largely White force. It has underscored how much power police unions retain in blocking changes demanded by the public, and how tentatively politicians are taking them on.
Jeff Follmer, the president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, the union for rank-and-file officers, has been part of the selection committee for the new commission but he said that didn’t give him much sway over its membership. He would not rule out another effort to block civilian control once the commission, whose finalists are now undergoing background checks, is put in place.
“At the end of the day, we really had no say in this commission process whatsoever. It’s been all smoke and mirrors,” Follmer said. “But we get it. More than 30,000 people voted for this, but I don’t even know exactly what they want officers held accountable for because if you go to the inner city, you talk to any law-abiding citizens, they want the police, they want these little dope boys and all these guys that are carrying guns off the streets. But it’s the one or two cases that make the media every 10 years that have them saying we have hold officers accountable now.”
Cleveland has seen a rise in crime, as have other cities. In June, Bibb lamented that, saying the absence of national gun-control measures meant that “our children are becoming victims of negligence and victims of thoughtless gun violence.”
“I’m not doing nothing,” Miller was heard shouting in a 911 call that recorded the final moments of his life. His family contended the call was proof that the teen was trying to flee the scene before Lundy fired eight shots at him.
“Everybody gets a settlement,” said Kirkman. “That’s how you know when something is wrong, because who gives out free money?”
A decade and a half after her son was killed, Kirkman says she’s seen Justice Department officials and judges try to change the culture of the police department without much success. Even though she campaigned for the ballot initiative and helped select commission finalists, she isn’t hopeful that much will change once the commission is formally appointed in October.
“So many things have come out of so many politicians’ mouths,” Kirkman said. “I will only really believe things are changing when we start to see some of these bad officers taken off the street.
“For the city of Cleveland, my son was just a dollar figure,” she said. “But he was my everything.”
Cleveland’s history shows how difficult it is to change police behavior. As early as 1922, a Cleveland Foundation report called for dismantling the bureaucracy that protects bad officers and makes it difficult to fire them. A report issued in 1945 recommended that social service agencies, not armed police, respond to social welfare calls. Reports in the 1960s and 1970s, as the civil rights movement reshaped America, recommended that officers be trained in African American history. Over decades, report after report called for recruiting more Black officers. And while the number of Black officers is up, 67 percent are White in a city where nearly 50 percent of the residents are Black.
“The influence of the police union has outlasted and outperformed anyone who has tried on the political side of the house to make an effective change,” Goodrick said. “They have the long-term institutional knowledge and memory and they know strategies that have won and prevailed year after year after year, politician after politician.”
Nationally, more than 160 police departments now operate under civilian review boards, but the results have been mixed. A 2021 Washington Post investigation determined that police departments often find ways to undermine oversight boards and that many of these bodies are simply too weak to hold officers accountable. In Louisville, the civilian board had no standing to investigate the police who shot and killed an unarmed Breonna Taylor in her home. In Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, found guilty of murdering George Floyd, was still on the force even after being the subject of at least 22 misconduct complaints between 2003 and 2015, 12 of which were investigated by the city’s current or former civilian oversight boards.
The Cleveland police union was born out of the city’s racial strife.
On a hot night in July 1968, police traded gunfire for four hours with a group of armed Black nationalists in the city’s Glenville neighborhood, on the East Side. Three policemen, three suspects and a bystander were killed and more than a dozen others wounded. In the days that followed, in a rebellion against what they saw as a racist police department, Black rioters damaged 62 buildings. Carl Stokes, the first Black mayor of Cleveland, who ran on a platform of addressing police brutality, initially refused to allow White police officers to patrol the area. White officers, angry that they didn’t have the mayor’s support, responded by forming the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association.
In August 2000, the Justice Department launched its first investigation into a string of controversial shootings and police use-of-force cases. When the probe concluded in 2004, the Justice Department criticized the way the police department handled internal use-of-force investigations and said some of the police shootings it reviewed “may have been avoidable.”
Justice Department investigators were back in the city only a few years later after police fired 137 shots into the car of an unarmed Black couple who were killed during a police chase in 2012. Two years later, the department came under a national spotlight when 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed on a playground by a police officer who said that the boy’s toy gun looked like a real weapon. A month after Rice’s death, the Department of Justice issued an unsparing report that found officers were using lethal force out of proportion with the threat posed by suspects and that, just as in 2000, Cleveland police were unnecessarily escalating confrontations.
Even before the Justice Department’s intervention, Cleveland had tried to place police oversight in civilian hands. In 1988, after a ballot initiative led to the lengthy legal battle with the police union that went to the Ohio Supreme Court, Cleveland established one of the nation’s first civilian police review panels. It had the power to investigate police wrongdoing but could only recommend, not impose, disciplinary action. Yet the 2014 Justice Department report on Cleveland found that the board hadn’t reviewed a single use-of-force case in the prior two years.
In the aftermath of the department’s findings, the board pledged to more thoroughly investigate citizen complaints and opened its meetings to the public in an effort to rebuild trust with the community. But police reform advocates said that the board remained ineffective, citing several issues, including a shortage of investigators.
Subodh Chandra, the lawyer for those who pushed the ballot initiative, said the commission’s success will rely on cooperation from the department. For example, the commission is charged with creating a database of officers who have been dishonest or engaged in misconduct. That evidence would have to come from personnel files held by the department.
“An open question is whether the rank-and-file and the mid-level ranks of the police division will really change,” Chandra said. “Even if you have well-intentioned chiefs, if people at the line level and the mid-level managers are obstructionists when it comes to reform, then it’s going to be hard to make change.”
“It’s just like a dance, and the politicians and union are dance partners, two steps forward, one step back, it’s a routine,” Henton said. “They make an effort to look like they’re doing reform, but it’s just for looks and appearances. At the end of the day, they’re still friends and they’re just all trying to keep their power.”
Charmin Leon, who left the Cleveland police department after 12 years in 2020, frustrated by what she said was a lack of interest in changing its racial demographics or officers’ mentality, was skeptical that the new commission could escape the same law-and-order politics that sank previous measures. But after seeing the range of finalists and their experiences with police, she said, she is feeling more confident that this commission will elevate people whose rights have long been abused.
“Officers would say all the time, we just need to educate the public,” Leon said. “You don’t need to educate the public, especially the public that’s most affected by the disparities, they know you better than you know yourself. You need to listen. That’s the one reason I’m excited because this right-sizes that.”
Hope remains in Cleveland’s mostly-Black East Side that the new Black mayor can deliver change to a city that has struggled to climb out of the depths of white flight and deindustrialization. Bibb talks about putting Cleveland, a city whose population has shrunk from more than 900,000 to less than 400,000, back on the map. Bibb and many in Cleveland see tackling the city’s high crime rate while rebuilding confidence in its police force as the first step.
“We have to rebuild that trust,” said Marilyn Burns, a community organizer and Bibb supporter. “There is such a different view of the police than when I was coming up, when you would seek out the police for safety and trust. We have to build that trust again. That trust comes in drips, but it was lost in buckets.”
Bibb, a native of Cleveland’s predominantly Black Mount Pleasant neighborhood, is confident that he can fundamentally change the relationship between the police and the community.
“Being a son of a cop, I got some early lessons: Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am, when you get pulled over,” Bibb said. “As an adult, I had a handful of interactions where I was a Black man driving a somewhat nice car and I got pulled over for failure to yield properly — a lot. My heart would always race, and I would always get tense when I got pulled over. So I saw both sides of it, I’ve experienced racism and what it’s like to be profiled. But I’ve also seen the importance of effective public safety.”
Bibb upset some supporters when, after committing to undertake a national search for a new police chief during his campaign, he selected veteran Cleveland officer Wayne Drummond to lead the force. While Drummond is Black, some wanted an outsider to come in as chief. Bibb traced that decision back to New Year’s Eve, four days before he was sworn in, when off-duty officer Shane Bartek was killed during a carjacking.
“Seeing Officer Bartek’s body, that’s when I felt the weight of this job,” Bibb said. “That’s when my bond and my journey with Chief Drummond started. That’s when I started to understand what I needed in a chief and how I needed to act as mayor. You don’t realize this when you’re a candidate, but as a mayor 90 percent of the job is not political. You got to let the experts do their job.”
Bibb says he has instituted changes meant to improve the relationship between the police and the community, including requiring officers to walk the streets and bolstering efforts to recruit more officers from Cleveland’s Black and Brown neighborhoods.
“We want to make sure they have good pay, make sure that they can work in a department that’s modern and progressive, but the police can no longer police themselves, and I think a large share of the new officers that are joining our department also believe that,” he said.
On a cloudy Saturday morning, residents and first responders took over the parking slot of a strip mall on the East Side to try to create a bridge between the police force and the community. Officers mingled with smiling children as groups set up games and booths. It was the final day of the city’s first public safety week, and Bibb had come to speak about the importance of the bond between the two.
But others are more skeptical than Bibb about changing the department’s trajectory after a century of failed attempts.
“The police who’ve been around a couple of decades are the ones teaching the young recruits,” said Goodrick, the former officer who co-authored the report on 100 years of Cleveland reform efforts. “They’re teaching them how to push back against the politicians, they’re teaching them that they’re blue-blooded and should stand with their blue-blooded brothers. Until you change that, nothing will change.” | 2022-09-26T10:29:37Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Cleveland fights to reform police after decades of failed efforts - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/26/cleveland-police-reform/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/26/cleveland-police-reform/ |
The disturbing strategy behind MAGA complaints about a ‘woke military’
Paintings of former president Donald Trump and Michael Flynn, who served briefly as Trump's national security adviser, are displayed during a ReAwaken America tour event in Batavia, N.Y., on Aug. 12. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)
This summer, I attended the promotion ceremony of a friend, an Army general who was pinning another star on his uniform. A Christian chaplain said a blessing and then the speakers extolled my friend’s lifetime of service to the country. Finally, the general took the oath of office on a Bible held by his wife. It was all very traditional and very moving.
If you think there is anything remotely surprising about this — if you imagine that the speakers would have been extolling the joys of transgenderism or denouncing white privilege — well, you’ve been watching too much Fox “News.” Donald Trump Jr., for example, claims a “militant female” can become an admiral or general in today’s military “for no other reason other than they’re probably female,” or “if you can say, ‘Hey I’m trans.’ ” Tucker Carlson asserts: “It has been one calculated humiliation after another for the U.S. armed forces: vax mandates, anti-white ideology, sex changes, drag shows. Whatever is necessary to telegraph to the United States military you are worthless.”
Needless to say, these fanciful descriptions from bomb-throwers who never served in uniform bear no relation to reality. The U.S. military remains one of the most conservative institutions in America with traditions dating back centuries. That the military now welcomes African Americans, women and LGBTQ people — all groups that were kept out in the past — only strengthens an institution that needs to draw on the talents of the whole country to defend it.
So why are cartoonish inhabitants of the Fox News Cinematic Universe caterwauling about a “woke military”? Because the military has resisted Trumpian attempts to politicize it. The MAGA brigades want to populate the military with far-right officers who will do whatever Trump or a Trump mini-me commands, no matter how illegal.
Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s new book “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021” — the best account yet of the worst presidency — serves as a useful reminder of all the ways that President Donald Trump tried to harness the military to carry out his unhinged agenda. The authors report that Trump told then-White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, a retired Marine general, that he wanted generals as loyal to him as Nazi generals supposedly were to Adolf Hitler. (The stable genius had no idea that German officers plotted to kill Hitler.) Trump wanted “his” troops to shoot both undocumented migrants and Black Lives Matter protesters in the legs. He even listened to pleas from his disgraced former national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, to have troops seize ballot boxes after the 2020 election.
Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, became anathema to Trump & Co. not by embracing “critical race theory,” but by making clear that the military would place loyalty to the Constitution above loyalty to Trump. The turning point, Baker and Glasser report, came when Milley publicly apologized for being duped into walking behind Trump through Lafayette Square after it has been cleared of protesters. “Why did you apologize?” Trump demanded. “It’s a sign of weakness.” Ever since then, this combat veteran has been subject to unconscionable abuse from MAGA World. (Tucker Carlson: “He’s not just a pig, he’s stupid.”)
All of these attacks against the military for being too “woke” should be seen as part of the MAGA strategy to harness the armed forces (“the guys with the guns,” as Milley put it) to advance their authoritarian agenda. Blake Masters, the ultra-MAGA Republican Senate nominee in Arizona, has even advocated firing all the generals (“they’re left-wing politicians”) and replacing them with “the most conservative colonels.”
Unfortunately, there would be little to stop a President Trump or a President Ron DeSantis from doing precisely that as long as the Senate confirms their new generals. A MAGA president could even summon back to active duty loony retired generals such as Flynn or Don Bolduc (the GOP Senate nominee in New Hampshire) and appoint them to senior commands — as long as the Senate consents.
There would be no shortage of MAGA retirees to choose from: 124 retired generals and admirals, including Bolduc, signed an open letter last year that pushed false claims of voter fraud and argued that, under the Democrats, “our Country has taken a hard left turn toward Socialism and a Marxist form of tyrannical government.” If Trump wins in 2024, he could choose his Joint Chiefs from their ranks.
Little wonder that five former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and eight former defense secretaries signed an open letter of their own warning that “We are in an exceptionally challenging civil-military environment” because of, among other events, “the first election in over a century when the peaceful transfer of political power was disrupted and in doubt.”
The growing chorus of MAGA complaints about the “woke military,” nonsensical as they are, indicate that the challenges will only grow. A homegrown extremist movement that has already captured control of one of the two major political parties is now trying to bend the armed forces to its supreme leader’s malign will. | 2022-09-26T10:29:43Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | The strategy behind MAGA complaints about a 'woke' military - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/26/maga-woke-us-military-influence/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/26/maga-woke-us-military-influence/ |
Ask a Doctor: Why do I get sleepy in the afternoon after eating lunch?
The most likely culprit is your circadian rhythm, but what you eat may also play a role
Advice by Lydia Kang, MD
Lydia Kang is an internal medicine physician at Nebraska Medicine in Omaha and the co-author of “Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything.”
Q: I always feel sleepy in the afternoon after I eat my lunch. Why does this keep happening, and is there anything I can do to prevent it?
A: Feeling sluggish after lunch is very common. The “afternoon dip,” as it’s sometimes called, refers to those groggy hours between 2 and 5 p.m., when your eyelids droop and your concentration becomes as sharp as vanilla pudding.
There can be myriad reasons this happens, including too little sleep at night or medical conditions such as obstructive sleep apnea, anemia and thyroid disorders. If you feel exhausted, check with your health-care provider to make sure all is well.
But if you’re just feeling a dip in energy, the most likely culprit is your circadian rhythm. Our biological clock is more pervasive than you might think: Though people often only associate it with sleep and wake cycles, it’s also linked to our routines for meals and activity. Research in fruit flies, mice and humans has shown genes control clocks in the cells of our tissues — including the skin, the liver and the brain — that work on an oscillating cycle affected by light exposure.
Studies have also shown that our alertness tends to be lowest at two points in the day: in the morning from around 2 to 7 a.m. and in the afternoon from 2 to 5 p.m. Most of us are asleep during the first dip, but that slump is highly relevant to shift workers. For people who work during the day, the second slump comes right in the middle of that boring meeting or when you might be driving home. (In fact, you’re far more likely to have a car accident after lunch than after breakfast.)
Research on other causes for the afternoon dip have been limited in scope but can give us further clues as to why it happens. After lunch, your circulation shifts to accommodate more blood flow to the digestive system, meaning less blood goes to your brain, which could trigger some tiredness. A tangled web of hormones, molecules and neurotransmitters is also at work.
One of them, orexin, is a neuropeptide in the brain that affects hunger and helps keep us awake. After a meal, when your glucose levels rise, this may inhibit orexin.
A similar phenomenon occurs with tryptophan, an amino acid that can turn into melatonin, a hormone associated with sleep. We’ve all heard those tales about turkey and tryptophan. It turns out the likely issue isn’t all about the turkey; it may also be the carbs.
Research has found that eating a protein-rich meal is not associated with a higher ratio of tryptophan in our blood. But the insulin rise caused by pairing tryptophan with high-glycemic index foods, such as potatoes, white bread and white rice, can lead to a relative influx of it into the brain and make you feel a bit sleepy.
Why? Insulin tells your body to store amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — in your cells. But it doesn’t do the same thing for tryptophan, giving it easier access to your brain.
In other research, tiredness has been associated with fried foods, saturated animal fats and high-calorie meals, while plant-based foods and the Mediterranean diet have been linked to less sleepiness. That being said, none of these studies were large enough to prove causation.
Based on what we know, it’s a good idea at lunch to load up on veggies, which are rich in fiber and can help regulate your blood sugar. Avoid consuming a large portion of animal protein and fat. Try eating complex carbohydrates such as whole grains and legumes, and veer away from simple carbs, including sugary drinks and white pasta.
Shaving off even small amounts of sleep for just a few days can worsen afternoon grogginess, so it’s important to get a restorative night of rest on a regular basis. A dose of a caffeinated drink early in the afternoon can help but remember that too much can disrupt your sleep and perpetuate the tiredness cycle.
A brisk walk, ideally outside, can give you a boost, as can bright natural or artificial light: One small study found that bright light exposure reduced fatigue after lunch — perhaps the only time a physician will recommend screen time.
If all else fails, a nap can help improve cognitive performance. Just keep it under 30 minutes and early in the afternoon, so it doesn’t mess with your nighttime sleep schedule. | 2022-09-26T10:30:19Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why do I get sleepy in the afternoon after eating lunch? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/09/26/tired-sleepy-after-lunch-afternoon/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/09/26/tired-sleepy-after-lunch-afternoon/ |
British pound falls to new lows against the dollar after taxes slashed
A cash tray holding British pound bank notes and coins in a shop in Barking, U.K., on Tuesday, Sept. 13. (Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg)
LONDON — The British pound on Monday hit an all-time low against the U.S. dollar amid market concerns about the new government’s plans to boost growth after it unveiled its biggest shake up to the tax system in 50 years.
The sharp drop in the value of the pound piled pressure on the British government as it grapples with soaring public debt and a cost-of-living crisis, amid deteriorating investor confidence. It also raised the prospect that the U.K. central bank may intervene in currency markets to shore up the pound.
The sterling’s slump is in part a reflection of the strong U.S. dollar, which has been boosted by higher interest rates, but the pound has also dropped against the euro, indicating specific concerns about the British economy.
Who is Liz Truss, the U.K.’s new prime minister?
The pound crashed to a record low of $1.0327 in early Monday morning Asian trading, before regaining some ground and stabilizing around $1.07 — still well down from where it was on Friday morning before the government unveiled its so-called “mini-budget.”
A weaker currency, of course, doesn’t necessarily reflect a weak economy. In many cases it may be advantageous, for example it makes British exports cheaper for consumers in America — a weak pound will boost overseas sales for companies which are export-oriented. Though it means anything denominated in dollars, like energy costs, will soar for consumers.
It is good news for U.S. tourists in the U.K., who are suddenly finding their dollar is suddenly going a whole lot farther.
In this case, however, it seems to reflect a loss of confidence in the government’s ability to manage the country's finances.
On Friday, the new British Chancellor of the Exchequer, or finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng announced a package of tax cuts worth £45 billion ($48 billion). The top rate of 45 percent for income tax was slashed, the cap for banker bonuses will be scrapped, and taxes on house purchases were cut — moves that will predominantly help more affluent citizens in hopes they will boost their spending.
While the new leader Liz Truss had pledged tax cuts during her leadership campaign, the scale of the cuts still shocked many economic observers.
“In the current economic environment it is a huge gamble,” wrote Thomas Pope, an economist with the Institute for Government. It is a major shift away from the policies of Truss’ predecessor Boris Johnson, who last year had announced tax increases to help pay for the pandemic.
The new British government hopes that by slashing taxes and regulation, it will be able to generate growth that will help to fund public services and eventually pay down the debt.
In a recent interview, CNN’s Jake Tapper put it to Truss that the opposition parties in the U.K. are saying that her plans are “recklessly running up the deficit” and that President Biden “is, in essence, saying you’re approach doesn’t work.”
Last week, President Biden tweeted: “I am sick and tired of trickle-down economics. It has never worked,” a reference to the supply side economics made famous by President Ronald Reagan which Truss’s approach resembles.
Truss responded in the interview saying, “the U.K. has one of the lowest levels of debt in the G-7. But we have one of the highest levels of taxes. Currently, we have a 70-year high in our tax rates. And what I’m determined to do as prime minister, and what the chancellor is determined to do, is make sure we are incentivizing businesses to invest. And we’re also helping ordinary people with their taxes.”
Truss continued: “That’s why I don’t feel it’s right to have higher national insurance and higher corporation tax, because that will make it harder for us to attract the investment we need in the U.K., it will be harder to generate those new jobs.” | 2022-09-26T10:30:31Z | www.washingtonpost.com | British Pound falls hard against the dollar after government mini-budget - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/26/uk-gbp-pound-falls-usd-dollar/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/26/uk-gbp-pound-falls-usd-dollar/ |
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at the campus of the World Health Organization in Geneva, on Aug. 18, 2022. (Marzena Skubatz)
GENEVA — For better or worse, covid-19 made Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus a target.
As the leader of the World Health Organization throughout the pandemic, the immunologist from Ethiopia has been attacked by all sides. He’s been berated by Donald Trump for being soft on China, called “irresponsible” by Chinese officials, and knocked by health experts who said he was too cautious at the start of the outbreak.
Yet he disagrees with those who say the pandemic is over. “We’re still in the middle of a big war,” he said.
Tedros arrives in Washington on Monday, where he will meet senior U.S. officials to push for more coronavirus assistance. At 57, he is the first African to lead the WHO, the top United Nations body dedicated to global health, and was recently reelected to a second term with bold plans to reform the system.
He sat down with The Washington Post last month for a wide-ranging discussion about the coronavirus and his ideas for change, in what WHO officials said was his most substantial one-on-one interview since the pandemic began.
Though he has a reputation among some as a headstrong leader, Tedros was demure in person, self-conscious about being photographed in a rumpled shirt and explaining away an exercise bike sitting idly in his office. In the hallways of the WHO, Tedros greets everyone from senior officials to cafeteria staff. His employees call him “Dr. T” and say he is a hands-on leader, peppering them with regular messages on WhatsApp.
But while Tedros has yet to catch the virus, his life, at the center of the pandemic, has been infected by the chaos and conspiracy covid-19 has created. Before the global outbreak, the WHO often worked behind the scenes, tracking disease clusters and providing technical guidance to governments. The agency was founded in 1948 to coordinate the U.N.'s public health work in the post-war period.
“Many life-threatening messages,” he said quietly over lunch. “Threats direct to my SMS. I don’t know how they got my number.”
Tedros, however, is not backing down. He has pressured China to revive an investigation into the origins of the virus and to roll back its “zero covid strategy,” which includes surveillance, isolation, harsh quarantines and travel restrictions.
At the same time, he has led criticism of Ethiopia’s government over the conflict in Tigray, where millions are now displaced and in “severe” need of food aid, according to the U.N. But his candor has come at a cost; in 2020, Ethiopian authorities seized a house he had rented in the capital, Addis Ababa.
“I don’t think it’s safe for me” to return to Ethiopia, he said. But, he added, “what I said about Tigray? I’m just telling the truth.”
A war child
“I am a war child,” he said. “From childhood, I’ve been conditioned for difficult situations.”
Despite the odds, Tedros ended up on a WHO-funded scholarship at Britain’s London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where he studied the immunology of infectious diseases. He later earned a doctorate in public health medicine from the University of Nottingham in 2000.
Today, the TPLF is no longer in government — and its forces have been at war with Ethiopia’s military since 2020, following a dispute with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed over elections that were canceled because of pandemic restrictions.
“For opponents who view him as a key, senior TPLF figure, he is a hate figure,” said Will Davison, a senior analyst with the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.
In 2017, the government nominated him for the job as director general of the WHO and he became the first elected WHO leader to be born after the organization’s founding in 1948. He is also the first director general who is not a primary care doctor, something his supporters and critics say allows him to think of the WHO as not merely a medical organization but also a political force.
‘Puppet of China’
Trump, who had also praised China early in the pandemic, abruptly switched course as thousands of Americans began to fall ill and die. He made the unprecedented decision to cut funding to the WHO in April 2020, calling the agency a “puppet of China” and withdrawing the United States from the organization completely.
“The 1918 pandemic,” Tedros said, recalling that Trump had asked: “Could anything like that happen again?”
“We lost more than 6 million people,” Tedros said of the pandemic’s death toll. “Morally, it’s important to know what happened.”
The report said the agency fumbled key decisions involving airborne transmission and the use of face masks. The commission even noted that Tedros himself had held a closed-door meeting of virologists, public health researchers and some government representatives on Jan. 22, 2020, as the virus spread — but failed to declare the growing outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern,” its most serious classification, until a week later.
Tedros said he was first made aware of the new “viral pneumonia” spreading in Wuhan at 5 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, 2019, when he received a routine text alert from his emergencies team.
Preparing for the next pandemic
But for Tedros, who says the end of the pandemic is in sight, “we are not there yet.” Thousands of people around the world are still dying of covid-19 every week, and poorer nations still lack vaccines. In Washington, he wants to make sure that the United States stays focused on global health and will rally support for a stronger WHO moving forward.
Tedros is already flexing muscles previous director generals have not, moves that experts say have empowered both the agency and its chief. In July, he unilaterally declared monkeypox a “public health emergency of international concern,” after a panel of experts convened by the WHO failed to reach a consensus.
“I would have. I was convinced,” he said of the monkeypox threat.
For some, the decision signaled a major shift in the behavior — and potential power — of a WHO director general. None of Tedros’s predecessors “in the history of the WHO” had ever sidestepped an expert panel to declare an emergency, said Gostin.
“He’s willing to take political and personal risks with his own reputation,” Gostin said.
The proposed agreement, he said, would be a “game changer,” ensuring scientific and political cooperation across borders both before and during an outbreak. A majority of member states support the idea and have pledged to finalize a draft text at the World Health Assembly, the legislature that governs the WHO, by 2024.
“There is a case for a stronger WHO, and I think Tedros during this first term has done extremely well to position the WHO for that,” said Anders Nordström, a Swedish doctor who served as the agency’s acting director general in 2006.
“But what does a stronger WHO mean and what are the implications for what the WHO should do and not do?” he said.
The WHO has an unusually strong constitution for a U.N. agency, according to Steve Solomon, a lawyer for the organization. In theory, it allows members to create rules that are automatically binding. In practice, however, it has no power to force countries to do anything they don’t want to do.
Because of that, countries such as Russia and China would probably balk at a WHO that could order investigations into a public health emergency. But so would the United States, experts say, which has long been skeptical of international agreements.
“The United States is going to be no more receptive to an independent WHO investigation of an outbreak in Texas than China was,” said David Fidler, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
But Tedros says he believes the world can work together. The United States and the Soviet Union cooperated to eradicate smallpox at the height of the Cold War in 1979, he said.
“It’s irreplaceable,” Tedros said. | 2022-09-26T10:30:38Z | www.washingtonpost.com | After covid-19, WHO’s Tedros plans for the next pandemic - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/26/who-tedros-covid-19-pandemic/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/26/who-tedros-covid-19-pandemic/ |
Post Politics Now Amid inflation challenges, Biden to hold event focused on saving money
Noted: Ex-staffer’s unauthorized book about Jan. 6 committee rankles members
On our radar: The Biden-Trump rematch, in many ways, has already begun
Take a look: On Sunday shows, Sullivan warns Russia against using nuclear weapons in Ukraine
Noted: Blinken says conversation about supplying weapons to Ukraine ‘ongoing’
Today, with inflation remaining a challenge for his party as the midterm elections loom, President Biden is convening senior administration officials at the White House to talk about “new actions that will save families money and lower costs,” according to an advisory. Among the moves will be a new rule to require airlines and travel sites to be more transparent about additional fees, CNN is reporting.
Congress returns to Washington this week with a deadline of Friday to pass a short-term funding bill to keep the government open. Also on tap this week: The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection will hold a public hearing on Wednesday. A witness list has yet to be announced but expect a heavy focus on former president Donald Trump.
10:35 a.m. Eastern time: Biden returns to the White House from Delaware.
11:45 a.m. Eastern: Biden welcomes the Atlanta Braves to the White House. Watch live here.
4:15 p.m. Eastern: Biden hosts a meeting of the White House Competition Council.
Vice President Harris, who is leading the U.S. delegation to Tuesday’s funeral of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, met Monday with the country’s current prime minister, Fumio Kishida, in Tokyo.
According to a White House readout, topics included China’s “aggressive and irresponsible provocations in the Taiwan Strait” that followed a visit to Taiwan by a congressional delegation led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
Harris and Kishida also condemned a recent ballistic missile launch by North Korea and “pledged to work together to address the threats posed by [North Korea’s] nuclear and ballistic weapons program,” the White House said.
With this year’s Major League Baseball playoffs just around the corner, President Biden plans to welcome last year’s World Series champions, the Atlanta Braves, to the White House on Monday.
Biden is scheduled to host the Braves late Monday morning in keeping with a long tradition of presidents celebrating championship teams in major U.S. sports.
The Braves were previously scheduled to be in town for a series with the Washington Nationals.
The Braves have secured a playoff spot again this year. With less than two weeks remaining in the regular season, the team is trying to overtake the New York Mets to win the National League East division. If the Braves fall short, the team will still make the playoffs as a wild card team.
News that a former adviser to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection is publishing a book billed as a “behind-the-scenes” look at the committee’s work came as a shock to most lawmakers and committee staff when it was announced last week.
The Post’s Jacqueline Alemany and Josh Dawsey report that Denver Riggleman, a former Republican congressman, is set to publish “The Breach” on Tuesday, just one day before a public hearing of the Jan. 6 panel, which has gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent unauthorized leaks, as well as keep its sources and methods of investigation under wraps.
President Biden was at a Democratic reception in Maryland a few weeks ago when his rhetoric turned toward an increasingly frequent topic — “what Trump is doing and the Trumpers are doing.” An audience member called out, “Lock him up!” Biden went on to cite “the new polls showing me beating Trump by six or eight points.”
National security adviser Jake Sullivan repeated on Sept. 25 that any use of nuclear force from Russia would be met with “catastrophic consequences." (Video: Blair Guild/The Washington Post)
National security adviser Jake Sullivan made the rounds on the Sunday morning talk shows, warning that there would be “catastrophic consequences” for Russia if it uses nuclear weapons in its war on Ukraine. Sullivan said that message has been conveyed to Russian officials at the highest levels.
The Post’s Blair Guild pulled together what Sullivan had to say during appearances on multiple shows.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said a conversation with Ukraine over the supply of U.S. weapons to aid the country’s war effort is “ongoing,” notably regarding a request from Kyiv for Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, as the surface-to-surface missiles are commonly known.
The Post’s Rachel Pannett has details: | 2022-09-26T11:33:51Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Amid inflation challenges, Biden to hold event focused on saving money - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/26/biden-saving-money-congress-shutdown/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/26/biden-saving-money-congress-shutdown/ |
Here’s what a creep in a coffee shop could actually learn about you
Take WiFi networks in airports and coffee shops. They’re part of life for anyone who travels or works remotely. They also have a reputation as cybersecurity risks. Do they still deserve it?
To see what potential hackers could see on a shared network, we invited professionals from cybersecurity company Avast to “compromise” my home network (all with my consent). We logged onto the same network at the same time, just like we would at a coffee shop, to see how much data a bad actor with a few free tools could learn about an unassuming WiFi user.
After a few minutes clicking around my finance, work, streaming and social media accounts, Avast’s team could see the sites I’d visited (though not what I’d done there), the time of day and the specific device I used (in this case, a MacBook Pro). It’s not nothing, but it wouldn’t do hackers much good if they were looking to rip me off. It’s also relatively reckless for hackers to sit around messing with public networks, said Chester Wisniewski, a principal research scientist at security company Sophos.
Tech writer Tatum Hunter gets hacked on purpose to figure out what hackers can see and what they can't. (Video: Monica Rodman/The Washington Post)
In the internet’s earlier days, the vast majority of web traffic was unencrypted — meaning anyone savvy enough to eavesdrop on a network could see everything you type into a website. By 2017, the balance had shifted, with more than half of all web traffic using the encrypted “HTTPS” protocol you may recognize from the top of your browser, according to data pulled from the Firefox browser. Today, few legitimate sites remain unencrypted, with more than 90 percent of webpages loaded in the United States obscured from prying eyes, according to the Firefox data. (If you’re curious whether a given site is encrypted, look for “HTTPS” in the URL, or site address. Pages with “HTTP” are unencrypted. Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell at a glance if a mobile app encrypts its traffic.)
Government employees, dissidents and anyone else dealing with sensitive data can use a trusted virtual private network (VPN) to cloak their activities, said Russ Housley, founder of cybersecurity consultancy Vigil Security. Since VPNs hide your IP address and web activity from everyone except the VPN provider, they help guard against both hacking and invasive advertising. Keep in mind that not all VPNs are trustworthy and many fail to protect against government surveillance if you’re traveling overseas, Housley noted.
Your VPN may be snake oil. These three are trustworthy.
Still, for the rest of us, public WiFi networks aren’t totally threat-free. Mom-and-pop shops are unlikely to keep up with necessary WiFi maintenance such as firmware updates and strong passwords, said Aaron Rinehart, co-founder and chief technology officer at cybersecurity company Verica. A truly committed criminal could impersonate a public network or website to try to steal credentials, he said.
But that’s a lot less likely than someone taking advantage of, say, your reused passwords or outdated software. Focus your energies on cybersecurity chores within your control — such as setting strong passwords, saying “yes” to software updates and learning the signs of a scam — and don’t sweat the public WiFi too hard.
“Generally, using public WiFi is safe so long as your computer is up to date and you encrypt all of your data,” said Eric Rescorla, chief technology officer at Firefox-maker Mozilla. | 2022-09-26T11:51:16Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Is public WiFi safe? We ‘compromised’ a network to test it. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/26/public-wifi-privacy/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/26/public-wifi-privacy/ |
Norman Rockwell’s Economy Is Never Coming Back
Promising a return to a Norman Rockwell-esque past where everyone had great jobs, financial stability and a shot at the American dream makes for great politics, but terrible economic policies. The current and last US presidents, perhaps recalling an economy from their glory years, are both guilty of this. Donald Trump ran on the explicit promise to “Make America Great Again” by reducing dependence on international trade and re-shoring manufacturing. Joe Biden also lets nostalgia guide his economic policies, which attempt to bring back the glory days of unions while restoring an economy based in manufacturing.
The economy, though, has evolved and policies that might have worked during the heydays of our most recent presidents would have little impact now. The simple fact is that the US economy is no longer dominated by manufacturing, giving way to services. The way forward means policies that lead to a more dynamic economy by making it less burdensome to start a business, allowing for different kinds of work, offering education to workers of all ages and new models of unionization that provide independent workers insurance but still lets them negotiate their own wages and hours.
We tend to idealize the economy of the past because there was more unionized manufacturing employment that provided good, stable jobs which did not require a college degree. This was in part because, after World War II, the capital stock in other countries was destroyed, meaning American manufacturing could dominate and earn a large premium it shared with its workers. But the rest of the world caught up, the global economy became more competitive and upended trade, advances in technology led to efficiencies and the premium shrunk. In 1970, manufacturing accounted for about 25% of nominal US gross domestic product but had fallen to just 11% in 2020.
It may be tempting to fight these forces, especially trade and technology, and the change they bring, but doing so serves neither workers nor consumers. For consumers, it only means higher prices. And while shielding workers from global trade may benefit them in the short-run, it makes them less competitive and unable to work with new technology in the long run.
Both Presidents attempted to revive manufacturing and related jobs by using subsidies and credits. Trump’s ill-fated attempt to build a factory for Foxconn (the maker of the iPhone) in Wisconsin at great taxpayer expense proved this approach was shortsighted. Some 13,000 manufacturing jobs were promised in Wisconsin, but only 3,000 materialized, most of which went to engineers and programmers, not those left behind by trade and technology. This was not just a failure of execution; most Americans workers lack the skills and are too expensive to make the inputs Foxconn needs. This is also why the prospects for Biden’s Chips Act which aims to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing look equally dim and more expensive.
Such efforts to revive the country’s manufacturing past do not work because they do not address the root cause of manufacturing’s decline. To be clear, American workers do have a future in making things, but what it will look like can’t be predicted and government directed, and it most definitely won’t resemble the manufacturing industry of the past. That’s because American labor is more expensive and better educated than ever, and the country’s comparative advantage is now in services and in more high-skilled manufacturing. A better use of resources is to reduce the barriers to entrepreneurship, invest in skills training for Americans of all ages and let the market determine the future of what gets made in America. Economists estimated that if the money spent on the Foxconn debacle were in the hands of entrepreneurs, 90,000 jobs would have been created instead of 3,000.
For most of the post-war era there were big advantages to building what economists call firm-specific capital, which is knowledge of how things are done at a particular company. If you worked at Ford Motor Co., it was knowledge of how cars are made at Ford, and if you worked as an office administrator, you knew how to format documents in a way that was unique for your employer. But technology has made work more similar across companies: everyone uses Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Technology also means firms can better track worker productivity. These trends mean there is less value in firm-specific capital and more in individual capital. In other words, there are bigger gains to be had building your own skill set and being a star employee.
When there was more value in firm-specific capital there was also a bigger return on union membership. Workers had less power since much of their value was tied to one employer, whereas now there is a high return to changing jobs. Unions worked by having all employees band together for similar pay and benefits in exchange for more security, meaning that highly productive employees subsidized less productive ones. When there were fewer gains to being an above-average worker, the extra stability was worth it. Now this is less true, which is one reason why many union drives are failing. In 1983, more than 20% of workers were members of a trade union. In 2021 it was just 10.3%, and most of them worked for the government.
These days there are also more gains to being a contract worker than one tied to a single employer. Many workers value flexibility, especially after they experienced remote work during the pandemic. Yet the current administration is also fighting this trend, pushing to classify gig workers as employees in another attempt to make jobs more like they used to be.
In fairness, Trump and Biden both attempted to address real problems in a transitioning economy that works for the well-educated or skilled, but leaves many others behind. Trade and technology destroyed the way of life for many, but the solution is not a return to the unionized manufacturing past. Giving all types of workers the chance to thrive will take some experimentation in policy and markets. This requires creativity and leadership that is open to the future, rather than set on trying to bring back the past. | 2022-09-26T11:59:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Norman Rockwell’s Economy Is Never Coming Back - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/norman-rockwells-economy-is-never-coming-back/2022/09/26/2c2f8580-3d8b-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/norman-rockwells-economy-is-never-coming-back/2022/09/26/2c2f8580-3d8b-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
By some measures, US stock market sentiment is just about as negative as it was in March 2009, right before the S&P 500 Index began its 10-year bull market that helped investors quintuple their money. As tempting as it is to take the other side of that doom-and-gloom trade, investors should consider fighting their contrarian instincts. This is a much different market, and the negative sentiment may well be justified this time.
The American Association of Individual Investors’ weekly survey(1) shows that bearish views on the market trajectory for the next six months far outnumber the bullish ones, with the ratio now at about 3.4-to-1, a level of pessimism more or less unparalleled since the wake of the financial crisis. That’s been the case more or less since April, with a few temporary mood swings for the better along the way.
Traditionally, these levels of negativity have been fantastic times to invest: The S&P 500 rallied almost 38% in the three months after sentiment soured in March 2009 and about 67% during the next year. In fact, investing during such sentiment extremes has essentially never been a losing proposition in the post-crisis era. Still, there’s a strong argument to be made that things are changing.
First, observe that the pattern has already been broken. Sentiment as measured by the AAII survey has been extremely bearish since late April, and anyone following a strict contrarian strategy would have gone all in when sentiment dropped that month. But the market is down about 10.6% in the period, albeit with a couple tradeable bear-market rallies in the middle. Three years from now, will this go down as a decent time to have bought stocks for the long run? Possibly. But it’s hard to bet that the market bottom has been reached.
Next, there’s the interest-rate environment to consider. The biggest contrarian buying opportunities in the table above — namely, March 2009 and July 2020 — both have in common that the Federal Reserve had just finished slashing interest rates to nearly zero. Investors are now contending with the opposite rate outlook. As Fed Chair Jerome Powell underscored in his press conference last Wednesday, the US central bank is set on pushing interest rates significantly higher and keeping them there until it has clear and convincing evidence that the worst inflation in four decades is coming under control.
Finally, there are valuations, which typically sink in the event of a bona fide sentiment wipeout. During the financial crisis, forward earnings multiples bottomed below 10; and in March 2020 they reached 14. At around 16 times forward earnings now, most of the S&P 500’s multiple contraction reflects high risk-free rates but little of the additional risk premium that investors typically demand for equities in a recession.
Investors may say that they’re bearish in surveys, but the multiples they’re using to value equities imply they don’t entirely mean what they say, even after last week’s declines. Until that negativity is fully reflected in asset prices, longer-term investors won’t find a lot of utility in trying to read the market’s mood. We’re living in a new market paradigm, and investors’ playbooks will just have to adapt.
• Stocks Are Courting a Nasty Surprise on Earnings: Jonathan Levin
(1) Understandably, investors have strong opinions about the representativeness of the AAII survey, and I’m not here to debate them. But AAII at least offers several advantages for the purpose of this exercise, including weekly updates; a long time series; and some demonstrated history of working as a guide to tops and bottoms. As always, take it with a grain of salt. | 2022-09-26T12:00:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | So You Say You’re Bearish on Stocks, But Are You Really? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/so-you-say-youre-bearish-on-stocks-but-are-you-really/2022/09/26/fda4a884-3d86-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/so-you-say-youre-bearish-on-stocks-but-are-you-really/2022/09/26/fda4a884-3d86-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
New York City’s population fell by an estimated 336,677, nearly 4%, between April 2020 and July 2021, according to the US Census Bureau. Timelier data from US Postal Service address changes, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel and other sources indicate that more people are probably still leaving the city than moving in. Payroll employment (which includes those who commute into the city) has been rising but remains 161,500 lower than in February 2020.
So, uh, why is it so hard to find an apartment?
In August, New York had by far the lowest rental vacancy rate of any large city in Apartment List’s database, at 2.6%. Asking rents in New York are also much higher than in any of the other large cities tracked by listing service Zumper. The effective median rent on new leases passed $4,000 for the first time in Manhattan in July, according to the monthly rent reports prepared for brokerage Douglas Elliman by the appraiser Miller Samuel, and is now well above $3,000 for Brooklyn and northwestern Queens. It did dip in Manhattan and Queens in August, but Miller Samuel’s Jonathan Miller said all signs point to prices “stabilizing, not falling.”
A little context removes some of the shock value from these numbers. The vacancy rate in New York City was an even-lower 2.3% right before the pandemic, and rent increases have outpaced inflation only modestly since then in Manhattan and Brooklyn and have trailed it in Queens. Most other cities in the US, as well as New York’s suburbs, have experienced steeper increases in both rents and purchase prices. But again, New York City has been losing population. Shouldn’t that have pushed vacancy rates up and pulled rents down?
The metrics cited above reflect conditions in the unregulated rental market in New York, and a rent law passed by the state legislature in 2019 cut off what had been a substantial flow of formerly rent-regulated apartments into that market, so that’s an obvious reason for the vacancy rate to be tighter and rents higher than one might expect. It’s definitely not the only one, though. “The impact of the 2019 rent control is quite significant,” said Eric Kober, a three-decade veteran of the New York City Department of City Planning who is now a lecturer at Yale, senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and vocal critic of the 2019 law, “but clearly there are many other things going on that in their totality create a perfect storm of bad housing policy.”
Here’s my rundown of the main elements of that perfect storm, starting on the demand side.
Fewer people, but different types
If the people coming to New York have different needs, priorities and resources than those who are leaving, population totals might not give an accurate picture of housing demand. Many families with children left the city early in the pandemic, and by all appearances a lot of young single people have arrived since. This could mean that the decline in population hasn’t been matched by a decline in households, which are the relevant unit in assessing housing demand. Nationwide, the Census Bureau estimates that the number of households grew by 1.5 million, or 1.2%, in 2021, even as population rose just 0.1%. Young adults striking out on their own drove much of the increase. Another factor that may be affecting household size in the city is the decline in the number of arrivals from abroad before and during the pandemic (although they are of course arriving by the busload now), given that newly arrived immigrants are often willing to endure more-crowded living conditions than domestic migrants.
Also, the job losses in New York haven’t been across the board. Lower-wage sectors such as retail, food service and accommodation have experienced the biggest declines, while some high-wage ones such as information (which encompasses software and internet companies as well as publishing and broadcasting) and professional, scientific and technical services (law firms, consultants, etc.) have actually added jobs in the city during the pandemic. Then again, the biggest job increases have been in low-paying home health-care services, and employment in the city’s gigantic and high-paying financial-services sector is still down slightly.
The supply-side issues seem a little clearer and are definitely easier to document.
Not enough new housing
New York City built very little new housing from 1975 to 2000, enjoyed a modest construction boom after that, and hasn’t equaled its late-2000s building pace since then except for a big 2015 rush to start construction to take advantage of the expiring 421-a affordable-housing tax exemption. (The exemption was revived in less generous form in 2017 and expired again this summer.)
New York is already the most densely populated large city in the US, and building there is almost never as simple as putting up housing on an empty lot. Still, other US cities near the top of the density rankings have managed to outbuild New York on a population-adjusted basis over the past decade, with one just across the Hudson River in New Jersey doing so by more than a 3-to-1 ratio.
How much new housing would be enough? Payroll employment in New York City increased by nearly a million from 2010 to just before the pandemic, making the just more than 200,000 housing units permitted over that period look paltry by comparison. A recent analysis by Up For Growth, a “pro-housing” nonprofit research group, estimated that the New York metropolitan area was 342,144 units short of meeting its housing needs as of 2019, second most after metropolitan Los Angeles — although smaller as a percentage of total units than lots of other large coastal metro areas. In the city proper, the simple fact that market-rate housing is so expensive seems to indicate that there isn’t enough of it.
What’s more, in a few wealthy parts of Manhattan, the housing supply has been shrinking. In the Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Greenwich Village, SoHo and NoHo neighborhoods, the number of housing units declined from 2010 to 2020 as buyers converted small multi-unit buildings, most of which had originally been built as houses and divided into apartments decades ago, back to single-family dwellings and multiple apartments into larger ones. Two new apartment towers planned for the Upper East Side will reportedly also have fewer (if larger) housing units than the low-rise buildings they are replacing.
Not enough rental housing
Rent control was imposed as an emergency measure in most of the US during World War II and remained in place after the war in New York City, albeit only in buildings constructed before February 1947. In 1974, the state legislature replaced it with a somewhat more flexible system called rent stabilization for buildings completed before that year, as well as newer apartments subsidized by the 421-a tax exemption and similar J-51 exemption for renovated buildings. (Tenants of pre-1947 buildings got to stay on rent control as long as they didn’t move.)
In a 1946 pamphlet that became pretty famous, economists Milton Friedman and George Stigler argued that rent controls depressed the supply of rental housing, which does in fact seem to have happened both nationwide during the 1940s rent controls and in New York City since. For decades, the US Census Bureau has been conducting a regular New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey to determine whether rental vacancy rates in the city are below the 5% threshold used to determine whether the “housing emergency” used to justify rent regulation still exists. It always has, in part because while the estimated overall number of housing units in New York City increased more than 27% between 1970 and 2021, to 3.6 million, the number of renter-occupied units has stayed the same.
The number of apartments covered by rent regulation has fallen outright over time. Statistics on this are readily available back to 1991, and they show the estimated number of apartments subject to rent control or rent stabilization has decreased by 122,295, or 10%, since then. The number of other non-market-rate apartments in the city — in public housing, semipublic Mitchell-Lama developments and other programs — fell 123,793, or 35%. In 2021, the estimated number of market-rate apartments surpassed the number of rent-controlled or rent-stabilized apartments for the first time, 1.023 million to 1.022 million.
In the 1970s and 1980s, apartments left rent regulation primarily through conversion to owner-occupied cooperative apartments, which usually offered renters the opportunity to buy at what in retrospect turned out to be bargain prices. In 1985, the peak year for co-op conversion, 48,176 units went from rentals to co-ops. That number hasn’t topped 1,000 since 2011, though, and while rent-stabilized apartments in 421-a and J-51 buildings convert to market rates when the term of the tax break ends, this has accounted for only an average of 1,400 apartments a year over the past decade.
The chief destroyer of rent-stabilized units since 2000 has been something called high-rent decontrol, which shifted an average of 7,244 units a year from regulated to unregulated from 2010 through 2019. State legislation enacted in 1993 allowed apartments to be removed from rent regulation when the rent passed a certain threshold ($2,774.76 in 2019) and they either became vacant or were occupied by a renter with a high income ($200,000 or higher in 2019). This created some strong incentives for owners of regulated apartments to make improvements that allowed them to jack up the rent and harass non-affluent tenants into leaving. Uproar over the latter phenomenon helped lead to the 2019 state rent law, which restricted rent increases for renovations, ended high-rent decontrol and made it harder to convert rental buildings into condominiums.
Most of the conversions from regulated to unregulated apartments took place in Manhattan, and going by the Miller Samuel data they appear to have amounted to roughly 10% of the borough’s market-rate apartment listings in the 2010s, surely enough for their disappearance to be felt in that market now.
The flip side is that more apartments have remained under rent regulation than would be the case without the new rent law. The 2021 Housing and Vacancy Survey showed the first increase in their number since 2011, although the change was within the survey’s margin of error. The survey also found a vacancy rate for rent-stabilized apartments of 4.6%, more than double what it had been in 2017. That vacancy rate appears be a lot lower now. One indication is the comeback of so-called key money for rent-stabilized apartments, in the form of broker’s fees rising into five digits that are legal if the broker pockets them but not if part is passed on to the building owner, as some suspect must be happening. Meanwhile, rising market-rate rents increase the incentive for tenants to stay in regulated apartments even if they’d rather downsize or upsize or move to a different part of the city.
The flow of units out of rent regulation has not stopped entirely. Owners may still remove units from rent stabilization when units are merged or when a building is condemned or demolished. The number of units in this “other” category in the above chart more than doubled from 2019 to 2021, to 2,428.
Too many empty apartments
Another thing that’s more than doubled — in this case over the past decade — is the number of city housing units classified as “vacant, not available for sale or rent” in the Housing and Vacancy Survey, which estimated that there were 353,400 such units in 2021.
In 2017, the reason most often offered for keeping units vacant was that they were under renovation. In 2021, it was that they were being “held for occasional, seasonal or recreational use,” which according to the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development comprises “those maintained as pieds-a-terre, units held for investment purposes, and those used as short-term rentals where the entire unit is occupied on a temporary basis.” Those who hold on to vacant apartments as investments or rent them out on Airbnb get a lot of (negative) attention in New York City housing discussions, but I’ve got to think that in 2021 the truly big driver was legitimate New York City residents with country or beach houses that became their primary residences during the pandemic. Also contributing was a change in survey methodology in which apartments were counted as vacant in 2021 even if someone was there, as long as that someone said their primary residence was elsewhere.
Another possible cause of the rise in vacancies since 2017 is that owners of rent-regulated apartments are holding them vacant because the rewards to renovating them and renting them have fallen or they’re casting about for some way to wrest them from regulated status or both. The Community Housing Improvement Program, a landlord association, has estimated that 20,000 rent-regulated apartments are being held vacant for such reasons.
Solving New York’s housing “perfect storm” will be incredibly complex. But building more housing is clearly the most important step.
• Housing Market’s P/E Ratio Is in the Danger Zone: Aaron Brown
• How Ending Single-Family Zoning Changed Minneapolis: Justin Fox | 2022-09-26T12:00:11Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Why Is a New York Apartment Still So Hard to Find? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-is-a-new-york-apartment-still-so-hard-to-find/2022/09/26/63249edc-3d8f-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-is-a-new-york-apartment-still-so-hard-to-find/2022/09/26/63249edc-3d8f-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
How Sixth & I CEO Heather Moran would spend a perfect day in D.C.
By Rudi Greenberg
Heather Moran’s career and personal life have been defined, in part, by the entertainment industry and the D.C. Jewish community, which is why she jumped at the chance to blend those passions at Sixth & I, an organization that’s found a way to nimbly mix the two for nearly 20 years. “It houses all the things that I love most: arts and entertainment that appeal to everybody, and a really welcoming, communal space for young Jews,” Moran says of the hybrid venue and sanctuary in Chinatown.
Moran joined Sixth & I as executive director and CEO in 2016, pivoting from a career in television that began at Discovery, where she worked her way into a programming and scheduling gig for TLC — helping to Americanize the British formats that became “Trading Spaces” and “Junkyard Wars.” After a stint at E! working on the Style Network, she ran the programming department at the National Geographic channel before taking on Sixth & I’s top job.
With her background in television, she made a bet that installing cameras to stream live events would be a worthwhile investment, which set Sixth & I up for success during the pandemic. “Part of our mission, and part of what’s so important to us, is to be a low barrier to entry for people,” Moran says. “We also grew our national audience, which was not something that we had really thought about before.”
Sixth & I is perhaps the only place in the country where you can watch a popular live podcast recording, catch an up-and-coming indie band, hear a talk from a best-selling author and celebrate Jewish holidays — all in a synagogue, often within the same week. “We want people to find meaning, we want people to find connection,” Moran says. “We do that on the Jewish side by making sure that our programs are focused on young Jews in D.C. And we do it on the entertainment side very differently because our audience is literally everybody in Washington.”
Though she grew up in Philadelphia, Moran, 49, has spent the better part of three decades in the D.C. area, moving from Foggy Bottom, where she attended George Washington University in the ’90s, to Silver Spring before ultimately landing in the Kensington/Chevy Chase area (with a brief stint in New York City in between). “I love the fact that D.C. is so different depending on where you go,” Moran says. In dreaming up a perfect day in D.C., Moran embraces the area’s breadth of things to do, while also nodding to her past.
The first thing that happens is my best friend’s in town, Amy, who I met at GW. She lives in New York now, and we never get to spend enough time together. Part of my dream is that we get to spend the day together. I love breakfast, so before we head into the city, we go to Parkway Deli in Silver Spring — a total institution. I’m getting whitefish salad on an everything bagel, not toasted. I think that toasted bagels are an abomination. This is an ongoing debate at Sixth & I staff meetings, but there is only one right answer. Their pickle bar is not open for breakfast, but it’s my dream day, so it is.
We’re in Silver Spring, so we probably go to Loyalty Bookstore right there. Whenever I go to a new city, I go to an independent bookstore. It’s one of my favorite things. I like nonfiction. The one that I’m holding in my hands right now, which I’m obsessed with, is “Our Unfinished March” by Eric Holder, because we hosted him recently. It’s about the past and future of the vote, and I love it. This is going to trigger something that’s going to make me want to read something else. There are books that are on the shelf at Loyalty that I’d have to special order at other places, and I want to lean into that.
We would go downtown. I love new books and old records. First we would go to Politics and Prose, the one on Connecticut [Avenue]. I feel like I can get everything there — it’s so vast. They have such a sweet coffee bar and such an amazing kids’ section. Then we’ll go to Som Records. I like that it’s a hole in the wall. I love it there, and it just feels like you can hunt for a little treasure. And unlike a shiny new book, I want an old record that can have a skip in it — that’s fine with me. If I got really lucky, I’d find a live Stevie Wonder album. I also always go to the soundtrack section because I love musicals, and they also have soundtracks from crazy television shows you didn’t need to know have soundtracks.
We’re going to Chinatown for lunch because I know a lot about lunch in Chinatown. So I would probably do something quick because I have things to do. I love Little Sesame. I love their hummus — it’s perfect. I’m getting a hummus bowl with chicken. I will ask for extra pita.
We’re going to the National Portrait Gallery. What’s great is that I can walk three blocks and just stare at Michelle Obama’s portrait, and it makes me feel better. Or they have drinks in the Kogod Courtyard. So, you know, middle-of-the-day pinot grigio?
It wouldn’t be my perfect day if I wasn’t able to take a nap. I love a nap. All I need is 30 minutes. I totally could pop into my office, and I would feel no shame in that.
Next is Navy Yard because Amy’s never walked on the water by Navy Yard because that wasn’t a thing when we went to GW. It’s not too long of a walk, and if it’s Wednesday, Dreaming Out Loud has a farmers market. Then there’s a particular store that I go to every time I’m there called Steadfast Supply. That’s where you buy the gift for someone that you didn’t know you needed to buy. It’s so well-curated. I do have a dog, and I got him a dog toy shaped like an avocado. It has held up more than any other pet toy I’ve ever bought.
Now it’s time to bring in my husband, Sean, and the kids. Because it’s my dream day, the kids are both actually interested in coming to hang out with me. We’d all meet at Duke’s Grocery in Foggy Bottom because it’s nice GW memories. They have one of the best burgers in town: the Proper Burger. It’s messy and delicious. And it’s also not enormous. But I have to have a lot of extra napkins. And a Maker’s and Coke.
We’re going to go home. We’re going to get in our PJs. And we’re going to cuddle up on the couch all together. But we have to get cupcakes from Baked and Wired on the way home. I would get plain vanilla, but I love their strawberry. They have an Elvis cupcake that’s peanut butter banana — it’s just so good. We’re watching movies from the ’80s. “Goonies” or “Young Sherlock Holmes,” which normally they would never allow me to do, and we’d probably watch an Adam Sandler movie. But I don’t care because I’m just happy to be with them and cuddling. | 2022-09-26T12:00:18Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Sixth & I CEO Heather Moran's perfect day in D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/26/heather-moran-dream-day/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/26/heather-moran-dream-day/ |
Unlocking these secrets might arm us with strategies to protect ourselves and stop the next pandemic
A health worker in the northern Chinese port city of Tianjin tests for covid earlier this month. (-/CNS/AFP/Getty Images)
Since a new coronavirus launched the global pandemic that has now killed more than 6.5 million people — 16 percent of them in the United States alone ― scientists in record numbers have devoted themselves full time to unraveling its mysteries.
Still, the virus has kept many of its secrets, from how it mutates so rapidly, to why it kills some while leaving others largely unscathed — mysteries that if solved might arm the world’s scientists with new strategies to curb its spread and guard against the next pandemic. Here are some of the most pressing questions they are trying to answer:
That theory is backed by multiple lines of evidence, including the clustering of early covid cases around the market — documentation laid out in two peer-reviewed papers published this summer. But key details remain elusive. We do not know where in the market the leap from animals to humans took place, or which animals were involved. Nor do we know the precise steps in the process.
Whatever its origins, SARS-CoV-2 has proven far more successful infecting large numbers of people than other coronaviruses, including the one that surfaced in Asia 20 years ago causing severe acute respiratory syndrome, a less contagious, though also sometimes fatal illness. Both coronaviruses invade human cells through a spike protein that attaches to the ACE2 receptor on the surface of human cells. Yet the trajectories of the two pathogens could hardly be more different.
The original SARS, which emerged in China in late 2002, sickened 8,098 people, killing 774. But that outbreak was over within a year due in large part to 19th century public health measures such as social distancing and isolation of the infected ― many of the same steps public health officials have urged during the current pandemic.
Resolving the uncertainties surrounding how SARS-CoV-2 was first transmitted to people and why it has thrived are “extraordinary questions,” Munster said, “because they would actually tie back to preparation for the next pandemic which everybody is worried about.”
“We know that unfortunately immunocompromised people are a major breeding ground for these noxious variants because of the accelerated evolution of the virus inside them,” said Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. “With all of the tens of millions of immunocompromised people around the world, the one that gave birth to omicron — what was it about that person?”
“But the language of the virus, the way it really comes up with ways to hurt us and infect us, and hijack our cells,” said Topol, “It’s always ahead of us and then we say, ‘Oh, that’s how it did it.’
“The virus is becoming more infectious, but less dangerous for the majority of people,” said Bill Powderly, co-director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “But we’ve no guarantee that the virus wouldn’t develop additional mutations that would eventually make it more virulent in the future.”
Tracking coronavirus in animals takes on new urgency
“They’ve been extremely effective, but they also have their shortcomings,” said Mark Siedner, an infectious-disease doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Immunity wanes, and their ability to protect us against newer variants has been variable — in some cases quite strong, in other cases, not as good as we’d like.”
“Can we develop a universal vaccine, effective across all existing and forthcoming variants, that confers sterilizing immunity, in other words that prevents infection altogether?” he said.
The condition itself is one huge question mark — a persistent illness marked by a variety of symptoms including fatigue, fever, shortness of breath, chest pain, pounding heart, headaches, difficulty thinking or concentrating, dizziness and joint pain.
Goldstein said the differing responses to the virus of young and old may have something to do with interferon, a protein that alerts the body’s natural immune system. “Maybe kids make more interferon, and maybe they make it earlier,” Goldstein speculated. “I think that’s probably the key.” | 2022-09-26T12:00:24Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Five covid questions scientists still can't answer - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/09/26/covid-questions-variants-long-covid/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/09/26/covid-questions-variants-long-covid/ |
Aaron Burr was the highest-ranking official charged with treason, which some have invoked amid Trump probes
Portrait of Aaron Burr, an American politician and lawyer who was the third vice president of the United States, serving during Thomas Jefferson's first term (1801-1805). (iStock)
On Aug. 3, 1807, in Richmond, Va., Chief Justice John Marshall opened the trial of former vice president Aaron Burr. The charge: treason against the United States. Burr was accused of plotting an armed insurrection against the government.
More than two centuries later, potential treason is being discussed again following the latest twists in the Justice Department’s investigation of former president Donald Trump, including the revelation that the FBI discovered a top-secret document about a foreign nation’s nuclear capabilities at Trump’s estate in Florida. Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner recently said on MSNBC that Trump’s role in igniting “an armed attack on the Capitol … may actually amount to treason.” So far, the Justice Department hasn’t indicated what charges, if any, might result from its probe, though Trump is facing at least eight criminal and civil proceedings.
Only about 30 people have ever been charged with treason in the United States, and Burr was the highest-ranking official to go on trial. By 1807, he was an outcast from both political parties. He had turned off many Democratic-Republicans when, as Thomas Jefferson’s presumed running mate in 1800, Burr had tried to claim the presidency after both men received the same number of electoral votes. Then, as vice president in 1804, Burr shot and killed Federalist Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Burr also presided over the controversial 1805 impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase.
The impeachment trial presided over by Alexander Hamilton’s killer
After Jefferson won reelection in 1804 with a new vice president, George Clinton, Burr took several trips to the U.S. southwest and launched the “Burr Conspiracy.” He assembled an armed force, allegedly to capture a part of Mexico (now Texas) from Spain and to take control of New Orleans in the U.S. Louisiana Territory, and then to persuade western states to join an independent nation he would head.
In December 1806, Jefferson warned that “sundry persons” were conspiring to form an illegal military expedition. In January, he named Burr as “a prime mover” of the treasonous conspiracy and said Burr’s guilt was “placed beyond question.” Meanwhile, he pressed Congress to pass what became the Insurrection Act of 1807, which gave the president the authority to send in troops to quell uprisings.
In February 1807, Burr was arrested in Alabama and taken by military guard on horseback about 900 miles to Richmond, then a town of about 6,000 people, of whom more than 2,000 were enslaved. Burr was put under guard at the city’s Eagle Tavern hotel. Public testimony before a grand jury began on May 22 in Richmond’s federal circuit court.
For 200 years, the Insurrection Act has given presidents the power to deploy the military to quell unrest
Crowds of people swarmed into Richmond. “They were so numerous that the trial had to be held in the legislative chamber of the State House, which was fitted with sandboxes to catch the flying tobacco juice,” wrote R. Kent Newmyer, author of “The Treason Trial of Aaron Burr.” Newspapers reported that one street orator was future president Andrew Jackson, who berated Jefferson for “persecuting his innocent friend.” Others called for Burr to find justice at the end of a rope. “May his treachery to his country exalt him to the scaffold, and hemp be his escort to the Republic of dust and ashes,” a Baltimore man wrote.
At the time, the Supreme Court’s six justices sometimes presided over circuit courts. Chief Justice Marshall, who lived in Richmond, took the lead on the Burr case, which featured a dazzling array of legal talent. Leading the prosecution were George Hay, a son-in-law of future president James Monroe, and William Wirt, a future U.S. attorney general. Defense lawyers included former secretary of state Edmund Randolph, former attorney general Charles Lee and Luther Martin, a delegate to the constitutional convention.
But the defense’s primary leader “was Burr himself,” wrote Joseph P. Brady in his 1913 book “The Trial of Aaron Burr.” “He was keenly alive to every proceeding” and “no move was made, or point conceded, without his sanction.” Jefferson provided guidance to the prosecution. At Burr’s request, Marshall took the unprecedented step of issuing a subpoena to the president to provide certain documents and even to appear in court. Jefferson, citing the Constitution’s separation of powers, never complied.
The government’s key witness was army commander Gen. James Wilkinson, the Louisiana Territory’s first governor, who had joined in Burr’s early plans before turning on him. Wilkinson, dressed in his military uniform, “strutted into court . . . swelling like a turkey-cock,” novelist Washington Irving wrote in a newspaper. Wilkinson’s testimony led to Burr’s indictment for treason. Burr, who had been free on bail, was put in the nearby federal penitentiary.
Aaron Burr had a secret family of color, new research shows
The treason trial began at noon on Aug. 3. Prosecutor Hay presented a broad interpretation of treason to the 12-man jury, expanding on the indictment’s charge that Burr had begun forming a military force on Blennerhassett Island in the Ohio River near Marietta, Ohio. On Dec. 10, 1806, the indictment alleged, up to 30 people were assembled, “armed and arrayed in a warlike manner” with “guns, swords [and] other warlike weapons,” being there “unlawfully, maliciously and traitorously” and preparing to make war against the United States, starting with an attack on New Orleans. Hay conceded Burr himself was in Kentucky that day.
The treason clause of the U.S. Constitution sets a high bar. It reads in part: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.”
Marshall, who had been appointed to the Supreme Court in 1801 by lame-duck Federalist President John Adams, leading Jefferson to accuse the Federalists of stealing the seat, adopted a strict interpretation of the clause. In his three-hour summation and instructions to the jury, he sided with defense arguments. He said an “overt” act of war must be “proved by two witnesses. It is not proved by a single witness.” He added, “No man can be convicted of treason who was not present when the war was levied.”
Marshall left the jury little choice. After 25 minutes, the jurors returned with a verdict: not guilty.
Jefferson was furious. “It now appears we have no law but the will of the judge,” he fumed. Effigies of Marshall and Burr were hung in several cities. Burr was soon a free man.
Historians still debate just how serious the Burr insurrection was, but he was widely considered a traitor at the time. He moved to England for five years, then returned to New York. In 1833, he married a wealthy widow who was 19 years his junior and who soon saw her husband losing her money in costly land speculation.
Burr died at age 80 on Sept. 14, 1836 — the same day his divorce was finalized. His former wife’s divorce lawyer was Alexander Hamilton Jr. | 2022-09-26T12:00:30Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Aaron Burr was tried for treason for insurrection, long before Trump - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/09/26/aaron-burr-treason-insurrection-trump/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/09/26/aaron-burr-treason-insurrection-trump/ |
A volcano in Tonga birthed a new island. Consider it limited edition.
Satellite imagery captured on Sept. 14 shows the Home Reef volcano in Tonga. (Planet Labs Inc./AFP/Getty Images)
That was the case earlier this month, when a baby island poked through the water 11 hours after the Home Reef erupted on Sept. 10, NASA announced in a recent news release. It started out around one acre but in a matter of days has grown to about 8.6 acres because of the volcano’s recent flurry of eruptions, according to Tonga Geological Services, a government agency.
While the word island might evoke images of sandy beaches and lush vegetation, that’s not quite the case with these volcanic islets.
“It’s more like a large layer of ash, steam and pumice over the ocean,” Rennie Vaiomounga, a geologist at Tonga Geological Services, told The Washington Post. That means the new island isn’t even sturdy enough to walk on, though that could change if it sticks around long enough to solidify.
Eruptions in the Home Reef — located in the Tonga-Kermadec subduction zone, one of the world’s most active volcanic arcs — have often produced new landmasses. But the sporadic emergence of resulting islands is somewhat of a “geological puzzle,” Vaiomounga said.
“We never know when the island will appear or when it will disappear,” he said.
Tonga volcano blasted unprecedented amount of water into atmosphere
It can take centuries, decades or sometimes just a couple of years for a volcano to erupt and form an island. The first recorded Home Reef blast was in 1852. Five years later, it erupted once more. In both cases, small islands were produced, but they were temporary. The same thing happened again in 1984 and 2006, according to the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program.
Each time, the little islands take on a different shape. The one from 1984 — which measured a little over 185 acres — looked like a rectangular cheese board, with handles and all. In 2006, the island that formed was more akin to a thumb sticking out of the water, with the rounded mound developing cliffs that stood at least 164 feet tall.
This time around, the new island looks like an almost perfectly circular mole poking out some 49 feet above the ocean’s surface. Its surface is big enough to fit 6½ standard football fields.
How long the nascent island will survive is another question. The one from 2006, for example, sank by 2008, when the volcano’s summit plunged about 33 feet below the water, according to Smithsonian Institution records. The Late‘iki volcano, also in Tonga, created an island that disappeared after two months back in 2020. That same volcano had previously produced an island that remained for 25 years, according to NASA.
The ephemeral islands often don’t live long because erosion chips away at them. The minerals that turn them into islands slowly return to the sea beds of their makers, which will then spew new islands in the future — a geological circle of life, Vaiomounga said. | 2022-09-26T12:00:36Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New island forms in Tonga after Home Reef volcano eruption - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/26/new-island-tonga-volcano-2022/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/26/new-island-tonga-volcano-2022/ |
The baby formula crisis wasn’t a complete disaster. Here’s why.
(Washington Post staff illustration; images by Getty Images)
Mate a dark comedy about government with a bleak horror movie about the American social safety net and you might get something resembling the U.S. baby formula shortage. The saga features a whistleblower’s report lost in a federal mailroom; decrepit conditions at a factory that was supposed to be making life-sustaining food; and worried, exhausted parents struggling to care for sick, hungry babies.
Yet viewed through a certain lens, the shortage has not been a complete disaster: It has also prompted businesses, private organizations and government to step up in ways that ought to be heartening to both corporate skeptics and small-government conservatives. These institutions’ decisions in the face of crisis reflect creativity and state capacity that isn’t always evident in the public sphere — and raise questions about why such thinking, quick action and collaborative spirit aren’t employed more often.
Take the way the U.S. Agriculture Department stepped up to help participants in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC). Those families were particularly vulnerable to the shortage because of long-standing norms in government contracting, which plays a significant role in shaping the national formula market. Under the program, each state signs a contract with a manufacturer and then allows WIC recipients to buy powdered formula in specific quantities from that company.
Those contracts save states an eye-popping amount of money — in some cases, hundreds of millions — allowing them to stretch WIC dollars further. But they have also fueled tremendous concentration in the formula industry.
Abbott Nutrition, the operator of the Sturgis, Mich., plant at the center of the shortage, supplies WIC contracts for 34 states and D.C.. As a result, when formula from that plant was recalled and the factory shut down, WIC families limited to buying Abbott formula were even more out of luck than people who simply preferred the company’s brands.
In a heartening move, the USDA moved quickly to implement (and later to extend) flexibilities in the WIC program so recipients wouldn’t be trapped by the terms of their benefits. And in states where Abbott holds WIC contracts, the company is covering the difference between the cost of its products and alternatives through the end of September so parents can keep feeding their babies.
In states supplied by other companies, the USDA itself is covering the cost differences between government-negotiated prices and those for other formulas, recognizing that as families try different brands, their purchases put pressure on the supply of formula available to WIC families, too.
The USDA is hardly the only government agency to have acted — and in ways that illustrate the complexities of both the formula product itself and the regulatory environment in which it is produced and sold.
The Biden administration invoked the Defense Production Act to give formula makers priority access to ingredients such as corn syrup, as well as filters and packaging materials, so they could step up production.
Anticipating a potentially severe storm season, the Federal Emergency Management Agency bought an extra 10,000 pounds of formula and distributed it to hubs around the country for quick delivery to disaster zones. And administration staffers called the hotlines set up by formula companies to test whether parents would get real assistance finding formula if they were to reach out for help.
Though the United States has been a notoriously difficult market for formula makers to enter, given differences in national and regional food standards, the Food and Drug Administration used discretionary authority to allow new brands of formula from Australia, the European Union and Mexico onto U.S. shelves. The administration even air-freighted formula into the country through an effort it called Operation Fly Formula.
Meanwhile, the Orthodox Union, which provides kosher certification to manufacturers, signed off on the overseas plants so Jewish families could be confident they were feeding babies food produced in accordance with the dictates of their faith.
Companies including Reckitt, which manufactures the popular Enfamil line of formulas, also took creative approaches to manufacturing and shipping. Robert Cleveland, Reckitt’s senior vice president for North America and Europe nutrition, said in June that the company was prioritizing the products it could produce the fastest, and that it had worked with its retail partners to make sure formula trucks got priority in the unloading process.
That’s the kind of tiny logistical detail that gets overlooked in public policy debates. But for families hitting up Target or Walmart in search of formula, a promptly unloaded truck can be the difference between relief and a demoralizing trek to yet another store in search of food for a hungry baby.
Opinions coverage of the baby formula crisis
In February, Abbott Nutrition issued a major recall of baby formula, leading to a shortage that escalated to crisis levels and left caregivers desperate and babies hungry.
“The baby formula shortage is an outrage,” columnist Alyssa Rosenberg wrote in May, calling for the federal government to step in.
Columnist Marc A. Thiessen disagreed, blaming too much government regulation for the shortage.
The Editorial Board called the shortage a national emergency and pressed for the government allow more imports from abroad.
There was bipartisan outrage over the shortage but little bipartisan action. Rosenberg criticized commentators and politicians on the left and right who reduced the crisis to a talking point.
Particularly reprehensible, Rosenberg argued: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s suggestion that formula be taken from migrant babies being held in federal detention and then given to American children.
The formula crisis was devastating for mothers, who were forced to make difficult decisions over how to feed their children. But the shortage also affected men, Rosenberg reminded us in May. “Feeding a baby is a family responsibility,” she wrote. “The men who are speaking out about formula have demonstrated that.”
Rosenberg joined Dr. Leana S. Wen in an online Q&A to answer questions about the formula shortage, such as whether it’s safe to use homemade formula or share breast milk.
One common question was why more women didn’t just breastfeed. Rosenberg tackled this in a visual column, using her own breastfeeding data to lay out the enormous financial and labor costs of nursing and pumping.
In February, Abbott Nutrition temporarily shuttered its Sturgis, Mich., facility after the Food and Drug Administration discovered bacteria in the plant. “I have high expectations of this company, and we fell short of them,” the company’s CEO, Robert Ford, wrote in May in an op-ed for The Post.
The baby formula supply has improved, but key problems remain: Just three companies dominate the nation’s market, strict import controls make it hard for the United States to get supplies from abroad, and there are gaps in the FDA’s food oversight process, the Editorial Board wrote.
Parents, especially those on public assistance, are still under immense strain, and barriers remain for families seeking help, Rosenberg writes.
But the shortage has not been a complete disaster, Rosenberg writes. It “prompted businesses, private organizations and government to step up in ways that ought to be heartening to both corporate skeptics and small-government conservatives.”
All these efforts have helped to ease the shortage, but not to end it. Some of the delay is due to simple bad luck — and tough decisions.
First, Abbott’s efforts to reopen the Sturgis plant were delayed by a major storm.
Then, when the factory resumed production, on July 1, Abbott prioritized the specialty formulas that are a critical source of food for infants with allergies and complex metabolic conditions. That was the right decision. If the only thing a child can eat is a specialty formula produced by a single company at a single plant, then of course that food should take precedence.
Still, that order of operations meant that Abbott didn’t begin producing its flagship Similac line at the Sturgis plant until Aug. 26, a full six months after the factory was shuttered. From there, it takes an additional six to eight weeks for new cans of formula to start their journey to stores.
Alyssa Rosenberg: Babies aren’t talking points. Stop posturing and get them formula.
Untangling the factors that produced this disaster won’t be easy. But it is essential. Lawmakers and businesses should move forward thinking first and foremost of the families who have paid the price — in anxiety, in time and effort, in babies’ health and lives — for the failures of policy and commerce that led us here.
Companies and the government proved earlier this year that they can act to protect our most vulnerable citizens. The key is to keep working, even when the acute phase of a crisis ebbs and the long haul begins.
This is the second of three columns exploring the nation’s response to the baby formula shortage. Up next: How to ensure a crisis like this doesn’t happen again.
Alyssa Rosenberg on parenting
Opinion|Putting parents first could be the secret to a successful return-to-office | 2022-09-26T12:00:39Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Why the baby formula crisis wasn’t a complete disaster - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/26/baby-formula-crisis-government-corporate-efforts/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/26/baby-formula-crisis-government-corporate-efforts/ |
No, I don’t want God in charge of my health care
Let’s say a patient is considering a tubal ligation after a planned Caesarean section because she doesn’t want to get pregnant again. Here are some factors that pertain to that decision: her vision of her reproductive future, her doctor’s advice, state regulations, the recommendations of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the latest scientific research.
Here are some factors that, for most patients, do not pertain: “God’s purposes,” “God’s will,” “the truth that life is a precious gift from God.”
But if our hypothetical patient happens to be in a Catholic hospital, those factors — precisely those words — will be controlling the decision, whether or not she or her doctor believes in God’s plan. It’s plainly spelled out in the ethical directives of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops: “Direct sterilization of either men or women, whether permanent or temporary, is not permitted in a Catholic health care institution.” She won’t get the operation no matter how medically safe and legal it is, no matter what she wants.
Clearly, she should have picked a different hospital. But with the expansion of Catholic health systems all over the country, that might not be an option. A 2020 report by Community Catalyst, a nonprofit health advocacy group, found that four of the 10 largest health systems in the country were Catholic. The Catholic Health Association says that Catholic facilities now account for more than 1 in 7 U.S. hospital patients.
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That number is likely to grow, as Catholic health systems expand by merging with or acquiring secular hospitals and networks. This consolidation is happening near me, in the Albany, N.Y., area. As the Times Union recently reported, one of our large health systems, St. Peter’s Health Partners, part of a Catholic network, has begun merging with the secular Ellis Medicine, which will ultimately put “God’s will” in charge of Ellis Hospital and the Bellevue Woman’s Center, which provides pregnancy and maternity care.
That would mean no tubal ligations for contraceptive purposes. It would also mean no abortions, vasectomies, IUDs or in vitro fertilization. It would most likely constrain choices in end-of-life care and end gender-affirming care.
A patient deciding where to have her C-section — even if she still had a choice of hospitals — might not even know this. Why would she assume that a nonprofit hospital, buoyed by large infusions of state and federal funds, could legally withhold health care from its patients?
But that’s exactly what happens when the church has the ultimate say in medical decisions. Not just at hospitals, either: Urgent care centers and physicians’ practices that are part of a Catholic network might well refuse to prescribe birth control, or to provide abortion services or counseling.
New York State has taken pains to protect reproductive rights, beginning with the 2019 Reproductive Health Act, which codified the right to abortion. As state after state passes abortion bans in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s fall, I often think, selfishly, thank goodness I live in New York.
But I still live in the Commonwealth of Religious Deference, where rules can be broken and citizens can be denied basic services as long as someone has decided that’s the way God wants it.
Some lawmakers are pushing back. One recent bill sponsored by New York state Sen. Michelle Hinchey, which has passed the Senate and awaits an Assembly vote, would require that hospitals publish a list of “policy-based exclusions,” detailing the care they will not provide, on their websites. In Oregon, a new law gives state officials the authority to block hospital mergers that would result in restricted health-care access.
But beneath these efforts lies unchallenged the notion that Catholic hospitals are within their rights to deny care. That religious organizations, despite their public funding, do not have to abide by secular standards.
Blue states? Secular country? Doesn’t matter. The most shocking recent evidence that even New Yorkers live in a State of God Knows Best is a devastating New York Times report on the state’s Hasidic schools, which teach Jewish law and tradition but little English or math. In 2019, 99 percent of the thousands of Hasidic boys who took state standardized tests failed. Meanwhile, New York’s yeshivas receive plenty of education funding — “more than $1 billion” in government money over the past four years. Religious leaders systematically denied their students the constitutionally protected opportunity for a “sound basic education,” and political leaders let it happen.
Or at least they did. The New York State Board of Regents recently voted to require private schools to prove they were teaching basic subjects or else risk forfeiting public funding. Whether that rule will be enforced remains to be seen. But it’s a start.
I’d like to see the New York State Department of Health take the same approach to health networks: Prove you are providing patients with all the care that modern medicine has made possible, state law has made feasible and the Affordable Care Act has deemed essential, and you’ll get your tax exemptions and your Medicaid payments.
And if you happen to have a patient who believes contraception contravenes the will of God? She can choose not to get her tubes tied.
Opinion|To say U.S. abortion rollbacks are in line with Europe is simply wrong | 2022-09-26T12:00:46Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Catholic hospitals are expanding — and denying essential health care - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/26/catholic-hospital-secular-reproductive-health-care/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/26/catholic-hospital-secular-reproductive-health-care/ |
Want to phase out fossil fuels? We must fundamentally change our buildings.
By Joseph G. Allen
Parichehr Salimifard
Jonathan Buonocore
Electricians install solar panels on top of the Terminal B garage at LaGuardia Airport on Nov. 9, 2021. (Mary Altaffer/AP)
Joseph G. Allen is an associate professor and director of the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Parichehr Salimifard is an assistant professor at the College of Engineering at Oregon State University. Jonathan Buonocore is an assistant professor at Boston University School of Public Health.
Just about everybody understands that getting off fossil fuels is central to our climate goals. What few people understand, however, is that we won’t be able to do it without fundamentally changing our buildings.
Buildings consume an average of about 40 percent of U.S. energy. And in some cities, that number is much higher — upward of 70 percent.
Local governments are attempting to address this by passing legislation that would require building owners to reduce emissions from their energy use. Local Law 97 in New York City, for example, requires them to reduce greenhouse emissions by 40 percent by 2030 and by 80 percent by 2050. Those who don’t hit the target could face massive financial penalties.
These are worthy measures that will help to “electrify everything” — a strategy that will shift buildings away from dirty fossil fuels, such as natural gas, and toward the electrical grid. In the meantime, we can work to make the grid cleaner by expanding renewable energy, such as wind and solar.
The problem is, to make this work, we’re going to need a lot more renewable energy. One model from Princeton University shows that a plausible path to decarbonization would require 590,000 square kilometers dedicated to wind and solar power, which would be about the same size as Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island and Tennessee combined.
Here’s another catch: Our energy needs vary dramatically by season. In summer, it’s dominated by electricity for air conditioning; in winter, it’s dominated by heating demand, mostly from gas. So phasing out fossil fuels would mean shifting when we put the most stress on the grid.
To help visualize the issue, we developed what we call the “falcon curve.” It shows that electrifying winter heating would reduce fossil fuel use, but this new extra electricity demand would be enough to shift the grid from summer peak to one that peaks in the winter. We call it the “falcon curve” because these new extreme peaks in December and January, when plotted out over the course of a year, look like the wingtips of a falcon. This is how it looks:
Without energy-efficient buildings, electricity demand will increase dramatically in the winter
The increase in demand would be nearly 30 times our current wind energy output or more than 300 times our solar energy output.
Electricity demand (Terawatt-hour)
The “falcon curve”
Estimated increase in electricity demand if we replace fossil fuels with inefficient technology.
Typical electricity use patterns in buildings today.
Sources: Jonathan J. Buonocore, Parichehr
Salimifard, ZeynebMagavi & Joseph G. Allen
(2022, Nature Scientific Reports).
Sources: Jonathan J. Buonocore, Parichehr Salimifard, Zeyneb
Magavi & Joseph G. Allen (2022, Nature Scientific Reports).
Sources: Jonathan J. Buonocore, Parichehr Salimifard, Zeyneb Magavi & Joseph G. Allen
Here’s why it’s such a big deal: If all buildings electrify their heating needs with the least efficient technologies on the market, we would need either 28 times more wind than we currently have or a staggering 303 times more solar to deal with the increase in electricity demands from using renewables.
But there are ways to flatten the falcon curve.
“Energy-efficient technology” might sound boring, but it is a powerful way for buildings to reduce energy needs especially during peak demand times. Healthy building tech, such as air quality sensors, can be used to deliver air only when and where it’s needed, rather than haphazardly dumping air into empty conference rooms. We can also use what’s called “energy recovery ventilation,” which simply means that after we spend all that energy to heat or cool a building, we don’t just exhaust it out of the building. That would be like heating your house in the winter and then leaving the windows open. Rather, the bad air goes out, but we first transfer that hot or cold air to the incoming air supply.
Meanwhile, climate tech, such as networked ground-source heat pumps, a technology being deployed in Massachusetts, can connect city neighborhoods to extremely energy-efficient geothermal energy. We can also develop and deploy long-term energy storage so that renewable energy captured at off-peak times can be used when demand spikes.
Altogether, efficient electrification can significantly reduce the need for renewable energy. Instead of having to multiply our current solar and wind power by 28 or 303, respectively, we find such technology would bring the need for solar and wind down to 4.5 or 36 times our current output. That’s much more achievable.
Transitioning away from fossil fuels would also come with big bonus: improved health for humans. Our analysis published last year found that from 2008 to 2017, the number of deaths caused by burning coal dropped from about 60,000 per year to about 10,000 per year. Indeed, with coal receding as a source of energy, now the dominant source of health damages from air pollution is from fossil fuel combustion in buildings.
These problems are interlinked. If we don’t get this right, we could very easily go down a path of inefficient electrification. That would force us to delay retiring fossil fuel power plants or to continue using fossil fuels in our buildings or other renewable energy sources, such as wood or biofuels, that might be carbon neutral but aren’t health neutral. That could jeopardize any ambitious decarbonization plan and all the resulting health benefits.
But we can — and must — take a different path. The technology we need is already available to us. We just need to use it. | 2022-09-26T12:00:52Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Want to phase out fossil fuels? We must fundamentally change our buildings. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/26/climate-carbon-fossil-fuel-energy-efficiency/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/26/climate-carbon-fossil-fuel-energy-efficiency/ |
College students hate our broken politics. But we’re partly to blame.
By Joshua Park
Joshua Park is a junior studying history at Harvard University.
Many young people lament the broken, polarized politics we stand to inherit. But do we have the courage to change them?
On a Monday morning this summer, feeling the lazy buzz of Washington heat, I showed up early to an event hosted by the Harvard Institute of Politics at the Republican National Committee. I was a tad early, so I sat in the cooled lobby to wait.
The minutes ticked by, yet no one came. This was new. At other Harvard Institute of Politics events this summer, there was always a healthy gathering of interested undergraduates. A lunch with a senior Biden administration official drew 16 students. A trip to the labor secretary’s office got a dozen.
But as we edged closer to the meeting time, it was apparent that we were not going to match those numbers at the RNC. By 2 p.m., it was just me and one other student.
In fact, there were more panelists than students. Over the next hour, four senior communications directors at the RNC shared their career pathways, talked to us about how their organization was structured and respectfully offered their concerns on the future of U.S. democracy. Like every other event this summer, this one was primarily designed to be educational and informative, not overtly political or partisan. The issue of the empty seats went unmentioned for most of the meeting — until we got up to take a group photo at the end. By then, it was four panelists, a couple of the institute’s organizing staff and me.
The Harvard Institute of Politics is the university’s umbrella organization for all things politics. Its annual Summer in Washington programming invites politicians, diplomats and bureaucrats to meet with Harvard undergraduates who are interning in D.C.
This summer, the question of polarization came up at almost every one of these seminars. When guest speakers discussed the need for both parties to get together and find common ground, students nodded their heads. Everyone, red and blue, agreed that some parts of Congress were not working like they used to. Everyone agreed that talking and sharing experiences with people on the other side was one small but obvious solution.
It turned out this was easier said than done.
As an Australian and someone who first stepped into the United States three years ago for college, I was — and still am — concerned for the health of U.S. democracy. In Australia, the strength of American democracy is often seen as a test of the strength of democratic government around the world. But in recent years, the American union seemed to be fraying.
The summer gave me a chance to go beyond Cambridge, Mass., and explore the capital of the republic firsthand. In this spirit, I went to virtually every event the institute hosted, regardless of political affiliation. After the trip to the RNC, I was curious why my peers had not attended. I was especially curious the very next day when some 10 classmates joined me on a trip to the Democratic National Committee.
So, I asked. One sophomore explained that she believed being in the same room with the other side was a form of endorsement or legitimization. She described how she felt alienated by certain Republican arguments and policies. But she also believed in bipartisanship and hoped that the other side would come to her table more often. It was unfair to expect one side to behave in a certain way, she argued, when the other side was not reciprocating.
I empathized with her perspective, but I couldn’t help but wonder, so what now? Someone needs to disrupt the polarization spiral downward and start rebuilding cross-partisan relationships. Sitting in the same room, listening to the other side respectfully, felt like a small and necessary first step.
This was Harvard’s first Summer in Washington program in three years. In some sense, the summer of 2022 was a political experiment. How would the students react to these events across the partisan spectrum? The results challenged our images of ourselves as open-minded students eager to learn from different perspectives. Despite all our chatter about the need for cross-aisle conversation, when we Harvard students were the ones put to the test, we failed.
These students are future leaders of this country. Many of my friends who interned in Washington this summer expressed interest in a career in politics. They hope to run for office someday. Many of them are also concerned about the direction democracy is heading. They want to play an active role in changing that.
During every panel this summer, from every shade of the political spectrum, the speakers expressed one thing in common. There was a tone of great expectation when they talked about our generation. A sense of potential that we have yet to realize, a trace of hope. The message was clear: We were where the pendulum would swing next. | 2022-09-26T12:00:58Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Can the next generation change politics? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/26/harvard-iop-rnc-visit-college-student/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/26/harvard-iop-rnc-visit-college-student/ |
By Micheline Maynard
For generations, people who live between the East and West coasts have been accustomed to being ignored. To live in Middle America was to live in the middle of nowhere — flyover country, or maybe the Rust Belt.
In recent months, though, it feels like that great overlooked expanse between New York and California has suddenly been making its presence felt in myriad ways, claiming an unfamiliar spot on the national stage. Abortion, infrastructure, supply chains, flooding, food supplies, energy production, even baby formula manufacturing — just about any subject that is top-of-mind nationally has come barreling out of places far from the Acela Corridor and the Pacific Coast Highway.
The first big test of the United States’ post-Roe v. Wade reality came last month in Kansas, which delivered a message that seemed to stagger everyone on both sides of the matter when voters overwhelmingly rejected an abortion ban that conservative legislators had confidently put before them.
Two more abortion verdicts will come out of Middle America in the November midterms when Kentucky voters consider an amendment declaring that there is no constitutional right to abortion in the state, and when Michigan voters decide whether to safeguard abortion rights.
At some points this summer, so many areas in the middle of the country had flooded that it seemed like a tsunami was slowly washing through the region. In late July, St. Louis and eastern Kentucky were hit by separate, recording-breaking deluges that claimed dozens of lives. A few weeks later, heavy rain caused flooding and infrastructure collapse in Jackson, Miss., cutting off the city’s entire water supply. Some residents were without water for up to three weeks.
The city had already been under a boil-water directive for weeks — not uncommon in Jackson, and all too reminiscent of tainted-water scandals in the Michigan cities of Flint and Bar Harbor. All are majority-Black cities, and in Jackson, activists accused generations of politicians of racist neglect, echoing charges made in those cities in the upper Midwest.
The country’s midsection has been so much in the spotlight that next month veteran public broadcaster Jeremy Hobson is launching “The Middle,” a series of live call-in radio specials exploring subjects such as the opioid epidemic and inflation, and how they affect the lives of millions of people living, well, you know where. It will be heard on nearly 470 public radio stations in 42 states, and in 21 of the top 25 markets.
“Since I was 17, I’ve been working in public radio, and I’ve always thought it had a coastal bias,” Hobson, with whom I worked when he was a co-host of NPR’s “Here & Now,” tells me. “The thing is, so many important things happen in the middle of the country.”
But Hobson, who grew up in central Illinois, cautions against lumping non-coastal the United States together under the one umbrella. “Look, Phoenix is not the same as Des Moines, and is not the same as Nashville and Cincinnati and Cleveland and Detroit. They’re all very different places, but they are all part of this country” — and “all have a lot of power in determining” its future.
He says he has found one similarity among many of these middle-Americans: “They don’t spend every waking minute thinking about politics. They make decisions based on what’s important in their lives.” He hopes to highlight those concerns.
My sense is that “flyover” country started to become unignorable when the pandemic started: Suddenly, in the big population centers on the coasts people woke up to how much they depend on largely out-of-sight states. Alarms went off over bottlenecks at meatpacking plants in the Plains states, automakers (starved of semiconductor chips) across the Midwest and South, and lumber mills in the Northwest and elsewhere.
In 2014, I drove from Michigan to Arizona in my trusty Toyota Prius for a job in Phoenix, taking my time so I could visit states that I had mostly seen only from airplane windows. I stopped in Emporia, Kan., the home of William Allen White, who a century ago was nationally renowned as the editor of the Emporia Gazette. I was cheered to see his name appear on Emporia’s sign welcoming visitors to town.
White attracted droves of notable people, including Theodore Roosevelt and Albert Einstein, to the small town, where his comfortable home, Red Rocks, has been preserved as a historic site.
In 1922, as the country wrestled with social and economic woes, White offered some reassurance, writing: “This nation will survive, this state will prosper, the orderly business of life will go forward,” as long as people can “utter what their hearts hold.” He added: “Reason has never failed” humanity. “Only force and repression have made wrecks in the world.”
The headline? “To an Anxious Friend.” That quintessential commonsense voice coming out of the Great Plains could have been writing today. | 2022-09-26T12:01:04Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Opinion | Middle America is having a moment - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/26/middle-america-flyover-country-no-more/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/26/middle-america-flyover-country-no-more/ |
Review by Olivier Laurent
Maspeth, N.Y., 2017. (Leah Frances)
Leah Frances has spent the last 10 years photographing America’s diners. Her American Squares, as she called them when she first started sharing her images on Instagram and later, in 2019, in a book of the same name, are “sticky snapshots … with big cars, gleaming diners, neon signs, the open road,” she told In Sight. “[They are] a romantic and idealized mythology of America that I felt was somehow based in the past and which I probably formed through watching too many American movies as a child.”
This week, Frances is releasing her second photo book. Called Lunch Poems, it is a continuation of what she started with American Squares, but with, this time, a more political undertone. Most of the photos that make up Lunch Poems were made between 2016 and 2021 — during Donald Trump’s presidency and the covid-19 pandemic. Little has changed in how Frances frames her squares of Americana. The plastic stools and booths, the old-fashioned jukeboxes, the colorful wallpapers, the evocative neon signs are all still there, often photographed when the light of the setting sun envelops all of these elements in the warm tones most associated with memories.
These objects and places might not have changed between American Squares and Lunch Poems, but for Frances, these icons of Americana have become mixed up politics. “When making and editing Lunch Poems, the influence of nostalgia on a segment of the American population, who seemed to want to get back to something that was felt to be better about the past, to get back to “great again” as a plan for the future, had become almost deafening,” she said. “In the edit, I attempted to highlight our political divide by emphasizing empty spaces that one might define as particularly American — such as diners,” she said. “I honed in on sites where might gather, if we could agree.”
The work also hints at the environmental crisis. “It is always looming in my mind,” Frances said. “As our business emptied and closed during the pandemic, the world began to look almost post-apocalyptic to me. I was thinking particularly about extreme weather events: forest fires, flooding, the warming climate and the resulting economic disruptions and food and water insecurity. Would the world become uninhabitable? How would that look?” So in one photo (above), Frances pressed her lens against a window. “We see the man-made object, the jukebox, but it is not being played. And we also notice the plant life.” For the photographer, through the reflection, “it looks as if it is grown over, the plants are overtaking a vacant human world.”
This photo, and many others in Lunch Poems, might create a feeling of sadness, but that’s not Frances’ intention. Instead, the artist hopes that people will ask themselves: “Can we reach any kind of agreement? Is there any ground to move forward? It’s hard to imagine, but what other choice is there?”
Lunch Poems, by Leah Frances, is published by Aliens in Residence. | 2022-09-26T12:01:10Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Photographing America’s diners: When nostalgia becomes political - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/09/26/american-diners-photos/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/09/26/american-diners-photos/ |
Democrats urge support for EPA union, testing Biden's pro-labor pledge
Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Shanah tovah to all readers observing Rosh Hashanah.
Below, we have an interview with Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) about his permitting reform bill courtesy of our colleagues at The Early 202. (Sign up for The Early 202 here.) But first:
Exclusive: Biden vowed to be ‘the most pro-union president.' Congressional Democrats are testing that pledge.
More than 80 congressional Democrats are calling on the Biden administration to support the proposals from the Environmental Protection Agency's largest union during ongoing contract negotiations, according to details shared exclusively with The Climate 202.
In a letter sent Monday to EPA Administrator Michael Regan, the Democrats urged the agency's political leadership to accept the requests of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which represents more than 7,500 EPA employees.
“At a time when EPA is administering historic levels of funding, it is imperative that EPA’s career employees are supported by the agency’s political leadership,” the lawmakers wrote. “Improving the rights and protections of EPA employees is critical to recruit and retain the talented and diverse workforce needed to fulfill the agency’s mission to address climate change, enhance environmental justice, and protect public health and the environment.”
The letter poses a key test of President Biden's effort to position himself as the “the most pro-union president” in American history. The union and its allies are trying to leverage that pledge — as well as the administration's desire to quickly implement the climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act — to secure its goals at the bargaining table.
The letter was led by Reps. Paul Tonko (N.Y.) and Diana DeGette (Colo.). Signatories include Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), as well as House Oversight and Reform Committee Chair Carolyn B. Maloney (N.Y.) and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Frank Pallone Jr. (N.J.).
Marie Owens Powell, president of AFGE Council 238, said in an interview that she was “thrilled” to gain the lawmakers' support. She added that the recent passage of the Inflation Reduction Act has injected a “sense of urgency” into the contract talks.
Asked for comment, EPA Principal Deputy Associate Administrator Nancy Grantham said in an email: “We will review the letter. EPA’s unions are central to a thriving workforce and the agency is committed to a positive and productive working relationship with our union partners.”
Promotions, blind hiring
In the letter, the Democrats raised concern that some EPA employees are being passed over for promotions. In particular, they wrote that many employees seem to be stagnating at the GS-12 level, despite performing the work of a GS-13.
“The practice of keeping employees at a GS-12, with pay and benefits of a GS-12, will only risk draining the EPA’s workforce as employees seek better opportunities with room for growth in the private sector,” the letter says.
The Democrats also urged the agency's political leadership to accept the union's proposals regarding diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), including the use of blind hiring practices, in which candidates' personal information is removed from their résumés.
“Using a blind hiring practice will prevent implicit bias from creeping into hiring decisions, while ensuring a workforce that is diverse in backgrounds and ideas,” the lawmakers wrote.
The union has asked for a DEI and accessibility article to be included in the upcoming collective bargaining agreement. While the agency has agreed to include such an article, “the devil is always in the details,” Powell said.
AFGE and the agency have a June 2024 deadline for hammering out a new contract. But Powell said the union wants to finalize the contract “as soon as possible” to lock in protections before a potential change in administration, should a less labor-friendly candidate win the 2024 presidential election.
Overall, Powell said the Biden administration has been much more accommodating during the contract talks than the Trump administration, which cracked down on federal worker unions and limited the use of paid work hours for union activities.
The crackdown was particularly acute at the EPA, where the political leadership imposed a contract in 2019 over AFGE's protests that reduced telework, curtailed the grievance process and forced union officials out of agency office space.
“AFGE's position is that we are a reminder to the agency of the president's clear pro-labor direction,” Powell said. “So we have to continuously challenge the agency to think outside of the box and outside of the previous administration's direction.”
Manchin says he has well over 40 Democrats backing permitting reform
Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) is “very optimistic” about passing his permitting reform legislation as part of a stopgap funding bill this week to prevent a government shutdown, the senator said in an interview Sunday evening with our colleagues Leigh Ann Caldwell and Theodoric Meyer of The Early 202.
When asked if he has the support of at least 40 Democrats, Manchin said, “Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. I'm hoping for 48 [Democratic votes] but 45 would be a very nice number.”
The permitting bill, which would speed up the approval process for new energy projects, has faced strong opposition from both parties in recent weeks, with Republicans hesitant to support Manchin in part because of his eventual vote for the Inflation Reduction Act.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has scheduled a procedural vote for Tuesday evening on the legislative vehicle for the government funding bill. The measure will need 60 votes to advance, meaning it will need 10 or more Republican votes, depending on how many Democrats vote against the proposal.
Manchin said he spent much of the weekend trying to rally GOP support. One of the senators he tried to reach was Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), his Republican counterpart on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, who said that he is still unsure of how he will vote, but he is not completely on board with the permitting bill.
“I have reservations about Manchin's proposal because it's really good for West Virginia and it's actually bad for Wyoming,” Barrasso said in an interview Sunday.
EPA unveils office to place environmental justice at agency’s core
The Environmental Protection Agency on Saturday announced the creation of an Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, one of the most visible efforts so far by the Biden administration to ensure that the well-being of disadvantaged communities is an essential part of federal decision-making, Brady Dennis reports for The Washington Post.
“It will improve our ability to infuse equity, civil rights and environmental justice into every single thing we do,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said during remarks Saturday in Warren County, N.C., the site of 1982 protests that birthed the nation’s environmental justice movement.
The new office, which will have hundreds of staffers and a Senate-confirmed director, will combine three existing offices at the EPA, ultimately increasing its budget to $100 million and elevating the issue on the agency’s organizational chart.
The recently passed Inflation Reduction Act authorizes billions in grants targeting environmental justice, including funds for cleaning up ports and rail yards and increasing air-quality monitoring near schools and vulnerable populations — all of which will be overseen by the new EPA office.
The National Hurricane Center upgraded Ian to a hurricane early Monday, as the storm intensifies and churns toward the coast of Florida, where it could make landfall later this week, The Post's Dan Diamond reports.
But first, Ian is set to slam western Cuba on Monday night, bringing “significant wind and storm surge impacts,” according to the center's latest advisory.
On Saturday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) placed the entire state under a state of emergency and warned that residents in the hardest-hit areas should brace for fuel disruptions, power outages and even evacuation orders.
Ian is the sixth named storm to form in September after zero storms were named in August. Although scientists have not found a link between the number of major storms and human-caused climate change, warming waters are proven to cause the storms that do form to be wetter, stronger and more prone to rapid intensification.
In addition to the drama over Manchin's permitting reform legislation, here's what we have on tap this week:
On Wednesday: The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold previously postponed votes on multiple nominees, including Joseph Goffman to lead the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Air and Radiation and six candidates to be members of the board of directors for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Immediately afterward, the panel will hold a hearing on reauthorization of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Brownfields program.
On Thursday: The House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis will hold a hearing on the benefits of the climate investments in the Inflation Reduction Act.
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will also hold a hearing on bipartisan legislation from Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and James E. Risch (R-Idaho) aimed at cleaning up abandoned hard rock mines.
The House Natural Resources Committee will vote on legislation to reauthorize U.S. fishing laws, which haven't been updated in 15 years and don't mention climate change. The measure is co-sponsored by Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and newly elected Rep. Mary Peltola (D-Alaska).
On Friday: The House Natural Resources Committee will hold an oversight hearing on Puerto Rico's beleaguered power grid. The hearing comes after Hurricane Fiona knocked out power across the entire island.
As wildfires grow, militaries are torn between combat, climate change — Michael Birnbaum for The Post
Fiona slams Atlantic Canada, leaving destruction, outages in its wake — Selena Ross, Sydney Page, Scott Dance and Laura Reiley for The Post
Germany secures more gas shipments as Scholz visits Gulf — Frank Jordans for the Associated Press
An oldie but a goodie from Michael Scott: 😂 | 2022-09-26T12:01:22Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Democrats urge support for EPA union, testing Biden's pro-labor pledge - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/26/democrats-urge-support-epa-union-testing-biden-pro-labor-pledge/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/26/democrats-urge-support-epa-union-testing-biden-pro-labor-pledge/ |
At least 13 dead, 21 wounded, at school shooting in Russia
Neither country was inclined to defend a global order that denies their status aspirations, but the war’s impact may be forcing a rethink
Analysis by Rohan Mukherjee
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, on Sept. 16. (Alexandr Demyanchuk/AP)
Earlier this month, Vladimir Putin met one-on-one with Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi as the three world leaders attended a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. For the first time, Putin publicly admitted that China had “questions and concerns” about the continuing war in Ukraine. Likewise, Modi reminded Putin that the present era is “not one of war.”
These developments are noteworthy. Until now, China has openly supported Russia, while India has avoided public criticism of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. During the summit, Modi reaffirmed the historic importance of India-Russia relations. And China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry issued a statement calling the China-Russia relationship “stable as mountains.” Both countries continue to buy Russian exports in large quantities. They even joined military exercises in Russia this month.
Why have China and India been so reluctant to rein Moscow in? While their dependence on Russia for defense and energy resources are significant factors, my research suggests that status also plays a role in their policies. India and China share Russia’s resentment about their second-tier status in a U.S.-led international order. That makes both countries likely to continue to be tolerant about Moscow’s ambitions.
Not defending the international order is risky
It may seem that security and economic factors are driving Beijing and New Delhi’s policies. But Moscow’s war in Ukraine has disrupted the economies of both China and India. The conflict has affected food and energy supplies worldwide, raising the price of oil and other commodities for India and China. Bankrolling a warring country with mounting economic problems is risky — Russia’s collapse, for instance, would also hurt partner countries.
Russia’s invasion also jeopardizes the international order, by disrupting the settled rules and norms that govern relations between countries. Moscow’s actions have challenged foundational international principles such as sovereignty, territorial integrity and self-determination. Russia has also announced its intention to withdraw from the World Trade Organization and World Health Organization, institutions that are core to the international order. In that light, it’s surprising that China and India would support Putin’s efforts to undermine the very order that has enabled their rise.
Rising powers won’t support an exclusionary order
History shows, however, that rising powers like China and India do not simply value economic and security goals. They also value being recognized as eminent countries with an elevated status in international politics. In my recent book, I show that this status comes from being recognized as equals of the great powers that manage the international order.
When core institutions of the international order recognize a rising country’s equality — typically by including these new aspirants in global leadership positions — they’re likely to uphold the order, even at great cost to themselves. When the order instead excludes these countries, they will demand greater representation in the governance of global issues and will be less willing to cooperate. If these demands are denied or indefinitely deferred, they may get frustrated and challenge the order.
The United States itself was once in this position, in the 19th century. Initially, it cooperated with a mostly inclusive international order. As a club of European great powers took over after 1815, the U.S. sought — unsuccessfully — to transform international law as a way of joining the club. Feeling unfairly excluded, the U.S. eventually challenged the order. In 1856, when Britain and France introduced new rules abolishing the use of private vessels in maritime warfare, the U.S. vehemently opposed the effort and refused to cooperate. At the time, private vessels provided the only source of equality the U.S. had with the naval powers of Europe.
China and India see the current order as exclusionary
China and India today are looking for opportunities for leadership in a global order dominated by the U.S. and its allies. New Delhi, for example, seeks a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. India’s foreign minister declared in 2020 that India deserved “due recognition” for its contributions to global order, and called for “reformed multilateralism.”
Beijing, already a permanent Security Council member, seeks greater representation in international financial institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank, whose top leadership positions have been exclusively occupied by American, European and Japanese nationals, respectively. Indeed, scholars have found that since 1971, the year China joined the United Nations, senior management positions within the U.N. system have been held largely by nationals of the U.S., France, U.K., Japan and Canada, with China, India and Russia trailing far behind.
Frustrated that these institutions have been slow to change in this regard, China launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2014. When the U.S. pressured other countries to boycott the institution, China’s vice minister of commerce compared the international order to a basketball game in which “the U.S. wants to set the duration of the game, the size of the court, the height of the basket and everything else to suit itself.”
China, India and Russia prefer a ‘multipolar’ order
So long as the international order continues to exclude China and India from the great power club, these nations have little incentive to defend rules and institutions that they did not create and over which they feel little ownership. Since the end of the Cold War, China and India have joined Russia in consistently declaring their preference for a “multipolar world order,” which would give them a greater say in global affairs.
At the same time, there are limits to how far China and India will go. The recent Shanghai Cooperation summit shows that Russia may be pushing its friends too far, and they are beginning to push back. The need to protect their own longer-term interests and to successfully transform — but not wreck — the international order may now be leading both countries to restrain Moscow.
History shows that rising powers do not wait indefinitely for their place in the sun. Without some accommodation of their status aspirations, China and India are likely to remain skeptical of Western efforts to defend the international order against Russian excesses.
Rohan Mukherjee is an assistant professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of “Ascending Order: Rising Powers and the Politics of Status in International Institutions” (Cambridge University Press, 2022). | 2022-09-26T12:01:35Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Are China and India changing their stance on Putin's war in Ukraine? - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/26/putin-ukraine-china-india-xi-modi/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/26/putin-ukraine-china-india-xi-modi/ |
Mikkael A. Sekeres, an oncologist and a former FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee chairman, wrote “Drugs and the FDA: Safety, Efficacy and the Public’s Trust.” (Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center)
Decades ago, people could hawk dangerous patent medicines and promise benefits — even when their concoctions might have catastrophic consequences.
Then, several tragedies struck, killing and maiming children and adults in the name of health. Afterward, the United States created the Food and Drug Administration, the federal agency that today oversees and regulates prescription drugs, medical devices and other products.
It was an “unholy birth,” writes Mikkael A. Sekeres, an oncologist and a former FDA Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee chairman, in his new book, “Drugs and the FDA: Safety, Efficacy and the Public’s Trust.”
After its rough beginnings, Sekeres says, the agency’s development into a trusted institution was rocky. Sekeres’s book recounts the FDA’s tumultuous early years as well as more current challenges, including showing how its public health safeguards were tested by a modern-day breast cancer drug.
Early “treatments,” known by names like Benjamin Brandreth’s Vegetable Pills and Peruna, could range from ineffective to deadly. It would take the advocacy of concerned patients and parents, the work of muckraking journalists, and a tragic drug adulterations, including children’s deaths from tetanus-tainted smallpox and diphtheria vaccines at the turn of the 20th century, to launch the FDA.
Sekeres writes about everything from the FDA’s painstaking 1937 search for remaining bottles of a deadly elixir with antifreeze in it to the agency’s 1962 demand that drugs be both safe and effective to be marketed in the United States.
He weaves in his experiences evaluating whether the FDA should allow the sale of Avastin, a drug approved to treat breast cancer in the face of data that showed it didn’t prolong or improve the quality of patients’ lives. In 2011, the FDA withdrew approval for that use of the drug, and Sekeres paints a vivid picture of a process he says tested the FDA’s mettle.
It’s a physician’s-eye-view on the products that fill our medicine cabinets, but Sekeres includes patients in the mix, too. A public that, in his words, “revolts, protesting loudly enough to be heard, to provoke change” is the true driver of this engaging book — and a reminder of who the complex, sometimes “maddeningly deliberate and slow” agency should ultimately serve. | 2022-09-26T12:01:59Z | www.washingtonpost.com | New book recounts the FDA’s ‘unholy birth’ - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/09/26/fda-drug-safety-history/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/09/26/fda-drug-safety-history/ |
It’s embarrassing to admit, but it turns out the link is not that uncommon
(Washington Post Illustration/Pexels)
One week, she had heart palpitations. The next brought so much abdominal pain that my little sister was in tears. In between, she had a flood of heavy mucous in her eyes, which she said made her “look like she was in a grade B horror film.”
On the morning in question, I hadn’t had time to pick up a newspaper or my cup of coffee before getting to the hospital. So after checking in — and getting an upsetting morning update — I took the central elevator down to the gift shop.
I picked up a newspaper and then went over to the self-service coffee bar and poured myself a cup. With both hands full, I headed to the cash register to pay. No one was there. I looked around the gift shop. I waited. No one. All of a sudden I felt rage: At my sister’s diagnosis. At the hospital’s inability to heal her. At a laundry list of grievances that I’d never fully expressed. And now at the gift shop. (All this anger despite how I’d been successfully treated at the same facility years ago.)
I didn’t see any security cameras, but in that moment I also didn’t care if I got caught. I walked out holding my unpaid possessions — a $3 newspaper and a $2.50 cup of coffee — in plain sight. I took the elevator back to my sister’s floor, handed her the paper and drank my coffee. Yes, I know the word for this is “shoplifting.”
Two weeks later, still deeply upset about the state of Julie’s health, I “forgot” about the $25 salad bowl I’d placed on the lower rack of my supermarket shopping cart. I went through self-checkout without paying for it — sure, I had plausible deniability, but what was going on with me? A blizzard seemed to have taken over my brain, and the usual filters that kept me within the lines of good behavior (and obeying the law) had disappeared.
In each instance, I felt a release — a rush of ecstasy followed by calm and a kind of numbness. For a few minutes — moments I held on to — I didn’t feel the pain of what it might mean to lose my sister.
Increasingly worried about my behavior, I decided to talk with a close friend, an attorney, and I asked him what the penalty might be. The first thing he said was almost a dare: “It’s not a felony unless you steal more than $1,000 worth of stuff” — although he pointed out that because I’m White I had much less to worry about from law enforcement or courts than someone who is Black.
“What should I do?” I asked, looking for a little free legal help. “I don’t think you need legal advice,” he said. “You need to talk with your psychotherapist.”
I did, and this is what he told me: “I think, at this moment, it’s pretty clear what you’re not wanting to feel. … And I’m sure that’s connected to a lot of things. Not just Julie.”
I took his advice to stop for a month to try to master my impulse. During that period, I also did some research, discovering I’m far from alone. According to the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention, 1 out of 11 people in America, or nearly 25 million individuals, shoplift each year. Men and women do it equally and 75 percent of us are adults. (It’s a myth that kids and teens are the usual offenders.)
In Psychotherapy Networker, Terrence Daryl Shulman, the author and founder of the Shulman Center for Compulsive Theft, Spending and Hoarding, wrote: “Most people who resort to stealing are actually ‘crying for help.’ There’s something amiss, wrong, unresolved, absent.”
Shulman detailed the emotional reasons people shoplift, noting that the top three are anger (“to try to make life fair”), grief (“to fill the void due to a loss”) and depression (“to distract from sadness”).
But law enforcement, stores and even mental health professionals rarely think about the underlying causes — the mental health ones — that drive shoplifters. That would be making excuses, even though for many of us there’s a compulsive if not addictive element to our behavior. Believe me, I could afford both the newspapers and the coffee.
I wanted to understand my compulsion better and spoke with Adam Borland, a psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Behavioral Health. He explained that “many individuals who shoplift experience a pleasurable rush of dopamine throughout the body, similar to other addictive behaviors, and seek to feel that pleasure again and again.” (He also noted that it’s different from those who steal because of economic need, financial greed or even because of a medical condition such as dementia or Alzheimer’s.)
Borland told me treatment options can include cognitive behavioral talk therapy; psychotropic medications (such as Xanax, Ativan, Lexapro, and Celexa); support groups; and even 12-step programs. But how do mental health professionals even know when this is a problem for their patients? A typical mental health screening asks about alcohol, drugs, sex and eating disorders — but rarely about shoplifting compulsions. Certainly, no therapist had ever asked me.
Six months after I took the salad bowl, my sister had another setback. This time I quickly told my therapist about my feelings of sadness, pain, loss and anger. I was more explicit with friends, too. “I’m filled with anxiety,” I told a few. I hoped that by more honestly confronting my deeper feelings I could disempower them.
Yet two weeks later, I pocketed three tubes of MCT oil, promoted as “brain fuel,” each with a price tag of $1.49. As with the salad bowl, I didn’t consciously plan it. My initial rationale was that because they were so small I knew they’d fall out of the shopping cart, so I had to put them in my pocket. As soon as I did, however, I knew I wouldn’t produce them when checking out. And I didn’t.
This time I felt real shame for not being able to control myself. I thought about a friend who has a car “accident” every time she has a big emotional upset. I remembered friends who’d tried to stifle painful feelings in other self-destructive ways: drinking too much, overeating, gambling and sexual compulsion. My advice to them had always been: “Stop!” much like the TV therapist who shouts the same at his patients.
I feel a great deal more compassion for them now, understanding better why telling someone to “stop” isn’t the answer. Maybe the better question is, “What’s going on with you?”
I decided to call the hospital gift shop and the two stores to make restitution. Part of me was afraid they’d call 911 and have me arrested — or just shame me.
I started each phone call with this opening, “I have something embarrassing to admit,” and was, to my surprise, met each time with compassion. “Thanks for letting me know,” the manager of the gift shop told me, appreciating my “honesty.” (Yes, I found that ironic). No one had a way for me to repay my debt, so to make amends I made a donation to the hospital that covered all my stolen items and more.
I wish I felt more compassion for myself, but even after making restitution for my thefts I still feel mostly shame and embarrassment. Recently, after my sister’s cancer marker jumped again, I felt the same emotional blizzard and that familiar urge to obliterate my feelings. This time, I left my shopping cart standing in the aisle of the market and ran straight for the exit — empty-handed — and then followed my niece’s tonic and started writing about my anxieties. | 2022-09-26T12:02:05Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Mental health struggles can lead to shoplifting compulsion - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/09/26/shoplifting-depression-mental-health/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/09/26/shoplifting-depression-mental-health/ |
Videos show train crash into Colorado police cruiser with woman inside
Dashboard-camera video shows the moment a train struck a Platteville police vehicle parked on train tracks with a woman inside. (Fort Lupton Police Department)
As Colorado police officers searched Yareni Rios-Gonzalez’s truck on the night of Sept. 16, a train horn sounded in the distance.
The officers appeared to take note of the train only as it came within feet of a police vehicle parked on the tracks — with Rios-Gonzalez handcuffed inside, according to authorities and body-camera footage. A male officer standing near the tracks looked at the approaching train and grew frantic, the footage shows.
“Stay back!” he yelled.
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God!” a female officer said as the train collided with the cruiser, according to her body-camera footage.
“I’m so confused,” she said before being placed in the police cruiser, according to the footage. About a minute later, a train horn could be heard in the background.
After the collision, the female officer requested emergency medical assistance, according to her body-camera footage. “The suspect was in the vehicle that was hit by the train,” she said.
The video clip briefly shows officers running toward the crumpled-up police vehicle on the side of the tracks before cutting to Weld County sheriff’s deputies doing a second search of Rios-Gonzalez’s truck and discussing her identification.
The Fort Lupton Police Department said in a Facebook post last week that it “is fully cooperating with the CBI investigation,” adding that it is investigating “the original criminal report.” The Weld County district attorney’s office has so far not filed charges against Rios-Gonzalez or any of the officers, a spokeswoman told CNN.
“You just never park on a train track,” he said, adding, “It’s kind of unbelievable they did something like this.” | 2022-09-26T12:17:45Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Body-cam video shows train hit Colorado police car with woman inside - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/26/colorado-police-car-woman-hit-train/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/26/colorado-police-car-woman-hit-train/ |
What it takes to install an EV charger, how much it costs, and when it’s just not possible.
(Chloe Meister/The Washington Post; iStock)
So, you’re thinking about buying a Tesla (or Chevy Bolt, or Nissan Leaf or one of the other options among the growing electric vehicle market). You know that emissions from gas-powered cars likely have more than a little to do with the extreme weather ravaging the globe. You know that, over the summer, Congress passed climate legislation with tax credits that will — at least eventually — make some electric vehicles easier to afford.
But now there’s a more fundamental issue to grapple with: What will it take, and how much will it cost, to set your house up for an EV?
Do I need to buy a charger before I get an electric vehicle?
Actually, probably not. Almost all electric vehicles come with what’s called a level 1 charger. These chargers plug directly into a standard outlet. But while they require minimal effort and money, they also charge a car’s battery at a slow rate. You might be able to add dozens of miles of range with an overnight charge, but it will take more than a day to fully charge an empty battery. You also need to make sure that your home’s electrical system can handle the additional burden of charging a car on top of, say, doing laundry or using a microwave oven (more on that below).
When you hear about installing an EV charger at a home, those conversations are mostly about level 2 chargers. Because they’re more powerful, consumers can fill up their battery overnight, and get dozens of miles of range added by plugging the car in for an hour. Level 2 chargers require a different kind of plug (think of the outlet that your washer and dryer use) and you’ll need to call an electrician to get one set up.
What the EV tax credit means for you
“Whether or not you’re going to absolutely want to go to a Level 2 has a lot to do with how far you drive every day,” says Simon Ouellette, CEO of Mogile Technologies, an EV research company in Montreal. Another consideration is whether you have other opportunities to charge your vehicle. “If there’s a lot of [public] chargers near your office or on the street where you live … then the urgency isn’t there in the same way it is if you’re really going to be depending on your own residence to charge your car.” (According to data from the U.S. Department of Energy, nearly 4 out of every 5 public chargers are level 2.)
Level 3 chargers are the fastest of all, but because they require so much power, it’s rare to see one installed at a private residence.
How do I know if my home can accommodate an electric vehicle?
First, the bad news: If you rely on street parking, your home likely can’t accommodate an EV. As long as you’ve got a driveway, a garage or somewhere else to store your car, you can install an electric vehicle charger. However, “some installations are more complicated than others,” says Caradoc Ehrenhalt, the founder and CEO of EV Safe Charge, an electric-vehicle charging solutions company in Los Angeles.
In general, it is much easier and less expensive if you’re able to park the car close to an existing power source. These days, you can buy chargers that come with about 25 feet of cable, so as long as you can park within that distance, you should be in good shape.
But some homeowners aren’t so lucky. Ehrenhalt gives the example of a detached garage that isn’t connected to a power source and that’s located far from the house. To install an EV charger in that situation, you’d need to connect the garage to the property’s electrical panel. That could involve trenching and running the cable underground, even cutting through the surface of the driveway before refilling and recovering it. In extreme cases, the whole process can take several days.
If your electrical panel is in the basement, your ceiling is another factor, Ouellette says. You may need to drill holes through it to run the wiring.
The other potentially pricey quandary for prospective EV owners is whether your home’s electrical system is equipped to handle the additional load of charging a car. A licensed electrician can help you answer that question. Harvey Faulkner, a master electrician and owner of Focus Trade Services in the D.C. area, says one major hint that you’ll need an upgrade is if you look at your electrical panel and it doesn’t have any room for additional breakers.
How much does it cost to have an EV charger installed?
Installation costs vary widely, depending on where you live and how complicated the job is.
“If you had a panel literally right next to where you want to park your car and you're putting a charger in that's just a few feet away, that type of installation by a licensed electrician, including permitting, might generally start at $500,” says Ehrenhalt. But most installations, he says, end up costing between $1,500 and $3,000.
That total will balloon considerably if your electrical panel or underlying electrical service (the amount of electricity that can be supplied to your house by the public utility) needs upgrading.
An EV charging station “is basically just a dedicated line” of power, explains Michael Anthony Harris, an electrician with Harris Electric Company of Washington. “And in order to run a dedicated line, your panel has got to be able to support it.”
If you need a new panel, expect to pay an additional $2,000 to $4,000 on top of the cost of having the EV charger installed. If you need a full electrical service upgrade, expect to pay an additional $5,000 to $8,000, according to Harris.
Then, of course, there’s the cost of the charger itself. With the exception of Tesla’s Supercharger (which is compatible only with Teslas), all level 1 and level 2 chargers available in North America have a standard plug that will work with any electric car. From there, the options are differentiated by size, charging speed, cord length and whether they connect to WiFi, among other features. Some have hoods or covers to protect them from snow, rain and ice. They can cost between a few hundred dollars and a few thousand dollars. One popular model, the Juice Box 40, costs around $700, and another oft-recommended charger, the ChargePoint Home Flex, is $749. You’ll want to talk to an electrician about which one is best for you.
Tips for making your home more energy efficient
And don’t forget about your monthly electric bill, which is bound to increase. Still, once the upfront expenses of buying the car and installing the charger are behind you, the gas savings will quickly add up. Plus, electric vehicles have fewer maintenance costs than gas-powered ones, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, because their batteries and motors need less attention, and you don’t have to worry about changing the oil.
Can I install an EV charger if I live in a condo building?
If your building doesn’t already have an EV charging station, this is where things can get thorny. “There are so many variables that come into play,” says Ouellette, including how people pay for electricity in the building and the rules that govern common space. “It’s not just a variable of what’s the physical reality of your condo and all that. But it’s also who’s on the board and are they problem solvers?”
Even if everyone can come to an agreement, you still need to determine how much power the building can accommodate. If, for example, the building can handle two EV chargers on top of powering the elevators and lights, how will those chargers be shared? If not, does the building want to pay for upgrading the electrical panel or service? Ouellette notes that it usually loops back around to the question of the building’s bylaws and rules, and “that could be a long loop.” | 2022-09-26T13:09:41Z | www.washingtonpost.com | What to know about installing an EV charger at home - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2022/09/26/how-to-prepare-your-home-for-an-electric-vehicle/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2022/09/26/how-to-prepare-your-home-for-an-electric-vehicle/ |
A reward of up to $7,500 is being offered in the case
Oli, a stolen puppy, has been reunited with his mother and siblings in D.C. (Humane Rescue Alliance)
The fifth of seven stolen puppies has been reunited with its mother, Godiva, in D.C., but two others remain missing.
The Humane Rescue Alliance said Friday that it will work to eventually return Oli to the family that brought him back when he is older and stronger.
He’s one of a litter of seven pups that went missing last month when they were 3½ weeks old.
Over the past few weeks, humane alliance officials have been working to locate the pups and reunite them with their mother at a foster home. A reward of up to $7,599 is being offered for information that leads to finding the dogs that are now just about 6 weeks old.
The other pups that have been found so far are named Apollo, Link, Glitter and Aries.
The saga of the puppies and their mother started in mid-July when Godiva was picked up by the animal rescue group. She was pregnant and malnourished, but after care, she successfully gave birth to a litter of seven in early August.
Godiva, a 1-year-old that’s believed to be a Labrador mix, was transferred to a foster home so she could be with them. But in late August, rescue officials got a call about a dog found tied to a pole outside a home on Crittenden Street NE. They got the dog and realized it was Godiva, but she was without her puppies.
They searched another home in the 4800 block of North Capitol Street NE and found one of the seven; over the next few weeks the other puppies have been returned to the rescue group.
Officials at the group have given few details about what caused Godiva to be separated from her pups but have said it is under investigation.
In a statement, humane rescue officials said, “Each reunion brings happy tears to our eyes and gives us renewed hope that the remaining puppies will be reunited with Godiva and their brothers and sister.”
Anyone with information is asked to call the group at 202-723-5730. | 2022-09-26T13:09:42Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Fifth of seven stolen puppies is returned in D.C. - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/26/stolen-puppy-returned-dc/ | https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/26/stolen-puppy-returned-dc/ |
One way they did this was by deciding to become candidates themselves. The share of Democratic nominees for the US House of Representatives who were women jumped from 29% in the 2016 election — a record at the time — to 42% in 2018, rising again to 48% in 2020. And as more women ran for office, more women won. The number of Democratic women increased from 62 to 89 in the House, from 14 to 16 in the Senate, and from 3 to 6 in state governorships over the four years of the Trump presidency, according to data compiled by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
The recent conclusion of the 2022 nomination season provides an opportunity for some preliminary analysis. According to figures I’ve compiled, women constitute 43% of all Democratic nominees for US House seats this year — a modest decline from 2020, but roughly equal to 2018 and well above any previous election. Women represent 40% of Democratic nominees for Senate or governor in 2022, marking a new record (the previous high was 38% in 2018).
• No One Knows How Roe’s Fall Will Affect Politics: Jonathan Bernstein
• 2021 Is a Tipping Point for Female Leaders: Stefanie K. Johnson
• Female Candidates Risk Falling Off the ‘Glass Cliff’: Kara Alaimo | 2022-09-26T13:31:55Z | www.washingtonpost.com | Trump’s Surprising Legacy: More Female Candidates — in Both Parties - The Washington Post | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/trumps-surprising-legacy-more-female-candidates-in-both-parties/2022/09/26/c04b114c-3d97-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html | https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/trumps-surprising-legacy-more-female-candidates-in-both-parties/2022/09/26/c04b114c-3d97-11ed-8c6e-9386bd7cd826_story.html |
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